So why aren’t advertisers taking it more seriously when it comes to developing a connected TV advertising plan?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, media agency Essence’s Mike Fisher explains the value of YouTube.

Shifting viewing

“Within the last couple of years, we found YouTube really becoming one of the largest sources of ad-supported streaming happening on the TV screen,” Fisher observes.

“Historically, a lot of marketers did not look towards YouTube as that true TV replacement. People are still going to watch Saturday Night Live content – they’re just watching it in a way that fits their viewing habits; that includes now going to YouTube the next day, watching three or four Saturday Night Live clips.

“A lot of people are at home during the pandemic and that younger viewership who grew up on YouTube is starting to age out of living at home and going out on their own.

“We’re really starting to see a rise in YouTube as a viable alternative to other streaming happening on that TV screen, which has really led to a rise of the need to find a combination of premium television content, coupled with premium television audiences inside of that YouTube environment, and really make a case to our clients on why they need to consider that television.”

YouTube’s growth

Nielsen Streaming Meter says, of the 25% of TV time spent with streaming video, 20% goes to YouTube, making it the second-most-watched digital video platform after Netflix.

Accordingly, YouTube’s CTV ad revenue is growing fast, according to forecasts.

In Q1, YouTube brought in $6 billion in ad revenue for the period, up 49% year-on-year, putting YouTube on course to beat Netflix in annual earnings.

In March, YouTube’s chief product officer reported:

“Our fastest growing viewing experience is on the TV screen. Last December, over 120 million people in the U.S. streamed YouTube or YouTube TV on their TV screens.

And there’s another interesting viewing behavior emerging. A new generation of viewers chooses to watch YouTube primarily on the TV screen: Also in December, over a quarter of logged-in YouTube CTV viewers in the U.S. watched content almost exclusively on the TV screen.”

Context for safety

But Essence’s Fisher wants to ensure connected TV providers like YouTube can offer ad buyers adequate control over ad placement.

“We want to make that ad messaging doesn’t collide,” he says. “If you have humorous ad messaging, we want to certainly make sure that it’s not paired with anything that’s not brand safe or not on target.

“You don’t want to come out of something very serious with a very funny message. It impacts both the content and the ad message in those cases.

“So we’re really starting to think more about how we can use contextual signals, how we can couple audience plus context to really tell a better story.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

In the new world, the emerging medium of over-the-top TV is going to need to convince marketers that their ad was truly effective.

That’s the view of one ad agency leader charged with plotting the course to the OTT future.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Fisher, Essence VP of Advanced TV & Audio, says he welcomes ad verification providers branching out into ad measurement.

Finding effectiveness

Fisher says brands have some worries about how their OTT ad money is really being spent, and whether it is really effective.

“With that comes client concern, and really the need to understand more from a third-party perspective, where these ads are running, how they’re reaching their viewer and ensure that they’re being delivered on target,” he says.

“The premium publishers, who have a lot of skin in the game and want to continue to drive substantial tier-one marketing budgets through their platforms, they’re trustworthy.

“The questions that marketers have (are) more around the longer-tail publishers, the aggregators, the programmatic buying pipes. They want to make sure that they’re upholding those buying channels and modalities to the same standard that they’re holding the premium television networks do – knowing what type of content it’s running in, making sure it’s brand safe, making sure it’s viewable and measurable.”

Personalization, democratization, globalization, diversity, and commerce: @gschmitt sets out five ways the pandemic is catalyzing a new creative era in an op-ed for @CampaignLiveUS today – and why there's no going back. https://t.co/5nGHWcpyzx

— Essence (@essenceglobal) September 25, 2020

Plugging the gap

But Fisher sees a role emerging for ad verification software providers. They have typically been focused on simply establishing whether an ad impression was viable – in other words, whether it was viewable by a real human.

“Move on beyond just validating that the impressions were delivered to a human,” Fisher says.

“The third-party ad verification platforms have an opportunity to step in and be that trusted validation partner – not just for the advertiser and agency, but for those tier-two tier-three publishers and tier-one programmatic buying pipes.”

