Today we kick off our second season  with our new sponsor in Mediaocean. A huge thanks for the continuing partnership.

Our guest today is Nicolle Pangis, CEO of Ampersand, the cable TV sales and data company owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox.  More on Ampersand and its expanding business in my chat with Nicolle.

Nicolle is one of the most accomplished media innovators we know. She started her career at 24/7 RealMedia, moved on to and Xaxis and then to  GroupM in senior positions.  In 2018 she joined NCC Media as CEO. The company was later rebranded a Ampersand.

Fascinating to chat with Nicolle.  We spoke about her personal ambitions, her advice for women aspiring to leadership positions and a deep dive around  the transformation of Ampersand from a cable “sales house” to powerhouse in audience buying, in data & analytics and in addressable TV.

Great session.

Thanks again to Mediaocean for sponsoring.

And thank you for listening.  I hope you enjoy the episode.

“There’s this dark side of addressable with many challenges yet to be addressed, and we can only solve them as an industry, as a collective,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, in her wrap-up of the February 2020 Beet Retreat in San Juan. “It’s not through any one individual large company that we’ll break through to the other side and find a tipping point of growth and acceleration for addressable television and video.”

Consumer privacy is one such challenge, Swartz observes, since more regulation to put guardrails around how sellers leverage data for targeting and delivery of ads is inevitable. The industry needs to coalesce around standards for using data with integrity, without violating the sanctity of consumer relationships.

Ultimately, users need to be put first, and sellers have to prioritize their experience.

“It’s important to come back to that as we evaluate how best to shepherd change toward more audience-based, addressable delivery of premium inventory and formats,” she says.

As they ramp up their addressable businesses, sellers also have to contend with a rising “ad tax” that results from data and technology providers getting a cut of their transactions. This is a long-standing issue within digital media but has only recently become acute for sellers of linear TV. It underscores the importance of developing a marketplace that creates economic value for buyers, sellers and intermediaries alike.

“Currently, the cost of doing business and of serving addressable ads may actually exceed the incremental revenue to be had in the short term,” Swartz says.

“The cannibalization of your traditional spot business as a result of cherry-picking impressions or addressable units means you’ve increased your effective CPM, but you haven’t increased your top-line revenue at the end of the quarter or fiscal period,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

To optimize the value of their entire portfolio, traditional TV sellers need to develop a better suite of tools and applications to drive ad-decisioning instead of relying on new products to fuel revenue growth. This is especially important when new offerings like addressable are rolled out; sellers need to be aware of the pricing implications for their existing inventory.

Ad-decisioning is gradually becoming more data-driven, though the “if greater than” rule often still prevails, meaning the available inventory that can fetch the highest price is served by default. (That’s how sellers can end up over-indexing on addressable and depress the value of high-performing spot inventory.)

“We see this arc of maturation in how we’re packaging linear inventory, where today it’s really about leveraging data to drive better pricing decisions and automate existing processes like rate cards,” Swartz says. “Eventually we’ll get to a place where we’re dynamically pricing and dynamically building plans and campaigns.”

But though demand for addressability and impression-based TV buying is increasing, it’s important to remember that advertisers still also want reach and frequency.

“We all know that a spot-driven, Nielsen-guaranteed business isn’t going away,” she says.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

The company’s overall goal is a shift to one-to-one marketing and a more relationship-driven model as opposed to the “old transactional-style, product-driven model,” Deming says in an interview with Beet.TV conducted by Tracey Scheppach, who recently launched the Matter More Media consultancy.

BOA will still have an umbrella brand message that it pushes out to the masses to tell its brand story. “But then when it comes down to each different audience group, we can deliver to individuals within them messages that are relevant and resonate to them,” Deming says.

For example, people looking for their first credit card would receive a specific pitch. “But if you already have a credit card with bank of America and you’re just recently married and are looking for a home loan, we can provide different home loans and mortgage solutions for you,” he adds.

