The narrow range of options was the focus of a Beet.TV panel discussion at CES 2017 conducted at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. It brought together representatives of 605, NBCUniversal, Omnicom Media Group and Turner Broadcasting.

Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink started the dialogue by stating “We don’t seem to making a lot of progress” in using data to deliver specific creative iterations to specific consumers.

“Some of that comes from the fact that measurement is still inherently broken,” said 605 CEO Kristin Dolan. She added that even measured at the segment level, a panel is not going to tell you whether your creative is good. “It will tell you that the one person who represents all the other people that are supposed to look like that person thought the creative was good or wasn’t good,” said Dolan.

Spiegel opined that dynamic ad targeting is “a soap box we should all be championing. You’re filming all this great video content. It seems way too hard to create five versions and be able to run them.”

Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, suggested reversing the cart and horse lineup. It would involve finding a way to identify an audience or segment and deriving insights based on certain things that are attracting that segment. This would both inform the creative brief and how the creative should be delivered.

“As opposed to we have the creative and which one should we allocate it to. I don’t know how that gets done,” Strober said.

“It’s about starting from the beginning of the process, which is the creative brief, and thinking about the audience targets and thinking about them together,” said Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group. This would yield “the ability to incrementally check your work along the way.”

There is much inertia supporting the current status quo of television ad buying, said Strober, wherein much inventory is purchased in advance every year during the Upfronts.

“We have to move to a more campaign-based approach where we’re constantly measuring and optimizing and iterating,” said Strober. “That’s just not there yet because of the measurement and the ROI metrics.”

To Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCU, it’s about taking baby steps toward a common goal. “We have to crawl before we run,” she said, adding that getting her clients to work with her to understand which format they want to use with which targeting capability “I think would be a tremendous improvement.”

Dolan related how a couple of years ago, her Cablevision Systems Corp. was assisting Madison Square Garden promote a boxing match featuring a Russian boxer. No one had considered running a Hispanic version of a TV spot until Dolan pointed out that “Hispanics buy tickets to boxing and watch it on TV.”

The eventual Hispanic version of the ad created “a lift because we took a product that we knew appealed to a particular segment,” said Dolan. “Just even getting people to consider doing something different from the way they’ve always done it isn’t that much more expensive and can result in some learning.”

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Cable programmers have always gone narrow in the sense that their individual networks tended to be much more niche content designed around specific audiences,” notes Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer for Omnicom Media Group.

Over time, the individual networks got rolled up into giant network groups, Steuer explains in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017.

“The giant network groups tried to sell everything bundled together. That meant that it wasn’t as easy to target the single audiences anymore,” says Steuer.

Now companies like NBCUniversal, Turner, Viacom and others are combing their ad inventory pools to help identify audiences of interest to brands.

“We’re thrilled whenever it’s easier to buy targeted advertising because it’s more efficient for our clients,” Steuer says. “The challenge is that if each of the network groups does it independently we’ll end up with a hodge-podge of different ways to buy similar audiences.”

Because media agencies want to reach their target TV audiences wherever they happen to be, programmers want to make them easier to buy.

“We’re early days,” says Steuer. “We think everyone will do it and what we need to figure out how to do on the buy is how to plan and buy across all those different audience-based strategies.”

Asked about the state of audience measurement across various forms of TV delivery like over the top, on demand and linear, Steuer concedes that its “really challenging” to combine viewership across different channels. “I think we’re evolving toward better solutions. I know Nielsen is trying with Total Content Ratings.”

Steuer hopes to see greater ability to target on-demand ad inventory, along with “more impression-based measurement based on real delivery.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

From year to year at CES, Shlachter sees a lot of incremental changes in technology, particularly regarding connected vehicles and homes. “For me what’s most interesting is what can we do with that? It’s been a promise for a long time and I think it’s going to become more of a reality now, particularly between the car and the home and the person itself,” he says.

Uniform standards for targeting people with ads one-on-one and measuring the results will provide “better value for consumers and make more use out of the space that we play in,” he adds.

The convergence of the digital and traditional media worlds now more than ever is opening a whole new world of opportunities from a creative standpoint, according to Shlachter. However, new approaches are needed to move things along.

“We have to get past the days of trying to fit one creative concept into a lot of different screens and formats, because we see that it doesn’t work as well,” Shlachter says before acknowledging that it’s hard to create a lot of native experiences for every single platform across a 360-degree media plan.

Finding better ways to integrate data and technology to automate creative delivery will be more useful than trying to “create some one-size-fits-all messaging that may help us scale but may not pay off,” he says.

In the meantime, Shlachter is excited about the one-to-many approach that Verizon took when partnering with other companies to live-stream the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2016. As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCUniversal produced a live stream of the parade separate from NBC’s broadcast that was shot with 360-degree cameras and viewable on Verizon’s YouTube page.

Calling it a “monumental effort,” Shlachter says Verizon garnered “a ton of positive feedback and sentiment from everything we were able to measure.”

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“It’s all about innovation, even in years like this when there hasn’t been something terribly disruptive to the industry,” de Nardis says in an interview with Bee.TV. “I think innovation is the key word and that is what attracts so many of our clients to come here each and every year.”

