There are consumers that engage with ads and marketers and then consumers of the content itself. Vangeli explained that there’s a lot of change happening between different stakeholders, whether it’s with the client and the agency, the agency and the publisher, the publisher and the distributor, and so on.

“There’s a lot of pressure happening,” Vangeli said. “And that’s why right now it just makes so much sense for a pivot to happen in the marketplace where we finally break through. But with that is a lot of complications because there are so many business models and legacy models, multi-billion dollar business models that are in there, and everyone cares about only what’s on either side of them, but it’s an equation that needs to balance out.”

This will ultimately lead to some level of disruption and discomfort, and fragmentation is one part of that. TV viewership has increased over time, but a great percentage of that has transitioned to a non-live linear stream. Consumers don’t realize this fragmentation, they’re simply doing what is convenient, so it’s up to marketers to build around this complexity.

At NBCU, they’re dealing with this complexity in three different ways. They’re producing more content than ever before, they’re rethinking distribution, and they’re building technology that supports all of the fragmentation. For the latter, NBC is now introducing One Platform.

“We’re at this point where we’ve had these different strategies of bringing things together from a structural standpoint, but also technology in the advanced advertising space with our AdSmart portfolio,” Vangeli said. “And so the amalgamation of all of that has unveiled onePlatform where you can have one plan, one optimization, one view, one measurement, and it all comes together for an advertiser.”

Interoperability, or the ability of computer systems to exchange and make use of information, is what’s helping NBCU to be able to accomplish this.

“Everything we’ve been building around that and on top of that has all been with this philosophy that we believe that there needs to be an interoperable ecosystem for television.” Vangeli said. “We’re still TV, so we’re only as good as the collection of the TV partners we have around us. So if that’s the case, in order for this to truly scale for all of us to continue making transacting easier on television, we need to be able to be interoperable.”

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

The future of advertising needs to be looked at through the lens of three main constituencies: publishers, marketers and consumers. O’Connell explained that advertising has existed relatively in balance of these three pieces throughout its history, but that is being phased out.

“The balance part of the equation is gone and that is bad,” O’Connell said. “The reality is that consumers now have the ability to get away from advertising in ways that are sort of unprecedented.”

Consumers are now skipping and blocking ads at an alarming rate. The byproduct of this imbalance is not good for publishers, because they’re not able to communicate a true value proposition and it’s not good for marketer,  because they are not able to generate an effective business performance.

But it’s important to trace back to what got us to this imbalance. The first reason is that we have a traditional notion of segmentation. This is most obvious in the fallback of age and gender, but not solely limited to that.

“We also tend to think of things like behavioral signals as somehow representative of consumers and use that as a way to develop segmentation.” O’Connell said. “But consumers are so much more complicated and nuanced than that.”

Another is how media is bought. It’s still bought in silos through traditional planning and buying teams and several other teams.

“The reality is, the way the consumers consume media is so much different than it was before,” O’Connell said. “Not only is it fragmented and complicated, but they’re also doing things like using two devices at the same time, so they’re doing things like simultaneously consuming two different things across two different devices.”

Messaging has also fallen flat. The way that consumers can now access information has meant that information asymmetry, which traditionally benefits the seller, has been diminished.

Simultaneously, there are external forces shaping the future of advertising. Privacy, and the ability to access consumer data, is one of these things that will reshape how advertising works. The cookie is dying out but is still the infrastructure that everyone is using. The way that we think about ad formats, including the banner ad, where we’re hitting walls with growth and considering their futility.

“What these things mean to me is that we’re looking at a future that is far less open, that is far less broad-based, that is significantly less audience-targeting driven in the way that it has been.” O’Connell said. “Those days are starting to wane, and we’re going to have a future that is significantly more closed, more curated, more controlled, and much more driven by consumers telling us what they want and what they’re OK with.”

It would be easy for the TV industry to pat itself on the back and think that they’re immune, but that might not be true. The reality is that it could very much fall into so many of the same traps that digital did. TV advertising could be creepy, intrusive, it could follow people around, it could disrespect their tolerance for advertising.

