But what if it could recalibrate the creative works that make all that happen?

That is what is beginning to happen, as a new generation of AI-driven technology sets its sights on the creative process.

Creative ad-tech rising

In this video interview with Anush Prabhu, MediaCom’s US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell explains the new age of “creative advertising technology”.

O’Connell and her colleagues authored a report on the sector, which includes dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and similar tactics, in Q4 2020, covering companies like Adacado, Bannerflow, Celtra, Clinch, Flashtalking, Innovid, Jivox, RevJet, and SundaySky. She recently delivered this presentation on the topic.

O’Connell says it is made up of “companies that are solving for various parts through the creative process… everything from kind of ideation at the kind of beginning through to having things out in the wild”. And that creates two kinds of benefits:

Production – “Create 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 variations without paying a whole bunch of production people to do it manually. That saves money, that money can be reinvested in people or media or whatever.”

Performance – “Does it work better if I deliver a creative that’s more relevant or more timely or whatever, more resonant?”

Maturation through messiness

So, how big is creative advertising technology, and where will it go from here? Forrester’s O’Connell sees the category is an “awkward teenager”:

Immature stage: “We used technology as a substitute for good thinking.”

Awkward teenage years: “Where you’ve got the really cool kids that have leaned in and are doing the cool things, but it’s still sort of fringy.”

Mature: “Technology as an enabler of creativity, rather than technology as a substitute for creativity.”

AI for cultural understanding

The content of advertising could be revolutionized by technology, including artificial intelligence, some think.

MediaCom’s Prabhu says that includes “equalizing” for diversity. “Tthere is a new majority coming in that is more diverse, more in-tune with what we see America as,” he says. “Data is allowing us to get to know those audiences and talk to those audiences equally and in a better way.”

O’Connell says that is an appealing theory – but complexity will continue to make the reality difficult.

“You can do that in a very basic human way, but you can also do that using technology, using artificial intelligence to look for patterns in massive data sets that would help just generally point you in a better direction in terms of something like the zeitgeist,” she says. “But I don’t want to minimize actually how hard it really is.”

AI will come out of the shadows

Still, O’Connell predicts AI will show itself front-and-center in advertising, not just in the back-end.

“The thing about AI,” she says, “is that it is omnipresent in advertising, we just don’t know it – in everything from planning to optimization to creative (through) natural language processing and … machine learning.”

“(It will go from a) behind-the-scenes, important workhorse to something that starts to also feel like it’s front and center in terms of the consumer experience.

“And I think we’re going to see so much more there.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s.  This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page. 

In April, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), of which Liodice is CEO, issued a call seeking a consultant to conduct a study to help the organization understand how much actual spend is siphoned off in assorted fees.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Liodice and O’Connell use the language of military strategy to discuss the “information asymmetry” and “unknowables” at the heart of the industry.

‘Seat of our pants’

ANA’s interest was sparked by a report by ISBA, the trade body for UK advertisers, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and auditor PwC,  which found 15% of advertiser spend could not be attributed, whilst publishers receive only 51% of advertiser spend on average.

The figures were described as “mind-boggling” – especially several years after earlier industry reports first raised the problems around “ad tax” and transparency.

“The ad tech community is probably the least understood within the purview of brands and marketers,” Liodice says.

“It’s extraordinarily complex. There are billions of transactions that happen second by second, there are an incredible amount of handoffs and deals that take place between buyers and sellers, between SSPs and DSPs.

“The ad tech community knows a hell of a lot about what’s going on, they understand data flows, money flows – and the marketers pretty much do not. A lot of times, brands are flying by the seat of their pants.”

‘Almost opaque’

The problem, Liodice says, is “you don’t know what you don’t know”. He describes the “lack of information that we have to be able to make these decisions and optimise” as “almost opaque for us”.

That, in a programmatic world, is a far cry from history, when marketers had far more certainty about where fewer ads ran, in fewer destinations.

O’Connell and Liodice both hope a byproduct of the new focus on consumer privacy will be a cleaner, simpler and more transparent ad supply chain.

“Particularly now, as Google is deprecating its cookies and Apple is changing its IDFA policies, the marketers are essentially in the dark,” Liodice says.

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. 

This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the cross-screen measurement track presented by Nielsen: 

1. Unified measurement for multiple screens 

Marketers face bigger challenges in measuring media consumption among different viewing devices, including mobile phones and smart TVs, to get a more unified view of consumers. The goal is to marry bottom-up measurement that’s common among digital advertisers with top-down modeling, said Joanna O’Connell, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. 

2. Consumer panel provides more in-depth insights 

Brands have access to troves of data about how their ads were delivered, but measuring their effectiveness on consumers takes another level of research. TV ratings company Nielsen has multiple data sources that complement its consumer panels, which are comprised of representative samples of the broader population. 

“The beauty of the panel is it allows us to have a representative sample of measuring total consumption within a home,” said Kimberly Gilberti, senior vice president of product management at  Nielsen. “For things that can’t be measured by the data sets that we have, we can fill in those blanks.” 

Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, agrees that panel information is critical for in-depth insights. 

“The reason the panel remains critical is that you need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” he said. 

3. Measurement includes outcomes 

“In addition to measuring delivery, we need to measure the impact. That can be complicated, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it or that we shouldn’t try to evolve that measurement,” said Nancy Beekman, group director of data sciences at Wavemaker. 

Measuring impact includes an analysis of how different media touchpoints help brands to achieve their objectives in terms of sales, awareness and brand consideration.  

“It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content,” said Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence. “We’re at the early stages of developing measurement solutions that really help us understand that into the media model.” 

There’s room for experimentation in achieving  results as measurement will never achieve a “perfect” level of insights, said Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at Wavemaker, GroupM 

“We won’t have perfect, but we have to come at this from the lens of what is the best option for this campaign,” he said. 

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

The session is guest hosted by industry consultant and advisor Jon Watts.

O’Connell  points to important innovations including Hulu’s pause ads and TripleLift’s dynamic ad placement.

She and Watts talk about the state of measurement and the needs for a common currency to plan and manage advertising.

Thank you Jon and Joanna for this wonderful session and all you participation in Beet.TV events and videos over many years.   Great to have you together for the #BeetCast

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service.  The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.

The episode is guest hosted by Joanna O’Connell, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.

The dramatic transformation in video investment is just part of deep dive into many transformative changes taking place in advertising including the resilience of digital media through the pandemic; outcome based modeling, omni-channel investments, the rise of DTC, privacy/identity and the maturing of creative optimization solutions.

This episode of the BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Opik, a Transunion company.   Please visit this page to find more episodes of the BeetCast and to subscribe on your preferred podcast service.

While 94% of marketing executives scrutinize their digital media budgets, only 33% said they can demonstrate a return on investment on their programmatic media spend with complete accuracy, a survey that adtech firm MediaMath commissioned from Forrester found. The difficulty in justifying their media spending limits the confidence of marketers, and interferes with their decision-making about key business objectives like boosting revenue and providing better service to customers.

“There’s so much good that’s associated with programmatic in being able to make much more intelligent, real-time, data-driven decisions,” Joanna O’Connell, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, said in this interview with Beet.TV, “but the supply chain is complicated and messy and hard to penetrate and confusing for a lot of brands and their agencies.”

The programmatic market started with digital display advertising more than a decade ago, and currently makes up about 88% of spending, eMarketer estimated. The computerized buying and selling of advertising is expanding into other media outlets like online video, podcasting, connected TV, over-the-top channels and even linear TV.

‘Data-Sparse Environment’

Amid the shift toward programmatic, marketers face challenges as stricter privacy laws limit data sharing and technology companies like Apple and Google become more restrictive toward audience tracking methods. In addition, the three biggest digital advertising platforms in the U.S. — Google, Facebook and Amazon — are expanding as “walled gardens” with exclusive data about their audiences.

“This convergence of forces — privacy regulation, deprecation of third-party cookies and rise of walled gardens — creates a much more data-sparse environment for brands,” O’Connell said.

More than half (55%) of marketers think consumer privacy restricts the ability to reach the right audiences through programmatic ads, while 45% of marketers struggle to maintain scale while relying on third-party cookies for ad tracking, the MediaMath study found. Forrester surveyed 221 U.S. executives who either influence or direct digital media buying at their companies.

Despite the uncertainties associated with the coronavirus pandemic, Forrester is advising marketers to remain visible with their advertising.

“We’re counseling folks to market thoughtfully through something like this rather than pulling back entirely in fear of what might happen,” O’Connell said.

There are consumers that engage with ads and marketers and then consumers of the content itself. Vangeli explained that there’s a lot of change happening between different stakeholders, whether it’s with the client and the agency, the agency and the publisher, the publisher and the distributor, and so on.

“There’s a lot of pressure happening,” Vangeli said. “And that’s why right now it just makes so much sense for a pivot to happen in the marketplace where we finally break through. But with that is a lot of complications because there are so many business models and legacy models, multi-billion dollar business models that are in there, and everyone cares about only what’s on either side of them, but it’s an equation that needs to balance out.”

This will ultimately lead to some level of disruption and discomfort, and fragmentation is one part of that. TV viewership has increased over time, but a great percentage of that has transitioned to a non-live linear stream. Consumers don’t realize this fragmentation, they’re simply doing what is convenient, so it’s up to marketers to build around this complexity.

At NBCU, they’re dealing with this complexity in three different ways. They’re producing more content than ever before, they’re rethinking distribution, and they’re building technology that supports all of the fragmentation. For the latter, NBC is now introducing One Platform.

“We’re at this point where we’ve had these different strategies of bringing things together from a structural standpoint, but also technology in the advanced advertising space with our AdSmart portfolio,” Vangeli said. “And so the amalgamation of all of that has unveiled onePlatform where you can have one plan, one optimization, one view, one measurement, and it all comes together for an advertiser.”

