Asked about his company’s commitment to machine learning, AppNexus president Michael Rubenstein tells Beet.TV, in this video interview: “We’ve made deep, deep investments at AppNexus over a multi-year period in helping brands and traders to be able to unlock the full value of their data through a variety of means.

“Our optimisation technology has been something we’ve invested in for many, many years. We are excited to be seeing fantastic results, consistently, for brands using the platform.”

What is machine learning and how can it be used in ad targeting? Put simply, it’s the ability of computer algorithms – which, in advertising, are already used to automate ad trading – to continually learn from discovered data points, reinvesting those learnings in to future transactions for incrementally better effect.

Or, as AppNexus puts it:

“By creating a seamless feedback loop between a brand’s decisioning logic and its consumer touchpoints, AppNexus is combining data and machine learning to build campaigns that actually grow smarter over time. The result is hyper-personalization at scale, a world where marketers can deliver targeted ads to tens of millions of users, spread out across billions of interconnected devices, all over the world.”

AppNexus’ technology investment is such that it has seven open positions for engineers at time of writing.

“It’s going to continue to be one of the major areas for unlocking the true value of digital advertising in the years ahead,” Rubenstein adds.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

That’s according to a media executive who has seen the evolution of the relationship over the broad sweep of time.

“A number of companies … have adapted to a very new important reality of distributed media creation,” says Hearst Digital Media digital president Troy Young, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“How is that creating tension between distribution and content, around how the spoils are divided? This is not a new conversation – it’s as old as media.”

Young was delivering a presentation at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting and an interview with Digiday on the same topic. He says Michael Eisner’s threat, to undermine Time Warner by buying customers satellite dishes to carry his programming direct, showed the crucial relationship between content and distribution had frequently been as tense as it was important, even in the analog age.

Whilst the tension may have been around for a long time, for Young, it has been inverted. “The platform was delivering value to content, now content is delivering value to the platform,” he says.

Publishers and producers are now living in a Catch-22 where they see value in owning audience data, but social funnels are perhaps their best chance at snagging audience in the first place.

Young thinks the equation has been weighted too strongly in platforms’ favor – but things are getting better.

“We’ve maybe taken content for granted a bit,” he says. “We’ve not worked hard enough at creating a mechanism to divide finances equitably.

“We’re seeing that now. Facebook has talked about monetization for publishers, disruptors like Snapchat are putting pressure on how curated environments work. It’s very welcome.

“I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing from Facebook, but I want more.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

So, why did the media agency make the switch. In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM digital ad ops managing partner Joe Barone explains.

“The GroupM 100% standard basically recognises the fact that the dollars moving out of TV are dollars being spent in an environment where you would anticipate sound, you would anticipate the full screen being viewable,’ he says. “So we created a standard.”

Bundled up in concerns over multiple kinds of ad fraud, a couple of years ago, the industry began worrying about rogue publishers invoking ads in spaces where they were not even being seen by audiences but, nevertheless, were triggering an ad buy.

Since then, the industry has done much to address the problem. Now numerous technology vendors offer software that assigns a viewability rating to ad inventory. And that development prompted GroupM to demand 100% viewability or nothing.

“In the last three years, we’ve come a long with with viewability,” Barone adds. “It’s an amazing testimony to the industry coming together and helping our clients achieve what they want, which is having ads seen by real human beings.”

In a world where wholesale advertising targeting data is now commoditised, Barone says the differentiator is the data brans hold about their own customers.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

Moreover, Minoff hopes to see the day when “that will be the only way that people are integrated and we won’t have to have as many people loaded up on the page.” Meredith is working with partners like Index Exchange “who are trying to lead the charge on doing server- to-server integrations,” he adds.

As AdExchanger reports, some people believe that server-to-server integration represents the next step in the evolution of auction dynamics.

In an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Minoff traces the development of programmatic ad selling at Meredith, calling it “a very important part of our monetization strategy.”

While the publisher’s programmatic sales people build out Meredith’s private marketplace business and try to drive up the value of its inventory in open marketplaces, its direct sellers focus more on what Minoff terms “non-IAB formats” like branded content, video, and social.