Fisher hopes that will plug a “gap” he sees in OTT ad sales. He says TV buyers are still trying to use traditional metrics.

“Brands want the flexibility now to turn things on and off and not have a pre-agreed-upon commitment.” Smart stuff here from @essenceglobal's Anthony Rinaldi about why #ProgrammaticAds have been able to weather #COVID19. https://t.co/a2LhLpS7Kk pic.twitter.com/29Ewwcj7RN

— Ben Zimmerman (@BenZimmermanMDG) September 15, 2020

This video is part of CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective, a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We would like to have cross-channel attribution, reach and frequency, and control,” Deborah King, vice president of media activation paid social for the EMEA region at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM media-buying firm, said. “Due to that not being available, it really opened up a lot of creative and innovative ways for me and my team to plan paid social campaigns.”

In this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean, King described how marketers need to approach their paid social campaigns.

“Social is one of the biggest ecosystems where you have to be a bit of a strategist at heart,” she said. “You always have to remember who is your audience. You have to remember the mindset, the context and the environment.”

Each social media platform has its own style of user experience, ad formats and ways for brands to engage with audiences. Understanding those differences is crucial in running campaigns and interacting with consumers.

“It’s an exciting time to be a digital marketeer with the paid social landscape,” King said. “There’s an element of creativity that we have to deploy and think about in terms of executing our campaigns.”

Marketers need to respect consumer privacy, not only to build trust with customers, but also to comply with stricter data-privacy rules in regions as varied as the European Union and the state of California.

“Privacy has become an increasingly more important, and having a privacy-first approach that we all need to follow through on,” King said.

She also sees more opportunities in livestreaming, which became more popular as people huddled indoors during the pandemic. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google’s YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch all support live video in some form.

“During lockdowns, live has had a place in social,” King said. “A lot of marketeers are going to start to incorporate that into their strategy.”

You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.

After a decade in which so much display ad inventory was traded through open programmatic exchanges, the emergence of connected, over-the-top (OTT) TV ads is coming with a key difference – broadcasters want to stay in control of the ads they sell.

But that doesn’t mean they want to continue selling ads through traditional direct-sold insertion orders.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Fisher, SVP of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a GroupM media agency, says supply-side platforms (SSPs) are becoming pivotal.

In control

“I truly believe that OTT is one of the safest forms of digital video that you can be buying programmatically,” Fisher says. “True television streaming content, that’s still sold directly by the end seller.

“We increasingly see our clients buy from who they’re comfortable buying from – the NBCs, the Viacoms, the Discoverys, the Hulus, the Comcasts of the world.

“Even though they’re executing it via programmatic pipes. They’re not buying in open auction because there’s really none of this inventory being made available inside of an open auction environment.”

Many of the networks Fisher mentioned have tooled-up with their own initiatives and platforms to sell ads. But many also want to use supply-side platforms to carve out private marketplaces or enable guaranteed deals.

SSPs in focus

Congratulations to @essenceglobal who was crowned #CampaignTechAwards 2020 Agency of the Year and to @kineticwwUK, @MediaComGlobal, @mindshare, @Ogilvy, @WavemakerGlobal who also scooped awards @Campaignmag https://t.co/pOfMv1oKmD

— WPP (@WPP) June 26, 2020

“The SSPs have a really unique role in this space,” adds Fisher. “They’re not just a pipe for the publishers anymore, in order to get access to the buy side.

“They’re really also providing yield management, unified ad decisioning, server-side ad insertion, the ability to better manage a pod or an ad load, to more mirror television.

“That really becomes important as buyers look to migrate their linear TV budgets to streaming. As they look to say, ‘I still want to maintain competitive separation inside the (ad) pod’, or frequency rules that you would normally put in place with a direct buy.

“It’s really up to the SSP to develop the technologies that allow the publishers to do that.”

Evolving the SSP

By the same token, SSP vendors have to work hard to give publishers tools in a world where more of them want to take more control of their business and software.

