In this interview with Beet.TV, Smith acknowledges the complexity of the programmatic transaction path and talks about efforts by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the trade organization TrustX to give premium digital publishers more control over things like fees and fraud.

Digital transparency will be one of the main subjects under discussion at the DMEXCO 2017 advertising and media trade show that takes place in Cologne, Germany on Sept. 13 and 14.

According to Smith, who is SVP, Revenue Platforms & Operations at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, transparency into pricing of digital media raises is not something on which all players agree.

“Does everyone have the right to full transparency on pricing? Does the publisher, does the advertiser?” asks Smith. “That is a debated topic actually. It’s unclear if there’s uniformity in terms of everyone feeling that the information about pricing should be revealed to all.”

On the issue of who ends up selling publishers’ inventory, Smith praises the IAB initiative called ads.txt, an effort to enable publishers to restrict supply side platforms from re-listing/reselling their inventory. “It’s greatly important and I recommend publishers adopt it,” Smith says.

As for digital ad creative, a lot of ad fraud occurs when a programmatic buyer purchases an impression on a publisher “and several hops away from the series of buyers is someone committing fraud and redirecting a browser, hijacking a browser it’s called,” he says. Solving this would require “having transparency into who the buyers are all the way through to the end and what ad they’re serving.”

Smith terms TrustX critically important to publishers and advertisers as it seeks to help create an auction technology that would discontinue the outsourcing of advertising auctions to tech firms. The result would be a shared platform for the auctioning of media.

Like other media companies, Hearst seeks flexibility in the way its advertisers want to do business. The company still uses traditional insertion orders and “we have a multitude of programmatic fulfillment channels, a series of open exchange channels, private exchange channels, private auction preferred deals, programmatic direct,” Smith says. “We accommodate our advertisers fully.”

This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Eight out of 10 marketers surveyed for the IAB “said they increased their spending on original digital video because of the NewFronts in 2016,” says Anna Bager, SVP and General Manager, Mobile and Video. The new research underscores a “pivotal change in the expand around video.”

While over-the-top and mobile device viewing are big drivers of the expanded investments, “It’s really the whole ecosystem. Marketers are getting that,” Bager says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Original digital video is gaining a greater share of total digital video budgets—its slice of the pie reaching 47% from 45% in 2016, according to the IAB research. Native advertising is increasingly a key part in these original digital video buys, accounting for 42% of investment, up from 32% the previous year.

What remains a “tricky” part of the digital video experience is discoverability, or how consumers find desirable content when there is so much out there, according to a separate study by the IAB.

“There’s so much great content out there, but how do you find it and how do you search between the different platforms” will be the subject of additional research, Bager says.

She believes the solution for consumers might turn out to be mobile. “I think that the phone is potentially going to transform into our set-top box and through that we can search and find the content that we need.”

Video discoverability “is something we need to improve,” she says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

“We’ve got a really high bar to get past in 2017,” says Rich Sutton, CRO of the more than century old publisher “gets it in the digital age.”

That realization led to a partnership between Trusted Media Brands and Arcade Creative Group, the creative and marketing agency born from Sony Music. “They’re masters at video storytelling,” Sutton says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Digital Content NewFronts.

The publisher of such venerable titles as Reader’s Digest took to the NewFronts to announce seven new video series aligned not only with RD but also with its Taste of Home and The Family Handyman/Haven Home Media properties. To meet demand for marketers’ increased appetite for video advertising and integrated brand campaign options, Trusted Media Brands will add more than 25 new roles to its digital team.

Citing the heritage of the company formerly known as The Reader’s Digest Association, Sutton credits its growth directly to content. “The more we produce, the more people like it,” he says.

Among other things, going digital-first has given the company a platform for the company to “get a read on” stories before they appear in print. This helps to explain why Trusted Media Brands’ newsstand sales are up by double digits while other magazines are down by double digits, according to Sutton.

Asked to look ahead 12 months, Sutton says, “My wish list is that we double down and we go to 130 custom videos a year from now and that we do some great work together with our friends at Arcade Creative Group.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

“The big picture for us is really moving toward the big screen, no matter what that big screen is,” says Newsy GM Blake Sabatinelli. “Really giving people that ten-foot screen and saying, ‘lean back, watch the news and learn something and get a better understanding of the world around you.’ That’s our big goal.”

Nearing its ninth anniversary, Newsy knows it needs to gain a deep foothold with over-the-top viewers “because that’s where the industry is heading and you’ll have huge amounts of penetration in the next five to seven years,” Sabatinelli says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts.

Newsy just announced three new series, a new two-hour, live news show, several new advertising deals and a new partnership with Tru Optik for advertiser performance guarantees, as ADWEEK reports.