Interoperability, or the ability of computer systems to exchange and make use of information, is what’s helping NBCU to be able to accomplish this.

“Everything we’ve been building around that and on top of that has all been with this philosophy that we believe that there needs to be an interoperable ecosystem for television.” Vangeli said. “We’re still TV, so we’re only as good as the collection of the TV partners we have around us. So if that’s the case, in order for this to truly scale for all of us to continue making transacting easier on television, we need to be able to be interoperable.”

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

The future of advertising needs to be looked at through the lens of three main constituencies: publishers, marketers and consumers. O’Connell explained that advertising has existed relatively in balance of these three pieces throughout its history, but that is being phased out.

“The balance part of the equation is gone and that is bad,” O’Connell said. “The reality is that consumers now have the ability to get away from advertising in ways that are sort of unprecedented.”

Consumers are now skipping and blocking ads at an alarming rate. The byproduct of this imbalance is not good for publishers, because they’re not able to communicate a true value proposition and it’s not good for marketer,  because they are not able to generate an effective business performance.

But it’s important to trace back to what got us to this imbalance. The first reason is that we have a traditional notion of segmentation. This is most obvious in the fallback of age and gender, but not solely limited to that.

“We also tend to think of things like behavioral signals as somehow representative of consumers and use that as a way to develop segmentation.” O’Connell said. “But consumers are so much more complicated and nuanced than that.”

Another is how media is bought. It’s still bought in silos through traditional planning and buying teams and several other teams.

“The reality is, the way the consumers consume media is so much different than it was before,” O’Connell said. “Not only is it fragmented and complicated, but they’re also doing things like using two devices at the same time, so they’re doing things like simultaneously consuming two different things across two different devices.”

Messaging has also fallen flat. The way that consumers can now access information has meant that information asymmetry, which traditionally benefits the seller, has been diminished.

Simultaneously, there are external forces shaping the future of advertising. Privacy, and the ability to access consumer data, is one of these things that will reshape how advertising works. The cookie is dying out but is still the infrastructure that everyone is using. The way that we think about ad formats, including the banner ad, where we’re hitting walls with growth and considering their futility.

“What these things mean to me is that we’re looking at a future that is far less open, that is far less broad-based, that is significantly less audience-targeting driven in the way that it has been.” O’Connell said. “Those days are starting to wane, and we’re going to have a future that is significantly more closed, more curated, more controlled, and much more driven by consumers telling us what they want and what they’re OK with.”

It would be easy for the TV industry to pat itself on the back and think that they’re immune, but that might not be true. The reality is that it could very much fall into so many of the same traps that digital did. TV advertising could be creepy, intrusive, it could follow people around, it could disrespect their tolerance for advertising.

“What I’m interested in is a future that’s a lot more thoughtful, a lot more collaborative, a lot more connected where we’re following a principal of the spirit of the intent of consumer choice and control and preference, not the letter.” O’Connell said.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But undeniably, O’Connell says, the future of advertising includes video in a big way. But before advertisers can reach their potential with video, the industry needs some re-righting.

“Looking at consumers, publishers, and advertisers, and how out of balance those relationships have gotten, how do we restore advertising to where consumers are less inclined to want to explicitly avoid or step away from advertising? Because that’s not good for anybody,” O’Connell told Alan Wolk, co-founder of TV/REV at the Beet Retreat in San Juan. The solution, she says, is to identify the forces shaping advertising today so that brands and advertisers can get ahead of them and be prepared.

These trends include the changing infrastructure (what will replace the cookie?), ad format innovation and walled gardens. But the biggest force changing the landscape is privacy and consumer data access. That is the lens through which the rest of the industry must be considered, O’Connell argues. Marketers are going to want to increasingly target their ad spend – and are looking at demographics beyond age and gender and other ways to be more relevant to audiences – but if these strategies aren’t shaped with consumer privacy in mind, video advertising will make the same mistakes that digital advertising is still figuring out how to fix.

“How do we not make the mistakes that the industry has made in the past, where we’ve gotten to a place where there is real concern over the use of data, and real concern over how that data moves around and gets transacted?” O’Connell asks, pointing to TV targeted by household and hyper-personalization as emerging areas in privacy.

The solution will lie in brands’ willingness to shape their strategies around this question. O’Connell says that privacy is a concern, but she’s not sure if it’s been “entirely internalized” as to what that means in execution. Right now, brands are simply prioritizing compliance, but not asking the bigger questions that will lead to better consumer relationships around data.

“It’s more about compliance than philosophically, how do we change how we work with customers so they can trust us and feel good about the experience, and we are good stewards of the data?” she says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

“I think what we recognize is what the industry is dealing with right now, which is the very real divide still between understanding of and the skills associated with traditional linear broadcast and more sort of digital ways of thinking and behaving,” says O’Connell. “So for the sake of the research, we partnered.”

For Nail, who brings more of a traditional TV perspective, this means seeing where digital trends are pointing, and putting a sense of urgency on pulling away from what is comfortable for linear ad buys.

