“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.

When studying big-spending, Silicon Valley brands the organization found some striking similarities, according to VAB CEO & President Sean Cunningham.

“We found it interesting that the biggest bet that the disrupters were making was, if you will, when it came down to the pivotal moment in their history when they really had to get big, they pushed in all the chips on television,” Cunningham says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit.

“It seemed that they had grown as far as they were going to grow in a pure digital, pure play world.”

So when the time came to move from thousands to millions of customers and billions of dollars in revenue from millions, “The pattern was just so alarmingly similar.”

Cunningham says it was “alarming” to see the tightness of corollaries between a television schedule going on-air and resulting traction.

“The first set of outcomes that you saw immediately were the most obvious things: site traffic, search queries, a look at their online videos, that type of thing. We understood it as a real transactional medium in terms of driving productive leads. It happens quickly.”

According to the VAB research, 14 Brand Building “disruptors” increased their TV spending 59% in 2016 and saw total digital actions (search queries, social actions and total online views) rise by 184% year over year.

The VAB membership includes virtually all of the national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPD’s, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business. “By the end of the year, we’ll probably have members in every single video advertising format that exists,” says Cunningham.

The “simple description” of the VAB is that “we exist to answer the unanswered questions for advertisers and agencies,” including cross-screen viewership.

Among those questions are how to unlock the keys to “how do you add it all up how does it all work, what does it all do and how do we keep track of all the moving parts.

“The industry’s challenge now is to measure it all, count it all and find a way to fluidly assign the various roles and tasks, outcomes and attributes to each of it. I think that’s going to keep us more than busy,” adds Cunningham.

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.

“That tells me the future of TV is a blend of live and on demand viewing,” Hulu’s SVP of Advertising & Sales adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

It’s all part of the “inflection point” that is evident in the TV industry as viewer preferences are driving programming choices.

“The evidence is everywhere,” Naylor says during a break at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “You see a collapse of gross rating points, particularly against scripted content and even live content you’re seeing kind of a sand-papering down of a linear television experience.”

At the same time there’s the “explosion” of OTT subscriptions and usage, underscoring shifting viewing habits.

“The viewer’s expectations around television have changed. They want what how and when they want their TV and they expect it. Anything other than being in control and having all the choices they have is not desirable.”

In May of 2018, Hulu became the only pay-TV service to offer live and on-demand channels, original series and films, and a library of premium streaming TV shows and movies, all in one place.

Noting that some 4 million U.S. households had cut the pay-TV cord in 2017, Naylor says what felt like “a long, slow steady change has reached a fast and sharp inflection point of change and we’re seeing it everywhere.”

He dubs Hulu’s ad sales approach as the best of TV meeting the best of digital.

“We are happy to transact with the TV community against their fifteens and thirties with their conventional campaign parameters, like age and demo and geo. No problem.”

For the more digitally inclined, there’s more of a focus on impressions, targeting and data-informed media buys.

“The automation that we’re seeing take off in the browser space for conventional display is absolutely made its way to the video space. We use Telaria as our SSP and we’re plugging into all the other on-ramps of demand.”

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.

That goal is “to be to find the right segment and then create all these different creative executions for the ads to resonate at higher rates,” says Jamie Power, COO of addressable inventory aggregator one2one Media.

Right now, “the majority of clients are only using addressable as a means to increase frequency against high-value households simply because they can’t afford to do four spots,” Power explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “And it works.”

But it works even better when advertisers create multiple spots. “We see that it resonates at higher rates and we see higher ROI. But then when you factor in the cost of the creative, then the ROI goes down. So we just need to work out the creative model.”

The traditional creative model “doesn’t work because creative is too expensive. So I think there’s going to have to be modifications made to efficiencies around creative so we can have different segments against different creative units.”

Over the past half-dozen years, addressable has been expanding to ever-larger scale “but it’s been challenging for advertisers to execute,” Power says.

one2one Media aggregates inventory that can now be targeted to some 63 million households and, by the end of the year, to 70 million. It has data from 7.5 billion impressions that can be mapped to every type of business outcome.

“I’m able to understand what a brand wants to do and then I can start a plan at an optimal place. We also have integrations with all the providers to get the back end media delivery.”

The company still works mostly with agencies but as some marketers take programmatic media in-house they are considering programmatic addressable. “The clients that we work directly with, they put that in their programmatic bucket,” Power adds.

She says addressable can work for any product/service category “As long as it’s the right use case. If a client tells us what they want to achieve, I think there’s an application for addressable.”

The plethora of data available enable Power to show sellers “what a client can pay to make sure that the ROI is going to pay out. A category like CPG is obviously going to pay a lower CPM than auto or financial.”

While addressable ads won’t be going the route of other media inventory during Upfront negotiations, “I think clients will hold money back for these data driven tactics in television.”

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.

