The SVP of Video Research & Insights for Dentsu Aegis Network is seeing an “explosive growth of attribution vendors,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Such providers have traditionally been digital oriented, measuring multi-touch attribution across all digital touchpoints. “But now, especially this year, there’s been a growing school of TV specialists,” Zhang says.

“They are able to attribute the impact of big-screen, top-funnel impact of TV advertising to the actual business outcome in terms of any type of conversion metric, be it foot traffic or online purchase, offline purchase.”

Dentsu Aegis has been doing “a very thorough audit across the entire spectrum of TV/cross platform video attribution vetting. It’s still going and we’ve learned a lot just to understand their modeling approach, their TV/video data sources, their conversion metric sources and how they can match together and modeling and analyze and predict the outcome.”

In an age sensitive to consumer privacy and increasing data regulations, the media agency is looking into “pixel-less methodology” to measure both conversion and viewership data.

“So ACR data is one good example and there are also a lot of other tech platforms that are able to provide data, especially on the back end without pixels. So we’re able to measure in terms of the audience in a one-to-one, deterministic fashion.

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.

Given that some 80% of data is unstructured, “What that means is we’re really trying as marketers to find what are the best sources of data that’s most actionable to help advertisers achieve their audience engagement goals,” the Co-CEO says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

“It’s early stages, but on the same side of things we’ve got a lot of great information that if we could structure it well we can really evolve the industry faster than we have over the last eight years,” Muldoon adds.

Amnet is the programmatic unit of Amplifi, which is the investment division of Dentsu Aegis Group. Muldoon had been the CEO and Co-Founder of Accordant Media, which Dentsu acquired in 2016.

There is so much data available to marketers that it can’t be humanly managed and understood, according to Muldoon. “Let’s understand also that data helps us across the whole advertising process. For advertisers we’re trying to help marketers reach their most important audiences toward engagement that will drive lifetime value of a customer relationship.”

In addition to using data to better comprehend consumers, the same information can help to determine their sentiments toward privacy issues. Working with Dentsu’s Merkle division “we’re really focusing on structuring audiences for people based marketing that are specific and valuable to the capabilities within Dentsu.”

That is a two-fold process, starting with structuring the audience and identifying the best audience segment, then in real time figuring out “how do you make a decision in the moment as to whether or not that appealing audience segment is available to be engaged with,” says Muldoon.

Amnet also employs data to reach and engage with consumers “at a tasteful frequency so that we respect consumers and also deliver the message that’s most impactful for the advertiser.”

Asked about privacy concerns, Muldoon notes that IAB attendees—from agencies to platforms, publishers to advertisers—take consumer privacy very seriously.

“We all value the ongoing relationship that marketers have with their customers and the consumers and the importance of respecting that relationship, making it specific and personal between the consumer and the brand and creating an environment that both we as consumers celebrate the brands that we choose to interact with and support their businesses as appropriate.”

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.

Six months ago, multichannel video demand-side platform Amobee acquired Videology. Now the former describes itself as a video and linear-TV tool to allow advertisers to plan against and deliver campaigns “against really any format that they want to deliver, which could be display, mobile, social. But also into connected TV and linear TV,” the VP of Global Business Development says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

“With Videology, we really get increased focus and driving increased demand through our linear product and driving convergence between linear TV and digital by connected television devices.”

Amobee provides both supply partners like broadcasters and agencies a broadcast platform “to apply data to make their linear plans smarter,” Rogers says. It’s driven by what Rogers calls “the Amobee advanced-TV brain” as linear TV budgets migrate to connected TV.

“The dollars are starting flow as seamlessly as possible right now from one format to another, with data as sort of the underlying feed and baseline.”

As convergence develops, Amobee considers traditional supply-side platforms as very important partners. “What we need to work with them on is making their connected-TV inventory look like linear TV inventory for planning and execution purposes.”

Rogers alludes to a large agency client that uses the company’s linear platform to make its plans efficient against data Amobee provides. “That’s got to be at the show level, there’s daypart considerations, all those different things. Right now in connected TV you sort of see it at the broadcaster level.

“What we need to do is upgrade our integrations with them to make sure that connected TV starts to look like linear to drive that convergence. Not necessarily making digital budgets into connected TV. That’s the convergence that we’re really starting to see.”

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.

Like many companies in advertising and media, Adobe is “seeing more and more that customers want to be working with their own first-party data,” Hammerman adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

“What that starts to bring up is PII, and whether we work with PII or not. We’ve been working a lot to think about how we can work both with, we’ll reference as third-party data, cookie data, unknown data, as well as being able to work with first party data.”

Enter the Adobe Experience Platform. Hammerman describes the technology as being about “the normalization and ingestion of data, along with semantics and controls that allow for the labeling and usage of data along with the democratization of data without the concerns of compliance.”