They need to shake off the perception that the category still lingers in the older, open-auction programmatic world, where they facilitated long-tail, less-than-premium ads.

That is not something the TV industry is going to stand for.

So off-shoots like private marketplaces, which help publishers govern whom they trade with, may help assuage concerns.

Three tiers of viewing

COVID-19 has forced people to find new ways to do old things. It's also catalyzed entirely new behaviors as well. Sarah Walker, Global Chief Business Strategy Officer, outlines how to identify and respond to both replacement and displacement behaviors: https://t.co/gsDg9Ab4qT

— Essence (@essenceglobal) June 30, 2020

Either way, Essence’s Fisher thinks the existence of both SVOD and a new wave of advertising-supported video (AVOD) services is settling down into a three-tiered co-existence.

1. “The average consumer is going to subscribe to one or two premium SVOD services, (like) Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max,” he says.
2. “And then they’re going to fill in the holes with two or three different lower-tier paid services like the on demand portion of Hulu, CBS All Access, or others, which has a lighter ad load, but still ad exposure.
3. “And then that’s really where they’re then going to turn to the free ad-supported services like Tubi, Pluto, Xumo.”

Fisher thinks the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing this kind of setup. According to him, consumption has boomed but many networks have struggled to commission new premium programming, leaving lower-tier, library-based content like that offered by AVODs to fill the gaps.

This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic.  for more videos please visit this page. 

A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV in Puerto Rico discussed that topic.

Slow addressable adoption?

The debate kicked off with some data points quantifying the size of spend in US addressable TV advertising today…

Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC:

“Two percent of all national media (is) being spent via addressable. Forester issued some research last summer that said about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines. Are you happy with the level of adoption? Are we behind?”

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

“For the advertisers where the return outweighs the work and the pain, they’re involved. For the advertisers and the brands where it doesn’t, they’re not there.

Brands only dipping a toe

Whilst media buyers are certainly spending in addressable TV, executives bemoaned that the budget was still experimental or occasional…

Michael Law, EVP,  US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:

“Our (clients’) spend is actually about flattened down a little. But the number of brands interacting is growing because we’ve had some brands who went in just way too high early on. What is worrisome is the amount of (spending that) is still considered ‘test and learn’ – it’s just a little bit of money and then it goes away.”

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

“That’s very true. That is the single biggest issue with scaling the dollars in addressable television today. Many advertisers want to do it for the wrong reasons. They want to check off the ‘innovation’ box.”

More supply needed

Panelists discussed how limiting the availability of inventory with the right audiences against it could actually work against addressable…

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

“Historically, television has always been (about) supply and demand. When the supply decreases, the knee jerk reaction is to raise the price. As we all know, in television, at least in recent times, the advertisers still stand in line with the checkbook.

“That’s not going to work with addressable television. If we run out of inventory, or we get to a point where there’s a finite supply of inventory, it’s going to drive up the price.”

Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV, LiveRamp:

“You’re going to have ownership of programmers by MVPDs or at least a fusion of the two. That inventory will open up and I think OTT is also growing rapidly.”

Don’t target, cap

The debate heard one view that addressability should not be about targeting audiences at all – especially for certain brands…

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

“We’re thinking about addressability wrong … The math is not going to work, right? I would question, are we thinking about addressability the right way as being about audiences? Or should we be thinking about it a different way, in that it can solve frequency distribution? The better option for us is, how do we use addressability to manage frequency, not target audiences.”

Michael Law, EVP,  US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:

“Right now, there’s a lot of categories saying, “How do I (target) toilet paper (which everyone needs)?”

Solve for cord-cutting

But the panel also heard how addressable or some alternative to conventional linear TV advertising is essential…

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:

“Part of the problem now, with the way viewership behavior is shifting, is that there are a lot of people who you’re just never gonna get on linear TV because they don’t do that anymore. Whether it’s linear or addressable, or anything that looks like broadcast, to try to reach people who don’t have an antenna or cable subscription ain’t going to work.”

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.

