The Emeryville, CA-based company has just confirmed an agreement to be acquired by the digital media powerhouse for $540m.
What does Adobe want with TubeMogul? According to its announcement: “Adobe’s acquisition of TubeMogul will create the first end-to-end independent advertising and data management solution that spans TV and digital formats, simplifying what has been a complex and fragmented process for the world’s biggest brands.”
TubeMogul has software to enable planning, buying, measurement and optimizing of programmatic, cross-screen TV advertising. It went public two years ago, for half this value.
“We aim to be totally aligned with advertisers so they never second guess the incentives,” TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson tells The Wall Street Journal.
The acquisition is a further sign of consolidation in a video ad-tech ecosystem where the number of companies has grown dizzyingly.
Across the landscape, companies are bolting on point solutions to go end-to-end. Mar-tech M&A advisory group Results International Group reports 331 mergers and acquisitions took place in ad-tech and marketing-tech in the first nine months of this year. Digiday calls the TubeMogul acquisition a “tipping point” for this consolidation.
Previously, AOL had acquired Adap.tv in the space, helping its effort to form its One offering.
TubeMogul’s Wilson recognizes the need for consolidation. Back in June, he told Beet.TV: “I think what’s actually happening is it’s getting more fragmented, not less so. Yes there’s some very dominant players out there. But there’s also huge new platforms that didn’t even exist a couple of years ago like Snapchat. So the implication for advertisers is it’s getting more complicated and fragmented.”
]]>But life forced Tracey Scheppach to do just that, when her son Ryan, then aged just seven, was diagnosed with leukemia.
The next three years were rough, as Ryan endured more than 1,722 admissions of 14 different types of chemotherapy, culminating – thankfully – in him being declared free of the disease.
During that time, Tracey – a friend of Beet.TV’s who spearheaded Starcom MediaVest Group’s advanced TV advertising operations until beginning her own consultancy last month – decided to fight, too.
Inspired by Ryan’s own determination, she formed a team to tackle the Chicago triathalon, raising money to help the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) to fund research to find kinder forms of treatment.
By now, Team Brightside – named after Ryan’s up-beat disposition through those dark times – has raised a total of $600,000, mom Tracey says, after she tapped up her SMG colleagues and a growing network of contacts in the advertising industry to run alongside her.
Scheppach, now heading up her own company Matter More Media, will be a keynote speaker at the Beet Retreat in Miami, November 16 to 18. And, on Friday, those around town can join for a 5k walk/run in support of Team Brightside.
More importantly, anyone can also make donations – right now – via Tracey’s Team In Training page.
We are grateful for Tracey coming to share her insights again, and hope that you can support her cause.
We interviewed Tracey and Ryan in their hometown Chicago last month.
]]>Like many others, he was frustrated about trying to make sense out of all the disparate data sources that might somehow shed light on how people consume content and advertising. “Trying to string those all together was a huge problem for me in my previous role,” Ackerman says in an interview with Beet.TV. “It’s something that just hasn’t been cracked.”
This is where the kitchen analogy comes in. Samba.tv, of which Ackerman is CRO, has its technology integrated into TV chips at the factory of nine leading smart TV manufacturers. When owners first power up those TV’s they can opt in to Samba’s data collection.
“What that opens the door to is data that understands all video coming through the glass” regardless of how the content gets there, says Ackerman.
That same technology is a gateway to cross-screen targeting and measurement, because the company also is able to map individual cell phones and tablets within a given household via the IP-connected TV.
“You have that view into the household and what’s being consumed and use that as a trigger to then advertise in a more personalized and targeted, addressable basis to those devices,” Ackerman adds.
He cites as examples marketers that might wish to one-up a competitor that has category exclusivity in a Super Bowl game with a conquest message, or TV networks informed by what and how viewers of competing programming are seeing.
The other side of Samba’s business is using its data, along with that of third parties, to correlate consumer exposure to ads and subsequent business results for the advertisers. Pairing digital and television data together provides “a real deterministic view of how consumers have been exposed on a one-to-one basis,” says Ackerman.
More than 90% of people with TV’s containing Samba’s technology opt in to being tracked, according to Ackerman, who pegs penetration at more than 10 million homes.
Noting that “advertising follows content,” Ackerman believes that the more content providers personalize their offerings, the more advertisers can benefit. “The more choice the consumer has in personalizing the way they get the content, then you have more data and a more personalized environment to send them targeted, addressable ads,” Ackerman 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.
