In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Beck talks about research Turner recently conducted to see what’s top of mind with viewers who face an ever-expanding roster of streaming choices, some of them without advertising.

“The research we did recently is very interesting,” says Beck. “People kept going back to trying to simply discover content has become more of a challenge because there’s so much out there. What can I watch and where can I watch it? And by the way, do I have to pay incremental for it?”

Among the research learnings was that people want more relevant viewing recommendations in a world of increased co-viewing wherein “typically you’re getting a recommendation based on a single profile when you have multiple people who are interested in what the content is,” Beck says. “Why can’t we have recommendations that are based on multiple profiles?”

But recommendations come with nuances, he adds, one example being not everyone who likes comedy programming likes dark comedic material. “The ability to go more granular in search to really get to what you’re looking for is going to be important.”

Another research finding that stood out is “there’s so much clutter in the experience today. When you open up any screen, there’s that infinite scrolling of content and how do you de-clutter that? So I think there’s going to be a lot of focus on UI, UX to make more personalized experiences for people,” says Beck.

Asked about reducing ad loads and other ways to improve viewing experiences, he notes that while Amazon, Netflix and others have done well without ads, Hulu has done well with an ad model.

“I think a lot of the services are going to have to consider is there an ad-supported model. Consumers may be very open to that, especially if the ads get better. By better I don’t just mean the quality of the content but not as interruptive or served at the times in which people are open to that.

“I definitely think that anybody that’s in this space is thinking hard about how can advertisers help fund the experience for consumers because we know consumers are going to want a free or ad-supported version.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

The bottom line, Sable explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, is that TV advertising will need to rise to the quality level of the programs themselves.

Noting that he predicted 10 years ago that Amazon would have brick-and-mortar stores, Sable says, “Netflix within the next two years will have advertising. They have to, in my view. Amazon’s already going to be there.”

This means “we’re going to have more and more opportunities to put more and more great advertising” around premium content.

A once widely held view that with the rise of digital most video content would be user-generated hasn’t quite worked out, according to Sable, citing “the cat peeing on your shoes that everybody would share. That’s such crap. It’s exactly the opposite.”

In recent years, producers who once shunned TV are flocking to its seemingly endless channels. “They all want to be back in TV because the budgets are high, the production quality is huge,” Sable says.

Of course, someone has to pay for all that content and “advertising has to be as good as the content that you put it around.”

While for many of Y&R’s clients TV “has to be that branded piece, to create the brand image,” more companies beginning to understand that “Amazon is DTC and so is e-commerce.”

With a drive toward direct-to-consumer even in staid consumer packaged-goods categories, there’s more concern now about “how do my ads look different, how do they sound different, what’s the call to action, what’s the offer? What’s the pricing. These have to be in there,” Sable says. “You see it with the Warby Parkers, you see it with the Caspers.”

Even companies like Facebook and Amazon are buying “a ton” of traditional TV. “How come they’re not just on Google or Facebook or Amazon? Because they’re smart.”

Asked about the proceedings at CES, Sable prefers to think of the annual event as more about innovation than technology per se. While he was impressed by a new LG screen that folds up like a window shade, he’d like to see more visibility around 5G cellular service “because so much of what we’ve seen is going to be dependent on 5G.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Singtel’s Amobee now seeks to simplify the delivery of advertising across all channels and screens—including video, display, mobile, and social. Its platform includes the Amobee DSP, Amobee DMP, Brand Intelligence and DataMine analytics.

“With Videology, we bring to bear a lot of solutions for the sell side. We believe that the liquidity between the buy and the sell side are necessary for the ecosystem to really drive forward and to circumnavigate the disruptors out there that are emerging right now,” Yi says.

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, he names one of the biggest of those disruptors: “Amazon and their capabilities to run the gamut of the whole consumer funnel.”

Asked what he sees in the marketplace and what Amobee’s clients want, Yi says they recognize a “tremendous opportunity to improve yield both on the buy side at the portfolio level ,as well as the sell side when we’re looking at siloes and across siloes. There’s a lot of work to do, but a lot of people finally understanding the massive opportunity to do so and racing very hard to get that done.”

One common trend in the industry as a whole is the “tremendous amount of partnership” in both the U.S. and Europe in the form of OpenAP, EGTA, RTL’s television marketplace “where you’re combining television, audio, outdoor. So there’s a great opportunity even outside of the traditional television space for these media companies to own more of the that consumer funnel.

“So we have to figure out from the technology and the client side how are we going to approach the full funnel ourselves. It’s not good enough to focus in year one to three on just linear and video and television and going across screens.”

