As a sell-side platform (SSP) that represents publishers, PubMatic is a key part of the advertising supply chain. The media marketplace is undergoing a significant transformation as marketers look for ways to reach target audiences while respecting consumer privacy.

“We’re seeing activation of data shift to the supply side as it’s closer to the source, in many cases,” said Kyle Dozeman, chief revenue officer for the Americas at sell-side platform PubMatic, in this conversation presented by Beet.TV. “Our focus has been on building tools that allow publishers and data owners to directly connect their data to media, and share that with the brands that they work with.”

Dozeman recently shared his insights about the changing media ecosystem with Adam Gerber, global chief media officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM. The agency’s “Responsible Investment” framework aims to advance brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Supporting Diverse Publishers

A key challenge for marketers is finding ad inventory among smaller, independent publications that have relied on advertising revenue to finance their journalism. Dozeman said PubMatic has worked to help access that inventory.

“We use a lot of our partners in different parts of our business in ensuring material portions of our dollars are going to companies that have diverse leadership and strong foundations and principles around equity and inclusion,” he said. PubMatic “is leaning in with buyers who care about this, and helping them get more connected with diverse publishers.”

Environmental Sustainability

Dozeman and Gerber agreed that the digital advertising ecosystem needs to become more mindful about energy use. The computer servers that form the backbone of the digital ad marketplace consume significant amounts of energy.

“We are cognizant of that fact, and we’re going to start evaluating partners and our supply chain – and try to generate some good results,” Gerber said.

Supply Chain Transparency

Advertisers also are demanding greater transparency in the digital ad marketplace, not only to ensure they’re reaching the right audiences, but also to avoid losses to ad fraud. Dozeman said PubMatic is focused on quality publisher partners that are reliable.

“We know that brands need complete confidence,” Dozeman said. “Some vendors catch things that others don’t. We want to make sure we’re honoring whatever a brand uses for their source of truth.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the TV transformation track presented by PubMatic, the sell-side platform (SSP) for programmatic advertising: 

 1. TV’s advertising model needs overhaul

Many consumers have shown a greater preference for streaming services that don’t carry ads, a trend that will challenge ad-supported channels to improve the consumer experience. The future of ad-supported TV depends on it. 

Instead of loading up on advertising that becomes a nuisance and pushes audiences to pay for ad-free programming, media outlets will have to focus on improving the consumer experience, said Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM.

2. Prioritize consumer experience

Media outlets also recognize the importance of giving consumers greater flexibility in controlling the viewing experience. Improvements to the consumer experience can include a reduced ad load, innovations in ad units and other opportunities to engage viewers. Combining the efficiencies of programmatic buying with premium content at scale is a key goal.  

“It’s about on-demand access and meeting consumers where they are, but it’s also about the user experience and keeping that at the center,” said Ashley Luongo, senior vice president of advanced TV and programmatic digital sales at NBCUniversal.

3. Brands want to buy premium inventory programmatically

The upfront market traditionally has been one of the best ways for media buyers to reserve premium inventory. But the marketplace is changing amid a shift in viewing habits and the growth of quality content that’s available in the programmatic market.  

Buyers awakening to idea of wanting security of reserving scarce, premium inventory, but want a biddable environment, said Nicole Scaglione, global vice president of OTT and CTV business at PubMatic.

4. Data and metrics offer more than a cross-screen currency

Consumers are viewing content among a wider variety of connected devices, spurring discussion about a cross-screen currency for measurement. But data and metrics can be used for more than just a currency, said Christine Grammier, head of TV measurement at data connectivity platform LiveRamp.

5. Pandemic will have lasting effects on media buying

Millions of people were stuck at home during the pandemic, spurring a significant shift in their media consumption habits. Advertisers have responded by de-emphasizing dayparts as people spend more time with streaming platforms. 

“When everybody’s at home during the pandemic and wanting to watch primetime content at all hours, every hour of the day became a theoretical prime hour,” said Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence. “It changed up the way we did our planning and our buying.” 

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the cross-screen measurement track presented by Nielsen: 

1. Unified measurement for multiple screens 

Marketers face bigger challenges in measuring media consumption among different viewing devices, including mobile phones and smart TVs, to get a more unified view of consumers. The goal is to marry bottom-up measurement that’s common among digital advertisers with top-down modeling, said Joanna O’Connell, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. 

