The annual gathering will unite dozens of executives in advertising and media, with this year’s theme being It’s Consumer First in TV Land.  Among the participants will be representatives from GroupM, IPG MediaBrands, Target, Nissan, Discover, Comcast, NCC, Oath, Google, comScore, Nielsen, DISH, Amobee,  FOX Networks, Turner Broadcasting and NBCUniversal.

“I really think we’re at a turning point,” says Colella. “Now we’re seeing giant publishers come together making the inventory available. We’re making standards like what we’re seeing happen in digital, that’s happening now for linear.

“We’ve always participated in the Beet Retreat so we’ve made a lot of great connections,” Colella adds. “But I also feel that the conversations that happen with the other providers really moves the industry forward.”

And while advertisers and agencies heretofore have “really struggled” with the difficulties involved in audience buying and advanced advertising, “we continue to make it easier and band together to really work on what’s going to bring the whole industry forward, not just ourselves,” Colella says.

Beet Retreat 2018 will involve three days of high-level panels, group conversations, one-on-one video interviews and extraordinary networking events and interactions.

In addition to covering the world of advanced TV, the Retreat will examine the changes and broader implications for the media industry from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017 led by executives from Procter & Gamble, Hearts & Science, Telemundo and GroupM

Confirmed speakers:

Kevin Arrix, SVP, DISH Media

Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu

Robert Bareuther, SVP, Business development. iSpot.tv

Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV | LiveRamp

Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent

Joe Cashan, Chief Marketing Manager, Nissan

Tal Chalozin, CTO and Co-Founder, Innovid

Dave Clark, EVP, Advanced Advertising, Comcast & GM FreeWheel

Andres Claudio, Managing Director, Hearts & Science/Omnicom, Puerto Rico

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU

Jacqueline Corbelli, Founder, Chairman, CEO BrightLine Partners LLC

Jose Cancela, President, Telemundo/NBCU Puerto Rico

Brad Danaher, Television Partner Director, Experian

Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu

Peter Dolchin, Head of Telco/Video Partnerships, Google

Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso

Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM)

Anupam Gupta, Chief Revenue Officer, 4C Insights

Jason Harrison, President, Client Partners, Essence (GroupM)

Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks

Freddie Hernandez, Managing Director, P&G, Puerto Rico

Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, comScore

David Hohman, EVP & Managing Director, Nielsen

Walt Horstman, SVP, Advanced Media,Tivo

Evan Hovorka, Director – Digital Media and Data Products, Target

Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, OATH/Verizon

Nick Jazarian, Media Director, Target

Marissa Jimenez, President, Modi Media (GroupM)

Brad Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal

Vijay Konduru, VP Brand Sponsorships and Media, Discover

Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising, Data and Technology, FOX TV Networks

Adam Lowy, Director of Advanced TV & Digital Sales, DISH Media

Eric Matthewson, CEO, WideOrbit

Jodie McAfee, SVP, Sales Marketing, Inscape (VIZIO)

Matt O’Grady, CEO, Nielsen Catalina Solutions

Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy/Business Officer, VideoAmp

Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal

Nicolle Pangis, CEO, NCC Media (Comcast/Charter/Cox)

Jessie Reddis, Chief Innovation Officer, Turner Broadcasting

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets

Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik

Andrew Ward, President, NCC Media (Comcast/Charter/Cox)

Anthony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee

Moderating the discussions will be:

Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services, GroupM

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Matt Prohaska, CEO, Prohaska Consulting

Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC

Ashley Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp Special

Guest Speaker: Olga Ramos, President, Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico

To attend the conference, contact info@beet.tv

The Beet Retreat is presented by

Title Sponsor

Presenting Sponsors

Everything starts with how media companies choose to integrate their advertising models, the President of Global Media for GroupM’s Essence agency explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Some are choosing to run a simulcast of their existing over the air feed, which would include whatever advertising is running through traditional MVPDF’s or over the air,” says Gerber. “Others are choosing to dynamically ad serve into the DMVPD stream and make it much more like a digital kind of environment, where impression-based media is being bought and sold and decisioned at an ad-server level, and a campaign level.”