Last year the company owned by The E.W. Scripps Company branched out beyond OTT by cutting its first cable channel deal with Cincinnati Bell. Newsy was one of the first digital natives on the Sling TV platform. “They were looking if there was an opportunity to do something that could supplement a CNN or disrupt a CNN, and we were looking to see if we could do something that could supplement cable news or disrupt something like a headline news,” says Sabatinelli.

Looking solely within the digital space, Sabatinelli sees it “flooded with news competitors,” but in the OTT space “it’s really us, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. That’s really it.”

Having run the company for the past 18 months, Sabatinelli describes his tenure to date as “an incredibly crazy ride.” Newsy has gone from 34 people to “ninety something” this year, plans to open a West Coast bureau and hasn’t ruled out going international.

“We describe ourselves as the better alternative. If you want to watch what people have been doing for the past 50 years, you have plenty of options,” Sabatinelli says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

The theme of last year’s NewFronts was ad skipping, recalls Scott Donaton, Chief Content Officer at Digitas. “We were literally telling our clients not only is your audience skipping ads, but you should to. You should make stories that are worthy of peoples’ time.”

Fast-forward a year in the fast-forward milieu that is digital media. This year “we’re going a little more abstract but a step further in essence,” Donaton explains in this interview with Beet.TV, with the theme of “the cave man and the astronaut.”

This unlikely pairing represents human storytelling melded with technology as it relates to marketers seeking to engage with consumers beyond standard ad units. “You still have to make people laugh and cry and care if you want to connect with them,” Donaton says.

He believes it is at this intersection of humanity and human-created, technological communications advances where modern communications needs to gravitate.

As he surveys the activity at the NewFronts 10 years on, Donaton notes that what started as a conference has expanded into an industry wide marketplace. “The important thing here is as a moment to stop and focus on all the exciting things going on and all the things that brands can do,” he says.

“Some of the players coming in and out of the marketplace, that’s just a natural thinning of the herd if you will and the strongest will survive in that.”

To view a slightly offbeat video from Digitas about a cave man meeting up with an astronaut, click here.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

According to Anna Bager, “lots of deals” have taken place since the NewFronts kickoff on May 1. “The NewFronts is definitely a marketplace. Brands are here to consume content, to evaluate it, to talk about it and essentially in the end to buy it.”

The SVP & GM, Mobile & Video, for the Internet Advertising Bureau says the marketplace theme has been evident in this year’s proceedings as “the presenters are geared up to really sell. It’s not as much of a conference anymore.”

Bager notes a “huge focus on OTT, mobile video and brand safety,” as trusted, safe content “has really been a theme that we’ve seen throughout” all of the NewFronts. There’s also been a bigger emphasis on live events, a big focus on women’s issues and Gen Z, which is this year’s Millennials of last year.

“Another interesting thing that started last year but that we’ve really seen big this year is the talk around distribution. How is your content going to be distributed how are you going to reach an audience,” she says.

Bager advises people to move beyond thinking about mobile devices as merely conduits for short-form, snackable content. “It’s a long-form video device where you may not consume content in the same way as you do” on any other screen.

“As we’ve expected we’ve seen record attendance” in an environment where marketers can pursue “true, impactful branded content so that brands can be more involved of the actual process of the content production,” says Bager.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

The prognostications of the President of Defy Media will come as no surprise to the company’s target audiences, Gen Z and Millennials, who aren’t accustomed to consuming video content based on predetermined time slots. That’s because they’re among Defy’s more than 70 million YouTube subscribers and 100 million social media followers.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Richman sees the Digital Content NewFronts as an effective venue for presenting new programming. And while he doesn’t expect to actually transact business “the day after the New Fronts,” it eventually follows.

“Just the fact that we can introduce people to the programming, make them aware of it and then have subsequent conversations has always led to everything that we’ve talked about at the NewFronts basically leading to partnerships,” he says.

Defy’s big news this season includes many new and returning shows, foremost among them three titles from its Smosh comedy brand on YouTube: Not Quite Canceled, One Hour Song Machine and Operation: Open World, as reported by Tubefilter.

Asked which budgets advertisers should tap to integrate themselves into Defy’s world, Richman is pretty agnostic.

“We’re not trying to change the macro trends. People are shifting dollars already. We’re just saying once it’s already here, how do we get our hands on the most of it.”

He foresees the time when modern day semantics about TV choices will go the way of the rooftop antenna, pushed there by Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home and cable set-top boxes that let people surf for programming choices instead of hopping across channels.