“Something had to be done to figure out how do we change what we’re doing so we can capture those opportunities to get our brands in front of those people,” says Nail. “But clearly it’s going to require pretty significant change in thinking about audiences, what data you use, and the technology platforms that are going to support that.”

O’Connell, whose work has been done mostly on the digital side, admits that there is much to be gained from exploring linear models of TV, but that digital people tended to be a little dismissive of, thinking that TV would look one very certain way in the future. Both analysts agree that there needs to be a happy medium that emphasizes the overlap between both models.

“We had a sea of what I’m now calling peaches and plums, which are really really different,” says O’Connell. “But the hybrid of the two is the beautiful nectarine.”

It’s these “nectarines”, O’Connell says, that will keep the industry evolving while still maintaining an organizational structure that can most effectively adapt.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Roku is the leading provider of add-on OTT devices, according to Strategy Analytics, and is also present natively inside many TV sets. In recent years, it has building on that footprint by branching out in to ad sales. Dataxu offers tools ad buyers use to find viewers on connected TV.

In Forrester’s Q3 New Wave report, Cross-Channel Video Advertising Platforms, published in August, the analyst firm gave dataxu a “differentiated” rating in five product categories.

So, what does Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell think of the just-announced Roku deal?

In this video interview with her colleague, Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail, for Beet.TV, O’Connell says: “It gives (Roku) the opportunity to do all kinds of interesting things around audience extension and the like, which is evidently something that they’re interested in.

“For those two things to marry is really notable,” she says. “Makes sense for Roku, that’s a great thing for them to have. It’s going to shore up the technology that they don’t necessarily have, built in the way that the ecosystem would like them to.”

Roku holds first-party data on its users in unique identifiers it calls RIDAs, helping facilitate targeted advertising. Earlier this year, Adobe Ad Cloud began matching marketers’ own audience segments to RIDAs, meaning buyers who use Adobe as a demand-side platform (DSP) can now end up buying Roku ads more easily.

Roku also offers 15- and 30-second video commercials but also background wallpaper sponsorships, sponsored content hubs or advertiser-funded free movie nights.

Just over a year ago, Roku launched a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.

Now O’Connell is pondering the market impact of Roku buying dataxu.

“What does it mean for buyers?,” she said. “That’s sort of a larger question. Does it limit their ability to get access to Roku and the variety of ways that they’ve gotten access to it before?

“Does it create some higher walls, where there were necessarily such high walls before? Does it complicate their ability to do the kind of truly converged, planning, buying and measurement that we’re interested in seeing?

“Remains to be seen. But that was my first thought.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

After a recognition that proxy metrics like “clicks” didn’t necessarily translate in to real goals, like sales, certain publishers and even TV operators are now doing just that, offering “guaranteed” outcomes in return for ad spend.

But, is “outcome”-based pricing really effective?

In this panel discussion Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, Joe Marchese, Attention Capital CEO, and Joanna O’Connell, Forrester Research principal analyst, poured suspicion on the new trend in ad pricing…

Input over output

“I don’t believe ROI is actually the input for advertising, ROI is an output,” Marchese said. “The ROI is what you seek. You don’t get to buy ROI.”

O’Connell concurred. “I get very nervous when I see people moving to these very outcomes-based models, and I just think, ‘I think you’re missing something really important and I’m not sure you totally know it’, and that makes me super nervous.”

Marchese replied: “Here’s what I don’t understand about outcomes. Aren’t they working (both) with Ford and Toyota? Like, which one (brand) are they promising the outcomes to for real? Outcomes are possible on a relative basis.”

Fake outcomes

Marchese and O’Connell voiced concern that, in the new push to offer outcomes-based ad pricing, some on the sell side may be constructing an incorrect causal link between an advertising exposure and real business health.

Marchese said he suspects “spoofing of ROIs and the mis-attribution and reverse engineering” are gathering pace.

“How do these brands that are collapsing keep getting ROI reports that say it’s working?,” he asked the conference.

Attention beats data

Marchese is the former CEO of true[X], the ad-tech company that seeks to make TV ads more engaging to viewers through interactivity, incentivising them to trade that engagement for lower ad volume. Now he has launched an investment firm called Attention Capital , which has taken a controlling stake in the Tribeca Film Festival and plans further investments.

“Data’s a good thing, but we have wildly swung too far,” he told O’Connell. “Attention is more important than data.

“You think we incept human beings? You think your consumers are that dumb that they weren’t going to go eat that thing and then you put it in front of them? (Rather), it’s a build over time.”

Data’s ad crimes

Marchese said modern advertising had the power to play a wider part in consumer conversations than even content these days, because the latter is so abundant and because viewers are no longer all viewing at the same time. But he criticized the culture that data-driven thinking had infused in advertising.

“We had perverse incentives that said ‘We need more impressions, they don’t have to be good or bad, we just need more of them’.

“We had really bad measurement. It was binary – ‘it either is or is not an impression’ – rather than some sort of gradient. And we kind of looked past the fraud and we had an over-belief that data would solve everything.”