“We rely on our programmatic teams to continue to sell our more standard display inventory and pre-roll video inventory,” Minoff says. “We’ve made a lot of strides in the last few years. It’s been a big part of our growth.”

Asked about Meredith’s presence on sites other than those of its own brands, Minoff notes that large followings on Facebook and Pinterest in particular remain important user acquisition vehicles, along with search. The company prefers that users access its site directly, according to Minoff.

“At the end of the day, our focus is on continuing to bring people to our sites to become brand loyalists and to be users that come back on a habitual basis,” he says.

Reflecting on the IAB confab and its various themes, Minoff sees a trend in the willingness to collaborate among advertisers, agencies and publishers.

“I think we all realize that we need each other in order to be successful,” Minoff says. “Whether it’s topics like viewability or identity and attribution, there seems to be more of an openness in collaborating and working together to get to better results.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

That is according to Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Shah says Ziff Davis is making videos for Facebook that carry sponsor videos powered by Facebook’s tools.

“Instant Articles is one way you can work with Facebook,” Shah says. “The way we work with Facebook is, we produce video content that’s embedded within the experience and often monetised through sponsorship with a client.

“Facebook, earlier last year, created a ruleset and a toolkit that allows content creators like ourselves to integrate marketers in to video that we produce that we post on Facebook and amplified through Facebook’s amplification.

“That’s a really nice revenue opportunity. The way they make money is the extent to which we do amplification. That’s a really good business model.”

Shah says TV ad spending has yet to move online because online video platforms beside YouTube lacked sufficient scale. But now he is excited that social platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter are providing that scale, thanks to big moves in to video distribution.

Many may contend that the social networks are becoming video networks. Whilst some of them are, of course, making big strides in to video and now claim large numbers of video views, text-based social interaction continues to be the prime consumption driver for many users.

But it is inarguable that the platforms’ video initiatives are driving large-scale consumption of video.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

Enter the Moat Video Score, a new impression-level metric for measuring digital video exposures that focuses on length of creative, plus its sound and viewability, along with the portion of a user’s screen in which it appears.

“Interestingly, we’ve never really asked questions about what we call screen real estate,” Moat CEO and Co-Founder Jonah Goodhart says in an interview with Beet.TV at the the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “So for the first time we’re asking if you have an ad, is it on 10 percent of the screen or 100 percent or 50 percent.”

While it may or may not impact effectiveness, “we think it’s important to understand how much of the person’s attention did you potentially get and for how long,” says Goodhart.

One of the things that makes video “incredibly exciting” right now is that so many platforms are becoming video-first in their approach to content and advertising, according to Goodhart. “The question we ask is how do you effectively measure video. What are the right questions to ask when you’re measuring video?” he says.

The Moat Video Score, which is census-based and uses a scale of 0-100, has early supporters in brand marketers like Unilever and Bank of America, media agency GroupM, Condé Nast, Fox Networks Group, Hulu, NBCUniversal and Snap Inc.

The jury is still out on what video ad experience will rise to the top of consumer preference, according to Goodhart.

“What we know for sure is we’re changing the way we consume content and we know it’s increasingly mobile and increasing video,” Goodhart says. “How that plays out is anyone’s guess, but I think it’s going to be fun to watch.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

Moore is one of many industry leaders who will gather in New York on March 9 at the Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes: Connecting Video Ad Spend To Sales. The event is sponsored by outcome-based video marketing provider Eyeview.

In an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Moore notes that one neglected aspect of “the fantastic growth of digital over the last ten years” has been creative.

“And what we have now seen is a whole host of creative management platforms, as well as dynamic creative optimization companies that provide one more way for us to optimize a campaign,” Moore says.

Alas, most of this creative customization has been relegated to display ads. “Today video is not being put together on the fly in order to create an ad specific for a user. That will happen in the future,” Moore predicts.

“Right now, most of the video renditions tend to be downloaded overnight into a cable box or made available in some other fashion,” he adds. “However, over the next few years you will see video become an increasingly important part of the dynamic creative optimization marketplace.”