And that tipping point coincided with a large-scale new bearishness that plagued its rival tech platforms, as concerns over ad practices, mental health and democracy coalesced to dog Facebook and Google.

So, who will be winning the race in 2019? In this video interview with Beet.TV, an executive from one of GroupM’s ad agencies says Amazon has taken share from the big two digital ad players, and now stands ready to capitalize on a world of walled gardens.

“The theme of 2018 was that it was a really hard year, from a digital measurement and tracking perspective,” says Essence SVP, media activation, North America, Gila Wilensky.

“And I think 2019 is going to be difficult, as well, as we sort through some of the challenges as it relates to the way we track audiences, and are able to market to our customers.”

Wilensky is talking about the ongoing challenge in which ad buyers want to use the likes of Facebook but find it difficult to put their activities there in the wider context of campaign performance – in other words, the “walled garden” issue.

That has been a grumble of many advertisers for a couple of years now. But, with Facebook facing an onslaught of criticism for insufficient oversight over how its user data is exported out of its platform, it could arguably be an issue that won’t get solved any time soon.

“We have a challenge that we could only get a read on what’s working within one channel, or within one place,” Wilensky says. “We’re not able to say that platform A or media A had this X impact on somebody. It just becomes more of a crap shoot in the way that we’re able to do attribution.”

What does that mean for the GAFA tussle, the race between Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon for ad supremacy?

Elsewhere in the GroupM stable, Finecast’s CEO has already told Beet.TV that Amazon’s connected TV ad ambitions, after announcing it will take a 30% cut of ad revenue spent over that platform, are clear.

“They’re building a big infrastructure, sales force of going directly after TV money,” Jakob Nielsen said. “So they’re definitely going to be a gigantic player in there.”

But Wilensky sees Amazon’s coming scale as being the sum of its many different parts.

“Amazon’s really interesting, because of the acquisition brands that it has,” she says. “They have amazing data from their customers. Whether or not we can use that in interesting ways will remain to be seen, but I think the acquisitions at Amazon makes is where it’s going to see differentiation.

“Whole Foods is one of them. IMDB was one of their first acquisition brands. And they just have a wealth of data across the different platforms that they own, and so their success, I think, will be in integrating their customer insights across all of those products, and then up-leveling the ad platform, which is pretty nascent right now, as it relates to its competitors.”

“I think we’re moving at a decent pace but I do wish we were moving faster,” Gerber, who is President of Global Media Investment for GroupM’s Essence agency, says during a break at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.

He expresses the wish that some of the barriers “that are really more commercially related, less technical related, would get pushed out of the way and that we’d have companies working more closely together on things that are important to ultimately the folks who matter, who are the viewers and advertisers.”

Until then, here’s how Gerber sizes up the field.

Media companies: They need to figure out “how they’re going to work together in the future as a platform as opposed to independent media sellers. That is a really big step change from where their current organizations are, where their motivations lie, et. cetera. And that’s going to be a tough one to untangle.”

Measurement companies: These are challenged with a different task, “which is completely rethinking and reinventing the way that they provide marketplace intelligence and marketplace currency to the actors.” In moving from a panel-based world to one where everything is addressable and highly fragmented, “requiring census-level data is a huge change for the measurement companies.”

Agencies need to reorganize and “rethink how they are structured and go to market. It shouldn’t be about price, it should be about business outcomes.”

Clients need to rethink how they engage with their agencies. “I think there’s too much pressure on price being the driver and I think they need to rethink the types of skillsets and capabilities that they really prioritize with their agency partners.”

Now for sympathy versus empathy. Asked how he would have responded while on the network TV side to suggestions that competing companies pool their inventory and become more of a easy to use advertising platform, Gerber offers the benefit of the doubt. “There’s a hypothesis that moving from the unit-based model and the directly sold model that we live in today to a algorithmically driven, automated platform-based model will create more value for everyone,” he observes. “I think that’s the way we look at it at Essence and that would be the argument that we would make. The problem is, the data doesn’t exist. No one really knows whether that’s what will happen.”

