“What we’ve discovered and what some of our receiving partners have come to us with is their issues have gotten more complicated. They have multiple outlets now,” says Extreme Reach CEO Tim Conley.

“They know that we get them the assets with the right quality and the right data ready to go. They’ve asked how to help make these assets available to other platforms” like OTT, mobile and set-top VOD, Conley adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

Buyers and sellers building their own systems for handling ads has created redundancies among brands, agencies, programmers and multichannel video programming distributors, as Broadcasting & Cable reports. Handing creative off to multiple systems can result in missed opportunities to monetize the right content with the right ads.

For buyers, AdBridge enables them to access more detailed locations, Conley explains. “Rather than getting something to the traditional broadcaster and letting them figure out how it gets to the other platforms, from their media buy they can actually decide I’m going to set-top VOD for this, I’m going to the mobile application or the in-app application directly. So our buy side customers and partners have control over that.”

Sell-side users of AdBridge will include traditional broadcasters, “newer media folks” and MVPD’s that are ad-supported.

“What we’re trying to do is help our customers move these things at the speed of media. I buy media but I don’t necessarily have an asset to put in that media right away. So all of a sudden it takes days or weeks to get that asset in.”

Extreme Reach also knows the talent and rights information around a particular creative asset to be able to say “it can be used in this environment but it can’t be used in that environment,” says Conley.

“The in-house agency phenomenon is something that really just popped out of surveys that we were doing,” says ANA CEO Bob Liodice in this Beet.TV interview at the ANA In-House Agency Conference, who also credits the Boston-based In-House Agency Forum.

“The more we began to learn, the more we realized that in fact in-house agencies are a function of growth,” Liodice adds. “Growth is our middle name. Driving growth for brands and businesses is what we are all about.”

After a survey of ANA members in 2018, “we saw how explosive it was. In house agencies were growing because marketers were feeling like this was an important element to gain greater control, to take their industry back.”

So now the option of taking work in-house is considered a fundamental growth element for brands and companies. What’s been missing from many conversations about building sustainable businesses were the words “brands” and “creative,” amid a decline in brand loyalty, according to Liodice.

“If you notice, there aren’t a lot of creative conferences or creative meetings. What was happening was creative was being pushed aside in favor of speed to market, the shiny objects that were out there.”

He cites survey data showing that young consumers consider only 26% of brands to be necessary or desired. “That is awful. The way to do that is we have to bring back that loyalty factor.

“We need to reach them in new ways that we’ve been missing on for years and years. There’s an atrophy and a deterioration that we can no longer accept.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos please visit this page.

“I see the hybrid model as being a great way forward for New Balance. We’re a business with a load of complexity,” says Steven Ruhl, the company’s Head of Global Metropolitan Consumer Marketing.

Advantages of maintaining in-house resources include “a closer connection and understanding to the consumer. They understand more about new Balance, our overall strategy and the culture of the company and also they’re dedicated to what we’re doing,” Ruhl explains in this Beet.TV interview at the recent In-House Agency Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

Being outside the company provides other benefits, as external shops can provide a fresh perspective. “They’re working on exemplary peer brands and they’re able to understanding what’s working in the market, what’s fresh and what’s already been done.”

Insiders often bring a passion to the table grounded in physical activities. “We have a lot of people who are what we call tier zero runners. They live and breath running. The might be into baseball, they might be into basketball. They bring that natural curiosity and passion for the communities that we’re targeting.

Then there’s a level of expertise that doesn’t exist in-house. “Creative technology to drive our media is extremely important for New Balance,” including tapping into artificial intelligence.

Like most companies, New Balance maintains a full-funnel approach to engaging with potential and existing customers. At the top are efforts to recruit new consumers to the brand. “The bottom of the funnel is where we get a lot more targeted around existing consumers and driving targeting through our digital platforms,” Ruhl says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Rather, people are working sort of where they are,” Teuber adds. “We recruit for talent, not for location. So we’re looking for the best people.”

