This was the approach taken by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization, as she capped off the proceedings at Beet Retreat Miami in November.

The final panel of this year’s conference featured Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights; Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud; and Jakob Nielsen, CEO of GroupM’s Finecast addressable TV business.

Declaring that “TV needs to change,” Gupta pointed out that while so-called enemies like Facebook and Google require advertisers to “do it their way” behind walled gardens, at least those companies offer application-programming interfaces. Those API’s facilitate valuable things like ad buying, targeting, reporting, measurement, creative testing and creative trafficking.

“Where are the API’s for the one trillion impressions” that comprise traditional TV?, Gupta asked.

Harrison said the Retreat was a great place for him to gain a better understanding of the financial and technical complexities of advanced TV. His reflections:

“You have to be able to adjust and redirect to achieve your goals. Coming from an Oracle Data Cloud perspective, I’m a bit neutral to all of this because regardless, we look at data as the fuel for innovation and it’s how do we enable this data in every and any place that a client wants this to be to achieve some goals.”

Nielsen warned that progress will be curtailed if agencies and tech suppliers make things too complicated for marketers. Said he: “One thing I’ve seen with advertisers is they are super excited about what we’re talking about. They’re seeing benefits of household targeting, using their own first-party data, to be able to do creative rotation in a different way, near-time optimization. That’s a journey that we’re on. We have to remember to take them on that journey, make it simple, give them what they need but don’t give people too much.”

Swartz suggested that it’s “human problems, not technology problems, that are holding us back.” This led to a discussion about current business models and methods that, while familiar and comfortable, won’t move things ahead at the desired speed.

Gupta described attending meetings with agencies and marketers in which everyone understands the importance of more data-driven TV audience buying. When he asks how they are currently executing it, responses typically include Microsoft Excel. “Then we say okay how are you processing large-scale datasets? ‘Well we don’t have the engineers to take second-by second-data from ten-plus million devices,’” Gupta related. “The point is, you’ve got business issues around talent, around the software not being there, around the horsepower not being there. Those are the issues holding you back. It’s not the desire to do something.”

Said Harrison: “Innovation doesn’t happen because you desire it. It’s because you must do it. You really don’t have a choice.”

Nielsen said there are too many tech solutions and there should be more use of fewer of them going forward. He offered these examples:

“We use Videology within Finecast to do some of the decisioning we’re doing and we have Sky in the UK use Videology as well. We work with Invidi in Australia, they won a fantastic deal with Foxtel, and we were very supportive of that. We went in nearly hand-in-hand and said we suggest you pick Invidi because that works with our systems and that means we can spend more money with you.

“The unpleasant part of that is there’s tons of technology companies that won’t exist in the future because there’s simply too much and it’s too complex.”

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 Chief Revenue Officer of Eyeview says the desire for more predictability involves helping marketers figure out how various inputs—among them audience, calibration, media and creative—actually drive business outcomes.

“I think you’re going to hear a lot that brand advertisers want greater accountability, to manage that entire thing and how to be more predictable. To get performance and manage all of the variables,” Baadsgaard says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2018.

Knowing the role that video plays in reaching consumers emotionally and rationally, Eyeview has “done some subtle changes to personalize and make that creative resonate,” including overlays, in-cards and maps, with “huge” results. That lead to this question: If small changes have huge results, what about big changes?

“We believe it’s changing the edit, in a brand friendly manner. Taking B-roll and other footage and editing it specifically to resonate with consumers,” Baadsgaard says.

One example would be touting the tech chops of an automobile in videos viewed by tech enthusiasts and promoting that same car’s eco-friendliness to viewers known to be eco-oriented. Eyeview calls it advanced storytelling.

“You can have a great brand message, you can have pieces that speak to the features that are going to resonate with the consumer and you can have your overlays and in-cards,” says Baadsgaard.

The fastest-growing part of Eyeview’s business is addressable television, and one of its more popular offerings is an integrated digital video and addressable TV campaign. Among other attributes, this solution provides scale that addressable TV alone typically lacks.

The company derives learnings about creative iterations from the digital video campaign side and then applies that creative “weekly to the addressable TV campaigns that we’re running.”