It’s powered by “a very strong overlay of AI,” which in Adobe’s case goes by the name Sensei. As Adobes AI foundation, the technology “really starts to look at things like what do you with that identity. How to do you look at further segmentation and data science in a very deep and meaningful and broad way.”

According to Hammerman, Adobe has 300 engineers dedicated to AI.

“What we’ve seen in data across the board is that the demand for data science is so high and you just can’t get enough of the workforce in place,” she says. “Additionally, the speed of data is moving so fast that to be able to do this in real time becomes almost meaningless for a customer, and AI allows us to move at that speed.”

With identity increasing at the core of great customer experiences, it encompasses not just advertising and marketing per se but also personalizing content experiences. “And that’s really ultimately what we think about when we think about a great customer experience.”

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.

“Traditionally, TV for BtoB audiences is extremely expensive,” Lau says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

He cites as an example a national TV spot for Procter & Gamble that costs $200,000 with the marketer’s entire audience “essentially guaranteed by the demo that you’re buying.” But if a company like IBM wants to reach Fortune 500 decision makers, with a target audience of 100,000 people “less than two percent of those people are going to be tuned in to that one spot.”

He figures that the cost of TV for BtoB advertisers can be 50 to 100 times higher than for consumer TV. “And that’s why we don’t see that many BtoB ads on TV, outside of the big guns,” Lau says.

Founded in 2014, Instinctive spent the past year building out an IP and device graph for its account-based TV offering, which launched this quarter and is in test mode. “So we know for any given IP address whether it’s a household, whether it’s a company. So we’re able to map that, bridge it with the device graph to deliver BtoB adds to people when they’re home.”

A client may give Instinctive 1,000 companies to target so that it can hone in on the “decision centers, where these people are, to make sure we’re reaching the right audiences and then delivering the right message at home that makes sense.”

Instinctive activates media buys through a series of programmatic private marketplace deals with Telaria and other major video supply-side platforms along with individual TV networks. Working on a cost-per-view model, the company guarantees completed ad views and provides insights into “how many households we were actually delivering ads to from a BtoB perspective,” Lau says.

By adding national TV to the mix, BtoB advertisers gain another pillar in their marketing efforts along with events and email. As for the latter, with things like the new GDPR regulations in the European Union “you’re already seeing a lot of email opt outs” or people not opting back in to lists.

“So people are looking for different channels to really reach their customers, and this is an effective way of doing it without spamming their in-box or calling people non-stop until they hang up on you.”

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 reality is even in 2019, we still have big-brand marketers and people spending lots and lots of money measuring click-through rates or landing page visits. That kind of stuff,” Sweeney says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

About four years ago, Xaxis invested in its own artificial intelligence platform called Copilot. Even though demand-side platforms typically offer great data and technology, “to provide advantages for our clients we had to go even further.”

Copilot was designed to augment DSP’s so that marketers and agencies can “find the metrics that matter most to their business,” Sweeney says.

“What we’re looking at is huge data sets that you can lift from a DSP, log-level files where with machine learning you can look at all this data and look for those multiple touch points. The multiple variables that lead to a better engagement for a client.”

Thus informed, buyers can be smarter about “how do you bid in a very, very competitive marketplace and find more people like those people that engaged with a customer and led to a successful engagement.”

Across all verticals, Xaxis uses what it calls “a custom outcome indictor” to find the best proxies for digital media success. “Stop looking at things like click-through rates and landing pages and start looking at things that drive to a better business outcome,” says Sweeney.

While Xaxis services mostly GroupM clients working with MediaCom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, it also has a direct team whose clients include so-called direct-to-consumer brands. Those tend to seek to combine brand marketing and performance.

“That’s what’s most exciting is very often you have sort of a brand KPI or performance KPI. But a lot of these DTC guys, they want both. We’re learning a lot and we’re driving great results for our partners in that space,” Sweeney says.

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.

This is particularly appealing to so-called direct-to-consumer brands with traditional digital video assets they can now extend to TV, the company’s VP and Head of Advanced TV and Video says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

What those newer brands have in common is that they probably haven’t had a relationship with a traditional agency while growing their businesses on the Internet with one-to-one, measurable marketing. They’re attracted to things like programming and tent-pole events they’ve never been able to access. “Programmatic really fits well into that pipe especially for TV, which is why direct to consumer is so big for us,” Fisher adds.

As video SSP’s continue to evolve, MediaMath’s model is “to focus on running on the rails that the publisher wants us to run on. A lot of our partners build leverage, Telaria and other video SSP’s, as their connection point for us into their inventory.”

This, in turn, “allows us to connect to multiple supply sources. It allows them to connect to multiple demand sources without having to do one-to-one integrations with networks.”

Working closely with its supply-side partners and TV networks yields lots of “cool things,” including enabling the passing of show titles, obtaining more information about viewing habits, which can then enhance the bid stream.