To CRO Rob Weisbord, Sinclair’s future road map will let advertisers extend reach from linear TV to “those cord cutters, cord nevers, cord savers through OTT solutions whether it’s through directly relationships with OTT providers or through an investment we have an in RTB company that is also buying excess inventory on the exchange level.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit, Weisbord says Sinclair will have an edge when offering addressable ads because of the breadth of pod lengths it plans to offer.

In addition to ramping up OTT service, “you’ll see us in the app format as well, more in a portal situation, amalgamating all our content and sourced content versus just trying to put one TV station over the top.

“The road map is we have our own content product team and they’ll be building apps and assets for connected TV as well as for the typical delivery services of Roku, Apple TV, Firestick and so forth. If you’re not on all platforms and if we’re not relevant on all platforms, our brand will be infringed,” Weisbord adds.

He sees ATSC 3.0 as overlaying IP technology with linear transmission and “the next step progression of one-to-one delivery, personalized content. And that will allow that delivery to connected cars, to mobile devices, and ultimately to the television sets within the home.”

Full rollout is three to five years. In the meantime, the Dallas test is aimed at generating proof of content and by validating any of “several business models that have yet to come to fruition that are on a whiteboard being framed.”

Asked about advertisers’ use of addressable TV, Weisbord believes that brands need to be developed through the use of mass media and then “finite the message.”

Noting that most MVPD’s allot two minutes of every programming hour to addressable ads—typically offering 30- and 60-second spots but not 15’s, “Depending on the demand we’ll open or close the supply. So we’ll have a mover advantage by being able to deliver fifteen’s.”

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.

“If all we do as an industry is make television look like digital programmatic today and the mess of the supply chain that exists out there, then we will fail,” says Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise. “We need to keep the economics of TV today and leverage the targeting and the data available for digital but we need to do it efficiently.”

Wise sees convergence “as not necessarily a buying problem but a planning and measurement problem” that it has sought to help remedy with internal solutions and partnerships with 4C Insights, VideoAmp and TubeMogul, among others, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Since Mediaocean’s sale in August 2015 to a private equity company, it has made six acquisitions, expanded globally and expanded its customer base, 90% of which had been agencies. It now deals directly with CMO’s on a planning workflow solution called Lumina and with TV broadcasters and publishers through Prisma for Sellers.

“Planning and buying need to come together and buying and selling need to come together,” says Wise.

He notes that 4C has done “an amazing job of creating platforms” to plan, buy, measure and optimize all in one system, through advanced data, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“The tricky part is being able to respect what makes TV the most efficient media marketplace in the world today and it continues to be. While moving it into the digital future.” Wise thinks the next few years are going to be “very interesting to watch” in the measurement space.

“I think Nielsen has done a really, really good job of expanding their datasets to be more relevant in the digital age,” Wise says, adding that comScore “has actually created a nice, viable alternative.”

Others will follow as MVPD’s “are leaning into platforms like 4C and VideoAmp and potentially TubeMogul” to leverage set-top box viewing data “and what we’re seeing is the market is almost open to there being another player in that space.”

Then there is Oracle with its acquisitions of Datalogix and Moat. “We will evolve as the industry evolves,” Wise says.

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.

“We’ve been working with people like BrightLine for a long, long time, Innovid, true[X] and others,” Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “It think we’re at an inflection point because my volume of orders for all of last year I’ve already booked year to date. That’s two hundred, three hundred percent growth. Very smart growth.”

A few weeks ago, Hulu served video trailers for the Warner Bros and MGM movie “Tomb Raider” that were interactive ads to the extent that viewers could order tickets to a nearby theatre from Fandango. As Variety reports, part of the strategy was to lessen the time between people seeing a movie trailer and actually going to a theatre.

“So I think as people, viewers in particular, continue to expect that they can interact with TV ads, you’ll see marketers take advantage of the opportunity,” says Naylor. “It’s a real opportunity to go beyond a conventional fifteen or thirty and I don’t see why it shouldn’t continue to go up and to the right.”

Such interactive spots are priced at a premium “because the results are superior in terms of brand awareness and purchase intent and even just at the most basic level, time spent with the ad. These ads just get more attention and I think expectations are going to just continue to increase for the viewer.”

Interactive ads typically begin with a conventional spot and some kind of call to action. “Maybe it’s an overlay or some kind of creative element to alert the viewer that they can interact. Once they interact it can be a video library, it could be a photo library, or a transactional unit. There’s a whole hoist of opportunities once you get people to engage.”

It’s a “modest call to action that lets people know pick up your remote, pick up your phone you can play around with this and learn more.”

Naylor likens growing consumer engagement with interactive ads to the advent of touch screens and peoples’ evolved expectations to encounter touch screens just about everywhere.

“I think sooner or later people just expect, of course I should be able to transact with a set. It’s IP TV. It’s a connected environment.”

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.

