In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hulu director of ad sales research Asaf Davidov complains that differences persist.

“When we’re talking to TV teams versus digital teams, those conversations are still very fragmented,” he says. “I think (the industry likes) to pretend like we’re buying and selling across all of those, and I don’t think that we truly are.

“The way that TV looks at reach and frequency is much different than the way that digital looks at reach and frequency. Different even within digital, video versus social versus display.

“And so, I think there’s a lot of work still to be done to figure out how to connect all of those pieces. ACR (automatic content recognition) data is the first step in being able to kind of connect across all of those platforms, but I think we’re still a little bit a ways away.”

Last year, Hulu launched a new ad format, “Pause Ad“, and claimed to generate 68% increase in brand lift associated with those campaigns.

Whilst Hulu offers an ad-free subscription option, ad-supported viewing remains a major part of its business.

Next up, it wants to offer advertisers certainty.

“We don’t guarantee on reach and frequency today,” Davidov says. “We are working closely with a lot of our measurement partners to figure out how to do that, and working with third-party vendors to be able to do cross-platform de-duplication.”

Davidov was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

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. 

Last year, Hulu began asking a different question – what if it served an ad when viewers stopped watching?

In January, it launched a new ad format, “Pause Ad“, and the first results from tests with Coca-Cola and P&G’s Charmin toilet paper are in…

“We’ve seen a 68% increase in brand lift associated with those campaigns, which is 5X the industry benchmark for similar types of ad executions,” says Jeremy Helfand, the long-time Adobe exec who has been Hulu’s VP of ad platforms since 2018, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

For Hulu, the launch was about embracing under-exploited behavior already evident on the platform.

“Our viewers at Hulu pause on content over 30 million times a day,” Helfand says. “If they’re pausing in order to get up to go to the bathroom or to answer the phone or get something to drink out of the refrigerator, we think that that’s a much better opportunity to introduce a brand message in an advertisement as opposed to stopping their content storytelling experience and introducing an ad.”

In other words, if you are leaving Modern Family for the bathroom, you may be primed to know about toilet paper. If you are pausing Futurama to head to the fridge, have you considered a soda?

“If they’re not using it in order to scrub forward or backwards on the content, we then will introduce the pause ad,” Helfand says. “The pause ad is an overlay that sits over top of the content so it’s translucent and you still see the content behind you

“It’ll persist on the screen with some sort of catchy, great visual and message, and it’ll stay there until the viewer returns to wanting to watch content again.

“Viewers love it because it’s not disruptive to their storytelling experience. It’s relevant to the situation that they’re in, and they really appreciate the fact that we have used a unique way to help connect them with a brand without disrupting the storytelling experience and the journey that they’re having with the content.”

For Helfand, Pause Ad is one expression of Hulu’s goal to deliver “viewer-first advertising”.

The company has reduced ad load and has radically capped the frequency with which viewers are exposed to brands, doubling the variety of ads they see per hour of content.

This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr.   Please visit this page to find more videos from the series. 

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.

Hulu has had programmatic capabilities since 2014 but “only recently we built a sales team around it” to work with Hulu’s local, national and performance marketing teams, the Regional Sales Manager of Advanced TV says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. “Hulu hasn’t been the easiest to work with programmatically in the past.”

The company works with “pretty much all” DSP’s, offering three types of programmatic deals. The first is automated guaranteed, wherein Hulu uses various data and determines targeting. “And then we send all those targeted impressions to the advertiser,” Laurenzo says. “It’s a fixed price. We do all the decisioning and pass those impressions on.”

Hulu’s second programmatic offering also is based on fixed pricing, called “unreserved fixed,” but it offers advertisers the ability to do the decisioning. “So based on the bid stream, they can decide if they want to accept or pass on those impressions.”

Three months ago, Hulu added a third programmatic variation that Laurenzo describes as the company’s “most differentiated deal type” called an invite-only auction.

“This is our first biddable model where you can actually go in and bid on inventory from Hulu,” Laurenzo says.

“It’s also the first time we’ve allowed multiple brands to run through one single deal ID. That’s a big deal for our DSP partners because that’s typically how they would prefer to work anyway.”

Asked about working with MediaMath, Laurenzo says, “We love the transparency, not arbitraging our inventory. We have so many issues in the marketplace with people representing Hulu inventory when maybe they shouldn’t.”

Given Hulu’s audience growth, “the DSP’s are actually working with us to help find ways to better utilize some of that extra capacity that we have.”

This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.

Lowy joined Telaria in the fall of 2018 from Dish and its Sling TV service, where he had been director of advanced TV and digital sales. In this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, he says he was motivated by the growing convergence of digital and TV buying, along with the uptake of programmatic transactions.