2. Consumer panel provides more in-depth insights 

Brands have access to troves of data about how their ads were delivered, but measuring their effectiveness on consumers takes another level of research. TV ratings company Nielsen has multiple data sources that complement its consumer panels, which are comprised of representative samples of the broader population. 

“The beauty of the panel is it allows us to have a representative sample of measuring total consumption within a home,” said Kimberly Gilberti, senior vice president of product management at  Nielsen. “For things that can’t be measured by the data sets that we have, we can fill in those blanks.” 

Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, agrees that panel information is critical for in-depth insights. 

“The reason the panel remains critical is that you need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” he said. 

3. Measurement includes outcomes 

“In addition to measuring delivery, we need to measure the impact. That can be complicated, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it or that we shouldn’t try to evolve that measurement,” said Nancy Beekman, group director of data sciences at Wavemaker. 

Measuring impact includes an analysis of how different media touchpoints help brands to achieve their objectives in terms of sales, awareness and brand consideration.  

“It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content,” said Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence. “We’re at the early stages of developing measurement solutions that really help us understand that into the media model.” 

There’s room for experimentation in achieving  results as measurement will never achieve a “perfect” level of insights, said Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at Wavemaker, GroupM 

“We won’t have perfect, but we have to come at this from the lens of what is the best option for this campaign,” he said. 

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

“There’s one over-arching thing we all need to recognize, which is that the old model doesn’t work,” Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’ve got a polluted environment — the tremendous amounts of advertising that just isn’t relevant or useful to viewers anymore.”

Making advertising work better for people is at the heart of an effort by GroupM to promote a media-buying framework it calls “Responsible Investment.” The idea is to create a healthier advertising ecosystem that advances brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.

As higher-income households subscribe to paid services that don’t carry ads and lower-income consumers stick with free, ad-supported channels, the media marketplace will reflect a growing divide. That’s worrisome.

“We’re moving to a world of have’s and have-not’s,” Gerber said. “Increasingly, we’re going to have a population that can afford to avoid advertising, and to experience their video content à la carte and without interruption — which limits brands’ abilities to engage with them.”

That group also will have access to higher-quality news, information and entertainment, deepening the digital divide with others.

“We’re going to have an environment where large swathes of the population just don’t have access to some of the best premium content available because it’s all behind paywalls,” Gerber said. “That’s what really concerns me — whether it’s delivery of news, delivery of thought-provoking dramas, documentaries or just entertainment that helps people escape.”

Instead of loading up on advertising that becomes a nuisance and pushes audiences to pay for ad-free programming, media outlets will have to focus on improving the consumer experience.

“We need to make massive changes to ad load, and more importantly, we need to recognize that the old, legacy model of individual publishers selling their own inventory does not accommodate a world where we are mutually trying to reduce the ad load to the lowest degree possible,” Gerber said. “Advertisers need all of their partners on the sell side to work together to help us optimize campaigns — not within their own siloed portfolios, but across the entire ecosystem.”

Improving the media ecosystem requires tackling ad fraud and enhancing measurement methods to help understand consumer engagement with media, Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

Weeding out fake ad inventory is a necessary step in tackling ad fraud, especially as programmatic buying continues to grow.

“The platforms that are connecting those sellers into our environments have a direct path to understanding who the real suppliers are and who aren’t,” Gerber said. “They’re ultimately cutting checks to those sellers, and should be able to vet them in a more proactive way.”

Improving the media supply chain also requires a better understanding of whether consumers are actually seeing ads, especially as they spend more time with connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones.

“The big question there is whether the screen that’s being consumed — that that content is being cast to or delivered to — is actually tuned into that viewing source,” Gerber said. “There’s potentially a lot of viewing or ad delivery that’s being captured that isn’t real. We need to make sure we have measurement solutions in place that truly identify whether that’s happening and to what extent.”

Advertisers and their agencies are in the early stages of developing ways to better measure viewability and engagement.

“The general premise of viewability needs to be something that we continue to focus on, and evolve,” Gerber said. “It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content.”

“We’re in a hypergrowth stage in terms of the transition that consumers are having to streaming,” Adam Gerber, global chief media officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’re seeing acceptance of the ad-supported model, which is promising, but we’re still in the infancy in terms of understanding how best to leverage the opportunity from a marketing perspective as the TV marketplace changes so quickly.

