“I feel that more and more TV is getting baited into trying to become a performance outlet,” the President of Advertising Revenue says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent EGTA Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018.

“The biggest thing would be to make sure you’re not fighting a fight that you can’t win or being tricked into fighting the wrong fight.”

Marchese says he understands why “the ideal” would be to say “prove performance and then I can spend more money there. But the truth is, performance is that I get people to sit there and watch the ad. That’s what TV does.”

He notes that TV has always performed by helping to build brands over periods of time. But there’s more of a balancing act going on among networks to let consumers “dictate how many ads are tolerable. I’m looking for a better way to say it, but tolerable it is.

“People think if the ads are good enough, people will like them. No. Advertising is an interruption. It’s not what you came there for.”

Asked about household addressable TV ads, Marchese points to such shortcomings in the quest for performance as co-viewing, wherein it’s hard to determine what person among several who are watching a Sunday football game is actually being addressed, and going too far with person-specific targeting.

Brands are built not only on advertising but also on cultural, family and familial ties, among other things, according to Marchese. “Take it to the extreme. It feels odd to say, ‘Imagine a world where we can perfectly target only the people we think are going to buy the product.’ Then what would the brand mean anymore if no one else ever saw it? No one would know what that brand stands for, so what difference does it make if the person’s wearing it?”

As for the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, Marchese believes that traditional TV must “create a Netflix-competitive experience, or ad-supported TV, if you will. As far as the other three FANG members, “Their advertising is different. It’s not a TV ad that’s running there for the most part. It’s performance advertising.

“But I think you’ll see the marketers reclassifying more and more dollars towards performance advertising. Because you know, who doesn’t want performance?”

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

“We’re very lucky here in Canada,” adds the company’s SVP of Media Sales. “We are a vertically integrated company.”

But even with the rights to National Hockey League games and its ownership of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team, the clock is ticking at Rogers the same way it is at its Canadian competitors and the 50 states located below. While 85% to 90% of Canadian households subscribe to pay TV, that is slowly eroding.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Future of Television Advertising Forum in Toronto, Dark says it will probably take the next three years to “flip” 50% of its approximately 2.4 million cable households to advanced TV options. In the meantime, data is opening new doors.

“What we’ve found is there’s a real opportunity to open up new products and services for both marketers and companies that are looking to make different types of business decisions based on the data we can provide them. Location being a massive opportunity,” Dark says in response to a question from interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp.

By marrying consumer data from cookies and set-top boxes “we can really start to define some really interesting audience segments and really understand the behaviors of these segments.”

Left behind will be contextual selling, to be replaced by “focus on a very niche audience, or as niche as a customer wants it to be, and approach marketing in a different way.”

A big step in this direction is the platform called Rogers Enabled Data (RED) that aggregates anonymous consumer data so companies can target specific audience segments. So someone watching Rogers GameCenter Live on an iPad will get “a very different set of messages throughout the game than what your neighbor is getting next door if he’s watching it on SportsNet, for instance,” says Dark.

It’s all part of Rogers’ race to stake its claim to the Internet of things on the connected-home front, a strategy has centerpiece is “really controlling the home from a full-pipe perspective.”

Amid all the change, Dark acknowledges the reality is that over-the-air television isn’t going away anytime soon.

“So we still want that mass reach. But if you can have specific messaging for a specific customer and we can find that customer within the ecosystem and serve them a different experience that is customized versus an OTA setup, I think there’s an enormous opportunity for us to capitalize on that.”

This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.

Powered by consumer segmentation data, set-top box data and TV-specific data, the self-serve platform for live avails is in the beta stage, Marcus says in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum.

“There were a couple of pain points from a TV buying perspective that we wanted to address. There’s a lag in posting that media buyers just aren’t used to in the digital world. There’s an ease of use with other products and so we wanted to address some of those things,” Marcus says.

Among other changes, transactions are in net dollars as opposed to traditional gross dollars. “We think that lines us up nicely for a multi-platform use in the future.”

Early feedback has been positive. “The market has basically come down on what we thought they would. It’s clean, it’s simple, it’s a little bit more powerful than they’ve had in the past and they like the timely, useful information.”