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

The Association of National Advertisers and the Cannes Lions Festival started the CMO Growth Council to reinforce and elevate the role of marketing in the C-Suite and corporate boardroom. In this interview with Beet.TV, Hatch gives her vision of what’s been accomplished so far and what lies ahead.

“I think what we’re recognizing is that we’ve broken marketing apart into different components that all need their focus and we need to get down to business and actually make change and action happen,” Hatch says. “A lot of that is foundational, but what does it really ladder up to?”

The answer is a common recognition within the Council that while marketing must drive businesses, it’s also paramount for brands to drive good.

“And so there’s a higher purpose in all of the work that we’re doing together, which is really unleashing the true power of brands today in the world and ultimately helping to impact all of humanity in a way that is incredibly important.”

Whether it’s social responsibility or environmental sustainability, “the roles that these companies that we’re in are playing in the world today has changed and we have to respond to that and use the power of brand to make that a reality,” Hatch adds.

Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, what lies ahead for the Council, Hatch says the power of brands lies in their ability to influence people.

“We’re seeing that our purpose conversations are getting bigger than any individual brand,” Hatch explains. “We’re starting to see partnership happen. We’re starting to see brands say ‘what can we do about climate change? What can we do about issues that affect all of us in a way that’s larger than just your brand purpose but it’s about human purpose?’”

She believes that the communications industry, working together, can wield more influence than any single company or government.

“We have a lot of influence and I think we’re all really recognizing by the simple act of organizing, we’ve gotten together. That’s what the Council is. We brought everybody together and magic happens. It will continue to happen and the conversation is expanding.”

How does Deloitte itself benefit from its participation in the Council?

“For our company, what we’re able to do is actually benefit not only from the learnings of other CMO’s, of other brands, we’re all working towards common vision in many ways.”

You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.

As a member of the “Group of 25” under the aegis of the CMO Growth Council, Lau is hoping to create “congregations of marketing organizations” to restablish the importance of marketing, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“The conundrums of the marketing fraternities that we’re facing today largely has to do with some of us have kind of deviated from the very first mandate or mission of being a great marketer,” says Lau. “Marketing in the past used to be a very, very highly regarded profession that brings great values to society.”

Lau, who is Tencent’s SEVP, Chairman of Group Marketing & Global Branding, gave a presentation at Cannes to introduce “Tech for Good” as an integral part of Tencent’s new vision and mission. His speech outlined how Tencent ignites the goodness in individuals to build a “universally accessible” digital community that addresses the challenges to individual empowerment, community, society and the planet.

One example is the Tencent Foundation, which engages individuals in charitable causes such as monthly donations, bundled charitable programs and daily step challenges and has become the world’s largest online platform for public charitable donations.

One of the goals of the CMO Growth Council at Cannes was to figure out how to turn the passion displayed by its participants in meetings over the past year into concrete action. “It has to move beyond passionate individuals…into an organizational-led movement,” says Lau. “The real thing is not about hastily coming out with solutions, it’s really about being honest to ourselves.”

Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, who is VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, whether marketers face a challenge of process or people, Lau points to the latter.

“Everything leads back to people, because people create process,” he says. In seeking to create a “global center of excellence for innovations and creativity,” the Council must “let information flow, let people really cultivate a life-long learning experience” as opposed to seeking quick fixes.

So how has a company as powerful as Tencent benefitted from its participation in the CMO Growth Council? “Immensely,” Lau says, adding that the company is “very privileged and fortunate to be among the McDonald’s the Googles the IBM’s of the world. But then we must remember that we’re only 20 years old.

“There is also a strong ambition, there’s a strong dream, to share with the world what we thought have made us from good to great, from China, from Tencent, from the so-called first mobile-first land of the world.”

You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.

Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.

That has spurred many networks to rip up and re-shape the norm for what a commercial break looks like, and how long it runs.

A Beet Retreat panel convened during three days of debate in Puerto Rico to discuss ad load and the viewer experience…

The big reduction that wasn’t

The debate kicked off when the analyst leading the discussion confronted two networks that have launched initiatives to reduce ad loads with data showing, in many cases, it has not come to pass…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

“I saw this really interesting research from Kantar that ad load, for all the talk, had not actually declined from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Actually, it had data on all of your properties which was super interesting to look at…”

Peacock’s cut is coming

Answering O’Connell, a leading NBCUniversal executive re-stated the company’s intention to reduce at load by 20% in some TV formats…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really a challenge because we need to find a way that the consumers will enjoy the experience and the advertisers will get their message out, and of course we will make money … How do we produce content that’s meaningful to consumers? It’s something that we’re very focused on for the next year.”

Linear is hard to change

Another network exec echoed recent industry sentiment about the pace with which TV is turning itself around, suggesting that the traditional TV business as defined by its legacy medium may not change any time soon…

Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks:

“In the linear format, we have an existing business model that unless I can figure out a way to sustain it and grow it the way I have to in my role, yeah, it isn’t just necessarily going to change. You have the opportunity in OTT and in new formats to build the ad model from the ground up.

