“Our biggest form of competition in human attention in the entertainment television space is ad-free viewing environments versus ad-supported viewing environments,” says Noah Levine, Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions for Fox Networks Group.

Fox aspires not only to preserve TV as an ad-supported medium but also to “enhance its market messaging, its brand safety, its effectiveness and the quality of ad recall,” Levine says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Fox used the occasion of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity to lend its weight to the six-second ad format that YouTube launched last year, as Advertising Age reports. Fox’s six-second ads will be shown to viewers across its digital and on-demand properties, where they will be unskippable, along with linear TV.

The rationale behind supporting six-second ads is that if agencies and advertisers are embracing a format that reduces the amount of time people are obligated to spend watching commercials while supporting advertisers’ goals, “That’s something that we’re absolutely willing to embrace and experiment with,” Levine adds.

Fox’s FX Networks already has some of the most Emmy nominated and awarded TV content that is ad-supported. To preserve and enhance the viewer experience, FX has crafted an option for set-top box, video-on-demand and digital content.

Under this scenario, “essentially an advertiser would own the entire ad viewing experience for an individual viewer and craft a story from a brand messaging perspective, from pre-roll to each and every mid-roll,” Levine explains.

Another FX offering consists of sponsored ad breaks wherein mid-roll positions “can be one ad that isn’t competing for attention along with four other 30-second ads for the viewer.”

Fox’s limited-ad options can be targeted to specific types of content, whether it’s FX originals, movie or other programming, according to Levine.

With audience-based targeting, Fox seeks to go beyond age and gender. “Let’s go into enhanced demographics. Let’s look at the third-party data sets that are out there” to deliver the most effective and engaging advertising “that’s as relevant as possible to the end user.

”This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying the New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.

“We’re seeing a lot of that now with the Entertainment Lions, the awards for content and creativity, the Creative Data awards as well,” Haxby, who is Global Marketing Director, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Making waves is the responsibility of MEC’s WAVEMAKER unit, which uses data and analytics showing how consumers behave and how they buy to inform content creation. The goal is to figure out which points in consumer’s journies are the most valuable to particular marketers.

With “tons and tons” of data available to her teams, “Our job is to try to make sense of that and really glean the insights that come out of that data,” Haxby says.

MEC brings to the table its own research study—called MEC Momentum and running for several years now. Its purpose is to close gaps in understanding what buyers do during the purchase journey, how their perceptions of brands influence their behavior and how they make their choices.

“We’ve surveyed more than 350,000 people in 30 countries, 60 categories to look at how they go around the purchase journey. We use that data and blend it with our clients’ data to create really targeted messages at certain points throughout the purchase journey,” Haxby explains.

Knowing that MEC itself has audiences that it needs to reach, the agency is constantly evaluating its own presence on platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. “It’s a learning curve for us all, but we would be remiss if we didn’t do what we said our clients should be doing,” says Haxby. “We have to do it for ourselves.”

She references an MEC session at Cannes in which iHeart CEO Bob Pittman talked about the power of radio, a medium sometimes overlooked.

“Ultimately, 250 million people listen to radio in the U.S. every day, so that’s something we have to tap into. We forget sometimes that it’s another platform. It’s called podcasting now, but it’s still radio.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

And it’s probably not going to get much easier going forward, Reed explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“I think we’re going to learn some things over the course of the next year that are really surprising,” says Reed. “We know that consumer attention us dropping every time we turn around. We have less attention span than a goldfish. We’re not getting any better.”

The implications are profound because “as we start to look at ad formats, we’re going to have the expectation that those ad formats need to be shorter and faster to grab attention.”

The need for speed will ultimately rest on the shoulders of creative because they won’t be thinking of “that anthem 30- or 60-second unit that they used to build but how do I build something that’s fast, gets to the point and engages instantly.”

On the subject of data and walled gardens, Reed is asked whether her agency gets everything it needs from Facebook. “Does anyone get the information they need from all of the walled garden partners?” she says with a laugh. “No. Certainly not.”

On a positive note, she believes the caretakers of the gardens “have actively taken an approach to say that they are willing to try to find a solution with all of our clients. It’s going to take time.”

Nonetheless, the clock is ticking. Reed thinks that in the next year or so Facebook and its ilk might have to get more magnanimous and “figure out how to give data back to the advertisers in order to be able to truly address ROI, or it will significantly affect their investment levels.”

In the meantime, new players are emerging all the time that could become the next Amazon, Facebook or Snapchat. “Let’s not forget that AOL was the behemoth many years ago, and now they’re starting that resurgence again with Oath,” Reed observes.