Proceeding further down the funnel requires “the right partnerships and the right relationships,” Yi says.

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

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, A+E’s EVP of Ad Sales discusses why advertisers haven’t taken the full plunge into advanced targeting and the likelihood that the ad-supported model is in the future for companies like Amazon, Netflix and the planned Disney service.

He says advertisers are “getting so pressured to prove the effectiveness of every nickel they spend. Everyone’s known for a long time TV works, especially on the upper-funnel metrics of awareness and all that. But there’s been like a vagueness to that. It doesn’t really tie back to ROI as cleanly as some other things.”

Being able to more closely tie TV ad exposure to tangible business results “gives the ammunition that the marketers need to keep recommending premium video as that centerpiece and not be shifting money somewhere else,” Olsen says.

Advertisers are looking to strike a balance “between what digital is claiming it can do and what we’ve always known TV could do, and then just really getting to kind of the right balance to answer on the effectiveness of both,” he adds.

It’s worth noting that while age and gender has been the transactional TV demographic for years, secondary targets have been available for more than three decades, Olsen observes. TV networks have the tools to go beyond, say, trying to reach everyone ages 18-49 to more strategic targets.

“Clients I think are interested but they’re not jumping in with both feet yet” given questions about data quality and scalability. “So I think it’s finding the right balance between what is still mass, what is targeted and then you take it a step further, what should go to addressable, et cetera.”

Then there’s the viewer balancing act. While many are seeking to avoid ads, that comes with a higher cost.

But Olsen points to signs of hope. “Some of the stuff we’ve seen, though, isn’t as daunting as it may look right now,” he says. “Some of the S-VOD penetration is kind of hitting a ceiling here in the U.S. and I think those companies are actually looking at ad models themselves.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix has an ad model, Amazon, the new Disney service. All those things eventually have ad models as part of that product. I think they will be more tailored ads and more personalized will be kind of the magic to it.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

As advertisers increasingly seek better audience targeting and efficiency, “The marketplace has kind of come our way,” says the company’s President of Advertising Sales, Jim Tricarico.

Less than five years ago, Cadent was “a DR product,” Tricarico explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan. “It was a way for people to get inexpensive GRP’s. But we knew that in order to evolve, we had to create a network-like solution.”

That solution is used by a host of premium brands, including Amazon, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal and Procter & Gamble.

Tricarico says Cadent can access network inventory for advertisers at a 30% to 50% discount from direct-network buys. “We’re never out there saying we’re better than network, we’re instead of network. We really just want to be a complement to network and solve some of those problems that are going on in the marketplace.”

Cadent has access to inventory on all networks and such major sporting events as the Olympics and NCAA tournaments.

A TV veteran whose background includes stints at MTV Networks, Viacom and Screenvision, Tricarico smiles while noting that some people talk about data as though it never existed before. “Every plan has data behind it. The question now is how deep is that data that they’re using,” he says.

Noting that Cadent eschews “walled gardens,” Tricarico says the company does what data tells it to do.

“Whereas when you go to a network group, they actually optimize to their portfolio because they don’t have access to every network. We buy directly against the data and optimize to the data and not to the portfolio.”

In addition to its own data, Cadent has partnerships with companies like 605, which has access to Charter Communications’ 10 million set-top boxes, and with Adobe and Videology. Cadent can cross-reference advertisers’ data with that of 605, “or we become more of an execution arm where we work with the Adobes and the Videologys of the world to execute on the fact that they’ve already put data over their plans and they use us as the inventory source.”

To broaden its footprint on the local broadcast side, Cadent has spent the past year hiring an internal buying group and now has relationships with more than 600 local TV stations, according to Tricarico.

“People are so desperate to find efficient GRP’s that even in cable there’s not enough reach to find them all. What’s growing so much right now is both news and syndication on the broadcast side.”

This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.

“Talent today in my opinion is a culture game,” Koenigsberg says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, a conversation in which he also shares his views on the present market dominance of Facebook and Google and why he thinks Amazon is most worth watching.

As he discusses the evolution of advertising and media agency holding companies, Koenigsberg recalls a decentralized approach consisting of “a ton of companies, not integrated but selling all kinds of different services. And when you think about companies that are completely integrated and non-siloed, it’s the antithesis I think of a holding company.”

Of the genesis of Horizon, he adds, “We didn’t build the company by buying a whole bunch of different companies that have competing interests.”

The industry talent pool consists of “smart kids” with “lots of choices.” So getting the most qualified ones to join a media agency is easier said than done.

“But we’re fighting a bit of an uphill battle with the pocketbook of Google and Facebook and Amazon and some of the other tech companies,” says Koenigsberg. “I believe that our industry has to somehow figure out an enormous pivot if we are going to get the best and the brightest in our industry.”