Baadsgaard believes that some measures have been successful in curtailing digital ad fraud but it’s still “a huge problem. It’s essentially theft and it’s a real issue for our clients. We spend a lot of time eliminating fraud. We have a zero tolerance belief structure around that.”

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.

LiveRamp has long been active in the digital space, using both personally identifiable and anonymous information from device ID’s and cookies to provide a single identity graph—for people or households—across all platforms. Acxiom, meanwhile, worked with pay-TV operators to create a safe haven for matching subscriber files.

“Now we have a scenario where Acxiom and LiveRamp are, in fact one company and so we have these capabilities across all of these platforms,” Craig Berkley, VP, Television Partner Development at Acxiom, says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

MVPD’s and linear TV providers use Acxiom data to inform the placement of TV commercials “by indexing the commercial viewership against the segment that the advertiser is trying to reach,” says Berkley. Addressable campaigns are done in a similar fashion.

Lacking a linear presence, OTT providers are focused on addressable video or display ads on their interfaces, “but the process from an identity perspective and from a data provisioning perspective is pretty much the same,” Berkley says.

Acxiom’s rationale for advertisers needing a single source of identity data, providing unduplicated reach among other goals, is ease and uniformity of matching.

“Otherwise, if you’re using various and sundry companies for identity in this space and identity in this space, then oftentimes you’re not going to have an accuracy across all of those,” says Berkley.

What’s the difference between omni-channel and cross-channel? Acxiom believes that “omni-channel is what cross-channel will be when it grows up.” For a full explanation, see this blog post.

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 CMO’s on the marketing side are being held more accountable than ever for the bottom line and care about driving those outcomes,” he adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

Katz’s background includes linear TV—stints at NBCUniversal in research initiatives for ad sales and then Oxygen Media—before moving on to TiVo to help networks advance their data solutions.

“Now that TV technology has allowed us to reach viewers on a more one to one basis with addressable television and connected television, Eyeview is primed for that space,” he says by way of explaining his joining the company not quite a year ago.

Eyeview has centered its efforts on four categories: automotive, consumer packaged-goods, retail and travel. Having achieved real-time results with business outcomes on the digital side, it’s now being asked to “apply that to a less real-time platform like TV.”

A lack of internal synergy at agencies is one factor that has hampered progress, but Katz sees that changing. While some agencies have created cross-platform groups, “there are many that haven’t yet and I think we’re going to see a lot of that shift in the coming years.”

Another trend is media, creative and the investment teams “coming under one roof because people are understanding that data and creative need to be together to help better advertising and better results.”

As more publishers gain access to addressable TV inventory, “we’ll see a lot more of that creative personalization.”

One of the positives about TV versus digital, according to Katz, is “there’s no fraud there. It’s all premium content.”

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.

In the connected-TV and OTT space, “There are quite a few ad-supported services and those are growing,” including Crackle, Vudu and Pluto TV, says Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange.

In terms of channels or apps being viewed, non-linear viewing does continue to fragment viewership, Bokor explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. And since inventory on platforms like Roku is purchased across the entire footprint, it’s done by demographics.

“But we’re starting to see and we’re working on programmatic activation. Instead of buying demo, buying audiences on connected TV, which I think is the promising area. Fragmentation is somewhat less of an issue when you’re buying an audience across apps.”

Cable TV operators continue to enable addressable advertising technology, thereby expanding the pool of households than can be targeted with specific ads, but it’s a system-by-system approach and doesn’t yet provide anything near national reach.

“We do get sort of national reach with the satellite operators because they can be accessed anywhere, but it’s a spotty national,” Bokor says.

What’s changing is that programmers themselves are trying to up the addressable inventory pool.

“I’ve seen some outreach from a few of the larger network groups who have secured some inventory on the Comcast platform coming to us and wanting us to invest in addressable TV through the programmer as opposed to the MPVD. That’s a big difference,” Bokor adds.

Streaming pioneer Hulu “really is connected TV and it’s the largest publisher,” while Roku aggregates ad inventory it secures from programmers. “Roku has been a significant source of inventory.”

Publicis is “working very hard to identify the partners” that can provide “a programmatic pathway for our video teams to be able to access audiences on connected TV across any connected-TV device.”

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.

“What we find is that as we’re creating more targeted segments of guests that we can deliver messages to, each of those groups have different needs and things that they want to hear about or are relevant to them,” says Target Media Director Nick Jezarian.