“What I’m interested in is a future that’s a lot more thoughtful, a lot more collaborative, a lot more connected where we’re following a principal of the spirit of the intent of consumer choice and control and preference, not the letter.” O’Connell said.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But undeniably, O’Connell says, the future of advertising includes video in a big way. But before advertisers can reach their potential with video, the industry needs some re-righting.

“Looking at consumers, publishers, and advertisers, and how out of balance those relationships have gotten, how do we restore advertising to where consumers are less inclined to want to explicitly avoid or step away from advertising? Because that’s not good for anybody,” O’Connell told Alan Wolk, co-founder of TV/REV at the Beet Retreat in San Juan. The solution, she says, is to identify the forces shaping advertising today so that brands and advertisers can get ahead of them and be prepared.

These trends include the changing infrastructure (what will replace the cookie?), ad format innovation and walled gardens. But the biggest force changing the landscape is privacy and consumer data access. That is the lens through which the rest of the industry must be considered, O’Connell argues. Marketers are going to want to increasingly target their ad spend – and are looking at demographics beyond age and gender and other ways to be more relevant to audiences – but if these strategies aren’t shaped with consumer privacy in mind, video advertising will make the same mistakes that digital advertising is still figuring out how to fix.

“How do we not make the mistakes that the industry has made in the past, where we’ve gotten to a place where there is real concern over the use of data, and real concern over how that data moves around and gets transacted?” O’Connell asks, pointing to TV targeted by household and hyper-personalization as emerging areas in privacy.

The solution will lie in brands’ willingness to shape their strategies around this question. O’Connell says that privacy is a concern, but she’s not sure if it’s been “entirely internalized” as to what that means in execution. Right now, brands are simply prioritizing compliance, but not asking the bigger questions that will lead to better consumer relationships around data.

“It’s more about compliance than philosophically, how do we change how we work with customers so they can trust us and feel good about the experience, and we are good stewards of the data?” she says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

“I think what we recognize is what the industry is dealing with right now, which is the very real divide still between understanding of and the skills associated with traditional linear broadcast and more sort of digital ways of thinking and behaving,” says O’Connell. “So for the sake of the research, we partnered.”

For Nail, who brings more of a traditional TV perspective, this means seeing where digital trends are pointing, and putting a sense of urgency on pulling away from what is comfortable for linear ad buys.

“Something had to be done to figure out how do we change what we’re doing so we can capture those opportunities to get our brands in front of those people,” says Nail. “But clearly it’s going to require pretty significant change in thinking about audiences, what data you use, and the technology platforms that are going to support that.”

O’Connell, whose work has been done mostly on the digital side, admits that there is much to be gained from exploring linear models of TV, but that digital people tended to be a little dismissive of, thinking that TV would look one very certain way in the future. Both analysts agree that there needs to be a happy medium that emphasizes the overlap between both models.

“We had a sea of what I’m now calling peaches and plums, which are really really different,” says O’Connell. “But the hybrid of the two is the beautiful nectarine.”

It’s these “nectarines”, O’Connell says, that will keep the industry evolving while still maintaining an organizational structure that can most effectively adapt.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

So far in the rush to launch new paid streaming TV services, pundit opinion has focused on how providers’ library strengths and finite household capital will end up crowning a winning provider.

But Jim Nail doesn’t see things so black-and-white.

Rather than betting on Disney to kill off Netflix, as many sections of the tech press may depict it, the Forrester Research principal analyst is betting on a more mixed ecology emerging.

Streaming wars

“2020 is going to be such a fascinating year, because you’ve got Disney+ launching in a little over a week, November 1,” Nail says. “Hot on the heels of that, you’ve got Apple TV launching (and) HBO Max sometime after the first of the year.

“So far, we’ve kind of lived in a world where there’s Netflix and Hulu and for a long time it was like Netflix was all. You go back three years, people, they’d given up Hulu for dead. But Hulu came on, which to me says the consumers are understanding this world of streaming is not like a ‘one or the other’.”

Nail was talking with his colleague, Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell, in this video interview for Beet.TV, at a time when TV has already been up-ended by the emergence of OTT players like Netflix.

But next year is when the game changes. Vertically-integrated SVOD offerings from content owners are causing many syndication rights with Netflix to time-out without renewal, as media companies look to distribute their own shows.

