“TV has completely changed. We’ve been trapped in our houses and watching a lot more of it, but at the same time, a lot of the platforms started to come out to give Netflix competition,” AJ Kintner, executive vice president of advanced video strategy at Publicis Media Exchange (PMX), said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Our viewerships of what traditionally was linear are completely different.”

Recognizing the need to support data-driven marketing, Publicis two years acquired Epsilon from Alliance Data Systems. Epsilon has a vast trove of consumer data from loyalty programs and email marketing campaigns. The data help to informing media-buying decisions amid the growth in connected TV.

Second-screening activity also is common among consumers who watch TV while using their mobile devices surf the web, chat with friends or check in on social media.

“We usually have our mobile device in one hand, and the channel changer in the other,” Kintner said. “They do complement each other, and there are companies like Samsung who actually have the ability to own the TV and own the device in your hand.”

Automated content recognition (ACR) systems that monitor what households are actually watching provide some of the most revealing data, Kintner said. The can show how advertisers are misallocating significant parts of their media budgets to linear TV, only to learn that much of their target audience consists of cord cutters. Meanwhile, marketers are working to develop greater insights about CTV viewing habits.

“Brands are trying to understand it just as quickly as the networks are creating it. All of the networks have created their own streaming services,” Kintner said. “Clients want to understand it, they want to buy more of it. They just need to make sure they’re buying it the proper way.”

You are watching “Data: Powering CTV for Marketers,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Sabio. For more videos, please visit this page.

But a collection of new developments promises to mean ad land must continue to respond and evolve to the changing privacy landscape.

That is according to an executive from one of Dentsu Aegis Network’s data-driven ad agencies.

“Still, I think you see changes going on,” says AJ Kintner, Merkle M1 VP business development, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

He cites similar privacy regulation mooted for California and Vermont as changing the game – but it doesn’t end there.

“What happens if the cookie goes away?,” he asks. “We’re seeing a decrease of cookies in the space, Apple’s making a lot of changes with their policies.

“People are kind of a little bit worried that what we’re currently doing in optimization or targeting might change. So everyone’s kind of asking, ‘How are we going to fix it?’ And there’s not a lot of solutions right now.”

Around the industry, tech vendors are scrambling to offer that solution – combining multiple fragments of an individual’s identity, as laid by different digital devices, uniting them in to a singular whole.

Parly as a hedge against that, Kintner wants to see more direct deals done between publishers and ad buyers.

“(After the changes), IP addresses might be PII (personally-identifiable information),” Kintner says. “If that’s true, that’ll change a lot of how companies in the ecosystem work. I mean, device graphs are currently being built off of IP addresses across the board of many companies. So if that goes away and becomes a private PII, it could change a lot of the ecosystem.

“We hope the privacy (issue) doesn’t come out of nowhere and just stop a lot of what we’re doing in programmatic. That’s the worst case scenario, (that) we have to switch so fast to a cookie or an anonymous ID.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic.   For more videos, please visit this page.