“Another really exciting we’re working on is being able to know how long someone has been in a viewing session,” Fisher says. “If someone’s spending four hours binging TV content, being able to hit them early with a message is so much more memorable and important than hitting somebody later in a binge session with a message.”

Working with SSP’s “we’re really able to determine how many ads that person has seen and use that to determine bidding.” Fisher describes the strategy as “this is what our outcomes are, this is where we want to be spending, but make sure we’re surfacing the right message and the right creative at the right time for that person, without needing to set up a separate strategy for video, and a separate strategy for TV and a separate strategy for display. Letting it all talk to each other, letting it all optimize across full funnel.”

Asked about the use of custom creative at various points in the purchase funnel, Fisher recommends that marketers use the same creative spots in connected TV as in linear.

While MediaMath isn’t seeing 10,000 different versions of a piece of creative, “some of our smarter clients are saying that after first impression happens with that mass-market creative, then start focusing more on driving a message for that specific user based on what we know about that user and their online behaviors.”

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.

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.

Like many in the industry, Watson Advertising believes there are too many tech players. With lots of partners in the digital media supply chain, there’s “lots of opportunities for things to potentially go wrong,” says Jeremy Hlavacek, the agency’s Head of Global Automated Monetization.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Hlavacek talks about wanting to trim away needless duplication while being sensitive to competitive realities.

“I think it is a complicated issue though, because you are at some point kind of digging into the real meat of how companies operate, and they are private companies, so I think there should be a little bit of a balance there,” says Hlavacek. “I for one would love to see a simpler, less complex supply chain, really making sure that the companies are adding value every step of the way.”

Formerly known as The Weather Company before its acquisition by IBM, Watson Advertising’s media holdings attract an audience that can be reached with dynamic ad insertion informed by weather conditions and other factors. The Weather Channel’s digital editorial team was nominated last year for two Emmy Awards for investigative series about the toxicity of Lake Okeechobee in Florida and child labor on Mexican coffee plantations, for which it partnered with Telemundo.

“We’re at a really interesting moment at Watson Advertising where we’ve got traditional publishing assets but we’ve also got a lot of new technology and data assets that make us more like a platform company,” says Hlavacek. “We also have an emerging data business where we’re now taking our weather and location data off of our properties and selling that to marketers.”

Partnering with IBM provides access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence, which links back to the issue of supply chain efficiency. Besides using AI to power a marketing planning tool called Lucy and a separate product for programmatic bidding, Watson’s voice and language-detection skills are being put to use to improve transparency.

“As marketers start to think about context and fake news and do they really want to be associated with the top story on a home page? Using some of Watson’s contextual tools could be very really interesting for them,” says Hlavacek.

Summing up his view of the supply chain, he hopes a year from now that the industry finds “the right level of comfort with all of this.” While the ecosystem has had some “growing up” to do, he’s ready to get back to more exciting things. “What’s the next great thing? Is it going to be AI? Is it going to be blockchain? The innovation is the fun part.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

It’s against this backdrop that Troy Young, Global President, Hearst Digital Media, views the ever-evolving role of the Interactive Advertising Bureau during a time of what he calls “incredible” change.

“I’m an advocate of the IAB because I think it plays an important role in the community, in education, our relationship with government,” Young says in this interview with Beet.TV at the organization’s Annual Leadership Meeting. Trying to figure out what comes next “is really complicated because marketing is so complicated right now.”

He refers to remarks by IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg about how “direct brands” have forged a new path, veering away from what Young describes as “industrialized communication through marketer to agency to publisher to consumer.” Now a new generation of companies is “empowered by the cloud and everything on demand to create direct relationships with consumers and sell products that people value,” he says.

“Everybody’s a content marketer right now and everybody needs close proximity to data. For a company like ours, how does that change us?”

Not that long ago, owning Hearst titles like Cosmopolitan, Country Living, ELLE and Esquire and housing them under the same roof as Rodale’s Bicycling, Men’s Health, Prevention, and Runner’s World would have meant more than adequate clout in the market. Now it’s more about speed, ease of use for advertisers and being as powerful as logging into the Facebook interface to buy ads.

“We have to react to that reality as a publisher. We define trends and understand consumers and create audiences. But we have to refactor our ad offering, essentially our market offering, to deal with the new realities,” Young says.

Hearst continues to enhance its programmatic capabilities while mapping user buyer behaviors and help brands produce content, which takes time and investment.

“We really have to listen to our customers and figure out how we can make selling a complex product much easier, because if you’re buying on Instagram it’s really easy today and I think that’s the reality we have to compete with.”

Buyers “still love our brands,” Young adds. “The buy-side loves our sophistication in creating content. “What we’re really focused on is how do we help marketers around the idea of actions. There’s no doubt that the entire market is becoming more performance oriented.”