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

So when an Alphonso SDK in a tablet, smartphone, smart set-top box or TV set recognizes what’s being watched, an ad can be served in real time, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mark Gall, explained during a panel discussion about the state of advanced TV sponsored by the MEC agency at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“Now we’re able to target one-to-one on a deterministic manner from TV to mobile but also, and even more importantly, show ROI,” said Gall.

Alphonso’s technology is present in more than 45 million devices in 32 million U.S. TV households, representing about one in three of the latter. It identifies TV shows and commercials and “fingerprints” them. The company plans to make its presence known in the U.K. in the fourth quarter of 2017.

“Most people are using a second screen while watching TV,” Gall said in responsive to a question from moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. “We are now solving the problem of connecting TV to mobile.”

In addition to being able to extend frequency and build reach in real time, advertisers can use Alphonso’s technology to attribute ad exposure to sales and traffic to online sites and auto dealerships, among other things.

“At the end of the day, we’re able to prove the ad was recognized and watched and you bought something,” Gall said.

If someone is watching a commercial on TV for, say, Walmart, a Walmart ad can be served to that person’s device. Contrarily, a competitor could have a conquest ad served. With paid streaming, someone watching Game of Thrones might be avoiding ads during that programming but they can be served ads via Alphonso.

Gall referenced a project his company is doing with an unidentified retailer in which the retailer’s CRM data is matched with Alphonso’s TV viewing database. This way the retailer can focus its resources on reaching its most valuable shoppers.

“Now you can focus in on the seven or eight networks, or the two or three paid streaming shows that they watched, and target them. And don’t worry about the shopper who’s only spending $20 a year. Worry about the ones that are spending $600 a year,” said Gall.

For a glimpse of Alphonso’s database of TV commercials, visit this page.

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

The result, as moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink termed it during an MEC-sponsored panel discussion at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, could well be dubbed “myth busting.”

The A+E project involved some 350 million ad-exposure records for 40 million addressable-TV-enabled households over a few months matched with transactional data to produce indices, according to panelist Ben Tatta, Co-Founder & President of 605.

While it’s true that a network like Lifetime is a great venue for reaching buyers of health care, beauty and packaged-goods products, digging deeper unearthed some interesting insights, said panelist Mel Berning, A+E’s President and Chief Revenue Officer.

“What we’re also finding out is that it’s a wonderful environment for reaching women who are the principle decision makers for buying cars. Or investments,” Berning explained.

“One of the things that was really interesting was that across the board for all of the A+E Networks, responsiveness to TV way over-indexed versus the average television viewer,” said Tatta.

Now for the myth busting. It turns out that Lifetime over-indexed both for viewers who are particularly weight conscious and those who are burger lovers. Men’s apparel was among the top-indexed categories for Lifetime viewers, while A+E overall “indexed high against younger families,” running counter to “today’s myth that younger audiences are migrating off the dial,” said Tatta.

As the discussion turned to how a company like A+E balances programming across platforms with the most appropriate ad formats, Berning separated out linear. For those nearly 100 million households, “The quality of the viewing experience is such a key factor to the environment on those networks,” he said. “We’re thinking about ad loads, we’re thinking about the ability to reduce clutter, to deliver a more engaged audience to the ad.”

With cross-platform, advertisers are at “different places in terms of the way they’re thinking about building their media plan across platforms,” Berning said. “It’s very easy to engage advertisers in terms of their requirements for linear. As you then engage them on what are your requirements on other platforms, there is a huge organizational effort to bring all of those pieces together.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Like other attendees of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Johnson welcomed the many conversations about how the industry can come together and drive more effective ways of measurement.

“We’re trading on a CPM currency that maybe is not the most optimal for trying to make television or video look like something that you can understand what the ROI is,” Johnson, who is EVP of Global Advertising Revenue at ESPN, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

He’s not alone when he acknowledges that video is being evaluated differently on different platforms, be it a 30-second TV spot, a pre-roll or a six-second video without sound. “But the allocation of what the value is of each of those components matters,” Johnson says. “At ESPN, we’re measuring the value and impact of a video ad, agnostic of whatever screen it’s on.”

When you add live streaming, all manner of opportunities arise. Not to mention breaking out from standard ratings constructs.

“What’s most important to me about live sports is that it’s absolutely unique to anything else that’s in the market,” he says. “There is nothing that exists from a content delivery standpoint that delivers so many people that are 98% consuming live.”

For advertisers, it’s an opportunity to truly be in the moment. “You’re not getting it aggregated with seven days or 14 days or 35 days. You’re getting it in that live moment.”

ESPN’s streaming content carries pass-through ads from ESPN1 and ESPN2 along with ads that are dynamically inserted.