]]>The ads in question would come from the two minutes per hour of local commercial time in programming DISH enjoys, and would playback in both live and DVR-recorded TV.
Most people would call that “programmatic TV”. But not the executive who runs the scheme.
“There’s no such thing as ‘programmatic TV’,” Dish Network media sales VP Adam Gaynor tells Beet.TV in this recorded interview. “I believe TV can be bought programmatically – there’s a layer of automation, of data and of buying impressions.”
But Gaynor believes “programmatic” – still the buzzword occupying hearts and minds in media land – will settle down to be just a mere technique.
“Programmatic is not a product, it’s a process,” he says, sharply. “If we can help brands and agencies reach audiences easily through data, that’s what our platform is all about.”
How about a progress update for DISH’s “programmatic” foray? Gaynor adds: “We’re going to come out of our pilot phase and more in to production. We’re going to be able to add many more DSPs now, to work with many more brands through many more platforms.”
Case in point – today DISH announced a summer-time integration with BidSwitch’s real-time partner ecosystem, itself a gateway to numerous supply and demand sources.
The increasing automation and efficiency of TV buying will be explored on July 24 at a Beet.TV leadership summit on advanced TV and data sponsored by Dish Media Sales and Experian Marketing Services.
This interview with Gaynor was originally published in June.
The Beet.TV leadership summit will feature the following speakers and moderators:
Mike Bologna, President, Modi Media (GroupM) Amy DeHaen, VP of Advanced TV, Cadreon (IPG)
Adam Gaynor, VP, Media Sales & Analytics, DISH Media Sales
Kevin Heindl, Director of Partner and Advertiser Solutions, Experian Marketing Services
Prasad Joglekar, General Manager, Viewer Measurement, DISH Media Sales
Chris Harter, SVP, TV Partnerships, Cardlytics
Joanna O’Connell, Chief Marketing Officer, MediaMath (Moderator)
Tracy Scheppach, EVP, Publicis Media Exchange
Matt Spiegel, SVP, MediaLink (Moderator)
Jay Stocki, VP of Product Management, Experian Marketing Services
Andre Swanston, CEO Tru Optik
]]>That’s the message the social network itself has been pushing out to agencies in the last few months, and agencies appear to be getting the message: when silent, auto-playing video ads scroll by with no audio, the kind of ads made for TV may not fit.
“In some ways, you are playing with a limited toolbox,” concedes Sean Bryan, the joint chief creative officer of McCann NY. “Most people have the sound off, so you don’t get the benefit of music, of a bold first line of voiceover or an interesting read from an actor.”
But Bryan, like some others, is starting to see the workaround. “You have to get your point across visually,” he advises. “It really helps to have something compelling, content-wise, to show. If you’re just pushing out an ad that’s on mute, it’s not really going to land. But if you’re talking about something that’s interesting and having people pass it along … that will break through.”
Bryan has been in the McCann family for 12 years, after a stint at DDB. Under his joint leadership with Tom Murphy, McCann NY was named to Advertising Age’s Creative A-List in 2013 and also honored as Agency of the Year by the Art Director’s Club.
Bryan reckons Facebook video is “a tremendous help” and an “incredibly powerful” to spread messages for brands. He shares some of his agency’s best campaigns through his own Facebook profile.
]]>That is the German native ad tech company acquired by GroupM two years ago. Since then, the agency’s Xaxis unit has been deploying native ad formats around the world, following recent launches in Russia, China and the US.
“Bringing it to the world is our mission,” says Plista CEO Nicolas Bidon, the former UK MD of sister company Xaxis, “About a year ago, we were in six markets, and now we’re in 12. By the end of the year, we should be in about 18 markets.”
Plista goes beyond standard bottom-of-story link recommendations and offers an array of formats, also for video, feeds, out-stream and more.
Although some industry folk have worried that native advertising, through which ads take the same form as editorial content, can scale, technology platforms are trying to prove the opposite.
In fact, Bidon is keen to differentiate. “There is confusion between branded content and native advertising,” he explains. “Branded content … leveraging deep editorial knowledge … has been around for many, many, many years. That’s the part that people feel is hard to scale.
“With Plista, we leverage a less intrusive type of advertising that’s more native to your content. We only sell on engagement metrics – whether that is a click or if it’s about a completed view.”