In a week that saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining his company to Congress, Koenigsberg observes that nothing is static and that the business world constantly moves.

“There are some storm clouds over Facebook right now. How are they going to deal with their data play in the future. There are some big storm clouds with Google with regard to brand safety and their data play and where are they going to be in the future.”

Nonetheless, he doesn’t count out media companies with a presence in linear and digital as they consolidate, build out digital ecosystems and invest in subscription services and other forms of entertainment to drive scale.

“So I think that Facebook and Google will be chipped away at over the next five years. They’re not going to have the hold on the ecosystem that I think people think they will have,” Koenigsberg says.

He thinks Amazon in particular is one to watch because of its ability to continue to scale, the data and information it has on purchasing power and “the fact that they’re getting into every business under the sun, including the content business.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

For Disney, it’s the appeal of a big, quick deal and the options here and overseas it will deliver for testing various direct-to-consumer offerings. He cites what Sky TV has in Europe and Star has in India, plus a bigger stake in Hulu, along with ESPN’s app launch this year and the standalone Disney branded app in 2019.

“There’s a number of initiatives that Disney will be able to experiment with and see which model of the direct-to-consumer approach works,” the oft-quoted Senior Analyst at Pivotal Research says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2018.

On the Fox side, he believes one factor is that the company was “freaked out” by Facebook having expressed a willingness to bid $600 million for five years of cricket game rights in India. It would have cost Facebook $120 million a year in a market with a billion dollars of annual digital ad revenue, which he terms astronomical.

“And if you’re a Fox and you’re looking at what Facebook is willing to do in India, what are they willing to do in the U.S. if that’s the scale at which they’re willing to operate?” Wieser says. “I think there’s an appreciation of the consequences of Facebook, Google, Amazon and even Apple pushing harder into the same space.”

The result will be more consumer choices and lower margins for everyone involved, according to Wieser. He dismisses the notion of “peak TV” wherein content creators will suddenly come to their senses and pare back output, adding “I don’t believe that.”

As far as advertisers are concerned, their TV budgets are “largely independent” of the supply of inventory, according to Wieser. For example, if there were 10% less “sufficiently premium” video inventory, it would not have an impact on the amount of spending in and of itself.

“As long as television is the worst form of advertising except for all those others that have been tried, and it is for large brands that are building or sustaining their brands, and there is no next best alternative, the money will be what the money is,” Wieser says.

While he acknowledges that the largest global agency holding companies are under extreme pressure from mostly client-initiated strictures, he’s less impressed by some in the industry about competition from big consultancies like Accenture. But until such time as of these companies were to buy a WPP or Publicis “or something much bigger, it’s not that big of a difference from what agencies always face.”

This means that things like self-driving cars, drones, artificial intelligence and virtual reality take a back seat to the “undercurrent” that drives merger and acquisition activity.

“The single biggest driver in terms of what we see here at CES and how that translates into deal activity is convergent TV,” Kawaja says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2018. “You see all of the big linear TV companies, both content and distribution, are here.”

So what are those players discussing? Not shows or content in general.

“They are talking about technologies that allow the targeting and delivery of specific content and specific advertising to individuals and homes because of the new way that TV is consumed by consumers.”

Citing ongoing deals involving AT&T and Time Warner and Disney’s desired acquisition of certain Fox assets, what excites Kawaja is that the industry is complex, fragmented and dynamic.

“When you get significant sea changes like these technology applications to a $160 billion television market, obviously people make their moves,” he says. “There’s a lot of moving parts right now, and companies in both legacy and the sort of digital world are positioning themselves for that by making moves that aggregate distribution, content, getting scale.”

Considering the TV advances and desires of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix, everyone else has “clearly figured out that scale is now on a whole new level and they have to get ready.”

This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018.   Please visit this page for more coverage. 

For both, the question becomes “How can we enhance the speed of change,” says Matt Spiegel, Managing Partner at MediaLink.

Thus the strategic advisory and business development firm grounds its marketer clients in a basic reality.

“We often say that if you’re going to participate in new things, you’re going to have to start with new measurement models,” Spiegel says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “What a lot of marketers are going through is what often is called the precision marketing journey.”

That voyage begins with accepting that measuring reach and frequency and exposure “is not going to be the sufficient metrics of the future in order to try new advanced things,” Spiegel says.

The new media world values a much more complex list of things. “That transition is semi easy to say and very hard to do.”

Choices must be made on the TV side as well. A major challenge common to traditional broadcasters is that their revenue streams “are much more finite and refined” than newer players like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix.

