Cadreon uses LiveRamp as a data source, and clients are using this data in a number of different ways. Many are using it to re-engage lapsed consumers or to increase the frequency of purchase from existing consumers. Others are utilizing data to build a lookalike model in order to extend the reach of an audience and find more that look like the best consumers and also sometimes to suppress consumers so that messages can be more controlled to them.

“I think that the most important aspect of addressable is that we have the ability to control frequency,” Hall says. “That’s critical, because as consumers, we want a good experience, and as a brand, we want to ensure that those consumers feel positively about our messaging and our brand. Therefore, controlling for frequency, especially across multiple channels, is critical.”

Hall believes that there needs to be some consumer education around value exchange. It’s up to the industry to inform them that in exchange for relevant advertising, they need to know more about why companies collect data and how they protect it.

“I believe that a full-fledged education is key,” Hall says. “Especially today as legislation like CCPA arrives and consumers read that legislation without truly being aware of that value exchange and what they’re getting as the exchange for their data.”

As far as this legislation, Hall is excited that the industry is in a position where they’re offering consumers transparency and can protect their data. It doesn’t come without its anxieties though. First, there’s a lack of understanding from the legislators and voting base on what the industry actually does with data and why they do it. Secondly, multiple states legislating on privacy is not tenable for companies to be able to comply with.

“We can’t expect that a company can operate efficiently and effectively to comply with fifty different policies,” Hall says. “My belief is that we strongly need a single voice and one policy that governs privacy across the United States.”

Hall feels confident, however, in the accuracy of Cadreon’s data sets. They gather it from Axium, so it is ethically sourced, privacy-compliant, and they can ensure that they’re messaging the intended audience.

“We’re in a good position from that standpoint,” Hall says.

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.

In addition to linear, there’s now addressability available in VOD and OTT among others. This allows companies like Cadreon to build scale, especially when there’s little hesitation from clients. According to Mantel, there’s a lot of education that they’re doing and promotion of addressable because there are a lot of clients still looking at things on a demographic basis.

“There’s a lot of legacy in there that’s tough to break apart,” says Mantel. “But I think because there is that feedback loop that’s available in addressable that traditional linear TV wasn’t able to do, we’re able to provide business outcomes and things that are interesting about the business to sales or foot traffic or brand lift that a national linear TV plan might not be able to deliver.”

As far as tools being developed for understanding performance, Mantel says that there are greater capabilities for data providers to be able to analyze performance data on a more cross-screen fashion.

“Instead of looking at my addressable TV plan in silo, I’m able to then connect it to what I’ve done in digital, what I’ve done in social, what I’ve done in all my other traditional channels, so that we can see the impact of the total plan versus just addressable TV,” says Mantel.

This will continue to be a focus in the year ahead. According to Mantel, streaming will be a hot topic in 2020, too. She believes that there will be more aggregation of streaming platforms, and for those that continue to crop up, it will be all about separating themselves from the current pack.

“It’s going to be a lot about discovery and how consumers are able to find that content. There’s going to be a lot of fragmentation, there’s going to be a lot of clutter happening,” says Mantel. “Marketing plans are going to be important for those specific new publishers that are coming out and who they may end up partnering with that’s bigger within the space.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January.  The series is presented by Samsung Ads.  For more videos please visit this page.

But Erica Schmidt is more interested in “open parks”.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the global CEO of IPG Mediabrand’s unit Cadreon says “identity graph” technology is helping to give ad buyers a sense of a consumer’s holistic identity, displayed across those platforms.

But she also wants open-web publishers to play a stronger part.

For her part, Cadreon is changing its attitude on a core part of ad-tech that emerged over the last few years.

“We just celebrated our 10 year anniversary of Cadreon,” Schmidt says. “We started as a small unit out of San Francisco focusing on one piece of business, and now we’ve grown into a big mature operation with over a thousand employees globally.

One provocative thing that I will say that we’re focusing on is not using the word ‘programmatic’ anymore, because the vernacular has never been quite emblematic or respectful of everything that we can be doing.

“We think that there’s a much bigger future in addressability as well as omnichannel optimization. So, that’s where we’re focusing today.”

 This video is from a Beet.TV series “Unlocking People-Based Marketing on the Open Web presented by OpenX.”   Please find more videos from the series on this page.   

But transparency issues still remain on the publisher side of the industry, according to this agency executive.

“As programmatic has evolved, there has been tremendous inconsistency in how (ad) supply is delivered,” says Sean Muzzy, IPG’s Cadreon North America president, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“The big opportunity there is to create more visibility for buyers and sellers, so that they know what’s fair price. When we’re trying to drive performance for clients … you need to have complete visibility of the supply chain.”