“Each source of viewing data has its own virtues and benefits. They have challenges as well,” says Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit, Levine puts those virtues and benefits into the context of the industry’s ongoing quest for more unified targeting and measurement.

Panels tend to be smaller than other options but can go deep in terms of being able to get a vast amount of information about the individual members of the panels. “Panels can typically go down in terms of Nielsen to the person level, and that is a powerful thing for the TV advertising ecosystem,” says Levine.

With cable set-top boxes, “what you’re doing to a certain extent is you’re moving away from person-level measurement to household level measurement.” This comes closest to census-level so that “you can get into the multiple tens of millions of households tracking what they’re viewing.”

The downsides to set-top boxes: they don’t capture over-the-air, over-the-top or connected-TV viewing behavior. “So that’s missing a lot of viewership potential,” says Levine.

Which leaves automatic content recognition, which provides second-by-second viewership information. “ACR by nature defaults to that very, very granular level.”

More granular than just having household mailing addresses, ACR provides “a different level of identity resolution and matching” owing to user registration information and home IP addresses.

“ACR not only allows viewership of what you’re watching through your cable operator it would potentially, provided your TV set’s connected to the Internet, allow you also capture over the air viewership,” Levine says. “But what’s even more interesting is combining that with connected TV viewership.”

Layered on top of panel, set-top box and ACR data are additional datasets for targeting purposes. “So it’s exciting, it’s diverse, it’s a little bit of a Wild West environment. It creates a lot of opportunity but it’s going to be a while for the industry to normalize and accept what is good and what is great,” he adds.

For now, a big focus is on figuring out how many impressions are available to sell and how many end up being delivered against precision targets, with unduplicated reach a key goal.

“We have to continue to make steps forward in being able to ensure that we can tell marketers whether they’re reaching five different people across five different touch points or one person across five different touch points,” Neuhauser says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“And we need to be able to do that with a high degree of confidence.”

4C Insights’ mantra is to “empower marketers to behave more like consumers, which is multi-screen, multi-formatted,” Neuhauser adds while attending the Advanced Advertising Summit.

Whereas digital has long been considered a data-driven medium—owing to the availability of addressability, targeting and measurement—TV is on the move to close the gap.

“We knew it had premium, brand-safe environments. Now we finally get to see just how far down the funnel TV actually goes.”

Last year’s linkup between 4C and NBCUniversal, which made all of its linear inventory available via self-serve, programmatic buying on 4C’s platform, is an example of serving thousands of ad buyers “that are constantly looking to find their audience wherever, whenever they might be available to a brand message,” Neuhauser explains.

Publishers “want to be able to leverage their inventory, their audiences, the value propositions that they have to be able to once again stand in front of the marketer and say ‘you should be putting more money into my platform not less.’”

While the data ecosystem continues to evolve, a “hot topic” is the privacy compliant extraction of consumer data, according to Neuhauser.

“It puts the consumer right at the center to ensure that their information is being used appropriately and is only providing them back with better experiences, wanted experiences.”

While datasets continue to emerge, some will have to work together. But even then, complications will loom large.

“It requires a significant mathematics, significant amount of data science to be able to mesh some of these walled gardens, again at an audience level, so that it continues to improve the experience but also ensures that privacy is at the heart of all decision making,” says Neuhauser.

In the meantime, 4C will continue to “push the envelope on measurement and attribution so that marketers can continue to evolve their understanding of who they want to reach and when they want to reach them.”

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

And even while advanced audience targeting will be the subject of many conversations at this year’s Upfront season, it will be as a “complement” to the traditional powers of television advertising, Rosen says in this interview with Beet.TV. at the Advanced Advertising Summit.

“When our world of premium video and television first started getting into the world of advanced targeting, it was very much reliant on a lot of third-party segments,” says Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising and Platform Sales.

Using syndicated data segments “was a great place to start.”

What surprised Rosen was the speed at which advertisers began to bring their own first-party data to the targeting process. “What was so pleasing is that as soon as advertisers and their agencies started to understand the power of this, it started to unlock what they’ve been doing in other worlds, like digital and social, which is using first-party data.”

He describes first-party data as an “incredible competitive advantage because they understand their consumer,” be it e-commerce or brick-and-mortar locations. That same data can “deeply inform linear television, addressable television campaigns, our full episode player, streaming online, our over the top, Hulu.”

Combined with brand-safe content, first-party defined audiences provide “that complete link from client all the way to media buy. That’s incredibly exciting,” Rosen says.

“I think what surprised us in a good way was how quickly we went from third-party data, sort of testing the pipes, to jumping right into let’s really light this up with first party data and get this engine to really run and see the ultimate promise of it.”

During the Upfronts, advanced targeting will be a factor, but advertisers will still concentrate on priorities like tent-pole sponsorships and major sporting events, plus “content and context-first decision making. That’s part of what has made television so powerful and so effective over the years. We see this as a perfect complement.”

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