Once again, 2017 is the year of virtual reality “because we’ve been saying it for the last three years,” de Nardis muses. “It hasn’t been yet,” with the exception of limited audiences for the emerging technology, he adds. “I don’t think we’ve yet arrived to the final consumers because of the lack of content and amazingly expensive cost of the hardware.”

He lists three things that he particularly appreciates this year, “even if they’re not new.” The first is driverless vehicle opportunities. “Every year it gets closer to where we need it to be. In comparison to just a couple of years ago, it’s absolutely fantastic,” de Nardis says.

He calls self-driving vehicle technology “a major revolution” because it has the potential to create time. “It’s good to give back 60, 90 minutes of time every day to people over the years. People doing it for pleasure or doing it for work,” he says.

Moreover, “It’s going to change the look, feel and organization of our cities.”

The second is evolution is the Internet of things, because every year it gets a bit closer to what every family needs at home. The end goal is to realize “amazing opportunities for us to connect the brands we represent with some specific moments and partnerships at the moment of consumption,” says de Nardis.

In third place in his rankings is the application of smart data, sensors and other technology in everyday products. He cites the example of L’Oreal’s “smart” hair brush, which counts strokes, analyzes the force used when brushing and recommends the company’s Kérastase products, as CNBC reports.

Such products show the promise of connectedness for a variety of daily activities, “Even the most banal one, brushing your hair,” de Nardis says. “There is a value out of it, even at 200 dollars. But eventually we go down to 50.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Too often, marketers forget about marketing 101,” the company’s Director of Product Marketing says in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017. “Consumer psychology. What do consumers want? What do they need? What is the hierarchy of needs?”

He suggests marketing concepts from the 1950’s and 1960’s can be useful when trying to create personalized experiences.

“Also what’s lost is the creative aspect of it,” he adds. “How do you create a better environment for consumers so that they’re more likely to make a purchase decision or more likely to have brand affinity for a particular product or service or company?”

Too often, the focus is solely on data and “we don’t focus on what people want,” says Foster. “Sort of the basics of marketing.”

While Adobe itself is slightly less than a quarter-century old, it seems to have been listening to what a lot of people in the tech space desire, particularly when it comes to video. Its 2016 acquisition of TubeMogul is the capstone in the creation of a “three-legged stool” to neatly capture both the demand side and supply side—and most points in between.

“Historically we’ve have a data management platform, we’ve had a performance marketing engine with Adobe Media Optimizer but we haven’t really had a demand side platform focused on brand building through video,” Foster explains. “And that’s really what we’re trying to accomplish with the TubeMogul acquisition.”

The next phase of the company’s video evolution is connecting the buy side through TubeMogul with the sell side via Adobe Primetime TV Media Management. This, says Foster, will create “tighter, stronger connections between media buyers, TV buyers, video buyers and broadcasters and MVPD’s that have professional video inventory to sell.”

Adobe is now equipped to assist brands from content ideation through to production and distribution video distribution, all the way through to measurement and monetization.

For the company’s media customers, Adobe’s primetime footprint and authentication touches over 99% of U.S. pay TV households, according to Foster. “That’s a significant footprint in premium inventory,” he says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

This was the consensus of media sellers and audience targeting specialists who participated in a Beet.TV panel discussion about commercial loads during CES 2017 held at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink began by asking panelists what the TV world might look like five years from now, given the low tolerance many people have for watching commercials in the digital realm and their ability to avoid them via subscription services.

Kristin Dolan, CEO of 605, which provides data-driven, census-based audience measurement solutions, commended Turner Broadcasting’s drive to reduce commercial load. “I think it puts the customer first to say were not going to jam however many minutes in an hour,” said Dolan. Observing that “advertising is part of our existence, it’s not going anywhere,” Dolan said she doesn’t perceive outright antipathy toward advertising. “The more relevant the advertising is the more it actually could have a positive impact on the brand that’s surrounding the ad that’s being presented,” she said.

“We take a long-term view,” said Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, before citing audience demographics showing how much people ages 18 to 24 watch on-demand programming as opposed to live TV. “What’s going to happen five to ten years from now when they are largely the key audience that most of our clients want to reach? If they go to linear TV and it still looks like it does today, we’re going to lose them.”

The key is to start to figure out now how to show fewer commercials “but each exposure or opportunity is incredibly impactful to the marketer and ultimately to the consumer,” Strober said.

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group, noted that the main objection to digital ads is their intrusiveness. It’s not that consumers don’t understand the value exchange at play when watching ad-supported content, according to Steuer.

“I think part of it is just about having a reasonable conversation with consumers at scale and looking at the data about what’s working and what’s not working and adjusting the mix accordingly,” said Steuer.

Asked by Spiegel to imagine a TV world in which ad delivery and performance is based on impressions as opposed to units, Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCUniversal, said “It’s just a matter of time. In a couple more years the television on the wall will be able to deliver advertising in the same way that you get it on your phone or that you’re getting it on your tablet or on your laptop.”