“So I think we have the best of both worlds available to marketers. We can talk about it like television or talk about it like video or use neither of those terms,” Johnson says. “Addressability is coming and OTT is allowing us to be able to understand that space. This is something that we’re going to make sure we continue to invest in.”

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“We’ve done an awful lot of work on unconscious bias. It’s a huge thing in our industry,” says Marie-Claire Barker, MEC’s Global Chief Talent Officer, who notes that agencies’ competitive set is “almost unrecognizable from five years ago.”

This led MEC during last year’s Advertising Week New York to launch an initiative titled Brave Your Bias. It’s based in part on research the company cites showing, among other things, that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have greater financial returns than the industry average.

While there are various varieties of unconscious bias, one that’s most prevalent in the ad industry is association bias, Barker explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“You associate and affiliate yourself with people who are like you,” says Barker. “They might have worked at the same place, they might gone to the same school, they could even have grown up in the same area as you.”

This creates a comfortable sense of community that keeps outsiders out. “What we’re trying to challenge people to do is step outside that comfort zone and start to work with people who are different.”

Barker evokes comments at Cannes by renowned photographer Mario Testino, who told an audience that he feared early on that his Peruvian heritage would put him at a disadvantage. “And that example shows that if people did have a bias against him because of that, look at the beautiful work we would have missed out on,” Barker says.

In the same vein, actor Sir Ian McKellen spoke to Cannes attendees about coming out as a gay man, while actress Helen Mirren reflected on how fantastic it is at her age to be associated with the beauty brand L’Oreal.

“I just feel that the conversation about the value that people bring and not just how they look and who they know is really coming to the surface now,” says Barker.

Given how tech-centric advertising and media agencies have needed to become, attracting talent means not only embracing all types of people but particularly those who are interested in advances like artificial intelligence, according to Barker.

“Our industry isn’t full of those people. We need to go outside of our industry and try to attract different people.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV, VMR author Ying Wang discusses the first quarter VMR findings, which show that premium video monetization mirrors linear TV investment in terms of the top industry categories.

“We’ve never been closer to true unification in the premium video industry. We’re seeing digital video and what we call traditional television look more and more similar,” says Wang, who is FreeWheel’s Director of Advisory Services.

She cites as examples “more and more people are consuming live streaming content through digital devices.” In the United States, about 25% of all ad views come from live stream devices, according to the VMR.

“That’s continuing to grow due to really great sports content, as well as a lot of live streaming happening on news. The content people are seeking out is looking more and more similar across all of the different end points,” Wang says.

One of the more interesting trends to Wang is that one out of every two ad views is now happening on the big screen. The biggest driver is OTT viewing.

For the first time, OTT devices that are connected to the TV set surpassed desktop as the largest platform where premium video is consumed. Together with set-top-box video on demand, the two living room-centric platforms account for nearly half of all ad views the first quarter, according to the VMR.

“OTT combines the best of digital, and the ability to measure and target on impressions with the best of linear, which is the engagement and high quality experience,” Wang says.

About one third of all ad views in the U.S. happen on OTT compared to around 20% in Europe, according to the VMR. Millennials account for 56% of all OTT ad views, “which is a great proposition for OTT,” Wang adds.

Additionally, OTT has very high ad completion rates. Around 98% of all ads viewed on OTT are completed, which is the highest of any digital device.

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

At least it is in the mind of Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink. Following his role as moderator of the FreeWheel/Beet.TV New TV Ecosystem Forum, Spiegel shared his thoughts on definitional differences and whether data segmentation standards are necessary.

“I love the fact that both buyers and sellers are now getting rid of the TV versus digital divide,” Spiegel says. “That’s not really news in some level, but the fact that it’s now being talked about means we’re evolving.”

The industry “transactionally” has had a TV versus digital divide for awhile, according to Spiegel. “It seems to me more than ever that’s coming together. Which is great news.”

He reflects on a panel discussion between representatives of Fox Networks and ESPN in which Spiegel’s age-old question—what is television—was center stage. “If it’s a full screen experience and the ad is being viewed what do I care about the rest of the environment? I don’t care what device it is. I don’t care what screen it’s on,” Spiegel recounts.

The viewpoint from Fox was regardless of how a consumer accesses programming, “if I’m showing you an ad and the consumption is the same and the viewership is the same, then that means an advertiser should look at it the same,” he adds. “We’re far from there but I think that’s an interesting point.”

Spiegel differs from many in the industry when it comes to the perceived need for standardization of data segmentation, another topic of discussion at Cannes.

“I still sit on the side that says customization of data science and the definitions, certainly for marketers of how they think about who they’re reaching and how they define those audiences, matters a ton,” says Spiegel.

The sell-side will probably lean toward more standards. “But I think you’re still going to be dealing with a buy-side that has customized that in a lot of ways. How that continues to evolve, the value of things like OpenAP, will be interesting to see as that evolves.”