Essence doesn’t focus on platforms for the sake of platforms, according to Gerber. “I think it’s a big mistake to try to break the marketplace down into DMVPD’s, MVPD’s, satellite, traditional VOD, on demand through OTT, traditional FEP distribution through desktop and tablet or mobile. All of those things are simply the consumer choosing to watch TV content one of two ways. Either live or on demand.”

What’s common to all those choices is that advertising is sold two ways. The first is unit-based within a show that reaches everyone who’s watching, “or impression based where I’m delivering an impression-based decision in real time,” says Gerber.

There are different ways that advertisers execute platforms and there are limitations along the way. “That will go away over time as the marketplace moves to more consistent standardized delivery platforms, but I really think it’s a mistake to think things in silos.”

An overarching concern should be how to stem the flow of viewers to non ad-supported services, Gerber adds.

“The challenge for marketers in that environment is that the more that we don’t fix the traditional ad model in the video ecosystem, the more migration we’ll see to non ad-supported environments. And that is a bad thing all the way around for marketers, for publishers and media companies, for agencies.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Whether to employ addressable depends on a given marketer and its business objectives “and the degree to which they’re willing to connect their business strategy, their creative strategy and their targeting strategy and a measurement solution together,” Gerber explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “Just implementing addressable or targeting without thinking about those other pieces is probably not a good use of addressable media.”

Sounds pretty straightforward, but the fact remains that addressable isn’t for all brands,  “For mass advertisers who are trying to reach large, large slots of the population, there’s probably a lot less value to addressable media.”

The value exchange arises given the premium cost that accompanies addressable buys. In addition to the extra cost to reach particular audiences there is the loss of media in traditional buys “that you’re not going to receive”—media that is alternately considered “waste or bonus.”

This where the age-old question of reaching lots of people in the name of branding arises. “We know that brands are always needing to built their equity, not just among consumers who are in market for their product at that given time but for consumers who may enter the category over time or who might become a customer down the road,” says Gerber. “Addressability is a double-edged sword. The more you refine your targeting, the less you reach in terms of prospects or future customers and the less that you achieve in terms of branding against those segments.”

Gerber’s background includes sell-side positions at Brightcove and ABC and at the agencies MediaEdge and Mediavest. Last month, Gerber was promoted to his current position at Essence from VP of Investment for North America, as MediaPost reports.

Gerber advises upper-funnel marketers to look at addressable less from a targeting standpoint and more from an opportunity to manage frequency, deliver a more distributed campaign and to optimize reach.

“For brands that are lower-funnel, who are very conversion focused, who are trying to retarget existing customers or who have incredibly robust data sets around in market shoppers, addressability is a fantastic tool because it allows you to really thread the needle and reach groups of people who have the highest propensity to be purchasers of your product at that given time.

“It also delivers the opportunity for much more defined measurement and outcome-based analysis and analytics relative to the media you run.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

As the President of Global Media for the Essence agency surveys the video ecosystem, he sees its constituent parts operating differently with regard to what advancements they can deliver. “If I’m talking about the national TV ecosystem or marketplace, what’s achievable there is very different from what I can do today at scale within local cable avails that MVPDs control,” says in this interview with Bee.TV.

“If you consider OTT and digitally distributed content through FTP players as advanced TV, there’s a whole other spectrum of capabilities that exist in that space.”

Those capabilities should go well beyond data and targeting, according to Gerber, whose background includes positions at Brightcove and ABC and agencies MediaEdge and Mediavest. Last month, Gerber was promoted to his current position at the GroupM agency from VP of Investment for North America, as MediaPost reports.

“It’s about everything from the business strategy that the client is trying to execute against, to how they envision messaging and delivering creative versions to different segments of their audience, how that ties back to the business strategy and how you apply data and targeting within that construct.”