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That seems to be the rationale at AOL, whose content division is now taking a stronger role in making ad formats that don’t piss off its readers and viewers.
“People are pushing back – we’re taking that very seriously on the AOL side,” AOL content and consumer brands EVP and president Jimmy Maymann reveals in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We’ve actually created a whole new team and moved it over to my side of the house.
“Before, we worked on ad experiences more on the tech platform side of the house. But, at the end of the day, we need to have it closer to the content experience, the consumer experience, so that we create things that are more in line with the overall experiences we create.”
In June, AOL announced a reorg in which Tim Mahlman, the founder of AOL acquisition Vidible became president of AOL Platforms, a new role responsible for advertising technology and data products, built by 1,400 engineers, product developers and sales and client service leads. Maymann’s new team was not detailed at the time.
Maymann’s content division publishes The Huffington Post, Makers, TechCrunch, Engadget, Moviefone, AutoBlog, AOL.com, and MapQuest. His new team sounds like an acknowledgement that ad-tech has become too disconnected from the content that consumers want.
After a frenetic few years in which the industry has debuted programmatic sales, mobile formats, video ads, advanced, data-driven trading practices and more, both publishers and ad buyers are staring in to the abyss.
So far, it has been a summer when the reality has hit – according to multiple data points, consumer ad blocking is rife, and publishers are beginning to accept that audiences hate some digital ad practices so much, they want to opt out entirely.
How they respond will be fascinating. Maymann says already-introduced formats like in-steam ads, native ads and branded content have already begun to help give better consumer experiences. “But we need to push it even further,” he says.
“AOL used to really push the boundaries – three or four years ago, AOL produced the Devil unit, which ended up becoming an IAB thing. We want to get back to that mojo.
“We need to take that baton again and lead again. The industry needs to do more in that space.”
This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Zohar Dayan thinks so. He’s the CEO of Wibbitz, a company helping publishers make videos out of text articles. And, when it comes to distributing those videos through social media, one format wins
“Eighty-five percent of the most shared videos on Facebook were square format,” he tells Beet.TV. “Publishers are noticing that today. You don’t have to tilt your phone to watch the video. But it still takes up the majority of the screen.”
That matters because, well, social matters. Just as with text publishing, most publishers have come to crave the funnel that social networks give their content.
“Facebook’s algorithm is very much geared toward video content today,” Dayan observes.
But making enough video to get noticed is hard. That’s why Wibbitz is one of several tech vendors helping publishers automate the process. The New York Times profiled the technology this week.
Wibbitz runs textual analysis and artificial intelligence on publishers’ text stories to produce attractive videos overlaid with text – content that would have taken reporters far longer, but which can be published on-site as well as on social.
“These videos are typically shorter – around 30 seconds in length – and they typically have these big text overlays on them,” Dayan says. “Most of the videos that are being watched on social networks and mobile devices are being watched with the sound turned off.”
]]>
That’s a world away from where we are today, says Fox Networks Group’s advanced advertising president. Because the truth is, consumers don’t really like ads at all.
“We have a market that’s out of kilter right now,” he says in this fascinating discussion with MediaLink SVP Matt Spiegel during Cannes Lions. “We have massive amounts of human attention, … but it doesn’t seem to be matching up correctly with what we know consumers are spending time doing.”
Marchese says ad blocking is “the best thing to happen to advertising in the last decade” because it is “the immune system putting antibodies for the virus of digital advertising”. In other words, billions of bad ads have so put consumers backs up, now the only solution is to act – not simply by making “better ads”, which Marchese calls a “self-delusion”, but by making ads match the media in which they run so that they align better with consumer expectations.
What could that look like? “Participation in advertising could make it more immersive,” Marchese advocates. “We could lower the number of ads a person needs to see if we could get them to participate with said advertisement.”
And Marchese argues “place-shifting” ads could, in a mobile world, let consumers transfer the commercial experiences they want to watch between devices, wherever they go.
This video was produced at the OMD Oasis at Cannes Lions 2016 as part of the Future of TV Advertising Leadership Forum, a series presented by true[X] and hosted by OMD Worldwide. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“Worldwide, (advertising) is $170bn, in the US it’s $77bn,” according to Herve Brunet, CEO and co-founder of StickyADS, one TV ad-tech vendor recently acquired by another.