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We’re just beginning to experiment with one company that’s involved in that,” Geraci, who is President of National Broadcast for the media agency group, says in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017.

He describes it as “sort of a rethinking of the whole Canoe idea,” a reference to the 2008 launch of Canoe Ventures by a half dozen major cable operators. The initial concept of the company was to develop interactive TV ads, as ADWEEK reports.

The modern iteration would direct advertising not on a local basis as with addressable, which is limited to two minutes of local advertising inventory, but on a national basis based on what’s known about specific households.

It could involve “ten versions of a particular brand advertisement that has different meanings for different individuals,” Geraci says. “But really it would be in that one commercial position that the advertiser owns with a particular national network.”

As for local addressable TV ads, “As you get these distribution platforms to be bigger and of greater scale that can then precisely target households and you’re covering most of the U.S., it becomes a bigger idea,” he adds.

On the subject of commercial load within programming, Geraci lauds the efforts of media companies like Turner that are experimenting with fewer commercials in addition to offering brands sponsored content opportunities that are complementary with programming.

“I give them credit for trying to address this head one and de-commercialize at least one of their networks in a major way to see if that’s going to improve viewership,” Geraci says. “Let’s face it. If they build ratings by lowering commercial load then they’ve got more GRP’s to sell. So in their view I guess it’s a practical business model to try and do that.”

As for branded content that fills in as a substitute for traditional ads, Geraci says Omnicom has experimented with it but the format is limited to advertisers that have “a certain specific message” that ties in well with the content.

“When you’ve got that and can make that work, it’s sort of lightening in a bottle and it’s a wonderful execution to take advantage of. But I don’t think it’s a large scale business that just about everybody can be involved in,” Geraci says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In the meantime, in an interview at CES 2017 with Beet.TV, Weather Company CEO and GM Cameron Clayton offers some advice for brands thinking about dipping their toes into cognitive advertising.

“Keep every audio recording your company collects. Don’t throw anything away if it’s voice related,” Clayton says. “Your call center logs, keep them all. Those are the crown jewels to train artificial intelligence in the future and to understand peoples’ intentions.”

The year 2017 will bring the debut of what Clayton describes as IBM’s cognitive media platform. It will put the power of Watson directly into the hands of marketers seeking to better understand consumer intent and create content that satisfies the intent.

“You bring your data set, we bring our data set,” Clayton explains. “We bring the artificial intelligence cognitive capability to help people make better decisions and personalize content across all screens, all devices.”

Among IBM’s main assets is scale, as evidenced by the 40 billion forecasts The Weather Company executes each day, consuming about 44 petabytes of data (one petabyte is 1 million gigabytes). While companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others also have massive scale, a big differentiator for IBM is cognitive capability.

“It’s the ability to understand with natural voice interaction and to learn and to access all kinds of data,” Clayton says. “Structured data, just like database, and unstructured data like tweets in twitter.”

IBM enables brands to scan the data to understand divine consumer intentions when interacting with natural language voice.

For The Weather Channel, it could be someone asking whether they will need an umbrella on a particular day. “What I really want to know is it going to rain on Saturday, but I didn’t ask that,” says Clayton. “The response from us is there’s an 80 percent chance it will rain on Saturday so yes, you should probably take an umbrella.”

IBM isn’t looking to replace humans altogether, according to Clayton. “Some companies are working on solutions to try and replace us. We foundationally believe it’s about helping people make better solutions,” Clayton says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Unlike digital, we’re actually working in a futures market,” says Michael Strober by way of explaining Turner’s audience targeting process. “Everything we do has to be projected or estimated looking forward.”

During a break at CES 2017, Strober relates in an interview with Beet.TV how Turner has been providing advanced audience targeting for several years and has over a hundred different schedules to show for it.

“What we’re finding is that we can actually zero in on the audiences that our clients care about most in a linear fashion,” Strober says. “It doesn’t have to be addressable. We can do it in traditional linear television.”

Turner uses a proprietary algorithm and a model that provides audience estimates using historical indices. In addition, the company takes into account “a myriad of other variables” to identify desired audiences, according to Strober.

“The Algorithm goes through our inventory and will help isolate those particular shows limited to the half hour of each day of the week where a marketer’s audience would most likely be,” Strober explains.

The resulting schedule is trafficked in the same way as a traditional Nielsen demo-guaranteed schedule.

“When we get the findings afterward, we usually see a significant lift in the intended audience they care about most. On average it’s been about a 21 percent lift in that target,” says Strober.

Asked how Turner determines business outcomes resulting from a particular schedule, Strober says it requires fusing consumer behavioral data with viewership data.

“The fact that we can now apply data and analytics to linear television in ways that have never been done before I think is an enormous opportunity for both our clients and our agency partners to get on board,” Strober says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That’s the worldview of Michael Zimbalist, CMO of marketing technology company Simulmedia, as he takes in the activities at CES 2017.

“The future will come,” Zimbalist says. “The future will be maybe like one to one, maybe not. One never knows. But there are so many things we can do today to optimize linear.”

Simulmedia does predictive planning informed by a single-source data set of viewing behavior from set-top boxes and smart TV’s plus purchase behavior. “We don’t have to be constrained by 40,000 plus Nielsen households,” Zimbalist says.