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“We obviously still have challenges as it exists today, I think, beyond just the consumer we’ve all experienced where you see the four ads. There are a lot of technical reasons why that happened. With video on demand, the ad load is a bit reduced compared to linear TV, but more importantly for the consumer experience, there are caps put in place. An ad can’t run more than two times per hour.”

Tech can solve for excess

If linear is hard to change, panel speakers suggested that technology platforms could help the networks and all parts of the value chain to make good on promises to reduce the frequency with which ads are seen, if not quite yet the number of them…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really incumbent on the technology providers to solve (it), regardless of who buys the ad, who puts it out there. It needs to be frequency-capped.”

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“NCC’s point of view is through partnering with the likes of Freewheel, who is really focused on this topic, and can help control for frequency across platform, but then also building scale.”

Viewers are revolting

Beyond these implementation challenges, though, a bigger threat is evident. In 2019, the booming success of subscription video on demand, which often comes minus ads of any kind, is inculcating an ad-free viewing culture. Steadily, viewers used to immediate content are discovering a disdain for advertising they always knew was latent but which has now bubbled to the surface…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“Our woes are certainly existent, but really the reason why (consumers are) fleeing the ad model is because we make it unbearable.”

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Generally, so far, television has fared better from an attitudinal standpoint than digital channels, but I fear that that will change because of the exact things that we’re talking about right now. (Consumers) understood the role that the ads played (in linear television).”

Re-think the ad unit

Panelists agreed that the very nature of an ad needs to be re-thought – and not just in terms of its length. Custom creative and interactivity should all be on the table…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Creative management platforms and DCO (dynamic creative optimization) technology is the most-under appreciated category of technology out there. The things that you can do with these technologies are really amazing, and yet the awareness is almost null in the industry. These guys are (just) playing around in formats like OTT.”

Proof of the pudding

Networks are more likely to respond positively and fully implement consumer-friendly advertising breaks if they can see data showing effectiveness – one panelist said that poses a problem in TV…

Lisa Lutz, VP, Product Management – Advanced Advertising TiVo:

“If I replace my (traditional advertising) pod with two 30-second (spots), instead of seven spots, what’s the retention? What’s the migration? Where are people going? Did this work? Did this not work? There’s always been such latency in terms of being able to get the data and measure it. (But) now (there is) the ability to have data at your fingertips and be able to really measure a few days after you run something.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.

The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

“To think that somehow everyone is okay with personalization, or to think that everyone hates personalization, is wrong,” O’Connell said at the outset of a fireside chat with GroupM’s  Phil Cowdell at Beet Retreat 2018. “None of us feels the same as any other person.”

As an example, she cited two hypothetical 25-year-olds that might have totally opposing attitudes toward the use of their data to better target them with ads.

“So that really is the crux of this, is that we need to appreciate that humans are individuals and we’re not doing that very well right now,” said O’Connell.

“We have all this data and technology available to us. It’s how we sort of tune the machines. The industry is kind of in the crapper. Consumers feel about different ad channels and formats, it’s not an awesome story,” particularly in the digital space, O’Connell added.

Addressing frequency capping of ads, Cowdell, most recently of GroupM, asked “How do we do it? Is it real or is it BS?”

From an omni-channel perspective, “There’s a lot of stuff out there where we are serving ads and we are just not cognizant enough of how all of those ads are interacting,” O’Connell responded. “We’re doing a good job in little fiefdoms of making things better, and that’s great.”

She talked about working with clients in the retail sector, one of which asked her “what should we centralize versus allow the brands to own?” Her response was to inquire whether the marketer understood the overlap in its user base, which it did not. “That might be a good place to start. Maybe the first thing to start thinking about is unifying your data. You can start thinking about execution a little bit later.”

Cowdell then asked about the potential for marketers embracing a service offering as opposed to individual brand managers selling individual products. “For sure. It’s starting to happen in little levels inside of these giant multi-brand organizations,” said O’Connell.

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

O’Connell’s observations are based on research Forrester has done plus findings from other sources. Combined they indicate that “you just generally find the reported engagement rates for the digital channels are just generally much lower,” she says.

It doesn’t matter whether a respondent is 55 or younger and more progressive, where engagement is nonetheless “pretty low.”

Asked whether this knowledge flies in the face of big shifts in marketers’ ad budgets to the digital realm, O’Connell says there’s nothing wrong with being where one’s consumers are.

“The question is, what are we doing with those opportunities when we have them with these people? What do you make of that moment you have to grab their attention?”

She cites shortcomings like “frequency run amuck” and hyper personalization of ads without fully understanding how consumers are actually perceiving such personalization. “We just have a lot of problems.”

Some of the research Forrester found shows that in general, “you will find that in premium environments response rates are in fact better. So there is value in being associated with these high quality publishers.”

What constitutes “premium”? This is where much of the complexity arises, because brands like Huggies might want to advertise in content that Vice would shun to promote “an edgy content series. It doesn’t fundamentally mean that one is bad content and another is good, or one is high quality and another is low quality. It means understanding what’s appropriate in that moment,” says O’Connell.