Gerber, whose background includes work on the sell-side of the media industry, including more than six years at Disney ABC Television Group, said he’s not surprised by programmers’ different strategies to reach consumers.

“It’s clear that consumers have been enabled by technology, and access to watch on their own time. They want things on demand, and they want aggregated offerings of large swathes of content. The move to streaming services was something that was going to have to happen.”

Shift in Consumer Expectations

He predicted that most scripted content will be on-demand through streaming platforms, while live linear TV will continued to different itself with sports and news. The popularity of streaming platforms that don’t carry advertising, such as Netflix and Disney+, is worrisome for marketers that seek to reach those audience, he said.

Source: eMarketer, Insider Intelligence

“There’s no question that the streaming services are cannibalizing the ad-supported environment,” he said. “That’s a problem for marketers, but it’s not unexpected. As an industry, we’ve not kept up with consumers in terms of the advertising experience they expect.”

Gerber would like to see media outlets work on improving that experience, and not be limited to traditional ways of grouping ads into commercial breaks. He’d like to see more advertising that’s less intrusive to viewers who have greater control over what they watch.

“There are a tremendous number of ways that we can reimagine and re-explore innovation on the ad format front in an AVOD environment,” he said. “I’m continuously shocked we’ve maintained a pod and multi-ad position model, and assumed that that’s how we need to move forward.”

Gerber anticipates that the upfront season will mark a significant change in ad inventories, including those of AVOD services.

“The supply that has existed historically is not going to continue to exist in the same ways and in the same environments that it has,” he said. “There is a very swift shift to streaming. We have to re-think our models. We have to ask our sell-side partners to shift their business models to enable buy-side decisioning to become a reality at scale.”

You are watching “The Stream 2021: New Audiences, New Opportunities,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Tubi. For more videos, please visit this page.

There’s still a role for an upfront market amid the uncertainty and advertiser demands for greater flexibility, Adam Gerber, global chief media officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM, said in an interview.

“There is going to be a market, whether it happens all at once or whether we have some clients moving on a broadcast-year basis, others on a calendar-year basis, or some choose to move to a hybrid scatter,” he said. “What’s going to change and what needs to change is we need the upfront to move from the 20th to the 21st century.”

Gerber spoke with Beet.TV days before the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) publicly pleaded for a shift in the upfront market. The trade group for some of the world’s biggest marketers this month asked that the upfront be shifted to a calendar year.

The move would let advertisers buy 2021 media placements this fall instead of committing now to the traditional October to September schedule that corresponds with seasonal viewing trends. The shift comes as advertisers seek more flexibility during a period of heightened uncertainty.

“We don’t know whether specific programming assets have been confirmed, whether sports is coming back. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace,” Gerber said. “That doesn’t mean that the discussions that we all need to have with our sell-side partners aren’t happening.”

This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr.  Please visit this page for additional segments from the series. 

A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV in Puerto Rico discussed that topic.

Slow addressable adoption?

The debate kicked off with some data points quantifying the size of spend in US addressable TV advertising today…

Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC:

“Two percent of all national media (is) being spent via addressable. Forester issued some research last summer that said about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines. Are you happy with the level of adoption? Are we behind?”

Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:

“For the advertisers where the return outweighs the work and the pain, they’re involved. For the advertisers and the brands where it doesn’t, they’re not there.

Brands only dipping a toe

Whilst media buyers are certainly spending in addressable TV, executives bemoaned that the budget was still experimental or occasional…

Michael Law, EVP,  US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:

“Our (clients’) spend is actually about flattened down a little. But the number of brands interacting is growing because we’ve had some brands who went in just way too high early on. What is worrisome is the amount of (spending that) is still considered ‘test and learn’ – it’s just a little bit of money and then it goes away.”

Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:

“That’s very true. That is the single biggest issue with scaling the dollars in addressable television today. Many advertisers want to do it for the wrong reasons. They want to check off the ‘innovation’ box.”

More supply needed

Panelists discussed how limiting the availability of inventory with the right audiences against it could actually work against addressable…

Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:

“Historically, television has always been (about) supply and demand. When the supply decreases, the knee jerk reaction is to raise the price. As we all know, in television, at least in recent times, the advertisers still stand in line with the checkbook.

“That’s not going to work with addressable television. If we run out of inventory, or we get to a point where there’s a finite supply of inventory, it’s going to drive up the price.”

Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV, LiveRamp:

“You’re going to have ownership of programmers by MVPDs or at least a fusion of the two. That inventory will open up and I think OTT is also growing rapidly.”

Don’t target, cap

The debate heard one view that addressability should not be about targeting audiences at all – especially for certain brands…

Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM):

“We’re thinking about addressability wrong … The math is not going to work, right? I would question, are we thinking about addressability the right way as being about audiences? Or should we be thinking about it a different way, in that it can solve frequency distribution? The better option for us is, how do we use addressability to manage frequency, not target audiences.”

Michael Law, EVP,  US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:

“Right now, there’s a lot of categories saying, “How do I (target) toilet paper (which everyone needs)?”

Solve for cord-cutting

But the panel also heard how addressable or some alternative to conventional linear TV advertising is essential…

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:

“Part of the problem now, with the way viewership behavior is shifting, is that there are a lot of people who you’re just never gonna get on linear TV because they don’t do that anymore. Whether it’s linear or addressable, or anything that looks like broadcast, to try to reach people who don’t have an antenna or cable subscription ain’t going to work.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.

The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

The short summary of their back and forth would be that from a cross-platform perspective, TV is still “a mess” and that despite much talk about industry collaboration among competitors, reality is bound to intrude when companies like Comcast and Disney wage their inevitable marketplace battles.

Gerber has been on the sell- and buy-side and is currently President of Global Media Investment for GroupM’s Essence agency. Clark is EVP of Advanced Advertising at Comcast & GM of FreeWheel.

In trying “to make supply make sense,” Comcast has scooped up no fewer than five companies—from FreeWheel to STRATA, under the FreeWheel brand—with the overarching goal of unifying linear and digital by removing a lot of the fragmentation and friction among the tv infrastructure, working on addressable technology, decisioning, and making life easier for marketers at the end of the day. The competitive backdrop is the ease of use of such platforms as Amazon, Facebook and Google.

“Whether you’re a programmer or you’re a marketer, you cannot run one campaign across TV. You cannot have it optimized in real time, you cannot get a report. You have to go hire an army of people to do that,” Clark observed.

This is why “television is not a platform…it is hundreds of sales teams, different ways of selling depending whether you’re local or national, measurement’s all over the place.”

As for Amazon, Facebook and Google, “Yes they’re walled gardens but they are unified tech and data platforms and they can bring sort of a seamless solution to marketers there’s no question about that. TV is not that,” said Clark. “Programmers are unified in wanting one campaign across linear and digital environments, which FreeWheel serves against all–including STB VOD–so that programmers can have everything unified.”

Never one to beat around the bush, Gerber put aside digital/linear unity for the more timeless question of competitive media selling, particularly as it pertains to national TV avails. “The fact of the matter is, most inventory still trades in television in a traditional unit linear model and it’s controlled by independent sellers,” said Gerber. “I care about the national avails that the national networks control because that’s where the bulk of viewing occurs. I need that brought together with the local avails, with the digital avails, everything together on one platform like you said with Google and Facebook. I don’t see that happening.”

Clark recalled when TiVo launched in 1995 and some people predicted “this is the end of television, it’s all going to change.” From his vantage point close to technology, he likened the state of affairs as “driving towards a mountain on the horizon, it doesn’t look like you’re ever getting close to it and then one day it’s right in front of you. There are massive investments right now going into the technology needed to clean this up.”

Gerber: “Who’s your competitor? Are you guys all going to work together to help us figure this out? Are you all going to compete with each other?”

This is where reality intruded. Just one day before, it was announced that Disney had chosen Google over FreeWheel to handle its digital advertising, as Advertising Age reports.

“They make the decisions that are in their best interests of course,” said Clark. “It’s undeniable that Google now has a massive beachhead in the industry. There’s no question about it.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

“I think we’re moving at a decent pace but I do wish we were moving faster,” Gerber, who is President of Global Media Investment for GroupM’s Essence agency, says during a break at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.

He expresses the wish that some of the barriers “that are really more commercially related, less technical related, would get pushed out of the way and that we’d have companies working more closely together on things that are important to ultimately the folks who matter, who are the viewers and advertisers.”

Until then, here’s how Gerber sizes up the field.

