The new solution is a “seamless overlay” on ads “so the creative does not need to be touched or modified in any way,” Corbelli explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you are interested in the product, you click one button and information on the mattress company, products, a weekly newsletter can come your way.”

For the past several weeks, Sleep Number has run a commercial allowing viewers to request a promotional offer from the advertiser be sent to the email that is associated with the subscriber’s Hulu account, as Variety reports. According to Hulu research, interactive ad units result in a 50% increase in ad recall and a 45% increase in purchase intent.

Until now, brands that wanted to use television for direct response “really had to deal with technologies that were not in sync with a kind of seamless digital experience that we’re after as consumers,” Corbelli adds. It replaces “the cumbersome, on-screen keyboard for entering your email address with email addresses that the content provider can use with the viewer’s approval. That creates that seamless opportunity for a brand to connect and actually move down that funnel with a customer.”

The overlay can be applied to a host of other direct to consumer interactions, according to Corbelli. Examples include scheduling an appointment with a tax advisor, a new product offering or planning a vacation.

“We’re really excited to bring it to the marketplace with Hulu as our launch partner and I think the market’s going to be pretty excited about it too.”

BrightLine works with all of the major TV networks as they navigate the expanding OTT marketplace while trying to provide brands with non-traditional advertising opportunities.

“What we’ve seen, and which will probably be a part of this equation for a while is that these types of interactions, or the ability for a brand to provide an audience a new kind of experience and seamless interaction, is a premium experience for a brand. Many networks that we work with approach it that way,” says Corbelli.

“How those deals ultimately get struck is very much up to the content provider, but the prevailing CPM pricing model is in play here as well.”

The launch with Sleep Number and Hulu as partners marks the start of “an incredibly exciting year” for BrightLine. Corbelli cites the company’s ability to bring household targeting across the national footprint of all OTT devices “and programmatic and how targeting works in that programmatic context and the role we play.”

Meanwhile, advertising sales rose to just under $1.5 billion from $1 billion. “We’re getting TV’s largest advertisers,” says Naylor, while direct-to-consumer brand revenue grew 86% “and we’re super serving them with some new tools.”

Foremost in that expanding toolkit is an attribution offering from the company owned by Comcast, Fox and Disney plus an ad format that would appear when Hulu viewers pause what they’re watching.

Hulu will develop customized attribution deals depending on the types of customer-relationship data its advertisers can share—information can be matched with customer behavior metrics from Hulu, as Variety reports.

“We can elegantly put our census level data with their census level data” resulting in a “census-to-census marriage of the data to show that an exposure resulted in a sale,” says Naylor.

Working with Telaria, Hulu is enhancing its programmatic private marketplace for ad inventory so that “we can put people in a biddable environment for the most coveted segments.” It’s a closed market because “we’re very protective” to avoid “category collision with our advertisers” and to be able to fully vet the ad creative, Naylor adds.

“Happily, the majority of people choose the advertising-supported Hulu but that doesn’t mean we can just feel free to just jam ads at them. If anything, we have to be as respectful as possible because they’re one click away from going to the commercial-free Hulu.” While the company is “conventional TV with conventional breaks,” it welcomes ads of any duration plus interactive units, working with partners like BrightLine and Innovid.

The “latest kid on the block” that Hulu is beta testing is “a pause ad.” When viewers hit the pause button “we’re going to serve up a little image” but not a display or video ad. “Imagine a Coke can with language like ‘the pause that refreshes.’”

The goal is to exploit the opportunity of “knowing situationally what viewers are up to with kind of a respectful ad execution. It’s an experiment that we can take because of who we are,” Naylor says.

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

Active on both the national and local side, a4 regularly confronts the complexities of trying to help local advertisers, who “don’t have a lot of time and don’t have a lot of bandwidth to deal with multiple parties,” says President Paul Haddad in this interview with Beet.TV.

“So when they talk to someone, they would like to buy a solution for their advertising,” he adds, citing local television, digital video and display, social media and mobile targeting.