So it’s reasonable that media sellers who in some quarters are expected to quickly upend their long-held business practices to try to move TV in general ahead are skeptical of the outcome. That’s because there’s no way of knowing whether doing so “will actually create more demand at a higher price, or at least at a revenue-neutral level. It’s a huge risk for companies that have large existing legacy revenue streams in place. Much easier for companies that are starting from scratch.”

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.

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.

That kind of consensus is forming, with executives promising to rebalance the audience relationship through better messaging.

Still, even as the industry looks to correct itself, it is also challenged to respond to the omni-channel demand – the reality that brands now need to engage with consumers across a wide variety of devices and touchpoints.

The Catch-22? As a Beet.TV panel moderated by Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell discussed, the solution to omni-channel is all about… technology.

How the crisis was created

The panelists lamented that technology capabilities have led the industry toward simply using tech for tech’s sake, bamboozling consumers with advertising – and prompting a backlash…

Essence president Jason Harrison: “It still is really amazing to me the number of advertisers and marketers that pour money into advertising without a really concrete understanding of what actually works. Technology is way ahead … whether the technology is working or not working, if it’s being used for good or for bad.”

Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell: “We have this habit of saying, ‘Because the tech exists, we should do this thing. Because I can personalize, I always must. Because I can target, I will only target the people I think I care about – until they hate me’.”

Adobe SVP and GM of Advertising Cloud Keith Eadie: “The metrics have followed the technology platforms … but not nearly to the point where we’re creating experiences and understanding how different audiences or individuals are reacting to that advertising and adjusting accordingly. We’ve given all of these marketers a hammer and then everything’s looked like the nail and the last 10 years has been about mass tonnage of advertising … it’s not surprising, given that context, of the outcomes we have now in terms of receptivity to advertising from our consumers.”

Fixing pipes with creative

Panelists debated how the way to solve matters was be reconnecting with message, by turning attention to using data to fuel more creative stories that reach audiences, not just for targeting.

Essence president Jason Harrison: “If you look at consumers’ expectations of what they see in terms of advertising, what’s rising fastest is, ‘I want something that’s relevant’. But there’s still a big gap in the way that I think creative storytelling happens in advertising. The next frontier of advertising is, ‘How do we get that right?'”

Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell: “We see in the data that some consumers are totally okay with personalized advertising, because they feel like they’re getting some value. Others are really, super not cool with it.”

IBM VP digital strategy and sales Jordan Bitterman: “You’ve got to be able to build for something that you know can scale. There’s a lot of great formats that are out there – but there’s a lot of clients that don’t want to spend that kind of money to build those different kind of ads out unless they know it can scale because. at some point, the wallet dries up and there’s only so much they can do.  I think the same is true for omni-channel.”

Future shape of the industry

IBM VP digital strategy and sales Jordan Bitterman: Bitterman left panelists with two predictions for how the industry will reconfigure itself to meet these challenges:

1. “I think we’re probably going to see a re-bundled agency come about that’ll be super interesting with media and creative and analytics altogether, and really kind of anchored by analytics in many ways.
2. “I was having breakfast with a senior agency guy last week, and he said something to me, which is really interesting. He thinks that there’s gonna be a real big comeback in planning.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018.  For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Essence president Jason Harrison says the roll-out of the omni-channel approach is still a mixed bag.

“Some are really good at it, where there is an experience that is very connected between touch points,” Harrison says.

He says some brands which reach people through app, website, advertising and products are doing so effectively. But that is not the view across the board.

“You see a lot of companies where you’ve got a head of digital, you’ve got a head of traditional, you’ve got an e-commerce and the three report to different places and maybe they collaborate, maybe they don’t,” Harrison laments.

“You know, I just think you’re set up for a situation where those things are bound to be not connected to one another.”

So how can brands finally think holistically on behalf of their audiences? Harrison recommends:

• Organizational alignment.
• Shared understanding of marketing’s role in company success.
• Common understanding for customers’ experience.

