This week, Facebook banned a so-called liberal site sponsored by the Russian effort, as she noted in her report. The project achieved very modest reach, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV

The real problem is homegrown: Misinformation coming from a super divisive political conversation, with “fake news” being bigger than ever – much of this fed by the President, she explains.

Having gotten more adept at blocking foreign interference, the platforms are focused on identifying and labeling misinformation from domestic sources.

With regard to paid media, Facebook has just announced they will ban new political advertising starting one week before the election, Dworskin reports today.

We spoke with him about his journey from Detroit to Wall Street to Silicon Valley and how mentors have helped shape his career.  He speaks about his loneliness along the way and how his fellowship with colleagues of color, in groups such as I.D.E.A., have been so helpful.

Looking ahead, he hopes the current crisis will not be a “moment in time,” but a period of transformation.  His hope is that people of color will move to senior positions in adtech and in corporate American.

While he applauds the public statements and funding around Black Lives Matter by companies, he says that we need to hold companies accountable for true progress.

This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here. 

Touch of Modern, whose app and website cater to millennial males, started business in 2012 as the result of a conversation among its four would-be founders about the best audio speakers, Hum explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.

“The CTO at the time was a real audiophile and he had all this knowledge about speakers and technical specs. And so he won that argument. And then we found that each one of us had a hobby or an interest that we were obsessed about,” Hum says.

Thus was born Touch of Modern to go direct-to-consumers with products “that were really valued by enthusiasts not so much things you find in mass market.” As a category, the 125 DTC companies tracked by the VAB added $1.4 billion to the TV marketplace last year, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

Like many modern-day startups, the company relied largely on Facebook to reach its target audience. It had few competitors at the time.

“We were able to get great rates and find our core male demographic,” Hum says. “Over time, more players moved in and we branched out to other platforms,” including Google search.

About two years ago, Touch of Modern started to experiment with TV with a small test.

“What we found was that when we started spending on television, the metrics on the digital side started to improve a lot as well.” He attributes the results partly to the company having achieved a certain scale and that measurement of TV ad campaigns had become more comparable to digital media. Touch of Modern uses TVSquared to measure campaign performance.

One unexpected outcome from TV “was a halo effect on the digital side. Google started performing a lot better, Facebook to an extent also started performing better and then just general brand recognition really increased.”

Relying primarily on its mobile app for most of its traffic and revenue, Touch of Modern sees “a lot more mobile traffic” generated by TV advertising, “which is really great for us because the mobile user also tends to be a more valuable one as well.”

This video is from a Beet.TV’s coverage of the VAB’s Direct to Success summit held on June 12 at Viacom in New York City. Please visit this page for more segments.

Performance has always been a priority for the retailer geared to millennial men “because we grew up in the digital realm, where everything could be tracked and you can attribute revenue specifically to ad campaigns,” Hum says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.

“What we don’t like is a general if you spend it you’ll just kind of see it materialize somewhere and it’s all kind of wishy washy. It’s really important for us to be able to measure the actual performance of television and not just kind of throw the money into the air and hope it comes back to use later on.”

Hum was one of the main presenters at the VAB session, along with Peloton Founder & CEO John Foley. For TV campaign attribution, Touch of Modern— which offers unique and new-to-market products not easily found at retailers—works with TVSquared.

“We measure a baseline of traffic before and after each airing and then we attribute the spike in traffic to television,” says Hum, noting that the company’s most important KPI’s are “sales, signups and sessions.”

His key takeaway for other companies is that “TV nowadays can be measured just as precisely as digital, and it’s really important to have a diversified portfolio when it comes to marketing.”

Launched in 2012, Touch of Modern shot its first iteration of a TV commercial using its employees and an in-house production team. While it worked pretty well, version #2 created largely by Marketing Architects “opened up new markets. Things that didn’t work before suddenly started working with the new creative.”

One way in which creative for digital media differs from TV is that “every banner is pretty short-lived, whereas the creative you produce for television tends to have a longer life span.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

“We’ve provided the opportunity for people to toe dip into connected TV. So we see that as really a big part of our future,” George says in this interview with Beet.TV at the LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference.

Referred to in some circles as “the trade desk for walled gardens,” Pixability’s foundation is in helping advertisers target audiences within YouTube and Facebook. “We are the only technology platform that has access to what is really the largest video inventory, and we get to leverage the unique capabilities for targeting and so forth on YouTube and Facebook,” George says.

In recent years Pixability has extended its footprint to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify. “Were uniquely positioned at the moment in really what’s a super exciting space.”

During most of his tenure at Facebook, George led the Mobile Publisher Solutions team, which drove rapid growth for Facebook’s Audience Network, according to a Pixability news release. His video software experience includes stints at Celtra, KickApps and Maven Networks, which was acquired by Yahoo.

“Think of us as a tech player that sits on top of the Google stack as well as Facebook.”

