That’s the theory. The truth is, behind the scenes, a veritable spaghetti soup of systems is required to make the dream a reality.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Stacy Daft, GM, Enterprise Commercial Business Development at Amobee, describes why equal, cross-channel sales is so complex, and how it can be fixed.

Seller centralisation

“They’re dealing with legacy platforms that are on the linear side of the house,” Daft says. “They’re disconnected from the digital platforms. And neither one of them really has an awareness of the other – yet, there’s still a need to monetize the full portfolio and maintain budgets that traditionally could be met on linear channels alone.

“So, ultimately it leads our clients looking for technology to reunify and package their inventory

“This leaves media companies with a unification problem, really – how do they pull together a full view of their inventory across all linear and digital distribution channels, regardless of that consumption platform?

“And it makes monetizing the content even that much more complex because they don’t have a centralised place to understand how their audiences accumulate across the different screens, much less have an ability to optimise for a specific client’s KPI across their full portfolio.”

Buyer beware

But it isn’t just the sell side that is facing complexity when embracing the new opportunity that lies inside proliferation. Ad buyers, too, are interested – but confused.

A recent study, Era Of Addressable, carried out by Forrester, found the buy side calling for change:

• Simplify buying and managing campaigns across suppliers (66%)
• Increase scale (65%) and national footprint (64%)
• Interoperability among MVPDs (74%); technology partners (93%)
• Single measurement standard from media companies (92%)

Daft feels their pain.

“When you think about the addition of CTV and more streaming services and premium TV quality content moving digitally, there’s a desire to not lose the data and the effectiveness of targeting in the digital environments,” she says.

“But most importantly, make sure that that is done in conjunction with the planning that they’re doing across their linear portfolios as well, so that they can maintain and understand total reach across their investments, whether or not it’s linear, digital, CTV, and what portions of those investments or what portions of their audiences are being reached in which environments and how incremental is the addition of new channels to their holistic buy.”

Viewers’ experience

Smoothing out that complexity matters to more than just media owners and advertisers.

Kinks in this chain can degrade the viewer experience.

“Sellers have the opportunity to use that targeting and the premiums that come along with providing optimization and better targeting across their portfolios to reduce ad loads,” Daft adds.

“This is something that’s also desirable by brands. They themselves have a stake in the consumer experience.

They don’t want to be repetitive and annoying, similar to media companies, in terms of how they want to satisfy their clients as they compete for the eyeballs across the various distribution channels today.”

You are watching, “The Stream: New Audiences, New Opportunities,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Tubi. For more videos, please visit this page.

That’s the view of one ad-tech exec who says advertisers may have to accept that what comes after cookies is several different solutions altogether.

But Ryanne Laredo, Amobee Chief Customer Officer, says that it’s perfectly possible to stitch together those solutions in a meaningful way, so that advertisers can benefit frmo an overdue upgrade to traditional ad-tech infrastructure.

Shifting norms

Three main trends are challenging accepted ad techniques:

1. Third-party cookies are being deprecated.
2. Privacy legislation like GDPR and CCPA are forcing advertisers and platforms to move to opt-in tracking.
3. But advertisers and publishers may be sitting on first-party audience data, or at least an opportunity to collect it – more valuable than old methods.

Laredo explains why this emerging ecosystem will be an improvement, not a downgrade.

Amobee’s Ryanne Laredo: Combatting Covid-19 Misinformation with Industry Partners

After the cookie

“There’s so much in the news about the dire straits that our industry is in because of privacy and technology challenges that are pending or changes that are pending,” Laredo says.

“I have a different POV on that.

“What we previously had in our reliance on cookie  was not the best for consumers, and it also wasn’t ever fully realised potential. Cookies were really a hack on a hack and we need to do better.

“Every challenge gives us an opportunity to rethink what is the balance of personalization and privacy for consumers.”

Join Amobee on December 17th as we discuss the necessity of creating a future-proof consumer identity strategy in a conversation with Philip Smolin, @Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and @MolsonCoors' Megan Sullivan. Click here to register: https://t.co/FrCfmTT8Ln

— Amobee (@amobee) December 1, 2020

Patchwork of solutions

Technologies are being put in place to enable that future, of course. But, thanks to that and to different marketers’ different data maturities, Laredo doesn’t imagine any single one of them being a direct replacement.

Rather, we are emerging toward a patchwork of solutions.

“I don’t believe there’s a one size fits all,” she says. “There are people who are data-rich who have one-to-one relationships, a lot of e-commerce platforms who already have the necessary consent to do highly personalised advertising, but, in those cases, they don’t necessarily have the opportunity to pass that consent outside of their own walls.

“A big focus is having an ability to just tie different solutions together because not everyone is going to choose this same identity partner.

“Then there are advertisers who I wouldn’t consider data-poor, but have less one-to-one relationships in a digital world with consumers and they must have a way to enrich the information that they have.”

Our investments into innovation extend beyond beverages. We are partnering with @LiveRamp and @Amobee to develop an alternative to the third-party cookie. Get the scoop from @mikejuangnews in @adage: https://t.co/PG9awu7peA

— Molson Coors Beverage Company (@MolsonCoors) November 23, 2020

Key considerations

Laredo says balancing interoperability for privacy, consent and identity solutions is paramount to advertisers’ success.

She is encouraging advertisers to consider three factors as they do so:

1. Establishment: “What does your current one-to-one relationship look like? Is it necessary to maintain the level of information that you have about those consumers? Do you have their permission?”
2. Enrichment: “How do you enrich that relationship with the consumer so they know that you care about their privacy? How do you have this two way conversation that says, ‘I care about your privacy, but I’m going to use data to make your experience better and that value exchange is understood and able to be’?”
3. Interconnection: “Utilising the right technologies that can interact between partners to honour that relationship and that value exchange that you have gathered from your customers or from consumers as a whole.”

Partner for personalization

Just as there will be no one-size-fits-all solution, no one company in isolation can bring results to customers.