“The linear side of TV is eventually going to go programmatic. Even if 20% of that goes programmatic, it’s going to be massive.”
StickyADS was recently bought up by Comcast’s FreeWheel as the latter looked to extend its US digital ad expertise in to European TV.
Today, programmatic TV is a tiny fraction of the overall. So what is it that the industry really wants from technology like this?
“From a TV broadcaster’s perspective, it’s one word – control,” Brunet tells Beet.TV. “It’s the ability to control their environment, define the business rules, make sure their inventory is sold on their terms, not on the buy-side terms.
“From a demand perspective, there’s a tremendous need for quality inventory. TV broadcasters have that inventory. So we’re making sure the two worlds meet in the middle.”
We spoke with him last month during Cannes Lions.
]]>
Last year, the ad-tech platform bowed AppNexus Programmable Bidder (APB), a way for buyers to connect with AppNexus via API. One part of that was Bonsai – a way to let advertisers “decide the values of distinct impression parameters and prioritize them via a tree logic and structure they create”, according to the company.
AppNexus president Michael Rubenstein tells Beet.TV more than 25 companies are now “developing amazing capabilities on top that”.
“They are writing custom algorithms for a particular advertiser or campaign,” he says. “They are using a proprietary programming language that we built for data scientists called Bonsai”.
Rubenstein says customization will be king.
“Programmability is the next big thing,” he predicts. “The ability to customize the platform is where this industry is heading.
“Today, you see a small number of brands controlling their data … 10 years from now, this is going to be ubiquitous.”
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Underneath all that change, however, lays the kernel of the same, enduring construct – storytelling.
That’s according to an agency creative who has devised campaigns for the likes of Dell, Chevron and Motorola whose work for Virgin, Xerox, Adidas, LG, and ESPN has garnered industry awards.
“In some cases, having a narrative in a piece of film is still critical – whether it’s in Facebook or even something you’re doing in Snapchat,” according to VML executive creative director and managing partner Mike Wente. “But there’s certain kinds of executions that will be more successful within different platforms.”
Kansas City-based VML is another part of the giant WPP group, since 2001.
Many an ad-tech vendor these days attempts to offset their typical focus on technology, revenue and efficiency by pointing to the importance of “creative” and “storytelling”. Creative agency folk like Wente are the people at the sharp end of those disciplines.
The key skill of a creative these days is not just about constructing a story, but deploying it across a plethora of platforms, each with different norms and possibilities.
“Having another 15 seconds to be able to work within (on Instagram), how do you have a creative idea that lives within that?,” Wente says. “Is it more about using the title screen to show all videos, or larger story? It’s still about a story, but the way it manifests is much different.”
An example of using platforms’ unique properties is VML’s 21in1 campaign for Motorola, advertising its Moto X handset by using Motorola’s Instagram account profile page as a tiled canvas for multiple photos that, viewed as a whole, add up to a single image at the same time as revealing individual but supporting stories inside.
“It was a non-linear story that I could engage, interact and learn however I wanted to,” Wente says. “It still all made sense.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Unlocking the Creative and Connect Potential of Video” which is sponsored by Facebook. For more videos from the series, visit this page. You can also find the series on Facebook’s media page.
]]>
But that would be missing the point – new channels demand new approaches, and new approaches reward creatives, according to one advertising leader.
“Every time they create a new tool or a new system, we take existing TV or digital content we have, we repurpose it to understand the tool, and then we see what happens,” Energy BBDO chief creative officer Andres Ordonez tells Beet.TV, describing his approach to Facebook.
“Last year, we had this film for 5 Gum it was a 15-second TV (spot) running in different platforms, we repurposed it for Facebook, with the sound off and captions and created a nine-second version. We had a 7x better ad view than we had before.”
Ordonez was promoted inside Energy BBDO, whose recent client work includes Ziploc, Quaker and Bud Light.
His work has garnered awards from places including Festival del Sol, Clio, FIAP and Cannes.
But Ordonez says shorter isn’t always better. “With traditional media, we were getting locked by time – 30 seconds, 15 seconds, sometimes 60s seconds,” he tells Beet.TV. “Now it’s about the story, about the idea.