Asked about consumer data, George says, “We can leverage first-party data from clients, but it’s less of a challenge because we live within the walled gardens. All the data is available to us.”

As part of the YouTube Measurement Program, Pixability gets access to “a bunch of data that brands will use for insights about the audiences, and it obviously helps us with helping them find their audiences on these platforms.”

One of the company’s main focuses right now is around planning capabilities for targeting down to “micro audiences. That doesn’t exist in the market outside of Pixability.”

“They’ve been our trusted partner for many years and we’re one of their largest partners there,” he says of YouTube. “But now also having a cross-platform story that now will extend into connected TV.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.

The bottom line, Sable explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, is that TV advertising will need to rise to the quality level of the programs themselves.

Noting that he predicted 10 years ago that Amazon would have brick-and-mortar stores, Sable says, “Netflix within the next two years will have advertising. They have to, in my view. Amazon’s already going to be there.”

This means “we’re going to have more and more opportunities to put more and more great advertising” around premium content.

A once widely held view that with the rise of digital most video content would be user-generated hasn’t quite worked out, according to Sable, citing “the cat peeing on your shoes that everybody would share. That’s such crap. It’s exactly the opposite.”

In recent years, producers who once shunned TV are flocking to its seemingly endless channels. “They all want to be back in TV because the budgets are high, the production quality is huge,” Sable says.

Of course, someone has to pay for all that content and “advertising has to be as good as the content that you put it around.”

While for many of Y&R’s clients TV “has to be that branded piece, to create the brand image,” more companies beginning to understand that “Amazon is DTC and so is e-commerce.”

With a drive toward direct-to-consumer even in staid consumer packaged-goods categories, there’s more concern now about “how do my ads look different, how do they sound different, what’s the call to action, what’s the offer? What’s the pricing. These have to be in there,” Sable says. “You see it with the Warby Parkers, you see it with the Caspers.”

Even companies like Facebook and Amazon are buying “a ton” of traditional TV. “How come they’re not just on Google or Facebook or Amazon? Because they’re smart.”

Asked about the proceedings at CES, Sable prefers to think of the annual event as more about innovation than technology per se. While he was impressed by a new LG screen that folds up like a window shade, he’d like to see more visibility around 5G cellular service “because so much of what we’ve seen is going to be dependent on 5G.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

The Upfront is the only marketplace where you can “figure out your whole year. There’s a whole bunch of efficiencies attached to that,” says the SVP of Client Strategy. “Getting the right kind of pricing, cementing a partnership, so there’s always going to be a role for that.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Effik also talks about the expectations of so-called direct-to-consumer advertisers and his team’s job of sifting through the “treasure chest of riches” that is the NBCU content portfolio.

At NBCU, the “whole idea of doing mass media now sits very comfortably with us bringing more targeted media, data-driven media, into the Upfront as well. So we’re managing to marry both of these worlds within the existing upfront,” says Effik.

His reference to a treasure chest of assets reflects, among other things, NBCU’s motion picture studios, theme parks, digital assets and set-top boxes. “My team’s job is to look at where the value is in that and then connect the dots for our clients.”

When talking about direct-to-consumer brands, Effik says that while NBCU wants to be “where any industry is being reinvented,” it’s also an opportunity change the way people see his company as just an upper-funnel player. “We think there’s been a misperception in the industry around what NBCU represents.”

For companies that grew up on Facebook and or Google, “we’re showing them that they can actually get just as good if not more superior returns by working with NBC at the lower end of the funnel.” For new but more established brands, “We’re now showing them that they can be mature brands by using the full scope of our portfolio.”

A common characteristic of direct-to-consumer brands is that “they’re CPA obsessed,” meaning cost per acquisition, according to Effik. “They want to get a low cost of acquisition, but they want to do it at scale. We know what things in our portfolio drive that the best and we’re packaging that kind of stuff with them.”

Priorities do change from one company to another, including economically driving website visits and gaining more brand awareness. For example, “People on the coasts, in the hip neighborhoods of New York or L.A. know who we are. Now we want to go into Middle America. I want awareness.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Instead of “iterating on media plans year over year,” companies should take a fresh look and contemplate how they would build a new brand today and before deciding how to go to market,.

“And I think that is one of the best learnings that a marketer can get today from those direct to consumer brands,” says Hofstetter, who joined Comscore as President in October of 2018 from the 360i agency.

Citing the “migration to the big screen,” she notes the “migration to the big screen” and the need to consider the various ways that consumers are receiving content.

Direct-to-consumer marketers would take the approach of an “if I were inventing that brand today point of view. How can I get the same kind of targeting and measurability from TV that I was getting from digital. And I think they’re doing a fantastic job.”

While first-party data is more important than ever for engaging with customers, Hofstetter says it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.

“It’s really fun to work with companies that have richer data sets, but they’re not necessarily nearly as necessary depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Yes, they have tremendous rich data sets, and that’s great for targeting.