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

He sees these trends as a welcome sign that the industry is moving beyond traditional age/sex demographics for audience targeting and defends the broadcast TV environment against newer platforms.

Whereas targeting traditionally has been the province of the advertisers, they have been “very protective of their data and very protective of sharing information about who their real target is,” Berning says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I don’t think any of that is going to change.”

However, he perceives “much more of an appetite to work together in terms of advertisers, data suppliers and networks like A+E” for a deeper understanding of audiences.

This involves moving beyond the concept of, say, women 18-49 who buy certain products to “women who live certain kinds of lifestyles or who have certain mind frames use products for a bunch of reasons, and it’s really delving into those reasons.”

He says marketers have long chosen certain types of content based on their intuition that scripted content might be appropriate for certain brands and unscripted “because it’s very energetic” for others.

“But now we have a lot more data that proves that certain kinds of people with certain kinds of likes and dislikes and different amounts of receptivity to messaging are all part of the audience,” Berning says.

The big difference between an A+E and newer content providers, according to Berning, “is really the quality of our content.”

From an advertising standpoint, “We think there’s a pacing and a quality to the environment because of the content that we provide that really makes the audience more receptive.”

He points to Viceland, History Channel’s scripted series Vikings and SIX and Live PD as standouts at A+E.

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“I think privacy is of the utmost importance for clients. It always has been,” says Doug Ray, Dentsu Aegis Network’s President of Product & Innovation.

At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, where Ray was a panelist at the Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel, he explains to Beet.TV how the way media is planned and purchased has become much more dynamic and why his company has “doubled down” on leveraging data.

This includes both PII information—names, physical addresses and email addresses—and cookie data within client data management platforms.

“That’s at the end of the day why clients are directly managing their DMP’s and leaning in to CRM, because they’re looking to try to understand and know their customers better,” says Ray.

Particularly in Europe, regulators go to great lengths to restrict what marketers can do with consumer data. This will only increase as companies become more sophisticated about mining that information.

Last week, Dentsu Aegis Network recruited the Chief Privacy Officer from British Telecom Group, Mark Keddie, to become its first Global Data Protection Officer. It came a year before such a position will be mandated by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The move is “very important and something we’re certainly taking quite seriously particularly as we pivot into utilizing PII more and more for our advertising campaigns,” says Ray.

The pivot includes its acquisition last August of a majority stake in data marketing firm Merkle. Baltimore-based Merkle specializes in so-called “customer relationship marketing,” which includes crafting loyalty programs for marketers and managing their vast customer databases that hold reams of consumer information, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

Earlier this month, Dentsu Aegis Networks’ media agency brands began using Merkle’s PII-based M1 platform for centralized data planning and activation. For some initial campaigns using M1, Ray says there’s an average improvement of 20% in return on investment “and that’s simply by cleaning up the supply side in terms of costs, duplication of cookies and so on.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Fast-forward and you had deals like NBC and Comcast and now the pending acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, flanked by the emergence of Amazon, Facebook and Google as video disruptors.

“All of a sudden, the U.S. really woke up as it became apparent that audiences were fragmenting and ratings were declining, especially among some key audiences,” recalls Ryan Jamboretz, CRO of TV and video software provider Videology.

This awakening has forced traditional cable companies and MVPD’s to face the reality of “competition from old foes, people in their own competitive set, and these kind of new barbarians at the gate,” Jamboretz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions gathering, where he was a panelist on the Advanced TV Summit.

Previously, companies needed only be proficient at distributing other peoples’ content or creating it. “Now they’re having to become both. If not become experts at monetization within that as well,” Jamboretz says.

As a “pretty global company,” Videology had a ringside seat to “bleeding-edge stuff on TV and video combining” as the result of its work with pioneers like Sky TV.

In the U.S., it’s companies like AT&T that “are really the ones we’re seeing with most of the innovation,” says Jamboretz.

Videology never sought to be a “jack-of-all-trades” in the digital arena. “For us it’s been a wonderful kind of awakening of the industry over the last two or three years as this challenge of how do we tackle TV turning digital has now kind of hit on all fronts,” he says.

One of the company’s keys to success is that it’s still privately held. “We have the luxury of not having to kind of expose all our state secrets, and I think we have every intent to keep doing that.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

For their part, marketers need to be brave and experiment with AI while not thinking short term about it, Fremont says in this interview Beet.TV with The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“For me, artificial intelligence is about the iterative learning process,” says Fremont, who is Global Chief Digital officer of MEC.

From an advertising and media perspective, AI represents a transition from algorithms to “something that is learning on its own.”