“I saw at Sling that if I could be able to do that at a larger scale and really work with many programmers in converging their businesses and help them grow the advertising space, it would be a tremendous opportunity for the entire industry to grow,” says Lowy, who is Telaria’s Chief Commercial Officer.

“What I’m seeing is more DSP’s really understanding the space and helping to go through to the agencies and through to the brands of how to do this. How to purchase this type of advertising. How to purchase in auctions, how to do the private auctions. And really understanding the safety of buying in the space.”

Along with transparency and speed, audience targeting also is a factor in the growth of CTV and OTT. “That’s really driving this wave as well and being able to really understand attribution and what’s happening to your buys.”

Lowy considers transparency to be the number one because advertisers want to know exactly where their ads are going. “And to be assured that your ad is targeted properly and correctly, and also being fueled or put next to the right kind of premium inventory that you want or the premium content.”

The speed and efficiency that programmatic offers extends to campaign optimization, namely “how quickly you can purchase an ad and see how your campaigns are running and be able to change or do what you need to do rather quickly.”

Lowy attributes the explosion of direct-to-consumer streaming video services to a universal desire for total control.

“They want more control of the advertising. They want more control of the content. They want more control of what’s going on and really to understand, start to finish, what’s going to the consumer and how to react and how to move quickly with them.”

Asked about Telaria’s growth plans, Lowy says while lots of partnerships are desirable, “we want to make them richer and deeper.” Citing clients like Hulu, Sling, fuboTV and Cheddar, Telaria wants to “get deeper into helping them to understand the converging business and to help them grow their business.”

Additionally, Telaria is eyeing more global expansion, including in Canada and Latin America.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.

The new solution is a “seamless overlay” on ads “so the creative does not need to be touched or modified in any way,” Corbelli explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you are interested in the product, you click one button and information on the mattress company, products, a weekly newsletter can come your way.”

For the past several weeks, Sleep Number has run a commercial allowing viewers to request a promotional offer from the advertiser be sent to the email that is associated with the subscriber’s Hulu account, as Variety reports. According to Hulu research, interactive ad units result in a 50% increase in ad recall and a 45% increase in purchase intent.

Until now, brands that wanted to use television for direct response “really had to deal with technologies that were not in sync with a kind of seamless digital experience that we’re after as consumers,” Corbelli adds. It replaces “the cumbersome, on-screen keyboard for entering your email address with email addresses that the content provider can use with the viewer’s approval. That creates that seamless opportunity for a brand to connect and actually move down that funnel with a customer.”

The overlay can be applied to a host of other direct to consumer interactions, according to Corbelli. Examples include scheduling an appointment with a tax advisor, a new product offering or planning a vacation.

“We’re really excited to bring it to the marketplace with Hulu as our launch partner and I think the market’s going to be pretty excited about it too.”

BrightLine works with all of the major TV networks as they navigate the expanding OTT marketplace while trying to provide brands with non-traditional advertising opportunities.

“What we’ve seen, and which will probably be a part of this equation for a while is that these types of interactions, or the ability for a brand to provide an audience a new kind of experience and seamless interaction, is a premium experience for a brand. Many networks that we work with approach it that way,” says Corbelli.

“How those deals ultimately get struck is very much up to the content provider, but the prevailing CPM pricing model is in play here as well.”

The launch with Sleep Number and Hulu as partners marks the start of “an incredibly exciting year” for BrightLine. Corbelli cites the company’s ability to bring household targeting across the national footprint of all OTT devices “and programmatic and how targeting works in that programmatic context and the role we play.”

The online TV provider last month announced it made $1.5 billion in ad revenue last year, a rise of 45%, increasing it advertiser base by 50%.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Doug Fleming, Hulu head of advanced TV, says that the company aims to put programmatic, automated sales methods “on equal footing” with ads sold directly by its human staff.

“When we look at the landscape, you can see this march towards automation,” Fleming says. “We’re not going to get in the way of that. We’re going to embrace that.

“We now have enough inventory and enough access that we have decided to create a team under me to go out and affect those agency trading desks and those folks that have decided to bring programmatic buying in-house.”

Hulu uses Telaria’s VMP (Video Management Platform) – which supports decisioning, demand delivery and analytics – to measure and manage its ad monetization. Prior to that, the TV service used Live Rail.

Both vendors offer technology to help the sale of ad space using automated systems.

But Fleming’s Hulu shares something in common with many other publishers that have embraced these methods – a modicum of control.