“The beauty of digital content is … it doesn’t matter how long it takes. We’ve seen stories six seconds, two minutes – it’s about a great story that will engage consumers. You can react or re-edit any type of content.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Unlocking the Creative and Connect Potential of Video” which is sponsored by Facebook. For more videos from the series, visit this page. You can also find the series on Facebook’s media page.
]]>That’s where media measurement agencies come in – and that’s why digital measurer comScore agreed to merge with TV mesaurement firm Rentrak last year. The outcome – a combined measurement powerhouse for a mixed-media world.
“Planning has tended to be done in silos – mobile, PC and TV. We’re being asked by our clients to start deduplicating, from a unique visitors perspective, across these disparate platforms,” Anthony Psacharopoulos, comScore’s EVP, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We’ve stitched together the digital data that we’ve historically connected, along with Rentrak data … across planning solutions, activation solutions and campaign measurement solutions.”
How does that go? Psacharopoulos offers up two real-world examples from comScore’s client base:
The insight in to client demands is a window in to the growing clamor to understand audiences as people, no matter which device they happen to be using.
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We are now announcing our roll-out of our new platform – we are piloting the holistic ad server for video – which comprises the integration of SSP-type capabilities natively within the video ad server.”
Why holistic? “We don’t believe, philosophically, in the standalone SSP. We see that as just a glorified network,” Braley adds.
He claims around 40% of European broadcasters are using his platform – so where will growth come from?
Braley aims to cross-sell the holistic platform to existing Ooyala as well as seeking out new customers.
“We expect there to be net new-prospect customers as well,” he adds. “Some premium, ex-LiveRail customers are now urgently looking for a new home.”
]]>Many publishers have spent the last few years locked in a pattern to acquire social followers, and to distribute content on social platforms, in the hope of bringing audiences back to their sites. Now some are not so sure if that is the right strategy after all.
But others seem happy with their choice. In an interview recorded before the algorithm change, The Washington Posts’s revenue chief said keeping WaPo readers on Facebook had not hurt.
“We publish over 750 articles a day on Facebook Instant Articles,” Jed Hartman told Beet.TV. “We said, ‘No, we’re not going to accept the traffic back to our site, we’re happy within Facebook Instant’, and we’ve seen engagement on our site go up as a result of that.”
Hartman says WaPo US traffic has grown from 40m to 70m unique users, whilst overseas traffic has more than doubled from 10m to 24m.
Of course, social distribution is not the only driver. Under new owner Jeff Bezos, the Post has been investing in software technology it says is necessary to grow business.
“You have to be great at both technology and content if you want to succeed,” he adds. “We’ve created anything from our own CMS to various widgets within the CMS that help scale and engage content – from a headline tester, to a personalization engine, to a viral predictor.”
This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>comScore national TV EVP Chris Wilson says his media measurement company is already helping brands with post-campaign verification”, but he acknowledges that is merely about proving that an ad ran and was seen.
“The even bigger opportunity … is attribution,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “After exposure to those addressable ads, what kind of sales lift or increase in foot traffic did I get from that campaign?
“That’s where addressability becomes interesting, because you’re actually able to measure return on investment.
“Now advertisers can start to justify the business model for addressable. If you compare it to traditional CPMs, it’s very high. But, if the return is there, it makes sense.”
This month, AdAge reported: “t’s been a slow go for addressable TV advertising, which allows marketers to target consumers by household. The lack of reach, expensive prices and lack of standardization has deterred advertisers from allocating meaningful TV budgets to the approach.”
EMarketer projects the format won’t take more than $1bn in the US until 2017, still constituting just 2.2% of overall US TV ad spend.
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Video advertising platform Videology’s chief commercial officer Ryan Jamboretz is talking about “outstream”, the format which inserts auto-playing video ads between text publishers’ written paragraphs.
And Jamboretz thinks that will help solve a problem.
“The biggest single constraint is the amount of high-quality supply,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It’s a positive development. Being able to bring more inventory to the publisher base is going to allow this industry to grow more quickly.
“As long as it’s quality and of a premium nature, it’s a fantastic thing. If the outstream business starts to become a lower-quality way to access the market, then it starts to be of concern to us.”
Agencies think out-stream video ads will be more important than in-stream or banner ads to their clients, according to a Forrester report published last year.”
This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Marketing agency Havas Media Group is amongst those wary of the new reality.
“Advertising is less and less acceptable for many consumers,” Havas Media Group global MD Dominique Delport concedes in the video interview with Beet.TV. “There is less and less acceptance of interruption, especially on mobile.