Laredo says Amobee relies on partnerships with data companies like TransUnion, Tapad and LiveRamp to enable “data-rich strategies”.

She says connected TV is going to be a big focus in 2021, after TransUnion published a study suggesting a 70% increase in consumers’ time investment in the channel.

You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.

That’s according to an ad-tech exec who is trying to give them that capability.

There’s been a lot of chat in the industry about the growth of CTV of up 50% in COVID time,” says Amobee chief commercial officer Jack Bamberger.

“But what’s interesting separately is that linear is up actually 10% in the last six months as well.

“Linear is still very much here to stay. No one’s walking away from broadcast television.”

Amobee has been recognized by Gartner as a Leader in their 2020 Magic Quadrant for our ability to execute and completeness of vision. Click here to download the full report: https://t.co/6TQ6ooF21u pic.twitter.com/zTar1acYaM

— Amobee (@amobee) September 28, 2020

Come together

Bamberger joined Amobee in April after serving as Verizon Media’s VP of global partnerships, bringing relationships with global agencies and other accounts following earlier stints at MEC, Dentsu, Meredith, Time Warner and IPG.

In September, the company launched CTV Allocator, a product allowing ad buyers to combine negotiated upfront and newfront direct ad buys with programmatic deals, thereby unifying the two channels.

“If you’re buying in the upfront or you want to buy linear TV and CTV together, we have a data-driven tech platform that will help you minimise excess frequency and reach overlap as well as improve efficiencies across your direct sold CTV and your programmatic CTV with your existing linear schedule,” Bamberger says.

“And since everyone right now is trying to figure out how do you smartly plan, buy, and allocate CTV, it’s really critical because you’re trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of your buy and give yourself the best possible cross screen experience that’s optimised for reach and frequency.

Bamberger says CTV Allocator gives buyers results in less than five minutes.

Today, Amobee unveils CTV Allocator, a first of its kind planning and portfolio optimization solution designed to help media buyers unify premium direct and programmatic CTV audiences. Read the full release here: https://t.co/OD91twzN0H

— Amobee (@amobee) September 15, 2020

Fraud-fighting

As connected TV audiences and ad spend grows, the medium is drawing more bad actors, like fake apps which spoof traffic in order to generate ad revenue – ad fraud.

“It’s really important that folks know and trust what we’re doing, how we’re delivering inventory, media and that we are a company that you can trust to make sure that you’re getting what you pay for,” Bamberger says.

“So for us to have a fraud-free guarantee and CTV as a partnership with DoubleVerify was really critical.”

Whilst TV, even internet-connected TV, is widely considered to be safer and more dependable than other forms of digital advertising, fraud is creeping in.

DoubleVerify’s (DV) new Global Insights Report 2020 lifts the lid:

• Q1 2020 CTV fraud was 161% up on the prior year.
• Since March 2019, DV has identified 1,300 fraudulent CTV apps — 60% of which were identified in 2020.

Methods include:

• Fraudulent apps containing bots
• Cloud server farms
• Spoofing

This video is part of CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective, a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Amid these shifting audience behaviors, it would be tempting for marketers to contemplate switching from one medium to another.

But emerging evidence suggests a tag-team approach can drive optimal results.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jack Bamberger, the chief commercial officer at Amobee, an ad-tech platform whose software helps placement of ads across over-the-top and linear TV, says both are important.

Best of both

“The acceleration of CTV has been significant, but even linear has grown as well,” Bamberger says.

“It’s a sizeable pie. If you think about the most recent eMarketer stats, in terms of the size of that marketplace, the last (ad spend) numbers were about $70, $80 billion for the linear side of the (TV ad) business and CTV was somewhere around $7, $8, $9 billion.

“What we do is help people understand how we can actually use data across all of that. It’s really about the ‘and’ versus an ‘or’.

“The ability to connect broadcast linear TV  and CTV and social and digital with extraordinarily rich data and business intelligence… that’s exactly what the industry is hungry for now.”

New commercial chief

Amobee is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.

Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.

Bamberger joined Amobee in April after serving as Verizon Media’s VP of global partnerships, bringing relationships with global agencies and other accounts following earlier stints at MEC, Dentsu, Meredith, Time Warner and IPG.

What's the point of advertising in markets where your products aren't on the shelf? Learn how to end ad waste by equipping your brand with smart SKU-level tactics: https://t.co/6nrIBqv1fn

— Amobee (@amobee) June 2, 2020

The road ahead

EMarketer now expects US TV ad spending revenue will have taken a dive during the first half of the year, thanks partly to COVID-19, leaving a bigger shortfall to make up through the year if it is not to fall below its typical $70 billion threshold.

All of which means the emergence of connected TV ad opportunities and even data-driven linear may have an important role to play – bringing higher effectiveness that could turn TV into a more performance-driven medium, encouraging agencies to return to spending.

Bamberger says advertisers want to know where viewers are shopping, how to deliver ads to them there based on in-store inventory and how to optimize upfront-bought media.

“In this time, there’s a desire for more flexibility, leveraging the right technology solution that’s enhanced by data-driven optimization,” he says.

For many on the buy side, the knee-jerk reaction to the news of the pandemic was to not want to spend at all in order to avoid any association with the virus. Amobee’s market intelligence analytics have aimed to determine what kinds of content consumers are engaging with, and among other valuable insights, has led to a greater understanding among buyers to approach Covid-19 as not a singular topic, but as many different topics.

“When you dive into it, what you find is that there’s actually a lot of opportunity in there from an advertising perspective and arguably, we’re going into a period of time here that could be the single biggest opportunity for market-share shift for brands that has happened in a generation,” Smolin says.

This alters the way that both the buy side and the sell side adjust their approaches at the core. On the buy side, this means being really data driven and keeping attune to shifts in trends on a weekly basis.

“It is a really real-time, dynamic environment that we’re living in right now. Patterns change, they change by region, they’re changing daily.”

