“It will be a responsible commercial load based on fan feedback and research, and what fans see as a fair exchange,” Joe Hogan, executive vice president of sales and marketing at WarnerMedia, said in this episode of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum. “Expect us to find a way to participate with as many advertisers as possible.”

In a conversation with Catherine Sullivan, chief investment officer of North America for Omnicom Media Group, Hogan discussed a key issue facing her clientele: measurement of reach and frequency among media platforms including digital and linear TV. Improved measurement would help to make media buys more efficient.

“Folks are realizing that all data are not created equal,” Hogan said. “Working together to bring data sets where we can will lead us into a much more progressive position than we’ve been historically.”

The subscription video on demand (SVOD) version of HBO Max costs viewers $14.99 a month for commercial-free viewing, while the AVOD version’s price remains to be determined. WarnerMedia aims to reach 75 million to 90 million subscribers to HBO Max by 2025.

You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB.  The series is presented by 605 and Magnite.  For more videos please visit this page.

WarnerMedia is restructuring its operations as advertisers demand from linear TV the same kind of flexibility they get from digital video platforms. Parent company AT&T in April announced plans to merge WarnerMedia with its advertising unit Xandr.

“The idea of combining Xandr with WarnerMedia is really what the customers want,” Joe Hogan, executive vice president of sales and marketing at WarnerMedia, said in the latest installment of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum. “They want our linear inventory to behave a little more like digital in terms of flexibility and real-time measurement, and the ability to shift and pivot. The Xandr data and analytics strengths allow us to move toward the similarities between digital and linear inventory.”

In a conversation with Catherine Sullivan, chief investment officer of North America for Omnicom Media Group, Hogan discusses how the idea of flexibility encompasses everything from the ability to swap out ad creative quickly to shifting spending among its different platforms for premium video.

“We would like … to be able to move into behavioral targeting that allows us that real-time flexibility,” Hogan said. “there’s work to do on the system side in terms of our having functionality to do that, but these conversations around flexibility will get us there faster.”

WarnerMedia’s network brands include CNN, HLN, TNT, TBS, TruTV and Cartoon Network, along with digital media platforms such as Otter Media and Bleacher Report.

You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB.  The series is presented by 605 and Magnite.  For more videos please visit this page.

Marianne Gambelli, President of FOX Advertising Sales, sees Tubi as an opportunity for advertisers to reach younger audiences who are hooking up their TVs directly to the internet instead of paying for a cable or satellite subscription.

“Tubi delivers a younger, cord-cutter, cord-never audience that we just don’t reach on broadcast,” Gambelli said in an interview for the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum. “It fit perfectly with Fox’s assets.”

Tubi’s ads are shown in “pod” segments with fewer interruptions than on linear TV, which has longer ad blocks that are well suited for sports, news and other live programming, Gambelli said in a discussion with Catherine Sullivan, chief investment officer, North America, at Omnicom Media Group, about the advertising marketplace.

They agreed that “subscription fatigue” is a concern as the streaming media market gets crowded with paid services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Disney+ and ESPN+, among others. AVOD can provide high-quality programming without burdening households with another subscription fee.

Tubi this month appeared for the first time at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2020 NewFronts, a presentation that wasn’t planned earlier this year. The pandemic led the IAB to reschedule its annual week of sales presentations by digital content platforms from March.

That change in timing worked in Tubi’s favor after its acquisition that month by Fox, which has ample experience in upfront sales, as noted by Adweek.

Tubi touted its lineup of kids and family programming, as homebound parents seek shows that are safe for children. Tubi plans to stream shows from Lego, Mattel and the “Garfield” comics franchise. It also will carry animated series like “Henchmen,” “Monster Family,” “Big Fish & Begonia” and “The Magic Brush.”

In addition, Tubi this year will expand into Spanish-language programming with the launch of Tubi en Español, which will have more than 800 titles, Variety reported.

You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB.  The series is presented by 605 and Magnite.  For more videos please visit this page.

TV marketplace is moving inexorably to an “audience-based” world.   It’s time to move past the way things have been done for 40 years and look at the way it could be in 12 months, she urges.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.  