This arrangement gives the professional services provider flexibility even as its in-house people are “a reflection of the culture of the larger organization,” Teuber explains in this Beet.TV interview at the recent ANA In-House Agency Conference.

“Once they get inside, what they’re looking for is a big-brand experience. Designers want to do new and playful things and make things really engaging for the people who participate in whatever experience we’re trying to deliver.”

To help recruit talent, it’s not unusual for PwC to take over a theme park and hold a branded event. “That’s something you can’t really get everywhere else. It’s a really great opportunity,” says Teuber.

PwC’s brand purpose is to “solve important problems and build trust in society,” which can be inspiring, but “Translating that into every piece of creative I think is a big challenge.”

Communicating with some 50,000 internal employees (median age: about 27) can be daunting as well. “There’s plenty of noise inside the firm and reaching our own people is a challenge.”

Asked to reflect on the conference proceedings, Teuber cites the quality of work being presented and “seeing where big brands with really quality in house shops continue to work with outside agency partners. In-house is right for a lot of things. We certainly work with outside agencies as well. But there’s no one right answer. It’s the right answer for the circumstance.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos, please visit this page.

Extreme Reach doesn’t make creative or buy any media, CMO Melinda McLaughlin explains in this Beet.TV interview at the Association of National Advertisers’ first-ever conference devoted exclusively to in-house agencies.

“What we do is enable those stories, in whatever shape and size, to move seamlessly into whatever media placement needs that story to play,” says McLaughlin. “We have this wonderful chance at this conference, and in what we do every day, to sit at the center of connecting the creative with the media and making it invisible to the viewer.”

Amid much talk about workflow and operational efficiency, putting a story on a particular screen and have it play perfectly requires technology that “should recede away and just work. There should be no delays in campaign starting, there should be no ad that plays pixelated because it wasn’t formatted right.”

While many things are subjective, workflow is not, according to McLaughlin.

“Creating stories is an art. Media plans are an art and science. How you move something from one place to another through different paths and processes is not subjective.

“It’s a very repeatable, tactical, executional element,” McLaughlin adds. “What we do is bring technology to the table to make humans better and to do what humans can’t do as fast as they can when they’re at the controls of that technology.”

One of those things beyond the facility of humans is automated and programmatic media buying. “We need the creative assets to be able to marry into those moments as fast as can be. The millisecond is gone if an ad doesn’t play when the ad call comes in.”

When it’s done right, “it does become invisible,” she says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Currently, there’s much more creative done in house than media. But I do think that media is absolutely increasing,” the Group EVP says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ In-House Agency Conference.

“In-housing is raging,” he adds.

He cites three ANA member surveys that show “the penetration of in-house agencies skyrocket” to 78% from 42% in 2008. Meanwhile, the in-house workload has continued to build, with 90% of survey respondents with an in-house agency citing an increase and two-thirds of those say “it’s increasing a lot,” Duggan says.

Social media was an obvious candidate for in-housing because of the quick turnaround times it requires. It’s been joined by programmatic media, influencer marketing “and all sorts of creative. Marketers these days have the need for much, much more content than they’ve ever needed before done at a faster pace,” ranging from Internet video high-end television commercials.

Despite some of its complexities, media is seen as “the next frontier posed for rapid growth in-house” but with limitations. “I don’t think the day will come where there’s a lot of client-side marketers negotiating their own television deals with the networks because certainly the big agency holding companies have that clout,” Duggan notes.

One incentive for bringing some media in-house is so that marketers can keep an eye on their first-party data, according to Duggan.

In-housing advertising and media has always been about cost and speed. Along the way, marketers have gotten better at recruiting and nurturing talent. “That has been a debate in the industry and a knock on in-house agencies that they don’t have the talent that external agencies have, but I do believe that’s changing.”