At the start of the year, it launched an invite-only private marketplace, meaning it gets to pre-specify the kinds of demand sources it will open its ad inventory to. That is in contrast to the way in which programmatic made its debut, as a free-for-all auction for unsold display ads.

“We’re going to do it in a very private, curtailed way,” Fleming adds. “There is no concept of a remnant provider, reselling our inventory. Everyone has to be blessed and driven through the Hulu process.”

“We identify the brands before they come in, so that they’re attributed to the appropriate seller on our side.

“We can category block appropriately, so people maintain their category exclusivity within pods.

“There’s no semblance of a DSP (demand-side platform) just hanging on and reselling, and an always-on situation.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix.   This series is sponsored by Telaria.  Please find additional videos from the series on this page. 

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Beck talks about research Turner recently conducted to see what’s top of mind with viewers who face an ever-expanding roster of streaming choices, some of them without advertising.

“The research we did recently is very interesting,” says Beck. “People kept going back to trying to simply discover content has become more of a challenge because there’s so much out there. What can I watch and where can I watch it? And by the way, do I have to pay incremental for it?”

Among the research learnings was that people want more relevant viewing recommendations in a world of increased co-viewing wherein “typically you’re getting a recommendation based on a single profile when you have multiple people who are interested in what the content is,” Beck says. “Why can’t we have recommendations that are based on multiple profiles?”

But recommendations come with nuances, he adds, one example being not everyone who likes comedy programming likes dark comedic material. “The ability to go more granular in search to really get to what you’re looking for is going to be important.”

Another research finding that stood out is “there’s so much clutter in the experience today. When you open up any screen, there’s that infinite scrolling of content and how do you de-clutter that? So I think there’s going to be a lot of focus on UI, UX to make more personalized experiences for people,” says Beck.

Asked about reducing ad loads and other ways to improve viewing experiences, he notes that while Amazon, Netflix and others have done well without ads, Hulu has done well with an ad model.

“I think a lot of the services are going to have to consider is there an ad-supported model. Consumers may be very open to that, especially if the ads get better. By better I don’t just mean the quality of the content but not as interruptive or served at the times in which people are open to that.

“I definitely think that anybody that’s in this space is thinking hard about how can advertisers help fund the experience for consumers because we know consumers are going to want a free or ad-supported version.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Meanwhile, advertising sales rose to just under $1.5 billion from $1 billion. “We’re getting TV’s largest advertisers,” says Naylor, while direct-to-consumer brand revenue grew 86% “and we’re super serving them with some new tools.”

Foremost in that expanding toolkit is an attribution offering from the company owned by Comcast, Fox and Disney plus an ad format that would appear when Hulu viewers pause what they’re watching.

Hulu will develop customized attribution deals depending on the types of customer-relationship data its advertisers can share—information can be matched with customer behavior metrics from Hulu, as Variety reports.

“We can elegantly put our census level data with their census level data” resulting in a “census-to-census marriage of the data to show that an exposure resulted in a sale,” says Naylor.

Working with Telaria, Hulu is enhancing its programmatic private marketplace for ad inventory so that “we can put people in a biddable environment for the most coveted segments.” It’s a closed market because “we’re very protective” to avoid “category collision with our advertisers” and to be able to fully vet the ad creative, Naylor adds.

“Happily, the majority of people choose the advertising-supported Hulu but that doesn’t mean we can just feel free to just jam ads at them. If anything, we have to be as respectful as possible because they’re one click away from going to the commercial-free Hulu.” While the company is “conventional TV with conventional breaks,” it welcomes ads of any duration plus interactive units, working with partners like BrightLine and Innovid.

The “latest kid on the block” that Hulu is beta testing is “a pause ad.” When viewers hit the pause button “we’re going to serve up a little image” but not a display or video ad. “Imagine a Coke can with language like ‘the pause that refreshes.’”

The goal is to exploit the opportunity of “knowing situationally what viewers are up to with kind of a respectful ad execution. It’s an experiment that we can take because of who we are,” Naylor says.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?

Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.

But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?

A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…

TV is the same – and different

Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…

Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:

“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.

“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”

But TV is fragmenting

Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:

“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.

Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”

Advertisers want ‘TV’, but like digital

From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…

Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights

“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.

“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”

Addressable TV hard to scale

The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…

Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:

“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.

“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.

“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”

But beware excess scale

But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:

“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”

Measurement needs metadata

Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…

Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:

“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.

“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”

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.

Disney+ will be the third piece of a direct-to-consumer triad when combined with ESPN+, which launched last April, and Disney’s stake in Hulu, the President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“On the Disney side, while we are not doing advertising at launch right now, we are doing marketing partnerships around how we can actually bring brands together that we’ve done broadly with the company,” Ferro says.