With its previous acquisition of Audience Partners, a4 added local, audience-based optimization. What ZAPP360 brings to the table is the mobile targeting piece.

“What we were missing was geo-targeted mobile messaging,” says Haddad, who founded and led Cablevision’s data business, which used census-level audience data from set-top boxes in millions of households in the New York DMA. Netherlands-based Altice acquired Cablevision Systems Corp. for $17.7 billion in 2016.

After testing with ZAPP360 for about a year, “the results were phenomenal and we decided we might as well start adding them to our portfolio. We completed the acquisition two weeks ago and we’re very excited about it.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.

What needs more refinement is marketers’ understanding of specific households for audience targeting and a more uniform way to execute addressable campaigns, Stimmel explains in this interview with Beet.TV. The latter drawback has resulted in “kind of like a Frankenstein approach to audiences,” he says.

With interactive ad units, viewers can act directly to obtain more information. “You don’t have to now log out, log in, write down something and do something later.” As for value and pricing of ad units, “Those things are still being worked out,” Stimmel adds.

The scale of addressability “will be critical,” he says. “As then you funnel down toward that purchase journey, how am I able to then convert that into some sort of action or obviously business outcome that critical to our clients’ business.”

He hopes that addressable ads are heading toward a place “where everybody can come together and understand what that advertising platform is and be able to sell it in a more national, simplified way.”

In the meantime, picking and choosing from different environments and interfaces can mean negotiating many hurdles. “It just becomes incredibly complicated for a media agency, a creative agency, a client to be able to work that way on a campaign-by-campaign basis.”

The same applies to emerging ad formats of varying length and utility, according to Stimmel. “We’re measuring things differently, the methodologies are all different, the ad loads are different. So there’s not one cohesive measurement that we’re working off of. It’s kind of like a Frankenstein approach to audiences.”

Stimmel would like to see more clarity about the characteristics of households for targeting, particularly purchase propensity that can be linked on to sales activity.

“We don’t want to cross the privacy boundary ever, but I really would like to understand exactly what are the type of households that we’re looking at. I think it’s ripe for us to be able to identify more about who these households are, these people, in order to make that even more responsive and get more out of that advertising investment on the back end.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.

Corbelli puts reasons for all those machinations into three buckets: vertical integration on the technology side, reach across screens and distribution points and “the ability to offer great content in this three-screen, streaming world,” the Chairman and CEO of BrightLine says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Originally known for its pioneering dynamic television ad solutions for brands, BrightLine early in 2018 launched DataCast, a unified OTT data platform that enables advertisers to target and measure across mobile, desktop and television screens. DataCast links commonly sought audience segments to TV screens—for example automobile purchase intenders—then identifies specific households within the BrightLine OTT footprint that match the target audience segments. Targeted campaigns using enhanced and/or traditional TV commercials can be sent to those households.

For DataCast, BrightLine’s media partners integrate the company’s technology within their OTT apps across the full OTT device footprint, including FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Samsung, IOS and Android. Household reach is currently 68 million.

Corbelli’s perspective helps to make sense of the seemingly frantic consolidation happening in the TV space. “You see AT&T trying to combine its distribution assets and the content that Time Warner owns. You see the AppNexus acquisition as being part of how digital becomes truly integrated with not just desktop and mobile but also telecom and television.”

She sees something similar happening with “the fight for Fox, as I call it. Very specifically, there’s a content play there, a content rollup, there’s a distribution play. It’s why Sky is as important as it is to Comcast.”

Meanwhile, she considers Hulu as the strongest ad-supported asset “that any media company could own in a space that is exploding. They’ve got 60% of all streams right now in the ad-supported environment. Not surprisingly, it feels a little bit like a free-for-all for who owns Hulu.”

Finally there’s Netflix, which in some quarters is considered to be an eventual convert to ad-supported content. “I think folks like Netflix are in for some challenges with all this consolidation going on,” says Corbelli, noting that Amazon is talking about offering ads on pre-roll. “I think that’s how the models start to shake out. You’re going to see a combination of subscription revenue and ad revenue and you start to see a lot of common models out there.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.