Just how busy are some in-house teams? Duggan observes that conference speakers mentioned handling anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 projects a year.

There is still a balance to be achieved by using internal and external resources. Two participants referenced establishing “swim lanes” so that “they can both live happily together and optimize the work.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos please visit this page.

“It’s been around for a long time. There have always been teams inside of clients within the marketing teams or supporting the marketing teams to address the needs that exist,” Kaplowitz says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ In-House Agency Conference.

At the event, Kaplowitz moderated a panel discussion titled Agencies and the Velocity of Change. It brought together executives from VMLY&R and GlaxoSmithKline, plus Publicis Media and New Balance. Turns out “balance” is a key word in the modern-day world of marketers and how they mix internal and external resources.

“There’s just so much more that is needed today and there’s a lot of work that needs to get accomplished,” says Kaplowitz. “I do think it’s important to recognize that here is no one size fits all. There’s no right way of doing it.”

It’s more about “finding what is the right model for you, but you have to really think about what are your objectives, what are you trying to accomplish. And that they’re not set in stone. They change over time.”

One theme from Kalowitz’s panel is that client-agency partnerships have to be right for both parties. For VMLY&R and GSK, a key element was “how to work together to support the tech stack that they work with, to collaborate with the team that’s in-house that’s actually managing strategy and comms planning.” In the case of Publicis and New Balance, while the agency sets the “base” brand strategy, the global creative services team at New Balance does “more of the executional work and work closely within the local territories and how they manage it.”

Asked about negative and positive implications for agencies, Kaplowitz says that’s largely in the eye of the beholder. The recent growth of in-house teams is undeniable, but 90% of marketers still require outside resources.

“Agencies have also shifted to being less reluctant to needing to do everything end to end. There’s more openness to recognizing what their specific role can be within the journey and how to bring that to life. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It doesn’t have to be negative.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos please visit this page.

After buying media in-house in one capacity or other for about six years, “We were pretty surefooted that we knew how to do it and we knew how this was going to play out,” Smith explains in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ In-House Agency Conference. “And we said, like, ‘Hey let’s triple down on this and let’s really build out a global presence in media buying and planning.’”

Along the way came the realization that EA had ended up “competing with Google and Facebook for talent” and that media buying and planning is “still really regionalized,” not just in the United States but also abroad. “And that influenced which hubs we were going to hire out of,” Smith says.

A key hiring question was how to bring “a new organ into the body” without experiencing “tissue rejection.” In other words, “How do we onboard all of these people to what makes EA special and give them a really good experience, and make sure that we’re growing people within our company as opposed to just hiring random onesies, twosies.”

Hence the small steps a company can take as opposed to trying to assemble a team ASAP. “Don’t be afraid to baby step it,” Smith says. “I would say plan as much as you can and know that while you’re planning, those plans are going to change constantly.”

She advises not to get caught up “on having enough people in seats and having this one perfect discipline, but really think about it from how is this going to transform my business, who do I need to bring along for that journey and what are the steps I can take to get there. Because you don’t have to do it overnight.”

Asked to comment on the traditional status of agency of record, Smith, whose background includes AT&T, PubMatic, the Internet Advertising Bureau and 360i, suggests it comes with limitations.

“We buy media across more than 40 countries, and I can’t think of an agency of record situation that would allow us to be as nimble, as fluid, as reactive and as experimental as we would want to be. I think there are definitely certain businesses that it makes sense for, but for me, personally, I don’t think I really resonate with agency of record.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos please visit this page.

As much as some brands might wish to create a particular message once and then chop it up and distribute it across multiple platforms, “You just can’t. You have to understand what platforms people are using for what reasons,” says Scott Donaton, Chief Content Officer at DigitasLBi.

This requires an understanding of why people frequent Snapchat as opposed to Facebook or watching a television show. “You really have to think about what is the user coming to this platform for and then what’s the best way to tell that story on that platform,” Donaton says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

A lot of brands “do get a little nervous” about having to create various messaging and then how to scale it all. “But it’s not as intimidating once you actually embrace it as it might seem to be,” Donaton adds.