Disney believes that direct-to-consumer, which requires a new approach to content allocation, which in Disney’s case includes pulling its movies and shows from Netflix next year, gives both consumers and advertisers the best opportunities.

“What you saw in the launch of that product was the quickness of adoption,” Ferro says of ESPN+, which provided access to more mainstream and “unique” sports like boxing. “Five months in we announced we were at a million subscribers and we’ve only grown from there.”

She describes Disney+ as “a broad, general entertainment brand for families” built around proven entities like Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney and National Geographic.

The third leg of the direct-to-consumer stool is Hulu, the unprofitable streaming pioneer that will be 60% owned by Disney at the beginning of 2019 by virtue of its acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox. Hulu is where ABC and Freeform programming resides, with ad-supported “live and on-demand content in season,” says Ferro.

“We’re also working very closely obviously with our product groups and our events groups and our parks and movie promotions teams,” she says of the company’s direct-to-consumer initiatives.

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.

Hulu harvests a plethora of insights from its first-party data, traits that don’t emerge from traditional metrics. “For a researcher and someone who loves television, it’s like a treasure trove of goodies of really interesting types of behavior that emerge when people have complete choice and control over their TV viewing,” DeTraglia adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.

With addressable TV limited to correlation with households or devices, profile addressability remains a longer-term goal, according to DeTraglia.

“For as long as television has existed, it’s been a collective medium where families and friends get together and watch something together. No amount of first-party data is going to measure those viewers in the room at that same time.”

Hulu’s approach is probabilistic, but it’s based on household-level composition data, census-level data from the ads that are being served and meta data associated with viewing.

“So all of that comes together to come up with what we call a viewer assignment model” that shows given a situation, campaign, program genre, time of day, device and household, “this is the most likely scenario of who is sitting in front of that ad at that time.”

In one camp of Hulu clients are traditional advertisers trying to offset the impact of linear TV ratings contraction on their reach and frequency goals by looking to OTT. “And increasingly, even those more traditional advertisers are also experimenting with adding more data to those audience segments or addressability and all that stuff that’s happening now,” DeTraglia says.

In another, more digitally steeped camp are newer brand marketers who have chosen the direct-to-consumer approach. “They start in a digital-specific world where they are buying Facebook and Instagram, display and they’re able to measure that very quickly and with some one-to-one accuracy because it’s also cookie-based environments where they see this person saw the ad, we had whatever conversion.”

That’s a little harder to execute in an OTT environment, “but we’re doing it and we enable those advertisers to take their traditional digital, sort of nascent marketing into more of a storytelling environment,” DeTraglia says.

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.

For advanced targeting of TV audiences, “Live linear programming is a big part of it. We are optimizing our television buys today for clients that have a desire to do so,” the network’s VP of Programmatic Sales says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect User Conference.

Meanwhile, on the digital side, whether it’s full-episode, OTT, connected-TV devices or set-top video-on-demand, “we are looking to bring this cross-screen, trying to find an auto intender regardless of the modality that they’re consuming our content and serving the person that is in market for that product that ad at the right time,” Callahan adds.

Finding the right ad length and load is easier with on-demand content like movies where it’s scripted and ad breaks are planned. “I think you can do things with the break. You can shorten the break, adjust the break.”

Callahan sees Hulu’s approach “with different flavors of subscriptions” as offering a tradeoff with viewers in terms of ad choices and data sharing, while the “holy grail of serving right ad to right person with right format creates a less clustered more meaningful ad experience.”

Linear commercial breaks remain “baked in, sports isn’t scripted, you don’t know when somebody’s going to score a touchdown or hit a home run. You don’t know when that commercial break is going to happen,” Callahan says.

“You can probably load some up to be a certain way, but I think more in the archived, on-demand digital video library today you can get creative do things unique and interesting and create more value for the interruptions in a shorter capacity in those environments.”

Like other networks, Fox is seeing continued growth in connected-TV viewing year over year. “The idea of cord nevers versus cord cutters, that pendulum swing has happened.”

He sees a call for greater transparency in reporting and proving out de-duplication of connected-TV viewing audiences. “How does CTV really operate as the standalone from a tracking, delivery, audience perspective” is one question. “As far as the CTV environment, there is a greater level of transparency on who’s watching it, what are they watching, when are they watching and certainly the ability to tie it back to greater outcome attributed data sets as well,” says Callahan.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

“The genesis behind the comScore-Rentrak merger was brilliant,” Wiener says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we haven’t done well is integrate those two platforms and provide rapid product innovation to the market, and that’s really what we’re doing with this resurgent comScore.”