Gerber sees a near-term need for uniformity in understanding how consumers choose their video experiences across any and all formats. “I think we have to stop defining things in terms of traditional linear programming, short form content, etc.,” Gerber says. “We need to understand how viewers are choosing to engage with video content regardless of content length or distribution platform.”

Pragmatist as he is, Gerber acknowledges the difficulty in reaching such an understanding. In the meantime, “I think that were going to continue to have to work in a world where we use proxies where we make assumptions for the gaps that can’t be measured.”

He believes marketers are at a disadvantage if they only focus on things “that are truly measurable, because I think many of the opportunity areas are in places where if you apply a little bit of common sense and you kind of understand what’s happening, I think there are opportunities in those environments.”

This is not to condone negligence in execution, according to Gerber, citing the need to evaluate the opportunity, how you implement it and what solutions to use to determine success.

“I think we are probably a ways off from having a truly vibrant and consistent and market-wide measurement solution for us to use on the predictive side of where are people watching,” Gerber says. “The other side of measurement has to do with how we measure outcomes and actually performance, and I think that is a completely different subject.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

This is Jim D’Antoni’s snapshot of the advanced TV and addressable advertising space explains how more marketers are integrating addressable buys into their strategic planning instead of integrating them further down the timeline.

While addressable TV has been available for several years, programmatic addressable is “relatively new,” having been pioneered by DISH Media Sales less than two years ago, says D’Antoni. “That’s something on both the DISH as well as the Sling side of the house is growing very, very quickly.”

With the rise of advanced-TV groups within the major media agencies, probably 70% now have them versus closer to 20% just two years ago, according to D’Antoni.

“You’ve seen these groups increase, you’ve seen their influence increase. That helps us actually, because their job is to educate not just the agency but the client base overall.”

It’s still not uncommon for DISH to work with one of these groups while simultaneously transacting with linear buyers on linear buys. “I see these advanced TV groups growing in a much bigger way,” D’Antoni adds.

Both DISH and Sling are seeing lots of conversions to cross-platform addressable buys. In 2017, there were seven cross-platform deals. “So far this year, we have eighty and counting. So the marketplace has responded to this bigger reach, more diverse set of audiences.”

Most buyers view an impression as an impression, regardless of where it appears, D’Antoni says. “It’s not about buying an impression on an OTT pool and then on a DISH or TV pool. It’s an impression is an impression. If you grow that reach, you’re going to help your message.”

Regardless of the category, besides having a good understanding of their first-party data combined with data overall, brands that have done the best are the ones “who are not in it for the short term. The ones who’ve had the most success have been doing it longer and have mastered it.”

Testing, learning and optimizing can provide insights into, say, the proper length of commercial flights. “How close should a flight be to a car launch or a film release? It’s that iterative process.”

It’s a process that includes figuring out where addressable fits into an overall media mix. Advertisers that buy the vast amount of their video impressions in the broadcast Upfront begin planning in December or January but don’t negotiate until July.

“And there’s more and more players that are involving addressable as a line item early on as opposed to more reactive,” says D’Antoni. “Just buying it and then kind of ramming it into the media mix. It’s becoming a key part of that media mix for a number of autos and a number of other players who have adopted it.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The business is changing so fast and there’s so many different opportunities and solutions out there that are going in so many different ways,” says Adam Lowy, Director of Advanced TV & Digital Sales at DISH Media Sales.

As an operator, “There are much more resources and much more technologies and opportunities at our company to help grow the advanced advertising space,” Lowy adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “And I think that’s helping us to be able to put more resources, more effort, coming out with more products faster, quicker, stronger for the marketplace.”

He calls opportunities like programmatic “becoming hugely important and a huge growth business” that makes it “easier, faster and stronger for the buying community to go ahead and buy addressable.”