Branded content has evolved from something that was once nice to have to a must have for marketers. It’s no longer something experimental “that you dip your toe in but that it really is the future of marketing.”

By way of illustration, Donaton says DigitasLBi doesn’t have a client that in the last 18 months hasn’t asked for a content marketing strategy. “We’re also starting to see a lot of brands like Mattel, Pepsi and Marriott follow in the heels of brands like Red Bull and GE and become really deeply committed to this idea of storytelling and investing heavily in it,” says Donaton. “And I think that’s just going to continue.”

With the 2017 NewFronts season on the near horizon, DigitasLBi marks a 10-year anniversary, having birthed the annual ritual initially as a half-day event for its clients. The agency’s message to brands was before you commit all your money in the television Upfronts, take a closer look at digital content.

“We’ve gone from that half-day Digitas-only event into a two-week, multi-billion-dollar marketplace where every major digital player is out there being a part of that conversation,” Donaton says.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

For Steve Erich, “not your typical agency model” means contracting for the best creative talent for the nascent Erich & Kallman shop based in San Francisco. “Agencies on the whole are too slow, they don’t have enough talent and they’re too expensive,” the E&K Founder & Managing Director explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

Having spent about 11 years at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, last year Erich finally was able to join up with Eric Kallman and give the biggest agencies a run for their money.

“My partner Eric Kallman is a gentleman that we tried to hire about three years ago” at CP+B. “He took a job at Goodby instead” and produced iconic work for companies like Old Spice. “We got together after we both left our agencies to create a new model.”

Erich likens their creation to a small, core group of individuals that contract creative work out to the best in the business “just for the amount of time we need. It makes us faster, it makes us more efficient.”

E&K’s account wins include a piece of business from General Mills, which was “looking for a new model. Faster, more nimble,” Erich says.

As regards creative briefs from clients, there’s noting out of the ordinary at E&K, although it is a big believer in the power of video. While television is still “the main thing that’s asked for” among advertisers, there’s a learning curve when it comes to digital.

“Just thinking you can cram a 30-second television spot into a Facebook post or whatever else is just not that effective. It’s better than not, but there are so many other ways to create video and content format-wise,” says Erich.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“It’s not about writing a check and being part of something,” says Chris Weil, Chairman and CEO of brand marketing agency Momentum Worldwide. “You’re borrowing the equity of a team, a celebrity, a league and you’re borrowing their audience and you’re trying to connect with them.”

In the sports sponsorship world, whether it’s American Express, United Airlines, Coca-Cola, SAP or Verizon, “A sponsorship is a borrowed equity programming,” Weil says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

So if one looks at what brands are trying to do with content, the learnings from many years of sponsorship marketing come to the fore. It’s about how to create content “that is not just push messaging but is about how you add utility and value to the consumer’s life and to their experience,” Weil says.

In other words, successfully sponsoring content always begins with the audience and the value exchange, but the most important part is the desired connection. “Everybody talks about targeting, targeting, targeting and how we’re going to deliver the specific message at the specific moment,” says Weill. “The reality is that more than targeting it’s the creative. How are you actually going to deliver a message that somebody cares about at a given time.”

Asked about measuring ROI on sponsored content, Weil eschews things like viewability and click-through rates. “Those are just distractions to what the real game is, which is to drive growth for our clients,” Weil adds, citing Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard’s comments at Transformation about the importance of P&G’s agency partners.

When it comes to leveraging influencer audiences online, Weil says that in order to guarantee earned reach there has to be a buy involved. “Things don’t go viral just simply to go viral. You have to look at how you use influencer audiences to help expand and amplify your message. And that is a value exchange that typically is money,” Weil says.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

Scheppach is particularly excited about new addressable TV operators and the potential groundswell of interest she’s noting among national TV programmers to participate in the addressable marketplace. While the inventory for addressable TV is still small, the base is growing with companies like Comcast and Verizon having stepped in.

