But what if it could recalibrate the creative works that make all that happen?

That is what is beginning to happen, as a new generation of AI-driven technology sets its sights on the creative process.

Creative ad-tech rising

In this video interview with Anush Prabhu, MediaCom’s US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell explains the new age of “creative advertising technology”.

O’Connell and her colleagues authored a report on the sector, which includes dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and similar tactics, in Q4 2020, covering companies like Adacado, Bannerflow, Celtra, Clinch, Flashtalking, Innovid, Jivox, RevJet, and SundaySky. She recently delivered this presentation on the topic.

O’Connell says it is made up of “companies that are solving for various parts through the creative process… everything from kind of ideation at the kind of beginning through to having things out in the wild”. And that creates two kinds of benefits:

Production – “Create 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 variations without paying a whole bunch of production people to do it manually. That saves money, that money can be reinvested in people or media or whatever.”

Performance – “Does it work better if I deliver a creative that’s more relevant or more timely or whatever, more resonant?”

Maturation through messiness

So, how big is creative advertising technology, and where will it go from here? Forrester’s O’Connell sees the category is an “awkward teenager”:

Immature stage: “We used technology as a substitute for good thinking.”

Awkward teenage years: “Where you’ve got the really cool kids that have leaned in and are doing the cool things, but it’s still sort of fringy.”

Mature: “Technology as an enabler of creativity, rather than technology as a substitute for creativity.”

AI for cultural understanding

The content of advertising could be revolutionized by technology, including artificial intelligence, some think.

MediaCom’s Prabhu says that includes “equalizing” for diversity. “Tthere is a new majority coming in that is more diverse, more in-tune with what we see America as,” he says. “Data is allowing us to get to know those audiences and talk to those audiences equally and in a better way.”

O’Connell says that is an appealing theory – but complexity will continue to make the reality difficult.

“You can do that in a very basic human way, but you can also do that using technology, using artificial intelligence to look for patterns in massive data sets that would help just generally point you in a better direction in terms of something like the zeitgeist,” she says. “But I don’t want to minimize actually how hard it really is.”

AI will come out of the shadows

Still, O’Connell predicts AI will show itself front-and-center in advertising, not just in the back-end.

“The thing about AI,” she says, “is that it is omnipresent in advertising, we just don’t know it – in everything from planning to optimization to creative (through) natural language processing and … machine learning.”

“(It will go from a) behind-the-scenes, important workhorse to something that starts to also feel like it’s front and center in terms of the consumer experience.

“And I think we’re going to see so much more there.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s.  This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page. 

In April, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), of which Liodice is CEO, issued a call seeking a consultant to conduct a study to help the organization understand how much actual spend is siphoned off in assorted fees.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Liodice and O’Connell use the language of military strategy to discuss the “information asymmetry” and “unknowables” at the heart of the industry.

‘Seat of our pants’

ANA’s interest was sparked by a report by ISBA, the trade body for UK advertisers, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and auditor PwC,  which found 15% of advertiser spend could not be attributed, whilst publishers receive only 51% of advertiser spend on average.

The figures were described as “mind-boggling” – especially several years after earlier industry reports first raised the problems around “ad tax” and transparency.

“The ad tech community is probably the least understood within the purview of brands and marketers,” Liodice says.

“It’s extraordinarily complex. There are billions of transactions that happen second by second, there are an incredible amount of handoffs and deals that take place between buyers and sellers, between SSPs and DSPs.

“The ad tech community knows a hell of a lot about what’s going on, they understand data flows, money flows – and the marketers pretty much do not. A lot of times, brands are flying by the seat of their pants.”

‘Almost opaque’

The problem, Liodice says, is “you don’t know what you don’t know”. He describes the “lack of information that we have to be able to make these decisions and optimise” as “almost opaque for us”.

That, in a programmatic world, is a far cry from history, when marketers had far more certainty about where fewer ads ran, in fewer destinations.

O’Connell and Liodice both hope a byproduct of the new focus on consumer privacy will be a cleaner, simpler and more transparent ad supply chain.

“Particularly now, as Google is deprecating its cookies and Apple is changing its IDFA policies, the marketers are essentially in the dark,” Liodice says.

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. 