Media companies: They need to figure out “how they’re going to work together in the future as a platform as opposed to independent media sellers. That is a really big step change from where their current organizations are, where their motivations lie, et. cetera. And that’s going to be a tough one to untangle.”

Measurement companies: These are challenged with a different task, “which is completely rethinking and reinventing the way that they provide marketplace intelligence and marketplace currency to the actors.” In moving from a panel-based world to one where everything is addressable and highly fragmented, “requiring census-level data is a huge change for the measurement companies.”

Agencies need to reorganize and “rethink how they are structured and go to market. It shouldn’t be about price, it should be about business outcomes.”

Clients need to rethink how they engage with their agencies. “I think there’s too much pressure on price being the driver and I think they need to rethink the types of skillsets and capabilities that they really prioritize with their agency partners.”

Now for sympathy versus empathy. Asked how he would have responded while on the network TV side to suggestions that competing companies pool their inventory and become more of a easy to use advertising platform, Gerber offers the benefit of the doubt. “There’s a hypothesis that moving from the unit-based model and the directly sold model that we live in today to a algorithmically driven, automated platform-based model will create more value for everyone,” he observes. “I think that’s the way we look at it at Essence and that would be the argument that we would make. The problem is, the data doesn’t exist. No one really knows whether that’s what will happen.”

So it’s reasonable that media sellers who in some quarters are expected to quickly upend their long-held business practices to try to move TV in general ahead are skeptical of the outcome. That’s because there’s no way of knowing whether doing so “will actually create more demand at a higher price, or at least at a revenue-neutral level. It’s a huge risk for companies that have large existing legacy revenue streams in place. Much easier for companies that are starting from scratch.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

Everything starts with how media companies choose to integrate their advertising models, the President of Global Media for GroupM’s Essence agency explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Some are choosing to run a simulcast of their existing over the air feed, which would include whatever advertising is running through traditional MVPDF’s or over the air,” says Gerber. “Others are choosing to dynamically ad serve into the DMVPD stream and make it much more like a digital kind of environment, where impression-based media is being bought and sold and decisioned at an ad-server level, and a campaign level.”

Essence doesn’t focus on platforms for the sake of platforms, according to Gerber. “I think it’s a big mistake to try to break the marketplace down into DMVPD’s, MVPD’s, satellite, traditional VOD, on demand through OTT, traditional FEP distribution through desktop and tablet or mobile. All of those things are simply the consumer choosing to watch TV content one of two ways. Either live or on demand.”

What’s common to all those choices is that advertising is sold two ways. The first is unit-based within a show that reaches everyone who’s watching, “or impression based where I’m delivering an impression-based decision in real time,” says Gerber.

There are different ways that advertisers execute platforms and there are limitations along the way. “That will go away over time as the marketplace moves to more consistent standardized delivery platforms, but I really think it’s a mistake to think things in silos.”

An overarching concern should be how to stem the flow of viewers to non ad-supported services, Gerber adds.

“The challenge for marketers in that environment is that the more that we don’t fix the traditional ad model in the video ecosystem, the more migration we’ll see to non ad-supported environments. And that is a bad thing all the way around for marketers, for publishers and media companies, for agencies.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Whether to employ addressable depends on a given marketer and its business objectives “and the degree to which they’re willing to connect their business strategy, their creative strategy and their targeting strategy and a measurement solution together,” Gerber explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “Just implementing addressable or targeting without thinking about those other pieces is probably not a good use of addressable media.”

Sounds pretty straightforward, but the fact remains that addressable isn’t for all brands,  “For mass advertisers who are trying to reach large, large slots of the population, there’s probably a lot less value to addressable media.”

The value exchange arises given the premium cost that accompanies addressable buys. In addition to the extra cost to reach particular audiences there is the loss of media in traditional buys “that you’re not going to receive”—media that is alternately considered “waste or bonus.”

This where the age-old question of reaching lots of people in the name of branding arises. “We know that brands are always needing to built their equity, not just among consumers who are in market for their product at that given time but for consumers who may enter the category over time or who might become a customer down the road,” says Gerber. “Addressability is a double-edged sword. The more you refine your targeting, the less you reach in terms of prospects or future customers and the less that you achieve in terms of branding against those segments.”

Gerber’s background includes sell-side positions at Brightcove and ABC and at the agencies MediaEdge and Mediavest. Last month, Gerber was promoted to his current position at Essence from VP of Investment for North America, as MediaPost reports.

