Creating a unified identity graph, and establishing “clean rooms” and interoperable marketplaces – all the while in a privacy compliant manner – are some of the industry topics discussed here.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service.  The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.

While he made early progress with product development and industry partnerships, funded from a few early stage angel investors, access to venture capital was nearly impossible.  While he says the adtech industry was open to him, he was shut out by VC’s — unable to even to get preliminary pitch meetings.  He blames racial bias.

With VC’s investing less than 1 % in Black-founded start-ups, Andre is committed to changing the equation both by his example, advocacy and now personal investing in promising companies.

This is one of the topics covered in a wide ranging podcast session moderated by guest host Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.  They cover a number topics including the transformation of TV, the background and promise of the acquisition by Transunion.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service.

The #BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.

But two trends are making it a reality:

• The growing proportion of retail that occurs in digital channels.
• Growing capabilities of online outcome attribution modelling.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz says US retailers are sitting on a treasure trove of first-party shopper data.

Online shift

Swartz says large retailers’ ability to utilize data on their own customers to activate media buys, both for themselves and for others on their network, makes them powerful like Facebook and Google.

“Let’s call a spade a spade,” Swartz says. “(With) such significant shift in spending, moving to online from direct retail… these are walled gardens.

Very large retailers that were specifically allowed to stay open during lockdowns … are building (advertising data) walled gardens.

“Amazon’s retail data set is used to ultimately sell and direct media and target media and re-target media within their platform and their advertising solution, and that’s really its core focus.”

Roundel’s Kristi Argyilan: Shopper Marketing Is the “New Black”

Buyer behavior

Swartz also says the several vendors which actually mine consumers’ anonymized credit card behaviors adds additional richness to targeting capability.

“In the US in particular, we’re able to see their shopping behaviours, their consideration set, what is in their cart, et cetera,” she says.

“And so it’s been a whole new world, and I think in some ways it’s immense opportunity.”

Retail publishers

Last year, Target Media Network was rebranded as Roundel, offering:

• Programmatic buying of custom ad audiences.
• Search ads on Target properties on Google.
• Social media ad delivery.
• Display ad targeting from first-party data.

It is an example of the new trend in which a large retailer is also a kind of publisher – offering an audience of purchase-focused consumers to brands that may even already be distributed through the company.

The kinds of data such retailers can offer on their customers within those media buys – for example, purchase and browsing history – it is thought, could help brands hone in on the buyers with the highest intent.

Roundel’s Hovorka: Tech Companies Need Humility When Working with Brands

Path to purchase

“First-party data can be used to target and to reach specific audiences, and to actually implement what is a very thorough user journey of targeting, retargeting, coming back and around to make sure that you follow through to try and get to do what is ultimately a purchase or some type of action for a consumer to take,” Swartz says.

In the offline retail world, following an ad exposure through to purchase was relatively more difficult, Swartz explains. But that has changed.

“Now that purchasing is online, there is much greater certainty and confidence and reliability and measurability in the data to ultimately see whether or not that consumer has taken an action and made a purchase.”

You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel  For more videos, please visit this page.  The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.

Grunther says that EDO is focused on how to capture the moment of impact for an ad, and specifically how to capture impact at the middle of the funnel.

“Everyone was at the top and hopped right to the bottom and attribution is terrific,” Grunther says. “But there is the ability in the middle of that funnel to capture impact when viewers are engaged and want to take an action. How do you capture that?”

The way he thinks of impact right now is the moment in which the viewer moves from passive to active. There’s exposure, attention, engagement and outcome, all of which are important and all are different measures of impact, but ignoring the middle-funnel metrics would mean losing out on a lot of key insights.

Part of finding a measurement that could be currency-grade requires thinking about scale. For the TV industry, this means being able to measure a small program on a cable network the same way that we measure a huge tentpole event like the Super Bowl.

“It’s basically being able to apply measurements and metrics to the entirety of programming regardless of how large or small the audience is,” Grunther says.

Reaching scale may be a huge step, but Grunther doesn’t necessarily believe that it will make the transacting process seamless. The buy side will look for accountability and proof of performance. Sellers, on the other hand, don’t want to guarantee anything that they don’t have to.

“In there lies this sort of conundrum and that is if you’re guaranteeing on outcomes or impact or other forms of effectiveness, it’s going to come down to what’s in it for both sides that is valuable for both,” Grunther says. “So I think we can get there, but ultimately the sellers are going to have to feel enough pressure from the buyers to basically adjust the way that they guarantee deals or conduct business.”

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. 

There are no longer tools in the arsenal to maintain the face-to-face culture of the industry, so companies must reimagine how to connect, do business, and continue to serve brands, audiences, and consumers. Furious Corp. has successfully grown over six years having been run remotely, and Swartz believes that the first piece is building a culture around working from home.

“Our muscle memory is to work at a distance yet figure out a way to connect in a meaningful way to do good business and to foster and ultimately infuse a creative process with goodness even though we’re not sitting side by side,” Swartz says.

An upside to working from home is that there is a huge opportunity to get things done. While watercooler conversation may be sorely missed, not only can it be substituted by programs like Slack, but it can now be time used to be more productive.

“There’s an immense and incredible opportunity for productivity,” Swartz said. “There’s also an immense and incredible opportunity to sort of narrowcast the boundaries of work.”

Without commutes, or stopping to get coffee, or other routine time-sucks, there’s more time to get important work done. The toolkit that companies have today, whether it’s Slack or Zoom, also allows for greater collaboration. Swartz believes that this is especially true for one-on-one dialogue.

“I have more substantive, meaningful dialogue because I’m reaching out to them with intention,” Swartz says. “And I’m reaching out to them in such a way that it’s purpose-driven and so there’s more substance and more meaning in the communication and ultimately we get more done together as a result.”