It helps to “eat our own dog food” by creating content that “sells product and we make money doing that. We’re keenly aware of what leads to a transaction and it’s that insight that we create by doing it ourselves that we sell to marketers.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

Nowadays, the company’s ad offering encompasses Xbox, Outlook and a whole lot more.

So Microsoft enlisted AppNexus to be its supply-side platform (SSP), the software ued to automate the sale of a publisher’s ads at scale.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Microsoft monetisation director Kevin O’Donnell explains key considerations for the company when making its SSP decisions.

“We need a partner that can go with us in terms of that diverse portfolio, so properties that have very robust, cookie-based, and traditional ways to do user matching to less traditional ways in the desktop app space,” he says.

“The other thing that’s really important to us is making sure that we understand what’s going on across the value chain. So, when you think about an SSP and a publisher of the scale of Microsoft, we want to make sure that our costs are in line with what our buyers expect and that they can provide as much of the intermediary value in the value chain that a buyer would expect.”

The “value chain” aspect is one that has flashed red lights across the industry over the last year, as as sides of the advertising world have become agitated with insufficient transparency over buying decisions, as well as the growth in fraudulent behaviour.

“Both publishers and buyers have taken their eye off the ball a little bit in terms of what they’re selling, what they’re buying,” O’Donnell adds.

“What’s happened is, a buyer targets a certain price that they want to buy inventory at, and then little bits and pieces of that are taken out throughout the chain, and then the publisher doesn’t really know how much the advertiser actually values what they’re selling.

“As a publisher, getting a little more clarity on how much an advertiser values our inventory and understanding where those intermediaries are actually adding value in the middle is really important.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

As Oath sorts out the DSP solution, “We’re very sincerely aligned with wanting to go from a Wild West to a real, trusted environment,” DeVine says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “We want to have an open platform and an open ecosystem where we bring technology that as an advertiser and as a brand builder you can trust.”

Such an open system means advertisers can bring to the table their own data, validation and measurement so that “we’re not grading our own homework so that you as an advertiser feel comfortable with the ROI, the results and the delivery of your message to our universe of users.”

The unified DSP is based mostly on the BrightRoll code base “but it pulls in ad learn and other features of the ONE by AOL DSP,” says DeVine. “We’re cross-coding right now the features and functionality of both into the combined platform.”

As The Drum has reported, Oath hopes to have the unified DSP by the end of 2018, along with two ad exchanges—one for video and the other for mobile.

According to DeVine, Oath is working on establishing “a common interface, features and functionality” between its Gemini native platform and the single DSP “so advertisers have one plug-in, one place to go.”

What Verizon has invested in with its separate acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo is growth. In addition to consolidating Oath’s tech assets, “We also know that growth starts with our consumer relationship and so our energies are going very aggressively toward that consumer interface”

Oath’s mobile-first regimen was bolstered in late 2017 with the addition of live-streaming NFL games, a five-year deal that Recode estimates will cost Verizon more than $1.5 billion.

“On the advertising side, we’re going to continue to push on creative ad formats. We want ads to be great for consumers and advertisers,” says DeVine.

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

That means being “more conservative than aggressive” because of issues like brand safety and being sure that the ads that show up in Hulu’s environment are appropriate for our environment, Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. At this year’s event, brand safety was once again front-and-center.

“You’re never going to see our inventory in an open marketplace where anybody can bid on it,” Naylor says. “So far, the advertisers who are willing to engage with how we want to engage and keep them out of harm’s way, keep ourselves out of harm’s way, seems to be working.”

Like many Leadership Conference attendees, Naylor refers to the strident comments from Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed about how some digital platforms—particularly social media—need to clean up their content act.

“He threaded the needle by saying brands need to be marketing in trusted environment,” Naylor says. “It’s not about trust alone but it’s about reputation and brand safety is also budget safety. People are concerned where they spend their money, the company they keep.”

It’s a discussion that will continue to evolve “and you’re going to continue to see the adtech world play a role,” led by the IAB’s Ads.txt initiative, the Trustworthy Accountability Group and the Media Rating Council.

Another big topic of discussion at the Leadership Conference was so-called direct brands, companies that have bypassed traditional supply and distribution channels to form direct relationships with customers. Naylor says the trend is a “wonderful way to reduce friction and increase a relationship” that is two-way as opposed to one-way in nature.

“Hulu resembles what we’re talking about. We have a direct relationship with million and millions of viewers who give us their time as well as subscription revenue,” says Naylor.

Direct brands stand to gain in the modern television and video world because of more precise consumer-targeting opportunities. “The old TV, a lot of people just can’t afford to advertise in the biggest sports or entertainment vehicles. But they can absolutely advertise and market with precision and targeting in the new game, the new arena. That’s enabling them to continue their growth.”

According to Naylor, the majority of Hulu viewers choose the ad-supported model.

