AdVance is the name given to a new suite from the company’s Sky Media ad sales division, threading together data from TV and internet to give advertisers new possibilities.

“We are trying to break down the barriers between TV and digital to enable linear TV viewing data to power digital ad serving,” Sky Media deputy MD Jamie West tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Sky’s in a position to do that because we have … a three-million-household, second-by-second viewing panel.

“When you overlay that with IP address, device ID or cookie ID, you have an opportunity to serve sequential stories across platforms.”

For Sky Media, which has long sold ads on the web as well as on TV, it is part of a multi-platform initiative.

“The next challenge for Sky is to think about how we can evolve in other media – not just thinking about addressable TV,” West says.

“Advertisers are asking us to work much more closely with them across all media, not just TV. A campaign is planned holistically across all media – but, when it comes to execution, that campaign is served in silos – TV is bought separately to press and radio.”

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Programmatic is changing the media landscape,” according to video ad tech platform vendor TubeMogul’s managing director Nick Reid, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“IHS predicts €2 billion spend in European video by 2020,” Reid added, citing an IHS study, released last week, to quantify the European programmatic video advertising sector for platform vendor SpotX.

Reid says TubeMogul’s focus is on helping advertisers plan video-based advertising in a world in which devices and consumer attention have fragmented.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“As a telco, we see our users not only as an audience, we see them foremost as customers,” according to Koen Delvaux, the consumer innovation head of Proximus, an operator serving both Belgium’s French- and Dutch-speaking regions.

“When we look at what targeted advertising can do for TV, we not only look at how we can earn money with it, but we also look at how is it going to make a better experience for the customer. Will it be a better advertising, a type of advertising they like? Will they be able to choose their own advertising, or the mix between advertising and content?”

To that end, Proximus is piloting use of ad tech software platform FreeWheel to deliver its video ads for clients.

“We have approached a number of media partners to see what scenarios they want to test with regard to targeted advertising,” Delvaux adds. “Some of these scenarios will be online, some will be on set-top box, some in linear TV, some in delayed viewing.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“It’s been better than we expected,” Medialaan digital head Olivier van Zeebroeck tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “After one year, without advertising around it, we already have more than 500,000 subscriptions. We reach one third of youngsters between 12 and 24 years old who have an account already where they give their data.”

But van Zeebroeck is not resting on his laurels.

“It’s a big step forward. But now the challenge we have is to build a better long-form product,” he says.

“In November, we will launch StevieFree, which is an over-the-top platform, where we will offer the five channels free with dynamic ad insertions, also live, which is a big challenge to manage.”

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The Media Ratings Council this summer put together guidelines for tackling the problem, which comScore advertising effectiveness VP Duncan Trigg says is a big deal.

“It might be bot traffic, it might be domain hijacking, it might be impression stacking,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It is a multi-billion-dollar white-collar-crime issue. It affects every platform, every device and every market. It’s the biggest thing that makes a difference to campaign effectiveness.”

Efforts are, of course, underway to tackle ad fraud. But Trigg warns: “The biggest  issue affecting the market right now is how brand safety, viewability and fraud detection are effectively becoming conjoined. The ability to separate them out with point vendors is dwindling massively because of the fraudulent activity that’s happening out in the marketplace.

“If you’re not taking out the most sophisticated tracking and blocking of non-human traffic before you calculate view ability rates, you’re going to get a misleading view ability rate – usually higher.”

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“If you look at the Bundesliga, for example, we already have 15% of the total viewing on Sky Go, and about 20% of the total viewing of the Champion’s League on Sky Go,” according to Peter Meininger, the head of projects and digital products for the company’s Sky Media ad sales division.

That popularity is fuelling upcoming monetisation efforts that will deploy new ad technology.

“As we have these huge peaks in live football, the next project we are working on is dynamic ad insertion,” Meininger tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We want to replace the linear ad blocks from TV and fill them with digital video ads.”

Sky in Germany just took on FreeWheel as its ad server software.

Whilst, in the UK, Sky has already launched the ability for advertisers to buy household-targeted ads on live TV in the living room, under the Sky AdSmart service, its German counterpart is farther behind.

“In two or three years’ time, we want to be there, too, offering addressable TV in Germany. Sky UK is further down the road than we are,” Meininger says. “The market is more mature in the UK.”

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But is programmatic automation really all it’s cracked up to be?

“When people talk about programmatic and they reference automation, the irony is it’s actually far more manual and far more inefficient, and, on a cost-per-dollar standpoint, more costly, than a traditional linear TV transaction,” says James Rooke, marketplaces GM of the programmatic video ad-tech platform FreeWheel.

But Rooke does see a glowing future in which advertisers can benefit from greater programmatic video efficiency, if they focus on their business models.