“What there’s going to be are brands that people care about, programming that’s meaningful to them and a set of people they trust to provide that to them,” Richman says. “And that’s what we’re trying to build here is that set of brands that people truly care about and will go to for their programming needs.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

“We come here because we like to learn what the partners are doing in the digital space,” Hughes says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We like to understand what’s new, what do they have in terms of data, technology and how are the content platforms changing and evolving with the rapid-fire digital space,” she adds.

What has occurred to Hughes and others about the current state of digital affairs is that everyone’s gone live. “Hulu is doing live this year. Everyone is reporting from Facebook Live or Instagram Live and Snapchat Live. So live is a big thing.”

She surveys the array of content opportunities that can help connect brands with consumers and is about what she sees for the coming year.

“Our challenge is to break through the clutter and to be always relevant. We look at lot to our digital partners to help us stay relevant with consumers,” Hughes says.

Front and center for Conagra are content integrations because they “have been huge for us and they really work well. We are definitely looking for integrations for the next year.”

The conglomerate also is interested in data and analytics and for publishers “to tell us how our brands are performing on platforms in ways that we can constantly push our content to our consumers.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

It’s a gathering where agencies and their clients size up trends in consumer technology, content consumption and distribution to “help tell stories together on those platforms or through those vessels or through things that maybe haven’t peaked yet,” says Adam Shlachter, President of Global Innovation at Publicis Media.

The ability to bring all of these fully or partially formed elements together for collaborative building is a far cry from other events described by Shlachter a “showcase of reels and demos and sneak peeks of things that may or may come to light.”

With so much to cover during the annual Digital Content NewFronts presentations, he’s looking for what’s actionable, most impactful and will help marketers transform their business and brands.

This can happen through new platforms, new partners or “new voices” to help tell marketers’ stories and connect with consumers “in new and better and more defined ways,” Shlachter says.

Also maturing a bit is Snapchat, along with its audience, according to Shlachter. Snapchat most recently revealed a deal with Moat to be able to provide a viewability score for its advertisers, as ADWEEK reports.

“There’s no shortage of content,” he says. What’s key is to understand how it works more seamlessly between platforms “because content doesn’t exist on just any one place anymore.”

We interviewed him at the Digitas NewFronts event.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

“I haven’t seen a single presentation that didn’t begin, have a middle and end with brand safety,” says the Chief Investment Officer at OMD. “I’ve seen the biggest rise on the side of brand safety and the biggest decline on the side of virtual reality.”

Last year, Winkler explains in this interview with Beet.TV, you could not walk out of NewFronts presentations “without Google Cardboard strapped to your head looking at the latest virtual reality options.” By contrast, this year some company presentations “aren’t even checking the box, and that’s a function of scale,” he adds. “Our clients need big scale to reach lots of people, and VR isn’t quite there yet.”

On the contrary, there’s no escaping the subject of brand safety in the light of some marketers pulling their ads from digital platforms that haven’t done enough to ensure their content is inoffensive. To Winkler’s way of thinking, there should not be a debate about the need for brand-safe environments.

“There’s nothing more important than the context in which our clients’ advertising appears. That’s what brand safety is,” he says.

Publishers that create and own their content have a “very simple and elegant story” about brand safety, he says. That’s a far cry from platforms that are populated with lots of user-generated content.

“The challenge YouTube will have is trying to combine their massive scale with the technology and human element to make all of our clients feel comfortable about advertising in that marketplace.”

He welcomes the audience-targeting consortium OpenAP formed by Fox, Turner and Viacom because it represents a radical departure from buying TV audiences based on broad age and gender demographics.

Being able to target specific audiences is “extraordinarily important” and it’s going to make TV more effective both for the advertisers and for the broadcasters themselves,” says Winkler.

We spoke with him at the Turner NewFronts presentation.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

Along with the continued explosion of live content streamed online, these are noteworthy trends to Emma Witkowski, Managing Director of global media and marketing services giant Mindshare, as she takes in the 2017 Digital Content NewFronts.

“We heard lot from publishers about producing longer-form content, TV and movie style content for online, as well as live TV online,” Witkowski says in this interview with Beet.TV.

This translates to “the concept of the beauty of TV with the brains of digital,” her reference to grey matter referring to better measurement of outcomes.

Like other attendees of the NewFronts, she hopes people come away from the multitude of presentations “inspired and educated” by experiencing lots of new content that’s being produced by “people they might not have originally thought was producing this great content.”

She thinks the NewFronts events do a great job of packaging content into a short time frame so that marketers can gain visibility into what’s happening in the marketplace. Among the topics she’s heard talked about are conversations that have made things like gender, race and sexual orientation top of mind.