“But I would say the vast amount of data that’s available today actually can be used to help target no matter what you have. I think there are a lot of big companies today that are short on first-party data, and it doesn’t necessarily put them at a disadvantage if they think about it the right way.”

While she attends CES in part to help elevate the Comscore brand, the annual event lets people think more out of the box.

“When you’re here, you get to take out the craziness of the day to day. You have an opportunity to really take a fresh look at your business and think ‘I probably need a more modern approach to how I’m looking at my data from a planning, executing and measurement perspective,’ and the receptivity has been wonderful.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019.   The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal.  For more coverage, please visit this page. 

“What’s different about them is they come to the TV investment process with data of their own” typically consisting of e-commerce conversion data, CEO Baker says of direct-to-consumer marketers. Dataxu’s OneView identity and data management platform can “turn that into a TV plan,” he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“That’s one of the big trends in advanced TV in 2019 and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen our revenue go up forty times year over year from connected TV.”

Already comfortable with a data-driven marketing process, newer users of the company’s TouchPoint demand-side platform seek to leverage all of their online and mobile data in new channels.

“Many of them have seen things like Facebook or Google search sort of saturate as a play for conversions, and so they’re very interested in not only the branding aspects of TV but also the ability to drive return on investment for new customer acquisition.”

Nine years ago, long before the concept of advanced TV, demand-side platform TouchPoint was dataxu’s starting point. Along the way the company found that most marketers had a problem with connecting the dots between targeting and measurement on PC’s and mobile phones. OneView, which solves for this and can now factor in streaming devices and connected TV, “has really been the center point of our growth in TV and addressable TV,” Baker says.

Consumer device identity is a problem shared by the sell-side, as evidenced by dataxu’s involvement with media sellers like Sky in the U.K. “So on the sell-side, we’re increasingly working with some of the big media companies to help them on attribution and media planning that merges digital and linear data.”

In addition to direct-to-consumer brands, agencies with billings between $50 million and $100 million that never developed big TV teams, are bringing some of their clients into advanced TV. Baker predicts that some of the biggest agencies will be joining in as well.

“What’s been holding them back has been a little bit of uncertainty around who owns converged TV” within those agencies, Baker says.

As for a misconception that advanced TV cannot be done at scale, he adds, “I think at CES we’ll be talking a lot about the fact that you can and a lot of people are doing it today.”

Update: NBCU’s Yaccarino Issues Call To Action On Advertising Standards

On Jan. 7, NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino cited “privacy issues, data misuse, measurement chaos and brand safety neglect” at “major digital advertising platforms” while seeking industry unity for high business standards.

“For decades, audiences have loved premium content, and advertisers have trusted networks’ multiscreen advertising ecosystems,” Yaccarino said in an article published on the NBCU website. “That’s why the premium media industry has refused to compromise its core values for how that content is created and distributed, even as we disrupt legacy mindsets and reinvent how we operate.”

Among other benefits, lowering barriers to entry for marketers to engage in TV advertising has attracted direct-to-consumer brands, Yaccarino noted.

“Already what had been an exclusive space for established companies is now welcoming a wave of entrepreneurs whose disruptive brands had long been at a disadvantage against larger incumbents. But here’s the best part: The marketplace is opening up without any compromises on consumers’ or brands’ safety.”

She called for all media publishers, agencies and platforms “to raise standards to let a safer, smarter, more accessible advertising ecosystem take flight.”

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

“There’s no question that lots of folks in the marketing and media world would like more alternatives to Google and Facebook, and AT&T by bringing a lot of extraordinary assets is the latest to present a credible assembly of important capabilities,” Rothenberg says.

One of the many invitation-only attendees of the Xandr Relevance Conference, The IAB chief was scheduled to moderate a panel discussion titled Consumers’ Choice: The DTC Revolution. It was based in part on the IAB’s “Rise Of The 21st Century Brand Economy” study.

“I think the elite attendance here at The Relevance Conference is an example of the interest, the hunger for an entity that can do what AT&T is promising to do,” Rothenberg says.

That’s based on what he considers to be AT&T’s “world class” assets encompassing entertainment, news, distribution, data, privacy and a “great embedded understanding of data security.”

Add them all together and “you’ve got a company that puts together a lot of remarkable capabilities that can be brought to bear on behalf of both consumers and businesses at the same time.”

Rothenberg has words of praise for AT&T management in the walkup to the Xandr unveil this week. “I think the fact that they’ve spent a good solid year planning and building before coming out with public announcements was incredibly smart.”

He expresses a special affinity for Xandr CEO Brian Lesser and CMO Kirk McDonald, both “colleagues” and in McDonald’s case a former IAB board member.

“I think everybody here wishes them well and expects that they will do extraordinarily well to help build not just a new media entity, but a new media communications and advertising industry in the United States and elsewhere,” Rothenberg says.

This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.

“Given this challenge there’s a real need to go beyond the install and go beyond the user acquisition and focus on engagement,” Jeger adds.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference, Jeger talks about the ways of measuring the value of app marketing campaigns and the role that companies like Criteo are playing in that effort.