“There’s an opportunity to reduce the number of back-and-forth conversations that go on between the buy and the sell side, automate the RFP process … and, through API connections, be able to go from the pitch-to-paid process, with less hand-offs, less emails, less conversations,” Rooke says.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

As the tech burgeons, many advertisers, scratching their head at all the results, speculate about combining those data in to a single score.

But that would not be the right way to go about assessing ad effectiveness, says one ad tech exec.

“Common measurement is a smokescreen, assuming it’s one number – it’s just not the way it works,” FreeWheel co-CEO Jon Heller says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “You have too many different environments, technologies and companies involved – no one measurement will cover everything, all the time, forever.

“It’s a world of federated measurement. Some of it will be in measurement A, which will be a panel. Some of it will be in B, which could be proprietary data from the marketer. Some of it may be in measurement C or D, which has worked really well on game consoles or tablets or such.

“Getting use to that you federate it is what will move us forward. If you wait for the one number, too slow.”

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We have a legal question,” according to Luc Vignon, the director of SFR Regie, the ad sales house of SFR, one of the country’s largest telcos, broadband and mobile operators. “The CNIL (National Data Processing and Liberties Commission) is very attentive for privacy.

“We have to respect the law. Technically, we can do a lot of things – but we don’t do a lot of things, because of the law.”

The commission is responsible for ensuring that privacy law is adhered to in the collection, storage, and use of personal data. That includes where data pertains to ad targeting.

US ad tech execs often note that doing targeting in France is relatively more difficult.

One of the most interesting rules monitored by CNIL, according to a Wikipedia summary, is that “no decision about an individual can be decided by a computer”.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

FreeWheel has launched its Preferred Partners Initiative, a programme which will enable deeper integration of third-party supply-side ad platforms. Details of the deeper integrations were not available in FreeWheel’s announcement.

“We share the same DNA,” says of the pairing. “We target broadcasters and premium publishers. We are (both) sell-side only. We are both software companies. So we complement each other very well.

“We’re very strong in Europe, they’re very strong in the US. We’ve been extremely successful in Europe… we think there is a place for us in the US.”

StickyAds is rising on the growth in trading of online video ads via so-called “programmatic” technologies.

“In the US next year, 40% of ad spend is going to be transacted in programmatic,” Brunet said, without citing the research source.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The pricing for video right now is predominantly CPM,” Tal Chalozin, CEO of Innovid, which helps turn video ad spots in to interactive ad spots, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “However, a lot of people are now judging this investment by the ROI that they’re getting.”

Chalozin’s company helps introduce clickable, hoverable, swipeable and expandable elements in to video advertising, so that users can dive in to ad content – and advertisers can turn on viewers. In this world, the time viewers spend inside a video is becoming part of the currency.

“On a regular video with no interactive elements on top of it, you can only spend at most 30 seconds,” Chalozin says. “But, f you are Netflix and the consumer is interested in the latest show, you can spend more time. This is the biggest KPI we see brands measuring.”

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“In the US in the also quarter, about 20% of the volume we were trafficking on our platform was coming from inventory created by operator platforms,” says video ad tech vendor FreeWheel’s Europe MD Thomas Bremond. “We’re starting to see the same trend in Europe.

“The unification between operators and programmers is working quite well. We’re going to see that increase over the next year or so.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Until and regardless of whether that happens, the company is shooting toward a future in which more of the ads it sells to finance itself are sold on an automated basis.

Last March, C4 struck a partnership with FreeWheel to create a marketplace in which advertisers would buy ads on its All4 catch-up service using programmatic automated technology. But digital partnerships and innovation head Jonathan Lewis is thinking beyond that.

“We’re trying to bring to our programmatic offering in the future addressability on connected devices like mobile and tablet applications which we currently offer,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Video-on-demand is moving from the small screen to the big, TV screen in your living room – through a set-top box, gaming device, connected television. That’s what we’re trying to set ourselves up for in the future – being able to buy programmatically against views in those environments.”

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.   

But “addressable” may not take off everywhere.

“Each market is a little bit different,” says Conor Mullen commercial director of RTÉ, the Republic of Ireland’s national radio and TV broadcaster.

“If you want to target a particular county within Ireland, you can do that with the web now. If you start doing that, you reduce the overall inventory as to what you want to advertise to.

“In a (larger) market like the US where you’ve got different scale, it probably has a greater opportunity.”

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

We spoke with him on the DMEXCO show floor about the scope of AdSmart, the extent of addressability of  the product, and how Sky is working with agencies and brands on new forms of creative advertising.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.   

FreeWheel was founded in 2007 and was acquired by Comcast last year.

We spoke with Knopper in Cologne where the company is an exhibitor at DMEXCO.