DISH has put programmatic and addressable together for buying contextually or addressably. In May, DISH announced that it had partnered with SpotX to create addressable data segments representing anonymous viewers of Sling TV. The segments involved included would-be-vacationers, auto intenders and back to school shoppers.

“Programmatic for us was just an easy, simple way for us to take the next step into advertising and to go ahead and put those automated needs in. It’s working with an SSP and going ahead and exposing our inventory and working with all the demand side platforms to go ahead and get into Sling TV,” says Lowy.

“It’s been a huge growth for us and what we’re looking at next is putting platforms together as we have our own programmatic business, we essentially act as the SSP on the DISH business. And we’re looking at putting those together to have one complete opportunity to buy our audience and to buy contextually across DISH and Sling programmatically through the simple easy turnkey approach.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The DR and the general market environments are sort of merging a little bit. So now everything is going to be measured, whether it’s a DR campaign or whether it’s a general market national campaign,” says the agency’s VP and Director of Performance Video.

Assembly defines addressable as the ability to target an audience, measure the exposure and understand how they are connected, Villegas explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“For DR, since everything that we do is measured, it’s a supplement to measurement. We identify an audience through addressable and then we find out whether that validation of that target meets the measurements.”

Asked about addressable inventory that Assembly surfaces for its clients, Villegas says it’s divided into two streams, the first being premium inventory. “If we go after a target, there is inventory that serves that target,” he says.

“On the flip side, there’s what is called an under-deliverable addressable. There’s inventory that’s left over that is not being targeted. We can take advantage of both.”

For some of the virtual MVPD’s like Sling TV, “We can take advantage of the under-addressable inventory at a cost effective CPM.”

He sees a culmination of both entities merging together as more marketers try to get a better handle on understanding measurement and targetability.

“Whether it’s placed in an Upfront or whether it’s placed in scatter or whether it’s placed in DR, everything will get measured in some way, shape or form and follow that journey from investing to an execution to an understanding of how that consumer went through the media journey.” Villegas says.

The pricing advantage that Assembly has under the “DR umbrella” is that there’s more flexibility in terms of coming in and out of inventory quickly. “The understanding of the inventory that we have is the same as a general advertiser, but we have more flexibility in terms of pricing, in terms of flighting.”

A certain level of timidity with regard to address drives from its complexity—at least on the surface, according to Villegas. But there’s nothing stopping advertisers from executing the basics.

“It has to do with targeting, data, there’s a lot of logistics that have to happen. In its simplest form, there’s ways to use addressable by simply targeting a household. Now the measurement part is a little bit more complex, but it also depends on what it is that you’re trying to go after.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Sling works with two supply-side platforms—SpotX and Telaria—and interfaces with all the major demand-side platforms, Lowy explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We set up different auctions, whether they’re contextual auctions where we set up ways to access inventory into World Cup, March Madness, sports networks, news networks, kids networks and we set auctions into that.”

In addition, Sling does addressable auctions wherein certain audience segments can be bid upon. “And we set up different auctions. Some are always on, some are on during different times of the year, whenever we feel most appropriate,” Lowy adds.

“What’s essentially happening is the way that we’re seeing our growth, so much of our business is now going into these bidding type of process or programmatic private auctions.”

He stresses the private nature of the auctions. “We don’t do open auctions so we are pretty clear on what’s coming through our pipes. We want to make sure it’s safe and top tier premium stuff coming through into our top tier premium content.”

More than 50% of DISH’s Sling/digital business last month came through auctions, while more than half of the advertisements were coming through a bidding process, according to Lowy.

On the TV side, DISH built its own supply-side platform a few years ago, “and that is growing well. Over time, we are looking at merging these two platforms where you’ll have audience-based buying or contextual buying all bid upon, whether it’s on the Sling platforms or the DISH set-top box platform.”

While Lowy foresees a continuation of the Upfront selling process and other ways to buy, he believes that almost all impressions will be done through a bidding process or an auction.