At AT&T’s upcoming The Relevance Conference later this month, Wiener will participate in a panel discussion of industry executives titled The ROI of Attention. He believes the conference comes at an appropriate time.

“I think we’re at this point in time where the industry needs to evolve pretty rapidly and, one of the core elements of that is how do we measure audiences and how do we measure advertising ROI,” Wiener says.

Wiener joined comScore in April of 2018, having been a board member since the previous fall. He was tasked with righting the comScore ship following a string of accounting crises and losses, as the Wall Street Journal reports. In his first 60 days at comScore he had more than that number of customer meetings in which he heard “over and over again” the desire from buyers and sellers for reliable, third-party measurement of audiences and advertising ROI.

“And that’s something that the current state is not doing very well and I think that’s our big opportunity.” comScore has laid out “an aggressive road map over the next six months of launching products that are going to solve that need,” says Wiener.

“That primary need is unduplicated reach and frequency in this cross-platform world. We’re going to start with currency products, but we’re going to move on to planning products.”

To Wiener, being “relevant” is table stakes for convincing people to buy something. “This entire industry is based on growing marketers’ business. I think people sometimes lose sight of that. At the end of the day, marketing is not about marketing. Marketing’s about fueling profitable growth for marketers. If that’s happening that creates a virtuous cycle for everybody in the ecosystem.”

At the AT&T event, Wiener will be joined on stage by Scott Howe, CEO, Acxiom; Peter Naylor, SVP Ad Sales, Hulu; and Donna Speciale, President, Advertising Sales, Turner. It will be moderated by AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein.

This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Corbelli puts reasons for all those machinations into three buckets: vertical integration on the technology side, reach across screens and distribution points and “the ability to offer great content in this three-screen, streaming world,” the Chairman and CEO of BrightLine says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Originally known for its pioneering dynamic television ad solutions for brands, BrightLine early in 2018 launched DataCast, a unified OTT data platform that enables advertisers to target and measure across mobile, desktop and television screens. DataCast links commonly sought audience segments to TV screens—for example automobile purchase intenders—then identifies specific households within the BrightLine OTT footprint that match the target audience segments. Targeted campaigns using enhanced and/or traditional TV commercials can be sent to those households.

For DataCast, BrightLine’s media partners integrate the company’s technology within their OTT apps across the full OTT device footprint, including FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Samsung, IOS and Android. Household reach is currently 68 million.

Corbelli’s perspective helps to make sense of the seemingly frantic consolidation happening in the TV space. “You see AT&T trying to combine its distribution assets and the content that Time Warner owns. You see the AppNexus acquisition as being part of how digital becomes truly integrated with not just desktop and mobile but also telecom and television.”

She sees something similar happening with “the fight for Fox, as I call it. Very specifically, there’s a content play there, a content rollup, there’s a distribution play. It’s why Sky is as important as it is to Comcast.”

Meanwhile, she considers Hulu as the strongest ad-supported asset “that any media company could own in a space that is exploding. They’ve got 60% of all streams right now in the ad-supported environment. Not surprisingly, it feels a little bit like a free-for-all for who owns Hulu.”

Finally there’s Netflix, which in some quarters is considered to be an eventual convert to ad-supported content. “I think folks like Netflix are in for some challenges with all this consolidation going on,” says Corbelli, noting that Amazon is talking about offering ads on pre-roll. “I think that’s how the models start to shake out. You’re going to see a combination of subscription revenue and ad revenue and you start to see a lot of common models out there.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, comScore launched Xmedia a few years ago to measure and de-duplicate viewers across screens, but that product didn’t specify how many people saw the actual ads. Campaign Ratings will launch in beta this September, with support from nearly all media companies and existing customers, including ABC, CBS, Fox, Viacom, Hulu and others.

In this interview with Beet.TV, DeTraglia recalls a time when TV viewing consisted of just one screen “and there was a system that worked” for measuring audiences. “And then everything fragmented very, very quickly.”

While companies were figuring out how to quantify audiences on desktop computers and then mobile devices, “What happened in between there was that living room connected devices really leapfrogged, at least in terms of television content and other video as well, as being a first choice for watching digitally,” explains DeTraglia, who is VP and Head of Research.

As has been the case with linear TV, connected-TV viewing is a shared experience, which has measurement drawbacks.

“None of the data that had existed or the measurement that had existed took that into account. So we were never really able to get a very accurate understanding of the reach of Hulu.”

Thus the company has worked with various companies, including comScore and Nielsen.

“We have this benefit of having first party subscriber level data that we can leverage in a variety of ways, and one of them is working with these third-party companies to use it as a baseline for measuring audience,” DeTraglia says.