“They benefit from seeing the creation of content and monetization, i.e. the ad business, the media business, being a secondary or tertiary revenue stream to their core business,” Spiegel says. “That has a huge implication for how you think about the economics of funding content development and the decisions you’re able to make in that business.”

The question for big, traditional broadcasters: what is the role they think they can play? Do they use other companies’ technologies, go direct to consumer, try to handle their monetization options?

“I think there’s a future where not everyone that’s premium, high-end content creators will be in the ad sales or ad monetization business,” Spiegel adds. “They’re likely to choose other partners to help with that potential piece of the pie. That’s years out there. But I think those are the plates that have to shift.”

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

“The strategy that we employ for DCO is very different on the consumer side of the business than it is on our commercial side of the business, says Dina Gowar, Chief of Staff, Digital Marketing Team, Dell, which has employed the targeting technique for about three years.

On the consumer side, Dell uses DCO in the traditional retargeting sense of cross-selling and up-selling. Such tactics are “based on what that customer was doing, what we know about them, what they were looking at, what they would genuinely be interested in,” Gowar adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

Dell is more focused on relationship building with its commercial clients and prospects, seeking to nurture trust and loyalty. Thought leadership content in the form of ads touting white papers or case studies are employed depending on the solution a website visitor had viewed.

Online selling changed dramatically for Dell with its landmark acquisition of EMC a year ago, which yielded “a huge portfolio of solutions and services that you can’t just buy with a click,” says Gowar. “It’s a much longer process…nine months from when someone might start looking at something to when they ultimately buy that solution.”

In the interim, sales and marketing need to be closely aligned to ensure that messaging is appropriate, because a prospect that expressed interested in particular solutions or services at the beginning of their search might be looking for something entirely different over time.

While at the Masters of Marketing confab, Gowar is pleased with the “feel good factor” expressed by so many brand representatives and encouraged for the advertising and consumer-engagement implications in a city that was ravaged by Hurricane Irma.

“There’s so much wrong in the world right now, let’s leverage the eyeballs that we get, our brand position and brand equity and followers to try to bring people together,” she says. “It’s great to be here and share the love amongst your peers and colleagues.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

This is not lost on marketing analytics provider DataXu, which has been in the programmatic space since 2009, fittingly using combinatorial algorithms originally developed by one of its co-founders for guiding NASA’s Mars missions. DataXu has a broad footprint in the demand-side platform side of the business and has set its sights on helping media companies so as to stay one step ahead of would-be competitors Amazon et al.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade show, DataX CEO Mike Baker explains what the buy-side wants from programmatic TV and the race to beat digital giants to help the sell-side better cope with automated transactions and measurement.

A big focus of DataXu to date has been on connected OTT screens via its core DSP called TouchPoint. Via self-serve software buyers can track campaigns running across seven types of devices, providing the benefit of automation “unlike some of what’s plaguing some of the TV targeting with linear streams,” said Baker.

Along with automation, he identifies application of digital audience insights and campaign attribution as three main issues of interest among buyers. With insights, it can be as granular as using mobile audience data to target a live ad on ESPN.

“That’s really provocative and I think an industry first,” Baker observes. OTT inventory “is much more valuable when you’re able to buy these kinds of granular targets with your data.”

There’s a shift by some ad tech companies toward the digital TV landscape given the continued growth in viewing habits. That’s where are Amazon, Facebook and Google come in.

“I think everybody at this point sort of understands this is the next frontier for these companies and they come very well equipped indeed” with data, analytics and other resources. DataXu is busily developing its media company segment to help some of these very large incumbent TV players adapt and fit up to be competitive with these Internet giants as they “encroach inevitably on TV,” Baker says.

This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Despite “doom and gloom” sentiments about competing with online giants, “At Criteo we just don’t believe that,” says Chief Revenue Officer Mollie Spilman.

Criteo thinks there’s a “vibrant future” alongside the Amazons and Alibabas of the world, Spilman explains in this interview with Beet. TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and media trade show. “And so we’re building what we hope to be the world’s highest performing and open—open being a really key term—commerce marketing ecosystem,” Spilman says.

Within such an environment, brands, publishers, retailers and other players are able to better connect with consumers by inspiring them with the most relevant offers and products.

It’s many steps beyond Criteo’s longtime core capabilities of retargeting consumers online. Criteo’s acquisition of HookLogic is a key component of the buildout.

“The scope is really expanding to not just reengage or retarget shoppers but to acquire them in the first place,” says Spilman. “To convert new shoppers into buyers” and turn one-time buyers into lifetime shoppers. “We’re trying to go up the funnel and be able to go to our clients and bring them new customers. Try to get current customers to buy more.”