But, in the internet-connected TV (CTV) era, the old shapes are being rebooted.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dan Callahan, SVP of data strategy and sales innovation at Fox, describes how new technology is ushering in a wave of innovation that is re-thinking what TV advertising can be.

Rebooting the break

“The opportunity for it to be different is there,” Callahan says. “I think that’s a key piece here. We have moved linear-style breaks – four 30-seconds, or a couple of 15s and a couple of 30s – (into CTV) and really mirrored what was historically done in linear and supported that same strategy.

“The opportunities are really endless with, I think, the way you can re-imagine the pod, and that being from a structure standpoint but also from … ‘What does the break look like and how do I get to interact with it via my phone, via my connected device or my smart remote?’ It’s really exciting to see what is possible on the glass.”

Callahan’s Fox was relatively early on in the new-wave TV ads game. In 2014, it acquired TrueX, a tech vendor helping it reduce digital ad load to viewers who opt to engage with a TV ad. New Fox owner Disney has since sold TrueX.

New pods rising

Callahan says Fox and other networks are experimenting with what the ad break can do, including:

• Faster breaks.
• One of one ad insertion.
• One of two ad insertion.
• Shortening the commercial time.
• Bringing the user back to content quicker.
• “Absolute A” zones, supporting advertising before shows start.
• Showing a pre-roll before uninterrupted content.
• Interactivity that supports making purchases and sending coupons to phones.

For him, technology is driving a change in the shape of TV advertising.

Creative experiments

“I think we’re going to see people test and try different things with overlays and lower thirds, different prompts, things that really speak directly to you, whether that’s based on geography or based on audience,” Callahan says.

“It’s a really exciting time that you can reimagine these things. You can get creative, you can work strategically with clients to find out what they want the interruption to look like and what makes sense for really that great content to have an ad break that doesn’t feel like an ad break.

“I think it’s something we’ve talked about for years, but now we really have not only the screen and the content, but really the mechanics, and the technology behind it, to truly do things differently.”

Tech evolution

But the technology to deliver those ads is still developing.

Callahan is enthusiastic about header bidding – the technology that allows publishers to entertain ad bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, thereby reaping higher yield – but that this is harder to implement in TV than it was in desktop display and mobile.

Furthermore, the CTV ecosystem is rather piecemeal.

Callahan hopes technology and specs can get more standardized in 2021, bringing the ability to switch out ad creative for different viewers much more easily.

“I hope that there’s better collaboration across the groups, and we can bring together a lot of the progress that’s made collectively,” he adds. “The rising tide will raise this opportunity.”

You are watching “Making CTV Happen: A New Ad Infrastructure Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Publica. For more videos, please visit this page.

The episode is guest hosted by Joanna O’Connell, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.

The dramatic transformation in video investment is just part of deep dive into many transformative changes taking place in advertising including the resilience of digital media through the pandemic; outcome based modeling, omni-channel investments, the rise of DTC, privacy/identity and the maturing of creative optimization solutions.

This episode of the BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Opik, a Transunion company.   Please visit this page to find more episodes of the BeetCast and to subscribe on your preferred podcast service.

Tech companies’ latest moves to limit ad targeting aim to do so at the operation system level.

Apple has declared iOS its IDFA (Identity for Advertisers), a tool which helps them gather user data, will enable user control for the system by default.

It has just delayed that change from this month’s release of iOS 14 to early in 2021. But the change, when it comes, will nevertheless, be profound.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Forrester analyst Stephanie Liu says the change will have several effects:

• Reduced targeting capabilities
• Slower, smaller measurement
• Opt-in rates will be low
• Workarounds will be clamped-down-upon
• Google may follow suit

Reduced targeting

“(IDFA) is a primary identifier for individuals,” Liu says. “It’s supposed to be semi-persistent.”

She says IDFA’s switch will raise questions like: “Can you target ads on a one-to-one basis? Can you re-target consumers based on what they’ve been doing in other apps and websites? And the answer there, frankly, is ‘no’.

“So it’s going to be much harder to get true personalised advertising the way that marketers have been able to for a while now.”

Measurement dip

In addition, measurement capabilities will be reduced. “They’ve restricted the kinds of data you can get,” Liu says. “So you’re only going to get performance data in aggregate, not in real time.

“They’re going to intentionally create a lag, so you can’t try to re-identify people who’ve clicked on an ad, and it’s limited to 100 campaigns at a time.