Among the speakers joining Moore on March 6 at the Andaz 5th Avenue for the Beet.TV Outcomes Leadership Summit are: Lisa Archambault, Senior Director, Global Advertising, Caesars Entertainment Corporation; Tal Chalozin, CTO and Co-Founder, Innovid; Brad Danaher, Television Partnership Director, Experian; Andrew Davis, Founder, Monumental Shift; Bob Estrada, EVP & Director of Strategic Partnerships, BBDO New York; Andrew Feigenson, Chief Revenue Officer, Nielsen Catalina Solutions; Oren Harnevo, CEO, Eyeview; Rebecca Lieb, Advisory Board Member, Netswitch Technology Management Inc. and OneSpot; Joanna O’Connell, Chief Marketing Officer, MediaMath; Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal, Prohaska Consulting; Tom Rogers, Executive Chairman, WinView Games, Chairman and CEO, TRget Media; and David Shim, Founder and CEO, Placed.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

The figure wasn’t out on its own. It was one approximated by a Morgan Stanley analysis. Together, they have scared the publishing industry.

AppNexus, an alternative advertising network operator, says publishers are desperate for a change.

“Publishers haven’t had good options for monetizing their inventory,” says company president Michael Rubenstein in this video interview with Beet.TV. “For 10-plus years, they’ve been stuck behind this Google monopoly.”

But Rubenstein says times may be changing. “Publishers are really voting with their feet right now – they’re looking for ways to increase monetisation in a way where they’re taking more control and they have more transparency.

“Publishers are looking for alternatives. Publishers are seeking independent solutions that are going to allow them to capitalize on the growing online advertising pie.”

So, what’s the problem with the big two? Some industry observers say the move of spending to Google and Facebook is really just a flight to safety, in a tumultuous world where ad-tech operators come and go, and equally snaffle a proportion of spend.

Rubenstein takes the big two to task like this: “They don’t have an empowerment philosophy as it relates to brands and publishers. They’re not trying to help those companies create independent, self-sustaining businesses.”

AppNexus lately has been building a profile in header bidding, the advertising technology that lets publishers call on multiple ad demand sources simultaneously, using the header of a web page on a consumer’s computer.

But header is changing. “Server-to-server is one of the most important trends for publishers,” says Rubenstein, whose company recently inked a server-to-server integration deal with Index Exchange, citing lower latency and better ad server integration.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

That is according to an executive from one vendor helping brands to develop just such a “universal ID”.

“(Brands) have a great story about who bought what,” says Neustar SVP and chief data and analytics officer Venkat Achanta, in this video interview with Beet.TV  Achanta joined Neustar from Walmart last year.

“But they do a lot of marketing across channels and devices. They don’t quite understand what journeys led to what results and outcomes. To connect all of this, they need to understand the customer holistically. If you don’t understand that connection, you don’t understand the consumer deeply.”

Achanta’s Neustar is an ad-tech company offering data management platform, customer data intelligence, marketing analytics, activation, compliance solutions and fraud detection.

It is one of those approaching the problem, for brands, of unifying customer data inputs to achieve better results. But, Achanta says, the solution has more than one shape.

“Marketing is at the forefront of the digital revolution – they can be the catalyst to get this happening,” he adds. “But this can be a whole connected CRM – it doesn’t have to end with marketing.

“This deeper understanding will help you drive the right actions across the lifecycle of the customer.

“We’re deploying this not only in the marketing space but also risk and security. Does a person have a reason to be at that location on that device to be applying for a card. You can give a fraud risk score … to (know) whether to accept their application or not.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

GroupM launched [m]Platform, a “suite” that comprises data analytics, audience insights, data scientists, technologists from across other GroupM divisions, and in to it wrapped Xaxis, its programmatic and data-driven ad unit.

What’s the rationale? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Xaxis chairman David J. Moore explains it’s about “organizing around customer and client needs”.

“The Xaxis platform that has served us so effectively is going to become part of [m]Platform, a GroupM effort to spread it across the entire network of agencies which GroupM oversees,” he says.

“The platform will handle all forms of media, giving GroupM, WPP and Xaxis a competitive advantage that we don’t see any holding company coming close to matching.”

Moore, who is also president of WPP digital, says the new-look entity prefers private programmatic ad exchanges to real-time bidding auctions. Whilst, in the latter, GroupM could be bidding for ads against anyone, private marketplaces constrain the buyers and sellers in the exchange to a preferred pool.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

That is according to a man who is surely the only executive out there with the title “VP of global automated monetization”.