In working with large companies, workers now have the opportunity to escape the “meeting hell”. This gives workers much more control and autonomy over what their days look like.

There are some risks involved though. Swartz worries that young workers who are new to the industry especially will not have the support that they need.

“Make sure you stay connected with those junior folks in your organization,” Swartz says. “They need support, they need guidance, they need to feel connected. They have not been equipped with a toolkit and the life experience or professional experience to go off on their own on an island and just continue to do their job every day.”

Swartz also warns that individual workers may start to feel a loss in camaraderie, identity within the organization, and an overall connectedness to a team. This is up to all stakeholders in a company to keep afloat.

“I really think that’s our shared responsibility to make sure that we maintain the excitement, the passion, the vigor about our industry, and we continue to push the agenda and innovation forward.” Swartz said.

Swartz was interviewed remotely at home via the BeetCam powered by Zoom.

There are two forces that got the industry to where it is today. One is the promise of digital and how the way that digital optimization has worked has led us down a dangerous path where optimization is about short-term campaigns simply proving that something worked. In turn, the data that is yielded has shown short-term gains and ignored the big picture.

“The data that we buy and use has been focused more on showing short-term gains because they’re easy to show than thinking about how data fits into a broader audience strategy that looks holistically at the whole marketing funnel, the consumer journey, the true inventory optimization,” Steuer said.

The industry is also still operating in a world of measurement that was designed for a TV ecosystem in which there were three TV networks and where rating numbers felt like an accurate representation. Now, this ecosystem has evolved.

Accuracy now comes from counting each atomic exposure, including delivery and and outcomes.

“If you skip that counting step and go directly to the, ‘we’re going to do it on an outcome’, you necessarily sort of collapse the entire conversation into, ‘This campaign did awesome because more people bought beds or beer or subscribed to a newspaper,’” Steuer said.

In order to make this more accessible and more realistic, Steuer explained that it’s about simplification and standardization. The industry has been so fragmented that there is no standard interface or data set or way of looking at outcomes.

“You need a standard underlying data set that everyone can trade on so that instead of worrying about the information gradients around who has what data and who can do what better than the other folks, you can at least look at reach and frequency across everybody,” Steuer 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. 

“The cannibalization of your traditional spot business as a result of cherry-picking impressions or addressable units means you’ve increased your effective CPM, but you haven’t increased your top-line revenue at the end of the quarter or fiscal period,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

To optimize the value of their entire portfolio, traditional TV sellers need to develop a better suite of tools and applications to drive ad-decisioning instead of relying on new products to fuel revenue growth. This is especially important when new offerings like addressable are rolled out; sellers need to be aware of the pricing implications for their existing inventory.

Ad-decisioning is gradually becoming more data-driven, though the “if greater than” rule often still prevails, meaning the available inventory that can fetch the highest price is served by default. (That’s how sellers can end up over-indexing on addressable and depress the value of high-performing spot inventory.)

“We see this arc of maturation in how we’re packaging linear inventory, where today it’s really about leveraging data to drive better pricing decisions and automate existing processes like rate cards,” Swartz says. “Eventually we’ll get to a place where we’re dynamically pricing and dynamically building plans and campaigns.”

But though demand for addressability and impression-based TV buying is increasing, it’s important to remember that advertisers still also want reach and frequency.

“We all know that a spot-driven, Nielsen-guaranteed business isn’t going away,” 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. 

In an interview with Beet.TV, Swartz explained that digital, digital targeting and social media will continue to be important, but after a tumultuous 2016 experience, many dollars will go back to the medium that has been relied upon by political campaigns for decades.

“The reality is that in the final mile, people buy television,” says Swartz.

Digital platforms are reacting accordingly, too. Google and Twitter have already announced that they will not be taking on political advertising in 2020 and the world is waiting to see what Facebook will do. The social network has come under fire for letting misleading and false claims run in political advertisements on its site.

“Although historically we’ve seen cycle over cycle growth in those [social] platforms, I think we will see it slow or just sort of flat if not even decline this year,” says Swartz.

This means increased opportunity for television to be a game changer. According to Swartz, local TV is always the biggest winner because they can target geographically and can aggregate local inventory on a national scale. She says that advertisers are doubling down in preparation for the upcoming election in order to maximize their return and yield for the political cycle. Television will be a large part of their focus.

She defines local TV as both local stations and local cable systems run by national operators.  She points to emerging local TV ad platform Ampersand, the joint venture of Comcast, Cox and Charter as one of key movers in 2020. Others in the advanced local TV mix include Comcast’s Effectv.

“I really think this is an opportunity for another resurgence or renaissance of television,” says Swartz. “Not only in that we will see an increase in aggregate dollars and spend for political and TV comparatively over the last election cycle, we will also see a great level of confidence and assuredness and trust, most importantly in television, that is not able to be achieved given what has transpired over the digital and social platforms over the last few years.”

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Swartz spent time in London interviewing industry executives based in the UK and the rest of Europe for Beet.TV ad the Future of TV Ads global forum. What stuck out to her during those conversations was the market’s willingness to work together. “It is in the DNA of the European market and the UK to cooperate,” Swartz tells Beet.TV. That cooperation includes following Open AP in the US, setting up audience segments, definitions and data sets across sales houses and standardizing the operations of addressable throughout the process. That has positive results.

“What I see ultimately is the sell-side of the value chain and the technology enablers and the sales houses are willing to do the work for buyers to make addressable actionable and meaningful faster. That is a lighthouse for us in the US if we look forward.”