More nuance needed

“So now consumer has choice,” Nail says. “Netflix, Hulu, I haven’t even mentioned Amazon, and now Disney, HBO Max, Apple TV. Roku is building up a lot of providers on their platform.

“A lot of people are arguing about ‘will Disney kill off Netflix?’ or whatever. But I think they’re thinking about it wrong, because it’s really about ‘how will consumers make this choice of what is the right combination of these services for them?'”

In her interview with Nail, Forrester’s O’Connell also imagines that the classical subscription model may not be as locked-in as people think.

“Will you just subscribe to something in perpetuity or will there be models where you essentially can subscribe for a week to binge-watch the show you want or subscribe to the show and then walk away?,” she wonders.

M&A analysis

Nail also offered his insight on two just-inked deals in the connected TV advertising space.

AT&T’s Xandr buying Clypd, a sell-side platform for digital and linear TV ads:

“I think it’s a really interesting acquisition. Clearly it is going to give Xandr a lot of power to reach beyond just the Time Warner media assets that are within the AT&T family where they are now.”

Roku buying dataxu, a demand-side platform for connected TV ads:

“I see that as more of a straight technology purchase. Roku had cobbled together some internal technology that everybody I talked to said it was just terrible, really primitive. And rather than build on that or build something new, it was much smarter for Roku to buy it. They’ve got very ambitious plans for their advertising revenue stream and this I think will help accelerate them.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Roku is the leading provider of add-on OTT devices, according to Strategy Analytics, and is also present natively inside many TV sets. In recent years, it has building on that footprint by branching out in to ad sales. Dataxu offers tools ad buyers use to find viewers on connected TV.

In Forrester’s Q3 New Wave report, Cross-Channel Video Advertising Platforms, published in August, the analyst firm gave dataxu a “differentiated” rating in five product categories.

So, what does Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell think of the just-announced Roku deal?

In this video interview with her colleague, Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail, for Beet.TV, O’Connell says: “It gives (Roku) the opportunity to do all kinds of interesting things around audience extension and the like, which is evidently something that they’re interested in.

“For those two things to marry is really notable,” she says. “Makes sense for Roku, that’s a great thing for them to have. It’s going to shore up the technology that they don’t necessarily have, built in the way that the ecosystem would like them to.”

Roku holds first-party data on its users in unique identifiers it calls RIDAs, helping facilitate targeted advertising. Earlier this year, Adobe Ad Cloud began matching marketers’ own audience segments to RIDAs, meaning buyers who use Adobe as a demand-side platform (DSP) can now end up buying Roku ads more easily.

Roku also offers 15- and 30-second video commercials but also background wallpaper sponsorships, sponsored content hubs or advertiser-funded free movie nights.

Just over a year ago, Roku launched a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.

Now O’Connell is pondering the market impact of Roku buying dataxu.

“What does it mean for buyers?,” she said. “That’s sort of a larger question. Does it limit their ability to get access to Roku and the variety of ways that they’ve gotten access to it before?

“Does it create some higher walls, where there were necessarily such high walls before? Does it complicate their ability to do the kind of truly converged, planning, buying and measurement that we’re interested in seeing?

“Remains to be seen. But that was my first thought.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

After a recognition that proxy metrics like “clicks” didn’t necessarily translate in to real goals, like sales, certain publishers and even TV operators are now doing just that, offering “guaranteed” outcomes in return for ad spend.

But, is “outcome”-based pricing really effective?

In this panel discussion Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, Joe Marchese, Attention Capital CEO, and Joanna O’Connell, Forrester Research principal analyst, poured suspicion on the new trend in ad pricing…

Input over output

“I don’t believe ROI is actually the input for advertising, ROI is an output,” Marchese said. “The ROI is what you seek. You don’t get to buy ROI.”

O’Connell concurred. “I get very nervous when I see people moving to these very outcomes-based models, and I just think, ‘I think you’re missing something really important and I’m not sure you totally know it’, and that makes me super nervous.”

Marchese replied: “Here’s what I don’t understand about outcomes. Aren’t they working (both) with Ford and Toyota? Like, which one (brand) are they promising the outcomes to for real? Outcomes are possible on a relative basis.”

Fake outcomes

Marchese and O’Connell voiced concern that, in the new push to offer outcomes-based ad pricing, some on the sell side may be constructing an incorrect causal link between an advertising exposure and real business health.