“Almost every publisher in the room said they had deployed some kind of header bidding,” The Weather Company’s Jeremy Hlavacek told Beet.TV, speaking at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting.

“It drives a lot more yield for publishers, more competition against the inventory, opens up new pools of inventory.”

Lets back up a little here. What is “header bidding”? Whilst publishers typically have to deploy programmatic tools in a sequential fashion, receiving individual best bids from each auction separately, header bidding technology lets them audition multiple demand sources all at the same time.

The practice has been around a few years, but spent 2016 bedding in. In 2017, however, header bidding is changing. Already, there is a growing realization that what is good for publishers may be bad for their users. That is because header bidding code is typically executed in the header of a web page on a consumers’ device.

“As you put more and more code on the page and increase latency, users don’t like that,” Hlavacek adds. “(It’s) a ‘hack’. Should this code live on the page of the website or should it be a server-to-server connection?”

So several tech vendors are now trying to move the header bidding superpowers to their own machines.

“The benefit of going server-to-server is, you’re using the big, industrial-strength computing power of ad servers talking to each other, as opposed to my laptop calling out to an ad server,” Hlavacek says.

“Passing all that data back and forth happens more quickly. The theory is, users don’t see the slowdown on the page.

“It is probably where it belongs, strategically.  It all looks great on a whiteboard. But testing is key to all this. It’s something you need to test very aggressively as a publisher, and find the right solution.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

This is why the company “is very focused on using data and interactivity to boost the value of the advertising that the consumer sees on our platform,” Rosenberg says in an interview with Beet.TV during a break at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We feel ad loads are likely to go down, and so ad value has to go up.”

Roku has a three-pronged approach to its ad business, starting with its endemic vertical that works with companies like HBO, Hulu, Netflix and others to garner more downloads and subscribers and to sell more movies. Second is its outreach to brand marketers “who are focused on the fact that TV viewers are moving their TV time to devices like Roku and they need to follow with their investments,” Rosenberg explains.

The third part of Roku’s ad business is its platform strategy, wherein it makes the technology and data originally built for its own networks available to publishers on its platform. “It’s more of an ecosystem enablement strategy,” says Rosenberg.

The recent expansion of Roku’s partnership with IPG’s Magna is the fruit of Roku’s efforts to develop the programmatic tools, data, its DMP and ad stack—all of which are necessary for more advanced advertising. In a separate interview with Beet.TV, Amanda Medeiros Kigel, Magna’s VP of Partner Innovation, says the exclusive arrangement provides advanced targeting “that we really don’t have access to with other partners” in the over-the-top TV space.

“The Magna partnership is really about creating a tighter, deeper link between the two companies so that Magna can bring those capabilities to their clients,” says Rosenberg. “Programmatic is a big part of the relationship as well because as you infuse more and more data into a transaction from the buy side and the sell side, you really need programmatic pipes to transact it properly.”

Roku’s free, ad-supported collection of apps is now the fastest-growing segment on its platform in terms of app count and growth of usage, according to Rosenberg. “Free is clearly still very important to our viewers and to OTT viewers,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

That’s according to the woman who runs the body representing advertising agencies in the US.

“We’re in a really good place right now,” says Nancy Hill, president of the 4As (the American Association of Advertising Agencies), in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We came through a really tough time (in) the last two years – especially the agency community feeling beaten-up. Now the people have had multiple very honest discussions with their clients feel like they’re in a good place. You’re about to see the dawn of a new era of creativity.”

What was that beating and who doled it out? All of us, Hill says.

“Digital just got away from everybody. Those of who lived in the digital world just said, ‘Trust me, it’s gonna be fine’. I don’t think we did a good enough job of bringing the clients along with us.

“Now we have to course-correct and make sure they understand what we (now) understand.”

For Hill, it was one of the last opportunities to course-correct the industry before, in June, she leaves the organization she has helmed since 2008.

The 4As flagship Transformation conference in April falls during the one-hundredth anniversary of the organization, but Hill is looking to the future, not the past.