The company buys inventory from networks and cable operators to use TV as an “acquisition vehicle” for brands to gain new customers.

“When people talk about data, the most valuable data that any brand has is their customers,” he says. “The one asset that can’t be commoditized in this day and age if you’re a brand is your first-party data.”

The concept is to look forward instead of backward, according to Zimbalist. “We can now watch and see and anticipate what people are going to watch on TV, not just look retrospectively at what they’ve watched in the past to make a plan,” he explains.

Predictive modeling of viewing behavior as viewing behavior changes is a “fantastic opportunity” for planners, Zimbalist adds. “When you do that particular modeling against targets that are purchasers of your product and not just age and demo, you’ve optimized linear TV today,” he says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The CEO and Co-Founder of Eyeview believes there’s no substitute for actual outcomes, meaning a person sees a video and then buys something.

“A lot of the video campaigns you see out there are optimizing toward hitting a demo, or targeting a DMA, or making sure the videos are completed, or they’re viewable and a lot of intermediate metrics like recall,” Harnevo says in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017.

Eyeview’s VideoIQ platform infuses consumer, brand and retail data into a decisioning engine to programmatically deliver one-to-one personalized video. One of the company’s recent case studies details a $7.83 return for every $1 in ad spend for TriHonda—representing dealers in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York.

“What’s special about focusing on outcome is that it kind of cures a lot of the ills and worries of the industry right now,” says Harnevo.

He cites “crazy, unprecedented” hacking attacks and “almost about $5 million fraud a day with video ads, and that gets advertisers very frightened and it should be.”

He says focusing on sales rises above such concerns because Eyeview is buying real people. “You can’t fraud a sale,” says Harnevo. “You can fraud a completion. You can fraud a viewable demo but you can’t fraud a store sale.”

Eyeview uses data partners that vary by business category, including marketers’ first-party CRM data, Nielsen Catalina and others in consumer packaged-goods, Cardlytics and MasterCard in financial services and, as in the case of TriHonda vehicles, J.D. Power and Associates.

“It’s really closing the loop from the view of a real person all the way to the end to see if they actually bought,” is how Harnevo describes the process.

Screens are becoming less important, according to Harnevo. “We need to make sure that we can find this individual again or find any person again. It doesn’t matter where he’s at,” he adds. “For us it’s television, Facebook, mobile.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“I think a lot of us are trying to find out what is the new format. Is it 30 seconds or is it 10 seconds or is it two minutes,” says Ruhanen. “We’re really stretching out to find out what is the right kind of engagement for the customer.”

In an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017, Ruhanen sees a “real arc to try to work out how to manage” clients’ production budgets.s.

This leads to discussions like, “We’re going to push this out, it’s going to be immediate, we’re going to take it back down. It’s not there to go run in the Super Bowl,” says Ruhanen. “I think it’s really an ongoing conversation with clients right now.”

Citing some 19 client wins from 22 account pitches over the last two years, Ruhanen says marketer expectations of great creative output “is like table stakes” for TBWA. “What’s interesting about that is it wasn’t about the work as much as what it used to be,” he says. “It’s much more about how do you work, how do you uncover insights, where do we get knowledge.”

Marketers, he notes, are “very stretched internally” so they’re looking for proactive business partners.

Competition for hiring the best talent is pitched. “And what it’s replacing is sort of the service culture. It’s much more into knowledge culture,” Ruhanen says. It’s led TBWA to hire journalists, people from Wall Street and “a lot of people, believe it or not, out of national security.”

A winning element of creative executions is cultural touch points in an age of global stress and strain. Ruhanen points to TBWA’s annual holiday campaign for Apple and an effort for ANZ bank in Australia.

The Apple ad features an iPhone-using Frankenstein who lives a Grinch-like, secluded life until he ventures into a local village and finds friendly people, as Tech Crunch reports. “That was incredibly timely and very, very impactful,” Ruhanen says.

In the ANZ campaign, which targeted females, youngsters are doing tasks for pocket money but the boys are unknowingly paid more than the girls. “I think doing things that are culturally relevant, that are about some of the tensions that are in society right now” are the ones “that are really hitting home,” says Ruhanen.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The company’s technology is now in 12,000 households, each with an average of 10 Internet-connected devices—hence its measurement of media consumption on some 120,000 screens.

“What we’re finding is pretty amazing in the way that different devices are being used and how they’re being used,” Fulgoni, who is CEO and Co-Founder of comScore, says in an interview with Beet.TV during a break at CES 2017.

For example, there’s no particular loyalty to iPhones versus Android phones. “A lot of the homes have combinations, which is kind of interesting,” he says.

comScore’s also seeing “a wide variety” in the way that over-the-top devices are being used to deliver content. According to Fulgoni, the company is measuring consumption of OTT for services like Netflix. (comScore’s take on the current state of digital media is available here.)

Gone is the era when a research provider could build its own panel and measure pretty much what its clients needed. “I think those days are over,” Fulgoni says.