All of that action presents an opportunity for Omnicom, which has been investing heavily in streaming and connected TV over the last few years, according to Sullivan.

“I only see that accelerating,” she tells Beet.TV during a remote BeetCam interview. “We’re excited about the opportunity to bring this all together, regardless of how a consumer is watching content. They have the ability to watch it linearly and digitally, and when you layer in behavioral targeting, that could be the holy grail in terms of getting linear to act more digitally and remove some of the friction.”

Omnicom works with Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising company, which is working with AMC Networks, Disney and WarnerMedia in a partnership announced in March to work toward a new linear buying and selling solution. Through that partnership, tools that Omnicom Media built with Xandr to facilitate more advanced linear targeting and measurement will be adopted by major media companies.

“They’ll be one asset for us to go push the envelope for demographic CPMs in the audience-based world,” says Sullivan of Omnicom’s work with Xandr. “Most media companies are finding new meaning, and understanding that in order to compete for the full funnel of dollars out there, they’re going to have to get into audience-based buying and targeting.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

“There’s a lot going on and as a result, I think you as brand need a very clear and concise message. To make sure that what you’re portraying your brand to be, what the attributes are, what the value of that brand is to be very clear,” Sullivan adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

These are the attributes that people are looking for in the broader space of news and information. “They want clear, concise information” informed by fact checking. “They really pay attention now more and more.”

Research done by Omnicom shows that 60% of the people they polled “are paying more attention to where they get their news from, the credibility of that news organization, the fact checking that is done. From a brand perspective, make sure that you are also telling a very true and reliable account of who you are and make the message simple for the consumer.”

Noting that “the news sometimes is just hard to watch,” Sullivan points to vehicles like CNN’s Great Big Story and branded content studio Courageous as examples of how news is a very broad category beyond the minute-by-minute, oft-volatile headlines. Viewers desire “the ability to learn something new. The ability to get a story that you knew nothing about the topic. They have a voracious appetite to get out there, see the world that they can’t actually maybe physically see. I think as news organizations are branching out into that.”

The more that news organizations are able to tell great stories beyond just the headlines, the more they can satisfy the “tremendous appetite” for reliable information about things like health, fitness, travel, food, music and sports, according to Sullivan.

Research shows that 80% of all Millennials are getting news and information from apps and from social media. “That alone is telling you what’s out there. It’s not just about politics and not just about current affairs. It is about all those other things I just mentioned.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference, Sullivan speaks about AT&T as a client and how she perceives Xandr’s blueprint for innovation going forward.

“I love the fact that they took a look back in order to take a look forward by using Alexander Graham Bell, and then seeing where the company is going and the logo they came up with. I think they are the future,” says Sullivan.

Omnicom Media Group  is “lucky enough to represent AT&T as their agency of record and I will tell you that having them as a client consistently keeps us on our toes. Constantly thinking about the future and where the business is going,” she adds.

A veteran of both Disney ABC and NBCUniversal, Sullivan says she gets where Xandr is heading. “They have the opportunity to leapfrog and really be at the forefront of what a media company looks like going forward. So I find it fascinating.”

Having heard AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson talk at the conference, Sullivan says the audience was privy to insights about an industry “that 18 months ago we really didn’t have a lot of insight to. He certainly is a person who knows what he wants and he’s going after and I think they have a great roadmap for success.”

The most pressing goal is to make TV more like digital and, in the process, smarter, according to Sullivan. It starts with helping clients get a better read on who they are trying to reach “because for so many of them, I think that’s one of the hardest things to establish.”

Asked about the utility of addressable TV ads, she says that targeting layer added to the medium’s huge reach has produced “really good results” in her agency’s testing over the past couple of years.

“I do think that all of our clients are realizing that, if not all of their campaign but certainly anywhere from thirty to sixty percent of their campaign, they’ve got to start understanding the audience that they’re really trying to target in order to stop having this be a test and learn and actually have it be a practice that they do every single time they go to market.”

This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.