Industry-wide privacy and security policies like GDPR are also having positive benefits for the ad market in the UK, says Swartz. Instead of limiting or holding advertisers back, it’s set universal standards that advertisers have the freedom to function within. That’s better than the alternative of privacy standard fragmentation, which is at risk of happening in the US. If California passes GDPR, Swartz points out, that could cause a chain reaction of state-by-state privacy laws that would be a headache for the huge market in the US. The incentive for every company to differentiate by building their own individual data sets only exacerbates fragmentation.

“We don’t see a concerted initiative across the US market to make addressable media easier for buyers and for brands, which I believe is going to continue to hold us back,” says Swartz. “We’ve seen incredible consolidation, so even though we have one-stop solutions and one-stop marketplaces, that maybe are aggregating more inventory, we haven’t necessarily made it easier for buyers and brands.”

Swartz believes that progress could be made as we enter 2020, a year set to break the record for political advertising dollars spent at an estimated $10 billion. “I’m hopeful that the collaborative spirit will come to the US because of the opportunity that lies in 2020 with political,” she says. “We’ll see a change of mindset going forward.”

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In conversation with Furious Corp. founder and CEO Ashley Swartz at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media, the agency’s evp and co-chief investment officer David Campanelli said that the top of the funnel still matters. Relying too much on data can leave a portion of potential customers off the table.

“As we get more specific and more addressable in media, do we lose that reach aspect, particularly in linear TV? What [linear TV] does well is reach massive amounts of people at one time with a 30-second ad,” Campanelli told Swartz. “Going too far down the addressable road, you’ll miss segments of the population that are potential consumers. There is still a role for that.”

The key, Campanelli says, is finding a way to make decisions using both traditional metrics, like Nielsen, and advanced TV metrics that paint more specific portraits of the customer. The more those two sides of the customer data coin – which incorporate top-to-bottom of the funnel reach – can merge, the more value that will be created, he argues.

And of course, as the top metric for Horizon Media is to drive business outcomes for clients, the value of the media buy has to match up for premium prices. As more agencies, including Horizon Media, build out their own data systems, the price of services increase. The investment has to be worth it, but Campanelli says the shift in emphasis from third- to first-party data is only going to continue.

“What we’re learning more and more is first-party data – good, valuable first-party data – is the holy grail, the way to go,” says Campanelli. “Third-party data is not as accurate as we had hoped. Leaning more into first-party matches and developing our own Horizon data practice and platform to match that and push that out to vendors is where we think it’s going in the future.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

But its flip side, “deterministic” targeting, promises to give advertisers more accuracy by using real viewer data to find the known audiences.

As LiveRamp explains it:

• Deterministic: “Create device relationships by joining devices using personally identifiable information (PII)…”

• Probabilistic: “Create device relationships by using a knowledge base of linkage data and predictive algorithms as the foundation for an identity graph…”

That digital determinism was the topic of Beet.TV’s recent Beat Retreat in the City @ Horizon Media event.

In this for Beet.TV, Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz reports how understanding is evolving.

“When we started the day, I surveyed the attendees and asked how many people talked about, used the phrase deterministic television or knew what to deterministic television was,” she says. “There were maybe three hands.

“I think we successfully ended the day with many more hands to be raised. We sort of all very organically and naturally set upon a definition of deterministic television.

But there is devil in the detail. Swartz also raises a number of possible frictions with the evolution of the opportunity.

“If we continue to grow revenue with new products or by productizing data, if that revenue is at a cost and has increasingly operational friction, the cost of doing business increases and ultimately is significantly, over time, less profitable revenue growth, is it worth it?,” she asks.

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, the owner of a software platform powering supply-and-demand advertising data for media companies observes a shift.

“If you look at the big box retailers like Walmart, Target… these guys have always been on the forefront of how to use data,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

“They know their consumers better than any other sector. And ultimately they’ve used that data not just to drive revenue and to drive business outcomes. They’ve used it to create an experiential experience within their big boxes.

“People come in, they feel known, there’s a sense of identity. They’ve threaded that through to actually how they look at purchasing behaviour. And then most importantly, they’ve shared that data… particularly with Roundel launching a new platform for data-driven television and ultimately offering a data product to enable that. What is so interesting is they are willing to share it.”

Swartz was speaking after Target’s in-house media agency Roundel partnered with Disney Advertising Sales to offer disney’s TV advertisers data about Target shoppers’ behavior.

Marketers who buy ads on a Disney channel, such as ABC or ESPN, will be able to see if their ad spurred product sales on a Target shelf, AdAge reported.

The partnership will involve both online purchase and brick-and-mortar purchase data.

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

Speaking at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” , Brendan Condon,  Comcast Spotlight CEO, said: “If you don’t have good creative, your ad’s not going to work … especially when you’re thinking about attribution to digital.

“In the tier of marketers that are mid- to smaller-size, either they don’t have good creative and they need some advice and insights or they don’t have television creative at all.

“We created a team and then we’ll be launching this officially in the next couple of weeks, whereby they’re exclusively focused on being a full-service creative agency for these marketers.”

Successive Beet Retreats have heard of mixed reception for advanced TV advertising techniques, with some large brands slow to put spend in to addressable TV. Lately, however, smaller, direct-to-consumer brands have been adding to their digital ad spend with TV, whilst local cable providers are getting tooled-up to support addressable tactics, including with technology that can attribute consumers’ online actions to their TV ad exposure.

All of that new toolset would seem to require some hand-holding. “In an effort to show that it’s not that hard, we can do that for you and therefore get you on to television,” Condon said.

The move follows a busy month from Comcast Spotlight. Condon spoke with Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat in the City.

