These and other insights emerged from a discussion about enhancing the value of traditional TV at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat. Moderated by MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel, it featured Arthur Mimnaugh, Head of Advanced Advertising for Adobe, and Marc Siegel, the CRO at advanced TV provider Simulmedia.

Siegel described the process of using advanced data sets to both predict where people are going to be watching TV and reaching them in a cost-efficient manger. Finding untapped audience potential can be counter-intuitive, as in “We’re seeing that if you’re a sports enthusiast, there’s plenty of those watching the cookie channel,” Siegel said.

The goal for Simulmedia is to generate unique audience reach by gauging how many new people a particular ad inventory unit will bring to an advertiser. This is typically a complement to an advertiser’s Upfront or base buy.

“There’s certainly a wide debate on what the right attribution model is,” Siegel said. “There is not a one-size-fits all when it comes to measurement.” It can range from a direct-to-consumer brand with lots of data to work with to those in consumer-packaged goods where data sets can have “a little less fidelity.”

Mimnaugh explained how Adobe helps marketers extend the information they already know about the users they already have in order to improve their viewing experiences. “One big area of focus is the collective group and the value of it,” he said in a reference to Adobe’s Device Co-Op, a network to brands to work together to better identify consumers across digital touch points. “So you can look at ad sequencing and targeting and other types of storytelling, when you’re merging that between what you’re going to do on traditional linear versus what’s actually happening on digital.”

Asked by Spiegel how advanced is the conversation about consistent consumer ID’s, Mimnaugh said, “I think we are seeing more and more of the notion of a common ID. It’s a process.”

For his part, Siegel noted that Simulmedia isn’t in the personally identifiable information business. “What we’re seeing is CRM’s collapsing with DMP’s identifiers and being able to transfer that over to linear has been a huge move,” he said.

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.

When MDC launched Assembly three years ago, it combined the prowess of TargetCast, RJ Palmer and Doner Media under one roof. Lee joined in 2015 from MediaVest, where he had spent 16 years and seen enough silos.

“We had a lot of leeway to build what we need in the marketplace versus inheriting what’s already there,” Lee, who is EVP of Investment at Assembly, says in this interview at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat. “Having everything under one roof helps us build a pipeline that goes through the entire company in sharing, accessing and analyzing the data.”

Lee’s background is in traditional TV video landscape, where there was far less data to inform decision making. “We have more information than before in seeing what networks, what dayparts, what spots are working harder for us,” he says. “I’m excited about having more data available to me in the way I activate.”

Having all teams under one roof is another plus. “I sit very close with the analytics team to see what’s working, what’s not working. Having everything under one roof helps us build a pipeline that goes through the entire company in sharing, accessing and analyzing the data.”

In addition to having data and analytics at the company’s core, Assembly takes a different tack when it comes to media buying practices that have raised eyebrows in the client community.

“We also strongly believe in building everything around a very transparent model,” Lee 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.

“Guess what happened? Nobody was buying,” recalled Carl Fremont, Global Chief Digital Officer at media agency MEC.

That’s because there was no measurement around digital viewing and digital really couldn’t be compared to broadcast buys, Fremont said in a keynote interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

“It was a complete buyer’s market,” Fremont added, in response to a question from Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz. “It forced us to really look at the measurement pieces of it, both the planning side and the buying side.”

While some things have changed since those first NewFronts efforts, much remains the same in the absence of uniform digital video audience measurement. This is a source of much frustration given the universal appreciation for the sight, sound and motion characteristics of advertising messages delivered every second of the day to ubiquitous screens small and large.

“It’s so fragmented,” Fremont continued. “It’s still a confusing marketplace.”

Swartz sees it more an issue of EQ (emotional intelligence) as opposed to IQ, requiring buyers and sellers to come together and forge solutions. “It’s not about cherry picking problems. It’s about providing solutions,” she said.

Both agreed that removing complexity from the ecosystem would lower costs as more brand marketers embrace addressability and an audience-based world. “We do need one way of measurement. We need one way of planning,” said Fremont.

One of the challenges of planning video buys is there’s no line of sight to inventory, particularly premium video. A system that could look across different platforms like OTT and connected TV would be akin to utopia if buyers could gear the right content to the right consumer experience in the right channel.

To Fremont, programmatic is a key component but not just for the sake of technological convenience. There still must be human interaction among partners whose interests are common but whose approaches vary.

“It has to be done in a dialogue manner,” said Fremont. “The relationship that I think we need to have is less about the complexity of the buy side and more about how do we use data to find audiences at scale.”

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.

Streaming music provider Spotify has no shortage of insights that define its users, as the company’s Head of Video Sales, Brian Danzis, explains in this interview with Beet.TV. Foremost among the tools for understanding what Spotify users are doing and feeling is their persistent identity.

With a user base that’s 100% logged in, there is “no opportunity for fraud on our platform, ever,” Danzis says during a break at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

Always on the lookout for new metrics that are unique to particular users, Spotify sees things on a continuum—from people who prefer the music the company programs for them to those who prefer a la carte selections, and everyone in between.

“These people are very different and we’re learning a lot about what those differences and behaviors are,” says Danzis.

Another metric is discovery, meaning whether users opt for tunes most familiar to them or whether they delight in finding new artists and use Spotify playlists to discover them. Then there is diversity, as expressed through the exploration of new types of cultures and genres, according to Danzis.