“Somebody could appear amazing in the advertising yet when you interact with that brand at a retail touch point or in a phone conversation or whatever, it’s a miserable experience, nothing, it doesn’t matter what happens in the advertising realm to over compensate for that,” he says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018.  For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.

“Chances are, we’ve probably done some work for someone with a similar objective or we’re actually working with an ad studio that has the creativity, the flexibility and the prowess to help them think through how we can do that in our ad format.”

Just after the Cannes Festival concluded, true[X] said that it has reached a one-year deal with GroupM digital agency Essence to develop and test new approaches for connected TV advertising. As Advertising Age reports, the aim is to develop consumer-friendly and compelling brand experiences that can scale to connected-TV offerings like Roku and Apple TV. In addition, Essence will be the first agency to access engagement ads programmatically.

At Cannes, true[X]’s focus on brand lift as a measure of success “is really resonating here,” says Midha. “There’s no better personal primetime than the OTT viewing we see happening across our publisher partners.”

Asked to comment on developments in OTT measurement, Midha says, “It’s unfortunate that it’s a little bit nascent because it’s such an incredible viewing environment. There’s a lack of standardization in those platforms. Each one is a little bit different, which makes rolling measurement across very difficult. It’s not something that’s happened quickly.”

True[X] has already built a measurement tool that can live in all OTT environments called Uplift, which measures brand lift.

“Because if you want to create a brand, you need emotion. That’s the difference between a brand and a product. The first thing you need to do that is you need to have attention, which is what our format is about, and once you have attention you want to make sure you’re lifting your brand and you’re having impact. We’re trying to follow the whole thread.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

This video is a highlight compilation our several of our conversations.

The first three are a related trio of concerns. Quality storytelling derives from consumer data and insights, the end product of which can be ripe for brand integration. Meredith Corporation’s extensive presence at the NewFronts was crafted to address all of these concerns.

“We’re trying to create advertising that becomes what people are interested in, rather than simply interrupting what they’re interested in,” is the way that Shane Akeney, President, Havas Media Group NA, sums things up in this video compilation, which Meredith presented in its NewFronts event on the big screen at Manhattan’s Hudson Theatre. “Big leaps can be made in creating content that is so compelling that consumers want to watch it, want to see it, want to actually be experiencing it.”

Rather than “insert” themselves into content, brand should be there “because they’re making the content better,” says Matt Seilor, President Brand Solutions, Dentsu Aegis Network.

Accountability means measurable returns on advertising spend. “I think the days of an advertiser just kind of spending money and hoping for the best are over,” says Jason Harrison, President and Client Partner, Essence.

Brand safety was a major theme during the week of NewFronts events, echoed by most participants and those featured in this video. They are:

Marla Kaplowitz, President & CEO, 4A’s.

Will Warren, EVP, Digital Investment, Zenith Media.

Yin Woon Rani, VP Integrated Marketing, Campbell Soup Company.

Christine Peterson, Managing Director, Digital Investment Lead, Mindshare.

Shane Akeney, President, Havas Media Group NA.

Matt Seilor, President Brand Solutions, Dentsu Aegis Network.

Jason Harrison, President and Client Partner, Essence.

Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas, GroupM.

Ben Winkler, Chief Investment Officer, OMD.

Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas, GroupM.

Louis Jones, EVP, Media & Data, 4A’s.

This video was presented on May 4 at the Meredith NewFronts presentation on the big screen of the Hudson Theater.

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For the full version of videos from the series, please visit this page.

“I think the two have to work together and you need to be careful that you don’t optimize toward specific audiences and optimize yourself out of business,” says Jason Harrison, President & Client Partner at GroupM’s Essence agency.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, Harrison discusses the growing use of marketers’ first-party data and why it’s important to understand “the role of advertising” within the context of desired business outcomes.

“For certain advertisers right now, they really can’t live without first-party data,” Harrison says. He cites retailers “or somebody that’s really concerned with driving consumption, having that data available enables them to really tightly target those individuals that they have a reason to believe are going to be in their stores.”

Closed-loop attribution can then determine how many people who were exposed to particular ads actually visited stores.