AppsFlyer helps its app marketing customers collect and surface data “to understand, for example, the impressions and clicks and installs and then further down the funnel within the app all the events that happened and attribute these to a specific source.”

A typical example could be an advertiser running multiple campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and some Tencent social apps in China, according to Jeger. It would want to try to make sense of the performance and how much each of the campaigns cost versus the revenue generated.

“We enable them to do that by having partnerships with all of these companies and being official measurement partners for those companies and putting revenue against cost,” says Jeger.

One of AppsFlyer’s more than 4,000 partners is retargeting specialist Criteo, which “focuses on one of the huge pain points of app marketers. Getting users into the app and then retaining them and keeping them engaged. There’s a huge retention issue when it comes to apps and Criteo is fighting that head on by providing campaigns to get users back into the app.”

Moving beyond user acquisition to focus on engagement, using very personalized and non-intrusive messaging, “is the holy grail of where we need to go as an industry,” Jeger says.

But there’s a learning curve that could be steepened if more people knew the kinds of data that are available and the most sophisticated ways of employing that data. “I think we should be seeing more and more apps in the next year being at the place where they can get to that kind of level of communication.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

From his position as GM, EVP, Advanced Advertising, FreeWheel, Comcast Clark sees broad recognition that “there’s an opportunity to coalesce a platform, bring audiences together, share data and offer marketers a more unified look into inventory, unified planning,” he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference. “Make it all easier. That’s a huge sea change.”

FreeWheel has been preparing for this change for about a decade, something that now fills the time of some 1,500 people. “We’re all focused on one thing: solving the very complex software and data issues around television, making it interoperable and driving economics for the programmers and for marketers.”

Media buyers understand the power of platforms because of the billions of dollars they routinely allocate to the likes of Facebook and Google in return for reach, targeting, unified pools of inventory and ease of use, according to Clark. They’ve been asking television to do the same.

“I think when television gets all of this together, the buy-side is ready to go. It’s a very big shift. You’re seeing the buy-side also invest in technology, which we’re excited about as well and we’re providing a number of solutions there to connect up to the supply,” Clark says.

Noting that the consumer “is the one piece of the puzzle that we don’t control,” he cites the continuing shift toward on-demand TV environments and lower ad loads. On the latter subject, there are limitations.

“We’ve also seen examples where the right ad loads and the right sort of targeting offsetting subscription fees or even with subscription fees can be very appealing to consumers. So there’s a long march in that direction.”

To properly manage inventory yield and the viewer experience is a balancing act that will require more time to achieve because “you need tools that the industry doesn’t have scaled yet, like addressable technology, better yield management tools, those kinds of things. All of which is coming on line very quickly and we at FreeWheel are powering most of that.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

But until recently, data from those cards has taken a back seat to the traditional buying and selling of TV ad inventory. According to Nishat Mehta, President of IRI’s Media Center of Excellence, the industry had been on a trajectory that simply wasn’t sustainable.

“The notion of accountability starts with making sure that the consumer was receiving what we thought was best for them, and then second that what we think is best for them is actually based on accurate knowledge of who that consumer is,” Mehta says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “And I think we had been following a path where neither of those was really being met. That ultimately leads to a consumer who is angry at the advertising industry and ultimately will shut us off.”

Mehta considers the new European Union GDPR initiative to be a “multi-year effort to clean up the industry” and the challenges of Facebook and other digital companies as paving the way for needed changes. Namely, to take lessons from digital targeting and bring them to TV.

“We believe very strongly in the notion of optimizing linear TV,” he says.

And while he’s hardly the first to suggest that age/gender demos for TV targeting are past their prime, IRI is offering “a set of capabilities focused around data and accurate data to the market that allow television to now be bought on sold on what people actually do rather than what we think they do.”

This is where data from the nearly 400 million loyalty cards come in, representing about 110 million households. “We have significant penetration across virtually every household in the U.S. about the types of products that they actually purchase in the physical world,” says Mehta.

Asked to summarize his Cannes experience, he thinks it’s shifting more toward adtech and “a little bit away from the actual advertisers. I hope that’s not a trend we see going forward. I hope we do see some balance coming back.

“I think we need to continue to remind ourselves who we work for. At the end of the day, it’s the consumer represented by the advertiser and if we don’t watch out we’ll lose track of that.

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

“So now we’re talking about what’s the right messaging format, how do you tell interesting stories,” Spiegel adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recently concluded Cannes Lions 2018.

Such discourse generates lots of discussion about, among other things, interesting new ad formats, the role of engagement ads in television, more precise micro segmentation and ad sequencing.

There’s another side to the coin that is a rapidly changing television landscape, according to Spiegel. “The business of television is certainly dealing with figuring out how to equal itself as a platform at scale, much like you’d see from Google and Facebook. In many ways, television today already drives more scale, but for marketers they want to figure out how can I buy against many audiences in one simple way.”

