Disney+ will be the third piece of a direct-to-consumer triad when combined with ESPN+, which launched last April, and Disney’s stake in Hulu, the President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“On the Disney side, while we are not doing advertising at launch right now, we are doing marketing partnerships around how we can actually bring brands together that we’ve done broadly with the company,” Ferro says.

Disney believes that direct-to-consumer, which requires a new approach to content allocation, which in Disney’s case includes pulling its movies and shows from Netflix next year, gives both consumers and advertisers the best opportunities.

“What you saw in the launch of that product was the quickness of adoption,” Ferro says of ESPN+, which provided access to more mainstream and “unique” sports like boxing. “Five months in we announced we were at a million subscribers and we’ve only grown from there.”

She describes Disney+ as “a broad, general entertainment brand for families” built around proven entities like Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney and National Geographic.

The third leg of the direct-to-consumer stool is Hulu, the unprofitable streaming pioneer that will be 60% owned by Disney at the beginning of 2019 by virtue of its acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox. Hulu is where ABC and Freeform programming resides, with ad-supported “live and on-demand content in season,” says Ferro.

“We’re also working very closely obviously with our product groups and our events groups and our parks and movie promotions teams,” she says of the company’s direct-to-consumer initiatives.

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

To make audience targeting more mainstream and move away from age and gender demographics requires a combination of technology and education, says Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales. It’s a question of “how do we transform this industry into transacting in new ways,” Nelson says in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.

“The ability to go and negotiate a deal and have the right conversations with the right people, both on the publisher side and on the buying side, is a challenge.”

Things like framing and negotiating deals during the annual Upfront selling ritual are among the obstacles. “When a large amount of money is transacted in a quick period of time, how do you get into the nitty gritty of an advanced deal makes it more challenging and can sometimes slow down a process that people don’t necessarily want to be very slow,” Nelson says.

In the quest for more advanced targeting, advertisers are a big part of the push. Meanwhile, agencies that are under more competitive pressure than ever before try to navigate the maze of publishers they need to deal with to transact business. “But I also think they’re incredibly busy,” she says of the buy-side crowd.

Asked how comScore and Nielsen could swiftly conjure up a solution to ease cross-platform complications, Nelson points to “great disparities between the measurement, particularly on the digital side. So how you’re actually transacting with the client and the value of a buy varies depending on the source. And that creates a lot of issues on our side from an inventory management perspective and a forecasting perspective.”

With new mediums like OTT “exploding,” she says “measurement needs to catch up with transactions.”

From a privacy standpoint, Disney’s approach to harnessing user data for targeting purposes is “careful and cautious” as it creates unique audience segments from fans and guests. That spectrum includes users of mobile gaming and websites, people with a known affinity for Disney products and content and, ultimately, information about fans of ESPN “so that we can create audience segments that represent the totality of our audience and make partnerships with our clients to match that information to then target against.

“The goal is to pre-target who they’re looking for ahead of time so that at the back end when you’re closing the loop you know you’ve reached that person versus trying to guess.”

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.

In addition to ESPN and Disney/ABC, Ferro’s domain as President of Disney Advertising Sales will include Disney’s mobile, social and digital portfolio and national ad sales for ABC’s eight owned local TV stations. Disney did not indicate if Ferro would also supervise ad sales for the properties belonging to 21st Century Fox that the company is expected to purchase in 2019, as Variety reports.

Having overseen multimedia sales for ESPN since 1999, Erhardt was appointed president of Global Sales & Marketing in May 2015. In a statement issued today, he said, “I have been blessed to sell and market the power of sports and the ESPN brand with best team in the business over the past 20 years. I want to thank George Bodenheimer for giving me this opportunity in 1999 and thank our customers for their partnership, confidence, investments and friendship.”

In the same statement, Ferro said, “I’m humbled to step into this new expanded role, and look forward to building upon the progress the teams under Ed and I have made since becoming a part of Disney’s Direct-to Consumer & International segment earlier this year.

“More than ever before, it is critical that we continue to evolve, rethink and anticipate how we work together across all of our platforms to best meet the changing needs of our clients and consumers.”

In his most recent video interview with Beet.TV in May 2018, Erhardt explained how ESPN’s audience becoming 30% female and its dominance in live programming has helped to expand its advertiser mix. We are re-publishing that interview in light of today’s announcement.

Always known for its male reach, ESPN’s audience is now 30% female. This diversity, combined with programming that’s nearly 100% live, is helping the sports juggernaut broaden its advertiser mix while making it a big player in real-time marketing.