When the transparency outcry first rose to prominence, it was because some agencies stood accused of withholding clients’ media spend because they had struck discounted rates with publishers and failed to disclose them.

Muzzy said both the buy and sell sides are now beginning to use the same language and that consolidation is helping buyers to be able to hold open conversations with their suppliers.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic.   For more videos, please visit this page.

But history will likely show that the opportunity is still just getting started.

“The opportunity is huge,” says Erica Schmidt, the global CEO of IPG Mediabrand’s ad-tech unit Cadreon. “Whilst it’s a significant part of our business, it’s still not at the scale that I would like it to be. In the next 12 to 18 months, there is a huge opportunity to blow this out.

“It’s slightly outside the paradigm of thinking for the client and the paradigm of their measurement and the paradigm of the models they build internally usually around what their media mix should be.”

According to a previous eMarketer forecast, US addressable TV ad expenditure was due to make up just 1.7% of total TV ad spending ($72.72 billion) in 2017. By 2019, that proportion was forecast to grow to 4.0%.

Schmidt says Cadreon is extending its centralized Unity programmatic platform to the TV-buying opportunity.

“I still think we’re only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the opportunity, but we’re pushing really hard on that, and it’s further manifested by the attention that the IPG agencies are giving towards our audience measurement platform and the potential for that to empower them,” Schmidt adds.

She talks about two other key imperatives – spreading Cadreon’s US programmatic success to other IPG agencies around the world, and “moving strategically upstream” so that her agencies can activate clients’ audiences in multiple different channels.

This interview was conducted in New York this week after her keynote presentation at The Drum’s programmatic summit.

This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.

But what does that look like in practice? To the North America MD of IPG Mediabrand’s ad-tech unit, data and creativity are not two separate worlds – they are just two hemispheres of the same planet.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Cadreon Erica Schmidt says the company has been leveraging the principles and the basics programmatic, applying them to the entire digital suite of investment that an advertiser has, to ensure all of its digital activities sit under the management of one singular lens.

It’s that – the ability of an agency to use programmatic to insert itself as a broad-based foundation under a wider range of client activities – which powers the refocus on creative.

“When you have all that under one umbrella or house … we’re now starting to move much more upstream and influencing … not just the media strategy but also the creative strategy,” Schmidt says.

“A lot of the work that (IPG) Mediabrands is doing in terms of the underpinning of data and technology infrastructure means that we are going to be speaking from the same ‘OS’ (operating system) with our sister creative agencies, which means that we’re moving upstream and influencing the creative storytelling on the basis of data.

“Now, we know that creators don’t love data when they come up with their brilliant ideas, but we’re helping move that. And what it means is, the results are 10 to 50 times better than they were without that piece of the pie.”

We’re saying there is an opportunity because we know more than demography and because we know behavioral patterns. What we could then do is segment out so that you can create different types of creatives that’s just based on large audience clusters.

This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.

These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.

Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:

“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”

Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:

“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”

Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:

“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”

Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.

To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”

Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”

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’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.

This is one takeaway from a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016 on the value of advanced TV advertising. Moderated by Tim Hanlon, CEO and Founder of The Vertere Group, the discussion began with an examination of the usefulness of addressable advertising and ended with a critique of legacy ratings.

To Jonathan Bokor, advanced TV is defined as addressable, audience index programmatic and over-the-top. “These are three very distinct and different tools,” observed the SVP and Director of Advanced Media at MediaVest | Spark. “They are not currently easily melded together. That’s where we have to go.”

Larene Mantel, the Director of Advanced TV at Cadreon, said it “might not make sense for all advertisers to be in the addressable space,” a sentiment echoed by Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media. “On average, about a third of every addressable analysis we do for an advertiser the recommendation back to them is this isn’t the right approach,” said Bologna.

Nonetheless, all three panelists agreed that addressable can be a valuable, bottom-funnel tactic and that in general, TV needs to be more effective, efficient and accountable. “This is really an opportunity to deliver more frequency against your best prospects,” said Bokor. “And as a consequence, to spend a little bit less on demo-targeted media that has a lot of waste associated with it.”

But there’s still the top of the funnel, which is why traditional TV isn’t going away anytime soon.

“There’s always going to be that top of the funnel and there’s always going to be the mass GRP’s being pushed there,” said Bologna. “But now that most of these advertisers understand who their real target is, we can balance it.”

Added Mantel, “It’s finding the balance” and for advertisers “not caring where your airing but who you’re reaching and that you’re reaching the right person.”