Marchese said he suspects “spoofing of ROIs and the mis-attribution and reverse engineering” are gathering pace.

“How do these brands that are collapsing keep getting ROI reports that say it’s working?,” he asked the conference.

Attention beats data

Marchese is the former CEO of true[X], the ad-tech company that seeks to make TV ads more engaging to viewers through interactivity, incentivising them to trade that engagement for lower ad volume. Now he has launched an investment firm called Attention Capital , which has taken a controlling stake in the Tribeca Film Festival and plans further investments.

“Data’s a good thing, but we have wildly swung too far,” he told O’Connell. “Attention is more important than data.

“You think we incept human beings? You think your consumers are that dumb that they weren’t going to go eat that thing and then you put it in front of them? (Rather), it’s a build over time.”

Data’s ad crimes

Marchese said modern advertising had the power to play a wider part in consumer conversations than even content these days, because the latter is so abundant and because viewers are no longer all viewing at the same time. But he criticized the culture that data-driven thinking had infused in advertising.

“We had perverse incentives that said ‘We need more impressions, they don’t have to be good or bad, we just need more of them’.

“We had really bad measurement. It was binary – ‘it either is or is not an impression’ – rather than some sort of gradient. And we kind of looked past the fraud and we had an over-belief that data would solve everything.”

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.

That has spurred many networks to rip up and re-shape the norm for what a commercial break looks like, and how long it runs.

A Beet Retreat panel convened during three days of debate in Puerto Rico to discuss ad load and the viewer experience…

The big reduction that wasn’t

The debate kicked off when the analyst leading the discussion confronted two networks that have launched initiatives to reduce ad loads with data showing, in many cases, it has not come to pass…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

“I saw this really interesting research from Kantar that ad load, for all the talk, had not actually declined from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Actually, it had data on all of your properties which was super interesting to look at…”

Peacock’s cut is coming

Answering O’Connell, a leading NBCUniversal executive re-stated the company’s intention to reduce at load by 20% in some TV formats…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really a challenge because we need to find a way that the consumers will enjoy the experience and the advertisers will get their message out, and of course we will make money … How do we produce content that’s meaningful to consumers? It’s something that we’re very focused on for the next year.”

Linear is hard to change

Another network exec echoed recent industry sentiment about the pace with which TV is turning itself around, suggesting that the traditional TV business as defined by its legacy medium may not change any time soon…

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

“In the linear format, we have an existing business model that unless I can figure out a way to sustain it and grow it the way I have to in my role, yeah, it isn’t just necessarily going to change. You have the opportunity in OTT and in new formats to build the ad model from the ground up.

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“We obviously still have challenges as it exists today, I think, beyond just the consumer we’ve all experienced where you see the four ads. There are a lot of technical reasons why that happened. With video on demand, the ad load is a bit reduced compared to linear TV, but more importantly for the consumer experience, there are caps put in place. An ad can’t run more than two times per hour.”

Tech can solve for excess

If linear is hard to change, panel speakers suggested that technology platforms could help the networks and all parts of the value chain to make good on promises to reduce the frequency with which ads are seen, if not quite yet the number of them…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really incumbent on the technology providers to solve (it), regardless of who buys the ad, who puts it out there. It needs to be frequency-capped.”

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“NCC’s point of view is through partnering with the likes of Freewheel, who is really focused on this topic, and can help control for frequency across platform, but then also building scale.”

Viewers are revolting

Beyond these implementation challenges, though, a bigger threat is evident. In 2019, the booming success of subscription video on demand, which often comes minus ads of any kind, is inculcating an ad-free viewing culture. Steadily, viewers used to immediate content are discovering a disdain for advertising they always knew was latent but which has now bubbled to the surface…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“Our woes are certainly existent, but really the reason why (consumers are) fleeing the ad model is because we make it unbearable.”

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Generally, so far, television has fared better from an attitudinal standpoint than digital channels, but I fear that that will change because of the exact things that we’re talking about right now. (Consumers) understood the role that the ads played (in linear television).”