Meanwhile, its audience targeting capabilities can be based on outcomes of sporting events and their impact on consumers’ moods, Erhardt says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts 2018.

Data and technology are providing the digital media ecosystem with the means to “know much sooner whether something is working or not. So with that in mind, we think we have a competitive advantage in real time marketing because of the fact that we’re live all the time,” Erhardt says.

With attribution data generating post-campaign insights on everything from store sales to Realtor bookings to in-store grocery sales, the whole process has become “much more sophisticated. In our minds, the more we can help feed that with intelligent information, particularly around what our brands bring to that conversation, the better.”

A growing female contingent now watches and consumes sports. And they do that for all kinds of reasons. “Differently than men in some respects, the same as men in others,” says Erhardt.

From an advertising perspective, ESPN positions its audience as more adults than just its traditional male base. This focus on diversity has helped to lure brands like Mattel and Northwestern, which bought time on ESPN “because we reached a female audience that they were having a hard time reaching. Because it happened to be more professional, more upscale, etcetera. That’s a big change I think.”

ESPN boasts that it harbors the “largest treasure trove of information about sports fans.” So if a female viewer has voluntarily indicated that she’s in a certain region and is a fan “of four other teams,” based on sports outcomes ESPN knows “whether you’re going to be happy on a Saturday or not. Well, there’s a different ad for each one of those things and they become more effective when we can do it in the right way. We call it live connect.”

Diversity aside, the company’s stalwart product categories aren’t going away. “We’ll always have beers and we’ll always have autos and things like that. But I think we’re tapping into the new economy,” Erhardt says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

As an example, he explained during a panel discussion at the recent Beet Retreat in the City the process involved in NBC executing dynamic ad insertion. “Through FreeWheel, there’s probably 700 right now end points of where we have to integrate into in order to be able do that. But it can be done,” said Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales.

That’s the good news. However, more than 90% of NBC’s impressions are still delivered in a live, linear fashion.

“It’s going to involve programmers and distributors, MVPD’s, virtual MVPD’s coming together both to solve for the tech as well for the business rules. We are a business of legacy. It’s hard to change that but the will is there,” said Rosen.

Moderator Laura Desmond, who until recently was CEO of Starcom, asked whether the traditional value exchange between content providers, consumers and advertisers is “broken.”

Vikram Somaya of ESPN said the value exchange “isn’t good enough. For a long time, everybody in the system was making money and it made it very hard to change. We’re getting to the point now where everyone in the system is not making the money they used to make and suddenly we have to look in the couch cushions a little more than we had to.”

Desmond described the efficiency and effectiveness of TV advertising before describing a scenario that is destined to become as antiquated as rabbit ear antennae on top of a TV set. “You push a button, the commercial goes out, it airs, time delay, you post it, done. That’s a pretty simple and easy model.”

So is lack of education inhibiting the adoption of addressable TV ads? “The ad-supported experience needs to change,” responded Rosen. “Limiting commercials, but also it is about relevancy. We do know that ads that are more relevant to the user are going to be less annoying or perhaps not annoying at all or even welcome. Data’s going to help us with that.”

Asked by Desmond about the role of automation, Metcalfe, who is GM of LiveRamp TV at LiveRamp, said technology isn’t the problem. She recalled that before LiveRamp was acquired in 2014 by Acxiom, companies like Facebook “weren’t really interested in working with us yet. We didn’t have the reputation we needed, etcetera. Acxiom brought that to us.”

LiveRamp was in the early stages of powering custom audiences for companies like Facebook, but it wasn’t easy working with them because they wanted to control every last detail. “And it’s very similar to what I’m seeing now working in the TV industry today because it started to ramp up and become a larger part of their business. Everybody has to get comfortable with losing a bit of control.”

Asked by Desmond whether ESPN parent Disney is ready to compete in direct-to-consumer content delivery with the likes of Roku, Hulu and YouTube TV, Pandit said one of the joys of sports is that “no matter where you go you will get advertising.

“We can’t put our heads in the sand and say we should not go down the DTC route because we’ve done very well with pay TV and very well with digital. We have to be open to what consumers want us to do,” said Pandit.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We do believe that the horse has left the stable in terms of us looking at audience buying on linear.”

While it’s been doing linear optimization for ad targeting, Disney has begun to see “what addressable looks and feels like for our audiences,” says Somaya. This year and next,  the company will work with addressable partners to target ads at the household level.