An AdExchanger article by TransUnion’s David Dowhan reinforces this message, saying that brands are increasingly turning to first-party data in order to closely monitor consumer behavior.

“Seasoned marketers are taking more stock in tools and technologies that help leverage additional, complementary data holistically to make the most of their own audience insights,” Dowhan says.

Smolin added that the sell side also needs to respond to this change in media consumption by being increasingly interactive with brands and agencies in order to understand how to best serve these new opportunities.

The lives of consumers have changed so drastically. Interests, intents, amounts of disposable income—this is just a small sample of the ways that the audience has transformed in the past couple months. For advertisers, the knee-jerk reaction to avoid COVID has been flipped around as they have opened their eyes to greater opportunity.

“There’s nuance about how life in America is changing and how your relationship as a brand to consumers should change as well,” Smolin says.

Along with this shift in media consumption comes the need to reimagine how advertisers should change their messaging and where they find their audiences. Smolin uses sporting events as an example, but is confident that this attention to first-party data will help to track where the viewers are exploring.

“It’s a crazy time right now,” Smolin says. “But if people are staying on top of the market insights and the media planning data and they are measuring for media efficiency, there are actually tremendous opportunities for them in market right now on both the buy and sell side to really move the needle.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

Weeks ago, even before the US had truly taken action, an engineer made a call to action at Amobee to see what the company could do about it as an intermediary between multiple corners of the media. 

“We came up with a concept which is that we wanted to combat misinformation, starting in the U.S., that was out there regarding COVID-19 so that we could influence people to make the right decisions. With the right data, you can make the right decisions,” Laredo says. 

Inspired by an article in AdExchanger by industry friend Joshua Lowcock about the need for the industry to come together during the current crisis, Laredo connected with Lowcock and the partnership spread outward from there.

“One thing that drove all of us is that we, as technology [companies], as agencies, as advertisers, as broadcasters, have a responsibility to the population and that is to combat misinformation as well as to continue to invest in information that is truthful and support journalism on that front,” Laredo says. 

The goal that sprouted from there was to get in front of as many viewers as possible with accurate information. They kicked off the campaign by producing PSAs about getting factual information and targeted COVID content using Amobee’s brand intelligence tool. Within a week, they had agency partners, verification partners, publishers and SSP friends and more on board. Partners are UniversalMcCann, Publicis Media, Influential, OpenX, IAS, DoubleVerify, NewsGuard, eBay Advertising, AdColony, SpotX, Rubicon Project, True[X] and The Krim Group.

“We decided that we had to have a coalition because there were so many smart people,” Laredo says. “So many people who were aimed at making a difference and driving forward the truth that we had to take a pause and look at our strategy.”

The expansion has grown over the past few weeks. The coalition has served over 500 million impressions to 300 million individuals globally. Organizations involved, many of whom are competitors, have offered various ways to help. 

Laredo also spoke about news consumption and brand safety. Most companies’ first response to the pandemic was to ask, “What does this do to my company and what does this do to my brand?” According to Laredo, this led to a careful balance of advertisers not wanting to appear to be taking advantage of an unfortunate situation but also looking out for the best interests of their employees and organization at large. In order to deal with this, Laredo said that organizations should be concerned with brand suitability over brand safety. 

“Brand suitability really takes in brand values,” Laredo says. “And so things like news, where previously there may not have been a way to prevent you from sharing your brand on the same page as something about COVID-19, is that something that you really want to be avoiding as a brand safety measure versus something that has unsuitable content.”

As a result, there’s been a push to get advertising back on news, which is one of the goals of this coalition. 

“We are continuing as an industry to support the journalism that is essential during times like these and on an ongoing basis.” Laredo says.

But the explosion in new measurement techniques and providers is actually causing a headache for ad buyers who want an apples-to-apples analysis of their ad effectiveness.

No wonder so many are actually now calling for fewer, more reliable ways of measuring that smoothe out discrepancies.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Aleck Schleider, SVP of client and data strategy at ad-tech firm Amobee, says advanced TV measurement has been spurred on by Vizio’s smart TV ad unit Inscape making its automatic content recognition (ACR) data widely available to vendors.

“The ability to measure TV … has become a lot easier,” Schleider says. “That allows for companies to do to some pretty seamless marketing measurement.”

But that isn’t all good news.

“The fact is, there’s so much data, there’s so much fragmentation, that it just kind of creates a lot of confusion in the marketplace,” he adds. “Ideally there’s going to be some level of reset … it does require some truth-level data.

“There has to be commonality. We’ve got to pick these pieces off the floor of all this fragmented components, bring them together, put it together to have a common measurement.

“Brands don’t want to have to work with different broadcasters in their own measurement solutions.”

In December, Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.

4Screen works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.

Schleider thinks the likes of Nielsen will be leaned on to boost ACR measurement with techniques like panels, plus its own ACR sources, to improve accuracy.

The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.

This video is part of  Beet.TV’s coverage  of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.  This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

At Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, a panel dubbed Investment and Innovation – Where Next? chewed over that topic:

• Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder, Innovid
• Michael Parkes, CRO, VideoAmp
• Philip Smolin, Chief Strategy Officer, Amobee

Chicken or egg?

Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by asking what was to blame for lack of forward momentum in advanced TV targeting.

“We don’t have technology problems, we don’t have ad problems, we don’t have media problems. We have business problems,” she said. “I think that’s the reality.

“We find ourselves at this point right now where the business problems have the signal to noise ratio. The business problems I think are louder than the technological problems.”

Innovid’s Chalozin said he sees a “chicken-and-egg” problem: “The tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”

Agencies not on the same page

As if to illustrate the problem, Amobee’s Smolin described a recent discovery he was able to make for a brand client for which it has recently conducted cross-channel measurement.

“Seventy-three percent of their impressions within a single campaign were going to 12% of the household,” he said. “It’s shocking to look at. These are smart people and they’re working with good agencies.