“That’s something that we’re actively trying to address right now, the ability to become more nimble and agile,” Jezarian adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

It’s all about adding value to experiences. For example, when someone is using a mobile device in-store, it isn’t necessarily the time for brand storytelling but to “help them get the answer they’re looking for as quickly as possible.”

Target has its own in-house shop, Target Creative Studios, and also works with world-class outside agencies. “But it feels like the content needs are getting greater as the years go on,” Jezarian says.

He describes the new partnership the retailer has with NBCUniversal for programmatic audience buying, which is in the test phase in the fourth quarter, as “even greater than just the programmatic side. We find them an amazing strategic partner.”

Jezarian is most excited about NBCU’s commitment to figuring out the advanced TV and targeting space, its offering of a large portion of premium, national inventory and its willingness to partner with other entities “to figure out the solution as opposed to just selling it.”

Target aims to achieve a strategic and symbiotic relationship between its online commerce and 1,700 brick-and-mortar locations. To Jezarian, it’s not an either/or proposition.

“We believe that they are actually integral to each other and build off of each other,” he explains. “As guests are shopping in the online space and doing research, there’s still something magical about going into the store and being able to touch and feel the product.”

As the retail landscape changes, online and in-store both contribute to “a holistic Target experience that pays off our promise” of Expect More, Pay Less.

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.

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2018, Klippel scopes out the company’s growing cross-screen audience targeting and campaign attribution capabilities and talks about its collaboration with TV data specialty firm 605 in developing the new AudienceApp product.

Klippel believes there’s a misconception that only addressable TV campaigns can generate detailed data on linear-viewing audiences along with ad exposure data. Whether it’s a traditional spot schedule, an audience-optimized schedule for an actual addressable campaign, “We’re able to pull back the same level of audience, ad exposure and impression data to run detailed reach/frequency analysis, ROI and lift and attribution studies to get a comprehensive view of how a cross-platform campaign has performed,” Klippel explains.

Addressable linear TV is the latest complement to Spectrum Reach offerings spanning set-top box video-on-demand and other digital products. Buyers can buy linear schedules the way they’ve always done and deliver unique creative to different households.

“We’ll also be launching the ability to sell different audiences to different advertisers within the same break and deliver only the specific households that a particular brand is trying to reach,” Klippel adds.

Surveying the addressable linear landscape, which has been constrained by the walled operations of multiple operators and content owners, he likens addressable to the advent of interconnects that have helped to make buying local cable inventory easier.

“We’re going to start seeing a lot more collaboration and a cohesive approach around addressable TV, not only among operators like in the case of interconnects but even across operators and national programmers,” Klippel says.

The past 18 months have seen the melding of three companies—Time Warner Cable Media, Bright House Media Strategies and Spectrum Reach, which is the advertising sales division of Charter Communications—while unifying their product portfolios. While all of that was occurring, Spectrum Reach “managed to build and start deploying an audience-based platform that’s fundamentally changing the way we’re selling television,” Klippel says.

That platform is called AudienceApp and it was first activated in Austin, TX. With AudienceApp, buyers can can look at audiences and other key audience attributes to identify and target messages on TV in specific markets based on virtual, real-time access to household viewing data.

“One of the major reasons we were able to have the focus and deliver that in such a quick turnaround was our partnership with 605, who helped us develop the platform and has a management team of executives that are familiar with and have worked with set-top box data and linear optimization,” says Klippel.

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.

Now the big issue is “consistency,” Bologna says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Addressability is still very much a system-by-system product. And the advertiser wants scale. So in order to really give them that scale, the various systems and products need to be stitched together and presented as one.”

Bologna will be one of more than three dozen featured speakers at next week’s Beet Retreat Miami, where industry executives will gather to discuss the coming of age of targeted TV advertising.

The scale of addressable linear TV is another longtime industry talking point. Now Bologna says it’s no longer an issue because by the middle of 2018, there will be in excess of 70 million households capable of being targeted with addressable ads. “That’s huge. So scale isn’t a problem.”

Inventory is a different story, being limited as it is to the two minutes of local time made available for addressable campaigns.