The change largely derives from the fragmentation of viewing consumption. “To be able to measure all of that with the granularity you need you have to have the cooperation of the content owners and the device owners to tag the content,” he adds.

So in a sense, he adds, “The providers of the research data have become dependent on the entities that they’re trying to measure. And that’s something that we’ve never seen before in the media research business. A case in point is comScore’s database populated by 52 million set-top boxes that it doesn’t own.

He believes the trend of television advertisers asking media companies for the ability to reach specific audiences beyond traditional age and gender targeting is heading in a distinct direction. “I suspect that that’s going to be in many ways the future of how advertising is bought and sold. That’s my personal view of where we’re going to go,” Fulgoni says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“From year to year, the changes are enormous, overwhelming,” observes Monica Karo, the CEO of OMD USA. “What our clients really come to CES for and what they love us to do for them is to really help navigate.”

It’s hardly a one-size-fits-all proposition. “It’s different for different clients,” Karo explains. “We’ve got such a breadth of our client base here. What works for one might not necessarily work for another.”

If there is a shared concern, it revolves around helping marketers connect with their customers in deep, meaningful ways. Or, as Karo puts it, “How do we talk one on one on an individual basis but obviously needing to do it at scale.”

Immersion is today’s theme for OMD’s Oasis panels and discussions, covering emerging technologies like artificial reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. At the consumer level, this translates into how marketers can provide new experiences that people cannot get on their own, according to Karo. “How do you surround a customer?” she asks.

In the television space, Karo sees two trends of particular significance. One is the “untethered” environment in which viewers can consume content whenever and wherever they want. It requires figuring out how to reach viewers “when the viewership is not happening at the same time on the same night at the same hour in terms of what we’ve been used to for all these years,” Karo says.

The second is the growing ability of advertisers to target TV households based on a slew of information particular to specific addresses, namely addressable advertising. Over the next 12 to 18 months, “That’s finally going to come to fruition and that will be something that we’ll be seeing much more of,” says Karo.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Show me what the future is going to be,” is how Brian Terkelsen, the Global President of Mediavest | Spark, explains it during a break in the activity. Clients expect their agency partners to weed out what’s not particularly relevant.

Problem is, CES very rarely deals in what’s real. “It deals in what’s real for that vendor,” Terkelsen says.

So while curved television screens are real, so are refrigerators that talk to you and show you pictures of their contents. Meanwhile, “We’ve been talking about the connected home every year for seven years,” he adds.

There’s no such uncertainty about television, which Terkelsen describes as “bigger, stronger, better than it’s ever been.” This leads to a “content is king mentality” that’s good for all marketers.

His key focus is on future viewership and, more specifically, how content reaches viewers, along with “how does the marketer play, because the biggest concern of advertisers today is how do I not get out of the equation,” Terkelsen says. “In a fully subscription world, there’s no room for advertising.”

He calls the ability to target individual households with addressable TV ads “a panacea” while expressing the desire of many in the advertising world for more granularity in this type of targeting.

“We have to get to the point where I actually know the difference between you and me,” Terkelsen says. “I want to sell you certain things and I want to avoid certain things with you because it’s pointless.”

While that’s the ultimate in advertising efficiency, there are generational factors at work. “Part of our demographics and audience have to age out of the fear of being identified,” says Terkelsen.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

He believes there are caveats to be considered along the way. “I think there’s some pros and cons to that. The pro is they have a lot of data and a lot of resources to tap into,” Kinsella says in an interview with Beet.tv. “The cons is you kind of lock yourself into a certain system and as we’ve seen the pace of change in this industry, you can get caught up trying to protect your point of view.”

On the latter point, he says the catch is you can get locked in to certain sources of information and cannot take advantage of others that might be “potentially less expensive.”

This is not to suggest that Kinsella isn’t on board the data train. Indeed, Havas having combined creative, media and data together in each of its U.S. offices was one reason he joined from Mindshare, where he had been CEO.

“The talk within the industry is maybe heading in the wrong direction because everybody wants more, more, more and different versions of data,” Kinsella says. “When it gets to be too big it almost becomes uncontrollable and unusable.”

Havas tries to find “the small pieces of data” that will actually drive clients’ businesses. “I think data is still a big area that agencies are trying to sort out. How deep to go and how effective going deeper really means,” says Kinsella.

What’s not a matter of contention is the need to follow consumers whose television viewing habits have shifted to mobile devices. “Sight, sound and motion,” says Kinsella. “Nothing’s ever beaten it” for explaining what brands are about and how they can benefit consumers.

Again, there should be limits at play in chasing the video prize. “We don’t have to jump off a cliff,” Kinsella observes. He sees a balancing act concerning “how much viewability is really there, how much fraud is in the online ecosystem and how do we balance that with the power of video getting in front of the right person.”

As he looks ahead to CES 2017, Kinsella doesn’t share the apprehension of some people who feel it’s a tough time of year to have to travel to Las Vegas. Calling it the “modern version of the World’s Fair,” he says it’s a great way to start the new year with clients “in an incredibly creative environment.”