“The impetus is on us now to make sure advertising does not fall behind and keeps pace with all the personalization and seamlessness of the viewing experience,” says Aksman, who is Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of the company best known for dynamic ad solutions.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Aksman discusses the options available to brands for “making commercials smarter” and explains the significance of BrightLine’s new partnership with Cuebiq to attribute commercial exposure and engagement to footfall at stores and restaurants.

In its simplest form, personalization can transform a traditional, static commercial for Benjamin Moore paint that’s delivered to a mass audience. “Now there’s a dynamic overlay on top of that commercial that everybody’s seeing but it’s tailored to me, showing me the location and address and phone number of my local Benjamin Moore store,” says Aksman. “All we’ve done there is just make a TV commercial a little bit smarter so that a viewer can take that next step.”

Further personalization based on viewing location can turn weather into an asset for, say, apparel companies to make product recommendations in an ad overlay relevant to viewer-based conditions or forecasts. Aksman cites the continued growth of third-party consumer data regarding brand preferences, purchases, familial makeup, income and more.

“We’ve built a pretty hefty connected-TV household graph at the home level so we’ve mapped all those segments to the home,” he says.

Within the past week, BrightLine announced a linkup between location intelligence firm Cuebiq and BrightLine’s OTT video ad platform. The companies say that an initial analysis of BrightLine advertisers using Cuebiq’s platform showed an increase in footfall traffic by as much as 24% when exposed to the ads, and by 56% when looking at customers that engaged with the ads in question, as MediaPost reports.

“We’re able to use their footfall attribution technology to measure the impact of an enhanced TV ad,” says Aksman. “When a viewer is exposed to a personalized ad or if they engage with a commercial, our partnership with Cubic allows us to report on what was the actual lift in foot traffic to that retailer that QSR or that restaurant by being exposed and or interacting with that commercial. And I think that is the tip of the iceberg in bringing the power of digital attribution to television.”

Asked about the tradeoff between creative versioning and the expense of producing multiple creative iterations, Aksman says it’s “not all that scalable today until there are better methods of creating versioned video.” There’s more emphasis being placed on versioning the overlays. “That’s pretty simple and turnkey. That’s how you keep it scalable and also efficient.”

BrightLine uses interactive ads to gain attention metrics on viewers “or start moving them down the funnel.” Examples include automotive brands using car colorizers or rotators and Cinnamon Toast Crunch enabling viewers to make one square eat another square.

“In the age of distraction, the agency now knows this percent of people not only saw but actually deliberately spent some time and engaged with the commercial,” says Aksman.

On the sell-side, BrightLine is at the forefront of efforts to increase the value of ads even as ad load reduction means less inventory with which to monetize content. “We see ourselves as the tech enabler for them to bring a tool kit of advanced ad experiences to market. We’re not just the tech provider for that but we’re also providing marketing support and ideation behind the scenes.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.

“What we’ve done is we’ve created a further opportunity beyond enhanced ads at scale for brands to buy household addressable and targeted ads across the entire OTT landscape,” says Jacqueline Corbelli, who is Founder, Chairman and CEO of BrightLine.

In so doing, BrightLine has focused exclusively on major broadcast and cable networks, building a national footprint for full scale across the likes of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, A&E, AMC, Turner and Viacom, among others. Hulu, which represents approximately 70% of ad-supported streaming, is a “very important partner,” Corbelli says in this interview with Beet.TV.

DataCast links commonly sought audience segments to TV screens—for example, automobile purchase intenders—then identifies specific households within the BrightLine OTT footprint that match the target audience segments. Targeted campaigns using enhanced and/or traditional TV commercials can be delivered to those households.

For DataCast, BrightLine’s media partners integrate the company’s technology within their OTT apps across the full OTT device footprint, including FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Samsung, IOS and Android. Household reach is currently 68 million.