Asked by Scheppach about BOA’s recent experience with addressable TV ads, Deming notes, “I think we’ve really just cracked the surface on it by launching our first campaign there. We’re working on one, possibly two, additional addressable campaigns. It will be in a very similar vein to what we did the first time.”

As technology evolves in the addressable space and the national footprint gets larger, Deming hopes to drive sequential messaging aligned with consumer needs.

“We can have more dynamic segmentation where we can actually have one group that’s in a segment for investing products but they may be in a different segment for cards,” Deming says.

One irony for BOA in an age of split-second digital ad delivery is the time it takes to prepare for an addressable campaign because of confidentiality surrounding its first-party data.

“It’s an asset and also a complexity at the same time when you have access to your own first-party data,” he says. “In our world, we need to be thinking nine months in advance and we need to be sizing and beginning to start seeking approval on the use of data six months in advance.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

In an interview with Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink, Cordes cites financial services companies as one sector siphoning direct mail dollars.

“In the credit card space, these financial companies have to stay compliant with fair lending, and a direct mail list is a compliant list that can be easily applied to addressable households in the same manner,” Cordes explains.

This is because direct mail lists are based on names and addresses, as is addressable TV. “It’s really a seamless way to take those same segments and move them to TV,” Cordes says. He adds that some marketers experiment with direct mail and addressable TV and weigh the outcome.

Asked by Spiegel about back-end correlation for addressable TV campaigns, Cordes says it doesn’t end with, say, someone in a targeted household simply opening a financial account.

“If you open up a brokerage account, for example, that’s a great acquisition for that company,” he says. “But if they never actually fund that account, that financial institution never makes any money off that customer. We can understand both the acquisitions and the funding part of it.”

Overall, AT&T is seeing more marketers use addressable TV for “increased frequency against those most likely to convert,” according to Cordes.

When the company launched its addressable TV product four years ago, it would not have expected consumer packaged-goods marketers to be among the ranks of the interested, much less involved.

While CPG, according to Cordes, was not expected “to be a major player but if you look at the numbers, it actually is.”

AT&T is in the process of “connecting the dots” between its more than 25 million pay TV subscribers and the 100 million-plus mobile screens it reaches, Cordes says. One stumbling block is getting advertisers and agencies to embrace a “video-neutral” strategy.

“One of the issues, frankly, we’re seeing is that a lot of times the mobile budgets will be siloed separately than the TV budgets and you got to work with two different teams to get a deal done,” Cordes says. “I think that’s changing.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605.  Please find more videos from the event here. 

In addition to revising carriage agreements, “They’re going to have a lot to work out,” Bologna says in an interview with Beet.TV. Issues include technology, business models and infrastructure economics. “But they will get there,” he adds. “Both parties seem to be ready, able and willing to at least begin the conversation seriously.”

With newer entrants like Charter and Verizon boosting overall addressable penetration north of 60 million homes, “There’s more and more clients involved than ever before in this space,” Bologna says. “We continue to have a repeat base of clients on addressable campaigns at over 90 percent.”

While noting that addressable advertising isn’t for every marketer, only about one-third of the plans MODI writes result in the recommendation that a client is “better off buying nationally and absorbing the waste and taking advantage of the much lower cost per thousand,” Bologna notes.

“Generally when you’re talking about an advertiser with a smaller segment, a more expensive product or service, they generate the most value out of addressability,” he says. “They continue to come back because they’re seeing that it’s generating sales and we’re seeing a positive return on investment.

The addition of national avails would enhance frequency as opposed to expanding reach.

“With only two minutes per hour and with all the new advertisers coming on, the demand will eventually outweigh the supply,” even if the addressable footprint expands to 75 million households, Bologna says. “But without the inclusion of national inventory and the influx of all these incremental advertisers, we’re going to need supply. And that supply can only come from one place, and that’s the national avail.”

This video is part of a series presented by DISH Media Sales. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

To learn more about addressable advertising and its benefits, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report:

“To create disruption, you have to start by being a curious person,” Speros, EVP of Corporate Communications at Fidelity, says in an interview with Beet.TV.