“There’s a lot of discussions going on now about once we’ve utilized all of the two minutes per hour that we’re currently working with now for inventory that there will be some national inventory involved,” says Bologna.

Last spring, one2one Media set out to leverage an integrated set of systems and technology to drive efficiency and yield by automating workflows and providing a unified reporting approach for addressable video. It also works with skinny bundle pioneer Sling TV, which like other OTT providers is expanding the pool of targeted TV avails.

“The beauty of Sling, because of the way it’s technologically set up, is it has the ability to deliver real time addressability in the forms of both targeting and attribution,” Bologna says. ““So the addition of Sling to the addressable pool is actually a very good thing and something we’re excited to expand in.”

The flip side to OTT generating more ad inventory is fragmentation, according to Bologna, something that one2one Media has set out to alleviate.

“I can’t say I’m terribly upset about it,” he says of fragmentation.

This video is part of series on developments with OTT. The series is presented by Sling TV and DISH Media Sales.  Please find more videos from the series here.  For the Sling/DISH report on OTT and the marketplace, download this report.

Swanston will be one of more than three dozen featured speakers at next week’s Beet Retreat Miami, where industry executives will gather to discuss the coming of age of targeted TV advertising.  (See speaker list below.)

With the new partnership, connected TV buyers and sellers using AppNexus’ platform will be able to segment and target audiences based on data offered through the integration of Tru Optik’s OTT Marketing Cloud, according to a news release. AppNexus and Tru Optik will be able to facilitate audience delivery across 75 million OTT households in the U.S., on any connected TV device or publishers regardless of whether the publisher has registered user data.

“It’s going to be the first time in the industry that publishers can pre-segment their connected TV inventory, even outside of registered user data, against third-party segments, demos from comScore, their own first-party data, and then have private marketplace deal ID’s to control who has access to that inventory,” Swanston says.

The shift from linear to connected TV is growing faster than the shift from desktop video to mobile video, according to Swanston. “So that just gives people an idea of how tremendous the opportunity is that’s coming across connected TV.”

As he looks ahead to Beet Retreat Miami, Swanston hopes that the discussions will focus on the here and now of targeted TV.

“Everything people have been talking about over the last few years about what they hope they’ll eventually be able to do on connected TV you can do right now. Today,” he says.

In the next 90 days Tru Optik will be revealing more partnerships, in keeping with its original go-to-market strategy. Among other things, this strategy negates the need to build “a massive sales force” to ensure growth.

“Going into 2018, the majority of audience based programmatic advertising across connected TV, on both the buy side and the supply side in the U.S. for sure, will be powered by Tru Optik. And that’s really exciting for being still a relatively young and small company.”

Here are are the speakers at next week’s Beet Retreat:

Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen, Cadreon/IPG
Jonathan Bokor, Director of Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange
Kristin Dolan, CEO, 605
Scott Ferber, CEO, Videology
Nick Jezarian, Media Director, Target
Raghu Kodige, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder, Alphonso
Jakob Nielsen, CEO, Finecast, GroupM
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group
Kelly Abcarian, SVP, Product Leadership, Nielsen
Dan Aversano, SVP, Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions, Turner
Anna Bager, SVP/GM Mobile & Video, IAB
Craig Berkley, VP. Television Partner Development, Acxiom
Mel Berning, President, Revenue, A+E Networks
Michael Bologna, President, one2one Media
Jason Brown, VP, National Sales, AT&T AdWorks
Lorne Brown, CEO, Sintec Media
Herve Brunet, GM, Markets, FreeWheel
Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder, Innovid
Peter Dolchin, Strategic Partner Lead, Google
Marco Forte, SVP, ABC Network Sales
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso
Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment, North America, Essence
Michael Glantz, VP, Business Development, Simulmedia
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions, Oracle Data Cloud
Jason Harrison, President, Team Arrow Partners (GroupM)
Cathy Hetzel, Executive Vice President, comScore
Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising, TiVo
Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, Oath (Verizon)
Brian Katz, VP, Advanced TV Insights & Strategy, Eyeview
Rob Klippel, SVP, Advanced Products & Strategy, Spectrum Reach (Charter)
Jennifer Koester, Director, Global Partnerships, Google
Michael Kubin,  EVP, Media, Invidi
Marcus Liassides, CEO, Sorenson Media
Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group
Adam Lowy, Director, Advanced TV & Digital, DISH & Sling TV
Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development, Inscape
Matthew O’Grady, CEO, Nielsen Catalina Solutions
Mike Rosen, EVP, Portfolio Sales, NBCUniversal
Neil Smith, SVP Markets, FreeWheel
Andre Swanston, CEO, Tru Optik
Ben Tatta, President & Co-Founder, 605
Tore Tellefsen, VP, TV Solutions at DataXu
Nick Troiano, CEO, Cross MediaWorks
Rob Weisbord, SVP, COO, Sinclair Digital Group
Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development, Videology