“So it’s going to be much less granular and much harder to track, frankly, which ads are performing the best at any given moment.”

Opt-in explosion

IDFA isn’t going away, Apple is just making it opt-in by default. But that may still lead to a dramatic reduction in its usefulness for advertisers. The reason lies in an earlier, similar change, Liu says.

“I think opt-in rates will, frankly, be pretty low,” she asserts.

“We saw this with the last version of iOS, when they resurfaced Location Settings and asked you to confirm, ‘Do you want this app to always have your location, even in the background?’ When they created that popup, the opt in rates went down drastically.”

Liu says a similar pattern has been seen when true cookie consent notices have been displayed, leading to reduced cookie opt-in.

“Basically, when you give consumers choice and transparency, they’re much more likely to take ownership of their privacy rights and revoke some of those settings,” Liu adds.

Workarounds won’t work

As ever, workarounds may be available. After all, devices still report data fragments like software version, language, WiFi network. Advertisers can try piecing them together into “fingerprints”.

But not only can this data joining lead to questionable results – Liu believes this, too, will be fall under Apple’s privacy eye.

“I suspect that that is a short-lived workaround, because Apple will try to clamp down on that, similar to with intelligent tracking protection in Safari,” she says. “They’ve updated it and gone through multiple iterations to, again, clamp down on those workarounds.”

Google, too?

Both Google and Apple are engaged in pro-consumer privacy measures. Google has already announced it will deprecate third-party browser cookies by 2022.

“We see consumers, an increasing number will go into their settings and try to block third party cookies in there, or they’re downloading extensions that will block cookies, et cetera,” Liu reports.

“Apple is setting the bar and Google has to respond. So in this case, I would not be surprised if they also take similar measures with the Google Ad ID.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series title Advertising in a Time of Privacy-Centricity presented by AppsFlyer. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Amongst the questions brands are asking Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail – “What is everyone else doing?” and “Should I be cutting my advertising?”

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nail says there are no historic models to look to for help – a coronavirus playbook cannot be found in 9/11 nor in the 2008 economic crash.

But Nail knows one thing. “I think the answer is pretty obvious,” he says. “In any sort of industry that requires gathering of people, sports, live entertainment, restaurants, travel, all of those things, you either pull it completely or you dial it back and you change your messaging.”

This week, Twitter revised-down its earlier guidance for Q1 2020 advertising growth, now anticipating a slight decline. eMarketer has revised-down its 2020 ad spend forecast.

Amid the crisis, many marketers are frantically trying to figure out how best to retain sales.

But Nail has another idea.

“Don’t even waste your time thinking about how can you stimulate demand in the short-term,” he says. “It’s just not going to happen, For people who were laid off, until they know how long they’re out of work, they are not going to spend a dime.

“Even those of us who are fortunate enough to still be getting a paycheck, it’s like we’re all going to be real cautious because we just have no idea. Rather than do that, you need to make decisions based on, how do you want your brand to be perceived when this is over and when we come out of it?”

The virus has prompted many brands to reconsider the creative they have out in the market.

Certain companies have pulled ads that depict hugging, hand-shaking or, in KFC’s case, finger-lickin’.

Coors Light has abandoned a campaign which would have depicted it as “the official beer of working remotely”, fearing being seen to make light of people self-isolating.

Forrester’s Nail thinks brands need to think beyond the current virus crisis, and tread carefully.

“Do you want your brand to be perceived as a brand that was helpful, that was empathetic, that understood and tried to support its customers and the community?,” he asks. “Or do you want to come across as a brand that was being very opportunistic and still trying to squeeze money out of people?

“Take that longer-term view and accept the idea that we’re going to go through this revenue chasm for the next number of weeks. Just don’t worry about that, but try to position yourself to be ready to capitalise when this is over. I expect there to be significant pent-up demand, and be there, be the kind of brand people will turn to when they’re ready to start spending again.”

Nail was interviewed remotely at home via the BeetCam.

Part of this has to do with the TV industry being accustomed to almost 50 years of thinking in terms of age and gender and an infrastructure that supports that.

“We’re about to throw that out and move into a whole different world,” Nail says. “And it just takes time to, first of all, get the infrastructure built up, then to gain the experience with the processes within that infrastructure, and then build up again those benchmarks and that history.”

