Chris Maccaro, chief executive of Beachfront Media
“We’re most excited about accelerating addressability across traditional linear, and that’s where we see an enormous amount of growth, both this year and into the future,” Maccaro said. “Our focus has really been on enablement, building the infrastructure to enable that addressability to happen, and then bringing the ability to access that supply through automated channels,” Maccaro adds.
Adam Gaynor, vice president of network partnerships at Vizio
“Addressable TV today acts as the bridge between linear and streaming,” Gaynor said. “When I think about it from the buy-side, when I think about it from the brand side, we now have a real opportunity to help brands as they find their audiences in both the connected TV world and the linear world, to connect them by using addressable TV.”
Beth Weeks, vice president and group director at Digitas
“Measurement becomes critically important as we’re losing reach on linear, but gaining in digital video,” Weeks said. “How are we validating the effectiveness of that holistic reach as we think about bridging those platforms, and being able to validate and verify that we’re achieving those critical KPIs and those business outcomes that our clients are expecting.”
Huda Kazi, vice president of ad technology and operations at Discovery
“Unification is key. We’re hyper-focused on creating a large deduplicated supply pool for our advertisers,” Kazi said. “This allows us to provide greater ROI for the advertisers while maintaining the value of our own content.”
Chris Pizzurro, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at Canoe
“We have a very well lit, brand-safe VOD environment today with the Canoe footprint,” Pizzurro said. “We absolutely need to maintain that quality, but we know we need to open up the pipes to programmatic so our programmers can sell 100% of their inventory…We’re up-and-running, and we look to turn up the heat this year.”
Rob Christensen, vice president of advanced TV sales and distribution at Vevo
“As we’re running ad pods in multiple minutes per hour, it’s important for us to make sure that it’s a great experience for brands, it’s a great experience for users and of course, maximizing the monetization opportunities,” Christensen said.
JoAnna Foyle, senior vice president of inventory partnerships at The Trade Desk
“[Ad] frequency is a big challenge, that if you’re not using the right platform and the right tools – we see this as consumers while we’re watching content on mobile devices, on streaming services…the odds are frequency isn’t being managed very well,” Foyle said. “One of the things we talk to our buyers a lot about is making sure that they’re using the tools available to them.”
John Vilade, head of ad sales at Premion
“We’re out right now doing a lot of education with marketers. Marketers are seeing rapid changes in the marketplace. There’s a lot of complexity and fragmentation. There’s a lot of nuance in terms of what you can do inside the connected TV space,” Vilade said. “I’m most excited about now is the data-driven innovations that we’re seeing inside of connected TV and OTT.”
You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>The launch of Discovery+ preceded this week’s announcement that Discovery and AT&T plan to pool their media assets into a new company led by Discovery CEO David Zaslav. The companies haven’t said whether they’ll keep Discovery+ separate from HBO Max, the streaming platform that AT&T’s WarnerMedia launched last year, or combine them.
In the meantime, Discovery+ is working on creating a positive user experience for its ad-free and ad-light versions, Huda Kazi, vice president of ad technology and operations at Discovery, said in this interview with Beet.TV. The ad-light version currently carries about four minutes of advertising with each hour-long episode.
“We’re focused on things like creative diversity, frequency capping and a seamless transition between advertising and the content playback to ensure that the ads are not a disruptive experience,” Kazi said. “It really should be a complementary experience that helps enhance the entire Discovery+ viewing opportunity.”
The ad-light version of Discovery+ carries a combination of direct-resourced national ads and programmatic ads to help unify its platform for media buyers.
“Unification is key. We’re hyper-focused on creating a large deduplicated supply pool for our advertisers,” she said. “This allows us to provide greater ROI for the advertisers while maintaining the value of our own content.”
Programmatic ads aren’t considered a “backfill solution” to fill remnant time on Discovery+ as advertisers and their agencies automate their media buying, she said.
“We’re a programmatic-first organization. Even to have programmatic running on our premium product, I think that’s probably something not everyone in market is doing,” Kazi said. “We’ve been able to offer our content directly, but then also allow advertisers to find specific users in this very premium environment in real time. They’re able to reserve supply, but then they’re also able to come in and find specific supply that they’re looking for in a brand-safe, premium way.”
Discovery participates in Project OAR, the industry consortium led by smart-TV maker Vizio to promote the adoption of addressable advertising. Discovery also works with ad-tech company Canoe Ventures, which was founded by cable companies Charter, Comcast and Cox to support addressable advertising on national TV networks.
“We’re very excited about linear addressable. It’s a true convergence point, bringing together linear supply and digital execution,” Kazi said. “Linear addressable, it’s a great opportunity to get that reach, the scale that we get from linear TV, but also the digital targeting and measurement capabilities.”
You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.
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