Research: viewing booming

Comcast Spotlight just published its Q1 TV Viewership Report, finding TV viewership is at a two-year high, reversing the trend of decline that Comcast Spotlight has seen since it began tracking this data in 2017. The report analyzed nine billion hours of cumulative Comcast platform viewing.

“Not only are (viewers) watching it more but (also) for longer periods of time,” Condon said.” The average television viewer in the Comcast household is watching television for about six hours and 25 minutes every day. It’s remarkable.”

“In 2019, we saw twice the amount of volume in terms of VOD (versus 2016). And that’s up 36% over the prior year.”

Web attribution for TV ads

Spotlight just launched Instant Impact, an analytics software platform that shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission. Initially, Comcast Spotlight rolled it out to car sales advertisers. But now Instant Impact is about to gain wider impact, sold to other kinds of brands.

Condon said he wants local advertisers to start adopting a “marketing funnel” approach, the same way big brands do, which requires drawing a line between initial awareness and measuring an end sale.

“We went all the way down to the local marketplace as well and said, Hey, that should hold true for them as well.” Instant Impact was conceived to answer the question: “How do you prove that the funnel actually works?”

Political campaigns need diversity

With a 2020 presidential election season gearing up, TV ad campaigns will be a focus again. This time, more than ever, household addressability based on available voter data will be well-used tactic. Now couple that with attribution technology which can actually illustrate the online outcomes of candidates TV ads.

But, from its analysis of the 2018 mid-terms, Condon’s TV Viewership Report, showed a broad approach can work best.

“Actually, the winning candidates spent money and time on the top three news networks. They spent less money on the primetime day parts. They spent less money in terms of shorter campaigns. The winners … needed to diversify their network selection. They need to diversify the day parts.

“Fourteen percent of our viewers are watching only the top five networks. That’s 86% of watching everything else. On average, the households are watching 34 different networks in any given month.”

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.

That is according to an executive whose software company’s insights have been encouraging hundreds of advertisers to greatly increase their spending in the medium.

TVSquared helps power Instant Impact, an analytics platform at Comcast Cable’s Spotlight ad sales unit which shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission.

The relationship started with a proof-of-concept in three to five markets, followed with a pilot involving 25 advertisers and the full roll-out was announced this month. Comcast Spotlight has also said it intends to apply Instant Impact to more customer types outside of automotive.

Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, spoke with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp, in this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” in August.

TV is resurgent

“Television, to me, has the opportunity to thrive, not just survive now,” Swartz said.

“(In TV), we’re really not … losing money to digital,” Kinsella concurred. “We see (advertising) people coming back all the time. We have advertisers on the platform in 72 different countries right now, soon to be probably up at a hundred countries.”

She said one advertiser on the platform, which spent $1 million on TV three years ago, this year plans to spend $40 million.

Attribution unlocks value

The “game-changer” is attribution technology. Historically, TV has been viewed as a brand-building medium, at the top of marketing funnels; it has been difficult to prove how television commercials prompt actions like store visitation or, particularly, purchase.

That has caused many marketers to turn away from linear local TV, finding they can get results and proven effectiveness in digital channels.

“Now we can measure it and make it accountable,” Kinsella said. “We’ve seen advertisers double their spend, double their commitment, saying, ‘I’m not just going to advertise for three months, I’m not just going to do a Pulse campaign, I’m going to do an annual commitment, because now you’ve shown me that TV. is working’.”

An incremental comeback

Kinsella doesn’t expect the return of ad flow to local TV will happen overnight. Rather than place all their money on black, she imagines ad buyers making iterative changes, testing to discover exactly how TV can demonstrably fuel performance.

“When they’ve done that for a couple of months and they see that it’s driving more response, whatever the response might be, they say, ‘Oh, this is working, let’s keep doing it’. We have clients that have been optimizing now weekly, monthly… for three, four, five years.”

The future is measurable

Kinsella acknowledges that many in TV land are “terrified” of data-driven, automated TV ad sales. But she expects they will come around when all kinds of TV are made measurable.

“It just changes the whole TV ecosystem, if we can now measure everything, whether it’s a digital platform or a linear platform,” she says.

“It’s about serving up an analytics platform that allows our clients to choose their KPIs and to tie TV performance, whether it’s linear or digital, back to business outcomes. That’s the future.”

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.

In a panel discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, three TV platform representatives discussed their take on “addressable” TV.

Ahead of next year’s 2020 US presidential election, two of them said that electoral candidates are big customers for local addressable TV ad campaigns.

Ashley Swartz, Furious Corp CEO, led the discussion with:

• Jennifer Donohue, Hulu VP local advertising sales
• Sean Robertson, DISH Network General Manager, Addressable & Programmatic at Dish Network
• Andrea Zapata, Comcast Spotlight VP research and insights

DISH talks politics

“We started this addressable journey seven years ago,” Robertson said. “We have the set top box data. Let’s use that to make our advertisers more enabled and more capable to reach a target audience.

“One of the early adopters to addressable was the political marketplace. It’s not (for them) enough to do (targeting by) age, gender and geo because you and your neighbor will have different politics.

“We looked to streamline that process and formed a joint venture (with DirecTV) called D2 where all political dollars to our two firms on an addressable scale are coming through one joint department.”

Comcast looks ahead

“Comcast has invested in technologies like blockchain, Blockgraph,” said Zapata. “I mean we are really looking at making sure like right now in the local space, we’re doing BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) actually for political ads. We are doing some really cool things in the local space.

“In five years what I would really like to see is, ‘How do we get addressable? How do we get national, how do we get geo all actually bought from the same team?’ It’s audience focused, it’s platform agnostic, it’s network agnostic. And there’s a currency that actually looks at (it) impression-based and de-dupes (audiences).