ESPN offers a product that “essentially takes what we’re doing on OTT, which is completely measurable from a digital perspective, and then retargets those messages across our digital footprint,” Somaya explains. An ESPN viewer who is known to have seen a 30-second spot on OTT can be sequentially targeted with digital ads across the ESPN digital portfolio.

“As part of our integration more broadly with the Walt Disney Company we’re now looking to see how we do that broadly across all of the Walt Disney Company properties,” he says.

With the retargeting offering, ESPN can take a 30-second brand spot and “connect it to a series of digital notions that can actually do something as complex as sequential advertising to a single viewer. We can take a thirty-second spot and do a series of sixes against that same audience member across our digital networks.”

Based on ESPN’s own research and that of partners it’s worked with, the retargeting “has a really positive impact.”

Another ESPN offering, called “reactive TV,” enables advertisers to build campaigns around major sports milestones that are known in advance—for example, a player’s home run tally.

Having recently reorganized its sales, technology, direct-to-consumer and international businesses under Kevin Mayer, who had been Chief Strategy Officer at Disney, “we are now open for business as a one-stop shop,” says Somaya in reference to the upcoming Cannes event. “A lot of the conversations we will be having in Cannes will be around that notion.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“Because, in fact, we are everywhere the sports fan wants us to be,” Howe explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “One of the core messages we wanted to get across today is wherever the sports fan is in the digital ecosystem, we are their voice of sports.”

While ESPN’s owned and operated platforms garner the largest audience of its 81 million fans a month, “Social is a critical aspect of it, most importantly because that’s where some of our fans want to consume their sports content.”

ESPN customizes sports content on Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter in sync with user expectations that vary by platform. “We do not treat them the same.”

Twitter “is a great place for live breaking news. Snapchat is there for digestible content and Facebook is there to tell the story,” says Howe. “Each of those platforms has a very different purpose in terms of communicating with the sports fan.”

He considers the recently upgraded ESPN app to be “one of our crown jewels.” ESPN+, the company’s long-awaited sports streaming service, will feature thousands of live games and original programming for $4.99 a month, and will live inside the ESPN app, as The New York Times reports.

“What’s important about our app is that it engages with 23 million unique fans. Capturing that audience is very important to us and we take it very seriously.”

Two main features of the app are personalization and direct-to-consumer sports.

Personalization ensures that “every single fan who comes to our app gets a unique and different experience based off of their preferences and fan behaviors.”

He calls ESPN+ “the first direct-to-consumer sports property, which allows us to give the sports fans more. ESPN+ allows us yet another outlet for our fans to engage with even more sports content around some of the best leagues and sports in the industry.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

Whether it’s Twitter and ESPN or Disney and Tastemade, “To me, that was very encouraging seeing all these partnerships form and bringing premium video into a more expanded space,” Francois Lee says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Among the deluge of announcements at the NewFronts, Disney revealed that the launch of the Disney Eats brand, partnering with online foodie network Tastemade to develop original content, as Deadline reports.

As someone who works primarily in the television space, the EVP of Video Investment at media agency Assembly is always on the lookout for “places where we can find premium TV-like video in a brand-safe environment with scale.”

Besides acknowledging the nexus of digital and traditional TV, Lee comes away from the NewFronts presentations impressed by the increasing number of publishers launching their own over-the-top channels. “It’s definitely table stakes now,” he says.

While content was front and center at the NewFronts, performance metrics or guarantees were less so. “I think there’s an expectation that if you’re in digital video you’ll be able to provide digital video like metrics, which is not always the case of course.”

Lee is encouraged by better TV-targeting options from the likes of OpenAP, calling it a “healthy trend.” While measurement still needs to advance, “from an attribution model standpoint there’s a lot more we know about what networks what dayparts what programs are driving ROI.”

The missing piece is incremental improvement on ROI on the back end of campaigns.

“We need the networks to say, ‘if you’re going to create this data-led approach then you need to guarantee me ROI on the back end,’” for example guaranteeing performance on age/sex demos plus one of an advertiser’s own targets. “We want an actual ROI on the back end, which I think would really put skin in the game for the networks,” Lee adds.

“We’re definitely seeing improvements from last year to this year. We’re not quite there yet, but I think we’ve made quite a lot of progress in a year.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

Meanwhile, its audience targeting capabilities can be based on outcomes of sporting events and their impact on consumers’ moods, ESPN’s President of Global Sales & Marketing, Ed Erhardt, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts 2018.