Beyond simple curiosity, he believes there are three pillars to creativity, which Speros defines as “drawing upon your eclectic thinking and experiences and putting it together in a surprising way.”

To be intellectually curious, “You have to look at music, art, science, technology, fashion, trends, news events and study other categories in other companies,” Speros says. “You have to put something in that repository before you can draw from it.”

Second on the list is having varied personal relationships. “If all you do is hang out with people that are exactly like you, all you’re going to be doing is reinforcing the same things that you already know,” Speros says. “I like to put it as inhaling your own fumes.”

Lastly, he thinks more people should learn how to “adopt more of a risk-taking attitude, because out of great risk taking comes great creativity.”

While at AT&T, Speros was credited with placing the first Internet banner ad in 1994—when Mark Zuckerberg was in grade school and social media consisted of bulletin board systems. Now he is all too aware of the impact of platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

“A bad string of social media commentary can absolutely destroy a brand very quickly,” Speros notes. “Were in control of the experience that we serve up, but the interpretation of that experience is defined by the consumer.”

He takes a dim view of the term “mass media” but thinks it can be achieved through a different approach than that traditionally taken.

“There is some element of reaching people in mass, but the way you get to mass might be through a series of highly personalized interactions enabled by addressable television, mobile technology and so on,” Speros says.

We interviewed him last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.

“I actually get to target the right person at the right time, no matter what content they’re consuming or when they’re consuming it,” she adds in an interview with Beet.TV.

Experian has been working with content distributors like DISH TV “to have this perfect marriage of data and subscriber information,” Pinnow says.

Experian applies its vast trove of consumer data to DISH’s subscribers “so that advertisers can finally go beyond age and gender and actually target people based on thousands of other attributes,” she explains.

Beyond targeting people at the household level, addressable TV “opens the door to closed-loop campaign reporting,” according to Pinnow. “Did that commercial, did that frequency, actually get people to come into a dealership or a store location and spend a certain amount of money? That’s the power of closed-loop reporting,” she says.

An added benefit of addressable is that it generates learnings that can be applied to linear TV buys. “DISH and Experian are able to do that for advertisers across verticals, show them the true return on ad spend for their TV buys, which is so different than what it was in the past,” Pinnow says.

At its core, addressable relegates to the past targeting by something as simple as age and sex. “I think everybody can think about themselves and they know that they are so much more than just those two things,” says Pinnow. “And so that’s the beauty of addressable TV. You get to take potentially thousands of other data attributes, life moments, and use that to trigger the perfect message at the perfect time.”

This video is part of a series presented by DISH Media Sales. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

To learn more about addressable advertising and its benefits, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report:

“So you could argue that the most sophisticated and exciting part of the television business is the most manual,” Bologna says in an interview with Beet.TV. “There’s more automation or automatic execution with legacy national television than there is with household level addressable television.”

In the interview, Furious Corp. CEO and Founder Ashley J. Swartz asks Bologna whether true, unduplicated reach exists for cross-screen addressable ad campaigns. “We’re there today,” he says.

Working with individual multichannel video programming distributors, MODI takes audience segments like “in the market to buy a luxury vehicle,” or “purchased soup in the past 30 days.” It identifies those segments on TV and then replicates them on mobile devices.

“We measure them together via an Experian or Acxiom. And what we end up with is unduplicated reach and frequency of an addressable spot cross device. So it is here today,” Bologna says.

Asked how everything comes together from a systems and workflow perspective, Bologna says, “Everything’s manual. There’s nothing coming together from a systems perspective.”

His crew toils away in Excel spreadsheets and its pivot tables to make addressable work. “I hope to change that,” Bologna says. “I don’t know how to fix that myself. I’m relying on other people to figure out that.”

This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising. The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.

For one, internet targeting capabilities support the delivery of individual ads tailored to specific households. It’s a theory that was a long time coming, but now the reality is hitting.