People don’t go to CES “to see things that are going to happen today,” Kinsella says. “You go there to see what potentially could happen in three years, five years.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

This is the prognosis from GroupM Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman, who thinks advertisers will be “super interested” in the Internet of things for the data that it collects and the new interfaces people have with content and commerce.

“Everyone’s seen what Echo can do and what Google Home can do and those will be big focuses,” Norman says in an interview with Beet.tv.

He sees “huge competition” in the coming year is how different channels and program creators will incorporate themselves into skinny bundles. For many people, Netflix and Amazon Prime can almost be considered single-asset skinny bundles.

“One of the interesting bits of calculus for the consumer is going to be how do they go about assembling their entertainment portfolio,” says Norman, citing a data pipeline to the home, a mobile data plan and perhaps bundled home security and management services.

“We’re actually asking the consumer to put together a really complicated puzzle,” Norman adds.

This is because of the plethora of choices for watching traditional broadcast channels and streaming video. “They’ll be thinking about their entertainment lineup in terms of where they consume it, in terms of the devices in and out of the home,” Norman says.

He suspects there might need to be changes in the way that entertainment products are marketed.

“I get this feeling that expressions like Double Play, Triple Play and Quad Play are feeling a bit old and I think there’s going to be a new dialogue,” says Norman.

Likening consumer choices to those involved in putting together a portfolio of stocks, Norman has a whimsical suggestion for making things simpler.

“I think we need to create a sort of eHarmony for personal entertainment and communications,” he explains. “It’s your date with technology because it’s getting harder and harder and harder for people to work out.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

In an interview with Beet.tv, Kawaja reflects on two significant deals in the convergent television space in 2016 and explains why he feels addressable linear TV should be getting more fanfare than programmatic TV.

Adobe’s November agreement to purchase TubeMogul brought to the Adobe Marketing Cloud a one-stop shop for video advertising and represented the recognition that Adobe “needed to be in the activation space, while primarily focus on digital but moving towards linear TV,” Kawaja observes.

The second deal is one LUMA had a hand in: the acquisition of INVIDI Technologies by the consortium of AT&T, DISH and WPP Group. Kawaja says it will have “significant implications” for the way TV is changing.

“Obviously AT&T is a new entrant buyer, which is always exciting,” Kawaja says, adding that the consortium buy is “particularly smart” because it ensures “that this particular technology would be widespread. I’m sure they will have conversations with other folks in the ecosystem because INVIDI is an ecosystem wide play.”

While programmatic TV seems to spark more industry talk than addressable linear TV, Kawaja emphasizes the latter.

“The reason being you already have a linear infrastructure, a linear market,” says Kawaja. “All you are doing with addressable is bringing additional data, targeting and precision to a bulk reach channel that already exists.” With addressable, “We’re simply taking set-top box data and being able to target this massive spend category on much more of an individual basis.”

As he looks ahead to CES 2017 in Las Vegas, Kawaja sees a “wide swath of buyers” in a variety of different categories, with both foreign and domestic players in such varied areas as data, media, TV and software. “We are seeing a maturation of this space, which is very healthy,” Kawaja says. “Let’s not forget the massive amount of fragmentation that exists in this space. It’s not sustainable. That can’t last.”

At CES, his focus will be less on emerging technology than on strategic meetings and discussions based on the technological innovations on display. With regard to AR, VR and the IOT, it’s the early worm that often gets eaten.

“From a business standpoint, strategic standpoint, what I advise people is that being early has the same financial profile as being wrong. You don’t want to be too early in terms of pursing deals in some of these nascent categories,” Kawaja says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

“What I think we’re going to start seeing with new technologies is using addressability as a way of versioning for national TV,” Winkler says in an interview with Beet.tv. “That’s really exciting stuff, particularly for our set of clients, many of whom are portfolio clients, all of whom are looking for growth.”

Media agencies have always touted their clout in getting the most advantageous rates for their clients owing to the sheer amount of money they spend. The same principle is still at play, but it’s just the starting point.

“Using technology, you can take the clout and those great rates but then deliver the right ad to the right person within that national buy,” Winkler says. “That’s a remarkable opportunity.”

More TV networks are realizing that in lieu of an increase in viewers, they need to bring more value to the table, according to Winkler. He cites NBC and Turner Broadcasting as examples of programmers using various data sets to optimize schedules on the fly. “And that’s a good thing. Just because we’re not doing pure programmatic doesn’t mean we’re not happy about the better performance we’re getting for our clients,” Winkler says.

For media agencies seeking to transition to the all-things-data approach to media planning and buying, the biggest change that Winkler has seen has been taking data out of the data silo “or even out of the digital silo, for that matter.”

OMD is seeing the biggest impact for its clients by “making data part of the beginning of the process and therefore affecting every medium that we plan and buy on behalf of our clients,” says Winkler. “When you do that, suddenly it’s 10X the impact. But only if you talk about data up front.”

As he looks ahead to CES 2017 in Las Vegas, Winkler will be trying to discern the most meaningful advances in television technology from the passing near-fads.

“We’ve seen a lot of gimmickry over the last few years, whether that’s curved TV’s or 3D TV’s,” he says.

