Williamson held various roles at Cox beginning in 2006, with stops along the way at Cumulus Media and Nielsen Audio. Upon assuming her present role, “we really felt like we had a right to win in video,” Williamson says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.

What she’s seeing in OTT “is an early adoption through great partners like Tru Optik where we can start to understand cookie data into the household level through their graphing,” Williamson says.

One thing that’s needed is “a little bit more scale. So now we look at models.” This is because unlike traditional television metrics based on panel-based, probabilistic data, “Within digital we really value one-to-one type of transactions” requiring a different kind of modeling.

“What we’re trying to figure out now is how to we take the best of both and create a new type of model or new type of application with data to be able to not only be more effective and efficient in our targeting, but also have more accountability on the back end with performance.”

It’s long been said of broadcast and cable that people would buy local if it were more easy and efficient. “Who wouldn’t want a strategic plan for every single DMA? We know when you buy national you get very heavy in the top five markets and then typically national advertisers come back in and fill in in the scatter market.

“So I think we’re getting to a point where with more addressable television, those lines between national and local are getting very blurred because you can get much more targeted than you could in the past with linear.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.

“We’re still the best way to get in front of an audience, but it’s changing how advertisers and agencies want to get in front of that audience,” Gianunzio says of broadcast TV in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018 in which he envisions a future where other local media can be sold alongside broadcast.

Videa partners with TV stations to deliver a live, supply-side marketplace for full-schedule, forward-reserve broadcast inventory that can be ordered weeks or quarters in advance. It’s a way of automating the buying process, with pricing approved by the individual stations and second-by-second campaign reporting.

It’s a process designed to “sand off the rough edges of how we buy and sell,” says Gianunzio. The fact that someone in a local broadcast buying department handles thousands of spots is “insane.”

He recalls his time as a sales rep for Cox as the digital age dawned and local broadcast revenues were declining. “And the revenue leaves not because there’s not a good return on investment by running your spots in broadcast. And it’s not because it’s not where advertisers want to be,” says Gianunzio, citing Google and Uber as examples. “The reason advertisers and agencies pull their money out of it is because it is so cumbersome.”

Videa has been building a “foundation” to unify station sales. “Within each station broadcast group we’ve got different ways of doing things. I’m just talking about getting everyone to think the same way” and hopefully agree on activities that should be automated. “Automation scares people because if I’ve been doing it manually, that’s what I’m getting paid for.”

He talks about the complexities brands face when entering a new market and wanting to surround prospective customers with ads across all the various media available and do it quickly. “You’d be discouraged from doing it,” says of the current environment of going seller to seller.

“And that’s when you can see real power in advertising, when you’re surrounding a consumer with each of the forms of media that you’re using so that it’s not a different message coming from each one.”

Videa’s future vision is to be able to unite more media sellers. “The idea is not for a platform like this just to exist for broadcast. It’s to exist for broadcast and everything that comes with it, OTT, VOD, then network and radio,” says Gianunzio.

“If we could build sort of a superhighway where media can exchange with data and exchange with revenue, we’re in a position where you can make a smart decision about opening up in a specific market, you can surround a market and have it all in one place.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

The deal was announced this week at the NAB Show.  To explain the agreement and its implications, we interviewed Scott Ferber, CEO of Videology in Las Vegas.