A lot of what was talked about at Cannes is how the business of television is “evolving to do that, and how are the various traditional competitors playing enough together to enable that. I think that’s a good hot topic as well,” says Spiegel.

On the subject of ad loads, keep all eyes on consumers, because “millions and millions” have voted that they prefer an ad-free experience.

“The dichotomy from ad-free on hand to the traditional broadcast model on the other, which is as much as twenty percent out of an hour of content is commercials, is the other extreme. I think that choice for consumers is pretty easy.”

So there’s little doubt that the “ecosystem of media companies” understand that they need to shorten formats, create new ad experiences and rethink how they make the exchange between content and advertising. What will the impact be on media company revenue?

“I don’t think that’s fully solved. I don’t think anyone would tell you on the sales side that they have that question fully answered. But I think they realize they’re going to have to experiment,” Spiegel says.

“And maybe there might be some short-term up and down pain, but I think there’s also the reality that marketers are willing to potentially pay more for things when they have less clutter and they’re more engaging.”

Proving paying more is worth it falls to measurement, particularly when it comes to marketers’ procurement teams.

“You’ve got to bring procurement departments along to make sure it’s not only about cheaper, it is actually about more effective,” Spiegel says. “These things are alright and I think we’re going to get there, but I think as you point out we’re in for probably some years of some bumpiness as those revenue shifts kind of shake out.”

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.

“If we have a better festival, it will prosper. In the same way our industry, and I include WPP, we need to make changes as well,” says Read, who is COO of WPP and Global CEO of its Wunderman digital agency. “We need to become simpler to navigate.”

When Read joined Wunderman several years ago, he recalls some people disparaging the venerable direct marketing agency for being in the direct-response space. “But actually, today all marketing is direct marketing, so we can do everything.”

Some industry change is imposed by outsiders, for example regulators. Read notes that the recent implementation of the European Union’s GDPR privacy strictures “has had a big impact in Europe.”

He contrasts the situation with the United States, where there is a different approach to privacy. “The EU approaches privacy as a sort of human right, something that consumers come to expect,” Read says. “I think the U.S. view is companies can do what they want to do so long as they’re clear about they want to do. As long as they do what they say, they’re fine.

“In the main, GDPR has been a challenge for companies, but I think it’s been a good thing as well.”

Asked about the ongoing efforts to bring more transparency to the digital media supply chain, Read says WPP’s GroupM media unit “has talked a lot to our clients about what they need to do to make sure that their marketing messages appear next to content that they’d like it to appear next to.”

Other improvements to the supply chain will require more cooperation for mutual benefit. “No one part of the industry can solve the problems on its own. It requires cooperation between various players.”

In a nod to the dominance of Facebook and Google, Read says there is a need for a market where people can afford to create quality content, particularly news.

“But then I think it’s incumbent on news organizations to evolve and innovate the way they create news, the way they work,” he says. “Each player in that ecosystem, agency, client, media owner, technology company, has a role to play and actually it’s the sort of cooperation around them and the coalescence of interests that will help us.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean.    Please find more videos from this series here.

Auletta interviewed 450 people, some of whom became key narrative characters in his book because of their vast influence and positions of power. They include former WPP Group CEO Sir Martin Sorrell, MediaLink Chairman and CEO Michael Kassan and Carolyn Everson, VP of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook. Auletta’s goal was to determine whether advertising is going through the same disruption that has impacted music, newspapers, magazines and television, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMS conference presented by LUMA Partners.

“And they are, I found. It’s a vital industry and yet it’s one under assault with grave consequences for the media,” Auletta says.

Under Auletta’s scrutiny, no entity that is dependent on advertising revenue is immune to seismic disruption.

“The reason I came to the title Frenamies is that if you’re an agency, you are suddenly faced by people who used to be your partners or customers who are suddenly your competitors,” he says.

He also cites marketers taking functions in-house that were formerly the province of agencies, “PR agencies increasingly becoming ad agencies,” consultancies shifting their focus to advertising, “Facebook and Google who were your customers are now dis-intermediating you and going directly to your clients” and media companies “increasingly are becoming ad agencies selling ads and dis-intermediating you as well.”

Some people have become power brokers across the entire advertising ecosystem, one example being Kassan, according to Auletta, whom he describes as being “everywhere I went.”

MediaLink’s clients range from major publishers to Facebook, Google and Microsoft, to brand marketers and agencies. “If you’re writing about politics, you’re interested in following the power brokers. Michael Kassan in the ad world is a power broker. I call him the connector.”

He describes CBS CEO Les Moonves as “probably the most successful modern television executive in modern history” who became a vehicle to help Auletta determine “can old media become new?”

Then there is the public, which represents a “threat to this whole industry” because of their ability and desire to avoid ads. Throw in data privacy concerns and Auletta’s book depicts a future rife with challenge.