“You have a national agency which has a siloed wall between TV investment and digital trading. You then have an ecosystem of tier-two agencies which are not using the same measurement as the tier-one agency. Many brands have higher-order efficiency issues that we’re already skipping over in these discussions.

“Based on what we’ve seen with other brands using tools and data available today that can probably drive about a 15% to 20% improvement in efficient use of their overall TV budget holistically.”

Is measurement to blame?

VideoAmp’s Parkes said, actually, technology is not yet advanced enough.

“There has been a organisational shift within the agencies, within the brands to be able to plan and execute against (new platforms),” he said. “But there is still a big shift that needs to happen on the technology side. I don’t think it’s anywhere near done in terms of the technology innovation that has to happen. Tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”

However, Innovid’s Chalozin disagreed.

“I must say I don’t think that this is accurate to blame that and say that this is the reason for a problem,” he said. “(Fragmentation) is the current state of connected television. There’s many ways to buy content. This problem is not going to go away. No one owns the connected television world.”

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

But, whilst technology has brought buyers to that point, institutional factors mean many ad buyers still plan their clients’ spending in separate lanes.

That is according to video ad-tech platform Amobee‘s chief strategy officer Philip Smolin.

“The bigger challenge right now is organisational and operational,” Smolin says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“For a lot of agencies, you still have a pretty big silo wall between what is the TV investment team and the digital trading team. And they’re planning differently, certainly, they’re executing differently, but oftentimes they’re measuring differently.

“If you don’t have a common measurement framework for both of them to look at, you cannot get those teams to work in a collaborative, orchestrated way.

“That requires a lot of change organizationally and operationally, and in this industry, I think we sometimes over focus on looking for technology to solve everything. And I would say the technology and the data at this point is really a couple of steps ahead of the state of the industry and now it’s about implementing.”

In December, Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.

4Screen works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.

Smolin was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

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

But, this time, things could look a little different. So says the strategy chief of an ad-tech firm aiming to help the industry buy and sell better across four screens.

“How both the buy and the sell side are looking at the TV upfronts within 2020, which are going to begin sooner than people realise, is very, very different,” says Amobee’s Philip Smolin.

“The ability to package and sell their media the way their customers want to buy it, on an audience basis, and to be able to do that as converged packaging across all devices is fundamentally the next step for the industry.”

Big day for @Amobee as we announce Amobee 4Screen, a first-to-market collaboration with Nielsen for advertisers and broadcasters to bridge linear TV, connected TV and digital data, further powering the convergence of TV and digital. Read more: https://t.co/Yg8pbVFqDW

— Nick Lashinsky (@nlashinsky18) December 13, 2019

Smolin was speaking with Beet.TV after Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.

4Screen, as the package is called, works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.

“The problem is all of those media platforms … become a highly fragmented media landscape that is very difficult to almost impossible to measure,” Smolin says.

“(It powers) planning, activation, optimization, measurement and analysis,” he adds.”

The recent 4Screen launch builds on Amobee’s earlier acquisition of Videology.

Smolin will be a speaker at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 5 to 7.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  

By working with Nielsen, and specifically with the company’s Gracenote ACR (automatic content recognition) data, Amobee has access to more granular viewership data that functions on the individual user level, rather than the household level.

“Nielsen recently rolled out user-level viewership data against their Gracenote ACR, about 4.5 million TV sets where they’re utilizing their national people meter panel to create models that are tied to the data,” Aleck Schleider, svp of data strategy and monetization at Amobee, told Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “It’s really important – it’s the advancement of ACR data for planning and measurement.”

That advancement gives broadcasters and advertisers a better understanding of who is actually watching content, and on what type of device. Formerly, measurement systems tracked viewers on the household level by tracking TV sets. Big data, as part of the convergence of linear television and CTV, has raised expectations around what information is available.

“It’s a big step for the market because the market wants faster data. They want to understand it, given the fact that so much information is available from the ACR, and be able to utilize it,” says Schleider. “And so this advancement is really a milestone, a big step forward for the industry to adopt ACR data when it comes to planning linear television, ctv and convergence.”

At the center of this need for better, more granular data and measurement is the change in consumer habits and how people watch TV. In any one household, multiple people may be watching live TV, streaming content on a mobile phone, and plugging a casting device into a TV set to run apps. Nielsen and Amobee’s partnership will give advertisers more clarity into who is seeing their content and where. That level of visibility, while new for linear TV, has been available to advertisers in advanced TV.

“What Nielsen has done with this data set is take that smart TV device and break it down more granular to who’s watching that, and who’s watching on other devices in the home,” says Schleider. “It’s leveling the playing field in this world of devices.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  

The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced “Planet V” at ITV Palooza, a celebrity-filled, advertiser-facing event in the mould of the US TV upfronts showcases, in London on Tuesday.

Planet V, powered by Amobee, enables buying, optimization and monitoring of ads bought on ITV Hub, the multi-platform app through which viewers can watch catch-up and live ITV shows.

Advertisers can use ITV’s own data on 30 million registered ITV Hub users or bring their own data.

“(ITV) realized that, technologically, they were going to be relying upon third party vendors,” said Ryan Jamboretz, Amobee chief development officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV back in June. “It was important for them to actually take some ownership and control. We are working with them very closely to develop what will be their stack.”

Cheeky Piers Morgan photobombs Holly Willoughby at ITV's glitzy Paloozahttps://t.co/hcxqkTFj1v pic.twitter.com/vuFJ37Gt1c

— Mirror Celeb (@MirrorCeleb) November 12, 2019

AdSmart Gearing up

ITV’s move comes in a quickly developing UK market.

Satellite platform Sky has pioneered UK addressable TV delivery with its AdSmart since 2014, beginning by swapping out ads stored on its TV set-top box. AdSmart is now becoming an agreed-upon UK standard of sorts, signing a deal to power rival cable platform Virgin Media’s target VOD ads as well as deals to addressable-enable ads for broadcasters Channel 4 and Channel 5 on those platforms.