“Now’s the time,” Neustar business development director Lock Dethero tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “There’s over 40m (US) households that you can target through addressable TV, via dynamic insertion in to set-top box or video on-demand.

“The demand is coming. We have advertisers calling us that want to repurpose their audiences from digital in television. A lot of the time, it’s the exact same audience.”

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

But what’s holding addressable back at this point? Certainly, there are many more households left to light up. But also the route to those households is a patchwork of small pieces. Finding reaching across each can be hard.

“The key is scale,” Dethero reckons. “What we’re seeing from at least one major advertiser in the automotive space is that, in order to create an effective program in addressable TV, you want to work with lots of platforms – not just the ones on set-top box, but OTT, too.”

Fortunately, Dethero hints that greater reach is coming next year. “We’ll see more MVPDs – one in particular will come to market maybe as soon as early next year to expand the complete reach that’s achievable,” he adds. “A rising tide raises all ships.”

This video is part of a series presented by DISH Media Sales. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

To learn more about addressable advertising and its benefits, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report:

“What we have found over and over and over again is that TV works and addressable TV works harder,” Scheppach says in an interview with Beet.TV at the Chicago offices of Publicis Media Exchange, where she is EVP of Precision Video.

It’s not often that someone mentions addressable TV and old-fashioned direct mail in the same sentence, much less in a cost comparison scenario. Scheppach does so to provide both contrast and similarity.

“Direct mail advertisers, their average cost of a mail piece is about a dollar. In TV speak that’s a thousand dollar CPM,” Scheppach says of the expense to reach one thousand prospects. “The CPM’s of addressable advertising are significantly less than a thousand and they combine the ability of sight sound and motion with essentially the same delivery mechanism.”

What is that common delivery venue? “Sending a message to an individual street address, whether it be a mailbox or a set-top box,” Scheppach says.

The industry is only beginning to see the potential of addressable TV because the focus has mainly been on national advertisers. “It ushers in the opportunity for smaller marketers with a smaller budget to get on TV for the very first time,” she explains.

Two examples are Allstate promoting renters insurance and online prescription eyeglass and sunglass marketer Warby Parker. Not long ago, the rule of thumb was that having a presence on TV meant committing at least $20 million. “If you didn’t have $20 million, don’t bother getting on television,” was the thinking, according to Scheppach. “Allstate represents a very large advertiser, but they would never be able to advertise renters insurance because renters are a smaller population and therefore not a mass game, which is what television used to be.”

She believes that addressable TV “is being niched” and that it’s actually “a much bigger idea.” That’s because in the end, all media will be addressable in the end and eventually all media will be programmatic.

“That is the future state that we’re moving to,” Scheppach says. “The opportunity to do addressable television will teach marketers how to do the future of television and how it will be combined with other cross media as all media becomes digital.”

This video is part of a series presented by DISH Media Sales. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

To learn more about addressable advertising and its benefits, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report:

“It’s not just about brands finding Latino audiences,” Adam Gaynor, Vice President of DISH Media Sales, says in an interview with Beet.TV. “It’s about brands finding Latino audiences using Spanish-language creative. We’re lighting up Latino networks so that they can have those addressable messages.”

The networks are beIN SPORTS, Discovery en Españo, ESPN Deportes, FOX Deportes, Galavisión, Telemundo, Telemundo West and Univision Deportes, Multichannel News reports.

In 2012, DISH introduced household-addressable advertising, which currently reaches more than 8 million of the company’s approximately 14 million homes nationwide. “Right now DISH has 89 Networks that are lit up for addressable,” Gaynor says. “The more networks we have, the wider the audience we can find.”

He recalls the early days of addressable advertising when a trial would be conducted “in a little town of maybe 15,000 homes.” And people said, “If we could only have more,’” Gaynor says.

With a current addressable population of about 40 million households, “When you find the audience, you know you’re finding an audience with limited to no waste,” he says.