“You’re in a seesaw here,” he explains. “The more the seesaw goes up in terms of data that we can target at you, the more privacy goes down. And if privacy goes up, then your ability to use data goes down. And that’s a conundrum that the advertising world faces and government faces.”

While neither anxiety nor frenemies are on the formal agenda at the upcoming Cannes International Festival of Creativity, they will be in abundance, according to Auletta.

“Everyone knows they’re being disrupted, they know that there are problems ahead. These are all anxieties that everyone shares, be they a client, a platform, a publisher or an agency. So I think in that sense it brings them together, and yet they’re all frenemies. So they can’t get too close.”

So what’s on the “other” side?

“Does it work? Is it valuable? What are the ramifications for it in a rapidly changing legal environment?” Hanlon adds in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he also talks about the limits of automating creativity and observes how competitive walls are rising in digital but falling in television.

[m]PLATFORM is GroupM’s means of spreading a wealth of data and technology prowess—and how to most effectively harness the two—across the multitude of WPP entities, many of them advertising or media agencies.

Hanlon says reverberations from the EU’s recently activated GDPR, which represents a tightening of data privacy restrictions, are “starting to find its way into the United States as well and forcing clients, particularly large global clients that we work with, to sort of really rethink how they think about their consumers and what is valuable to them from a data and technology perspective.”

The reasons are clear: it can cost more to properly manage and safeguard customers’ data under GDPR, which while quite voluminous in verbiage isn’t crystal clear to marketers at this point with regard to what definitively constitutes non-compliance and the specific financial consequences.

Nonetheless, when having a serious conversation about the realistic value of customer data, “I think what’s interesting is that the answer has been no as much as it’s been yes,” says Hanlon. He stresses that “no” isn’t inherently bad because getting a “concrete answer” carries its own value.

“But what it means is that the opportunity for evolution, for change, is a lot more prominent than I think we would have necessarily anticipated from the conversations that we were having with clients a year or even two years ago.”

When Hanlon addresses the convergence of traditional TV and digital video, he characterizes the conversation around platforms like Google and Facebook as “one that’s slightly negative or closing. All you hear about is the sort of closing down of access and the application of data at an individual level that can happen as policies start to change, as the walls start to get higher.”

By way of contrast, “On the TV side of the world it’s the opposite. We’re seeing an acceleration into a world of addressability and an ability to think about things from a cross-channel perspective.”

As for limits on hyper personalization of ad messaging, Hanlon questions the idea that “we can fully automate creativity and that we can create an individual experience for every single person that we ultimately see within the ecosystem.”

Such an approach ignores “very key reasons how we build brands and how we build resonance and salience. It may make a lot of sense within a retargeting context, but when it comes to these larger TV and video-based executions, we’re never going to be able to get to a space, I think, nor do we want to, where we personalize it for every single person.”

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

He also traces the arc of a digital content ecosystem that is in a sort of “retrograde” phase as live content becomes more prevalent amid the decline of linear television viewing.

“The mantra of the week: premium content at scale. Original content being produced by publishers, really in response to cultural trends,” Gilbert, who is Head of Digital, Midwest, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

It’s premium not just in the various big-name publishers that are generating content but also in the “production values that is elevating this content to a premium level.”

While many content partnerships were announced at this year’s NewFronts, they were accompanied by other collaborations, for example publisher-to-publisher and publisher-to-platform.

“As well as even partners such as Hulu trying to hold themselves more accountable through the likes of measurement partnerships with Nielsen, IRI as well as others,” says Gilbert. “That to me as a marketer, as an advertiser, as an agency lead is critical to defining success for the future ahead of our clients and brands.”

He also heard “the loud and continued cry towards personalization and creating authentic resonance with consumers, ultimately helping to also ensure brand safety along the way.”

Gilbert’s perspective includes a view of the marketplace for live content that for him suggests a “retrograde” of how the digital marketplace has been built and where it’s going.

“Digital video has really been build off of traditional both long-form and short-form content that gets uploaded and then lives in perpetuity,” he says.

This stands in contrast to linear TV, which has largely been live and which still draws “a wealth” of live audiences.

“In order to draw more audiences away from linear and traditional channels to digital platforms, we are seeing the likes of ESPN, Twitter and Facebook live. We also heard it last night at YouTube’s Brandcast is they’re continuing to double down with YouTube TV. So I expect we’ll continue to see that grow in the years ahead.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s great to have data, but you need to turn it into the so what?” says Alysia Borsa, the company’s Chief Marketing & Data Officer, whose team is responsible for all consumer data and insights across the merged assets of Meredith and Time Inc.

“The common goal for all of my team is really to understand our consumers. When we understand our consumers we drive advertising, we drive product, we drive editorial, we drive consumer revenue. So we have this common goal.”

One element of that goal is capturing and understanding user data not just based on the life stage of a consumer and their interests but on capturing the “billions” of intent signals that Meredith sees.