Moderators:

Steve Ellwanger, Contributing Editor, Beet.TV
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Tracey Scheppach, CEO & Co-Founder, Matter More Media
Matt Spiegel, Managing Director, MediaLink
Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp.
Andy Plesser, Executive Producer & Founder, Beet.TV

Jakob Nielsen, Managing Director at GroupM Digital in the U.K., has been named Chief Executive Officer of Finecast. The company is headquartered in London with Rich Astley as Chief Product Officer supported by Kelly Clark, Global CEO of GroupM, and Irwin Gotlieb, Chairman of GroupM.

“The time is right for traditional TV and over-the-top providers to scale their new classes of addressable inventory to the benefit of our advertisers and to meet demand for targeted TV advertising,” Nielsen said in a news release. “With the rapid growth of digital advertising, TV budgets may be at risk from new competitors, particularly as digital video improves in quality and ease of access.”

Nielsen will be one of the featured speakers at the 2017 Beet Retreat in Miami, where the theme will be The Future Of Advanced TV.

Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.

Beet.TV interviewed Nielsen last year at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London where he discussed the potential of addressable TV ads in the coming years. We are republishing the interview in light of today’s news about the rollout of Finecast.

About 42% of US homes are now able to receive so-called “addressable advertising” – TV ads custom-targeted at individual homes thanks to one of a variety of return-path TV systems. But how much of the multi-billion-dollar TV advertising industry could be funneled through that channel in the years ahead.

It’s early days, but ad agency GroupM’s UK MD Jakob Nielsen says his group is taking a guess.

“You are changing how you are thinking from the past – therefore, it will take some time,” he cautions, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“But, if you look across all our clients, we think 30% to 50% of all TV could eventually – not tomorrow – be addressable TV. You will have some clients having 60% of their total mix, in five or 10 years, being addressable, other clients being 20%.”

Nielsen says Europe is farther behind on roll-out, but dominant UK pay-TV provider Sky is already an early leader with its so-called AdSmart technology, pushing multiple alternative ads to consumers’ set-top boxes for subsequent decisioning and play-out during standard ad moments.

The beauty of the idea is two-fold. First, it is opening TV advertising to smaller new advertisers. Second, it means those advertisers can target people close to the point of purchase, not just spend money on raising initial awareness.

“You have the top of the funnel, but all of a sudden TV can start going in to the mid and lower parts of the funnel, that they weren’t part of in the past,” Nielsen adds. “AdSmart, in the beginning, 70 to 80% of their advertisers came from non-traditional TV advertisers.

“They were able to reach a BMW dealership who wanted to sell a BMW in Edinburgh. That puts a completely new perspective on what you can do with TV.”

Converged television and video advertising software provider Videology is a sponsor of Beet Retreat Miami along with TV data company Alphonso and 605, the data and analytics company. Topics will include video monetization and distribution, programmatic TV, addressable TV, the role of data in ad targeting, emerging platforms for distribution, the changing role of creative and the impact of consumer preference.

“As we go to many conferences and events around the world, typically they’re sponsored by one set of stakeholders,” Ferber says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What’s so great about the Beet TV Retreat is that many stakeholder groups—agencies, brands, media companies and distributors—are all there together to discuss the common challenges that the whole ecosystem must overcome in order for it to grow in total.”

To Ferber,  who has attended several past Beet Retreats, having the ecosystem come together on common ground is a case of “a rise of tide, rise all ships opportunity.”

A major issue the industry faces is how to enable the entire ecosystem to develop a unified platform opportunity so that it can buy, sell, execute, measure and trade against a common set of data attributes across multiple platforms and devices.