He is particularly attracted to the notion that AI could help vehicle marketers configure a car “based not on what you told it but what’s learned about you, your lifestyle, if you have a family, how old your kids are, what you do. You go right to the showroom and your car’s there.”

Fremont dubs AI “beyond transformational” because it touches everything from product design to demonstration and purchase.

“It’s not device oriented, it’s not marketing oriented,” Fremont says. “What I love most about it is that it’s completely disruptive.”

Asked by Bitterman whether AI is just a lot of talk at this point, Fremont posits that marketers need to do a lot more experimentation. Beyond the vehicle design model, he talks about the potential for machine learning from consumer engagement with digital ads.

“It’s really taken the notion of one-to-one personalization to the ultimate.”

Recalling the early days of one-to-one marketing with the direct mail medium, Fremont marvels at the swiftness of the AI realm.

“Now the ability to move at lightening speed is what is so disruptive,” along with “the accuracy that it has.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.

This is the viewpoint that Tim Castree brought to global advertising and media planning agency MEC upon his arrival as CEO from Videology, following stints at MediaVest and Leo Burnett. Having been tapped to lead the merger of GroupM’s MEC and Maxus earlier this month, Castree sees a need for more standardization for targeting and measurement and fewer “home-grown” solutions.

Many people look at advanced TV and premium video “and say it’s obvious, we get better targeting, we get better performance, etcetera,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV. “But there’s a larger context that I’m not sure people are talking about in the industry that’s really essential.”

While companies like Google and Facebook are “fantastic, important partners” they represent “disintermediation against the agency model at the moment,” according to Castree.

Meanwhile, he alludes to consultancies that are attempting to lower the rank of agencies on the value chain.

“They want to give all the smart advice and try to relegate us to execution,” Castree says.

So the opportunity for better optimization of advanced TV and premium video isn’t just about better performance. “It’s our bulwark. It’s our big hedge against the competitive threats and disintermediation.”

The route to erecting these ramparts is by bringing more data, targeting and addressability “but more importantly more standardization to the approach behind which we transact in premium video.”

In other words, a common way to apply different types of data to targeting and measurement.

“The challenge we’re having at the moment is everybody is building a home- grown solution,” Castree observes. “There’s just a multitude of home-grown solutions so it’s getting more fragmented, more difficult to navigate and the power is in some form of consolidation around that.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Sorrell’s comments in this interview with Beet.TV came as the organizers of Cannes announced the formation of an advisory committee to help them decide what the event should consist of going forward amid controversy generated by the pullout next year of Publicis Groupe, as The Drum reports.

“Cannes as ever was a frenetic week,” says Sorrell. “Probably has become too big. Probably has become too expensive.”

Some people are questioning “whether Cannes should be Cannes, or Cannes should be in Cannes, or whether Cannes should be canned as somebody put it to me,” he adds. “I think it’s a good question.”

The value of Cannes to WPP “is that it’s important to our people and it’s important to our clients.” WPP staffers see the awards confab “as a way of enriching their careers and celebrating their success with their peers judging their work.” The holding company’s clients “also enjoy it in the sense that they get a great kick out of winning awards and being judged by their peers has having been responsible for producing great work.”

Seen in this light, Sorrell doesn’t think a boycott or withdrawal is helpful “but where it’s directionally correct is it does raise the question about whether this is the right place to do this and whether this is the right format.

“Because I think in certain respects, certainly in terms of expense, and maybe some excesses, it’s too much.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

In this, Soul Machines Co-Founder & CEO Mark Sagar walks The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman through three immersive and utterly absorbing examples of how AI technology is “humanizing” computing.  The Weather Company is part of IBM’s Watson group and Watson is being used by Soul Machines.

“You can basically bring anything to life, whether it’s a virtual spokesperson or we can even animate non-human characters,” Sagar says as he begins to summon virtual humans on a computer screen. “So it creates a level of engagement never seen before.”

The first example that Sagar presents is a baby girl who appears to be sitting in a car seat directly facing him. “She can see my face. She’s responding to me. She’s not copying me. She’s got her own emotional models,” Sagar explains.

This becomes evident when Sagar moves away from the computer. The girl’s expression sours as her eyes try to find him. A graph superimposed on the computer screen shows her stress level rising. When Sagar comes back into view and speaks, she smiles. “I’m basically calming her down with my voice and my facial expressions. Just like you do with a child.”

When he shows her a book, she tells him what it is. Her pupils respond as he adjusts her simulated level of dopamine.

The next two examples are virtual female adults who are programmed to be able to interact with humans, for example answering questions from customers on behalf of brands. All the while showing genuine human emotions.

“We’ve actually got absolutely precise control over what their faces can do,” Sagar says, noting that every single virtual eyelash is constructed individually.