“You’re about to see the dawn of a new era of creativity,” she says.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

The Lab’s first SDK is a takeover of an initiative originally conceived and developed by Integral Ad Science. Called the Mobile Verification Open-Source Software Development Kit, it will help app publishers set up monitoring of in-app ads without relying on multiple SDKs from multiple ad platforms or other partners, as Marketing Land reports.

“It’s our very first tool that we’re putting onto our repository that IAS and other members of the community have given to us to open source,” Gombert explains during an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We should have tools for everyone to use in our ecosystem…to help get them to the same level on the framework side of our business.”

The open RTB protocol upgrade is aimed at being more transparent and engineering-focused, according to Gombert. “We had a summit in Boston two days ago and we talked about a brave new world for advertising and a way to think about open RTB as a framework for the next generation of ads and exchanges,” she adds.

The new version will address user happiness and transparency, supply chain economics and supply chain transparency, says Gombert, who is both SVP of Technology & Ad Ops for the IAB and GM of the IAB Tech Lab.

Declaring that the problem in digital right now is that “the focus on user experience is just not there,” she says the fledgling Coalition for Better Ads wants to create a methodology “to improve user experience and hopefully prevent ad blocking in our world.”

The Coalition’s near term output hopefully will yield “a global realization of the user experience problem in our industry and adoption of the standards,” says Gombert.

Asked to comment on server-to-server technology and its impact on user experience, she explains that while it’s a topic of much conversation of late, there are ways to optimize in-browser technology. As for header bidding, the technique that enables publisher to surface the best offers for their ad inventory, Gombert says the Tech Lab is considering a standard for it even as there are different points of view on the subject.

“Google has its own solution, which is not header bidding, which is equally as important,” says Gombert. “I think we need to think about everyone’s technology stack and talk about what would work for the publishers and consumers.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

The practice has been around a few years, but spent 2016 bedding in. In 2017, however, header bidding is changing.

No longer confined as a “client-side” technology (one which runs on a consumer’s web browser and can, therefore, cause heavy load), header bidding is also now moving to the server side.

“We’re quickly entering header 2.0,” says Index Exchange partner development SVP Alex Gardner. “Whereas, once, it was a client-side integration, we’re now moving to a place where publishers are going to have a lot more choice as to how they integrate additional bidders or demand sources – be it client or server side.”

Index Exchange is a real-time programmatic ad exchange launched by Casale Media.

It is one of the a-tech vendors that offers a header bidding solution.

AppNexus and Index Exchange already had their own server-side header bidding offerings, and already had a partnership on conventional header bidding.

In an extended integration just announced between the pair works with existing header bidding wrapper software, but the pair say the latest version is more like real-time bidding, with auctions taking place on their servers as opposed to in the publisher customer’s header.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

“We finally seem to be going a little bit beyond just the discussion of viewability and fraud and getting back to how does that combine with audience,” Fetters says in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “I’m hearing the buy side really begin start to ask again am I getting the audience I thought I was buying.”

Now SVP, National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore, less than two years ago Fetters was on the buy side, as Director of Global Insights at the Kellogg Company. He thinks it’s a positive sign that the industry seems to be moving beyond a sole concentration on viewability, fraud and eliminating waste.

“It think we’ve probably made a lot of progress in beginning to eliminate a lot of the waste in the ecosystem, but now I’m seeing the attention turn back to it’s not enough to just know that I’m getting a quality impression,” Fetters says. “I want to know who’s seeing that impression.”

Addressing the digital ad ecosystem, Fetters expects the consolidation among ad tech providers to continue. “Clearly we’re seeing it week after week, month after month,” he says.

It cannot happen fast enough, according to Fetters. “I think if you look at some of the campaigns that are running today, where you may have three, four, five, six tags on an ad to do various measures or activities against that ad or to collect data. Marketers are realizing this is too much and this is a mess,” he says.

Alluding to remarks at the IAB event by Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard, Fetters acknowledges that marketers have mostly allowed the digital ad ecosystem to be managed for them. But that’s changing.

“Now they’re kind of stepping up and saying how much of my working dollar is going against non-working activity and can I be more efficient with that,” says Fetters. I think we’re going to see a big move toward simplifying the execution of ad serving, how do we get ads in front of consumers.”