Asked by Hanlon to reconcile increasingly longer Nielsen ratings windows like C30 with the move toward more targetable impressions, Bologna said that both are needed. “It’s absolutely both. There’s nothing wrong with improving the legacy metrics.”

Bokor was hard pressed to assign a value to C30. “The market forces that are applied to determine the value are really insufficient,” Bokor said. “We have a marketplace that doesn’t truly reflect the actual value of each impression. C30 is going backwards in the extreme.”

Bokor would like to be able to bid on every advertising impression, a situation that Bologna suggested would result in “all hell is going to break loose” because the CPM’s could skyrocket.

“I want a holistic marketplace so that it’s not just about TV,” said Bokor. “I want to look at the entire marketplace of all advertising impressions and find where the value is. And if I can truly get that, then I know exactly what I’m paying for and I might be willing to pay more.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

To Larene Mantel, it’s been “a challenge and refreshing at the same time” to explain advanced TV to the uninitiated. The Director of Advanced TV at IPG Mediabrands’ Cadreon has deep roots in the traditional TV space from stints at ZenithMedia and PHD and so is well suited to the task.

“There are a lot of clients who are digital in background and are willing to do new things in the space and test and learn,” Mantel says in an interview with Beet.TV. “But there are clients that are traditional and very rooted in their traditional TV and their GRP’s. They know that this has worked in the past and if it’s not broken why fix it. It’s very interesting to have those conversations.”

Smaller, digital-based clients approach advanced TV strategies and tactics with a different comfort level, according to Mantel. “They’re not having to spend as much money to reach their target audience and that opens up the door for them to get into TV,” she says in response to a question from interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group.

Some traditional TV advertisers are more sheepish. “Sometimes they have sponsorships and that’s working for them. That’s where they’re having mass awareness,” Mantel says. “Some clients are not focused on a niche audience. They want to reach everyone.”

As addressable TV becomes pervasive, some clients are willing to test and learn, according to Mantel. Hurdles to experimentation include clients that are rooted in their networks and dayparts and knowing exactly where their ads are going to run, which runs counter to how addressable works.

“Changing that mindset and helping them feel comfortable and focusing on the target audience and making sure that you’re reaching the right people is a conversation,” Mantel says.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

That’s bringing in new, smaller advertisers for which TV may previously have been too costly. But one surprising new group of buyers is those from overseas.

At Cadreon, IPG Mediabrands’ ad-tech unit, advanced TV VP Amy DeHaen describes the main three kinds of addressable ad buyers currently in-market:

1. “You have one bucket of clients that is it a complement to their overall schedule and they’re looking at it from a test-and-learn perspective.”
2. “Then you have another bunch of clients that are looking at it from a new way to get involved in TV, (for whom) TV might have been too massive or expensive.”
3. “We’ve also had clients come from an international perspective, utilizing it from the entree in to the United States, which is a new perspective.”

That last group is interesting, because, unlike the previous two, it is little talked about as a constituency benefitting from addressability.

So why are foreign brands flocking to US addressable? DeHaen adds: “Because the US market is so dramatically different from a lot of the other markets, this allows them to come in and take the targeting and the demo they believe they have in their home market and test it in the US market … before they spend a lot of money … before they release their branding in the US, to see if it’s precisely working.”

In this example, the brand in question even ended up having to change its entire US branding after realizing, thanks to addressable, that its creative wasn’t resonating in the US, DeHaen says.

Despite the market movement, DeHaen wants to see greater scale through more addressable households and to see a common reporting mechanism.

This video is part of a series presented by DISH Media Sales. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

To learn more about addressable advertising and its benefits, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report:

Semantics aside, Kumar is focused on answering a particular question from marketer clients. “Have I made a smart decision on my media investment, and why is it smart?” he says in an interview with Beet.TV.

Key to such smart decisions is making sure that creative and planning agencies are working with the same target audiences and that buyers are executing against the same segment.

“What it means for us is this is the way we expect all media to be bought in the future,” Kumar says. “It’s less about whether it’s biddable, whether it’s going through an exchange, whether it’s private inventory. The most important point is are we planning and buying on audiences or are we still stuck with space.”

He notes that advertisers are increasingly willing to pay a premium for media “but we need to know exactly what are we paying a premium for and how is it driving the business.”

Kumar is encouraged by the increasing scale of U.S. households that can be reached with addressable TV advertising. “From our perspective, addressable has been a significant growth area. I think as the number of households scale, that’s where a lot of clients are going to be focused,” says Kumar. “We’ve gone past the tipping point on that.”

The bigger challenge lies in being able to target specific individuals within households as they consume content on a variety of devices through a variety of delivery mechanisms.