Hulu re-thinks ads

“At Hulu, the nice thing about our local team is that we can execute with an ease on the client side,” Donohue said. “You can buy every DMA (designated market area) in the United States or you can buy down to one zip code.

“It doesn’t just have to be a 15-second spot or 30-second spot. You could use our ads selector, make a decision. The viewer could decide, “I’m going to watch a two-minute commercial and then be ad free, a binge ad or a pause ad.”

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.

That is according to the North America boss of the world’s largest media-buying agency, GroupM.

Tim Castree, GroupM North America CEO, in this video with Beet.TV, says traditional TV, therefore, remains robust with plenty of remaining upside to sell data-optimized traditional TV ad campaigns.

He is calling for “open” standards to change the game.

Castree spoke with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp, in this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” in August.

Three steps to pace

Castree is calling for three things to accelerate adoption:

1. “A simple standard … to agree … to measure all screens on an impression basis.”
2. Agreed “data portability back to the customer’s definition of how they want to look at audience”.
3. “The ability to define what data I’m going to use to build my advanced audience targeting set.”

Simple standards

Swartz described Castree’s vision for a common standard as “ensuring that they have a UID that allows them to identify unduplicated reach across multiple supply sources.”

He added: “Within that (standard), we’re (need) to understand, who have we reached perhaps, and at what level of certainty, and who have we reached for certain.

“We want to bring other data into systems where we care about people as the central kind of units that we measure things around. I think we can do a lot more with television than we are today.”

Bundling holding back addressable

Castree accused certain vendors of acting in their own best interests.

“We’ve had a lot of systems … a lot of companies trying to bundle data, technology, and inventory, and not bring it back to us,” he said. “(But,) we (at agencies) want to buy that in a disaggregated way.

“Bring the data back to us, so we can de-duplicate it and look across that”

Coming soon?

Some of these challenges may seem big. But Castree is confident. “I think we can get all those three things done in the next year,” he said.

That is because it isn’t the technology holding back adoption, it is protectionism.

“When we don’t operate this way, we give a massive advantage to the walled gardens (Google, Facebook and Amazon).”

And GroupM seems intent on the industry building common standards in an open way.

“Our goal at GroupM is to have an approach … which is not some locked-in GroupM standard.”

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.

On August 7, Beet.TV convened executives from advertising, media and technology companies for Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, an afternoon of hashing-out how new technology can help local TV grow ad spend by giving advertisers new performance super-powers.

What did it add up to? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ashley Swartz, Furious Corp CEO, who moderated a panel at the event, offers up her takeaways…

1. Collaboration

“There was a unified consensus within all of the large companies that participated here. It requires that we all work together to make it easier for buyers to buy and easier for buyers to aggregate audiences and make sure that they are reaching unique audiences in every dollar they spend.”

2. Data insights

“What I got to at the end of the great sessions in the panels … was that data is not just about driving dollars and targeting and actually execution of addressable. It’s really about taking a step back and leveraging data ultimately to enhance the value of the ecosystem.”

3. Protect this house

“(There is a need to) protect the preciousness of your audiences and ensure that television continues to rise above the noise that is digital … The things that make television great need to be protected while we move into this new world of data-driven television.”

4. Content still matters

“It is about programming. Even if you’re reaching the right audience, that audience is not captive. If you don’t have them at that moment of time … regardless of how precise and targeted the data with which you decided to reach that person at that moment, it doesn’t matter if they’re not actually engaged and paying attention.”

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. 

The panel participants were Tim Jenkins, CEO of 4INFO, and Walt Horstman, SVP/GM of Advanced Advertising at TiVo, whose companies have launched a new partnership, along with moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

4INFO’s roots date to 2011 when it built a platform that provided proof that ads on mobile devices could drive sales. “TV came along and presented us with a whole new opportunity,” namely the creation of an identity graph tying mobile to other connected devices within households, Jenkins explained.

While Nielsen GRP metrics remain the major TV currency, ever more granular set-top box data are opening up new insights. “The most important thing is having the rights to that data to match it to an identity graph like Tim’s so then we can truly take all of the viewership experiences in linear television and understand how they are impacting other media,” said Horstman.

“I fundamentally think the big news with the identity graph is television is now playing nicely with the other children in the media ecosystem, which has not historically been the case,” Horstman added.

The new partnership between 4INFO and TiVo, according to Jenkins, will allow brands “to be able to use all of this viewership data that’s been captured via traditional linear delivery models…on a one-to-one basis at scale. It’s not a panel, it’s a whole bunch of households that you have actual viewership data on.”

As TV targeting, measurement and attribution continue to evolve, buyers fall into two camps: those still grounded in GRP’s and those using addressable and connected for one-to-one targeting and measurement.

“We try to treat them the same but have to talk to them completely differently,” Jenkins said. “One of the biggest challenges we have is helping people who are traditional digital buyers who know how to buy what we sell work with traditional TV buyers who don’t understand the measurement piece alone.”

“How are you making marketers better, faster stronger in regards to being able to deliver outcomes?” asked Swartz.

“Our fundamental goal has been to make all of this TV viewership data and traditional linear television very accessible to programmatic and digital buyers and DSP’s,” said Horstman. “The uptick is happening. It’s been a big education process.”

Amid comments about “stone age” TV versus more advanced digital media, Horstman said he believes broadcast linear TV still should serve as the foundation for media campaigns given the economics involved. That’s because road-reach TV CPM’s are still very efficient compared to more expensive, highly targeted buys, although a mix of both is appropriate.

“That’s the way that as an industry we should be thinking about this. Understand the economics of what you get across all these different properties and learn how to get the most from them,” said Horstman.