“In addition to providing enhanced ads, we are now able to provide a targeting and household addressable solution that is as simple to buy as a thirty-second commercial has been all these years,” says Corbelli.

Because of the way that BrightLine has brought its new technology to market and the data it is able to collect, it can map devices to a home and create “a now 68-million household graph that allows for this type of targeting to occur. And the reason it’s important is it’s a reach extension for household addressable that is bought on the linear side of the TV equation. It brings that OTT layer to the opportunity for brands to get increasingly targeted.

“We talk about one to one. But in the home and where TV is concerned, household addressability is really a much more appropriate way, as advertisers believe, to reach their audience. And that’s what we’ve built,” says Corbelli.

This segment is from a Beet.TV series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos. 

As the Wall Street Journal reports, comScore launched Xmedia a few years ago to measure and de-duplicate viewers across screens, but that product didn’t specify how many people saw the actual ads. Campaign Ratings will launch in beta this September, with support from nearly all media companies and existing customers, including ABC, CBS, Fox, Viacom, Hulu and others.

In this interview with Beet.TV, DeTraglia recalls a time when TV viewing consisted of just one screen “and there was a system that worked” for measuring audiences. “And then everything fragmented very, very quickly.”

While companies were figuring out how to quantify audiences on desktop computers and then mobile devices, “What happened in between there was that living room connected devices really leapfrogged, at least in terms of television content and other video as well, as being a first choice for watching digitally,” explains DeTraglia, who is VP and Head of Research.

As has been the case with linear TV, connected-TV viewing is a shared experience, which has measurement drawbacks.

“None of the data that had existed or the measurement that had existed took that into account. So we were never really able to get a very accurate understanding of the reach of Hulu.”

Thus the company has worked with various companies, including comScore and Nielsen.

“We have this benefit of having first party subscriber level data that we can leverage in a variety of ways, and one of them is working with these third-party companies to use it as a baseline for measuring audience,” DeTraglia says.

Hulu has worked with Nielsen on DAR side for OTT and with comScore on its vCE offering.

To achieve accurate, consistent cross-screen measurement requires “full industry participation, and some are more interested in doing that than others,” she says. “It just takes a very long time. It’s not an easy thing to implement or execute. We believe it’s important to live in a third-party verified world and we know that it’s important to our advertisers.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine.   Please visit this page for additional videos. 

Hulu sees it as the logical extension of what consumers have grown accustomed to on various digital devices like desktop computers and phones—being able to discover product attributes via interactivity, for which it partners with Brightline.

“That’s a little bit more nascent in the living room, but I think it’s just as interesting to consumers to be able to see something and rather than have to go to some other device and find it they can get more information about it right through the living room screen,” DeTraglia says in this interview with Beet.TV. “So far we’ve found the marketplace is really I think sort of excited by it because it offers them the opportunity to utilize it in a variety of ways.”

Interactivity is not just about being able to buy tickets but also about “being able to offer other information about the product right within the ad unit, and we find that people stay in the ad unit longer because there’s other stuff for them to do.”

Hulu considers consumer choice to be “purposeful viewing,” which “tends to have a halo effect on the overall experience.” Advertisers benefit as well, according to DeTraglia.

“When you ad choice and interactivity to all of that, what you get is lifts across all key branding metrics” compared to linear TV, she says.

Not being locked into specific timing of ad pods allows Hulu to accommodate “whatever it is the advertiser wants to put in front of us. And we can sequence them in various ways.”

DeTraglia cites experiments with storytelling within ads, which “tends to work very well because it keeps users engaged with that messaging in the advertising as they’re engaged in the storyline of the program that they’re watching.”

Like other premium video providers, Hulu can match first- and third-party marketer data to its subscriber base. “Obviously we have a really deep understanding of viewing behaviors, so that allows us to target by daypart, by geo, by genre.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine.   Please visit this page for additional videos. 