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

“And that’s a huge part of what we do,” Brace says of her position at Fox in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “I think the fact that so many people in the industry have lost sight of that and we’re seeing that course correction happen right now is a good thing.”

She says clients’ expectations are to give them reliable information about exactly where their ads are running. “That we’re doing our best to give them real human attention that can transfer their message. We couldn’t be more aligned with what brands are asking for.”

Brace also spent more than two years in a senior sales role at true[X], the interactive advertising specialist tech firm that Fox acquired three years ago this month in an effort to reinvent TV advertising by giving viewers more choice. Just before last year’s Upfront season—a mix of presentations and negotiations for TV ad inventory—Fox announced it had reduced the advertising load on all of its digital FX Networks programming by 75% in an effort to enhance the viewing experience.

“We kind of shocked the market,” Brace recalls. “That is absolutely about taking that model of reduced ad load and high consumer attention that pays off for brands.”

She notes that not only has Fox leveraged the true[X] model on platforms where there is interactivity, it’s taken the concept to video as well. Advertisers can own a full break or a full-series video without sharing consumers’ attention with other brands.

“And we’re seeing great success with that,” Brace says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you hear more news from us extending that sort of format to other platforms as well outside of digital. So it should be really interesting.”

Interactivity generates higher brand recall, according to Brace, because “the more someone spends time, the more they remember, the more vested they are and the more relevant it is.” Brands have caught on. “I always like to say once we kind of get a brand into the format they never leave because…what they can accomplish there and the stories they can tell,” she says.

It does create more work on the creative side, as Brace is quick to acknowledge, but there are benefits. “There’s always challenges with a customized solution because there’s a little more hand holding in terms of getting creative. I think the people who dive in and really leverage the most that it has to offer are the ones who do the best.”

Brace cites FX research showing that 90% of people prefer interactivity. “That tells me that we’re on to something and that we need to absolutely provide choice for people wherever we can. We’re not going to win by just jamming more commercials into the system to try to monetize.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

“The cool thing is it’s working,” says CEO Brian O’Kelley.

That turns out to be an understatement considering that AppNexus is now one of the world’s largest video platforms. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the company signed as clients three of the biggest media companies in the world. From January 2017 to January 2018, its video spend was up 260%.

“So we saw this explosion of our video marketplace,” O’Kelley explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Besides working directly with premium publishers—more than 150 using the AppNexus Video SSP—one advantage has been its decision to charge “a very low take rate,” which O’Kelley pegs at “half of what the other video SSP’s charge.”

One thing has led to another, and now AppNexus is taking a closer look at the linear TV space.

“A year ago, I’d have said there’s no way we’re going to touch linear, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that these worlds are converging so quickly that there’s actually a huge opportunity,” O’Kelley adds.

Some of the company’s biggest buyers are asking it to integrate with linear TV platforms. “And I think if we do that we can provide a holistic way to help these brands transition from linear to digital and help curate a digital environment that feels a lot more like TV in the sense of high quality content.”

He sees the company’s role as being able to provide “an alternative for Keith Reed or Unilever to a platform like Facebook or YouTube, where there’s really no way to know what’s going to happen next.”

His rationale: “Can you really afford to have your ad appear next to somebody who’s tasering rats on his balcony? That’s just not good for your brand, I don’t care what brand you are. Maybe if you’re a taser brand.”

While broadcast will always be different from addressable, one-to-one programmatic, where those worlds are converging is that “we’re having more and more capabilities, especially through IP and set-top boxes, to sort of bridge that gap. We can do insertions for more and more content down to the set-top, household level.”

He believes the United States is just three or four years from reaching the point where linear TV is in, say, the Netherlands, where “it’s just gone completely off the cliff. So I want to be ready. And I think to be ready we have to start helping those companies transition to programmatic and then to start shifting more and more to an audience-targeted model.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

The IAB announced this week that Schiller is the newly elected Chairman of the IAB Board of Directors. He has served in that position since October 2017 due to board executive changes, according to an IAB news release.

As was the case at last year’s event, when Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard and other brands were outspoken about the shortcomings of the digital ecosystem, this year that role was filled largely Unilever’s Keith Weed. Together they “set the stage at the high level of what the bigger, more established companies are thinking,” Schiller, who is EVP, GM, Marketing, Advertising & Client Partnerships, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Meanwhile, smaller companies are always emerging on the landscape with their own hopes and needs. “The industry needs to work with this disparate group of companies,” he adds.

As regards the ecosystem, media sellers need to keep finding new ways to make dealing with them as smooth as possible. “We have to be more thoughtful in how we transact and we have to be focused on bringing results whatever they are to our clients,” says Schiller.