According to Nail, the TV industry is entering a world in which there will be multiple metrics for different advertisers, sometimes even for the same advertiser with different objectives. This makes it even more complicated for media sellers. There are also risks involved.

“That is my biggest fear,” Nail says. “That TV will end up going down the direct response rathole that digital did in 2000-2001 and has never gotten itself out of. If we do allow TV to go there, we will be doing the brands and ourselves a huge disservice.”

But can the industry balance funnel metrics and brand or revenue business outcome? Nail believes that the industry needs to head towards this balance, and TV as a medium is unique in that there could be payoff in the long-term.

One of the positives is that the finance around advertising will become much clearer, so we could see more companies willing to spend more in order to see more specific outcomes for their brand.

“Now we’re getting better and better tools for tracking,” Nail says. ‘’Whether it’s the cash register, store traffic, web traffic, whatever that business outcome is, we’re getting better tools to measure that which I think will justify the spending on television and video.”

When it comes to the transition away from the cookie, Nail sees a period of chaos as inevitable. He believes that the focus has shied away from the big picture—consumers’ attitudes towards advertising and the invasiveness that is sometimes perceived to come with it.

“There’s a deeper issue of how we do this in a way that consumers feel respected,” Nail says. “And feel like it’s being done more for their benefit than for the advertising ecosystem’s benefit.”

A big part of it is making the value exchange much more explicit, as it has been historically implicit. In being more explicit, Nail sees opportunity for experimentation, especially in giving the user more options to either pay or see ads along with viewing content.

“I have no question that we will get to a good solution in the end,” Nail says. “But it’s never a straight line, it’s always a little bit chaotic for a while, a lot of stuff gets thrown against the wall, but then ultimately we get to a point where we find a really positive solution.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

“To think that somehow everyone is okay with personalization, or to think that everyone hates personalization, is wrong,” O’Connell said at the outset of a fireside chat with GroupM’s  Phil Cowdell at Beet Retreat 2018. “None of us feels the same as any other person.”

As an example, she cited two hypothetical 25-year-olds that might have totally opposing attitudes toward the use of their data to better target them with ads.

“So that really is the crux of this, is that we need to appreciate that humans are individuals and we’re not doing that very well right now,” said O’Connell.

“We have all this data and technology available to us. It’s how we sort of tune the machines. The industry is kind of in the crapper. Consumers feel about different ad channels and formats, it’s not an awesome story,” particularly in the digital space, O’Connell added.

Addressing frequency capping of ads, Cowdell, most recently of GroupM, asked “How do we do it? Is it real or is it BS?”

From an omni-channel perspective, “There’s a lot of stuff out there where we are serving ads and we are just not cognizant enough of how all of those ads are interacting,” O’Connell responded. “We’re doing a good job in little fiefdoms of making things better, and that’s great.”

She talked about working with clients in the retail sector, one of which asked her “what should we centralize versus allow the brands to own?” Her response was to inquire whether the marketer understood the overlap in its user base, which it did not. “That might be a good place to start. Maybe the first thing to start thinking about is unifying your data. You can start thinking about execution a little bit later.”

Cowdell then asked about the potential for marketers embracing a service offering as opposed to individual brand managers selling individual products. “For sure. It’s starting to happen in little levels inside of these giant multi-brand organizations,” said O’Connell.

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.

O’Connell’s observations are based on research Forrester has done plus findings from other sources. Combined they indicate that “you just generally find the reported engagement rates for the digital channels are just generally much lower,” she says.

It doesn’t matter whether a respondent is 55 or younger and more progressive, where engagement is nonetheless “pretty low.”

Asked whether this knowledge flies in the face of big shifts in marketers’ ad budgets to the digital realm, O’Connell says there’s nothing wrong with being where one’s consumers are.

“The question is, what are we doing with those opportunities when we have them with these people? What do you make of that moment you have to grab their attention?”

She cites shortcomings like “frequency run amuck” and hyper personalization of ads without fully understanding how consumers are actually perceiving such personalization. “We just have a lot of problems.”

Some of the research Forrester found shows that in general, “you will find that in premium environments response rates are in fact better. So there is value in being associated with these high quality publishers.”

