But it’s also nice to stay ahead of the audience targeting curve by using data science to analyze viewing behavior and enable more targeted advertising buys, Shimmel, who is Chief Research Officer, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

For the most part, professional sports still lives on broadcast and cable. “It seems to have been more resilient in terms of ratings over the last couple of years than other genres have been,” Shimmel says. “We’re really happy with the way that post-season baseball is performing for us, both on linear and we’re seeing amazing growth on digital.”

Earlier this year, Fox, Turner and Viacom announced they would collaborate on a linear TV audience targeting solution called OpenAP. It launched the first week in October and Shimmel says acceptance in the advertiser and agency community has been “great.”

He references a paper that was just released of an analysis of a $1 million TV spend and the resulting ROI depending on whether age-sex demos or audience optimization was the basis for the buy. “It turns out that the ROI for audience is about 30% more than buying age-sex” at the same budget, Shimmel explains.

Simply stated, the goal of OpenAP is “to facilitate that.”

As for the future roadmap of OpenAP, Shimmel lays out the vision thusly: “ Obviously we want to migrate beyond linear TV. We want it to buy cross-platform. We also want it to include cable set-top box inventory.”

Shimmel references an exercise that Turner did within the past couple of years when it first started measuring homes that had streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) services. Data showed that those homes watched about one-third less traditional TV, so the exercise involved creating a group of non-SVOD homes with similar demographics to SVOD homes.

“Of the 33 percent difference, about two thirds of it was explained by demographics. Only a third of it was due to the fact that the technology, SVOD, was in the home,” Shimmel says.

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

The deal with 4C “allows us to juxtapose the value of our inventory within the same buying console that they’re buying this other inventory,” says Aaron Radin, NBCU’s SVP of Partnerships & Portfolio Products.

This means that among other things, buyers will be able to decide whether buying a 15- or 30-second ad on the hit show This Is Us “will be a more effective use of a client’s marketing spend than a three-second autoplay video in a news feed,” Radin says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“What’s particularly notable about this relationship is that 4C has been used to buy social media platforms” including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn. And while they are still considered to be social media platforms, nearly half of the advertising transactions that occur on them are for video inventory.

“We saw this as an important place where we could provide the efficiency and targetability that clients have been able to enjoy on those platforms,” Radin says.

Retailer Target is the advertising partner kicking off the self-serve offering, which in the future will expand beyond NBCU’s linear TV inventory to digital as well.

“We’re super lucky to have Target as our launch client for that partnership. I think they’re the perfect client to do so.”

Target is known for its digital targeting prowess and CRM savvy. It’s also been “laser focused on being able to leverage that information against television inventory,” says Radin.

NBCU has created application programming interfaces for its television inventory, a move that Radin describes as “a landmark” in the industry.

“The initial results have been super exciting. We couldn’t be more excited not only that we got it off the ground but about the types of opportunities it opens up to our clients by being able to present our inventory to the market in this way.”

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

“Each client and agency will transact directly,” Mike Rosen, NBCU’s EVP of Portfolio Sales & Strategy, told BusinessInsider. Nearly all of NBCU’s ad inventory will be available, except for ads in future marquee events like the Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup, according to Rosen, who will be one of the featured speakers at Beet Retreat 2017 in Miami.

While Target will be able to reach the audiences of its choosing, all of them will be served the same ads. NBCU is being assisted in its latest audience-targeting offering by 4C, which specializes in reaching people on social media platforms.

Last month, Beet.TV interviewed Rosen at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York, where he discussed the search for better ways of measuring and optimizing key performance indicators from campaigns. We are republishing the interview in the wake of today’s news.

It is now two and a half years since NBCU launched its Audience Targeting Platform (ATP), a way to let advertisers use data to reach specific audiences.

In that time, the company has offered up viewing data from 22 million Comcast set-top boxes, combined with other data from first- or third-party sources, to help marketers create more refined viewer segments.

Now Mike Rosen wants to go further.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the NBCU portfolio and sales strategy EVP explains the next step.

“As you start to unlock the value in the targeting side, how can you see the data to understand the outcome measurement?” Rosen asks.

“So… (we’re trying) to better understand what the different outcomes are from the different campaigns. We want to make sure the KPI we get is being properly measured and optimized.”

Rosen says outcomes for data-driven campaigns vary depending on many factors. But one thing all have in common is, they are better informed.

“We moved from simply looking at age-and-gender, which was the currency of our marketplace but also the only real measurement we had to transact, to something more richer – custom segments unique to each client,” Rosen adds.

And it is no longer pocket change that is changing hands in this way. This year, NBCU said it would make $1 billion inventory available for buying using data-based, non-Nielsen methods – equivalent to a tenth of its total ad revenue take last year.

“There’s a bit of both conversation and concern that TV is going to move all the way down the funnel and be a direct-response medium,” Launce Neuhauser tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “(That) negates one of the biggest benefits that TV has, which is its ability to reach large audiences and change brand preference.”

Neuhauser says advertisers are going to need TV – but the reason may surprise you.

“People are actually having babies at a slowing rate compared to the generation before – the amount of new consumers coming in to market is lessening,” he observes. “The biggest (ad) spenders are having a harder time continuing to grow. They’re going to have to reach and retain their current customers. They’re going to have to reach new customers and change their brand preference.”