Broad-based brand building via mass media is still relevant to young brands, according to Harrison. “Some advertisers aren’t known to customers. They need to become known so they drive a lot of brand advertising to create awareness. Once you’ve done that, then you can begin to move toward stuff that’s lower funnel, that is much more targeted.”

On the opposite end of the broad-brush approach, one-to-one TV targeting is limited by scale. “Addressable television is a great example. It’s highly effective. We know it works at driving specific kinds of actions but there’s a limit to how much of it you can do,” says Harrison.

The trick, he adds, “is in understanding what the balance is between the two and how much of one does one job versus another and that’s really where I think there’s been some evolution recently.”

He predicts TV will become “more and more targeted” and then questions the future of commercials as we now know them.

“Do they continue to be beautiful, brand-building, equity based messages or does television as a medium move more in the direction of driving promotional conversion? I think that will be very interesting to watch.”

Harrison says the mission of Essence is “to make advertising more valuable to the world by viewing it as something that creates value. It has created a lot of interesting dialogues with our clients about the nature of advertising and how we think about what advertising should be and what it could be.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“I think it’s a really complicated challenge that the industry is in right now,” says Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment at GroupM agency Essence, who has spent nearly three decades on both the agency and publisher side.

“I think that a number of networks have been very vocal and, in many cases, very right about one of the challenges that exists in the marketplace today, which is consumers have lots of access to content in non-ad supported environments,” Gerber says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit.

Migration to those environments is occurring “because the experience is better, the aggregation of content is monstrous, it’s a really easy and enjoyable experience for them,” Gerber ads.

Ad-supported TV in general—whether linear or across linear platforms like OTT or VOD or via digital video records—increasingly are “I don’t want to use the word painful but challenging to live through, especially if the viewing behavior moves from single show to binging, where you’re watching multiple episodes all at once.”

Given that viewers are more in control than ever, the longtime ad model has been under increased scrutiny.

“I think the initiatives that networks are taking to really address clutter ad pod length and some of the format issues with regard to traditional fifteens and thirties potentially being replaced by other more innovative formats are what’s needed,” says Gerber.

The challenge to publishers: how they make it pay out.

“Because if you decrease inventory, there’s an immediate challenge related to revenue,” Gerber adds. “If you’re a public company, it doesn’t help you to go into your boss and say we’re going to have a decrease in revenue because I’m making this change to our ad model.

“It think from the advertiser and buy side, there has to be a payout in terms of ROI and improvement in performance if we’re going to be talking about any kinds of changes to the pricing that we pay for our inventory.”

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

While pursuing these topics can lead to circular conversations—everyone agrees on the need for change but no one thinks it won’t happen soon, if at all—such discussions actually help to clarify a very complex landscape. This was the goal of a panel at Beet Retreat Miami 2017 featuring executives from FreeWheel, one2one Media and digital-first agency Essence.

Moderator Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink, kicked things off by asking for specific suggestions that would remove roadblocks from the advanced TV space. What follows are a sampling of responses.

Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment, North America Essence: “Everyone’s got different agendas. The MVPD’s don’t want to allow me to bump my first-party data up to their set-top boxes unless I’m buying local media through them. That’s not a long-term success for anyone in this business, to link business models that don’t need to be linked. On the distribution side, there are affiliate agreements that restrict national networks from selling local inventory. That’s going to cause a problem if we’re talking about moving to an addressable model where national networks want to be able to sell.”

Mike Bologna, President, one2one Media: “Unfortunately, I agree with a lot of what you said. It really comes down to how we articulate change in our business. Everybody around here knows that nothing moves quickly in this business when it comes to change. We’re all used to thinking cheaper is better. So in terms of moving this along, it’s about identifying how something might cost a little bit more but the return on it might be more than the X factor of that cost.”

Herve Brunet, GM, Markets, FreeWheel: “We’re living in a world where video sits in two worlds, basically linear TV and digital video, and these are still two silos and they’re run separate at the agency level but also at the publisher level. We think that needs to become a lot simpler, it needs to become one pool of inventory, it needs to become one way for the buyer to find their viewers, as opposed to two different ways.