This week, Sky signed a technology deal with the BBC, whose UK broadcasts are not allowed to carry advertising, through which AdSmart will nevertheless power personalized BBC show recommendations in the form of video trailers.

Planet V will work with digitally-delivered programming and ads, not linear non-digital broadcasts.

Say what?#itvpalooza pic.twitter.com/qPCRLi5CGQ

— Susan McLellan (@Speedqueenie) November 12, 2019

Going it alone?

A growing collection of partnerships between rivals in both the US and UK is currently aimed at amassing greater audience scale for addressable TV. That is a response to what has become the many fragmented islands of addressable opportunities.

However, ITV – which, beside the ITV Hub software, does not own its own distribution platform as Sky does – is breaking away from the pack of main UK broadcasters by not throwing in its lot with Sky’s AdSmart.

Of those broadcasters, it arguably is in the best position to do so. ITV is the UK’s largest commercial broadcast network – regulated as a public service broadcaster but, unlike the BBC, funded by advertising.

With shows like The X Factor, Downton Abbey and Coronation Street, its inventory is still a huge draw for advertisers trying to reach large audiences.

ITV says it is “extending an open invitation to any other broadcaster to join the platform”.

ITV has been searching for a paid VOD business model to bolster its historic advertising reliance.

That is what a panel of industry executives gathered to discuss at Beet Retreat In The City:

• Amobee – Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer
• FreeWheel – Joy Baer, president, FreeWheel Advertisers
• ZenithOptimedia – Nick Hartofilis, EVP, national video activation

They were questioned by Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM…

Zenith buyer bullish

Hartofilis said he doesn’t see the barriers to delivery that many industry executives often observe.

“Essentially, all the ingredients (to do that) are there,” he said. “We’re talking about data platforms, measurement, sciences, all those ingredients are there. It’s just a matter of having the right plan there to put it all to work. I’m actually in the stage now where I’m very bullish on a lot of this.”

Agencies stuck in Excel?

But that same optimism for and embrace of new converged buying techniques isn’t universal.

“The concepts of incremental reach and being able to really measure meaningful audiences outside of just (a) linear television buy, for example, is very real and moving in the right direction,” said FreeWheel’s Baer.

“But we still have a lot of clients who are working with Excel spreadsheets.”

Amobee’s Smolin echoed that sentiment. “There are definitely some leaders in the space and there are a lot of laggards in the space within kind of the agency ecosystem from our perspective,” he said.

TV effectiveness diminishing

Broader TV audience and economics shifts may prompt evolution of converged OTT and linear ad buying.

“TV does some things really, really well… But the economics are diminishing every year and with good reason,” Hartifilis said. “Our clients are under more pressure to want to bring those things and be able to prove the value of TV the same way as other mediums on the funnel.

“Every year we’re paying more (for ads) and we’re getting less. The relative advantage of TV in delivering immediate scale is still there and that’s why the TV upfront is still as robust as it is. But eventually we’ll come to a place where these things are going to have to come together and the supply space is going to have to expand.”

Play to medium’s strengths

FreeWheel’s Baer said, amid convergence, it is useful to think about the best and worst aspects of both digital and linear TV buying.

“Another ‘best’ in the digital space is around using data for targeting, measurement, attribution, things like that that digital does really well, that we still have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of in linear,” she said.

“The worst are things … like excessive tech and data fees that eat into working media budgets, the sort of creepiness factor of over personalization and being able to avoid things like that in this new world of converged television.

“With linear, it’s very important to preserve the things that are good and that work and then focusing on the things that work really well in digital around automation for example, really truly automating the entire buy, sell process is still elusive and we’re not all the way there.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is the view according to one executive who sits at the nexus of TV, ad-tech and agency professionals.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer of Amobee, paints an optimistic picture of evolution.

“The really good news is we’re seeing, I think, across the board in the last six months or so, pretty recently, almost all of them leaning in more than you would’ve expected, on being able to do several things,” he says:

• “Use of data – working as really much more of a partner as opposed to just a vendor, a partner to the large agencies and being able to utilise a brand’s first party data.”
• “Being able to package that, so what they’re selling is not just linear or digital – it’s linear and digital as a function of that audience.”

Smolin was speaking with Jon Watts, partner at TV consulting firm MTM, for Beet.TV.

Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.

It is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.

Smolin describes how advertisers are now striving to plan and buy TV ads across both traditional linear and new OTT channels in a seamless way, one that takes advantage of features like:

• “The ability to utilise a brand’s first party data to understand definition of audience.”
• “It may be who are consumers who have visited a brand’s website, but did not actually convert.”
• “That conversion doesn’t necessarily mean a product purchase. It could be an insurance company and it’s for quotes or lead generation.”

He recognizes that this evolution is not a zero-sum game in which OTT providers will simply win out over linear – at least, not for all audiences.

“Addressable (TV)  is, I think projected, to go to about like 13 or 14%,” Smilin says. “CTV will be a full third of the industry. But the flip side of that is 50% or more is still going to be traditional linear.

“Younger audiences will skew more to CTV. But for most brands it’s about using a combination of them.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“There’s also a lot of confusion around it because oftentimes people think, ‘Oh, connected TV, that’s ‘convergence’,” says Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer at Amobee, an ad-tech platform vendor.

“Convergence is really about how you bring data-driven audience strategies to all forms of TV – that’s connected TV, and it’s linear TV, and it’s addressable TV, and it’s online video, and it’s even social video.

“So solving for that is really a very different problem than what the industry originally solved when you used the term ‘programmatic’ back in the mid 2000s, around remnant display advertising.”

Amobee is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.

Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.

Smolin says his platform enables the fusion of panel planning data and measurement with digital planning data and measurement, and lets advertisers use their first-party audience data for not just programmatic or addressable TV ad buying but also linear TV ad targeting.