“When you have more than 250m people getting so upset that they put an ad blocker in their system, download it in their browser and kick any kind of ad coming, I think it’s a wake-up call – something is wrong.
“There is a necessity … to really try to clean the slate … go back to the consumer with trust, and say, ‘we want that moment of time to be the most entertaining possible’.
That’s why Havas is looking to route around the traditional advertising model, by turning to in-video, post-production product placement.
Its creative agency subsidiary Arena just signed a deal to put product placements in programming on Vice Media’s Viceland TV channel.
The placements are powered by Mirriad, the London-based technology that can super-impose brands’ products in to TV and video programming. Mirriad has been going a few years now, but the technology has been evolving and, in light of the ad blocking growth, the necessity may be greater than ever.
The software blends images in to even old, archive programming, meaning producers don’t need to make a conscious plan for product placement at shoot, and meaning long-tail shows can have a commercial life, long after first broadcast.
Havas reckons its clients will spend $25m through this channel in the next 12 months. That is a significant indicator as to the scale of the model, as well as a market of the expected size of Viceland itself.
]]>The company has grown from fewer than 100 to more than 1,500 employees, to more than 3,000 brand customers and more than $1bn in revenue, 15% of which comes from outside WPP and its Group M agency, according to Xaxis global CEO Brian Gleason.
Next up is considerable further investment in Xaxis’ underlying technology, with a big expansion of a campaign visualization tool.
“We’ll invest over $54m in our tech this year,” Gleason tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We have over 260 engineers and scaling very quickly.”
Xaxis’ technology platforms revolve around the following, Gleason says:
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Qumra Capital is a new investor addition to the line-up. Eyeview says it will use the funding to further invest in its sales, marketing, and engineering efforts.
Eyeview CEO Oren Harnevo tells Beet.TV the company provides “outcome-based video marketing”.
“We commit to sales returns for our advertisers,” he says. “We provide return on ad spend. They see how their dollar worked.”
Specifically, it does that by slicing video ads in to many different possible combinations of scenes, targeted for individual viewers.
“We take original creative and create hundreds of thousands of different videos about the different types of toothpaste, about the different stores you can buy them on,” Harnevo adds. “We’ll match down to the individual level with the right video ad.”
This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We never could have imagined how big it would become,” said New York Times advertising and innovation SVP Sebastian Tomich. “It was our most successful app launch in history. It’s got 600,000 users right now.”
NYTVR wasn’t just an app launch, of course, and those users didn’t materialize magically. The New York Times gave away Google Cardboards, the rudimentary VR headset container for Android phones, to 1.3m of its print home-delivery subscribers. That has helped popularize the app.
And that’s good news for Tomich, whose T Brand Studio team is helping brands like Mini and GE embrace VR as advertisers.
“The team is probably doing about 10 virtual reality briefs a week,” he says. “We’re hiring technologists, AR experts. “Banner ads are not ideal for consumer. We need to have better tools.”
All this is why NYTVR won a prestigious award in Cannes last week – the Mobile Grand Prix – with the jury president hailing it as “a Wright Brothers moment for mobile in how it can really help a brand thrive in its most challenging times”.
“We think it’s the first publisher to take home a grand prix in Cannes history,” Tomich added.
This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So, with live sports the jewel in the crown of TV content today, are the digital networks really challenging traditional TV operators for the rights? Will traditional TV really lose its hold over top competitions?
Not so fast – each of the deals above was really about marketing, building the brand of at least one of the partners involved: the NFL outside the US, BT Sport to potential subscribers, and women’s soccer to the uncoverted.
Sports TV rights remain hugely lucrative – money the online upstarts may not stump up. But that doesn’t mean they have to stay locked to TV, and it doesn’t mean the online platforms won’t still have content to gain.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, UK pay-TV platform leader Sky, which paid a record £4.18 billion to retain three years of English Premier League soccer, reveals it hopes to distribute videos from its coveted locker through the big online platforms.
“We’ve got really strong partnerships with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – they are a very key part of our marketing plan for our content rights,” says deputy MD of the company’s Sky Media ad sales division, Jamie West.
“In the next Premier League season coming up in August, we’re already exploring with all of those platforms how we might share our Premier League clip rights across those platforms, within the rights restrictions that we have – time-bound, day of match and that sort of thing.”