Sponsored content and the creation of branded content is becoming increasingly important “as so much of what we do in the media business is algorithmed or commoditized.” How advertisers find their way into content is critical for two reasons: It can enhance the consumer experience and “The money that comes from sponsorships is what ultimately fuels in large part great content,” Schiller says.

Asked about NBCU’s ongoing coverage of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, he mentions its Total Audience Delivery solution and how the event has not only always been a “hotbed of change” but also “a great example of what’s going to happen.” The Olympics were the first place that “digital really came together with television.” Now the natural emphasis is measuring all viewers on all possible devices.

“From a programming and marketing perspective, you’re seeing us try everything with every platform that makes sense.”

Apart from the IAB, more discussion and education are needed to help everyone find their way forward, unlike the pre-digital advertising and media world.

“In the old days it was very clear. The brands did what they did, the agencies did what they did and the consumers ingested it. Today everyone does everything,” says Schiller.

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

So far, one of the biggest takeaways from the PyeongChang Winter Games for Krishan Bhatia has been the acceleration of over-the-top and connected TV viewing. “I think for the past few years we have continued to underestimate that potential,” says NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, who Beet.TV interviewed at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau several days after the opening ceremonies. “Once again, we believe that it’s going to blow through all of the estimates.”

As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCU figures showed that 28.3 million viewers watched the opening ceremonies, 27.8 million of them on television. Audience numbers for out-of-home viewing weren’t yet available. As of Feb. 13, half of U.S. television homes and more than one-third of the country’s population had watched the  Olympics on the networks of NBCUniversal, according to fast cume data provided by Nielsen. Six days into the events, NBC Sports Digital’s presentation had been accessed by 6.6 million unique devices–higher than the 2016 Rio Olympics (6.0 million through the comparable date) and more than tripling the 2014 Sochi Olympics (1.8 million to date).

Bhatia says the company’s total audience measurement and delivery approach should apply to any content and consumer segment that is proliferating and fragmenting across multiple platforms along with time-shifting consumption. Given this backdrop, brands want to work with fewer, bigger partners to re-aggregate eyeballs.

“I think we will find marketers and agencies leaning more into this than they ever had,” Bhatia says of Total Audience Delivery.

Commercial ad load and viewer experience remain “another area of huge focus for us,” he adds. Having reduced ad loads on OTT and on-demand platforms by about 30%, NBCU continues to test new formats and develop new products as well as improving its contextual targeting solutions.

“We’re in a two to three week process of researching ad pod length and formats right now to really come up with what is the optimal solution both for the consumer experience and for how that drives marketer metrics,” says Bhatia.

As the company approaches its third year of enhanced audience buying, it doesn’t plan to “reinvent the wheel” but scale the business “and quite frankly making it more efficient for marketers and agencies to engage with us.”

As examples he points to NBCU’s work on facilitating better data interoperability for audience targeting and its automation capabilities. In the latter category is its API through which buyers can access TV inventory on the 4C Insights Platform, which is the subject of this interview.

“We think that’s a giant step towards making the buying and transacting of television significantly more efficient,” Bhatia says.

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

“The swamp isn’t very transparent,” says Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed, whose speech at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting was intended to prod online platforms to foster inclusivity as opposed to divisiveness. In this interview with Beet.TV, Weed says that simply threatening to withhold advertising dollars from digital platforms while expecting them to solve their own content challenges isn’t the proper course for the industry.

“They all have their different challenges. All of them are seriously engaging them,” says Weed, adding that he wants to see “an acceleration and bigger commitment to this moving forward.”

He believes that, like Unilever itself upon its founding in the 1880’s, digital behemoths like Facebook and Google intended to make the world a better place, but the horse of progress has galloped off without the cart of good intentions.

“I think what’s happened with technology is the acceleration of unintended consequences has happened very rapidly,” Weed says.

He notes that even as negative headlines about the hygiene of the digital media ecosystem—both for advertisers and consumers—proliferated at the time of last year’s IAB gathering, Unilever did not walk away from the table. “Not only did we stay with YouTube, and we still are, we very publicly stayed with YouTube.”

Aside from its collaborative approach to problem solving with digital platforms, Unilever is actively harnessing technology to protect its own interests by experimenting with blockchain to achieve complete transparency on various kinds of online and offline transactions. In the everyday supply chain, the company has used blockchain to keep tabs on the path taken by tea as it makes its way from farmers in Africa to supermarket chains in the U.K.

“We’re finding it’s really helping us understand where the value exchange is and the different people” involved along the way.

If the same thing could be done with digital media transactions, it would solve lots of issues. “If you can manage to get each and every player to engage in the blockchain, this could take out a lot of the noise,” Weed says.

Unilever is working with IBM iX on its blockchain initiative, which the company’s EVP of Global Marketing, Babs Rangaiah, explains in this interview.

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

“Blockchain was built exactly for that kind of friction in a supply chain,” says Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing, at marketing services provider IBM iX, which is assisting Unilever in the blockchain project.