Looking forward, Marcus hopes the rest of the industry embraces such platforms and common audience segmentations. “The days of heavy competition between broadcasters has diminished and we need to think of ourselves as a platform to compete against other platforms,” he says.

Marcus cites three hurdles to scaling addressable TV advertising, the first being regulations requiring such ads on specialty stations must be for national advertisers and national campaigns. “Very hard to break up a spot in addressable,” he explains.

The second hurdle is that cable companies in Canada are investing heavily in the next generation of set-top boxes, something that will make addressable easier, but “no one’s investing a lot of money in the current set-top boxes and so we sort of have to wait until that scales until we start making addressable easy.”

Lastly, growth of addressable TV in the U.S. market has been driven by the two minutes per hour of local time that cable providers have been able to use to monetize their investments in technology like new set-top boxes. This is not the case in Canada, so there’s “no direct way to monetize addressable inventory.”

This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.

Not that the advertising industry knew this instinctively. In fact, it’s been looking in the wrong direction for awhile, according to Christian Kurz, SVP, Global Consumer Insights, Viacom. Kurz believes the future will bring more live programming and events to get people to watch programming at a specific time.

“As a media industry, as media executives, we have a very warped view of the world, particularly when it comes to media consumption. We are just not normal,” Kurz says in this interview conducted by Beet.TV contributor and Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum. “And we completely misrepresent what the rest of the population does,” Kurz adds.

“We overestimate their use of mobile their use of online for big TV viewing, we completely underestimate the importance of TV sets. We are more urban, we are more male, we are younger. So there’s a really big discrepancy.”

Those are among the reasons why organizations like thinkTV set out to ask viewers what they really think, beginning with their definition of television. It is anything that is professionally produced video content between seven and 90 minutes—which leaves out short-form video and movies.

“That really means that when they talk about television, they have a slightly different conversation than we have in the industry ourselves. So we kind of need to recalibrate with that,” says Kurz.

In recent thinkTV research, survey respondents in Canada had to give up watching television for 10 days. “People completely underestimated how television brings people together” both in the home and “also in the wider world, the cultural connection,” he says.

Some survey respondents indicated they had given up social media “because they didn’t want to spoil the stuff they’re not watching on TV. So then the connection to the outside world is completely gone.”

Among linear TV’s attributes are flexibility and versatility because it “can be active and lean-forward when you really want it to, but it also is the easiest thing when you come back from school or work or whatever and just press a button.”

“Would you call it escapist?” Swartz asks.

“It’s incredibly escapist. That’s essentially what it is. It’s escaping reality,” with the exception of news programming.

Asked to speculate on the state of television three years hence, Kurz demurs but offers some predictions:

• There will be much more on-demand consumption, but “I don’t necessarily believe that dumping all of a series at one point is going to be the norm because people actually like the idea of watching something occasionally. It gives you something to talk about.”

• More linear TV programming will become dependent on “live-ness,” and not just traditional awards, news and sports. It could be “cameras following police cars around the world.”

• The “event-ization” of everything. “The shiny floor entertainment shows, they’ve been big, they’re going to continue to be big, because there’s a reason for you to watch it at the time. You can vote, you can participate.”

This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.

“So what we need to look at here in Canada is are these platforms going to be North American? If they are, we need to find a way to carve Canada into that,” says Colette Watson, SVP, Television & Broadcast Operations, Rogers Media. Watson has held a variety of ascending roles since starting at Rogers in 1990.

“In terms of program acquisition and program commissioning, we’re now looking at how do we participate in a North American market as opposed to a Canadian market,” Watson adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum.

As recently as a couple of years ago, Rogers would compete against Netflix and Amazon for a program hour and come up empty, Watson explains in response to a question from interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp.

“But today I find that’s not the case. Studios are now holding their programming back from big global suppliers, not all of it obviously, but they’re looking to create their own over the top products” like CBS All Access.

In addition to the second season of Bad Blood on Oct. 1, Rogers has a variety of its own shows in development, but they’re not 100% exclusive. “Right now, the way the Canadian market works is we create and commission for Canada but we partner on Bad Blood, for example, there’s an international distribution sale with Netflix,” Watson says.