“One of the biggest things I’d like to do is have the buy and sell sides talk a little bit more about how they can actually bridge the effective gaps that they each have in transactions,” says Ferber.

While buyers and sellers typically interact by negotiating, wherein exists “a natural tendency to be nervous about disclosing what’s going on,” if both sides better understood each other everyone would benefit.

“If we could somehow get people to just truly open up on both sides and share the true challenges they’re facing and how they can best get there together, I think we can move much quicker. And I hope that’s what we can accomplish at the next Beet.TV Retreat,” Ferber adds.

The Beet Retreat 2017 program will involve just 35 participants. Executives will join from the major media agencies, large brands, cable and network programmers, data providers and tech platforms.

Here is the lineup of featured speakers and other participants:

The Featured Speakers

Kelly Abcarian, SVP, Product Leadership, Nielsen
Jason Baadsgaard, Chief Revenue Officer, Eyeview
Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen, Cadreon/IPG
Craig Berkley, VP. Television Partner Development, Acxiom
Herve Brunet, GM, Markets, FreeWheel
Mel Berning, President, Revenue, A+E Networks
Jonathan Bokor, Director of Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange
Michael Bologna, President, one2one Media
Jason Brown, VP, National Sales, AT&T AdWorks
Lorne Brown, President, Sintec Media
Jason Burke, VP, Strategic Development, clypd
Tim Castree, Global CEO of MEC, GroupM
Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder, Innovid
Ashish Chordia, CEO, Alphonso
David Clark, EVP/GM, Advanced Advertising, Comcast
Fred Di Blasio, CMO, Invidi
Kristin Dolan, CEO, 605
Andrew Feigenson, CRO, Nielsen Catalina
Scott Ferber, CEO, Videology
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising, TiVo
Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, Oath (Verizon)
Rob Klippel, SVP, Advanced Products & Strategy, Spectrum Reach (Charter)
Jennifer Koester, Director, Global Partnerships, Google
Marcus Liassides, CEO, Sorenson Media
Bill Livek, Executive Vice Chairman & President, comScore
Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group
Adam Lowy, Director, Advanced TV & Digital, DISH & Sling TV
Dave Morgan, CEO, Simulmedia
Lou Paskalis, SVP, Enterprise Media Planning, Investment, Bank of America Merrill Lynch
John Paul, Managing Director, Advanced Advertising and Data at Liberty Global
Mike Rosen, EVP, Portfolio Sales, NBCUniversal
Julie Sterling, Head of Broadcast Partnerships, Google
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group
Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation, Turner
Andre Swanston, CEO, Tru Optik
Ashley Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp
Ben Tatta, President & Co-Founder, 605
Tore Tellefsen, VP, TV Solutions at DataXu
Rob Weisbord, SVP, COO, Sinclair Digital Group
Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development, Videology

The Faculty

Tracey Scheppach, CEO & Co-Founder, Matter More Media
Matt Spiegel, Managing Director, MediaLink
Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp
Andy Plesser, Executive Producer and Founder, Beet.TV

The Special Participants

Allen Bush, CMO, Alphonso
Sandro Catanzaro, Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, DataXu
Boaz Cohen, CPO & Head of Business Development, Clinch
David DeSocio, SVP, Ad Sales Marketing and Partnerships, A+E Networks
Brian Katz, VP, Advanced TV Insights & Strategy, Eyeview
Justin Lebbon, Director, Mediatel Events (London)
Lisa Lutz, VP of Product, Tivo
Stefan Maris, SVP Product Strategy & Partnerships, Sorenson Media
Kim Norris, Division Vice President, Spectrum Reach
Jamie Power, Chief Operating Officer, one2one Media
Christa Rimonneau, SVP Sales, Agency & Advertiser, North America, Videology
Jack Rotherham, CMO, FreeWheel
Eric Schmitt, VP, Acxiom
Neil Smith, SVP Markets, FreeWheel
James Shears, Vice President Advertising, Sorenson Media
Abbey Thomas, SVP, Tremor Video
Charlstie Veith, SVP, Marketing & Communications, 605
Ben Zimmerman, President, Media Design Group

“Data is paramount to every strategy we put together with our clients, with our partners. It’s sort of the universal language that we have not just to transact on necessarily but to plan against,” says Adam Shlachter, President of Global Innovation at Publicis Media.