“That opens up a whole new way to buy inventory, a whole new way to buy television. You get the true value of your content, your true value of the audience.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“What we hear consistently from clients is that they still believe that TV is extremely effective in driving brand preference, driving store traffic, driving sales,” Gordon, who is Director of Programmatic TV, says in this interview with Beet. TV. “But it’s a much more complicated TV world to navigate” given the multiplicity of inventory sources, erosion of linear ratings and a diversity of suppliers.

Moreover, traditional linear TV needs more automation to establish a connection between audience targets and inventory, according to Gordon.

Referring to virtual MVPD’s as “truly the best of what is TV,” Gordon notes that it provides great access to content and the linear ad feed and can be supplemented with on-demand content. “All of which can be delivered, whether it’s on demand or in the linear feed, through IP pipes and the advertising can be delivered on a one to one basis instead of one to many.”

As a demand-side video ad platform from its acquisition of TubeMogul about two years ago, Adobe Advertising Cloud is using addressable opportunities that make the most sense given an advertiser’s objectives.

“One of the clearest is when you want to reach your target because of the effectiveness of a TV-like environment to influence, but your target is narrow so that traditional ways of buying TV are not efficient enough,” says Gordon. “If you buy a million adult eighteen to forty-nine impressions and only a few percent of them are your true customer, the traditional way of buying TV doesn’t match up to that.”

Addressable also offers incremental audience reach for traditional linear buys.

“Even with broad brand target, some of those consumers are going to be heavy viewers of TV and are going to be quite well reached in a traditional linear approach,” Gordon says. “Others may watch some TV but less than other people in the target.”

Using addressable to reach the hardest targets is a way of “evening out the frequency count among different groups and making sure that you’re extending the reach of that campaign to more qualified customers.”

A main focus of Adobe is providing more automation to linear TV to counter what Gordon describes as the “loss of fidelity” between a strategic target that’s developed in planning and a post-campaign buyer with a GRP goal.

“And so the view of the target that is created early in the process falls apart, really because the transaction is manual.”

There needs to be a more direction connection between linear inventory and tools used to optimize it, according to Gordon.

“So that instead of theoretically creating a target and then manually trying to find inventory that matches that target, you’re actually in platform decisioning against real, live inventory.”

Like others in the space, Adobe is seeing automotive as a category that’s widely embraced addressable owing to its advanced targeting and the high value of transactions. But packaged-goods are also coming on board “because in a lot of cases, a retailer sits in between the producer of the product and the transaction.

“It’s an area where data has been lacking, but there’s a lot of hunger in understanding that transaction better,” Gordon says.

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Horizon’s client roster includes A&E Networks, Scripps and Turner, in whose category “in terms of driving viewership and tune-in to programs that we’ve seen a lot of success with addressable TV because you can really hone in a specific audience,” O’Connor adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

“You can really identify who the target is, see how that target performed when you delivered the message and then also see how that target performed when you didn’t deliver the message. We’ve seen that there can be a lift of twenty, thirty percent in terms of tune-in, which is obviously a huge lift when you’re trying to drive next day ratings.”

For clients in other categories, addressable is not as easy a sell. It all begins by deciding on particular campaign results, according to O’Connor.

“We have to dig in and look at the target we’re trying to reach. Is it worth going the addressable route? Is there enough waste there? Is there a specific enough target that we can deliver a message to, or are we okay with kind of the spillover into a larger buy?”

Although advertising inventory of the various virtual MVPD’s is “still a pretty small portion of the overall universe,” it does have its values.

“We do have clients that are reaching out and buying those specifically, particularly a lot of our digital-first accounts, whether it’s ecommerce or brands like that. We use that to drive down costs to some degree,” says O’Connor.

He sees huge opportunity for the VMVPD’s “particularly when you think about something like a DISH and a Sling, is where you can supplement something like an addressable TV buy and you can use the Sling as a portion or complement to what you’re doing through the traditional or satellite set-top box.”