Insights gleaned from machine learning technology helps Criteo understand identities not just online but offline as well.

“What’s happening right now is each e-tail or commerce company has a very siloed view of their shopper. They know what happens on their site or in their store. Sometimes they don’t always know how those two interact.”

In the same vein, the company provides intelligence on the differences between what happens on a desktop versus a tablet or a smartphone. The pooled data in its ecosystem is shared with all participants “so they have a much fuller view of the path to purchase.”

Criteo’s rise has made it a major force in the digital ad world, representing some 16,000 advertisers. “What publishers are looking for is, of course monetization of their inventory. But they just don’t want that at any cost. They want that with high quality advertising. They do want higher CPM’s.”

Criteo controls the creative assets of its advertisers “across the board,” buying billions of placements and paying very high CPM’s. Moreover, it recently launched its own header bidding product to enable even more efficient bidding on ad inventory.

“We’re actually paying publishers double-digital percentage more in terms of monetization of their inventory than we had through RTB platforms” and other programmatic channels, Spilman says.

“Welcome to the Vibrant Future,” a video series of thought leadership from DMEXCO 2017 presented by Criteo. For more videos please visit this page.

“We talk about bundling products and we talk about bundling video products together, but I think what’s interesting is the opportunity to bundle more than just video with video,” says Peter Naylor, SVP, Advertising Sales, Hulu.

“Even Amazon is bundling shipping with video. So I think bundles are going to leap beyond video and go multidimensional, multimedia,” Naylor adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and media trade show.

Founded in 2007 by three traditional broadcast networks, Hulu earlier this year debuted its own live package consisting of more than 50 channels. Since then it’s added The CW Network and more than 200 local TV affiliates. “Depending on where you, are you’re getting not only national feeds but local content as well. So that’s going very well,” Naylor says.

Beginning on Sept. 12, subscribers to the T-Mobile ONE plan with at least two phones on their plan were able to stream Netflix programming at no additional cost.

“While the big bundle collapses, people will reassemble their own bundles in more of an a la carte fashion. It will be interesting to see how many relationships viewers want with different services.”

Naylor says advertising on Hulu is “healthy and vital right now,” given that the majority of people who sign up opt for the ad-supported version. And while 15- and 30-second ads “are totally welcome” on the platform, he sees creative opportunity in interactive advertising.

“We partner with people like Brightline, for example, for interactive advertising. We’re doing a lot of integrations.”

Naylor cites as examples the season and series finale of The Mindy Project, in which brands like McDonald’s, Sprint and Volkswagen have show integrations. “So we have some of the best of old school TV with integrations and the best of new TV with interactive ads.”

At the 69th Emmy awards, Hulu achieved a milestone when it not only tied for most wins of the night–five, along with HBO–but its original production The Handmaid’s Tale made it the first streaming service to take home the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, as The Verge reports.

While many advertisers are still content to transact on age and demographics mostly with 15’s and 30’s, “I think you’re seeing a more layered and nuanced approach because data is only increasing with advanced TV capabilities.”

This is accompanied by a rise in attribution measurement. “It’s not just did my ad get served in a way that’s viewable and, frankly, non- fraudulent but did it move the needle for my business,” says Naylor.

This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Performance marketing technology provider Criteo, perhaps best known for its online consumer retargeting expertise, is leveraging its learning loop capabilities to assist not only brands but retailers and others as ecommerce grows ever-more competitive.

There will nearly two-dozen sessions devoted to the present and future of e-commerce marketing at the DMEXCO 2017 advertising and media trade show in Cologne, Germany on Sept. 13 and 14.

With the combined forces of Criteo and HookLogic, the latter acquired by Criteo in the past year, the company offers a performance model that has the ability to learn from what sells, Jonathan Opdyke, Criteo’s President of Brand Solutions, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“It’s one thing to just target a high-intending audience,” says Opdyke. “It’s another to be able to target that audience and actually understand which parts of it end up buying. And then use that to learn and buy the next part of the audience and know exactly how to buy in order to generate a sale.”

He cites as one example Hasbro, whose products are sold by a gamut of retailers, from Toys “R” US to Kohl’s, Target and Walmart. This makes it complicated for the toy marketer to figure exactly where and how to promote itself.

“They don’t have a single point of sale. They have many points of sale. So you have to treat that as basically one big giant ecommerce site that now Hasbro is promoting online,” Opdyke adds.