What constitutes “premium”? This is where much of the complexity arises, because brands like Huggies might want to advertise in content that Vice would shun to promote “an edgy content series. It doesn’t fundamentally mean that one is bad content and another is good, or one is high quality and another is low quality. It means understanding what’s appropriate in that moment,” says O’Connell.

So for the time being, consumers will continue to lead a revolution while the advertising industry attempts to manage an evolution involving varying infrastructure, organizational design and “lots of business rules that is hard to flip upside down.” She will be conducting more research to examine success stories in the “practical realities” of omni-channel advertising along with her colleague, Jim Nail.

“I hope we find great examples of that happening, because I want us to be able to say ‘here’s a model for how it can work.’ I don’t know yet what I’m going to find.”

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.

Reasons for the variations include corporate financial “short-termism,” thinking in narrow silos and measuring campaign performance in ways that aren’t always the most accurate or pertinent.

The panel by media agency Wavemaker was moderated by Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. It brought together Peter Naylor, Hulu’s SVP of Advertising Sales, Twitter’s Managing Director of Media & Entertainment, Jennifer Prince, and Jacqueline Corbelli, the Founder, Chairman & CEO of BrightLine.

Citing Forrester research showing that not all consumers love or hate advertising, O’Connell posited, “My suspicion is that marketers don’t understand this at all.”

Hulu’s research has revealed “a spectrum of ad acceptance,” responded Naylor. “On one extreme end are people who are ad avoiders at all costs. The trap people fall into is that everybody avoids ads at all costs, and that’s just not true.”

According to Naylor, among those who sign up for Hulu on any given day, “The wide majority will take advertising.”

On Twitter, brand marketers “expect to hit consumers because eighty two percent of our users expect to see a message from a brand,” said Prince. Another thing she believes differentiates Twitter is that its advertising is “extremely native, it’s within the timeline and a tweet and so there’s not as much of a separation between ads and content, there is this blend.”

Given its “leaned-in, receptive audience,” Twitter does see marketers thinking a lot about consumers and the consumer journey, according to Prince.

Brightline has taken its cue from the desire of consumers to bring together their experiences with premium video and other content, said Corbelli. Giving credit to Hulu as an innovator, she explained that Brightline got involved “when we started noticing folks like Roku and streaming consoles like Sony PlayStation were vehicles for actually bringing these two things together.”

As for consumer ad tolerance, Corbelli believes “absolutely that viewers will not just tolerate but I think that in certain cases they’ll even embrace advertising. I think the personalization piece of this is really big. Things as simple as geo location and being able to personalize the dialogue a little bit.”

Again citing research, O’Connell pointed out how “highly variable” consumers are in their opinions of personalization. While some “super- progressive,” digital savvy people are “totally okay with personalization in exchange for something useful to them,” other super-progressives “are absolutely opposed to it.” O’Connell’s bottom line: Don’t assume we should always use technology in a certain way.

Naylor coined the term “short-termism” when asked about the barriers to widespread if not uniform adoption of approaches to advertising that do not repeat mistakes made early in the digital media world. “I think short-termism is a real problem when publicly traded companies have to lead ninety-day by ninety-day existences. When CMO’s are so nervous that they continually pout their accounts into review,” Naylor said.

Another symptom is “whatever you can measure you measure, irrespective of whether it’s the right thing to measure,” for example the “rush to last-click attribution and you lose sight of what drove the demand and you only give credit to the last click,” Naylor added.

Explaining Twitter’s approach to test-and-learn, Prince acknowledged that some features it’s rolled out have not been without controversy. “Like when we went from 140 characters to 280 characters and there were a few haters. Maybe more than a few. It has really done wonders for those who need more space to communicate.”

Corbelli pointed to the disparity among the top TV networks, each of which see things from their own, individual perspective and act accordingly. “They all are thinking about this directionally the same, but in terms of how they execute on it, pretty different. And they want to stay in charge of those decisions. So I think that for now, the experience in terms of personalization is going to vary depending on what content you’re watching, where and when.”

That is the new advice from one leading marketing analyst who has worked at an ad-tech platform but who also benefits from reams of consumer insights.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell says many marketers are guilty of using the tools available to push too many messages at consumers. Whilst programmatic tools are great, O’Connell laments:

• “We got really, really obsessed with direct response.”
• “We got really obsessed with hypertargeting, I think, to the detriment of frequency management. So we’re over-serving the people that we care about.”
• “We ushered in an era of, really, low quality, which, I think, in a lot of ways created a bit of a crisis of faith in digital advertising.”