In the first presidential election to benefit from the granular targeting capabilities of addressable TV advertising, the joint venture between DISH and AT&T-owned DirecTV is helping political campaigns target more than 20 million households at the state and national level. Called D2 Media Sales and founded in 2014, the entity offers precision and scale that was heretofore unavailable.

That’s because traditionally, political campaigns have targeted households via Designated Market Areas (DMA’s). Which means genuine statewide reach wasn’t possible.

“You’re either buying local broadcast stations on a DMA basis or you’re buying cable interconnects in the same way,” says Joe Hockenjos, VP of Political Ad Sales at D2 Media Sales, in an interview with Beet.TV. “When you piece those together to complete a state you find that you’re buying a lot of waste, because a lot of those homes in the DMA’s will fall outside of the state that you’re primarily interested in.”

Enter the lowly DVR, informed by AT&T, DISH and DirecTV subscriber data, along with voter registration information and data from such third-party providers as TargetSmart and i360. Once a campaign selects a target audience, D2 delivers specific television commercials to that household during a commercial break when they are watching TV via a DVR.

How does D2 gauge results derived from addressable campaign ads?

“In terms of determining the value, because it’s a zero-waste product, they know that they’re getting into just those homes that have a great propensity to vote and to vote their way,” Hockenjos says. “You compare it to the other choices in the television marketplace and you see this as a superior way to get your message across.”

D2 hopes that the success of political campaigns will help to bolster commercial marketers’ embrace of addressable advertising, “just as we’ve done on the commercial side with different verticals like financial services, automotive and pharmaceuticals.”

The commercial, “Stop Showing the Right Product to the Wrong Customer,” offers up three vignettes: a grownup in a classroom pitching complicated financial services to kids; a man trying to sell a rugged construction boot to a fashion model; and a showroom salesman pitching a muscle car to seniors.

“It’s based on insights that there’s a lot of waste with traditional TV advertising,” Maria Mandel Dunsche, VP of Marketing at AT&T AdWorks, says in an interview with Beet.TV. “The campaign shows all of the fun mishaps that happen when you may have the right product but you’re reaching the wrong audience.”

The communications giant believes that a lot of advertisers are questioning the value of television advertising.

“Gone are the days when nobody gets fired for putting their ad spend in television,” Mandel Dunsche observes. “Media planners and advertisers want TV to become as accountable as some other channels, such as digital.”

She answers questions about the scale of addressable TV as it now exists by pointing to AT&T’s 13 million households and the estimated 40 million addressable households that will be available to the advertising industry by the end of 2016.

As for cost, addressable is more expensive on a CPM basis because of its more granular targeting. “But you have to look at the effective CPM and not the CPM on the outset,” Mandel Dunsche says. “When you look at the fact that there’s no waste associated with addressable, you’re reaching 100% of your target audience. Thousands of campaign results show addressable can be very efficient way of driving results.”

The company continues to roll out cross-platform (TV to mobile) addressable advertising, an effort that includes last year’s trial with Opera Mediaworks.

A big target for addressable providers is the consumer packaged-goods category. Advertising Age reports that ConAgra has been running addressable TV ads for nearly three years.

We interviewed her as part of our series on addressable and the new world of television advertising. This series on Beet.TV is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks.

“It’s fascinating that of all the categories we work with, political probably is the most sophisticated in terms of the use of the data,” Ben Tatta, President, Cablevision Media Sales, says tells Beet.TV in this video interview, during a week in which the top Democratic and Republican presidential candidates descended on Manhattan, a prime market for Cablevision and its roughly 3 million customers. Although addressable advertising is more expensive, it’s definitely on the rise in the ongoing election season, Advertising Age reported.

According to Tatta, the choice of TV platform for political campaigns is not an either/or situation, because most are running campaigns simultaneously.

“They will use a traditional linear schedule to get the tonnage and mass message out, and use addressable to drill home very specific, issues-based messages to very specific voting constituents,” Tatta says. “Most of them are using sophisticated techniques to convey a message and those messages change daily based on news cycles.”