So for the time being, consumers will continue to lead a revolution while the advertising industry attempts to manage an evolution involving varying infrastructure, organizational design and “lots of business rules that is hard to flip upside down.” She will be conducting more research to examine success stories in the “practical realities” of omni-channel advertising along with her colleague, Jim Nail.

“I hope we find great examples of that happening, because I want us to be able to say ‘here’s a model for how it can work.’ I don’t know yet what I’m going to find.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

The theory is all well and good – but how do you actually make it happen?

Perhaps inconveniently, a key ingredient of “relevance” seems to be another thing about which consumers are becoming wary – data about them.

So how can marketers navigate the waters? In this interview with Beet.TV, Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell, who has also spent time as a marketers, opens up on key considerations.

“Things like identity management become really really important,” she says. “It’s not a ‘nice to have’, it’s literally a ‘how do I resolve to people so that, when I’m doing my advertising, I’m doing it at the people level?’

“Another thing would be ‘how are my different ad technologies talking to each other in a way that allows me to better manage my frequency more globally?'”

So-called “frequency management”, understanding how often audiences are exposed to particular ads, is an oft-discussed topic, O’Connell concedes.

But she says marketers have to put their money where their mouths are – and actually switch on the systems.

However, gaining consumer relevance isn’t just about technology, it’s also about crafting creative, human-driven messaging that can meet the right audiences once you know who they are, O’Connell adds.

“In the digital world we’re not as good at that in the day-to-day with the creative that is out in market,” she complains. “How do we make sure we’re always thinking about the consumer, and there’s tech that actually is giving advertisers those palettes and agencies those palettes to be able to do that kind of stuff?”

O’Connell is a seasoned marketing analyst who also had a stint as MediaMath’s chief marketer.

Her recent work has included a playbook report on selecting ad-tech vendors for an omni-channel strategy, a breakdown of 34 media agencies and an upcoming Forrester Wave dissection of tech firms that help power ad creative.

This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.

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.”

That kind of consensus is forming, with executives promising to rebalance the audience relationship through better messaging.

Still, even as the industry looks to correct itself, it is also challenged to respond to the omni-channel demand – the reality that brands now need to engage with consumers across a wide variety of devices and touchpoints.

The Catch-22? As a Beet.TV panel moderated by Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell discussed, the solution to omni-channel is all about… technology.

How the crisis was created

The panelists lamented that technology capabilities have led the industry toward simply using tech for tech’s sake, bamboozling consumers with advertising – and prompting a backlash…

Essence president Jason Harrison: “It still is really amazing to me the number of advertisers and marketers that pour money into advertising without a really concrete understanding of what actually works. Technology is way ahead … whether the technology is working or not working, if it’s being used for good or for bad.”

Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell: “We have this habit of saying, ‘Because the tech exists, we should do this thing. Because I can personalize, I always must. Because I can target, I will only target the people I think I care about – until they hate me’.”

Adobe SVP and GM of Advertising Cloud Keith Eadie: “The metrics have followed the technology platforms … but not nearly to the point where we’re creating experiences and understanding how different audiences or individuals are reacting to that advertising and adjusting accordingly. We’ve given all of these marketers a hammer and then everything’s looked like the nail and the last 10 years has been about mass tonnage of advertising … it’s not surprising, given that context, of the outcomes we have now in terms of receptivity to advertising from our consumers.”

Fixing pipes with creative

Panelists debated how the way to solve matters was be reconnecting with message, by turning attention to using data to fuel more creative stories that reach audiences, not just for targeting.

Essence president Jason Harrison: “If you look at consumers’ expectations of what they see in terms of advertising, what’s rising fastest is, ‘I want something that’s relevant’. But there’s still a big gap in the way that I think creative storytelling happens in advertising. The next frontier of advertising is, ‘How do we get that right?'”

Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell: “We see in the data that some consumers are totally okay with personalized advertising, because they feel like they’re getting some value. Others are really, super not cool with it.”

IBM VP digital strategy and sales Jordan Bitterman: “You’ve got to be able to build for something that you know can scale. There’s a lot of great formats that are out there – but there’s a lot of clients that don’t want to spend that kind of money to build those different kind of ads out unless they know it can scale because. at some point, the wallet dries up and there’s only so much they can do.  I think the same is true for omni-channel.”

Future shape of the industry

IBM VP digital strategy and sales Jordan Bitterman: Bitterman left panelists with two predictions for how the industry will reconfigure itself to meet these challenges:

1. “I think we’re probably going to see a re-bundled agency come about that’ll be super interesting with media and creative and analytics altogether, and really kind of anchored by analytics in many ways.
2. “I was having breakfast with a senior agency guy last week, and he said something to me, which is really interesting. He thinks that there’s gonna be a real big comeback in planning.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018.  For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.

That may or may not be true, depending on your persuasion. But a 2018 intervention by new blockchain technology could at least improve the quality of agencies’ lives in the foreseeable future.