The aim is to get “one definition of an audience, and to be able to engage with that audience in a conversation very seamlessly across channels”, Smolin says.

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

TV networks give cable and satellite platforms the ability to sell just two minutes per hour of advertising in their live feeds of network programming.

What is it going to take for the addressable opportunity to be realized at greater scale, across the country?

At Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a panel of executives was asked by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel how to make national addressable sing…

• Mike Bologna,  President, Addressable, Cadent
• Kelly Abcarian, General Manager of Video Advanced Advertising
• Stacy Daft, GM commercial and business development, Amobee

Partnerships needed

“There is not a scale problem with addressability,” Bologna said. “There are 60 plus, 70 million households where you can dynamically insert an ad to a household. It is with the local two minutes per hour. It is system by system. That’s not a longterm scalable model in order for it to really scale.

“National networks have to create some type of arrangement, relationship or deal with a MVPD or a smart TV because for the foreseeable future, ads that are dynamically inserted into live linear programming are going to happen through either the set top box or through the smart TV.”

Device-level deals

“We are working with one of the largest chip set manufacturers globally, media tech and which to embed our technology directly into smart TV chip sets,” Abcarian said. “We are working alongside directly the OEMs in which to better our tech directly into their software layer.

“All of this enables you to unlock all 16 minutes in real-time.”

Software must be linked

“We believe has been holding back linear addressable … is a lack of technology and tool sets that really fit within the seller’s workflow,”said Amobee’s Daft.

“It’s not enough to just have a linear addressable insertion technology or have data technology. It has to be linked together with the sales process, which has to do with making them confident to be able to sell that inventory.”

Consistency is key

“If they all work in a different way, if 50 different networks are treating at addressable or a dynamic ad insertion differently, then it’s just going to be the same mess we have right now with seven different MVPDs – just four times worse,” said one2one’s Bologna. “And that’s not going to make it any easier for buyers and agencies and advertisers.”

Eyes on the prize

Bologna said addressable ads could end up commanding much greater returns overall.

“In an addressable world, you could take that unit and you could sell 20, 30, 40% of that unit at three or four times that CPM to multiple different advertisers,” he said.

“Then, of, course you have what’s left over that you would then ultimately sell at perhaps a 10, 15, 20% discount. The net-net in a perfect world would turn into a 10, 15, 20 perhaps 50, 60% increase in the overall value of the unit. So. instead of the network collecting $2,000 for the unit, they end up collecting $3,200 for a unit.”

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

GroupM’s North America CEO Tim Castree used Beet Retreat to call for the industry to develop common standards for measuring ads on an impression basis.

Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer of Amobee, in this video interview with Beet.TV, said agency in-fighting is stopping standardization.

Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory. It is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.

Smolin spoke at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” with Janet Balis, EY Global Advisory Services Leader for Media & Entertainment.

‘Fights’ holding back agreements

Smolin said technology is not holding back standardization – “operational” disagreements, between agencies’ distinct traditional TV-buying and programmatic trading desk teams, are.

“There’s kind of a fight in a lot of agencies over who gets control over that, on who’s going to lead in that going forward,” Smolin said. “On the sell side, you have a similar challenge in that, up until very recently, most of the broadcasters, programmers and MVPDs have generally been leaning back in regards to programmatic, as opposed to leaning forward.”

Three steps to converged agencies

Asked by Balis if technology was “out-innovating the market readiness”, Smolin said he saw a three-step process through which agencies can prepare themselves to buy in this converged fashion…

1. Converged measurement: “(If) you’ve got separate teams, just have a single view.”
2. Converged planning: “It may be TV first, it may digital first.”
3. Converge management: “Are you going to have a single team that is doing all of your upfronts as well as all of your digital and all of your social? Hopefully it should be within the next 24 months and definitely within the next 36.”

Ongoing optimization

Smolin said advanced TV ad buyers that are profiting from the opportunity don’t want to be named, seeing the technique as a “competitive advantage”.

“We are seeing some organizations that are pretty evolved with their traditional TV investment teams, very data-driven. They are doing data-driven (TV) upfronts, and then they are taking those and using digital KPIs measured against the linear TV upfronts in order to do monthly and, for some of their brands, weekly planning updates.”

Why Amobee acquired Videology

The company spent $101 million on the TV and video ad-tech supplier in 2018. But what was the rationale?

“Amobee’s heritage as a technology platform was in programmatic,” Smolin said. “Programmatic evolved out of remnant display advertising; it’s demand-constrained.

“But when you look at TV, it’s supply constrained. It introduces the dimension of time, upfronts, reservations.

“It’s very different algorithms in order to solve those problems effectively. We realized it would take us years to build (this new kind of software).”

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

But, with different advertisers each having unique different outcomes and measurement metrics for them, how can a TV platform manage the proliferating burden?

An ad-tech exec serving TV publishers says they must go beyond the now-accepted obsession with data.

“I think (the industry has) a lot of understanding that targeting data is important and necessary,” says Stacy Daft, Amobee GM, Enterprise Commercial Business Development, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“But almost as important as that is an understanding of what the competing KPIs and metrics are for all of the clients you’re trying to satisfy across your scarce inventory pool.

“That problem set requires an understanding of not just the target segment that’s being used and asked for by a client, but that of all of the other competing campaigns.”

Amobee is a media management software provider helping in the yse of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.

Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.

The latest imperative Daft is describing sounds like a game of 4D chess.

She says: “You need to understand the audience overlap, you need to be able to understand what’s been committed and sold to to date.

“And then you need to be able to forecast and understand the fluctuations in the viewership, and the changes in terms of the volumes that you’re going to be seeing in order to be able to confidently determine ‘How much inventory do I need to set aside for my addressable campaigns versus how much inventory do I need to reserve to satisfy my traditional linear?’

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Fortunately, many ad agencies are now putting together the pieces involving audience data sets and software tools, according to Philip Smolin.