Unilever’s effort will come in several phases, the first “in the next few months” being reconciliation of digital data—from measurement to viewability and everything possible in between.

“One of the things that happens when you have so many middlemen is discrepancies become rampant,” Rangaiah says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Leadership Meeting, following a presentation by Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed. “And so you typically can’t reconcile that until the end of a flight, and by then it’s a mess. What blockchain does is allow you a single, unified view of how that media buy occurred, and there’s one number.”

Ultimately, Unilever would like to “put the payment system directly into the blockchain for a seamless buy” before moving on to using the technology in the real-time-bidding of digital ad inventory.

Another sought-after benefit is the high-quality, first-party, encrypted consumer data that blockchain will enable. The goal would be that “each member of a blockchain has the appropriate key for the data they can see, but the real advantage of the system is that you’ll get laser targeting like we are not able to do today.”

Even farther down the road, Unilever could use blockchain for various iterations of television media, including over-the-top, “bringing that all together and really putting a whole media buy through blockchain.”

In referencing Weed’s remarks to the IAB attendees, in which the CMO threatened to pull ad dollars from tech platforms that create societal division or don’t protect children, Rangaiah cites the term “In brands we trust.” He believes what will “improve and enable advertising to move forward is to get that trust back in the supply chain and that’s what blockchain does. This is a great solution.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

“I think it’s going to have the effect of dramatically reducing hidden fees, hopefully eliminating them, and increasing the amount of spend from marketers that gets all the way to publishers,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Leadership Meeting of the Internet Advertising Bureau. “Trust means we have to provide transparency.”

Steps taken by AppNexus include publicly disclosing its “take rate” for its supply-side business, which it says is “by far the lowest in the industry.” It’s extending its transparency on take rates all the way through to the brand.

“So any brand who says ‘where did my money go through my DSP to AppNexus,’ we’ll tell you exactly how much the publisher made,” O’Kelley says.

Partners in this effort include Adobe and third-party auditor Amino Payments.

O’Kelley says the AppNexus DSP, called AppNexus Programmable Platform, is fully transparent for every fee.

“We should see publishers making more money, marketers seeing better outcomes and a dramatic reduction in the inefficient intermediaries that we’ve seen in this space for two decades now.”

He traces the path to opaque digital practices in part to the shift to audience buying in the last decade or so. Brands didn’t seem to care where their ads appeared as long as they were told they were targeting the right people.

That indifference has given way to extreme concern by brands large and small, most notably Procter & Gamble and Unilever, whose Chief Marketing Officer, Keith Weed, used the occasion of the IAB gathering to issue a public threat to pull spending from digital platforms.

“Imagine you’re a marketer. You think you’re buying relevant data but it turns out that’s fraud. Really what you’re spending this on is terrible for your brand and having no known outcome.” O’Kelley says.

In the not-to-distant future, he foresees brands reducing the breadth of inventory they’ll buy, working only with quality publishers “maybe one hop away. But this multiple hops isn’t going to work.” They will also reduce their purchases of third-party data “unless it comes directly from a source” and there will be “a lot fewer intermediaries in the space. I think it’s going to be amazing.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

Moreover, Minoff hopes to see the day when “that will be the only way that people are integrated and we won’t have to have as many people loaded up on the page.” Meredith is working with partners like Index Exchange “who are trying to lead the charge on doing server- to-server integrations,” he adds.

As AdExchanger reports, some people believe that server-to-server integration represents the next step in the evolution of auction dynamics.

In an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Minoff traces the development of programmatic ad selling at Meredith, calling it “a very important part of our monetization strategy.”

While the publisher’s programmatic sales people build out Meredith’s private marketplace business and try to drive up the value of its inventory in open marketplaces, its direct sellers focus more on what Minoff terms “non-IAB formats” like branded content, video, and social.

“We rely on our programmatic teams to continue to sell our more standard display inventory and pre-roll video inventory,” Minoff says. “We’ve made a lot of strides in the last few years. It’s been a big part of our growth.”

Asked about Meredith’s presence on sites other than those of its own brands, Minoff notes that large followings on Facebook and Pinterest in particular remain important user acquisition vehicles, along with search. The company prefers that users access its site directly, according to Minoff.

“At the end of the day, our focus is on continuing to bring people to our sites to become brand loyalists and to be users that come back on a habitual basis,” he says.

Reflecting on the IAB confab and its various themes, Minoff sees a trend in the willingness to collaborate among advertisers, agencies and publishers.

“I think we all realize that we need each other in order to be successful,” Minoff says. “Whether it’s topics like viewability or identity and attribution, there seems to be more of an openness in collaborating and working together to get to better results.”

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.

Enter the Moat Video Score, a new impression-level metric for measuring digital video exposures that focuses on length of creative, plus its sound and viewability, along with the portion of a user’s screen in which it appears.