This language translates into understanding people as people, not just as broad-based segments to be traded on or targeted against. Tapping into mindsets and behaviors while grasping the effect of ad environments can unleash many useful changes.

“We can create better ads, we can certainly create better experiences and over time we can probably eliminate a lot of the waste that exists today,” Shlachter says in this interview at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat.

That wastes derives from a lack of transparency, lack of connectivity and “quite frankly an overly complex media ecosystem that is not as connected as we’d like it to be.”

It’s been just over a year since Publicis Groupe began to transform its media operations, eliminating some divisions while merging agencies, as The Wall Street Journal reports. From a central perspective, the realignment facilitates greater intelligence sharing while providing better access to talent, resources and technology, according to Shlachter.

“I do believe that these transformations take more time,” he says. “You have to make sure you have all the right pieces in place. Nothing’s going to happen overnight.”

Nonetheless, he’s excited about the momentum Publicis has exhibited in recent months. And he marvels at the pace of the long-discussed convergence of data, technology and platforms, plus the growth of industry partnerships.

“We’ve been waiting for it for a long time. The next three to five years are going to be super interesting,” Shlachter says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

At MEC, the process is called Momentum and it derives from surveys showing how brand perceptions influence behavior. Momentum provides “a deeper understanding of each brand’s purchase decision,” Fremont explains in an interview during the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat. “What’s going to make them make the decision about that brand based on different stages of where they are in that purchase decisioning.”

All forms of data “are critical to ensure we are reaching the audience most receptive to a brand’s message,” Fremont adds. “So when we go out to find those audiences that are most relevant, it’s with an understanding of what’s going to impact them.”

MEC wants to understand people behaviorally, emotionally, active and passively before marrying this intelligence with creative that will “drive their decisioning forward and make it all end to end.”

When it comes to measuring outcomes in terms of brand lift and ultimately brand sales, “That’s what I’m most excited about,” says Fremont.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“It’s not that easy,” Claudio says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Not all the data that is needed is available in all markets.”

Claudio was among the several dozen advertising and media executives who convened here for the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat. Noting that Hearts & Science is “not a media agency anymore,” he describes the company’s mission as it staffs up around the world to service clients like Procter & Gamble and AT&T.

“Work on data to identify resources that can give us enough information about consumer behavior. Therefore, we could deliver better resources to our clients,” Claudio says.

P&G is its biggest client in North America, Canada, the United States and Puerto Rico. Then there is AT&T in the United States and Mexico. In short, the agency grew from zero to about $5 billion in billings in seven months, as ADWEEK reports.

“We’re growing. We’re already over 800 employees around the globe,” with offices in such far-flung locations as Dubai, London, Japan and China. “Our clients are telling us they want to deliver better messages to better audiences in a way that they can measure the resource.”

But simply being big and thus far successful doesn’t overcome all challenges, particularly with regard to data availability. “In Puerto Rico, we don’t have all the resources that we have in the States,” says Claudio. “In Mexico we have other challenges as well.”

He chooses to look on the positive side.

“That’s a good challenge for anyone in the market because it’s no longer a media buy or digital buy. It’s how you deliver the right message in the right platform at the right time to the right target,” Claudio says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“What’s really interesting today is advertisers are much more serious about programmatic than they ever have been before,” says Schmidt, who is MD for North America.

What used to be a small and simple line item has progressed to Cadreon clients taking programmatic so seriously they feel the need to contemplate their own marketing ad tech stack, Schmidt explains in this interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere!

Cadreon augments its own datasets with what its clients bring to the table to find the highest value audiences, making sure it can not only plan but activate based on the data. This avoids the use of standard proxy metrics like reach and frequency or generating ratings points, according to Schmidt.

Beyond cultivating its own data to use with that of its clients, Cadreon works to foster cooperation among clients.

“For example, if you have an advertiser that has sale point data because of customer loyalty, how can you bring that to a CPG that’s trying to measure convenience type of sales,” Schmidt says.

Clients can leverage their own datasets not just for their own investments but can also use such second-party data “to generate revenue that they’ve never seen before.”

One of the best aspects of the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat for Schmidt is that it represents an amalgamation of “really progressive, forward thinkers that come from every spectrum of the ecosystem”—from data to media owners to agencies.