Data and technology are providing the digital media ecosystem with the means to “know much sooner whether something is working or not. So with that in mind, we think we have a competitive advantage in real time marketing because of the fact that we’re live all the time,” Erhardt says.

With attribution data generating post-campaign insights on everything from store sales to Realtor bookings to in-store grocery sales, the whole process has become “much more sophisticated. In our minds, the more we can help feed that with intelligent information, particularly around what our brands bring to that conversation, the better.”

A growing female contingent now watches and consumes sports. And they do that for all kinds of reasons. “Differently than men in some respects, the same as men in others,” says Erhardt.

From an advertising perspective, ESPN positions its audience as more adults as opposed to its traditional male base. This focus on diversity has helped it lure brands like Mattel and Northwestern Mutual, the latter of which bought time on ESPN “because we reached a female audience that they were having a hard time reaching. Because it happened to be more professional, more upscale, etcetera. That’s a big change I think.”

ESPN boasts that it harbors the “largest treasure trove of information about sports fans.” So if a female viewer has voluntarily indicated that she’s in a certain region and is a fan “of four other teams,” based on sports outcomes ESPN knows “whether you’re going to be happy on a Saturday or not. Well, there’s a different ad for each one of those things and they become more effective when we can do it in the right way. We call it live connect.”

Diversity aside, the company’s stalwart product categories aren’t going away. “We’ll always have beers and we’ll always have autos and things like that. But I think we’re tapping into the new economy,” Erhardt says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

Video views on Twitter have nearly doubled in the past year, the company said during its Digital Content NewFronts event this week.

“Where we first start is, we look at the conversation that’s already happening on the platform. The goal is to actually marry the organic conversation that’s happening on the platform with the content that they’re talking about,” Kay Madati, Global VP & Head of Content Partnerships, says in this interview with Beet.TV. “The marriage of those two things deliver quality content for our audiences and real distribution and engagement.”

NBCU will be sharing live video and clips from properties including NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo, as TechCrunch reports.

Twitter has been working with NBC for many years. The new expansion gives it the opportunity to now work with seven different brands inside the organization.

“Part of what I think the value that we provide for our content partners is that we end up being an extension of their reach,” Madati says. “The ability for a producer like NBC or the Ellen show to be able to reach our engaged audience on our platform.”

Linking content with social conversations and tying in advertisers provides opportunities for all types of publishers, according to Madati. “We’re not trying to dis-intermediate their businesses. We’re here to extend the ability to tie the conversation that’s happening around their content on our platform and allow us all to take that out to market.”

Twitter is “excited to see what we can do with Telemundo around approaching Hispanic conversations on the platform, we’re excited to see what we can do with E Networks, NBC news.”

The deals stem from the core understanding that “eyeballs in this new world of multi-platform, multi-device consumption are going everywhere,” Madati adds.

He believes that one of the best things about Twitter is that communities and movements that use the platform to disseminate their messages are self-organized. “When I think about the violence in Florida with guns and how a couple of students got together, joined our platform and a month, two months later they have millions of people listening to them, that in its essence is what Twitter is fantastic at.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Somaya talks about linear optimization across the Walt Disney Co. portfolio and why advertisers are becoming more comfortable providing their first-party data for targeting linear audiences.

“We are now seeing it rapidly approaching us in the form of syndicated data notions within linear television and I think we’re seeing the beginnings of being actually able to use first and third-party data in a linear television framework,” Somaya says. “So true, addressable television if you will.”

Disney is taking those notions “and broadening them out beyond ESPN” through its other media groups.” So it’s not just about the power of ESPN’s first-party knowledge of sports fans “but more broadly, how do our guests at the Walt Disney Company become part of that audience selling notion,” Somaya adds.

ESPN is introducing linear optimization into its linear networks “and I think over the next I’ll call it 12 to 18 months we’ll really start seeing the insertion of first and third-party data into our linear networks in a very, very I think forward looking way.”

One sought-for result is being able to change how television is given attribution for the things that it does, “which today digital gets an outsized amount of attribution for.”

Things are still in the early stages for media buyers wanting to target specific audiences as opposed to demographics. So the next 12 months will constitute the experimental phase, according to Somaya.

“Once we get past that and the systems are able to do this at scale, that’s when the whole game changes.”

Somaya calls live sports “the last bastion of communal viewing” and cites the upcoming launch of streaming service ESPN Plus as “adding even more content that makes our sort of super sports fans get access to things they’ve never gotten before in an almost completely new way.”