The new and interesting dynamic with political addressable is that copy changes in commercials are constant.

“Every couple of days we can be changing out copy. You can fine tune messages based on things that are in the news cycle and deliver it in two days,” Tatta says. “That kind of tempo is somewhat foreign to television, but with addressable we can deliver it.”

Rather than hosting one big industry event, AT&T AdWorks will produce a series of some 100 smaller events around the U.S. starting next month. The events will be largely educational, meant to convey the value of addressable to the marketing and media community, she explains.

Beet.TV  Partners with AT&T AdWorks on Video Series

As part of the Addressable Upfronts project, Beet.TV  will produce a series of 25 video interviews with leading marketers and agency executives on the topic of addressable and advanced television advertising.  Production begins next month in New York and Chicago.  AT&T is the series sponsor.

Experience at the bottom of the funnel proved that TV drives actual sales, according to Tracey Scheppach, EVP, Publicis Precision Video.

“Unfortunately when we raced to the bottom of the funnel we forgot about the other layers of the funnel,” Scheppach says.

One of the things SMG has done is to combine location data—big data coming from mobile phones and off of TV—and combining them at the agency’s “safe haven,” Acxiom. This activity falls within SMG’s Maps platform, launched this time last year.

“We’ve done three campaigns with Maps and seen phenomenal results,” Scheppach says. “For example, we see for a tourist advertiser that we sent a message to you and you actually visited the locale that you were interested in. For an auto we can show that you’ve actually visited the showroom, or for a retailer that you actually went to the store.”

Along with a bigger addressable advertising footprint by Comcast, SMG foresees a big move into the addressable TV space by pharmaceutical marketers as soon as the ad formats move from 30 seconds to 60.

“I think you will see a significant increase in some of the pharmaceutical companies that are willing to do addressable television,” Scheppach says.

We interviewed her at the Videology Full Frontal Conference in New York.  Please watch other videos from Beet’s coverage here. 

Advertisers will be able to bring their own data to a self-service, “private marketplace.”  They will be able to see results in a fully transparent manner, explains Jason Brown, VP for National Advertising Sales at AT&T AdWorks.

The new programmatic marketplace is powered by Videology.  Details of the AT&T plan was discussed on Thursday at an industry event on advanced TV presented by Videology in Manhattan.   We interviewed Brown there.

News of the plans at AT&T was reported earlier today by the Wall Street Journal.

We interviewed him at the Videology Full Frontal Conference in New York.  Please watch other videos from Beet’s coverage here. 

Newly named IAB Chair Lauren Wiener, President, Platform Buyers,  Tremor Video,  says that the consumer has to come first.

In this interview, she talk about other big issues facing digital publishers including diversity and she covers some of the important events this year including the presidential elections and the summer olympics.

Ad agency SMG has already reported a tripling in client addressable TV business last year

And SMG’s director Steve Murtos says lots of clients finally “leaned in” after years of evangelizing.

“There’s more scale coming,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Primarily, it’s been MVPD-led inventory but we’re starting to see some other sources come online.

“As you see more inventory, you’re gonna see more of everything else. It allows us to be able to secure more budgets, there’s going to be more data available for us to continue to measure. so I think 2016 is going to be a big year.”

Last year, SMG launched SMG Maps TV, an addressable TV measurement product that it says links addressable TV ad exposure to brand location visits,in partnership with PlaceIQ and Acxiom.

But Murtos thinks the industry isn’t changing overnight. “I think we’re still maybe two, three years out before we’re, before it’s at scale,” he says. “There’s still a lot of confusion in the marketplace, too many players all trying to do the same thing. I think that’s going take a good two years to shake out.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.2 

The new concept means brands can advertise only to relevant segments of TV viewers, targeted at the household level, cutting out wasted spend.

Joanna Thissen, targeted TV division at Modi Media, Group M’s division working on addressable, says car makers were the first brand category tobuy in.

“It just makes sense,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I mean, I live in Manhattan, I am never going to drive an automobile … You could blast me with an auto commercial 100,000 times, it could be the prettiest commercial of all time, and I’m still not gonna buy a car.