“But what’s really interesting is quietly I’m starting to hear national programmers starting to be interested in how do I actually bring addressable opportunities to market,” Scheppach says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

So while just one to two percent of TV inventory is addressable via a TV set, “there are a lot of things that are kind of behind the scenes that I can feel happening that are going to explode that marketplace,” she adds.

Having worked with Murtos at Publicis for 10 years, the duo represents almost 50 years of experience in TV buying and advanced TV.

Among other things, Matter More’s engagement with Tapad includes the use of Tapad’s Device Graph to measure the actual performance of media across channels. In a release announcing the partnership, Scheppach said that achieving “unduplicated reach and frequency across all channels with true addressability, and the ability to measure outcomes, is marketing nirvana.”

Asked about creative versioning of TV ads, she says she’s “yet to really crack the code” but is impressed by companies doing 5,000 or more versions of an ad for online video. “When television becomes more real time and sophisticated, I think we’re going to see more of that coming. It hasn’t happened yet and I think that’s a big opportunity,” Scheppach says.

Her company is focusing much of its efforts on bringing to TV direct mail marketers and mid-market brands—described as having smaller budgets and including “savvy digital marketers”—that have never before embraced the medium.

“We think we can show them the way using these sophisticated tools, whether it be Device Graphs or Identity Graphs or addressable television,” Scheppach says.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“I think the opportunity around creativity is to divorce it from the visual design standpoint,” says Doug Rozen, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer at global media agency OMD. Rozen and his teams spend a fair amount of time thinking through the role of media in driving creativity and creative decisions, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

In this manner they constantly seek to push contextual understanding to reach people better. “I think the most important thing is to find ways to think beyond a box, think beyond a screen, beyond an ad and create content that a consumer really wants,” says Rozen.

Part of the job is reaching audiences and then engaging them and breaking through to make a meaningful connection. “I think at times we get lost about either just making a connection and failing to reach, or reaching them without that connection. A lot of what we’re trying to do is how to bring those two things together,” says Rozen.

Asked about OMD’s experience to date with artificial intelligence technology, Rozen says it ranges not only from conversation assistants like Amazon’s Alexa to Google Assistant but to insights that can be gleaned from AI to inform media knowledge of things like audience segments. He likens AI in human terms to a toddler in a hurry.

“What’s exciting is that it’s growing up fast. It will not take years for it to be a teenager and adult,” Rozen says.

Transformation in advertising and media means different things to different people. People usually talk about how creative or media agencies have changed to keep pace with consumers and clients, but not Rozen.

“What transformation means to me is evolution. We cannot stand still. If we stand still we are dead,” he says.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“I think it’s becoming more viable and scalable every day,” Gotlieb says of set-top box, dynamic ad and smart TV addressability that can “aggregate a pretty substantial chunk of the population. I think this is the year that it becomes a truly scalable proposition.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Gotlieb goes on to explain that GroupM’s initial focus on addressable ad targeting has been with clients that can do the “cleanest and quickest attribution” and for whom the value of an acquisition is highest. He cites financial, automobiles and the studio sector because the data are reasonably good and closed-loop attribution can be accomplished.

“Once that gets laid down properly, we will scale it out to the broader client list,” he says.

Creative versioning is something “we need to do a great deal of work on,” Gotlieb adds. “There are a couple of technologies that we’re working on that will enable things like segmentation. More to come.”

On the issue of brand safety, he says one’s response to recent headlines about digital ads appearing alongside objectionable content depends on “when you arrived at the party. We arrived at the party a long, long time ago.”

He goes on to outline the steps GroupM had taken to blacklist websites that “thrived from privacy violations” and once that list had been established “we began to add to that from a brand safety perspective.”