Having introduced its video advertising formats two years ago, Spotify “was in a unique position to not have to retrofit our ads to meet the needs of our customers” who were concerned about viewability, he adds. Spotify’s mid-roll ad units, consisting of video takeovers on both desktop and mobile, are served at key points in between songs, “only when an ad is in focus, so we know someone is looking at it,” Danzis says.

Each mid-roll video is billed to advertisers based on Moat’s Human, Audible, Viewable on Complete guidelines, meaning videos are viewable not just a the start or in the middle but upon completion.

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.

This not to say that a common sales and measurement currency is in sight and, in fact, it seems that more pieces are constantly being added to the puzzle, according to Kristin Dolan, the CEO of data and analytics firm 605 and former longtime executive at MVPD giant Cablevision Systems.

“Coming from the business side of it, we still see there’s very specific differences between linear television versus a YouTube view,” Dolan says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising. “But as you watch children and the changing consumption habits of consumers, I don’t know that’s it’s as clearly defined anymore.”

This is because people watch all sorts of video content right alongside traditional serialized content or traditional sports and news. “So I think for the consumer it’s becoming more blurred, but for the industry we have to kind of get there and figure out who we are and what we do,” Dolan says in response to a question from Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.

What’s undisputed is the importance of being able to sell to and measure the impact on an audience at the household level as opposed to census level, “Because of the differences that are occurring in consumption of traditional television along with the insurgence of digital video,” she adds.

Dolan mentions new questions that arise about the potential valuation of things like earned media and sponsorships, where the visibility of an advertiser’s logo within the video stream also needs to be measured. “You have all the pieces but it’s sort of a mishegoss of different things it’s a bit of a mess but it’s all there,” says Dolan, invoking the Yiddish term for craziness.

She also touches on issues like how long cable and satellite TV operators will be able to continue to extract subscription fees from consumers in addition to revenue from affiliates and advertisers when network TV content is no longer as “exclusive” as it once was.

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.

“That’s really exciting because we’ve been investing in our data capabilities and our audience platforms for a couple of years now and we’re ready to put our money where our mouth is,” Colella explains in an interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

In the past, NBCU’s Audience Targeting Platform was available only during the Upfront period, while its NBCUx programmatic linear product was limited to buys in the scatter market. “Now that we’re seeing the great results that we’re getting and we’ve invested in the ability to scale these, we’re turning all of our data products always on,” Colella says.

Part of the momentum comes from advertisers, which are increasingly investing in their own data infrastructures to enhance TV audience targeting. NBCU has a unique position in that advertisers can use their own data and demand-side platforms to buy programmatically on NBCU’s platform, according to Colella.

“At this point in time we know who is consuming the content,” she says. “The value proposition is really to speak to consumers individually and make sure we’re providing the best return on ad spend for our advertisers.”

Given its plethora of properties—ranging from entertainment to sports, news to Hispanic brands—NBCU has no shortage of insights into its more than 100 million unique visitors.

“We know a lot about our consumers, whether it’s what platform are they consuming our content, when are they booking golf games with our properties like Golf Now, what movies are they watching on Fandango and when are they going to the theatre,” Colella 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.

“We’re having the business impact conversation, which I think is great,” says Spiegel, who prefers to talk about metrics than “sausage making.”

It represents a tipping point of sorts, but only for media companies and marketers that fully understand “it’s about the consumer,” he adds. “One of the things that the industry often forgets is that we are chasing where consumers go.”

He cites as an example statistics showing a 50% year-over-year growth of watching television via connected devices like Roku and Chromecast. For Millennials, that represents about 10% of TV consumption in the 18-49 age cohort.

For marketers of consumer packaged-goods, automobiles and retail products, the viewing shift of younger consumers is something to which they need to adapt, according to Spiegel.

“I think what we’re finding is the industry is recognizing the need to catch up and that we’re pretty close to that tipping point,” he says.

Spiegel believes there are more investments being made in “the right things” on both the media seller and buyer side. If sellers don’t have a grip on understanding their audiences at scale and reaching audiences wherever they are, “You’re going to have a harder and harder time attracting the ad dollars you’re looking for.”

Marketers need to spend more time on measuring the way they reach audiences as opposed to just targeting them. “It’s easy to target new people, but if you’re not creating new measurement models, you’re not measuring new things, you’re going to miss that Millennial audience,” Spiegel 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.

To speed advertiser adoption, the three media companies are hoping to make it much easier for brands to define their specific audiences and target them most efficiently, in a consistent manner, with publishers of their choosing. Measurement of campaign outcomes will be reported in a consistent format as well.

“We now have to become very data-centric and almost data experts in order to execute audience-based buys,” Porter says.

Among Turner’s contribution to OpenAP is the more than 100 linear TV, audience-based deals the company has executed to date, Porter explains in this interview conducted at Beet.TV Executive Retreat 2017 by Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. Turner has learned a lot along the way.

“When setting up these campaigns, there’s a lot of friction in defining the audience segment,” Porter says. In addition, there’s the job of “getting the advertiser to help us figure out how we’re going to score that with historical viewership data and build that audience segment.”

As ADWEEK reports, OpenAP’s goal is to create a standard audience targeting platform that will allow for more transparency in audience buying and consistency of data use. OpenAP, which will go into beta this summer, will factor into the companies’ upfront talks this year, according to ADWEEK.

“The OpenAP announcement is huge because it will enable scale and efficiency in the industry,” Porter says.

Turner has been offering “two flavors” of audience targeting guarantees: a double guarantee on both the demo and the audience segment within a single network, and a “true audience impression guarantee across our portfolio,” he adds. “Our core proposition is that we can move through a whole continuum of KPI’s.”

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.