To Sagar, such uses of technology represents for brands a “whole vocabulary which has been untapped so far in terms of human computer interaction and it’s totally ready to go now.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business and Watson. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“From an advertiser perspective, we’re seeing a lot of that right now. Brands that are actually taking sales impact as a KPI and then adjusting all of their media tactics to meet that,” Feigenson says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Meanwhile, on the publisher side, what interests Feigenson, who is Chief Revenue Officer at Nielsen Catalina Solutions, “is a wholescale embracing of this.”

The company has about 90 million households worth of frequent shopper data garnered from retail partners frequent shopper data. “That means we can go really deep in terms of creating segments for activation or in doing closed-loop attribution,” Feigenson says.

That data is complemented with insights from the Nielsen Homescan panel, “which allows us to create a representative view of what’s going on in the market beyond the retailers that participate with us through Catalina.”

Since the beginning of 2017, Nielsen Catalina Solutions has announced new relationships with Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify.

With regard to business outcomes for advertisers, TV is still an easier medium to mine, according to Feigenson.

“It’s somewhat easy to look at effectiveness because you have one format and you can take that format and put it against a media mix model and get pretty predictive about what results are going to be,” he says.

Digital involves many different formats and ways of targeting, so outcomes can vary widely. “So from a publisher perspective, first and foremost they need to show that what they’re doing works.”

Some publishers exceed these expectations by using outcomes to influence their own product strategy. “In other words, they use outcomes as a way to figure for them what works, they work backwards to make it better.”

At Cannes, Feigenson is optimistic that all parties can come together in the common interest of advancing the ad industry and lifting certain clouds that have lingered overhead, among them digital ad fraud.

“I’m hoping here we address issues honestly and creatively and we come up with ways to make this industry better.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“I think the way we think about AI is how to strengthen our journalism,” Jarrod Dicker, Washington Post’s Head of Commercial Product & Technology, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“How can we create more stories in a broader scope that are more factual, that allow us to be able to take artificial intelligence and API’s to help us bring our journalism farther.”

What he finds particularly interesting right now is how companies like his are using AI to benefit their advertisers. This is important when some people are questioning whether brands are funding fake news and whether “fake advertising” exists, according to Dicker.

“I think it’s up to the publishers to build in certain products and technologies and investments on our site and really bring them from point A to B faster,” he says.

Washington Post’s effort in this regard is Postcards on the Post, which allows it to identify each consumer’s consumption habit based on content type. It’s used for branded content.

As ADWEEK reports, the initiative breaks down an immersive piece of branded content into its multimedia components, which can include infographics, video, text and photo galleries. These can all be turned into standalone units that are then targeted to individuals using available data on their content preferences.

“You look at how different publishers are delivering their stories and it’s always the same thing,” says Dicker. “Headline with the description, similar to what the front page of a paper looked like in 1950 and 1960 a lot of modern home pages look exactly the same.”

This ignores the reality of how people consume content and how data brings these preferences to light.

“So if we know that a consumer prefers video over text, over images, then why don’t we deliver that medium to them directly where that promotion sits?” Dicker says.

Postcards on the Post delivers branded content “in a very seamless and authentic way” that our users are most likely to consume “at that given point wherever they are.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.

The bank hopes that Erica will help to humanize relationships in what has historically been a very transactional service category. As The Wall Street Journal reports, a client could say things like, “I want to send money to a friend,” or “I want to pay a bill,” and Erica could easily facilitate the transaction.

“I think this is really going to be a paradigm shift as we become much more relationship-centric,” Verdone says.

Another transition that has been under way at BOA is that of being more “audience-first” instead of looking for solutions and delivering them to audiences, according to Verdone.

“And what we’re finding, not surprisingly, is people do need more information about their finances. What we’re trying to do is deliver it in a digestible, easy way that they want to engage with it.”

One particular target is the Millennial cohort, which Verdone describes as wanting to “follow their passion” but not fully knowing whether they can afford to do so. This is one reason why BOA maintains an ongoing relationship with online learning center Kahn Academy.

On her list of exciting developments in advertising are addressable TV, “something that we’re starting to tip our toe into” given BOA’s range of service offerings and audience needs.

“The other thing we’re seeing a lot of success with is sequential video,” Verdone explains. For example, instead of running three separate 30-second spots on Hulu considering it an opportunity to have “90 seconds in front of this audience. What is the story that we want to tell them in 90 seconds and to really think about it as a short film.”

Amid all of the talk of technology at Cannes, what Verdone doesn’t want to lose sight of “is the amazing creativity that is here.” At the end of the day, “how we connect on a very human level and break through and touch our customers is really what’s going to make the difference.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Donohue talks not only about the prospects for AI but the talent needs of the modern media agency and how Starcom has doubled down on its human experience positioning.