“Every time someone clicks on a video or opens an email or creates a shopping list or clicks to buy, they’re helping us to understand their intent. So life stage, plus interest, now intent,” Borsa says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Complementing intent signals is the capability of creating profiles to understand consumers who are always changing. This is where persistent and dynamic means intersect.

“Persistent is I am a mom, I’m interested in sports. There are persistent aspects about who I am and what I’m interested in. But on Monday mornings versus Saturday afternoons I have different needs.”

Bringing everything together to create the “so what?” is what really unleashes the power of consumer data, according to Borsa.

“The whole team is focused on how do we develop insights to create, for example, video programming that impacts a client or that can drive engagement.”

Two recent examples are when the Better Homes & Gardens team “saw a really interesting trend toward an interest in whipped cream and decorating eggs,” Borsa explains. They created a video about dyeing Easter eggs that garnered 60 million views on Facebook, was shared one million times and was “cross-promoted across multiple brands where we saw a seventy percent completion rate.”

Meredith’s Real Simple title created a “momfessions” video based on insights. The resulting brand-sponsored video got 17 million views, according to Borsa.

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.

“When I’m on Facebook, I’m in browse mode. I’m scrolling through a feed and I’m looking for things that capture my attention. When you’re coming to us, you’re coming with a purpose,” Minoff adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

That purpose varies by title, generating “both the implicit and explicit data” the company collects from its reach consisting of some 175 million consumers monthly.

“You’re coming to our recipes because you’re looking to make dinner or you’re thinking about going grocery shopping. That’s an ideal moment for a client to capture consumer attention and to be part of that experience.”

Visitors to Better Homes & Gardens are considering “planting your garden or doing some type of home improvement project. When you’re coming to Shape, you’re thinking about how do you improvement your fitness,” says Minoff.

When you pair intent, data, creative capabilities and scale, “I think we have something that very few others can offer.”

On the branded content creation side, Minoff mentions the Foundry, Meredith’s New York-based facilities where data, insights, storytelling and scale are leveraged to connect brands with consumers. The Foundry was recently nominated for three Webby Awards, presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and two Emmy nominations from The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in the Outstanding Innovation category for virtual reality projects.

“I think how all great branded content starts is an understanding of what consumers are looking for and then figuring out how do I weave a brand into that in a way that still drives return for them,” says Minoff.

Asked to assess the near future of the publishing business, his “deepest hope” is that most publishers are able to find business models that support the great content and products that they create.

“I think there’s been a challenge with advertising shifting a lot toward the platforms, that a lot of publishers have been trying to figure out what’s the next generation business model,” Minoff says.

Subscriptions are one such model. With some 50 million print subscribers, Meredith sees “a big opportunity to extend that into our digital properties as well.”

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.

“We have knowledge and capabilities to essentially put dollars to work over three-, six-, twelve-month campaigns like we do in Upfronts,” the CEO of Cadent and one2one Media adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “The evolution of addressable will follow the same evolution that I think advanced TV has.”

At this month’s Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan, the sister companies brought together industry leaders to discuss the state of advanced and addressable TV, along with end-to-end solutions encompassing mobile and over-the-top viewing.

Troiano shares two takeaways from the event: TV’s standing in the media hierarchy and the evolving role of data in driving brand engagement.

“With all that’s happened in the marketplace and the changes over the last couple of years, TV still is a dominant medium for brand advertising and will continue to be so,” he says. “Second, the use and influx of data is forcing evolution and change within our industry. Facebook, Google certainly have some of the best data in the space, but data isn’t what drives brand engagement. TV does.”

While the evolution will take time and will be accompanied by “bumps in the road,” the best way to achieve it is through collaboration by advertisers, programmers and technology/platform companies.

“I think if we keep true to the value of television, what it means for our advertisers and for our clients, and find ways to take advantage of what technology and data offers, we’ve got a bright future,” says Troiano.

Troiano says no one questions the value of addressability and the application of data to bring digital-like capabilities of ROI to TV. “The challenge that the industry has encountered is how do you actually make it easier to simplify that process to execute addressable television across a national footprint.”

In the past year since one2one Media joined Cadent under the Cross MediaWorks umbrella, “we’ve invested tremendously in technology and workflow. It’s exactly what we did with Cadent over the past three to four years where we brought scale and stability and ease and transparency to an unwired base of inventory.”

Asked to look ahead, Troiano thinks data-driven television “will continue to be a much bigger play for next year, a percentage of the media buy for the Upfront. The evolution of addressable will follow the same evolution that I think advanced TV has. Two years ago they dabbled with it. This year it’s going to be a significant part of the upfront, at least the upfront discussion.

“Whereas next year I think there will be a larger percent of the transaction in the Upfront for advanced TV, addressable we expect to be the same thing for next year.”

This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.

“Let’s be very clear. This is not like everybody woke up this morning and discovered that they were giving their data away,” the Global CEO of Y&R says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference. He was referencing the ability of companies like Cambridge Analytica being able to harvest vast amounts of Facebook data.