“Once some clients saw big players coming to the market, especially in the auto category, they saw the press and they were like, ‘this is a really cool idea, look at how successful these campaigns are’, and ‘if the auto industry with all their big money is coming to play, then maybe we should try to dip our toes in the water and see how that works’.”

Now 43 million US households are available to target addressably, Modi said recently. So who is next to the party?

Thissen sees financial services providers coming in next.

“If I already have a certain credit card, stop showing me ads for it – maybe show me a card that has a better interest rate,” she says.  “CPGs are big to the industry, too. There’s so many different datasets – from NCS to 84.51° which was formerly Dunnhumby and Shopcom. All have this amazing shopper data that will allow brands to go and specifically target their competitors to drive sale and steal share.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.2

The company already has traction, and the pace of change it is already seeing suggests a big uptick in the opportunity this year.

“We have 92 million homes under contract, 30 million of those installed,” CEO Dave Downey tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Last month, we did 9 billion addressable impressions and we’re gonna triple that by next year so it’s at a rapid pace of growth.”

Invidi is currently in a big international expansion, with the company’s technology due to underpin an addressable service launch by Liberty Global’s Belgian broadcaster Telenet and channel owner SBS Broadcasting.

That is just one part of its ambitions. Downey says he has another 100 million homes identified all over the Pan Asia area, Europe, South America and other markets.

So what does “addressability” mean to this addressable pioneer?

“If we’re watching American Idol or The Voice or any of the more popular television shows and they go to a commercial break and the commercial’s for Revlon, obviously that’s a commercial geared towards a female of a particular age group,” Downey says. “There’s obviously other people watching that show who are outside that cohort.

“With addressability, we’ve been able to take television advertising and increase the value of single commercial instances of up to 700% … Think of direct mail with the sight, sound, and motion of TV – it’s a great combination.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

That change is happening because, as TVs or TV boxes get connected to the internet and enabled with software services, the way content is consumed and ads traded is, many think, about to look a lot more like digital video.

“I think there are elements of linear that could be applied to digital – maybe finding ways to put a specific advertiser in a specific spot as opposed to the dynamic, continual dynamic allocation of those ads,” according to James Rothwell, the agency and brand relations VP for FreeWheel, a video ad tech vendor, in this Beet.TV video interview.

“But I think it’s more likely to be the other way around … I think linear is more likely to look like digital … where we’re taking the best of digital in terms of data, in terms of automation, in terms of dynamic insertion and applying those to the linear world.”

The industry is now replete with ad tech vendors trying to enable TV, a decades-old, one-way medium, with some of the qualities of online ad buying, like refined targeting and solid campaign measurement.

Whilst the change has started, many also concede they are in it for the long haul.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Rothwell acknowledges. “There’s still decades of practices and infrastructure. That means that we’re just not gong be applying the same digital practices across the board.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page. 

We spoke with him earlier this month at CES for this update on the evolving AT&T AdWorks offering.

This video is part of a series produced at CES which are sponsored by Adobe.

At least, it may look like that from the outside. The Santa Monica-based outfit spent plenty of time perfecting its platform before taking on a $15m first venture round in November, the latest in German broadcaster RTL Group’s ad-tech roll-up.

Now VideoAmp CEO Ross McCray says 2016 is primed to be “the year of execution” for the company he co-founded. So what does VideoAmp bring to the party?

A “cross-device graph”, McCray says: “We associate multiple device IDs to a user, we append intelligence to those devices. We’ll say, ‘here’s everything those devices have consumed’; it watches these ads or shows on TV.

“Today, we over 150m unique users in the United States and over a billion devices associated underneath those users, and consumption data across all of them.”

That means advertisers will get to more smartly target ads based on a holistic understanding of who exactly is behind the many devices that are now used throughout households.

McCray says an earlier seed round had funded the engineering build-out, but the effort in 2016 will be about sales.

This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.