Neuhauser says that’s what the scale and reach of TV excels at. So why throw the baby out with the bath water?

Programming Note:  He will be a speaker at the Beet.TV executive retreat next week in Florida.

“There’s a lot of talk about addressable TV. The market is trying to look for what is real,” comments digital ad group 4C Insights‘ CEO Lance Neuhauser, whose company offers social media insight in to the buying of TV ads.

“We finally now have the infrastructure and the data available to actually deliver on the promise of addressable TV – one ad going to a specific household.

“That brings about a whole new series of questions – ‘Who should I be putting my message in front of and why?’ ‘How can I measure whether that ad was effective?’ We plan to play aggressively in the delivery portion of this.”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.

Now 4C has fully integrated this special-sounding little piece of tech, and is planning a “coming-out party” at the DMEXCO advertising gathering in Cologne, Germany. So what does it do, and what’s in-store?

“The holy grail that we’ve all been chasing forever is right person, right person, right message, right time,” says 4C chief marketer Aaron Goldman, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Now advertisers, agencies can use the 4C social ads platform to run ads on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and sync them up with what’s running on broadcast, whether be it a certain program or a certain advertiser.”

The system works because the technology employs the former Teletrax’s bank of computers and global TV feeds to identify and understand what kinds of shows are being broadcast at any minute around the world, indexing and categorising content by type in its live database. That gives advertisers another targeting characteristic, beyond demographic and interests, that can be deployed in real-time in social media.

“Nobody is just watching television anymore – you’ve got your phone in your hand, your tablet,” Goldman says. “We can make sure advertisements are in sync across all devices.

“We’ve seen as high as 50%, 70% higher click-through rates. We’ve seen conversion rates go up 20% to 30% across multiple different categories.”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.

For TV viewers distracted by touchscreens during commercial breaks, Teletrax has been gaining attention for allowing brands that are advertising on the living room big screen to also buy ads on social media at exactly the same moment. But the potential doesn’t just stop at this in-brand synchronization.

“The lowest hanging fruit has been the simulcast – knowing when there is a television commercial for Audi on the first screen and executing that similar commercial on the second,” according to Teletrax sales and strategic partnerships VP Joe Krokus.

“More and more brands, though, are looking at ‘switchers’ – individuals that don’t necessarily belong strictly to them.

“If there is an ad for Audi on TV, BMW would want to know that and want to execute on the second screen, across social, display, search and now, of course, across TV.”

Teletrax was acquired by Chicago-based 4C Insights to beef up its multi-screen ad offerings late last month.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

The Chicago-based company is helping advertisers better understand how to target users of social networks by comprehending their response to brands, interests and media behaviour.

“We look at over 1.5 billion user profiles, 250,000 interests, 50,000 brands and 6,000 TV programs on a regular basis, and we map the connections between all of those entities, which is literally trillions of nodes’ worth of data,” CEO Lance Neuhauser tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

He says brands don’t want to target consumers based on reach and demographic any more, because the media landscape has become so fragmented and unpredictable.

“We also start to ingest set-top box data in which we’re looking at millions of households’ second-by-second data, every single button that’s pressed on the remote control,” he adds.

“We overlay over 29 different categories of information so we can see who’s tuned in to what program, whether they’re fast-forwarding through commercials and those that are viewing commercials, what their persona is.

“We also ad occurrence information that spans over 60 countries, over 2,000 channels, 600,000 commercials a day.”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

“We’re playing aggressively in the decisioning process for addressable TV and we’re hoping to streamline some of the creative decisioning,” 4C CEO Lance Neuhauser tells Beet.TV in this video interview, recorded in Chicago earlier this month.

Teletrax was first started as a TV watermarking and monitoring service by Medialink Worldwide in 2002. Six years later, it was acquired by Philips’s Content Identification unit, which later spun out as Civolution.

As Civolution, the company’s main technology play has been to trigger ads on social media platforms in sync with live TV broadcasts, maximising advertiser reach. The technology was deployed to target ads against in-game Superbowl plays back in January.

Civolution sold off its audience measurement and watermarking tech to Kantar last fall, reverting to use the Teletrax brand to focus on the TV-synced ads. Social ad click-throughs increase when delivered along with related TV broadcasts, the company says. It is this which 4C Insight is acquiring.

Chicago-based 4C already offers a measurement and planning platform that lets ad buyers target social media users by interests, TV programs and languages.

In its announcement, it says: “By combining data from set-top boxes, ad scheduling, and TV ad occurrences, 4C can address millions of households and provide TV verification for advertisers, agencies, broadcasters, and operators.”

4C is getting an Eindhoven, Netherlands-based company that will expand its feature set and geographic footprint, as the industry begins to apply online ad targeting techniques to TV, even combining the two.

To make the purchase, 4C raised further investment led by Jump Partners. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Civolution CEO Alex Terpstra, who joins 4C as EMEA managing director, says: “Teletrax clients will soon enjoy 4C’s unique ability to unlock the power of social connections in driving advertising effectiveness, while 4C’s clients gain access to our real-time TV analytics and TV synced advertising offerings. It truly is a win-win for everyone involved.”