“The blockage in the system is how do you measure cross-screen and how are you going to figure out frequency capping across those multiple devices,” says Kumar.

In addressable TV he sees a similar pattern in location-based targeting of digital ads populated by dynamically inserted creative messaging. “I think a lot of that is also driving the growth of household addressable,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.

Matt Greenberg describes Rubicon’s expanded involvement with Cadreon as the latest step in a relationship spanning about three years. Cadreon has been using Rubicon’s non-guaranteed orders marketplace along with its open auction exchange.

Now Cadreon will be accessing “the entire spectrum of the programmatic waterfall, from the unreserved open market to the reserved automated guaranteed space” via Rubicon, according to Greenberg.

Rubicon’s new partnership with Mediaocean aims to help scale automation efforts for the direct buying sector—the largest component of the digital advertising market—through the integration of Rubicon’s Guaranteed Orders product with Mediaocean’s Prisma platform.

“This allows us to access a lot more agencies that are looking for great supply, great partnerships, great publishers for every brand and agency that connects with the Mediaocean platform,” says Greenberg.

The new deals are a far cry from the early days of programmatic buying when it mainly involved remnant inventory.

“As the years have gone along we’ve found publishers and buyers are looking for places to buy premium inventory in well-lit environments,” says Greenberg.

But programmatic is also changing. What once was just a more efficient way to trade ad inventory is now also taking on new capabilities.

“Programmatic has been very science-driven, treating humans as if they were equations,” Cadreon programmatic SVP Marc Lomas acknowledges, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“But now we’re seeing programmatic move up the (marketing) funnel. We’re getting art men looking at the infrastructure an ego ‘how do we use programmatic to tell better stories?’”

Lomas calls the emergence “programmatic creative”, “the fusion of creative strategy and media strategy that adapts to consumer signals in real-time with the inclusion of data”.

Cadreon is IPG Mediabrands’ technology unit, operating its own Audience Measurement Platform (AMP).

A year ago, the outfit teamed up with video ad tech vendor TubeMogul to create a new platform for automating TV ad buying.

Lomas says smartphones can provide consumer signals to inform ad buys on TV and elsewhere.

This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.

Companies tackling and talking about that problem are now commonplace. One such, Cadreon, believes the answer lays in what global president Arun Kumar calls “advanced TV” – a mix of household-level addressable capability, programmatic audience buying and smart TV sets.

“TV ratings are dropping because people are not just watching it on the main screen in the house; they’re watching on all these different platforms,” Kumar tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The measurement systems have not kept up pace.

“There is a lot of viewing that takes place for some of these programmes, but it just doesn’t take place on the channels which we measure. But, as an advertiser, I want to be able to reach these people. You can target them on other platforms. The possibilities are endless.

“So the fascination with ‘Are we going to get cheaper pricing by moving to a programmatic trading model?’… that should not be a topic of discussion. The bigger component is, in a dynamic age where consumers are moving fluidly in their journeys between platforms, how are you going to keep track of that?”

Cadreon’s Audience Measurement Platform (AMP) and advanced TV platform, built with TubeMogul, help advertisers combine multiple data sources to target audience groups.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

He says that inevitable evolution of the new medium will bring new muscle to an already powerful TV.  He see the power of data targeting and television as challenger to even the biggest digital players.

Starting off the interview, Kumar explains the philosophy of the IPG group in advanced television media planning and buying. He says unlike some other companies which buy digital media upfront, IPG buys for specific campaigns, keeping the essential flexibility in the process.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

But that is now changing, with a couple of big agency initiatives to reboot how their dedicated programmatic divisions operate in their wider groups.

Publicis’ VivaKi unit is moving its programmatic staff out in to operating agency stablemates, while IPG Mediabrands’ digital and ad tech group Cadreon is retooling itself to be more of an “incubator” for group technology, executives tell an industry panel.

“Everything about automation, programmatic, data needs to reside in the agencies,” says VivaKi global CEO Stephan Beringer. “It is the paradigm the new business model needs to be built on. If we want to scale this intelligence and integrate it in to the service, we need to push capabilities in to the agencies.”

Cadreon global president Arun Kumar says clients are asking for greater visibility in to programmatic strategies – something that is prompting changes.

“We’ve looked at how we can transform ourselves from being a trading desk in to being an incubator for ad tech and develop platforms that allow our agency partners to access that intelligence,” he adds.

“(We are seeking) greater synchronization between planning and buying. When you democratize that , the media agencies can play a more strategic role.”

We interviewed them at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by Rubicon Project.  Please visit this page for more videos from the series.