Such was the case at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity when Marchese was interviewed on stage by Dave Clark, GM of Comcast’s FreeWheel, as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.

Never one to mince words, Marchese described the complexity of trying to figure out just how many commercials a given consumer is willing to watch on a given platform and how sellers like Fox should price newly emerging ad formats.

What’s not complicated is the silent clock ticking in the background for an industry that is known to advance in capsulized increments, according to Marchese.

President of Advertising Revenue at Fox Networks Group, Marchese was blunt about “what sucks” about television. “TV and advertising have been for so long negotiating with each other and they didn’t have to worry about a third party in the negotiation. Building a business model for consumers first, that’s what’s different,” Marchese said.

“Why does anybody like you?” asked Clark.

“I’m not sure anyone does. I say what other people I think are thinking, I hope,” Marchese responded.

The ticking clock analogy refers to the two or three years he estimates might pass “before you start to see massive, tectonic shifts in how viewers behave.”

Clark: “Is there a simple way to think about the amount of advertising that consumers will accept?”

“It’s variable,” said Marchese. “The real problem is we haven’t even gotten to how complex it’s actually going to be.”

Since consumers are not “some giant, homogenous group of people” but individuals who value their time differently at different times, “I think we have to have a test and learn approach to what’s intrusive and what isn’t.”

That approach will reveal that there is content people are willing to endure ads to access “and there’s content people won’t sit through ads to get,” Marchese said. “Google’s already doing this in a lot of places. On YouTube, not everyone sees the same ad load. I think TV has to get a little bit smarter about when and where.”

Asked by Clark whether advertisers are willing to pay more for exclusivity in a commercial break, Marchese said “They have and they are” while noting that Fox’s two-ad JAZ pods “sold out early in the Upfront.”

Nonetheless, there’s no easy formula at this point for exactly how much to charge because marketers in certain categories might be willing to pay more, according to Marchese.

“The real problem is, saying what are they worth or how much more is so relative to who buys it. And so until these things are out there and the market can get set, we don’t know how much more yet.”

As a founder of engagement-ad pioneer true[X], a startup that Fox acquired for approximately $200 million, surely Marchese has some advice for TV networks, said Clark.

“Be prepared to work in chaos, things are going to change,” said Marchese before explaining that companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix are in the video space “because they want to be the operating system for peoples’ lives, but people choose their operating system based on where the best stories are.”

Citing FX, Clark asked whether the highly awarded network holds lessons for other networks. Marchese said it was among the first to abandon the model of producing cheap programming in bulk to fill a 24-hour schedule. This helps to explain why when it comes to Emmy and Golden Globe awards, the most have gone to HBO, Netflix and FX, “and only one of those still sits on a cable-operated system, ad-supported,” Marchese said.

Asked by Clark whether he’s worried when he sees people like Shonda Rhimes leaving ABC and Ryan Murphy exiting Fox to join up with Netflix, Marchese said Ryan indicated that interruptive ads weren’t his main motivation.

“Shows had to be exactly 42 minutes and the episodes had to have exactly these arcs,” Marchese observed. “Then you add in the fact you’re scheduling to a clock that has ads in very particular breaks. When they add a new break, they actually have to add a new act to the show and that’s a lot of actual work and creativity.”

On a positive note, Marchese said that when Fox announced its JAZ pods, Seth McFarland said he wanted them for the entire season of The Orville. “That’s a creator being excited about a better ad system,” said Marchese.

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

“We’re actually introducing something that we think is really informative and revealing things about the new brand identity that’s going to be associated with this advertising company,” McDonald adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

Earlier this month, AT&T prevailed over the Justice Department in its bid to acquire Time Warner’s assets, foremost among them HBO, Turner and Warner Bros.

“We are very excited about the outcome of the trial,” says McDonald. “For sure, this actually allows our business to actually go forward and execute against the strategy that we believe is really going to be very, very valuable to consumers, to the marketers and publishers we work with as well as to the AT&T business for all.”

The branding effort at Cannes introduces “a new business that reflects a welcoming of the creative canvas, tied together with informed by technology and data in a way that truly advertising companies haven’t existed before.”

There are no words in AT&T’s branding unveiled at the Carlton, just colors, starting with “trusted blue on one end” signifying the company’s 140-year roots and the brand’s “credibility and high integrity,” says McDonald.

“And that transitions across the face of the Carlton to produce a new color, bright coral, which has all of what that color embodies. Energy, passion, innovation. And that is the brand color of the new name for this advertising business and we can’t wait to talk more about what we’re going to be doing inside that business later this year.”

This is why the company “is very focused on using data and interactivity to boost the value of the advertising that the consumer sees on our platform,” Rosenberg says in an interview with Beet.TV during a break at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We feel ad loads are likely to go down, and so ad value has to go up.”

Roku has a three-pronged approach to its ad business, starting with its endemic vertical that works with companies like HBO, Hulu, Netflix and others to garner more downloads and subscribers and to sell more movies. Second is its outreach to brand marketers “who are focused on the fact that TV viewers are moving their TV time to devices like Roku and they need to follow with their investments,” Rosenberg explains.

The third part of Roku’s ad business is its platform strategy, wherein it makes the technology and data originally built for its own networks available to publishers on its platform. “It’s more of an ecosystem enablement strategy,” says Rosenberg.

The recent expansion of Roku’s partnership with IPG’s Magna is the fruit of Roku’s efforts to develop the programmatic tools, data, its DMP and ad stack—all of which are necessary for more advanced advertising. In a separate interview with Beet.TV, Amanda Medeiros Kigel, Magna’s VP of Partner Innovation, says the exclusive arrangement provides advanced targeting “that we really don’t have access to with other partners” in the over-the-top TV space.

“The Magna partnership is really about creating a tighter, deeper link between the two companies so that Magna can bring those capabilities to their clients,” says Rosenberg. “Programmatic is a big part of the relationship as well because as you infuse more and more data into a transaction from the buy side and the sell side, you really need programmatic pipes to transact it properly.”

Roku’s free, ad-supported collection of apps is now the fastest-growing segment on its platform in terms of app count and growth of usage, according to Rosenberg. “Free is clearly still very important to our viewers and to OTT viewers,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

Now the latter says it wants to pull off similar tricks elsewhere around the world.

“We’re looking in a lot of places – but mostly Europe, Middle East and Asia, we’re looking globally,” Parsifal Entertainment Group CEO Sushil Kambampati tells Beet.TV in this video interview from IBC.

Peter Ekelund’s Parsifal aims to help operators set up over-the-top VOD services. “We’re focusing on providing business systems that make it easy for an operator to know who is watching, what they’re watching and on what devices,” Kambampati says.

“If you don’t have this information on subscribers, then you don’t know your market.”

Watch the full video for more.