He encourages cooperation around data “and understanding how data can become mobile as much as possible. I think the other piece of that coin is allowing consumers to have control over what piece of their data is shared and allowing for an open value exchange.”

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

This is not lost on marketing analytics provider DataXu, which has been in the programmatic space since 2009, fittingly using combinatorial algorithms originally developed by one of its co-founders for guiding NASA’s Mars missions. DataXu has a broad footprint in the demand-side platform side of the business and has set its sights on helping media companies so as to stay one step ahead of would-be competitors Amazon et al.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade show, DataX CEO Mike Baker explains what the buy-side wants from programmatic TV and the race to beat digital giants to help the sell-side better cope with automated transactions and measurement.

A big focus of DataXu to date has been on connected OTT screens via its core DSP called TouchPoint. Via self-serve software buyers can track campaigns running across seven types of devices, providing the benefit of automation “unlike some of what’s plaguing some of the TV targeting with linear streams,” said Baker.

Along with automation, he identifies application of digital audience insights and campaign attribution as three main issues of interest among buyers. With insights, it can be as granular as using mobile audience data to target a live ad on ESPN.

“That’s really provocative and I think an industry first,” Baker observes. OTT inventory “is much more valuable when you’re able to buy these kinds of granular targets with your data.”

There’s a shift by some ad tech companies toward the digital TV landscape given the continued growth in viewing habits. That’s where are Amazon, Facebook and Google come in.

“I think everybody at this point sort of understands this is the next frontier for these companies and they come very well equipped indeed” with data, analytics and other resources. DataXu is busily developing its media company segment to help some of these very large incumbent TV players adapt and fit up to be competitive with these Internet giants as they “encroach inevitably on TV,” Baker says.

This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The answer rests on delivery systems, according to Joe Marchese, President, Advertising Revenue, Fox Networks Group.

“The idea is, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you know who’s watching and, secondarily, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you can either change the ads or not change the ads?” Marchese said during a panel discussion by Comcast at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. “Last portion is, is it being delivered on demand or live?”

Additionally, he suggested separating content from delivery vehicle. This yields a definition of TV as “long-form storytelling, sports, news and information.”

To panelist Eric Johnson, EVP, Global Advertising Revenue at ESPN, behavior is a key component. People watch on average 63 of live sports, whether on a TV set or mobile phone. “The behavior looks the same. If they’re watching SportsCenter they’re watching for 15 minutes on a television or a mobile phone.”

Beyond definitions, the only thing that marketers should care about is the likelihood that their message was delivered, according to Marchese. The problem is “pricing mechanisms and the currency we trade on. So we can innovate on the format all we want but if we don’t change the currency, if we don’t change what success is, none of it matters.”

ESPN is moving to a Nielsen Total Live Audience metric this year, Johnson said in response to a question by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.

“We’re seeing a 9 percent lift with young men in terms of streaming that’s not being counted by the current Nielsen measurement tool. I think it’s going to help immediately,” Johnson said.

Marchese would “love to have Nielsen measure 9 percent more audience” but wondered whether “I have to take the same ads that were in the linear TV environment and then put them into the place, that other 9 percent where I could do a digital ad where you could get a different ad from me? Is that the only way I’m going to get paid on that extra 9 percent?”

Johnson’s response: “We are passing through the commercials for the part that’s being measured by Nielsen and then we have another half that we’re dynamically ad serving, that we’re selling digitally, so to speak. So it’s a little bit of the best of both worlds.”

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

It’s that “other” programming that concerns media sellers like ESPN and Fox, as evidenced by the discussion during a Comcast panel at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. In fact, it keeps them up at night.

For ESPN, live is a North Star given its connection with fandom, according to Eric Johnson, EVP of Global Advertising Revenue.

“What has become live sport is expensive and at the same time we continue to just grow the way that consumption looks like,” said Johnson. “In live, real time. It’s complex, without a doubt. We try to make it as simple as possible for marketers.”

Fox Networks Group’s Joe Marchese is a big fan of live programming because it’s a choice of that or on-demand, where viewer attention isn’t a given. “Live doesn’t have that same problem. I will keep signing up for making money on live,” he said.

Asked by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink what keeps them up at night, both Johnson and Fox cited the options available to consumers who don’t want to see ads. Then there is a “virtual tonnage of garbage impressions out there that try to keep the price down. That keeps me up,” said Marchese.