“We’re seeing a number of agencies that are on the leading edge of that evolution,” says Amobee’s chief strategy officer in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And I think generally we’re seeing it play out in three somewhat discreet phases:

1. “Converged measurement. You you have different teams, they’re executing on different channels, different devices, but get them to utilize the same measurement data.”
2. “Converged planning. Once you have that unified measurement, you’re now able to look at your planning to decide, ‘Hey, for this strategic audience … how do I create complimentary reach and the proper exposure and frequency controls across the other channels?”
3. “Converge management. Do you have a single team that is doing all of your TV planning and investments and that same person is also doing all of your digital? (This) will be the one that’s the most distant out, it may be 24 months as opposed to six to 12 months.”

Amobee is a media management software provider helping in the yse of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

But the “addressable” TV advertising opportunity doesn’t have to start and end simply with an all-targeting approach to a TV campaign.

Some marketers are using the new-wave of addressability features to support an old-fashioned linear TV ad campaign, too.

That is according to an exec whose company is helping them use connected TV in a spectrum of ways.

“Connected TV is for all brands,” says Aleck Schleider, Amobee SVP client and data strategy, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We use a lot of connected television to help brands compliment their TV campaign. Addressable TV doesn’t mean (advertisers) have to reach only homes based on a certain (targeting) attribute – it also can mean (they) want to reach individuals who were not exposed to my linear TV campaign.”

Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.

“It doesn’t always have to be about the application of an attribute to think about addressability,” Schleider continues. “It could be geotargeting … these broadcasters who have all these supplies … can start thinking about taking some local regional budgets. It could be about driving incremental reach.

“We work with many brands who are using CTV (connected TV) to drive incremental reach because they’re not getting it on television.”

The early throes of addressable TV ad trading have involved the emergence of real-time bidded inventory. But Schleider acknowledges the TV industry, even premium connected TV, will continue to rely on upfront ad sales.

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight and TVSquared.   Please visit this page for additional segments. 

This theoretical game isn’t going to be won by the emergence of one overriding supply side platform, Pangis predicted in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Moderator Tracey Sheppach asked what it is that buyers can ultimately expect to see. “Once we move through this innovation, do I have two logins to two different systems Xandr and NCC? Is that what it looks like?” said Scheppach, the CEO & Founder of Matter More Media.

“I think the future of collaboration in television is a much different discussion than what a lot of people are having, which is like ‘come on my platform and then you can use my demand-side’…that is not the way we’re going to get far fast,” responded Pangis. “It’s how do we connect with one another and sort of bring each of our super powers together, and the demand side is always going to want to do something a little different.”

Allison Metcalfe, GM of LiveRamp TV, explained that about two years ago, LiveRamp began to focus on automation to better serve the sell-side. Last fall, the company sold Axciom, the data provider that had itself acquired LiveRamp in 2014. “Life has changed pretty dramatically since then,” said Metcalfe.

Along the way, LiveRamp figured out that it needed to pay more attention to the buy-side. “The reality is that LiveRamp sits on the CRM’s of close to four hundred of the largest brands in the US and internationally. Those brands rely on us for people-based marketing strategies. It’s very natural that they would look to us to help them understand what’s possible in TV,” said Metcalfe.

Easier said than done, she went on to explain. Her team of four full-time people whose daily mission is to evangelize advanced TV to brands typically come away from meetings with “a list of twelve questions” regarding how to reach those brands’ audiences across platforms “and it takes us months to answer those questions.”

Even when such discussions lead to a purchase order, the entire process can take six months. “If we could get that to maybe two or three months, that would be a win for both Nicolle and I.”

One advantage of distancing itself from Axciom is that it dispels doubts about perceptions of LiveRamp’s neutrality, according to Metcalfe. “We are a technology platform with a data marketplace.”

Under the leadership of Grant Ries, LiveRamp is helping companies that have data assets but never considered themselves to be data suppliers. Metcalfe cited the example of travel data co-op Adara, which came to LiveRamp because it wanted to get into TV.

“So now we’re able to offer some really unique targeting capabilities to the travel industry, which historically wasn’t a really big buyer of advanced TV strategies,” Metcalf said. “We’re seeing a lot of trends like that.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

What also came to the fore in this segment recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit and presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science was differences of opinion about the role of technology providers and the status of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium.

Asked by panel moderator Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, about Fox’s approach to advanced advertising, VP of Audience & Automated Sales Dan Callahan says the company is “piecing the bits together. There’s a million different places where our content is distributed and each has different rules and standards and tech specs, and that’s what makes it hard.”

He described a process wherein it’s “very much what can we deliver across these five platforms and what are their standards and methodologies. And then you have to have the conversation with the client and they’re like ‘we agree with these five but not these five’ and it’s a mess.”

So while everyone agrees on the need for convergence, “right now unfortunately it’s packaging smaller bits of our content and here’s what we can sell this way, here’s what we can sell this way, are you willing to accept it?”

Things are much different at Univision, as President, of Ad Sales & Marketing Steve Mandala explained.

“We have tried a lot of things, sought quick failure and fast learning on it too,” Mandala said. “One of the reasons that I’m glad to be able to be here because I don’t think we’ve figured out our solution yet. I think we’ve learned a lot of things along the way, typically much more of what we don’t want to do than what we do want to do. And are still searching for it.”

What Univision lacks in complexity can largely be attributed to the fact that 92% of its primetime programming is still watched live. “So we don’t have the issue of the time-shifted, alternative viewing sources that is so prevalent with all of our competitors, colleagues, peers. The issues regarding standards and unification of those standards are going to happen. It’s going to get fixed. It’s a rule of nature basically. It won’t happen as quickly as any of us want it to, but it’s going to happen because it’s the only way that the industry can come together.”

Mandala was not big on praise for tech providers, most of which he described as promising “silver bullets” that fail to solve what they purport to solve. “We’ve been completely dissatisfied in what we have found so far, other than Videology to be quite honest, is that there’s a flavor of the week all the time. It’s what is the next silver bullet that’s going to fix things. The truth is that very few of these things have yet panned out. The thing for us is to try to find those places where we believe that they’re really delivering simplified value.”