For Sky, this is not altruistic. Nor does it represent a tipping point in which the networks gain full-match, live or substantial programming rights. Sky is not about to give away the content it has spent heavily for. But it does want to use soccer clips as a shop window for its full package of Sky Sports subscription channels.
“For us, it’s about driving consideration back to the Sky Sports app, the Sky Sports platform,” West adds.
“Some of our relationships are very deep-rooted relationships – whether it’s F1, Premier League in the UK or Bundesliga in Gemany. We look to build really strong relationships with those rightsholders that really amplify their content across multiple platforms.
“So for us in that social world it’s about bringing that consumer back to the (pay-TV) platform.”
Such a distribution arrangement would be interesting. In addition to owning live, multi-platform broadcast rights, Sky also has a separate package of rights governing online clips. Whilst these are also made available through Sky Sports’ own apps, the company also struck an exclusive sub-licensed distribution deal with its sibling company News UK, the newspaper publisher, to run the clips across The Sunday Times, The Times and The Sun newspapers’ digital properties.
The Premier League has tended to use coercion and legal action to remove illegal use of its rightsholders’ content from social and other online platforms, its latest concern being Vine clips and live rebroadcasts through Periscope and Meerkat. Sky Sports’ own football channel on YouTube stops short of including match clips.
Partnering with the online platforms to gain visibility for its premium content is nothing new. In a recent fire-side chat with me at The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit, Sky’s UK CEO and Facebook’s EMEA VP explained how the pay-TV company runs events to trail things like Game Of Thrones and Sky News stories on Facebook, all building awareness of Sky’s own core pay platforms – but never giving away too much.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That’s according to one agency creative chief watching a world of change open up new opportunities – for brands that are prepared to communicate honestly.
“Never before has advertising been such a part of culture,” Arnold global chief creative officer Jim Elliott tells Beet.TV. “The lines between entertainment and advertising is blurring more and more. We’re driving culture. We’re inspiring culture.
“We have so many opportunities, channels, platforms, places that we can interact with audiences – it’s never-ending … to create art that drives business, motivates people and changes the world. Never before has advertising been in a position to effect change … it’s incredible.”
Elliott took the role at Arnold in 2015, working on clients including Hershey, New Balance and Jack Daniel’s, after a stint at Y&R. His campaign work has garnered a list of awards as long as your arm – Cannes, D&AD, CLIO, London International, New York Festivals, Stephen E. Kelly, Effie Worldwide, the One Show, the Epica Awards, National ADDY, the Art Directors Club, the ANDYs, Communication Arts, the Webbys, Radio Mercury, the Web Marketing Association and the Yahoo! Big Idea Chair.
So what, for Elliott, is the driving imperative of modern brand work? “It has to feel authentic to the brand,” he says. “It needs to feel the brand has a permission and a right to put this idea out in to the world. It can’t be force-fit.”
That means being “authentic” and “transparent”, he adds. “It’s not blindly selling someone and not wanting to hear what your audience has to say or think.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Unlocking the Creative and Connect Potential of Video” which is sponsored by Facebook. For more videos from the series, visit this page. You can also find the series on Facebook’s media page.
]]>All that has changed in an era when the consumer feedback loop has closed, and a warm reception by users is a prerequisite.
“People aren’t going to watch a product that is mindlessly shilling,” is how ad agency JWT‘s worldwide chief creative officer Matt Eastwood puts it. “People regard Facebook as their space.
“The feedback loop with consumers keeps brands honest. You have to be more mindful of what viewers want to see, which is a great place to be.”
In Ad Age‘s 2013 Awards Report, Eastwood was listed as the 5th most awarded Chief Creative Officer worldwide. He joined in mid-2014 after senior creative stints at DDB, M&C Satchi and elsewhere in a career that began as a DDB copywriter in Sydney, Australia.
“The big change from 20, maybe 10 years ago is, you can be so much more immersive in the way that you tell the story,” he tells Beet.TV.
“Because of the technology Facebook is developing, you can tell a wider story, you can plan the way you roll out a sequence of videos. You can tell bigger, better, more immersive stories using all the different video techniques. It’s an exciting time.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Unlocking the Creative and Connect Potential of Video” which is sponsored by Facebook. For more videos from the series, visit this page. You can also find the series on Facebook’s media page.
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