Hulu has worked with Nielsen on DAR side for OTT and with comScore on its vCE offering.

To achieve accurate, consistent cross-screen measurement requires “full industry participation, and some are more interested in doing that than others,” she says. “It just takes a very long time. It’s not an easy thing to implement or execute. We believe it’s important to live in a third-party verified world and we know that it’s important to our advertisers.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine.   Please visit this page for additional videos. 

Hulu sees it as the logical extension of what consumers have grown accustomed to on various digital devices like desktop computers and phones—being able to discover product attributes via interactivity, for which it partners with Brightline.

“That’s a little bit more nascent in the living room, but I think it’s just as interesting to consumers to be able to see something and rather than have to go to some other device and find it they can get more information about it right through the living room screen,” DeTraglia says in this interview with Beet.TV. “So far we’ve found the marketplace is really I think sort of excited by it because it offers them the opportunity to utilize it in a variety of ways.”

Interactivity is not just about being able to buy tickets but also about “being able to offer other information about the product right within the ad unit, and we find that people stay in the ad unit longer because there’s other stuff for them to do.”

Hulu considers consumer choice to be “purposeful viewing,” which “tends to have a halo effect on the overall experience.” Advertisers benefit as well, according to DeTraglia.

“When you ad choice and interactivity to all of that, what you get is lifts across all key branding metrics” compared to linear TV, she says.

Not being locked into specific timing of ad pods allows Hulu to accommodate “whatever it is the advertiser wants to put in front of us. And we can sequence them in various ways.”

DeTraglia cites experiments with storytelling within ads, which “tends to work very well because it keeps users engaged with that messaging in the advertising as they’re engaged in the storyline of the program that they’re watching.”

Like other premium video providers, Hulu can match first- and third-party marketer data to its subscriber base. “Obviously we have a really deep understanding of viewing behaviors, so that allows us to target by daypart, by geo, by genre.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine.   Please visit this page for additional videos. 

Reasons for the variations include corporate financial “short-termism,” thinking in narrow silos and measuring campaign performance in ways that aren’t always the most accurate or pertinent.

The panel by media agency Wavemaker was moderated by Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. It brought together Peter Naylor, Hulu’s SVP of Advertising Sales, Twitter’s Managing Director of Media & Entertainment, Jennifer Prince, and Jacqueline Corbelli, the Founder, Chairman & CEO of BrightLine.

Citing Forrester research showing that not all consumers love or hate advertising, O’Connell posited, “My suspicion is that marketers don’t understand this at all.”

Hulu’s research has revealed “a spectrum of ad acceptance,” responded Naylor. “On one extreme end are people who are ad avoiders at all costs. The trap people fall into is that everybody avoids ads at all costs, and that’s just not true.”

According to Naylor, among those who sign up for Hulu on any given day, “The wide majority will take advertising.”

On Twitter, brand marketers “expect to hit consumers because eighty two percent of our users expect to see a message from a brand,” said Prince. Another thing she believes differentiates Twitter is that its advertising is “extremely native, it’s within the timeline and a tweet and so there’s not as much of a separation between ads and content, there is this blend.”

Given its “leaned-in, receptive audience,” Twitter does see marketers thinking a lot about consumers and the consumer journey, according to Prince.

Brightline has taken its cue from the desire of consumers to bring together their experiences with premium video and other content, said Corbelli. Giving credit to Hulu as an innovator, she explained that Brightline got involved “when we started noticing folks like Roku and streaming consoles like Sony PlayStation were vehicles for actually bringing these two things together.”

As for consumer ad tolerance, Corbelli believes “absolutely that viewers will not just tolerate but I think that in certain cases they’ll even embrace advertising. I think the personalization piece of this is really big. Things as simple as geo location and being able to personalize the dialogue a little bit.”

Again citing research, O’Connell pointed out how “highly variable” consumers are in their opinions of personalization. While some “super- progressive,” digital savvy people are “totally okay with personalization in exchange for something useful to them,” other super-progressives “are absolutely opposed to it.” O’Connell’s bottom line: Don’t assume we should always use technology in a certain way.

Naylor coined the term “short-termism” when asked about the barriers to widespread if not uniform adoption of approaches to advertising that do not repeat mistakes made early in the digital media world. “I think short-termism is a real problem when publicly traded companies have to lead ninety-day by ninety-day existences. When CMO’s are so nervous that they continually pout their accounts into review,” Naylor said.

Another symptom is “whatever you can measure you measure, irrespective of whether it’s the right thing to measure,” for example the “rush to last-click attribution and you lose sight of what drove the demand and you only give credit to the last click,” Naylor added.