Re-think the ad unit

Panelists agreed that the very nature of an ad needs to be re-thought – and not just in terms of its length. Custom creative and interactivity should all be on the table…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Creative management platforms and DCO (dynamic creative optimization) technology is the most-under appreciated category of technology out there. The things that you can do with these technologies are really amazing, and yet the awareness is almost null in the industry. These guys are (just) playing around in formats like OTT.”

Proof of the pudding

Networks are more likely to respond positively and fully implement consumer-friendly advertising breaks if they can see data showing effectiveness – one panelist said that poses a problem in TV…

Lisa Lutz, VP, Product Management – Advanced Advertising TiVo:

“If I replace my (traditional advertising) pod with two 30-second (spots), instead of seven spots, what’s the retention? What’s the migration? Where are people going? Did this work? Did this not work? There’s always been such latency in terms of being able to get the data and measure it. (But) now (there is) the ability to have data at your fingertips and be able to really measure a few days after you run something.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.

The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

The theory is all well and good – but how do you actually make it happen?

Perhaps inconveniently, a key ingredient of “relevance” seems to be another thing about which consumers are becoming wary – data about them.

So how can marketers navigate the waters? In this interview with Beet.TV, Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell, who has also spent time as a marketers, opens up on key considerations.

“Things like identity management become really really important,” she says. “It’s not a ‘nice to have’, it’s literally a ‘how do I resolve to people so that, when I’m doing my advertising, I’m doing it at the people level?’

“Another thing would be ‘how are my different ad technologies talking to each other in a way that allows me to better manage my frequency more globally?'”

So-called “frequency management”, understanding how often audiences are exposed to particular ads, is an oft-discussed topic, O’Connell concedes.

But she says marketers have to put their money where their mouths are – and actually switch on the systems.

However, gaining consumer relevance isn’t just about technology, it’s also about crafting creative, human-driven messaging that can meet the right audiences once you know who they are, O’Connell adds.

“In the digital world we’re not as good at that in the day-to-day with the creative that is out in market,” she complains. “How do we make sure we’re always thinking about the consumer, and there’s tech that actually is giving advertisers those palettes and agencies those palettes to be able to do that kind of stuff?”

O’Connell is a seasoned marketing analyst who also had a stint as MediaMath’s chief marketer.

Her recent work has included a playbook report on selecting ad-tech vendors for an omni-channel strategy, a breakdown of 34 media agencies and an upcoming Forrester Wave dissection of tech firms that help power ad creative.

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.

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

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

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

How the crisis was created

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

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

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

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

Fixing pipes with creative

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

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

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

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

Future shape of the industry

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

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

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

That may or may not be true, depending on your persuasion. But a 2018 intervention by new blockchain technology could at least improve the quality of agencies’ lives in the foreseeable future.

That was the hope of one big-brand marketer, excited about the prospect for how the infrastructure which underpins crypto-currency could bring a step-change in transparency to the advertising business, speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV.

The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:

• Unilever global media VP Rob Master
• Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics  Josh Herman
• Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise
• IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah

The theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which processes $140 billion dollars of ad spend on an annual basis – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain. Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of the consortium.

Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics  Josh Herman:

“My expectation is that it will be a quality of life improvement. The ease with which you can defend the spend improves your quality of life. The extent to which you have confidence about the numbers that you’re putting in front of the meeting to make actual business decision, improves your quality of life.”

Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise:

“A lot of companies who have fraud running through their businesses. I think we all, as an ecosystem, want to clean that up.

“Our agency partners who are forward-leaning and run transparent businesses are pushing for this. They also want to be involved. We announced the marketers (first) because, at the end of the day, it’s your guys’ money, but the ad agencies are going to also be big participants in the pilot as well and we’re working very collaboratively with them.”

Unilever global media VP Rob Master:

“We spend so much time now around the reconciliation, around massaging the data, trying to track down the data, waiting for things to come in before we can actually spend our full amount of money.

“(Blockchain) allows us to actually spend more time thinking about the consumer.”

IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:

“We think about this initiative, in baseball terms, as the very first inning. We want to be able to show transparency of the money. The second piece is the speed of reconciliation. Lastly, if we can show any amount of improvement in that percentage of money that gets (ad-)taxed …  I think that would be considered a great success.”