The continual increase in data and technology fosters the ability for brands to be more personal and “recognize people for what they are, human beings,” which is a change for the better, according to Donohue.

Regarding AI, she sees on one end of the spectrum machine learning leading to better insights “from a significant amount of data as well as then building strategies off those insights.”

On the other end of the band is the promise of more personal relationships, for example the growing use of chat bots. “Bots is a very technology term, but the reality is bots are allowing a more human interaction with a brand,” says Donohue.

Unlike technology that facilitates website transactions, bots can provide users with a direct dialogue with a brand “that can enable me to figure out how the brand can better serve my needs.” Overall, the range of the AI spectrum “is pretty powerful in how it can change marketing overall.”

Donohue segues to the organizational change at Starcom within the past year or so during which management “took a step back” and decided to determine whether the human experience positioning it had staked out was a viable one.

“The resounding answer among our people and among our clients is that human experience is absolutely the right positioning,” she says. “And in fact, you could argue that it’s more right than when we first created it.”

So Starcom “laser focused” on the notion of the power of a human experience with brands. “Human experience is right, but what’s the modern iteration of it? That’s what we spent the last year on.”

With about 30 years of agency experience behind her, Donohue has a keen perspective for the changing role of what used to be referred to as personnel or human resources. The modern media agency needs everyone from data engineers and scientists to storytellers to managers who can horizontally manage those resources.

“It’s a diverse range of talent needs that we have, which on one hand does make it challenging,” Donohue says. “It also opens up a much broader competitive set that we have to deal with.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.

At the same time, the personal ambition of OMD Worldwide’s CEO, Mainardo de Nardis, during the festival is to learn new experiences and meet people. “I make a list throughout the year of all the people who I actually want to meet here,” de Nardis says in this interview with Beet.TV in which he opines that data has become so commonplace that people “should stop talking about it.”

He recalls an important client telling OMD that the Oasis is the only place one needs to be at Cannes “because everything happens there,” whether it’s new initiatives, presentations or live video streams from the Palais des Festivals.

“I’m very passionate about the OMD Oasis here at Cannes because I think it’s a great program. It’s a place where our clients, our friends, our colleagues, our prospects want to spend time and therefore it’s important to us,” de Nardis says.

With creativity and technology constantly colliding, “It’s extremely complex for our clients,” he adds. “They want us to pull down the walls and make it easy for them,” a process that includes not adding the agency’s own complication “to the complication of the marketplace.”

Even with the influx of digital and tech partners at Cannes over the past decade, it’s important to remember that at the end of every marketing connection point there is a human being. “Whatever techniques and data and support we use to get there, it’s about the story that person will engage with,” says de Nardis.

Data has become so important “we should stop talking about it,” he adds. “It’s not about the data. It’s about the insights, the understandings, the learnings that the data allows us to extract in order to do things in a different, more precise way.”

Likewise, the role of an agency is no different than it was three decades ago, according to de Nardis. “It’s just that the means that we have available today is what we’ve been dreaming all our life and now we finally have it.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“The experiences that we’re are bringing our clients through here that are all Watson-based is really where the future is for us,” The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

All things weather-related won’t disappear altogether when The Weather Company undergoes its name change. The future “does not exclude weather, because weather is obviously a big part of how we can utilize AI going forward,” Bitterman says. “We’re going to be rolling it out in the coming months.”

IBM envisions Watson as akin to the Android or iOS app stores “where it’s a platform that people can develop on.” Bitterman cites companies like Soul Machines that are building their technologies on top of the Watson stack via application programming interfaces.

For Soul Machines, building “virtual humans” involves using such Watson skillsets as natural language recognition to sentiment analysis. Auckland-based Soul Machines recently unveiled its first virtual assistant, Nadia, voiced by actress Cate Blanchett, as idealog reports.

“Right now there’s 38 different API’s that Watson has and there’s more in testing right now,” Bitterman says. “Probably by the end of the year there should be close to 50 or even 60 different API’s that Watson can enable companies with.”

Cannes attendees can demo various kinds of AI interfaces at The Weather Company’s encampment at the Carlton hotel. One of the experiences is operating the self-driving car called Olli that is powered by IBM’s technology.

“We also have a mirror here that will let you know if you have early signs of melanoma,” Bitterman explains. “Which seems highly appropriate for the south of France.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.

The social media behemoth next week will kick off a campaign to showcase new ad formats like 360 and vertical video as it seeks to instill a heightened sense of agility in brands that want to engage with its users, Facebook Marketing Director for North America Michelle Klein explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“The power of mobile video is incredibly important and it’s exploding on Facebook,” says Klein, noting that more than 100 million hours of mobile video is watched on the platform every day.