Explaining Twitter’s approach to test-and-learn, Prince acknowledged that some features it’s rolled out have not been without controversy. “Like when we went from 140 characters to 280 characters and there were a few haters. Maybe more than a few. It has really done wonders for those who need more space to communicate.”

Corbelli pointed to the disparity among the top TV networks, each of which see things from their own, individual perspective and act accordingly. “They all are thinking about this directionally the same, but in terms of how they execute on it, pretty different. And they want to stay in charge of those decisions. So I think that for now, the experience in terms of personalization is going to vary depending on what content you’re watching, where and when.”

Now Hulu has enabled it, and its ad chief thinks the future has finally arrived.

The new ad unit, called T-Commerce, was launched with interactive firm BrightLine, and allows viewers to buy things with their connected TV remote control or game joypad.

The pair ran a T-Commerce ad for the Tomb Raider movie to buy tickets through Fandango, back in March.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hulu ad sales SVP Peter Naylor explains: “The opportunity creatively is really to go beyond 15s and 30s.

“We’re happily taking 15s and 30s from marketers but marketers need to really understand that, with 100% connected television environment, you can do video libraries, photo galleries, you can do all sorts of data collections. I almost think it’s an imperative that they look beyond the conventional 15 and 30.”

Hulu is no stranger to innovating with user experience. The service allows viewers to pick up their show from one device on another, and its live TV service is currently gaining plaudits for the way it melds with the on-demand experience.

But is the joint venture building its subscriber base, and what role does advertising play in a subscription-driven company?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hulu subscriber growth head Patrizio Spagnoletto opens up on his strategy. Part of the marketing mix is with Oath, he explains.  We spoke with him at the Oath NewFront event.

“Bringing subscribers in for any service is challenging in our world because there’s a lot of competition, and it’s a market that’s changing a lot,” he says.

“We look at our subscribers and who are the healthiest subscribers. Then … we’ll work with partners to do look-alike modelling to see where are those subscribers out in the wild. We also work very closely with our agency at UM to build what we call high-value audiences so we can know not only who they are but what they look like, what do they like, and what is their media consumption.”

At the NewFronts, where premium publishers like Hulu touted their upcoming content roster to advertisers, Hulu announced series orders for a Four Weddings and a Funeral TV series and Ramy would join upcoming Hulu Originals Castle Rock, Catch-22, The First and Little Fires Everywhere.

It is a year since Hulu launched its live TV offering, on top of its VOD service, with one of the newest and freshest user experiences in the market. Now advertising is coming to the live service, making Hulu look a lot more like traditional TV – but with all the extra smarts afforded by targeted addressability.

Its product announcements didn’t stop there. The company also announced advertisers would be able to embed their messages in the shows viewers download for offline viewing, and it revealed that Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) for OTT is its currency of business across the platform.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts 2018, Badigian, who is Account Lead at the GroupM media agency, talks about why consumers are more sensitive than ever to brand alignment with content and the utility of downloadable video content from Hulu. And she predicts a heyday for audio.

“I think Studio71 actually had a really interesting approach” consisting of computer-driven text and image screening plus a third variable that’s not always found, says Badigian. “They actually have a human element, which I thought was really interesting because not all publishers or content creators are doing that. And it allows them to really understand what’s the difference between maybe a child holding a water gun versus an actual weapon.”

While she doesn’t think there’s a “solve” yet for the overarching issue of brand safety in digital environments, “It’s a very sensitive area and I think it’s one that we’re going to have to be more careful about as advertisers and people as consumers are going to be looking for.”

Asked about tactics for brand alignment, Badigian says a client might be getting “great reach” out of YouTube but not all of the content the client is aligning with on the platform might not be relevant enough to the actual brand or product. “I think that’s where a lot of these smaller publishers or content creators are really important for us because their content might be more customizable to our brand,” she says.

“Studio71 has a lot of different content integration opportunities where you can more tightly weave your brand into that platform. They really do have a ton of very loyal followers.”

In this interview, Studio71 Media Sales EVP Matt Crowley explains the company’s vetting process.

Badigian says Hulu’s NewFronts announcement about viewers being able to download content, including programming containing ads, is a nod to the reality that people don’t always consume video in the same way.

“Sometimes we’re in our homes, sometimes we’re in a train, sometimes we’re in a plane. So downloadable content’s important because we’re not always online even though we probably always want to be online.”

More details can be found in this interview with Hulu’s Peter Naylor.

Badigian was surprised she didn’t hear much about audio content at the NewFronts, given the ascendance of podcasts and similar formats. “I think video had its heyday. I think audio is about to have one.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

“Great presentations, the right amount of great content, sales, customer engagement. I really thought it was extraordinary,” Bager says in this interview with Beet.TV.