Now GDPR, related initiatives and a growing body of evidence and anecdotes from consumers frustrated with over-marketing suggest a change is needed.

What is that change? O’Connell, who also had a stint as MediaMath’s chief marketer, says marketers will have to refocus on their relationship with consumers, so that they can know enough about them to be sensitive to over-marketing.

“Our instinct is to say, ‘I found the user I want – I will serve this user an ad’,” she says. “It might actually be better for the consumer in that moment not to hear from you because they heard from you three times already that day.

“I would love to believe, naively, that brands are invested in delivering good experiences because they see that will deliver positive upside. That isn’t necessarily, always the case.”

This topic will explored at a Beet.TV leadership forum at Cannes Lions on June 18.

This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.

A new Forrester report, “Solving Digital Video Advertising’s Premium Dilemma“, commissioned by outstream video ad vendor Teads from Forrester, spotlights a disconnect between the two camps.

“Media companies talk about the user experience,” Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail, who authored the report, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But then the advertising agencies talk about the quality of the data used for targeting.

“So it seems like the media companies are still stuck a little bit in the old world. (They say), ‘We’ve got great content…’. Advertiser agencies are saying, ‘That’s important, but, in this new world, the targeting is at least as important’.

“The media companies need to have a deeper conversation with the advertisers to make sure they’re building the data strategy.”

Forrester’s report says publishers are struggling with insufficient video ad inventory to satisfy advertiser demand, but that advertisers report so-called “outstream” ads, which play in between chunks of text, helps alleviate concerns around viewability and enable programmatic buying.”

We interviewed Nail last week at a Teads industry summit in New York. 

“Advertisers see that targeting can make their campaigns better, but there are still challenges. Devices and platforms aren’t always talking together, and advertisers are finding it challenging to track a user across multiple devices with accuracy and there is always the measurement issue,” he said, in explaining the hurdles.

However, the GRP is still part of the equation, and many video buyers want to use it. “The GRP currency is something everyone is very comfortable with. It helps in planning and measurement and it lets media companies sell more holistically across devices. It is still really important to the various stakeholders,” Joyce said.

The study also found that marketers are expecting a boost in digital video revenues due to data-driven advertising. The use of more and better data makes more detailed targeting possible, which increases the cost efficiency of ads.

This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO.  Please find all of our coverage of the show right here.

However, the study revealed some differences between the goals of advertising agencies and media companies. Brands and agencies say they want reach and audience attention, while media companies want interactivity and to be able to time the ads to day parts. Forrester said media companies and agencies may move closer on this issue as online video and linear TV planning becomes more aligned within an agency. Expect some growing pains, but common ground exists though and both media companies and agencies expressed interest in wanting the same tools in a video technology platform — they want to analyze viewing behavior, target individuals and measure campaigns.

Other key highlights from the report include:

-About 70% of respondents at advertisers, agencies and media companies believe that consumers will shift more of their viewing of full-length TV shows to streaming in the next three years.

-Likewise, more than 70% of respondents in all three groups believe time spent viewing TV on connected TVs, smartphones and tablets will significantly increase in the next three years.

-As that viewing shifts, new ad opportunities arise, and respondents in each group say they are most keen on targeted advertising as the biggest benefit of that change.

-They also expect consumers will spend much more time interacting with additional content about a program.

For more insight into this report, as well as details from Joyce about the perceptions of private marketplaces, please check out this video interview. The report was released today at DMEXCO where is was presented by Joyce.

This report commissioned by video ad tech group Videology from Forrester finds a majority of advertisers, agencies and media organizations believe ad campaigns will be planned holistically across all devices.

That’s something Videology is already seeing on its network. “Fifty percent of (our) campaigns are selected as (device-)agnostic,” development SVP Brent Gaskamp tells Beet.TV.

“That campaign can be delivered via digital format – connected TV, online video, tablet or mobile. As long as that campaign is delivering the ROI against those KPIs I set to begin with, I really don’t care, in video, where the media mix shifts.”

Gaskamp was speaking at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat at Vieques, Puerto Rico.

Videology commissioned a report from research firm Forrester that surveyed 150 advertisers, media companies and agencies in the U.S and Canada on consumer use of online video and how it’s changing the industry.