A constant thread regardless of the platform is more advanced audience targeting. “I don’t think that there are many advertisers out there saying ‘just give me adults eighteen to forty-nine,” says O’Connor.

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Last month, Dish for the first time quantified its Sling subscriber footprint at 2.21 million households, as The Hollywood Reporter noted.

“The live, streaming space as a whole is about 4.6 million households, so we have near a 50 percent market share of that universe,” Flatley says in this interview with Beet.TV. “The interesting thing with Sling is that each of our households, because of the way we deliver it through IP, is inherently addressable.”

Educating the industry “as to what’s possible” with advanced TV typically begins with an advertiser wanting to target viewers contextually. During March Madness, that could entail running ads in entertainment and sports networks, according to Flatley.

“And what that generally leads to as advertisers get more comfortable with the platform is the advanced TV capabilities that we offer, such as household addressable or overlaying specific demos right onto a buy,” he explains.

For example, an auto manufacturer “may come in and say we’re looking to reach SUV buyers who are in market for a new auto in the next 12 months.” Sling works with a data vendor like Polk to pull those segments, “apply it to the Sling file and serve only matches to that advertiser who are people are actually in market to buy a car.”

Eliminating waste by serve ads only to the most likely prospects is one part of the process of proving value to advertisers.

“So when we do an addressable deal, there will typically be attribution behind that. Using auto, we do sales match back data and tell the advertiser how many people were buying their cars who were exposed to the message,” Flatley says.

It doesn’t matter whether buyers prefer traditional insertion-order transactions or programmatic, he adds. If it’s the latter, “anything we can do directly we can execute programmatically and the pricing is going to be the same.”

In 2017, more than 1,000 new advertisers come onto the Sling platform, “and that really spans every vertical you can imagine. I think where we’ve seen huge uptick initially is with the autos and now the CPG’s coming through.”

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

“Obviously this is a new area of the business and it’s changing very rapidly,” says SpotX Chief Revenue Officer Sean Buckley. “Consumers are really starting to shift their consumption behavior. And obviously we’re seeing on the flip side some of the virtual MVPD’s and digital offerings really start to take off.”

Just a few years ago, the broad conception in the industry was of a shortage of premium video supply, what with much of it locked up by things like traditional Upfront marketplace deals.

“That was definitely true for a long time,” Buckley says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Certainly over the past three to six months we’ve seen the amount of supply, specifically around OTT both VOD and live streaming, really start to surge.”

SpotX’s major offerings are its ad-serving platform and programmatic infrastructure for media owners like Sling. The company also has an agreement with DISH Media Sales wherein DISH can leverage its first-party audience data through SpotX’s platform.

“We’ve seen great results there,” Buckley notes. “We’re taking that data and not only enabling programmatic transactions but we’re doing that in both VOD and live streaming environments, which is really the cutting edge of the digital ad industry.”

Given the learning curve that exists in the OTT space—both on the buy- and sell-sides—SpotX created an Advanced Solutions Group to help everyone figure out the “various technologies that touch our platform. It’s a different engagement with each of our customers,” Buckley adds.

On the buy-side, SpotX helps to decipher live, linear OTT traffic patterns because they “tend to look a lot different than what, for example, the DSP’s or the agencies are used to. You have to address the traffic differently and the environments differently than you would, for example, a desktop web environment.”

Asked about pricing of premium video ad inventory, Buckley looks at it from a digital perspective. OTT commands a premium over formats like out-stream and short-form, “but we think we’re reaching the point where there’s great balance in the market. Pricing isn’t necessarily a huge barrier and I think both sides see value in what the market is bringing to the table at this point in time.”

This video is part of series on developments with OTT. The series is presented by Sling TV and DISH Media Sales.  Please find more videos from the series here.  For the Sling/DISH report on OTT and the marketplace, download this report.