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

“These numbers to me really indicate that we’re at that inflection point, and after all these years of talk and headlines, conferences about it, it’s actually going to start happening,” says Jim Nail, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.

Nail presented the findings of the ANA/Forrester State of TV and Online Video Survey at RampUp 2018, the two-day LiveRamp conference. In this interview with Beet.TV, Nail explains why the annual TV Upfront ritual isn’t going away anytime soon and why marketers need to be “data detectives” in evaluating providers of advanced audience-targeting data.

According to the Rogers diffusion of innovations theory, once 15% of market participants have adopted a new innovation and 30% represent the early mainstream, “you’re at the inflection point, the proverbial hockey stick where the adoption accelerates rapidly,” Nail says.

In the survey, 28% of marketers reported being knowledgeable about addressable TV but haven’t yet entered the market, while 18% said they were aware of it but don’t know enough to use it and 6% said they were not at all aware of it.

While the industry is “not going to abandon the Upfronts anytime soon,” mainly owing to greater demand for primetime inventory than there is supply, advanced TV targeting is playing an ever-increasing role in negotiations, according to Nail.

Nail is “really excited” about some of the companies that are building the tools that buyers need to build TV schedules based on audience targeting beyond age and gender. “No buyer wants to be dependent on the data that the seller is telling them ‘here’s who our audience is.’ LiveRamp is certainly making a big contribution to the development of this area,” he says.

These data providers enable buyers to “let me do my planning myself and then go to the sellers and negotiate from that basis.”

He calls automatic content recognition technology that helps to track TV viewing and ad exposure “a very promising area of data.” Then he cautions that marketers entering the space need to become data detectives.

“All of those platforms promise a lot but you can’t take it at face value. You’ve got to ask who are these users that you’re getting this data from, how representative are they of the viewing audience as a whole.”

It boils down to “classic market research nuts and bolts methodology stuff to make sure that the data that you’re getting is really as high quality, as solid as the traditional data sets, like Nielsen, MRI and Simmons.”

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.  

Overall, the Principal Analyst believes that things are moving from “conversations about how the TV industry is evolving to action in the TV industry,” O’Connell explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

“It’s a massive industry. It was been very, very slow to change. And I think it’s still moving relatively slowly in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. But the energy this time feels meaningful, as though we are graduating to action.”

Because of her grasp of the complicated adtech ecosystem, it’s easy for her to boil things down when the issue is consolidation of players. She notes that some companies are interested in owning the full technology stack, “everything from data management and analytics and data as an asset” through to execution.

Then there are “the other set of companies who, at least so far, seem less interested in getting into the execution game. When you look at consolidation, to me that’s the most interesting dynamic,” O’Connell says.

The bottom line: will execution inevitably become “part of these massive clouds? It sort of feels like it will. And yet if you ask them, some of them deliberately take a stance that it won’t.”

While she appreciates the efforts of media companies like NBCUniversal to accelerate the shift from buying demos to audiences, O’Connell believes that things can only progress so quickly. There’s a lot of inertia in basic business dynamics.

For example, the traditional, procurement-driven practice of “getting CPM’s lower than the CPM’s that the agency achieved the prior year. Which is insane. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s a crazy model.” A model of “rewarding efficiency and effectiveness needs to become more of the norm,” she adds.

Asked whether Netflix will go the ad-supported route, O’Connell evokes the chicken-and-egg causality dilemma. Are consumers demanding ad-free services like Netflix, or is the company driving change that consumers embrace?

Either way, Netflix has made some companies up their game, according to O’Connell.

“So when we are in an ad-supported model, it’s one that consumers don’t hate but actually find valuable. Let alone not annoying, can you imagine if they actually found it valuable?”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

He says that the pricing model, based on commission-based percentage of media, needs to to some sort of performance or services basis.

We spoke with him for “The Road to DMEXCO,” a series of interviews with industry leaders produced in New York, London and San Francisco sponsored by the automatic content recognition (ACR) technology provider Civolution.

Please find more videos from the series here.  Beet.TV is a media sponsor of DMEXCO and will be covering the conference extensively.

He called the alliance between Dish and Disney as “the first chink in the armor” of the big operators.

Nail also speaks about the development of TV Everywhere.

We spoke with him today at the VideoNuze conference where he was a speaker.