It’s a question of necessity, according to Fetters, “because the buyers are starting to take notice, the buyers are starting to demand it.”

He says it’s fascinating to see the expanding desire by brands to build more targeted TV plans to reach specific audiences. And while addressable or programmatic TV “may be not quite scalable today, it certainly is not stopping the same idea of using data to build television-based audience in a new way.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

Right now, hundreds of thousands of consumers around the world are watching each other play video games. And those broadcasts are proving to be lucrative.

So much so that Turner Sports started up its own esports league last year. Why did the company launch Eleague? In a video interview with Beet.TV, Turner Sports sales SVP Seth Ladetsky explains.

“It’s an insanely passionate growth of (the) young-male demo(graphic). (It’s the) same 20-year-old demographic (as physical sport), (but a) different psychographic.

“They’re spending hours and hours a day around gaming and esports. We want to be around it. It’s important to do it authentically and be respectful.”

The way Turner is deploying Eleague says much about the new state of media. Most of the match-ups are broadcast on YouTube and Twitch, the video game broadcast platform now owned by Amazon.

But it doesn’t stop there.  “It’s a digital footprint that leads up to the television culmination,” Latesky adds. “The grand finales are on TBS. The final two or three hours are on television.”

Esports pulls huge crowds, and now TV companies are getting involved to pursue similarly large numbers of die-hards. In the UK last year, Sky and ITV combined to launch GINX TV, a 24-hour esports network.

Turner Sports has already seen big audiences. “We did a million concurrent streams globally,” Latesky exclaims. “We see this massive audience of young males and now we’re reaching them.”

What’s the upshot, commercially speaking? “Due to our relationships in the sports world, a lot of non-endemic sponsors have come on board,” Ladestky says.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

Now the outfit is bolstering that last part, by making an acquisition which will put more of the automation power in the hands of its ad buyers.

Last year, Time Inc bought itself in to the ad-tech ecosystem, by acquiring ad data outfit Viant. Now Viant is making an acquisition of its own.

In January, the company announced it is buying Waltham, MA-based Adelphic, a six-year-old demand-side platform for ad buyers.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Time Inc global data commercialisation VP Judith Hammerman explains the company wants to cover both ends of the chain.

“There’s a piece of (Time Inc) … that is a more curated (advertising) opportunity,” she says.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t (also) put automation, data and people behind it. More and more, people want automation, and they want it in a self-service way.”

The move from managed service to self-service is an emerging trend in ad-tech right now. Venture investment is turning away from business models where revenue is linked to ad spend itself, as VCs prefer the certainty of guaranteed recurring revenue and the efficiency of empowering customers to do the heavy lifting some ad-tech providers do behind the scenes.

For Hammerman, it is about satisfying ad buyers, rather than investors.

“We’re sitting on a tremendous amount of data with 155m subscribers, 140m uniques, 120m on our mobile side. The acquisition of Adelphic helps to super-charge that.

“Now we have cross-device powered by Viant’s ID graph, measurement associated with that, and we have it in a self-serve platform.

“We’re creating the first people-based DSP, giving democratisation to the data.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

“I saw nobody recreating the MSNBC, CNN, CNBC for people under the age of 60,” Steinberg recalls of his spring 2016 launch of a live news service focusing on business and technology. “It’s a cable network. Instead of living on a cable box it lives on Twitter at three o’clock every day and on Facebook live.”

Cheddar also has its own channel on Sling TV “in the base bundle right next to CNN” and is live on Amazon’s bundles as well, Steinberg explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We’ll have two more of these announced by mid year.”

Steinberg’s bet is that young people who are hooked on on-demand programming like House of Cards and Transparent “would have a need for what I call ambient, non-appointment viewing to see what’s happening. And that’s effectively what Cheddar is. It’s a live news network.”

Last fall, Cheddar went behind a pay wall with a monthly subscription price of $6.99, as The Wall Street Journal reports. It also gets a fee from pay TV bundles “and the ability to monetize the advertising on those bundles as well,” Steinberg says.

Another revenue stream is what he calls “Native 3.0,” wherein advertisers have a presence on the lower third of the screen. For HP, it’s the Keep Reinventing message that’s promoted, while Dunkin Donuts prefers an On The Go theme and Fidelity’s app is used to reference stocks being covered by the correspondents at Cheddar.