Criteo helps Hasbro and others by creating a learning model to drive sales based on picking the right media. The company’s new Commerce Marketing Ecosystem is designed to encourage retailers retailers, publishers and brands to pool their data in the hopes of getting new and existing customers to purchase their products outside the Amazon ecosystem, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

With Criteo Sponsored Products, an offering akin to Amazon Sponsored Products, the company offers brands native product ads that appear throughout the purchase path of retailer sites and apps. Shoppers who click on the ads stay within a participating retailer’s ecommerce environment to convert, while brands pay for each click.

Additionally, Criteo is working on a new format called Brand Spotlight, which Opdke describes as a new kind of brand placement built into retail websites.

Instead of a product-level auction, “It’s more of a brand-level auction for competition for a featured placement within the retailer,” says Opdyke. Designed as a value-add for brands and retailers, Brand Spotlight is done on a programmatic (as opposed to CPM-display type unit) pay-for-click auction approach “with full attribution.”

“Welcome to the Vibrant Future,” a video series of thought leadership from DMEXCO 2017 presented by Criteo. For more videos please visit this page.

And it’s probably not going to get much easier going forward, Reed explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“I think we’re going to learn some things over the course of the next year that are really surprising,” says Reed. “We know that consumer attention us dropping every time we turn around. We have less attention span than a goldfish. We’re not getting any better.”

The implications are profound because “as we start to look at ad formats, we’re going to have the expectation that those ad formats need to be shorter and faster to grab attention.”

The need for speed will ultimately rest on the shoulders of creative because they won’t be thinking of “that anthem 30- or 60-second unit that they used to build but how do I build something that’s fast, gets to the point and engages instantly.”

On the subject of data and walled gardens, Reed is asked whether her agency gets everything it needs from Facebook. “Does anyone get the information they need from all of the walled garden partners?” she says with a laugh. “No. Certainly not.”

On a positive note, she believes the caretakers of the gardens “have actively taken an approach to say that they are willing to try to find a solution with all of our clients. It’s going to take time.”

Nonetheless, the clock is ticking. Reed thinks that in the next year or so Facebook and its ilk might have to get more magnanimous and “figure out how to give data back to the advertisers in order to be able to truly address ROI, or it will significantly affect their investment levels.”

In the meantime, new players are emerging all the time that could become the next Amazon, Facebook or Snapchat. “Let’s not forget that AOL was the behemoth many years ago, and now they’re starting that resurgence again with Oath,” Reed observes.

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Fast-forward and you had deals like NBC and Comcast and now the pending acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, flanked by the emergence of Amazon, Facebook and Google as video disruptors.

“All of a sudden, the U.S. really woke up as it became apparent that audiences were fragmenting and ratings were declining, especially among some key audiences,” recalls Ryan Jamboretz, CRO of TV and video software provider Videology.

This awakening has forced traditional cable companies and MVPD’s to face the reality of “competition from old foes, people in their own competitive set, and these kind of new barbarians at the gate,” Jamboretz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions gathering, where he was a panelist on the Advanced TV Summit.

Previously, companies needed only be proficient at distributing other peoples’ content or creating it. “Now they’re having to become both. If not become experts at monetization within that as well,” Jamboretz says.

As a “pretty global company,” Videology had a ringside seat to “bleeding-edge stuff on TV and video combining” as the result of its work with pioneers like Sky TV.

In the U.S., it’s companies like AT&T that “are really the ones we’re seeing with most of the innovation,” says Jamboretz.

Videology never sought to be a “jack-of-all-trades” in the digital arena. “For us it’s been a wonderful kind of awakening of the industry over the last two or three years as this challenge of how do we tackle TV turning digital has now kind of hit on all fronts,” he says.

One of the company’s keys to success is that it’s still privately held. “We have the luxury of not having to kind of expose all our state secrets, and I think we have every intent to keep doing that.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

In the aftermath of the television UpFront season, Sorrell thinks traditional networks have done pretty well price-wise. ““I think they’re quite bullish about the UpFronts in the U.S. They’re seeing reasonably significant prices increases in the mid single-digit area at a time when we’re seeing deflation elsewhere,” says Sorrell, who is Founder & CEO of WPP. “So I think owners of the inventory feel pretty good about it.”

He then cites “obviously broader and much more significant opportunities” for advertisers in the programmatic space. It’s an area where WPP has made significant investments in its Xaxis unit and [m]PLATFORM technology.

“We’re offering something a little bit more than programmatic as it overlays brings in data and technology inputs, which make it far more sophisticated in terms of targeting,” Sorrell says.

Clients that had been concerned about some aspects of programmatic buying are thinking differently, he adds.