Asked about the increasing complexity that accompanies advancements in TV targeting and attribution, Jenkins said that orchestration is everyone’s responsibility. “At the end of the day, I guess the ultimate responsibility is with the brands. The brands need to really understand what’s available, they have to push their agencies to be able to buy it, be able to explain it and they need to definitely hold platforms accountable to deliver it.”

Swartz wanted to know how, with so many constituencies vying for their place at the table, “How do we make the economics work for everybody?”

Horstman cited the recent report from the 4A’s and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement showing the existence of “at least twenty different companies in the TV attribution world. So all this data has now enabled a whole new industry.”

It’s up to the buy-side to look beyond the obvious incentives that sellers have to provide their own means of attribution and be able to attribute value to each link in the chain, according to Horstman.

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The biggest thing that I hear from sellers right now is that it just takes so much time for them to sell,” White says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I think the biggest problem they have right now is just trying to get out into the streets.”

So why not just junk the old systems and start fresh? “We talk about that a lot and I think the answer is no. I don’t think that’s the answer at all. As a product person, again what I think about is the gaps. What can we do to sort of make these systems work together a little bit better and just fill some of those.”

In other words, it’s about progress as opposed to disruption. “I don’t want to disrupt anything. I just want to make things easier for people. And I think we have the ability to do that right now,” White says.

Such progress requires patience and collaboration but it will ultimately do eliminate things that handicap sales and deliver a way to achieve yield optimization across an organization. “That’s not a small feat and it requires a lot of people and those people are doing a lot of manual work.”

White would rather “shoot the gaps, find small wins that you can make a huge difference in and just free your talent and empower the people to go do what they do best.”

The solution at Furious, which helps TV broadcasters and premium publishers manage pricing and planning of cross-platform video inventory, is called PROPHET, which aggregates and normalizes data across disparate data sets. “And so it’s about taking a really, really easy approach of ‘let’s not over-complicate things.’ What Profit does is it talks to all those systems and it puts you in the position where you get to drive.”

Just because he isn’t advocating disruption doesn’t mean that White suggests that TV sellers can just let things slide, given major sales opportunities that include the 2020 presidential election cycle. “I think if you’re not acting right now you’re doing a huge disservice not only to your sellers and your sales org but also to your bottom line. It’s not going to be simpler six months from now. It’s certainly not going to be simpler two years from now, when addressable really kind of hits its stride, audience buying becomes kind of the norm.”

“It’s interesting that somebody would try to separate television from the broader identity ecosystem,” Jenkins says in this interview with Beet.TV contributor and Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

“When we talk about a TV identity graph, what we really mean is the ability to be able to get to all the devices, including connected televisions as well as digital devices, within the same household using something other than cookies to get to it,” says Jenkins.

“It allows you to do that one to one identification of all of those devices that people are actually viewing TV content through and being able to pull them together into a single audience.”

4INFO acts as “connective tissue” across some 500 million screens in 92 million households while serving as a match or onboarding partner for marketers.

Founded in 2004 with a focus on mobile search via text messaging, 4INFO will sponsor the Beet.TV half-day Leadership Forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World on March 5, hosted by Viacom at the company’s studios at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan. It will feature about a dozen industry leaders and an invitation-only audience of fewer than 100.

Jenkins says 4INFO’s overriding goal at the event is to educate the marketplace.

“What we’re really hoping we can do from a thought leadership standpoint is just trying to get people to understand how to use an identity graph to make what we call addressable TV space successful,” he says. “What we have found is there is a real lack of understanding about the scale in the space, how you actually make it work, what kind of business outcomes people can measure and what role identity plays in pulling all that together. We hope to be able to educate folks at a much deeper level.”

After all, “programmatic” advertising unleashed “real-time bidding” (RTB) on to the world several years ago now. Today, real-time auctions for display ads are commonplace and many hope for a similar arrival in TV and video.

But a panel discussion at Beet Retreat discussed ongoing inertia in a $70 billion US TV advertising business where the legacy medium is proving reluctant to change…

DISH Network director, ad sales, Dish Media, Jim D’Antoni:

D’Antoni was asked if ad buyers’ requests for audience segments are still processed “mostly in Excel and (with) manual extracts of data from various systems, lots of macros”.

He responded: “Yes. There is still some friction.

“And that’s just dealing with one supplier – if you’re on the buy side, you’re going to have to deal with that three or four times. So there is a long way to go in terms of streamlining the process.”

Videa VP sales Archie Gianunzio:

Automation is what Videa is aiming to bring to the market. The company makes platforms that reduce friction in ad avails, makegoods and posting

“We have found, much to our chagrin, that (even) within the same broadcast group … multiple stations are not speaking the same language. There’s almost no standards at all when it comes to broadcast.

“We spent probably two years on something that we called traffic normalization, which was literally just getting our system to understand all the different names that exist for one program so that when someone wants to make a buy across multiple markets, the buy could happen and the system can understand (what) they mean.”

Google Head of Telco/Video Partnerships Peter Dolchin:

Asked for the most important priority, Dolchin said: “Interoperability.”

“We like challenges, but this is clearly complex and we have some really smart, talented people at the company who understand it. We’ve been recruiting people from the industry over the past decade. And so, we know it’s hard, but we are testing in a variety of different ways.

“So with this new linear addressable solution that we’ve launched, there is the ability to look at set-top box tuning data real time and bring that into the decision making when they’re selecting the ad. That is one of the ways in which we’re bringing real time to it.”

Experian director of TV solutions, Experian Marketing Services, Brad Danaher:

Danaher said his company had helped political advertisers target campaigns during the recent US mid-term elections.

“It was a big cycle for political. Even though it was big, we actually thought it would be a little bigger.