Despite the expectations for pending convergence, the report found that marketers remain concerned about measuring in a multi-screen world. Some agencies and advertisers are “lukewarm” about using GRPs for measurement.

“To shift more advertisers…we need ROI to show that you are driving lift and sales across these mediums. The success metrics we are used to on TV are different in online video. We need to measure that output and show delivery against the KPIs of advertisers,” Gaskamp says.

The  free report also found that advertisers and agencies want more options in how they target their audiences with online video.

We spoke with Gaskamp at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat. 

“The promise of addressable television, which has been worked on for over a decade, actually will begin to take off in 2014 in a major way,” Videology CEO Scott Ferber tells Beet.TV

“We have the pipe to deliver a different ad to the set-top box in the living room that my kids are watching versus a set-top box in the bedroom that my wife is watching, even if they’re watching the same TV programs”

Ferber reckons a handful of multi-national advertising brands may have the scale to buy such ads directly, but advises most smaller brands to do so via agencies. Videology helps advertisers deliver across screen types.

Videology’s report on the state of the sector, authored by Forrester and just published, polled 150 advertising decision makers and found:

• 51% of advertisers see targeting specific consumers as a benefit, and just 37% of agencies.
• 70%+ of agencies see programmatic buying as important to the future of video advertising.
• 82% of agency respondents think consumes’ use of second screens will grow.

In addition, DVR penetration is slowing down, and Forrester’s Research find that 25% of consumers with DVRs don’t watch anything on them, while another 30% only watch about five shows a month on the DVR. “Is it worth the etxra $5 to $10 a month?”

Nail also expects that marketers will be drawn into deeper business discussions around media modeling, revenue lift, share of voice and other topics as cross-screen advertising and measurement progresses. For more insight into OCR and measurement, check out this video interview. During the discussion, Nail is joined by Andrew Feigenson of Nielsen, SVP Digital Client Services at Nielsen, and Amanda Richman, President, Investment and Activation, Starcom USA.

Beet.TV spoke to Nail recently in New York at the Beet.TV summit on cross-platform monetization hosted by Starcom MediaVest Group and sponsored by Dailymotion. In this earlier interview, Nail dived into the future of the DVR in greater detail.

Asked by moderator Ashley Swartz of Furious Minds whether marketers are using quantitative or qualitative methods to judge campaigns, guests emphatically said: both!

“CMOs are trying to be more quantitative – but they’re also forced to be short-term,” Nielsen’s digital client services SVP Andrew Feigenson said.

“They always talk about the average life expectancy of a CMO. The  moment the brand is not resonating, the CMO also has a problem, because the CEO is going to pick up on that. There has to be a qualitative/quantitative balance.”

Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail echoed: “That idea that there has to be a binary decision is exactly what keeps us stuck in this period. There’s a lot of stumbling around. We haven’t broken the old models. It’s a much more complex world – we’re going to have another two to three years of random experimentation until we find that new formula.”

And Starcom USA investment and activation president Amanda Richman said marketers are still using the “funnel” approach to assessing campaigns:

This is an exciting time because of the mix of art and science. There are many more formats we can start developing beyond 15- and 30-(second ads)  – pushing more in to 6-second and shorter-form, but also long-form.”

Watch the full video for more of their lively discussion.

“Up to this point, the DVR has been main alternative to linear television – it has trained consumers to get whatever they want whenever they want it,” Jim Nail tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Consumers aren’t quite ready to jump in, both feet, to online. As consumers get more and more in to dabbling with online and they find new sources and new ways to get it, I believe that, ultimately, online can kill off the DVR.”

Nail just published a report on the topic for Forrester.

He also says advertising should consider the unique characteristics of individual new platforms in a holistic marketing mix. Watch the full video for more of his great insight.

Nail was speaking at the Beet.TV summit on cross-platform monetization, hosted by Starcom MediaVest Group and sponsored by Dailymotion.

Agencies too are trying to figure out how to best manage the quick rise in programmatic buying. The implementation of trading desks inside agencies can help significantly, she says. “We’ll see agencies start to evolve in the way they’re organized,” she says. Publishers, likewise, need to make sure they have sophisticated and savvy salespeople leading the charge when talking to agencies about programmatic buying.

For more insight, check out this video interview.

-Daisy Whitney