“The direct subscription model is our restaurant regulars. They’re people that just want Cheddar and don’t want a bundle,” Steinberg says. “But ideally any skinny bundle out there, I intend for us to be in those and the consumer can buy us that way.”

He counsels against every publisher thinking that live video is where it’s at. “It’s about looking where there is white space,” says Steinberg.

As for so-called fake news, he blames social media networks like Facebook and readers themselves.

“If people just read credible sources, if you went to BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cheddar even, there would be no fake news,” Steinberg says. “Fake news is a consequence of the fact that people got disoriented from what they were actually reading and this stuff was able to spread.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

“It’s just a means of servicing our clients,” Guenther says of programmatic in an interview with Beet.TV during a break at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Private or preferred programmatic advertising buys “are growing rapidly” at News Corp., in addition to open auction buys, according to Guenther. “It varies dramatically” depending on marketers’ needs.

He believes that what’s most important for publishers from an infrastructure standpoint is to be flexible. “Nothing’s set in stone. It’s an evolving space.”

On the topic of server-to-server header bidding, for example, a subject of much conversation at the IAB confab, Guenther notes that the technique “has actually been around for a number of years. We’re going to see how that evolves and I’m sure that will become part of our programmatic mix in the future, too.”

For now, Guenther says News Corp. has been rolling out Prebid.js from AppNexus “and we’ve been very happy” with it.

“The critical thing you need to do as a publisher is to be on top of what’s the most efficient way of delivering advertising and keep modifying your infrastructure as appropriate,” Guenther says.

Another focus of the IAB sessions is combatting digital ad fraud and coming up with ways to tamp down on so-called fake news. “The conversation around fake news aligns with a lot of things we’ve been talking about at News Corp.,” Guenther says. “That’s obviously a very important topic that’s near and dear to us.”

He’s pleased that discussion of fake news has “infused” the gathering. “It feels like every session I’ve been to has brought that up. The need to combat it. How we all play a part in addressing it,” he says.

Asked about online advertising viewability standards, Guenther alludes to remarks by Procter & Gamble Chief Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard, who who at the outset of the IAB event bemoaned “crappy advertising accompanied by even crappier viewing experiences,” as CNBC reports. “This desire within the industry to work toward these goals I think will make things easier and more efficient and help our advertisers and help our users. I think it’s a good trend this year,” Guenther says.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

Last summer, the Post was among the first publishers to offer branded content on Instant Articles. Just last month, the company said it would publish news stories as well.

In an interview with Beet.TV while attending the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Post Chief Revenue Officer Jed Hartman explains the impact of Instant Articles on the company’s own digital readership.

“For us it’s been a win because we’re watching our total audience stay about the same when we went on to Facebook Instant Articles,” says Hartman. “That’s the close as you can get to an A/B test. But our page views grew, so the audience was going deeper because it’s a far better experience.”

He adds that Instant Articles has driven more reader engagement. “More engagement means more impressions, and we’ve been able to monetize those impressions. For us it’s been a win financially,” Hartman says.

From a technology standpoint, if any media owner knows the value of speedy delivery, it’s Jeff Bezos. As the Post continues to grow its digital audience, constant technology upgrades put the time element front and center.

“Our owner likes to say give the gift of speed to our audience,” says Hartman. “We’re constantly working on removing friction for users who want to engage with the Post and making sure our content is wherever they are.”

Using a lot of its own homegrown technology, the Post has built a personalization engine to divine reader interests. If a user is not engaged, or if they are moving too slowly or too fast, a message pops up with a personalized story. “That all enhances engagement as well as click through to the story,” Hartman notes.

At a time when other media companies are jettisoning staff, the Post has hired “a couple hundred” journalists since Bezos of Amazon fame acquired the venerable news organization in the fall of 2013, according to Hartman. He cites comScore figures showing a digital audience of just over 100 million in the U.S., plus about another 30 million internationally. “The bigger you get, the more opportunity you have to get small, by targeting,” says Hartman.

In this tumultuous political environment, not every marketer wants its ads adjacent to related news coverage, which suits the Post fine because only about 20% of its content is politics/global news, according to Hartman.