“Interestingly, we’ve never really asked questions about what we call screen real estate,” Moat CEO and Co-Founder Jonah Goodhart says in an interview with Beet.TV at the the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “So for the first time we’re asking if you have an ad, is it on 10 percent of the screen or 100 percent or 50 percent.”

While it may or may not impact effectiveness, “we think it’s important to understand how much of the person’s attention did you potentially get and for how long,” says Goodhart.

One of the things that makes video “incredibly exciting” right now is that so many platforms are becoming video-first in their approach to content and advertising, according to Goodhart. “The question we ask is how do you effectively measure video. What are the right questions to ask when you’re measuring video?” he says.

The Moat Video Score, which is census-based and uses a scale of 0-100, has early supporters in brand marketers like Unilever and Bank of America, media agency GroupM, Condé Nast, Fox Networks Group, Hulu, NBCUniversal and Snap Inc.

The jury is still out on what video ad experience will rise to the top of consumer preference, according to Goodhart.

“What we know for sure is we’re changing the way we consume content and we know it’s increasingly mobile and increasing video,” Goodhart says. “How that plays out is anyone’s guess, but I think it’s going to be fun to watch.”

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.

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.

The Lab’s first SDK is a takeover of an initiative originally conceived and developed by Integral Ad Science. Called the Mobile Verification Open-Source Software Development Kit, it will help app publishers set up monitoring of in-app ads without relying on multiple SDKs from multiple ad platforms or other partners, as Marketing Land reports.

“It’s our very first tool that we’re putting onto our repository that IAS and other members of the community have given to us to open source,” Gombert explains during an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We should have tools for everyone to use in our ecosystem…to help get them to the same level on the framework side of our business.”

The open RTB protocol upgrade is aimed at being more transparent and engineering-focused, according to Gombert. “We had a summit in Boston two days ago and we talked about a brave new world for advertising and a way to think about open RTB as a framework for the next generation of ads and exchanges,” she adds.

The new version will address user happiness and transparency, supply chain economics and supply chain transparency, says Gombert, who is both SVP of Technology & Ad Ops for the IAB and GM of the IAB Tech Lab.

Declaring that the problem in digital right now is that “the focus on user experience is just not there,” she says the fledgling Coalition for Better Ads wants to create a methodology “to improve user experience and hopefully prevent ad blocking in our world.”

The Coalition’s near term output hopefully will yield “a global realization of the user experience problem in our industry and adoption of the standards,” says Gombert.

Asked to comment on server-to-server technology and its impact on user experience, she explains that while it’s a topic of much conversation of late, there are ways to optimize in-browser technology. As for header bidding, the technique that enables publisher to surface the best offers for their ad inventory, Gombert says the Tech Lab is considering a standard for it even as there are different points of view on the subject.

“Google has its own solution, which is not header bidding, which is equally as important,” says Gombert. “I think we need to think about everyone’s technology stack and talk about what would work for the publishers and consumers.”

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.

“We finally seem to be going a little bit beyond just the discussion of viewability and fraud and getting back to how does that combine with audience,” Fetters says in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “I’m hearing the buy side really begin start to ask again am I getting the audience I thought I was buying.”

Now SVP, National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore, less than two years ago Fetters was on the buy side, as Director of Global Insights at the Kellogg Company. He thinks it’s a positive sign that the industry seems to be moving beyond a sole concentration on viewability, fraud and eliminating waste.

“It think we’ve probably made a lot of progress in beginning to eliminate a lot of the waste in the ecosystem, but now I’m seeing the attention turn back to it’s not enough to just know that I’m getting a quality impression,” Fetters says. “I want to know who’s seeing that impression.”

Addressing the digital ad ecosystem, Fetters expects the consolidation among ad tech providers to continue. “Clearly we’re seeing it week after week, month after month,” he says.

It cannot happen fast enough, according to Fetters. “I think if you look at some of the campaigns that are running today, where you may have three, four, five, six tags on an ad to do various measures or activities against that ad or to collect data. Marketers are realizing this is too much and this is a mess,” he says.

Alluding to remarks at the IAB event by Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard, Fetters acknowledges that marketers have mostly allowed the digital ad ecosystem to be managed for them. But that’s changing.

“Now they’re kind of stepping up and saying how much of my working dollar is going against non-working activity and can I be more efficient with that,” says Fetters. I think we’re going to see a big move toward simplifying the execution of ad serving, how do we get ads in front of consumers.”

It’s a question of necessity, according to Fetters, “because the buyers are starting to take notice, the buyers are starting to demand it.”

He says it’s fascinating to see the expanding desire by brands to build more targeted TV plans to reach specific audiences. And while addressable or programmatic TV “may be not quite scalable today, it certainly is not stopping the same idea of using data to build television-based audience in a new way.”

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.