“We are seeing I think the start of a groundswell of change in attitude toward programmatic,” Sorrell says, citing marketers’ in-house operations “perhaps becoming less attractive” for reasons that include the need to keep updating the technology.

Turning his attention to newer content providers like Amazon he notes, “The amount of money that these companies are willing to invest in content is quite considerable.”

He says it’s not uncommon for Amazon to spend $10 million on one, hour-long episode, “Netflix maybe $7 million and the more traditional producers spending about three.”

As for whether Netflix, which according to Sorrell loses money on a cash flow basis, can ever turn that around, the answer will lie in its subscription and advertising policies. “In a way Netflix is already advertising, it has product placement warnings in front of some of its series already. So we are starting to see advertising in one form or other start to invade the Netflix platform.”

Companies like WPP, which traditionally had concentrated their investments outside of the content creation sector, have changed their thinking and are ramping up on the sell-side. Sorrell points to investments in Vice Media, Refinery29, 88rising and Mic as examples of his company’s need to experiment “to see how we can learn more and how are clients can be involved in it.”

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

David Sable is quick to point out that algorithms for TV buying are nothing new, as spot TV was traditionally purchased based on CPM’s—the algorithm of the day. In this interview with Beet.TV, the Global CEO of Y&R discusses the seeming dichotomy that is TV everywhere and the growing urge to micro target audiences.

“It’s complex because the promise of so much data and so much targeting makes one think that that’s what they have to do. That you have to be super targeted,” Sable says.

He references Facebook, Mars and Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard as advocating a wider approach to reaching audiences. “We’ve always looked for better ways to target,” Sable says. “I think the problem is we’re in a world of because we can we do, as opposed to people taking a step back and thinking about it and saying ‘what am I actually targeting.’”

He was experimenting with what is now known as addressable TV advertising roughly 15 years ago at direct-marketing agency Wunderman. And while he believes addressable is “going to be important,” he fears that “hyper micro targeting is creating an echo chamber” that keeps getting smaller.

“Do I really only want to talk to people who are going to buy a car in the next six months, who have a propensity to buy a Ford or a Mercedes and only talk to them? If that’s what you do, you’re going down the wrong path,” he says.

In a parallel vein, he points to analyst prognostications a decade ago about the bleak future for TV programming because it would all go the way of CGI.

“There’s more stuff on location than ever before. Less stuff in studio. Less CGI,” Sable notes. “On the content side, we in the golden age here.”

He agrees with NBCUniversal ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino on the need for ad-supported programming that fuels the content of popular platforms like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, as The New York Times reports.

“They’re selling the stuff that advertising has allowed to be created,” Sable says. “They’re just reaping the benefit.”

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.

According to President & Chief Operating Officer Gretchen Tibbits, comScore data show that at 55.8 million women, Little Things claims the mantles of largest standalone lifestyle site and the largest URL reaching women.

“We’re very protective of our audience,” Tibbits says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts. “We all know that there are challenging things going on the world and there’s plenty of places for an audience to get that content. We’re not that.”

That protection encompasses not only content but also user experience. The Little Things website “is very ad light,” says Tibbits, and there are no content recommendation widgets to slow down page loading.

Little Things took to the NewFronts to unveil a new talk show series, “The Daily Glow,” which will debut on June 5 and air every weekday afternoon on Facebook Live. In addition, the company by mid-summer will distribute its long-form video programming via Amazon, Apple TV, Roku, XUMO and Pluto TV, as Campaign reports.

“The Daily Glow” is the 13th show from Little Things. The shows consist of episodes ranging from 30 to 60 minutes in length.

The company’s goal with branded and sponsored content is that “it’s woven in,” be it sponsorship of a live show or custom videos. “We can tell a story that our writers, editors and researchers have found and if a brand wants to join us on that journey, it’s an incredible service to the audience and to the brand,” Tibbits says.

Facebook has turned out to be a very productive “front door” for Little Things, generating website traffic and new users. Although it claims to generate less output on Facebook than other publishers, what Little Things does publish “has the highest engagement per article of anybody doing it,” Tibbits adds.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

Entrepreneur not only provides these personalities with a high-profile platform but a relationship with a well-known brand and distribution, both proprietary and syndicated.

“It’s not just about YouTube revenue, because that’s minimal,” Shaw explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts. “It’s about being associated with our brand so we can integrate you in as a sponsor. Bring influencers to advertisers.”

Entrepreneur.com has a monthly global reach of 14 million and more than 11 million followers on social platforms. “With our social platforms we are 100% organic. I have never bought one person for my social.”

In addition, Entrepreneur magazine reaches 3.1 million readers around the world global each month and is growing, according to Shaw.