“When we work with folks like DISH, we have a platform called Audience Engine, which basically allows counts to be accessed within seconds if needed be. If (the audience target is, for example), environmentally-aware consumers … we can tell the MVPDs through that platform within 10 seconds and you can go on the platform and know it, and then launch that into their media plan, knowing the sizing right away. That’s an improvement.”

DISH Network director, ad sales, Dish Media, Jim D’Antoni:

D’Antoni was asked to describe the typical lead time to make an addressable TV campaign active.

“Typically three to five days,” he said. “And then that it served, it’s beamed up to the satellite. It’s (then stored) in the (set-top) box.”

Furious Corp  CEO Ashley Swartz:

That prompted the panel moderator to make a “broad” statement on the relative slowness of what many think should, by dint of being digital, be a fast process.

“There is no real-time in TV,” she said. “Tthere’s really very little real time data, real time insights, real time decisioning, real time delivery, realtime ops.” Fellow panelists agreed, though Google’s Dolchin explained that Google has launched a linear addressable TV ad solution which supports examining set-top box tuning data in real-time.

Videa VP sales Archie Gianunzio:

Gianunzio said he thought a lot of the infrastructure inertia remains in place because few inside the legacy TV business perceive a threat driving need for change.

“Within TV, things have always been relatively rosy. There’s this feeling that, ‘No matter whatever came along, we were going to be able to deal with it’.” He cited DVRs, internet and Netflix as examples of purported TV-killers that have not turned out to be.

“Every article that you read is like ‘The audience is down and yet it’s more important than ever that you’re using television to get your message out there’ – Facebook and Uber are (doing just that).”

But Gianunzio sees a change may finally be coming.

“The people who thought ‘we’re just going to go passed this and we’re not going to have to actually deal with it’ … they’re either retired or they realize that they’re not going to get to retirement without dealing with it. I think that’s what’s going to push us there.”

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.

That means spending on addressable TV – with which buyers can use advanced data and return path to more precisely target viewers and households – would represent only around 1.1% of total US TV ad spend.

What could draw more spending? For one, we know that US OTT device penetration is high – but also that much consumption through those is devices is of ad-free, subscription VOD.

Furthermore, the Beet Retreat heard many views about the importance of scale, with claims that ” about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines“, worries that many advertisers are still just experimenting and a call for more inventory to be given to addressable TV.

In this panel, several executives further debated how addressable can hit scale.

Scale is an organisational challenge

Even the largest of media companies is grappling with how to transform their ad sales initiatives…

Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales:

“The whole reason that you’re seeing all this consolidation in the media industry is to get scale, and to get reach. Other companies have already done it. We’re doing it at our point.

“We had all these individual businesses that had different types of scale. In the linear side, it worked – but now we have to spend millions of dollars … to find the right partners to be able to activate the inventory and look at it holistically.

Competing with SVOD’s scale

Years ago, few may have predicted that paid video over the internet would be as big as it has become. But the rise of Netflix and Amazon now presents a challenge to media companies. Panelists discussed whether those players would emerge in to TV ad sales, and how TV companies must team to compete…

Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales:

“If you think of our competitors particularly in the space like Netflix and Amazon. Netflix has scale, but are they going to be able to sustain what they’re doing with one revenue stream (subscription)?

“Amazon, on the other hand, is a whole other thing. Right? They have this whole base. They have multiple revenue streams coming in, and then they’re going to invest in content. To me, they feel like our biggest competitor from a scale and a reach perspective.”

Tony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee:

“They’re going to invest, between Netflix and Amazon, over $20 billion next year, which is larger than most of the TV ad revenues of any single companies in this room. They own the entire consumer funnel.

“We in the TV industry … need better consortiums, better marketplaces, better easier ways for the buy side to buy in a more frictionless manner. I think we’re seeing that right now with EGTA, with EVX, with RTLs, TV Marketplace, with OpenAP. We see a lot of starts to that solution.”

Buyers want more, better – and cheaper

The internal structure of the relationship between advertiser brands and their buying agencies influences the kind of ad inventory being chased, which may ultimately impact outcomes…

David Hohman,  EVP & Managing Director, Nielsen:

“Right now, most of the media agencies are winning business on a savings guarantee, which means that they have to show the advertiser that they’re spending less money. They want reductions every single year.

“So, there’s this pressure on agencies who are trying to innovate, who are trying to do the right things for their clients, and in the end of the day, they’re chasing low CPMs.”

Finite media time impacts scale

The entire media universe is growing – but consumers still only have 24 hours in a given day. Panel host Ashley J. Swartz of Furious Corp cited eMarketer research showing 2018 consumer media time went from 12 hours and 7 minutes to 12 hours and 8 minutes a day. She asked if consumers’ capacity to consume content naturally limits scale…

Tony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee:

“The latest stats on Facebook are that less than 20% of their audience will view a video ad for more than three seconds. That’s not going to move the needle.

“I definitely think there’s a capacity issue – the human conscience capacity issue.”

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.

Now we are living in a world which is swimming – or, perhaps, drowning – in the sticky, digital substance.

For many in broadcasting, data is proving to be transformational to the way they sell advertising, reinventing a discipline that has long relied on manual operations and sketchy viewer targeting.

In this Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV, executives discussed the application of data to their businesses.

Data is a product

Panel leader Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by positing that “data is a product”…

Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:

“100% data is a product. We just announced the fact that we’re launching our own Warner Media D2C (direct-to-consumer) product itself, which will be driven by deep insights on consumption, on behavioral insights, personalization, recommendation engines, dynamic ad insertion built into the overall interface, as well as dynamic content insertion, and dynamic framework of how the actual product itself gets built out. That’s all data driven.”

Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:

“Typically. what we see is in a programmatic delivery or even in a direct sold model, we see anywhere from 15% to 20% lift on the value of media when that kind of data is applied to it.”