Gerber advises upper-funnel marketers to look at addressable less from a targeting standpoint and more from an opportunity to manage frequency, deliver a more distributed campaign and to optimize reach.

“For brands that are lower-funnel, who are very conversion focused, who are trying to retarget existing customers or who have incredibly robust data sets around in market shoppers, addressability is a fantastic tool because it allows you to really thread the needle and reach groups of people who have the highest propensity to be purchasers of your product at that given time.

“It also delivers the opportunity for much more defined measurement and outcome-based analysis and analytics relative to the media you run.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

As the President of Global Media for the Essence agency surveys the video ecosystem, he sees its constituent parts operating differently with regard to what advancements they can deliver. “If I’m talking about the national TV ecosystem or marketplace, what’s achievable there is very different from what I can do today at scale within local cable avails that MVPDs control,” says in this interview with Bee.TV.

“If you consider OTT and digitally distributed content through FTP players as advanced TV, there’s a whole other spectrum of capabilities that exist in that space.”

Those capabilities should go well beyond data and targeting, according to Gerber, whose background includes positions at Brightcove and ABC and agencies MediaEdge and Mediavest. Last month, Gerber was promoted to his current position at the GroupM agency from VP of Investment for North America, as MediaPost reports.

“It’s about everything from the business strategy that the client is trying to execute against, to how they envision messaging and delivering creative versions to different segments of their audience, how that ties back to the business strategy and how you apply data and targeting within that construct.”

Gerber sees a near-term need for uniformity in understanding how consumers choose their video experiences across any and all formats. “I think we have to stop defining things in terms of traditional linear programming, short form content, etc.,” Gerber says. “We need to understand how viewers are choosing to engage with video content regardless of content length or distribution platform.”

Pragmatist as he is, Gerber acknowledges the difficulty in reaching such an understanding. In the meantime, “I think that were going to continue to have to work in a world where we use proxies where we make assumptions for the gaps that can’t be measured.”

He believes marketers are at a disadvantage if they only focus on things “that are truly measurable, because I think many of the opportunity areas are in places where if you apply a little bit of common sense and you kind of understand what’s happening, I think there are opportunities in those environments.”

This is not to condone negligence in execution, according to Gerber, citing the need to evaluate the opportunity, how you implement it and what solutions to use to determine success.

“I think we are probably a ways off from having a truly vibrant and consistent and market-wide measurement solution for us to use on the predictive side of where are people watching,” Gerber says. “The other side of measurement has to do with how we measure outcomes and actually performance, and I think that is a completely different subject.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“I think it’s a really complicated challenge that the industry is in right now,” says Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment at GroupM agency Essence, who has spent nearly three decades on both the agency and publisher side.

“I think that a number of networks have been very vocal and, in many cases, very right about one of the challenges that exists in the marketplace today, which is consumers have lots of access to content in non-ad supported environments,” Gerber says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit.

Migration to those environments is occurring “because the experience is better, the aggregation of content is monstrous, it’s a really easy and enjoyable experience for them,” Gerber ads.

Ad-supported TV in general—whether linear or across linear platforms like OTT or VOD or via digital video records—increasingly are “I don’t want to use the word painful but challenging to live through, especially if the viewing behavior moves from single show to binging, where you’re watching multiple episodes all at once.”

Given that viewers are more in control than ever, the longtime ad model has been under increased scrutiny.

“I think the initiatives that networks are taking to really address clutter ad pod length and some of the format issues with regard to traditional fifteens and thirties potentially being replaced by other more innovative formats are what’s needed,” says Gerber.

The challenge to publishers: how they make it pay out.

“Because if you decrease inventory, there’s an immediate challenge related to revenue,” Gerber adds. “If you’re a public company, it doesn’t help you to go into your boss and say we’re going to have a decrease in revenue because I’m making this change to our ad model.

“It think from the advertiser and buy side, there has to be a payout in terms of ROI and improvement in performance if we’re going to be talking about any kinds of changes to the pricing that we pay for our inventory.”

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

While pursuing these topics can lead to circular conversations—everyone agrees on the need for change but no one thinks it won’t happen soon, if at all—such discussions actually help to clarify a very complex landscape. This was the goal of a panel at Beet Retreat Miami 2017 featuring executives from FreeWheel, one2one Media and digital-first agency Essence.

