“If you’re constantly just trying to get that pre-roll in front of a consumer and all they’re doing is waiting for that skip button, you’re wasting the whole effort,” the agency’s Head of Performance Marketing says in this interview with Beet.TV during the Digital Content NewFronts presentations.

Looking at the mix between branding and activation, it pretty much needs to be customized based on the product or service category, says Cannata.

“If you go heavy brand on a retail category, you’re not going to get the lift you’d expect because the consumers now are dealing with a daily media assault of ads. So how do you punch through that and connect to them and build that emotional connection to the brand?”

Data obviously plays a big part in understanding consumers and what messaging will resonate with them. “It’s all about behavior now. I think the breakdown between performance and what it used to mean is different. It’s just advertising now,” says Cannata.

Asked about creative versioning, he cites the attendant financial constraints involved but feels it’s important element of connecting with consumers if done properly.

“If I’m showing you a message versus what I’ve seen, that’s got to be tailored to what resonates for me. It think that versioning is going to play an important part in how we break through that media assault.”

While interactive ads are moving beyond display, video is still king, according to Cannata. But where much video consumption is taking place poses challenges to impacting viewer behavior.

“They’re spending their time on mobile. Creatively, how we do that is going to be a challenge. It’s a new world.”

He believes that even with the rise of ad-blocking solutions, display isn’t dead. It’s just going to take a different form. “And I think that’s building video into it.”

This is where out-stream comes in. “Putting headlines on the videos to get people to think about watching and not skipping” and “actually make something that people are going to interact with.”

Trends like VAST (video ad-serving template) overtaking VPAID (video player ad-serving interface definition) “allows us to do that in mobile apps a little bit better. Cache it, buffer it. Let it play just like it would on TV and consumers will appreciate that a little more.”

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.