“What was really fun was yesterday was the panel of major broadcasters telling what they’re doing in the advanced TV space, in particular the news with the partnership across Fox, Turner and Viacom,” says Schmidt. “To me that was great to be with those individuals the day after a major announcement and have the opportunity to peek under the hood and really understanding what they’re doing.”

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The industry has been talking about this around the fringes but hasn’t used the data in a monetizable way to either trade or to drive that value,” Liberty Global’s MD for Advanced Advertising & Data, John Paul, says in an interview at the Beet Executive Retreat 2017 titled Video Everywhere: The Transformation of Media & Advertising. “And there’s a much bigger story there.”

Paul likes the term “attention economics” because the bottom line is understanding Liberty’s customers engagement with content, or “What’s really going on behind it,” he says in response to a question from Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., the inventory and supply chain management company serving premium publishers.

As CNBC reports, Liberty recently announced fourth quarter results that included a 198% increase in revenue in Latin America and the Caribbean, driving the company’s stock price up more than 15% in one day. During 2016, Liberty added 946,000 new European subscribers and 94,000 organic Latin American and Caribbean division subscribers.

While understanding data and its implications in the marketplace is a must given the current competitive environment, it’s not rocket science, according to Paul. “What we’ve learned mostly out of this is that we don’t need to be PhD data scientists to get the value out of this,” Paul says. “Most of the value that’s being generated not just within our activities but what we’ve observed in the United States, is actually fairly basic applications of data.”

The ongoing rollout of Liberty’s EOS set-top boxes will enable addressable in markets where the company has yet to plant its flag. Liberty is up and running in Belgium, plus it offers video on demand and dynamic ad insertion in the UK, Latin America and Puerto Rico.

Latin America is a particularly special market for Liberty because it’s selling other channels’ advertising, “So they have skin the game and a real reason to generate this value,” Paul says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques.  The event and series is presented by Videology and 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

One key competitive advantage is that it only charges advertisers for impressions that garner a 75% view-through rate, its Group Director of Advanced Advertising, Jamie West, says in this interview with Beet.TV. West was one of some four dozen advertising and media leaders who gathered for the Beet Executive Retreat 2017 titled Video Everywhere: The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

Sky is Europe’s largest entertainment company, serving the UK, Austria, Germany, Ireland and Italy, West explains in response to a question from Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., the inventory and supply chain management company serving premium publishers.

“When you think about Sky from an advertising perspective, we’re most known for our advanced advertising products and scale,” says West.

As The Drum reports, Sky takes an agnostic approach to competing for advertising budgets not only with the likes of ITV and Channel 4 with with digital giants. “We as a broadcaster and an innovator have to compete head-to-head and toe-to-toe with the likes of Facebook and Google to truly compete in the digital age,” he told The Drum.

Asked by Swartz about the biggest change to Sky’s business over the last three to four years, West cites data enablement. It’s been a driving force behind not only Sky AdSmart but also Sky AdVance, which West describes as the ability to serve ads in a digital environment “as the result of some kind of consumption, whether viewing to apps or programs.”

The third pillar of the company’s operations is its analytics capabilities, including its viewing panels that now reach some 3- 3.5-million households and provide insights into second-by-second viewing. “With that appended to device ID’s and IP addresses means that we can serve ads across the whole digital estate as a result of that viewing consumption,” says West.

With Sky AdSmart, advertisers are charged only for impressions that have a 75% view-through rate. “On a 30-second commercial, that will be something like 20 seconds of incremental value versus some of the digital players that charge on one or three seconds,” West says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques.  The event and series is presented by Videology and 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

You also get to experience a sense of shared success—whether the topic is television audience guarantees, addressable advertising, or new offerings from the likes of Hulu, Innovid and Spotify, according to Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. and the self-described Dean of the Faculty of the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat, which was sponsored by Videology with 605.

In keeping with longstanding tradition, in this video Swartz gives a brief recap of two days of industry give and take in a venue that eschews divisiveness for camaraderie and shared success.

This year’s Retreat was truly a global affair, with the presence of experts from Liberty Global, Sky TV and others. But for Swartz, there was something more basic at play.

“How blessed I am to have such amazing colleagues,” she says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques.  The event and series is presented by Videology and 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.