So what went wrong? According to Winkler, manufacturers were focusing on the wrong types of technological advances.

“People want technology that makes it easier for them to watch more TV,” he explains. “Technology that lets you watch more TV is going to be embraced by the American public because we love to watch TV.”

Voice recognition could be that technological magic bullet. The ability to tell your TV set to play episode #4 of Seinfeld or a particular pro football game.

“Once you have the experience of asking technology to do something for you and it does it instantly and without hesitation and without a mistake, you will never go back,” Winkler says.

Who’s going to deliver it? Siri with Apple? Amazon Echo? Google?

“I’m not sure,” Winkler says. “That’s the new battlefront. Voice activation in the living room with a TV and may the best man win.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

This isn’t to suggest that GroupM does not have clients advertising in feed-based video. The media investment giant takes into account data showing the duration of views and uses that data “as a modifier when we’re advising clients as to how they allocate their money between different video platforms,” Norman says.

GroupM also is working on evolving viewability standards for such formats as outstream video, according to Norman. Outside of the mobile environment, the company “increasingly and almost exclusively” uses its standards for making client investment decisions.

Norman expresses disappointment that the market hasn’t “responded in the way one had hoped in terms of producing platform-specific creative.” In many environments, “I think for a lot of advertisers, very short format video remains a problem other than for simple brand recognition and depth point of view,” he adds.

It’s GroupM’s view that most media will end up embracing standards that the company can trade to, but for a lot of feed-based media it will examine duration data “and use that as a modifier about what we’re prepared to pay and how we allocate it,” Norman says.

When discussing standards and modifiers, Norman says the goal is to find the best instruments to value the duration of a view in any given platform.

“The outstream issue is different from the feed-based one because you’re not looking at it in a scrolling environment, you’re often not looking at it in an autoplay environment,” he says.

As for the difference between a standard and a modifier, Norman says it comes down to the specific use case.

“We thought the standard was absolutely necessary in the desktop display environment because we felt the physical nature of desktop publishing needed to be cleaned up to make ads viewable,” he explains.

It’s not the same scenario with regard to the mobile, feed-based environment. “It’s the actual measurement of time and exposure that needs to be established. They’re different use cases,” Norman says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

As a “pure data play,” 605 doesn’t sell media or advertising, isn’t a media broker and doesn’t run an ad marketplace, according to President and Co-Founder Ben Tatta.

“Our goal is really to empower programmers and advertisers with data direct,” Tatta says in an interview with Beet.tv.

605 was formed this year by Dolan Family Ventures—which had sold East Coast MVPD Cablevision Systems Corp.—via the acquisition of Analytics Media Group, a pioneer in the use of set-top box data. Tatta had been President of Cablevision Media Sales.

The goal of 605 at CES is “to look at all the new devices that are out there, because ultimately these devices represent fragmentation, which present measurement challenges we can help solve,” Tatta explains.

By acquiring AMG, 605 enjoys access to data across roughly a half dozen MVPD’s. “Our goal is to build on top of that and also extend that beyond just addressable to programmers so they can do other forms of programming analytics,” says Tatta.

Given AMG’s roots, 605 has a deep perspective of the addressable TV landscape. So it’s more than familiar with the need for census-level data for more uniform audience targeting.

“The biggest challenge is that there isn’t a census level data set available,” says Tatta. “A lot of the data that’s used today is sort of pockets. Whether it’s a certain MVPD or certain device that might make their data available.”

Another limitation is the two minutes per hour of local ad inventory currently earmarked for addressable. While it’s beneficial to cable operators and local advertisers, it’s just not enough longer term.

“I think where over time this goes is addressable capability extending to the national advertising avails,” Tatta says. “That’s where it really starts to serve the programming interests well in the sense that they’re serving a national audience,” plus the ability to target based on discreet customer segments.

“This will take some time because it requires a lot of capacity to do addressable on a national basis, but I do think it’s coming,” Tatta adds.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

605 is the sponsor of Beet.TV’s upcoming coverage of CES 2017. 

If that’s not enough, there also will be disruption, the kind that is sweeping the video and television business and which MediaLink Chairman and CEO Michael Kassan will discuss on stage with media executive Barry Diller.

“We will have many other programs that focus on sensation,” Millard says in an interview with Beet.tv. “Lots of client meetings, lots of panels and our own immersive experiences.”

Among other challenges, MediaLink clients are “trying to get their arms around” the ever-changing video sector, according to Millard.

“It does seem very overwhelming with all the opportunities, but they are opportunities and markers are decidedly interested in being where their audiences are,” says Millard. “It’s almost an imperative for them to play in this new video environment and to figure out what works for them.”

Experiences and sensations involving virtual and augmented reality will be a particular focus at CES, even though “only a small sliver” of consumers has been exposed to these technologies, according to Millard.

“Like many things in this world, the East Coast and West Coast have a little bit of a lead in terms of what’s new,” says Millard. “I think the rest of the country in this particular case is probably not very up to speed on VR or AR.”

Nonetheless, she thinks it’s important for marketers to understand such emerging technologies.