Gotlieb expresses wonder at “those people who are just waking up to brand safety issues,” citing the appointment last year of John Montgomery as Chief Brand Safety Officer.

“I don’t think the issue is one that we can throw the media owners under the bus on,” he says. “I think we have to take some responsibility for it and we have to work collaboratively to provide an ecosystem that is friendlier to our clients.”

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“We as an industry, in trying to learn each thing, create isolation, create separation and create a break in the consumer experience,” says Phil Cowdell, President of Platform Services for global media investment group GroupM.

Part of GroupM’s response is [m]PLATFORM, which allows all GroupM agencies to present clients with a more fully unified suite of ad planning, tracking and targeting tools, as ADWEEK reports.

Cowdell describes [m]PLATFORM as an amalgam of technology, data, people and expertise coming together “into one seamless, horizontal utility to client and agency teams.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Cowdell shares his vision of a world in which advertisers earn the right to consumer data by creating meaningful ad experiences for them. And he posits that data sharing among non-competing marketers can create a powerful alternative to first-party and third-party data, something he calls “closed-second” data.

Tackling semantics first, he says the terms first- and third-party data are off the mark because it’s the consumer’s data. “It’s consumer first.”

He offers an anecdote involving two men discussing who’s going to “chat up the girl” they encounter in a bar. “The reality is, the lady in the bar can decide who she’s like to spend her time with, and it’s not the choice of these two people.”

What really matters is how agencies and brands actually deploy all of that information. “If we don’t respect their data, if we don’t add value through their data, their own experience, we’re not going to get it,” Cowdell says.

He fully expects to see more data sharing in which brands in non-competing categories share useful consumer information to the benefit of all. “If we make it too isolated within our own narrow set, we can’t activate it,” he explains. “So the thing we’ll start to see in data is this emergence of closed-second.”

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“Because we’re a retail organization, we’re able to really understand who our guests are and how they shop,” Argyilan says. “As a result of that, we’re able to create these rich marketing programs that are very specific to groups of human beings and what their natural interests are.”

The next step is taking that first-party data and applying it to mass media, television being “the frontier that we are going to attack in 2017,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

Knowing not on a demographic but more granular basis how Target customers view video has a direct impact on its program and content rankings “in ways that we didn’t necessarily expect.” Traditionally, marketers and media companies decided this while focusing primarily on high attentiveness and premium programming.

“But now we’re actually able to go right to our guests and ask them what do they consider their favorite programming, and those lists are very different,” Argyilan says. “So you can imagine the power of understanding that when we go to any of the media companies and talk about the kind of programming we want to buy from them or the kind of content we want to develop with them.”

Target hopes to get to a “more sophisticated place” with creative versioning, according to Argyilan. While it believes that addressable TV “has been stuck in this kind of awkward place for a very long time,” the retailer is hoping to find ways of doing addressable at scale for individual markets.

“We’re not to the place yet where we can start to understand patterns across the country that start to aggregate so it makes it easier for us to execute,” says Argyilan. “We’re still looking at it one store at a time, one market at a time, which just makes it hard from a mechanics standpoint to really be able to execute it at scale.”

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Shimmel provides a look under the hood of OpenAP and the mechanics of trying to standardize audience targeting beyond age/sex demographics across several publishers.

“There is an immense appetite among agencies and advertisers to do audience deals, but nothing has made the infrastructure easy for them to do it cross publishers,” Shimmel says.

The problem has been that different publishers have used different data sets for audience targeting and schedule management has been disparate as well. “The whole idea behind OpenAP is to standardize that,” he adds.

Buyers use the OpenAP interface to identify their audience targets and will be able to see the size of those targets, according to Shimmel. The targets are then published so that all partners are aware of the deal.

“We then go through the normal process of optimization and managing the schedules,” says Shimmel, while on the back end buyers come back to OpenAP “and they will get a verified, third-party post in terms of delivery against the audience.”