The Post recently added another 30 people to its video unit because video is becoming “front and center with everything we do. We’ve certainly been a mobile first company. Now we’re becoming a mobile and video first company,” says Hartman.

The company runs ads in pre-, mid- and post-roll video content as well as within news feeds. With its FlexPlay product, video assets can be converted into shorter units and animated GIF’s, “so it’s lightening fast,” Hartman says.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

Until three years ago, Index Exchange was known as Casale Media, an early proponent of programmatic founded in 2001. Back then, “There was the dream of technology but a very manual process to transact” digital media buys with paper insertion orders, Casale recalls in an interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the IAB.

“Programmatic emerged and to us, it felt like the right fit,” he adds.

Now Index Exchange is well beyond Casale Media’s roots in desktop display ads with lots of activity in mobile and video. Casale credits the company’s transformation in part to always being very clear about its role in the marketplace.

“We only serve publishers and media companies,” Casale says. “That’s a big deal. In adtech there are a lot of companies that focus on buy and sell.”

As a result of this approach, other tech companies are comfortable partnering with Index Exchange, including Google, which offers competing products. The new relationship with AppNexus expands the companies’ header bidding partnership to include support for server-to-server integrations, as MediaPost reports.

“Having a clear focus creates a breeding ground for partnerships,” Casale says. “They know what to expect from our company. We’re not going to enter the buy side. We’re not going to enter measurement.”

The company’s other major point of differentiation is that Index Exchange is “more of an infrastructure company” than just an adtech company, according to Casale. “We’ve made huge investments in servers and data centers all over the world and we continue to.”

Index Exchange has 300 employees, 165 of them engineering and technology. “Adtech companies should be more technology companies than just sales and marketing companies,” Casale says.

Based in New York and with offices in San Francisco and most recently London, Index Exchange’s engineering prowess is based on Toronto, which is “a little bit uncommon in adtech,” he adds.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

That is according to the new chair of the US branch of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Jim Norton was elected to the post this week in the organization that represents the online advertising industry.

“This authenticated supply chain has been a real challenge in our industry, causing a proliferation of fake news and fraud,” Norton tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“A lot of bad actors out there are profiteering from proliferation of fake news unreliable content, using social media platforms and new ad technology. How do we weed out the bad actors? We can do a much better job.”

The IAB post is Norton’s second new industry role in just a few months. In October, Condé Nast hired him from AOL to oversee revenue operations.

His plan, revealed in January, sees cost savings, titles being grouped in to “brand collections” and “client industries”, and “publishers” of magazines replaced with “chief business officers”, with the addition of “chief industry officers”, according to reports.

Norton explains to Beet.TV: “We want to leverage the heritage of our great brands … and really apply that in a very focused way to the most important marketers in the industry.

“We want to make sure our tech platform is commensurate with those (social) distribution platforms.”

IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg has previously told Beet.TV there are too many ad-tech vendors all offering the same thing.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.   Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange.  For more videos from this series, please visit this page. 

The pair announced they have worked to produce tight technical integrations for server-to-server header bidding.

“Header bidding” is a technique that has only recently grown up, in which publishers place code on a web page that plugs in multiple ad demand sources simultaneously, allowing them to get the best inventory price in one go, rather than approach demand sources in a sequential, “waterfall” approach.

But this means more processing is typically done on the client side, in consumers’ web browser or app.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, Index Exchange product SVP Drew Bradstock explains times are already changing.

“Header bidding has helped publishers make more money – but it’s also putting more and more code on to the page,” Bradstock says. “On mobile … you don’t want all that extra code.

“Publishers are now considering the trade off between latency, user experience and revenue.”

“Server-to-server takes all that work that used to be done on the browser – instead of doing it on the client side, it pulls it back on to Index Exchange’s infrastructure. It takes the onus off the user.”

AppNexus and Index Exchange already had their own server-side header bidding offerings, and already had a partnership on conventional header bidding. The extended integration works with existing header bidding wrapper software, but the pair say the latest version is more like real-time bidding, with auctions taking place on their servers as opposed to in the publisher customer’s header.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.   Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange.  For more videos from this series, please visit this page.