Moderator Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink, kicked things off by asking for specific suggestions that would remove roadblocks from the advanced TV space. What follows are a sampling of responses.

Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment, North America Essence: “Everyone’s got different agendas. The MVPD’s don’t want to allow me to bump my first-party data up to their set-top boxes unless I’m buying local media through them. That’s not a long-term success for anyone in this business, to link business models that don’t need to be linked. On the distribution side, there are affiliate agreements that restrict national networks from selling local inventory. That’s going to cause a problem if we’re talking about moving to an addressable model where national networks want to be able to sell.”

Mike Bologna, President, one2one Media: “Unfortunately, I agree with a lot of what you said. It really comes down to how we articulate change in our business. Everybody around here knows that nothing moves quickly in this business when it comes to change. We’re all used to thinking cheaper is better. So in terms of moving this along, it’s about identifying how something might cost a little bit more but the return on it might be more than the X factor of that cost.”

Herve Brunet, GM, Markets, FreeWheel: “We’re living in a world where video sits in two worlds, basically linear TV and digital video, and these are still two silos and they’re run separate at the agency level but also at the publisher level. We think that needs to become a lot simpler, it needs to become one pool of inventory, it needs to become one way for the buyer to find their viewers, as opposed to two different ways.

So how long will silos hold back progress, asked Spiegel.

“I think we are going to continue to see it rise in silos because there isn’t one person that can actually snap their fingers, make a decision and bring it altogether,” said Bologna. “But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth doing all the work and working through all those silos if the return pays out, which can be demonstrated with the proper data.”

Gerber pointed out that consumers want two things: live and on-demand programming. Delivery mechanisms are irrelevant. “They don’t give a rat’s ass whether it’s through a DVR, through their VOD platform, through a connected TV app, through any other number of mechanisms that get the content to their screen,” said Gerber. “It’s not about platforms it’s about experiences and it’s about delivering an ad in those experiences.”

Organizational malfunction isn’t going away anytime soon, noted Bologna. “It exists at agencies, it exists at media companies, it exists at the brands. In my opinion, the best we can do is work within the organizational malfunction and do the best we can.”

Gerber cited the status quo of how brand portfolios do business, beginning with their budgeting processes, explaining how it works against an addressability model. Using the hypothetical example of a telecommunications company, he said it should be able to message across various product suites based on what it knows about its customers.

“But if they’re building their brand budgets and their campaigns from the product level up, addressability doesn’t scale,” said Gerber. “Because what you want to be able do is push addressability from the top down. When you know about a consumer and they’re in a particular mental state in terms of purchase you want to serve them the right product. Serving them the right product that’s out of flight because it doesn’t align with the brand budget doesn’t work. So client org structures have to completely flip in terms of how they manage their marketing budgets for this to work.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

The latest Zenith figures estimate Google and Facebook took 96% of spending outside of China last year.

But one of the world’s biggest media-buying agencies says there are bigger problems than the duopoly.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Essence North America investment SVP Adam Gerber points the finger elsewhere.

“We all have mutual interest around the advertising model, so I’m not so sure that there needs to be as much tension … around the ‘platforms-versus-the-publishers’,” he says.

“I think there are other folks who we really should be looking at as the problem. There are companies that are trying to disintermediate and get in the way of value creation that services the end constituents.

“To me, we need to eliminate as much of the middle as possible so that the beneficiaries of a more efficient marketplace and a data driven marketplace are the advertisers and the media sellers.”

Gerber was referring to a maze of tech platforms that now sit between buyers and sellers.

His company was founded a decade ago by a number of marketers in the banking industry. Over time, they were able to win project work from Google and ultimately over the last decade have become Google’s global digital agency. Now Essence has grown to add NBCUniversal and Target as clients, and was acquired by GroupM in 2015.

Gerber also warns that the growth of subscription VOD services like Netflix, which run without advertising, reduces marketers’ potential reach.

“The other thing that no one talks about is the behavior changes that a number of new platforms are driving amongst key segments of our population, to be conditioned to watching content and consuming video without ads,” he says.

“The more that that happens, the more that we allow that behavior change to evolve, the less opportunities marketers are going to have to reach their consumers in ad-supported environments, the more challenge publishers are going to be in terms of their business models and the more difficult it’s going to be for agencies and marketers to effectively plan and build marketing solutions that drive their product sales.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.