Each publisher manages its own inventory in OpenAP, with Turner using its proprietary methodology, according to Shimmel. He notes that Turner tries to find the most appropriate inventory given the advertiser and its goals as opposed to “carving out” inventory specifically for OpenAP.

He hopes that more publishers join OpenAP so that it will incent advertisers and agencies to get involved.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“One of them being, let’s bring together all the right parties that all have the same interest in success in the briefing process,” says the President of Investment & Activation at Starcom USA.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Richman discusses the need for creative—not just media—to drive effectiveness and the eternal value of human input in a technology laden industry.

Richman believes that digital audience targeting has been perfected and new network television audience optimization products are showing lots of promise toward the same end. Programmatic “is certainly elevating our game” with respect to brand safety, when it comes to controls and processes.

“But we still have not put sufficient time, resources and attention really to the space around creative messaging that is more bespoke to the audience,” she says.

The goal is to make a more meaningful impact with consumers and engaging with them not only in a campaign “but maybe across a longer period of time.”

As for the “simple stuff that we still need to crack,” it starts with having the right people at the table during the briefing process and then sticking to the brief. “Let’s map out what it is that we’re trying to achieve and understand where we actually can make that happens,” says Richman.

The process includes tapping the best practices of publishers that can help agencies understand, say, how to make the best six-second commercial format or the best experience on Snapchat. The end goal is to “really sequence and synchronize campaigns in a way that can make an impact over time,” Richman says.

“Humans and their ideas and their creativity lead the best work,” she adds. It’s something “you can’t replace with technology.”

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“We just can’t be in business with any company that is facilitating that,” says Paskalis. “Its not a 99.9 percent requirement. It’s a 100 percent requirement. That’s the regulatory nature of the banking industry.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, the SVP of Enterprise Media Planning, Investment & Measurement at BOA discusses the parameters of reputational risk, his enthusiasm for the new OpenAD venture by three TV networks and why legacy media measurement needs to change.

“Brand safety is vitally important to Bank of America,” says Paskalis. “But you also have another set of concerns, which is some of the content that’s out there is promoted by companies that have some connection or in some way are promoting terrorism.”

YouTube and others have garnered negative headlines since the beginning of 2017 because of ads showing up alongside objectionable content, prompting some brands to pull their ads.

“The magnitude of the challenge that our friends at Google, who are a very important partner to us, is daunting because of the sheer volume of content that’s uploaded,” says Paskalis. “That said, contractually, they need to guarantee 100% brand safety.”

This presents an ultimatum of sorts for the digital giant.

“I think they have a lot of engineering work to do, and they’re also going to need to wrestle with are they a technology company or do they have an editorial disposition in order to create that brand safety,” he says. “And I think that’s going to be a hard series of conversations with them.”

Paskalis praises Fox, Turner and Viacom for their OpenAD consortium, which enables advertisers to target TV audiences uniformly across their programming. “If this is the final idea or it’s an interim idea until the next step, it’s the first major step I’ve seen companies take and I applaud it,” he says.

Asked to cite the biggest transformational change needed in the industry, he singles out media measurement—specifically, how to measure the value of interaction.

“I don’t believe that the measurement community has been able to keep apace of the changes that are required in marketing,” Paskalis says.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“TV’s still really powerful for us. It’s still the most mass reaching audience for us and it still works for us,” says Thalberg.

Turns out you don’t need complicated measurement and attribution metrics to tell whether a particular advertising medium works, Thalberg explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

“You feel it right away when we have a limited time offer coming up and we have a big a launch,” says Thalberg. “If the media is not kind of working and the message isn’t working, we know within a few days.”

She refers to this kind of feedback Taco Bell’s direct response model. “It’s not a pure correlation, but it’s about as close as you can get without the perfect data science behind it,” says Thalberg.