Asked by Swartz whether Rogers approaches original programming first from a linear TV mindset and if it considers going digital-first, linear is still the first step by a margin of roughly 80% to 20%.

“Mostly because producers who come to us still get most of their funding through linear applications. As regulations and legislative frameworks evolve, that will change. It’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle in terms of how financing works in Canada.”

There is a mix of ad-supported and subscription models, the former represented by two new products from Rogers in October: Citytv NOW and FX NOW.

“As revenue streams change and evolve, you need to add more and more revenue streams,” says Watson. “Creating a good viewer experience, primary. But also creating a good advertiser experience is paramount. And so that’s how we’re looking at our development.”

This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.

This “interesting construct of a market” with huge geography and “not a lot of people” still has more than 75% of households using cable TV subscriptions. “And it’s not eroding at the same rate we are seeing in the U.S.,” Swartz explains in this conference recap interview for Beet.TV.

A frequent Beet.TV contributor, Swartz is CEO and Founder of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization and has clients in Canada. She says that research shows similarities in Canada to audience behaviors in the United States and Western Europe, “Which means there’s a huge opportunity for brands here to take lessons they’ve learned in other markets that may have more data, may be more mature, be introducing audience-based products sooner and bring that to Canada and execute with great precision sooner.”

She cites as examples a real-time buying platform by Corus Entertainment that encompasses 25 of its specialty TV networks and the introduction of the data-enabled RED solution from Rogers Media.

“Both of them are innovating and bringing new products to market that are elevating the value and ROI of television,” Swartz says. “Stepping on the traditional business models of an Upfront-driven marketplace and taking risks in order to innovate and deliver more ROI.”

Although she hears complaints about the amount of friction required in buying TV and media overall, Swartz believes the sentiment exists in Canada to collaborate, plus a “hunger to innovate and a desire to continue to grow this market.”

She doesn’t see the kind of industry protectionism that exists in the United States, where “fear and uncertainty” still prevail.

There is much to be learned from the growth of advanced TV in other markets as Canadian broadcasters pave their future, according to Swartz.

“I think that creates a Petri dish of opportunity for brands and marketers for their agencies to begin to start to spend dollars in different places or allocate net new money in different ways as these sellers are coming to market with new opportunities and new innovations.”

This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.

Canada is a “fascinating market and for many reasons,” Astley says in this Beet.TV interview conducted by Furious Corp.’s Ashley J. Swartz at last week’s Future of TV Advertising Forum in Toronto. Foremost among those reasons is that Canada has one of the world’s highest rates of pay-TV subscriptions, at some 85% to 90%.

“So that means obviously you’ve got boxes in living rooms, in pretty much every living room in Canada. Which is a pretty good base to start for an addressable TV business,” Astley explains.

The challenge is that many set-top boxes are older-generation devices not equipped with modern ad-serving capabilities. Currently, Ericsson and Comcast are rolling out new boxes with all of the latest technology.

“That’s going to change a lot because it’s going to create a new universe of addressable boxes in Canadian homes and we hope that will scale pretty quickly,” Astley says. “Where there’s been a lot of VOD inventory available in Canada historically but with no real ad insertion capabilities, suddenly that will unlock over the next year or so.”

Until quite recently, Canadian broadcasters have not really been under “a huge amount of threat from international distribution businesses,” he adds, but this year and going into next year “the threat is very real.”

Netflix adoption in Canada is “incredibly high. We’ve seen OTT start to grow massively.”

Launched a year ago in the U.K. to serve as a single access point to inventory across different broadcasters and operators, Finecast sees three pillars to the success of addressable, with an ecosystem being the foundation. Those are advertiser demand, content distribution and content.

“We think collaboration across those three areas is really important because what a marketer really wants is scale against unique addressable segments,” Astley says. “To achieve that scale you’ve got to collaborate on data and you’ve got to collaborate on a multi-broadcaster basis to really achieve that scale.”

While the transformation in Canada won’t happen overnight, “the change is there and I think over the next six to twelve months, we’ll start to see some pretty interesting developments.”

This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast.   For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.