“I think the big revelation was Cambridge not just taking your data and my data if it was us, but then taking our friends’ data as well. I think it was that complete vacuuming that freaked everybody out.”

The resulting awakening is how many people make money off of other peoples’ data. With regard to Facebook, “The original deal was yeah you get to target me, which is okay” because television advertisers have always targeted audiences. “In return for that you watched all these great shows for free.”

One difference was that TV networks and advertisers “didn’t make extra money” from audience targeting.

“These guys are making a fortune by limiting, if you will, access to you. They’re the guardian between you and everything else. And it’s not just Facebook. It’s Google, it’s everybody,” Sable says.

He’s long thought that perhaps digital companies should share their revenue with users whose data is the source of that revenue. “What does it cost me to be on your platform? Take that out of the equation. I’ll give you that money up front,” is how he articulates it.

After all, direct-response advertisers have always been willing to pay an “allowable” to secure new customers. That could be, say, $400 for an automaker will to pay to generate test drives. “If they’re spending four hundred dollars to get you into a car and they’re giving that four hundred to Facebook, why shouldn’t Facebook give you two hundred?” Sable asks.

“The truth is, at some point you should be in charge of your data and you should be able to control the amount of money that you either want to take in or give out or whatever.”

Asked about the continued evolution of linear TV ad formats, Sable says he’s “not sure what the new form factor is.” Back in 1976, his agency was experimenting with 15-second ads. “Now we’ve split it in half. Big deal.”

Sable is skeptical about one-to-one marketing being a cure-all for brands, given how “serendipitous” human beings are on their circuitous paths to purchase.

“That’s why you hear more people talking about brand,” he says. “As the Facebooks and the rest began to discover that in fact people weren’t necessarily going that pathway and buying specific things, they started themselves talking about brand advertising. They knew about serendipity.”

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.

“Talent today in my opinion is a culture game,” Koenigsberg says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, a conversation in which he also shares his views on the present market dominance of Facebook and Google and why he thinks Amazon is most worth watching.

As he discusses the evolution of advertising and media agency holding companies, Koenigsberg recalls a decentralized approach consisting of “a ton of companies, not integrated but selling all kinds of different services. And when you think about companies that are completely integrated and non-siloed, it’s the antithesis I think of a holding company.”

Of the genesis of Horizon, he adds, “We didn’t build the company by buying a whole bunch of different companies that have competing interests.”

The industry talent pool consists of “smart kids” with “lots of choices.” So getting the most qualified ones to join a media agency is easier said than done.

“But we’re fighting a bit of an uphill battle with the pocketbook of Google and Facebook and Amazon and some of the other tech companies,” says Koenigsberg. “I believe that our industry has to somehow figure out an enormous pivot if we are going to get the best and the brightest in our industry.”

In a week that saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining his company to Congress, Koenigsberg observes that nothing is static and that the business world constantly moves.

“There are some storm clouds over Facebook right now. How are they going to deal with their data play in the future. There are some big storm clouds with Google with regard to brand safety and their data play and where are they going to be in the future.”

Nonetheless, he doesn’t count out media companies with a presence in linear and digital as they consolidate, build out digital ecosystems and invest in subscription services and other forms of entertainment to drive scale.

“So I think that Facebook and Google will be chipped away at over the next five years. They’re not going to have the hold on the ecosystem that I think people think they will have,” Koenigsberg says.

He thinks Amazon in particular is one to watch because of its ability to continue to scale, the data and information it has on purchasing power and “the fact that they’re getting into every business under the sun, including the content business.”

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 we have to back up from that. What we’re really doing is talking about the integration of mass reach with sophistication of measurement, targeting and ultimately relevance,” says the Managing Director of strategic advisory firm MediaLink.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the RampUp 2018 conference, Spiegel talks about the “next wave” in identity resolution and why marketers should recognize the value of a blend of more granular targeting and pure scale.

“Identity is going to power the ad business and marketing, however you want to define it,” says Spiegel. “Identity is the underpinning of future success without any question.”

He observes that the gap between companies like Facebook and Google and big media companies in being able to more precisely target audiences is shrinking as the latter expand their digital footprints and seek better linear TV options. “You now have this whole more sophisticated level of targeting and measurement that the industry on the more traditional media side couldn’t have before.”

All the distribution points of content “built into that ecosystem is the power of identity, the potential of identity anyway, if they stitch it together the right data,” says Spiegel. That connected to “this massive world of linear television, which by the way is still really big and still a lot of money and still has a lot of value, those two things combined I think are huge.”

The trick, he adds, is understanding identity with sophistication. On-boarding data and employing device graphs is all well and good, but the hardest part is matching individuals to their households.

“We’ll keep talking about matching and on-boarding, and there’s value. But what we’ll really start to talk about is the applications built on top of a sophisticated identity resolution system. That’s what I think’s much more interesting.”

This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.