So how long will silos hold back progress, asked Spiegel.

“I think we are going to continue to see it rise in silos because there isn’t one person that can actually snap their fingers, make a decision and bring it altogether,” said Bologna. “But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth doing all the work and working through all those silos if the return pays out, which can be demonstrated with the proper data.”

Gerber pointed out that consumers want two things: live and on-demand programming. Delivery mechanisms are irrelevant. “They don’t give a rat’s ass whether it’s through a DVR, through their VOD platform, through a connected TV app, through any other number of mechanisms that get the content to their screen,” said Gerber. “It’s not about platforms it’s about experiences and it’s about delivering an ad in those experiences.”

Organizational malfunction isn’t going away anytime soon, noted Bologna. “It exists at agencies, it exists at media companies, it exists at the brands. In my opinion, the best we can do is work within the organizational malfunction and do the best we can.”

Gerber cited the status quo of how brand portfolios do business, beginning with their budgeting processes, explaining how it works against an addressability model. Using the hypothetical example of a telecommunications company, he said it should be able to message across various product suites based on what it knows about its customers.

“But if they’re building their brand budgets and their campaigns from the product level up, addressability doesn’t scale,” said Gerber. “Because what you want to be able do is push addressability from the top down. When you know about a consumer and they’re in a particular mental state in terms of purchase you want to serve them the right product. Serving them the right product that’s out of flight because it doesn’t align with the brand budget doesn’t work. So client org structures have to completely flip in terms of how they manage their marketing budgets for this to work.”

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.

The latest Zenith figures estimate Google and Facebook took 96% of spending outside of China last year.

But one of the world’s biggest media-buying agencies says there are bigger problems than the duopoly.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Essence North America investment SVP Adam Gerber points the finger elsewhere.

“We all have mutual interest around the advertising model, so I’m not so sure that there needs to be as much tension … around the ‘platforms-versus-the-publishers’,” he says.

“I think there are other folks who we really should be looking at as the problem. There are companies that are trying to disintermediate and get in the way of value creation that services the end constituents.

“To me, we need to eliminate as much of the middle as possible so that the beneficiaries of a more efficient marketplace and a data driven marketplace are the advertisers and the media sellers.”

Gerber was referring to a maze of tech platforms that now sit between buyers and sellers.

His company was founded a decade ago by a number of marketers in the banking industry. Over time, they were able to win project work from Google and ultimately over the last decade have become Google’s global digital agency. Now Essence has grown to add NBCUniversal and Target as clients, and was acquired by GroupM in 2015.

Gerber also warns that the growth of subscription VOD services like Netflix, which run without advertising, reduces marketers’ potential reach.

“The other thing that no one talks about is the behavior changes that a number of new platforms are driving amongst key segments of our population, to be conditioned to watching content and consuming video without ads,” he says.

“The more that that happens, the more that we allow that behavior change to evolve, the less opportunities marketers are going to have to reach their consumers in ad-supported environments, the more challenge publishers are going to be in terms of their business models and the more difficult it’s going to be for agencies and marketers to effectively plan and build marketing solutions that drive their product sales.”

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.

“We’re the guys who coined the term ‘frenemy’, and we’re not big fans of the whole walled garden concept that Google represents,” Group M global chairman Irwin Gotlieb tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’ve developed our own tech stacks to deal with the digital area. We prefer not to use the Google technology.”

So why did GroupM just acquire Essence?

“As GroupM, we still spend in excess of $3 billion dollars a year with Google. And we need to spend that money … in a best-in-class manner,” Gotlieb explains.

“Essence uses the Google tech stack. And they are, in fact, Google’s agency around the world. We see a path … we’ve got our meta DSP going and we’re beginning to integrate the Essence component as the pathway from the meta DSP into Google inventory. That’s kind of the play there.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

Gotlieb was interviewed on stage by moderator Scott Ferber, CEO of Videology.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.