These represent a double-edged sword for brands seeking to align themselves with such topics.

“I think brands need to be very, very careful with it because these conversations are very emotional conversations. The audience really has an emotional connection to them,” says Witkowski.

Brands that wish to align themselves with these subjects need to do so for the right reasons. “Not just jumping on the bandwagon to do it for the sake of doing it, but doing it in a really authentic way. Otherwise, it’s not going to be successful.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

The President and CEO of the Internet Advertising Bureau sees that inflection point supported by two main tent poles, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV. The first is that over-the-top video viewing in the living room is attracting all demographics, and that “everybody wants to be in” on the mobile video craze.

Among Rothenberg’s observations is the gratifying number of marketers at this year’s NewFronts events. He cites a Chicago contingent from Conagra and Starcom along with “what appear to be hundreds of primary buyers in this room now.”

Asked about the scope of the NewFronts, given its inexorable expansion year after year, Rothenberg dismisses headlines about companies dropping out of the festivities. The only year companies did not drop out was the very first year.

“We’ve said from day one this is a marketplace. It’s not for everyone. It’s going to be right for some, right for others and they should deal with it in different ways,” he says.

Scale is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to the choice of activities from May 1 through May 12 in New York City.

“If you’re a big monstrous player like Hulu, you can fill Madison Square Garden, which Hulu did just this morning,” says Rothenberg. “If you’re a newcomer or if you’re a repositioning incumbent, you may want to do a small dinner for your best clients, which by the way is exactly what AOL did last night, a dinner for 60 top clients.”

If there’s one conclusion to be drawn from questions about the breadth, scope and necessity of the NewFronts, according to Rothenberg, it would be “People who write stories for the trade press are not buyers and not sellers so they really don’t know what they’re talking about.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

If the advertising industry maps measurement as a key performance indicator, it we can start addressing some of the issues of confidence “and figure out how to advertise better,” Feigenson says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes and presented by Eyeview.

He cites recent remarks by Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard calling for a cleanup of the digital advertising ecosystem as “a pretty bold statement for the industry.” As Advertising Age reports, Pritchard told a gathering of the Internet Advertising Bureau that “the days of giving digital a pass are over.”

Historically speaking, television advertising has been effective and predictable, according to Feigenson. Using media mix models, advertisers have had a pretty solid understanding of what their outcomes would look like.

But as audiences continue to migrate to the digital world and advertisers aggregate them through targeting, “what you find are there are gaps in some cases,” says Feigenson.

In addition to digital fraud and viewability issues, there can be a lack of understanding or “forgetfulness” of the basics of good advertising,” according to Feigenson.

Brands have always spent lots of time testing television creative in advance of launching campaigns. “We find over and over again creative is the most important variable in effectiveness,” he says.

However, “The way of doing that in the digital world is to test more of a feedback loop against effectiveness. I think that’s where there are some interesting opportunities,” says Feigenson. He does believe that progress is being made in the way publishers are proving their contributions to sales lift.

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.

“It’s a completely different way of thinking about marketing,” Randall Rothenberg says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress 2017. “All marketers are kind of overwhelmed.”

With some two-thirds of U.S. consumers’ time spent on mobile devices, the biggest overall opportunity is “truly a one-to-one connection,” Rothenberg explains.

He offers an anecdotal observation about the extent of change in the mobile marketing world by noting that one of the MWC participants, Leonid Sudakov, used to be Chief Marketing Officer for the Mars pet care brands. “Now he’s President of Connected Solutions. That transition alone speaks volumes,” Rothenberg says.

In addition to figuring out the one-to-one consumer interface, brands and publishers are grappling with the question of how to integrate mobile media with preexisting media, according to Rothenberg. For example, how do Nielsen ratings for traditional television viewing mix with one-to-one metrics in the mobile environment?

On the publishing side, the classic advertising model continues to move to “some kind of post-advertising model.” Gone are the days of strictly thinking of advertising units as consisting of “boxes and time slots.”

For one thing, you just can’t fit enough of the boxes and time slots into the mobile space to make up for the volume of revenue that publishers enjoyed in the pre-mobile world. “The actual value that’s being created is through this one-to-one connection with the end user,” Rothenberg says.

Citing Turner Sports, CNN and Cartoon Network, Rothenberg notes that people will always want sports, news and entertainment content. These are “the kinds of things that publishing companies have specialized in since before the dawn of print,” he adds.

While the mobile train clearly has left the station, its potential has yet to be fully unleashed.

“You know you that you’ve got to start changing the wheels on the train but how you do it, what the new wheels are, what the time frame is to put the new wheels on is difficult to discern,” says Rothenberg.

This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.