“We’re extremely happy because we have all these great distribution tools and we have pretty solid partnerships with MSN and USA TODAY for syndicating content.”

In the over-the-top video space the company is available through Roku, Apple TV and Amazon. Asked to chart the course ahead, Shaw mentions “a couple of TV programs that you’ll see in the near future,” adding that Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch “will be one of them.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

“We provide content that we think is really authentic. Behind the scenes, how-to, funny, trick shots. It’s all video-based content.”

Whistle Sports’ mostly short-form video content is distributed across some 2,000 social media channels and says it reaches 350 million young sports fans around the globe, according to West. The company brings brands “into those discussions we have with our fans” with branded social content.

It boasts a network of 500 video creators and social influencers. Advertisers have included McDonald’s, Nike, Pepsi and Under Armour. “We help them create authentic content that’s entertaining but also gets their brand message out in a very engaging way to a large audience.”

West notes the bidding for sports rights programming among the likes of Amazon, Facebook and YouTube for TV channels and observes, “It’s a dynamic environment right now.”

Five years ago, Sports Whistle conducted research and found that among younger demographic cohorts, TV ratings for the top five sports in the U.S. was declining.

“We don’t do live sports for a variety of reason, but one of them is the attention span of our demographic is not three hours long. It’s three minutes long,” West says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress 2017, Delport opines that while this year is one of transition and incremental innovation, there’s no ignoring the strides being made by telcos. “They are organizing our digital life. They just want to be back in the race,” he says.

Artificial intelligence is one means of gaining the upper hand with mobile users. Delport cites Telefónica’s announcement at MWC heralding its new AURA platform, which the company describes as “the basis for a new relationship model with customers.” AURA will make “cognitive sense” out of the flow of user data while giving users the means to control which data are used, the company says.

Augmented knowledge about mobile device users, including sharing of devices, will help telcos understand “all these weak signals that will be activated for advertising purposes,” Delport says.

Surveying the landscape of major U.S. players like AT&T and Verizon upping the ante on content creation, he says it’s a clear sign that “convergence is back.” It’s a major reason why telcos induce users to sign up for bigger data packages so that they spend more time consuming content.

Responding to the desire for premium content, Vivendi Content in Latin America and Europe recently launched Studio+, which the company describes as “the first global premium short series offer for mobiles.” Delport, who is also Chairman of Vivendi Content, describes the offering as 10-minute episodes in a series of 10.

The backdrop to the telcos’ advertising and content plays is the increasing integration on the part of  Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. “They are fascinating but also a bit scary for the other players,” he says.

Delport refers to a prediction that in the next three years, 80% of mobile bandwidth will be consumed by mobile video. “It’s just beginning,” he says.

This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.

“I saw nobody recreating the MSNBC, CNN, CNBC for people under the age of 60,” Steinberg recalls of his spring 2016 launch of a live news service focusing on business and technology. “It’s a cable network. Instead of living on a cable box it lives on Twitter at three o’clock every day and on Facebook live.”

Cheddar also has its own channel on Sling TV “in the base bundle right next to CNN” and is live on Amazon’s bundles as well, Steinberg explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We’ll have two more of these announced by mid year.”

Steinberg’s bet is that young people who are hooked on on-demand programming like House of Cards and Transparent “would have a need for what I call ambient, non-appointment viewing to see what’s happening. And that’s effectively what Cheddar is. It’s a live news network.”

Last fall, Cheddar went behind a pay wall with a monthly subscription price of $6.99, as The Wall Street Journal reports. It also gets a fee from pay TV bundles “and the ability to monetize the advertising on those bundles as well,” Steinberg says.

Another revenue stream is what he calls “Native 3.0,” wherein advertisers have a presence on the lower third of the screen. For HP, it’s the Keep Reinventing message that’s promoted, while Dunkin Donuts prefers an On The Go theme and Fidelity’s app is used to reference stocks being covered by the correspondents at Cheddar.

“The direct subscription model is our restaurant regulars. They’re people that just want Cheddar and don’t want a bundle,” Steinberg says. “But ideally any skinny bundle out there, I intend for us to be in those and the consumer can buy us that way.”

He counsels against every publisher thinking that live video is where it’s at. “It’s about looking where there is white space,” says Steinberg.

As for so-called fake news, he blames social media networks like Facebook and readers themselves.

“If people just read credible sources, if you went to BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cheddar even, there would be no fake news,” Steinberg says. “Fake news is a consequence of the fact that people got disoriented from what they were actually reading and this stuff was able to spread.”

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

In August, we spoke with Doug Knapper, co-ceo about the growth of FreeWheel in the marketplace.  We have republished that interview today.