When the conversation shifted to OpenAP, Mandala noted that Univision was one of the first non-original partners to join the initiative “and I completely agree and endorse what OpenAP started with and still do.” However, Univision has had “an incredibly disappointing first year with OpenAP” and Mandala voiced doubts about so-called industry standards.

“There has to be a common vernacular. And the question is, is it going to be the seller or the buyer who develops that lexicon and that vernacular? What I worry about is that as we do this as sellers, we’re asking buyers to change their way of doing business to accommodate what we decide is the way that lexicon process should all be structured.

“Yet on the other side,” Mandala added, “I don’t think that the buyers can hardly agree what day of the week it is let alone a standard like that. Agency A will compete with Agency B in reviews based upon their view of how they deal with advanced advertising. So I don’t think it’s actually to the advantage of the agencies to have a standard in many ways so they can differentiate themselves.”

Callahan was more sanguine about OpenAP. “I feel like OpenAP is really putting their best foot forward to solve what they feel the programmers’ situation is, and then it really is the agencies and the brands and the others that can come to the table if they want to band together.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

There was no doubt that consumers had completely changed their viewing television venues, but that was just one component of the larger picture, Smolin related in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science.

“You have to have the broadcasters and programmers that are in a position where they really want to lean in for what is bringing data into advanced television,” Smolin said in response to a question from Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM.

“But you also have to have on the buy side, you have to have the agency ecosystem be in a position where it’s really ready to start using that and converging maybe the TV investment team versus what had been the digital trading desk.”

Amobee made its wager after assessing a variety of technology providers and determining that Videology was unique compared to companies that had fashioned themselves to fit into the programmatic space “for a world that came out of remnant display advertising and frames every problem like that,” Smolin explained.

Given the difference between display and long-form, premium video, “Videology to their credit had designed from the ground up to solve the problems of how TV works. That was uniquely powerful, and we thought it was the right technology at the right time and it’s had a huge impact on our business.”

Now, with Videology’s assets and Amobee’s partnership with Nielsen “we are able to bring converged measurement to linear plus digital activation. When we use the term advanced TV, it’s very much about being able to take that digital-first audience, first-party data, and to use that within what is video, what is OTT, what is connected TV but also to linear.”

Noting that eMarketer predicts linear will be 50% or more of all TV budgets by 2022, Smolin said it’s important for many brands to think holistically and for Amobee to provide “true, converged media solutions.” Another thing Videology had in its favor was its sell-side presence, “and that’s also critical because if they’re not positioned with the right tools to be able to sell the way that the advertisers want to buy, then it doesn’t work on either side.”

He echoed the concerns of many in the industry that agency structure remains an impediment, as some still have siloed TV investment and digital trading teams. “They don’t have to be the same people, but getting them to look at the same measurement data and turning that same measurement data into integrated planning” needs to happen.

Asked how TV can win back ad dollars that have flowed to Facebook and Google, Smolin cites data, targetability, measurement and scale. Where TV has an edge is that premium, long-form content “is not the strength for Facebook and YouTube. If the broadcasters, the programmers, are now bringing the data that gives you the audience and the measurement at the scale they already have, they’re now in a position to compete very effectively with much higher value ad units than what Google and Facebook have been doing.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

The broadcaster, which airs Downton Abbey and Coronation Street in the UK, recently picked Amobee as the platform through which it will distribute its digital ad inventory.

The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on its VOD catch-up service, the ITV Hub.

“ITV was keen … to take a much more proactive stance in terms of how they were going to operate in the programmatic and converged digital and TV space,” says Ryan Jamboretz, Amobee chief development officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“They realized that, technologically, they were going to be relying upon third party vendors and it was such a critical thing, not only to their future, but their future in terms of their share, that it was important for them to actually take some ownership and control.”

ITV is a public service broadcaster, meaning it must operate within a regulated environment to fulfil public purpose.

But it is also a commercial one, meaning it must fund itself to do so. Historically, that has been through advertising. Whilst it goes on upgrading its ad capabilities, however, ITV is also endeavoring to offer paid VOD services, something that is proving a challenge.

Still, Jamboretz sees the Amobee-ITV relationship as two-way.

“It’s incredibly close,” he says. “We are working with them very closely to develop what will be their stack. And in many ways, what they’re helping us develop is helping to inform what we are pushing out around the world.

“It’s quite a cherished position for us because we have a customer in the form of ITV who, in their market and across the region of Europe, is considered to be probably one of the largest, most progressive players.

“And to have them, in many ways, kind of holding our hand, guiding us on some of the more, interesting product development aspects makes it much less guesswork and makes it feel like we were actually going out into the market and other regions with a lot of confidence about what’s coming.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee.  For more videos from the series, visit this page.  To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

That was the clarion call from an ad-tech exec enjoying the sunshine at the Cannes Lions advertising industry gathering.

“Everybody sees kind of this moment in time, where we can really embrace converged strategies,” says Philip Smolin, Amobee chief strategy officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“But, in order to do it, we have to have standards, we have to have scalability in those solutions.”

Smolin was speaking after a couple of years in which acquired two other major ad-tech suppliers – Turn and Videology – in a further sign of industry consolidation.

The Videology acquisition last summer meant Amobee became a major player in the TV and video ad ecosystem.

“It’s not about just creating competitive advantage, it’s about creating solutions at an industry level. It’s a complex industry, but we do have a path forward to really being able to simplify it and make it scalable, so that it works in both the buy and the sell side.”

Amobee is a software-as-a-service vendor which helps ad buyers plan, activate, optimize and analyze their media spending, and which helps programmers control how they package up their inventory for sale, including to work with buyers’ first-party data.

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee.  For more videos from the series, visit this page.  To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.