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.”

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.

“What we’ve done is we’ve created a further opportunity beyond enhanced ads at scale for brands to buy household addressable and targeted ads across the entire OTT landscape,” says Jacqueline Corbelli, who is Founder, Chairman and CEO of BrightLine.

In so doing, BrightLine has focused exclusively on major broadcast and cable networks, building a national footprint for full scale across the likes of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, A&E, AMC, Turner and Viacom, among others. Hulu, which represents approximately 70% of ad-supported streaming, is a “very important partner,” Corbelli says in this interview with Beet.TV.

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 delivered 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.

“In addition to providing enhanced ads, we are now able to provide a targeting and household addressable solution that is as simple to buy as a thirty-second commercial has been all these years,” says Corbelli.

Because of the way that BrightLine has brought its new technology to market and the data it is able to collect, it can map devices to a home and create “a now 68-million household graph that allows for this type of targeting to occur. And the reason it’s important is it’s a reach extension for household addressable that is bought on the linear side of the TV equation. It brings that OTT layer to the opportunity for brands to get increasingly targeted.

“We talk about one to one. But in the home and where TV is concerned, household addressability is really a much more appropriate way, as advertisers believe, to reach their audience. And that’s what we’ve built,” says Corbelli.

This segment is from a Beet.TV 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.”