Reasons for the variations include corporate financial “short-termism,” thinking in narrow silos and measuring campaign performance in ways that aren’t always the most accurate or pertinent.

The panel by media agency Wavemaker was moderated by Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. It brought together Peter Naylor, Hulu’s SVP of Advertising Sales, Twitter’s Managing Director of Media & Entertainment, Jennifer Prince, and Jacqueline Corbelli, the Founder, Chairman & CEO of BrightLine.

Citing Forrester research showing that not all consumers love or hate advertising, O’Connell posited, “My suspicion is that marketers don’t understand this at all.”

Hulu’s research has revealed “a spectrum of ad acceptance,” responded Naylor. “On one extreme end are people who are ad avoiders at all costs. The trap people fall into is that everybody avoids ads at all costs, and that’s just not true.”

According to Naylor, among those who sign up for Hulu on any given day, “The wide majority will take advertising.”

On Twitter, brand marketers “expect to hit consumers because eighty two percent of our users expect to see a message from a brand,” said Prince. Another thing she believes differentiates Twitter is that its advertising is “extremely native, it’s within the timeline and a tweet and so there’s not as much of a separation between ads and content, there is this blend.”

Given its “leaned-in, receptive audience,” Twitter does see marketers thinking a lot about consumers and the consumer journey, according to Prince.

Brightline has taken its cue from the desire of consumers to bring together their experiences with premium video and other content, said Corbelli. Giving credit to Hulu as an innovator, she explained that Brightline got involved “when we started noticing folks like Roku and streaming consoles like Sony PlayStation were vehicles for actually bringing these two things together.”

As for consumer ad tolerance, Corbelli believes “absolutely that viewers will not just tolerate but I think that in certain cases they’ll even embrace advertising. I think the personalization piece of this is really big. Things as simple as geo location and being able to personalize the dialogue a little bit.”

Again citing research, O’Connell pointed out how “highly variable” consumers are in their opinions of personalization. While some “super- progressive,” digital savvy people are “totally okay with personalization in exchange for something useful to them,” other super-progressives “are absolutely opposed to it.” O’Connell’s bottom line: Don’t assume we should always use technology in a certain way.

Naylor coined the term “short-termism” when asked about the barriers to widespread if not uniform adoption of approaches to advertising that do not repeat mistakes made early in the digital media world. “I think short-termism is a real problem when publicly traded companies have to lead ninety-day by ninety-day existences. When CMO’s are so nervous that they continually pout their accounts into review,” Naylor said.

Another symptom is “whatever you can measure you measure, irrespective of whether it’s the right thing to measure,” for example the “rush to last-click attribution and you lose sight of what drove the demand and you only give credit to the last click,” Naylor added.

Explaining Twitter’s approach to test-and-learn, Prince acknowledged that some features it’s rolled out have not been without controversy. “Like when we went from 140 characters to 280 characters and there were a few haters. Maybe more than a few. It has really done wonders for those who need more space to communicate.”

Corbelli pointed to the disparity among the top TV networks, each of which see things from their own, individual perspective and act accordingly. “They all are thinking about this directionally the same, but in terms of how they execute on it, pretty different. And they want to stay in charge of those decisions. So I think that for now, the experience in terms of personalization is going to vary depending on what content you’re watching, where and when.”

“In an OTT (over-the-top) environment, it’s a more dynamic environment,” Rob Aksman, founder of BrightLine, which enables interactive ads for brands on interactive TV sets, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“EMarketer says something around 34m homes are actively using a connected TV (and they are) increasingly switching inputs – some people even cancelling cable together – to get custom video environments. The more connected TV eyeballs, the more of a need there is for advertising.”

He was interviewed by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, for Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

One such firm is New York-based BrightLine, which just completed the raise of a $6 million investment round.

Sales director Lana Urso tells Beet.TV: “We augment services for agencies but also have our own design team.”

This segment was taped aboard the AT&T AdWorks yacht during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.  Thank you AT&T for the floating set.

Please find more Beet coverage of the festival here.