For the first time, the IAB will hold a second NewFronts event this year. Titled the Digital Content NewFronts West, it’s scheduled for Oct. 9 and 10 at NeueHouse in West Hollywood, a central location for all media presentations.

Of the New York event, Bager talks about common themes that were unique to 2018. “I think there was a clear tendency to talk about diversity, diverse content,” she says.

In her NewFronts speech, Bager told the audience that for brands these days, “It’s about creating movements, not just moments. And with digital video, you can really, truly do that. The platform is so impactful.”

Other highlights for Bager were themed events like Meredith Corporation’s Help Puerto Rico effort and Hulu’s Huluween programming, along with Hulu’s ability to dynamically insert ads into its live television service, as ADWEEK reports.

“You can kind of see that the industry through the lens of the NewFront is growing up and knows what it’s doing and really starting to think about the audience that’s out there,” says Bager.

In West Hollywood, the focus will be on branded and sponsored content and how brands and media companies can work together to “capture those moments that mean something to individuals that can help brands build more direct connections with their audience. So we’re really excited about that event.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Peter Naylor, SVP of Sales, explains the value of reaching “elusive”consumers “untethered” will provide a valuable platform advertisers.   The new feature will roll out later this year.

Here is the press release with all of today’s  announcements from Hulu.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018.  The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB.   Please see additional videos from the series on this page.   

“That tells me the future of TV is a blend of live and on demand viewing,” Hulu’s SVP of Advertising & Sales adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

It’s all part of the “inflection point” that is evident in the TV industry as viewer preferences are driving programming choices.

“The evidence is everywhere,” Naylor says during a break at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “You see a collapse of gross rating points, particularly against scripted content and even live content you’re seeing kind of a sand-papering down of a linear television experience.”

At the same time there’s the “explosion” of OTT subscriptions and usage, underscoring shifting viewing habits.

“The viewer’s expectations around television have changed. They want what how and when they want their TV and they expect it. Anything other than being in control and having all the choices they have is not desirable.”

In May of 2018, Hulu became the only pay-TV service to offer live and on-demand channels, original series and films, and a library of premium streaming TV shows and movies, all in one place.

Noting that some 4 million U.S. households had cut the pay-TV cord in 2017, Naylor says what felt like “a long, slow steady change has reached a fast and sharp inflection point of change and we’re seeing it everywhere.”

He dubs Hulu’s ad sales approach as the best of TV meeting the best of digital.

“We are happy to transact with the TV community against their fifteens and thirties with their conventional campaign parameters, like age and demo and geo. No problem.”

For the more digitally inclined, there’s more of a focus on impressions, targeting and data-informed media buys.

“The automation that we’re seeing take off in the browser space for conventional display is absolutely made its way to the video space. We use Telaria as our SSP and we’re plugging into all the other on-ramps of demand.”

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

“We’ve been working with people like BrightLine for a long, long time, Innovid, true[X] and others,” Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “It think we’re at an inflection point because my volume of orders for all of last year I’ve already booked year to date. That’s two hundred, three hundred percent growth. Very smart growth.”

A few weeks ago, Hulu served video trailers for the Warner Bros and MGM movie “Tomb Raider” that were interactive ads to the extent that viewers could order tickets to a nearby theatre from Fandango. As Variety reports, part of the strategy was to lessen the time between people seeing a movie trailer and actually going to a theatre.

“So I think as people, viewers in particular, continue to expect that they can interact with TV ads, you’ll see marketers take advantage of the opportunity,” says Naylor. “It’s a real opportunity to go beyond a conventional fifteen or thirty and I don’t see why it shouldn’t continue to go up and to the right.”

Such interactive spots are priced at a premium “because the results are superior in terms of brand awareness and purchase intent and even just at the most basic level, time spent with the ad. These ads just get more attention and I think expectations are going to just continue to increase for the viewer.”

Interactive ads typically begin with a conventional spot and some kind of call to action. “Maybe it’s an overlay or some kind of creative element to alert the viewer that they can interact. Once they interact it can be a video library, it could be a photo library, or a transactional unit. There’s a whole hoist of opportunities once you get people to engage.”

It’s a “modest call to action that lets people know pick up your remote, pick up your phone you can play around with this and learn more.”

Naylor likens growing consumer engagement with interactive ads to the advent of touch screens and peoples’ evolved expectations to encounter touch screens just about everywhere.

“I think sooner or later people just expect, of course I should be able to transact with a set. It’s IP TV. It’s a connected environment.”

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.