She cites research predicting that by 2020, 75% of all mobile data will be used for video.

Facebook’s recently launched vertical video ad product “allows you to tell a taller tale using the longer format” instead of shooting horizontally and adapting it, according to Klein.

She wants brand marketers to understand the need to create “for the speed of feed” while trying to capture users’ attention in short time span. “If you’re trying to engage with somebody in a longer-form, lean-in format you might want to look at in-stream video or longer format,” Klein says.

“If you’re trying to reach people on the go, then short-form is the right format.”

Facebook’s raison d’être is to encourage an open and connected world. “That mission translates into the way we engage with the industry.”

To this end, the company has created industry councils dedicated to clients, measurement and creative. At Cannes, the Creative Council will to create marketing programs in an agile framework.

“As marketers today, we need to move much faster,” Klein says. “We need to test, we need to learn, we need to iterate, we need to respond. Agility is key and it’s different to how it was even a year ago.”

This segment is part of the Beet.TV lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. 2017. The series is presented by Storyful. For more from the series, please visit this page.

As he looks ahead to the 2017 Cannes Lions festival, Lang talks about the importance of conducting content strategies and audits for brands and explains how Mindshare used data and technology to tackle the challenge of getting Millennials to consider buying a Jaguar automobile.

“As a Chief Content Officer, this is going to sound funny but there’s too much content out there because a lot of the content doesn’t have a reason for being,” Lang says in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s not based on a strategy, it’s just noise and clutter.”

He prefaces his thoughts by noting that Mindshare has removed the word “branded” as it relates to content. The bigger issue is that content needs to have “a reason to live and a purpose,” for both brands and their target audiences.

This was a particularly thorny issue facing Jaguar when it came to convincing the Millennial age cohort to include the brand in their consideration set, something they’d never really done before. Mindshare decided to create a two-minute action movie with a Jaguar model in the hero role and seven separate shots of potential protagonists. The goal was to lure 10,000 Millennials to Jaguar dealers for test drives during a six-city campaign.

Using the understanding that Millennials are the “selfie generation” and proprietary technology from Canada, Mindshare was able to film the 10,000 people and put each of them in the seat of the protagonist so that it appeared they were starring in their own action movie.

“So we had a technology stream, we had a data stream and because the content was relevant to the Millennials themselves, we had a 50 percent shareability on Facebook with a target that didn’t consider this brand at the very beginning of the conversation,” Lang says.

Via RFID technology, Jaguar dealers were able to follow up with the test participants. The effort was “hugely successful” and Jaguar “sold a ton of cars,” he adds.

“I would say in Cannes, less is more” with regard to the plethora of content available to consumers, says Lang. “It’s really important to do a content strategy and content audit to help drive what you should be doing, why you should be doing it and the metrics associated with those outcomes.”

This segment is part of the Beet.TV lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. 2017. The series is presented by Storyful. For more from the series, please visit this page.

At this year’s festival, Twitter will spend a lot of time talking about the value of experiences, how it’s doubled down on live streaming and what it takes for brands to create a value exchange with the platform’s users, the company’s Director of Brand Strategy, Stacy Minero, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We talk a lot about how you can creative feed-first content,” says Minero, who joined Twitter three years ago following stints on the buy-side at Mindshare and ZenithOptimedia. “Everybody’s talking about mobile-first and we’re focused on feed-first.”

Some of the best work done on the social platform by brands involves designing memorable experiences. “We know that consumers skip ads but they don’t skip experiences,” Minero says.

Foremost among these are brands becoming live broadcasters, the increased use of 360 video and harnessing the power of bots. One example she cites is when fast-feeder Wendy’s teamed up with Twitter during the NCAA final four playoffs, which enabled fans to create their own team brackets on the rails of Twitter, as ADWEEK reports. “It was a really interesting way to capitalize on that heat moment but to bring consumers into an experience that was more immersive,” Minero says.

The company’s feed-first approach is based on the knowledge that “people are more likely to scroll or to swipe than they are to stop on content.” Among its suggested best practices for brands are “having a bias to short form,” engineering the front end to create stopping power and adding captions to content.

To create a value exchange with users, brands need to understand their mindsets and motivations, but also their need states “so that you can either deliver entertainment or some type of utility.”

Twitter has “doubled down” on live streaming because while people are attracted by content, being part of the conversation keeps them engaged. It’s the result of the “first screen” and “second screen” melding together for shared experiences.

“There’s a lot of opportunities for brands to not only draft off of live streaming and be a part of it but to actually create their own live stream content,” says Minero.

This segment is part of the Beet.TV lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. 2017. The series is presented by Storyful. For more from the series, please visit this page.