Johnson believes the industry has lost sight that “ultimately good marketing is good marketing. We’ve overcomplicated the industry a little bit to get away from that.”

What keeps Johnson awake is that amid the demand branded, native and other forms of interruptive content, “we’re not thinking about advertising in the same way.”

He explained that most clients could buy a full season of football and run one just commercial with lots of frequency, but that wouldn’t be the optimal way of doing things. They need to be shown that varying creative iterations is desirable.

“That’s part of the process of how do we get to a place where we’re now creating a lot of creative for our customers, because we know what works but we have to help them get to that space of what works,” Johnson said.

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Like other attendees of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Johnson welcomed the many conversations about how the industry can come together and drive more effective ways of measurement.

“We’re trading on a CPM currency that maybe is not the most optimal for trying to make television or video look like something that you can understand what the ROI is,” Johnson, who is EVP of Global Advertising Revenue at ESPN, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

He’s not alone when he acknowledges that video is being evaluated differently on different platforms, be it a 30-second TV spot, a pre-roll or a six-second video without sound. “But the allocation of what the value is of each of those components matters,” Johnson says. “At ESPN, we’re measuring the value and impact of a video ad, agnostic of whatever screen it’s on.”

When you add live streaming, all manner of opportunities arise. Not to mention breaking out from standard ratings constructs.

“What’s most important to me about live sports is that it’s absolutely unique to anything else that’s in the market,” he says. “There is nothing that exists from a content delivery standpoint that delivers so many people that are 98% consuming live.”

For advertisers, it’s an opportunity to truly be in the moment. “You’re not getting it aggregated with seven days or 14 days or 35 days. You’re getting it in that live moment.”

ESPN’s streaming content carries pass-through ads from ESPN1 and ESPN2 along with ads that are dynamically inserted.

“So I think we have the best of both worlds available to marketers. We can talk about it like television or talk about it like video or use neither of those terms,” Johnson says. “Addressability is coming and OTT is allowing us to be able to understand that space. This is something that we’re going to make sure we continue to invest in.”

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Like other media executives whose content is distributed on an ever-increasing number of platforms, Debra O’Connell “would like to see it move faster. We continue to help drive that discussion” about cross-platform measurement.

In the meantime, Disney has made it easier for advertisers to avail themselves of opportunities across a content portfolio that offers “something for all life stages,” the EVP of Sales & Marketing for ABC Television Group says in this interview with Beet.TV.

While ESPN maintains a separate sales organization, as Variety reports, “When clients want us to work together or we have a great opportunity to align both groups we will continue to work together,” says O’Connell. “Actually, having Disney ABC sales as one portfolio makes that streamlining even easier.”

Disney was an early proponent of enabling brands to target desired audiences beyond traditional Nielsen age/sex demographics. “There’s absolutely an appetite for it,” she says. The company’s recommendation for many advertisers is a balance of branding at scale and targeting a particular audience segment “for a particular solution that they’re looking for or key performance indicator that they’d like to see as a return on investment for that campaign.”

She believes the industry is “not quite half way there” on uniform cross-platform measurement but that in the next five years there will be more than one option.

Having a few measurement solutions “as opposed to just one individual monopoly” would provide variety while maintaining “some kind of standardization of what that measurement needs to look like” to provide a true picture of audience and viewership.

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.

However, softer brand measures such as “wholesome” or “innovative” don’t push KPIs very well in TV, she added. ESPN also learned that creative doesn’t need to be contextual, meaning a brand doesn’t need to run a football-themed commercial during a football game in order to connect with consumers.

Singer also touched on the value of media mix and cross-platform reach. In ESPN’s research, digital venues provide a 23% lift in reach for the male audience in a given week. The sports network also learned that multiple platforms support each other. TV usage doesn’t decline when combined with other platforms, she said.

Singer was a panelist at the Beet.TV Video Ad Effectiveness summit presented by Nielsen.

ESPN has been studying consumer behavior across platforms to better understand how fans consume sports across venues. Other platforms are incremental and don’t take away from TV time, she explained. Last September, ESPN launched its Project Blueprint initiative to measure consumption across five platforms — TV, PC, tablet, mobile and audio. The network learned it reaches 136 million adults in a given month and that men who are multiplatform consumers of ESPN content spend twice as much time with the brand as do those who only consume ESPN on one platform. For more insight into ESPN’s multiplatform approach, check out this video interview.

Singer was a speaker at the Beet.TV Video Advertising Effectiveness Summit held in New York last week.  The event was sponsored by Nielsen.