But what if emerging technology imperatives said that both sides could now benefit more from shared interest?

“When you look at the kind of the technologies that underpin this entire industry, you’ve always had this world of advertising technology and then content technology,” says Daniel Harrison of IRIS.tv, a video technology vendor. “But very rarely have they really spoken together.

“If you really want to deliver on the concept of relevance and create that personalized stream from the ads you see to the content you experience, and then ultimately tie that to some outcomes for an advertiser … you have no choice but to start to link these tools together.”

Harrison is chief revenue officer of the LA company whose technology is already deployed on many broadcaster and publisher sites, for which it uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata.

That data now also signals the context of videos to ad buyers, and IRIS.TV even allows buyers to buy ads right in its own publishers’ video units.

“We actually bring both the content decisioning and the advertising decisioning much more closely together,” he says.

MediaMath, a digital ad-buying platform, has just teamed up with IRIS.TV to provide a “sentiment score” brands can use in their buying decisions.

The company took Series A funding in 2015 from investors including Sierra Wasatch, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Progress Ventures and Machinima founder Allen DeBevoise and executives from Nielsen, AEG and Lionsgate.

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“You’ve got a lot going on, but ultimately each of these companies needs to figure out a strategy that ensures that the video that they’re producing and that they’re delivering is getting watched and that it’s being monetized to build a business,” the company’s CRO says.

On the publisher side, IRIS.TV has a video personalization and programming platform that drives more views and guides content strategy and makes your site. For marketers it’s a marketplace for distributing branded video and sponsored content in-stream alongside editorial video across the company’s publisher clients.

Through integrations across the ecosystem of video players and content management systems, IRIS.TV acts as “a brain in terms of helping to decide what is the best most relevant video that any individual should be seeing at any given period of time,” Harrison says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event.

The company’s focus is on the “core video environment” of major news, sports, lifestyle, entertainment media companies. More people watching more video ultimately results in more ad inventory being created.

“And if there’s more ad inventory, then it’s also about ensuring that you are highly relevant in terms of the advertising that you show,” says Harrison, who joined IRIS.TV a year ago from Oracle Data Cloud. “So we start to match up the context of the video to the actual context of the ads which solves for both sides of the equation.”

The key has always been about finding “the right mix of advertising or subscriber based-models” against content, something for which companies like AT&T Disney, Fox and others are spending considerable resources. The end goal for all, according to Harrison, is “to be viable.”

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This was the approach taken by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization, as she capped off the proceedings at Beet Retreat Miami in November.

The final panel of this year’s conference featured Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights; Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud; and Jakob Nielsen, CEO of GroupM’s Finecast addressable TV business.

Declaring that “TV needs to change,” Gupta pointed out that while so-called enemies like Facebook and Google require advertisers to “do it their way” behind walled gardens, at least those companies offer application-programming interfaces. Those API’s facilitate valuable things like ad buying, targeting, reporting, measurement, creative testing and creative trafficking.

“Where are the API’s for the one trillion impressions” that comprise traditional TV?, Gupta asked.

Harrison said the Retreat was a great place for him to gain a better understanding of the financial and technical complexities of advanced TV. His reflections:

“You have to be able to adjust and redirect to achieve your goals. Coming from an Oracle Data Cloud perspective, I’m a bit neutral to all of this because regardless, we look at data as the fuel for innovation and it’s how do we enable this data in every and any place that a client wants this to be to achieve some goals.”

Nielsen warned that progress will be curtailed if agencies and tech suppliers make things too complicated for marketers. Said he: “One thing I’ve seen with advertisers is they are super excited about what we’re talking about. They’re seeing benefits of household targeting, using their own first-party data, to be able to do creative rotation in a different way, near-time optimization. That’s a journey that we’re on. We have to remember to take them on that journey, make it simple, give them what they need but don’t give people too much.”

Swartz suggested that it’s “human problems, not technology problems, that are holding us back.” This led to a discussion about current business models and methods that, while familiar and comfortable, won’t move things ahead at the desired speed.

Gupta described attending meetings with agencies and marketers in which everyone understands the importance of more data-driven TV audience buying. When he asks how they are currently executing it, responses typically include Microsoft Excel. “Then we say okay how are you processing large-scale datasets? ‘Well we don’t have the engineers to take second-by second-data from ten-plus million devices,’” Gupta related. “The point is, you’ve got business issues around talent, around the software not being there, around the horsepower not being there. Those are the issues holding you back. It’s not the desire to do something.”

Said Harrison: “Innovation doesn’t happen because you desire it. It’s because you must do it. You really don’t have a choice.”

Nielsen said there are too many tech solutions and there should be more use of fewer of them going forward. He offered these examples:

“We use Videology within Finecast to do some of the decisioning we’re doing and we have Sky in the UK use Videology as well. We work with Invidi in Australia, they won a fantastic deal with Foxtel, and we were very supportive of that. We went in nearly hand-in-hand and said we suggest you pick Invidi because that works with our systems and that means we can spend more money with you.

“The unpleasant part of that is there’s tons of technology companies that won’t exist in the future because there’s simply too much and it’s too complex.”

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.

“That is certainly one of the objectives for us as well as for a number of partners that we work with in the space, and it certainly seems like it’s going to require a number of stakeholders to get to where the industry wants us frankly to be,” says Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud.

With 97 of the top 100 US advertisers and slightly less of the top 100 globally, there’s very little in the way of data that Oracle hasn’t seen on the digital side. Now a core focus, according to Harrison, is to “deliver solutions to all flavors of TV, from national linear to addressable VOD, linear to connected and OTT.”

Oracle doesn’t lack for partnerships in the TV space, counting Hulu as an early collaborator and also The Trade Desk, DataXu and TubeMogul, all of which have been “investing quite a bit to solve for TV through their own initiatives so we are working to align closely with them,” Harrison says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

The first time that Oracle Data Cloud enabled its purchase-based audiences for linear national TV was through a linkup with Simulmedia, something company founder Dave Morgan called “a defining moment in the transformation of TV to a data-driven, audience-targeted business.”

Asked about the quest for unified, cross-platform measurement, Harrison says clients are indeed looking for a more holistic approach to planning and activating both digital and TV. That would mean no longer having to ““drop that digital audience that you’ve customized and invested a lot of time and effort into at the gate and then pick up a totally different audience derived very differently to solve for it in, let’s say, TV and other media.”

A second priority for Oracle’s clients is measurement, i.e. what’s really driving lift, and to bring its digital methodology to the TV space. “That’s where again you come up against the uniqueness of each of these different media types and the need to address them first in and of themselves and then in a more overarching way across media.”

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.