“For us, it goes back to the simplicity of understanding the consumers really well,” says the company’s VP of Brand Marketing, Tim Goldsmid. “As a small advertiser company, we have to do that better than larger companies. We don’t have the scale.”

Smaller brands “need to be very clear about what it is you want to accomplish, and then once you’ve got your media plan together or your plan of attack, you want to make sure you’re measuring and learning,” Goldsmid explains in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.

Jack Link’s identifies specific needs and then matches up the appropriate consumer targets with the most appropriate media channels. “We do a lot of measurement and read on the back side and then scale from there. So we have a lot of little tests going on to see how we can connect with consumers and then move it forward from there,” says Goldsmid.

If the chosen medium is TV, Jack Link’s will shoot “multiple amounts of content and then we’ll optimize and get feedback. We have a partner that can tell us which spots or which creative is running, whether it be digital or TV, and then we optimize from there.”

One of the brand’s partners is Cadent “because they bring a solution that allows us to be much more efficient in the marketplace that we couldn’t get if we weren’t working with a partner like them. If we were going straight to networks.”

By working with Cadent, Jack Link’s is able to localize because Cadent buys media on the local level and offers “different solutions and products that allow us to go into different markets.”

Having worked with other small brands, Goldsmid says it’s all about testing, learning and then scaling.

“You need to basically be scrappy and push your agency or partners to find different solutions, like a Cadent, like other partners that are out there,” he says. “Because it’s not a one size fits all solution anymore. There are very different ways that you can put your marketing model together.”

This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.

Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.

“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”

Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.

“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.

As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.

“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?

“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”

At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.

“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”

OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”

When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”

That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”

This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.