While acknowledging the profound changes that social media has fostered in how people and brands connect and communicate with each other, Thalberg sees “a bit of a morass” right now in the digital space.

“I think there are really big, dark clouds that are hovering over our industry right now that make it very scary to be putting money into the marketplace,” she says.

Within these clouds are the issues of viewability, fraud and “the recent issues that have impacted a lot of brands, including mine, in terms of the trust of appropriate context where your ads get placed in a Google or YouTube environment.”

Nonetheless, these digital stalwarts continue to be a key partner for Taco Bell. “But we need to figure out a way that someone in my job, or someone right under me, don’t have to be tending this like giant acre garden of every little detail and still feel like we can be confident that our message is where it should be,” Thalberg says.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“What they want to know is did you drive sales,” says Matt Sweeney, President of Xaxis North America, the programmatic specialty unit of WPP Group.

He thinks the pendulum has swung “so far to the right” in terms of having very timely data and being able to identify people who are most likely to buy in market.

In response, Xaxis continues to staff up Xaxis Ad Labs, which currently consists of a team of about a dozen people. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s twice that if it’s twice that size by the end of the year,” Sweeney says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

It’s within XAL that designers, producers and developers stay ahead of the curve of dynamic creative optimization. “They very often are working with the strategists who are creating the audiences and working within our DMP and, more importantly, finding partners who can help us with data activation,” Sweeney explains.

Decisioning factors that inform may include not only male/female differences but rural versus city locations and what the weather happens to be doing during a particular time of day. Client categories include e-commerce, retail and, increasingly, automobiles.

“The storytelling is something that I think folks in programmatic have to do a better job of embracing,” says Sweeney. “At the end of the day, even our best clients, our closest partners, are a little tired of hearing about ad tech stack and data integrations.”

Asked about the value proposition of investing in numerous creative iterations for targeting a variety of audiences, Sweeney says Xaxis can use benchmarks to show clients that with dynamic creative, “the incremental cost of being smarter in engaging customers has tremendous, tremendous ROI.”

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17.  The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. 

The “dirty little secret” that much of the industry is either unaware of or doesn’t want to acknowledge is the complexity and inefficiency of today’s creative delivery.

“The fulfillment of the creative, the actual message that the consumer sees, is burdened in these complicated workflows,” Dan Brackett, the CTO & Co-Founder of Extreme Reach, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

That workflow is characterized by endless and needless FTP’s back and forth between creative agencies and media agencies.

“What used to be a fairly well-defined, simple, streamlined process has now become quite convoluted,” Brackett says. “Especially in the ad ops world, and you see many different workflow steps required to execute what should be a very simple process.”

Extreme Reach began life in 2008 when traditional linear TV was the norm. But it envisioned a future of multiple screens and constant creative decisioning so the company pioneered software-based delivery of creative over the Internet.

Needless complexity is “that dirty background secret that nobody is really aware of that essentially supports all online video right now,” Bracket says. “And it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Extreme Reach stores all creative assets in its ad cloud, incorporating ad serving, video ad streaming and talent and rights management.

“When these commercials get used across different screens there are different implications for rights holders,” he adds. Get something wrong and agencies and brands pay the price.

“In 2008, we envisioned a future where video ads would appear across a variety of screens,” says Bracket. “It’s the reality that’s here today.”

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

As if proving that prediction, today his company offered to buy DGIT‘s Video Fusion TV advertising unit for $485 million in cash.

Interestingly, this deal sees Extreme Reach buy further capacity in distribution of conventional TV ads and leaves DGIT focusing solely on online video ads.

But, as Roland told Beet.TV in this video we are republishing today, there is still significant value in taking ads that originate in online video back to the living room screen.

Roland is a former exec of the company Extreme Reach is buying. Ad Exchanger speculates: “Given Extreme Reach’s private company status and recent $50 million in equity investment, it would not be surprising to see the company attempt an Initial Public Offering in the next year.”

Release.