Data needs more

But speakers also said that data alone won’t be a game-changer…

Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:

“I would say it’s not just the value of the data. It’s the value of the addressability itself. You’re also enabling this household-level dynamic insertion ability. It’s the combination of those two plus the media I think that gets you to that.”

Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:

“They have to work together.”

Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:

“Where I see the convergence of these two is traditional linear and then you have this audience data. The challenge is, what is the value of that? Is it about outcomes? Is it about time spent? Is it about consumer lifetime value?

“I think we’re not getting to that. We’re not starting to understand the value of combining data and linear television in a way for brands and buyers to truly value it in a sophisticated way.”

Quantifying value

Turner’s Redniss argued that this value actually is becoming clear. But Swartz asked panelists whether it can really be quantified…

Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:

“There is not a significant interest in proving the value from a buying standpoint at the moment, because they’re not incentivized to do so. They’re incentivized to efficiencies and reach.”

Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:

“I think we have the talent. I just think the costs of trying to understand the end ROI is still so high, and every marketer has their own metrics for success. It’s just hard to make it a universal standard.”

Industry must come together

Swartz said she feared different companies, all hoping to burst the bubble of traditional TV measurement currencies, would simply pick their own solutions, leading to silos…

Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:

“We as an industry need to come together to identify some key data points that we can all trade on. That’s it. If we can all baseline around that – and it’s not just one currency, it’s probably going to be five or six – that’s when it really starts to come together.

“We all need to do a better job of educating … the end consumer. Right now we’re giving them a shit ton of opportunities and a shit ton of choice. How do we help teach them and educate them on what those things mean?”

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.

Operated by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications, NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks.

In this Beet Retreat interview with Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz for Beet.TV, NCC Media’s CEO Nicolle Pangis says: “What NCC did is literally brought together a fragmented industry and became the one place where you could buy across all markets in the United States, across all networks.”

But that was “NCC 1.0”.

Under the new CEO, the group is transitioning to a more consulting role – but it also aims to solve a familiar problem.

“Ironically, we all know that the world is again very, very fragmented from a media perspective,” Pangis says.

“A fragmentation problem now exists across different data sets that are not pulled together in a cohesive way for the buy side to be able to leverage in a scaled way.”

Pangis says that problem doesn’t just exist across smaller distributors, but larger ones, too, like NCC co-owner Comcast, which has a large footprint of addressable TV-viewing households.

What do ad buyers want? “To be able to look for audiences that they need to reach, wherever they need to reach them,” Pangis reckons.

Put simply: “Anybody who buys addressable advertising knows this… there’s nobody from an addressable perspective now who has a big enough addressable footprint to be relevant to a large national advertiser.

“So that’s the 2.0 version of NCC – pulling together the largest data set in TV, which is part of the ownership of NCC, set-top box data, broadband, IP data … and leveraging that data set in conjunction with the supply that we have access to from a national addressable perspective.”

For NCC, it is perhaps a repeat of its founding mission, but with a different slant. “Addressable” TV is when internet-connected TV sets allow for the targeting of individual households or viewers, going far beyond the old way in which advertisers bought ads in shows whose audiences were deemed to be broad demographic matches.

2018 US spending to over-the-top (OTT) TV platforms was due to reach $2 billion, Magna recently forecast.

As much as that is an amazing opportunity, making it happen to the fullest extent means guaranteeing a degree of commonality across systems – or, as Pangis puts it, “making the dirty data clean”.

How will Pangis do that?

1. “One piece of the puzzle is making the operational workflow between the agency, the buy side … make it easier for agencies to buy inventory that isn’t upfront inventory.”
2. “Two is (to) just transact that down to the sell side with the make-good process in a more efficient fashion. We’re working through that right now with workflow tools. There’s things that are manual (that) can be automated if we put a little time into it.”

Which means NCC’s role will be that of “an aggregator of aggregators”.

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.

That was one of the many tricky balances debated in a fireside discussion at Beet Retreat between Turner EVP of data strategy and product innovation Jesse Redniss and Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

Swartz set up the distinction as a juxtaposition of “EQ” (emotional intelligence) and “IQ” (intelligence quotient), noting that the ongoing human characteristic of TV involves a heavy dose of the former.

Agreeing, Redniss said: “If you don’t have a great consumer experience, you’re never going to capture data.

“TV traditional business was never based on PII (personally-identifiable information), it was based on panels that Nielsen drove for a long time. Then along came all mobile platforms, web-based platforms, which are capturing IP, device IDs, you’re capturing a lot of behavioral insights.

“Now a lot of companies are blending emotional responses that can be gleaned from everything from biometric measurement to social conversation. All that (is) flowing into now how you’re actually really truly trying to understand consumers.”

After watching the digital display ad business convert largely to programmatic modes of ad trading, the broadcast business has spend the last couple of years looking for similar ways to inject data and automation in to TV and video advertising.

But, so far, a fraction of the US TV ad business has converted, and the evolution is now happening amidst a new global concern over practices which use consumer data in ad targeting.

Is the pendulum suddenly swinging back toward the human touch?

“I think right now, we need to put a pause, quite frankly, into the free fire hose of how data is accessed and utilized to strategically align use cases of how data can be leveraged,” Redniss added.

“Facebook is now in a position where they took too much liberty in how they’re leveraging data and who could actually access it.

“That’s the balance that every single company and every publisher is trying to solve right now – how do you scale content creation, how do you scale direct-to-consumer relationships in a way that respects that balance?

“When you look at what’s going on with GDPR and soon to be CCPA, which we believe and I believe should be an overall regulation that the US has to stand by. We’re going to have to do it.”

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.