“I think CES at large is a great opportunity for us not to necessarily focus on the technology itself buy the change in consumer behavior that’s facilitated by technology,” Millard adds. “And then look at the implications for our business and the potential applications.”

With virtual reality alone Millard sees “quite extraordinary” opportunities, citing sectors like education, health and entertainment.

“Exactly what that is and how we reach the mass audiences that so many marketers need, that’s all to come,” she says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

Ignite evolved from the realization that the TV industry had “overstuffed the bird” with too many ads and that creative content had to work harder for marketers, Dan Riess, EVP of Content Partnerships, says in an interview with Beet.tv.

During this “test and learn” year for Ignite, Turner has already cut the number of ads in its programming, according to Riess.

“What we are learning is that the shorter the ad breaks, in general the better performance for advertisers that are in that ad break,” he says. “Makes total sense, less clutter. We’re seeing it as less is more.”

After the self-imposed commercial “diet” came the “workout,” as Riess explains it.

“The workout part is to make the creative work harder in those pods. Start taking what would be a traditional ad pod of four, six, eight sometimes spots and putting in custom branded content,” Riess says.

Normally, viewers would emerge from a program segment and encounter a pod with several commercial messages, none of them related to the other. In its tests, Ignite swapped out the traditional pod and substituted a two- to three-minute exclusive branded content piece from an advertiser, then returned viewers to the program.

At the next commercial break, viewers were shown a 30-second ad for the company whose branded content they had previously viewed. This is a formula that Turner has executed 30-40 times across its networks, according to Riess.

Biometric testing with 4,500 viewers revealed that “you have a huge bump in engagement when you put a story in front of someone for two minutes plus,” Riess says. That has a huge effect.”

As for the 30-second ad, it “starts to perform extremely well” following the branded content “because it’s been essentially set up by the content piece,” says Riess.

Ignite does audience targeting via both contextual means and “a huge array of data sets, being Nielsen, be it MRI. Pretty much any dataset that a marketer would want to use we actually have in house and are willing to target against,” he says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

In an interview with Beet.tv, Marchese traces the path to the current state of consumers and their tolerance—or lack thereof—of ads from a longstanding blind spot.

For too long, the TV industry “thought too little about what consumers want and just thought this was a negotiation that was happening between content owners and advertisers,” says Marchese, who is President of Advanced Advertising at Fox. “In reality, it was a three-party negotiation: content owners, advertisers and viewers.”

The last group have “fought back” as evidenced by the rise of ad blockers, DVR’s, Netflix, Hulu Ad-Free and other choices, according to Marchese.

He cites “the rash of virtual MVPD’s” like AT&T’s new streaming offerings and as he looks ahead to CES 2017, believes there’s no doubt that TV and video content will increasingly be delivered via IP.

“If that’s true and people are going to be logging in to watch television even on the big screen at home, what does that finally mean for advertisers?” Marchese posits. “How do we realize that?”

Among other things, he sees IP delivery fostering personalized ads and enabling advertisers to become “smarter about targeting and reduce ad loads because the ads get better and more relevant.”

To Marchese, creativity doesn’t always mean interactive ad design. “Sometimes it means designing different length commercials for different viewing experiences,” he says. “Sometimes it will mean designing sequential commercial messages.”

In an IP environment, “We know that a person has seen commercial one,” Marchese says. “Let’s show them commercial two now. That’s a whole new way to think about advertising than a simple reach and frequency.”

In any event, more consumer choices have put the market in a very different place. “Content owners and marketers are going to need to work together more than ever before,” says Marchese.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017.  The series is presented by FreeWheel.   Please find more vidoes from the series here. 

On the consumer electronics side, “I say this every year but it has never been more true than it is today. TV’s are getting bigger, better, cheaper and the pace at which that trend continues to go is escalating,” Gotlieb says.

While consumers will see “step change” as the trend plays out, Gotlieb notes that people on both the content side and manufacturing side are thinking even bigger. This group is “contemplating what an apartment of the future might look like and how it would need to be configured to have a video wall,” he says.

Among other things, such contemplation raises questions like “Do you do virtual reality with a helmet on your head, or do you do virtual reality with a 200-inch screen that represents an entire wall in your living room,” Gotlieb says.

Moreover, “What about a screen of that size with almost infinite resolution and autostereoscopy, which means 3D without glasses and what are the implications of those capabilities,” particularly for marketers, he adds.

In the computing space, Gotlieb observes that “mobility and computing have intersected with each other. Today we talk about not just the CPU but the GPU.”

He goes on to marvel at the rapid progress of NVIDIA processors, whose initial application facilitated the rendering of graphics in real time before being used in autonomous vehicles.

“And sure enough, last year NVIDIA moved to the automotive floor from the consumer electronics floor” at CES, Gotlieb recalls.

As for integration and the internet of things, he believes there will be increased emphasis this year on the risks involved, given that hackers have been able to infiltrate some IOT devices.

“We need to be very careful about how we develop the internet of things so that we can continue to secure our identities and our lives,” Gotlieb says. “But it’s going to be an exciting show, as always.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017.  The series is presented by FreeWheel.   Please find more vidoes from the series here.