That was the hope of one big-brand marketer, excited about the prospect for how the infrastructure which underpins crypto-currency could bring a step-change in transparency to the advertising business, speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV.

The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:

• Unilever global media VP Rob Master
• Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics  Josh Herman
• Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise
• IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah

The theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which processes $140 billion dollars of ad spend on an annual basis – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain. Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of the consortium.

Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics  Josh Herman:

“My expectation is that it will be a quality of life improvement. The ease with which you can defend the spend improves your quality of life. The extent to which you have confidence about the numbers that you’re putting in front of the meeting to make actual business decision, improves your quality of life.”

Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise:

“A lot of companies who have fraud running through their businesses. I think we all, as an ecosystem, want to clean that up.

“Our agency partners who are forward-leaning and run transparent businesses are pushing for this. They also want to be involved. We announced the marketers (first) because, at the end of the day, it’s your guys’ money, but the ad agencies are going to also be big participants in the pilot as well and we’re working very collaboratively with them.”

Unilever global media VP Rob Master:

“We spend so much time now around the reconciliation, around massaging the data, trying to track down the data, waiting for things to come in before we can actually spend our full amount of money.

“(Blockchain) allows us to actually spend more time thinking about the consumer.”

IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:

“We think about this initiative, in baseball terms, as the very first inning. We want to be able to show transparency of the money. The second piece is the speed of reconciliation. Lastly, if we can show any amount of improvement in that percentage of money that gets (ad-)taxed …  I think that would be considered a great success.”

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

That is the new advice from one leading marketing analyst who has worked at an ad-tech platform but who also benefits from reams of consumer insights.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell says many marketers are guilty of using the tools available to push too many messages at consumers. Whilst programmatic tools are great, O’Connell laments:

• “We got really, really obsessed with direct response.”
• “We got really obsessed with hypertargeting, I think, to the detriment of frequency management. So we’re over-serving the people that we care about.”
• “We ushered in an era of, really, low quality, which, I think, in a lot of ways created a bit of a crisis of faith in digital advertising.”

Now GDPR, related initiatives and a growing body of evidence and anecdotes from consumers frustrated with over-marketing suggest a change is needed.

What is that change? O’Connell, who also had a stint as MediaMath’s chief marketer, says marketers will have to refocus on their relationship with consumers, so that they can know enough about them to be sensitive to over-marketing.

“Our instinct is to say, ‘I found the user I want – I will serve this user an ad’,” she says. “It might actually be better for the consumer in that moment not to hear from you because they heard from you three times already that day.

“I would love to believe, naively, that brands are invested in delivering good experiences because they see that will deliver positive upside. That isn’t necessarily, always the case.”

This topic will explored at a Beet.TV leadership forum at Cannes Lions on June 18.

This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Overall, the Principal Analyst believes that things are moving from “conversations about how the TV industry is evolving to action in the TV industry,” O’Connell explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

“It’s a massive industry. It was been very, very slow to change. And I think it’s still moving relatively slowly in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. But the energy this time feels meaningful, as though we are graduating to action.”

Because of her grasp of the complicated adtech ecosystem, it’s easy for her to boil things down when the issue is consolidation of players. She notes that some companies are interested in owning the full technology stack, “everything from data management and analytics and data as an asset” through to execution.

Then there are “the other set of companies who, at least so far, seem less interested in getting into the execution game. When you look at consolidation, to me that’s the most interesting dynamic,” O’Connell says.

The bottom line: will execution inevitably become “part of these massive clouds? It sort of feels like it will. And yet if you ask them, some of them deliberately take a stance that it won’t.”

While she appreciates the efforts of media companies like NBCUniversal to accelerate the shift from buying demos to audiences, O’Connell believes that things can only progress so quickly. There’s a lot of inertia in basic business dynamics.

For example, the traditional, procurement-driven practice of “getting CPM’s lower than the CPM’s that the agency achieved the prior year. Which is insane. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s a crazy model.” A model of “rewarding efficiency and effectiveness needs to become more of the norm,” she adds.

Asked whether Netflix will go the ad-supported route, O’Connell evokes the chicken-and-egg causality dilemma. Are consumers demanding ad-free services like Netflix, or is the company driving change that consumers embrace?

Either way, Netflix has made some companies up their game, according to O’Connell.

“So when we are in an ad-supported model, it’s one that consumers don’t hate but actually find valuable. Let alone not annoying, can you imagine if they actually found it valuable?”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

The partnership is designed to provide marketers with a neutral, security-rich computing environment along with the ability to maintain ownership of their data through the IBM Cloud.

“It’s about bringing the power of Watson AI into the bidding process, essentially creating real, cognitive bidding in an advertising environment,” MediaMath Chief Marketing Officer Joanna O’Connell explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and trade show.

A longtime veteran of the digital space, O’Connell ticks off the many attributes of digital marketing—from omni-channel touch points to real-time decisioning, machine learning from ad impressions to changing the way that siloed organizations can be customer-centric.

“But we have to be honest about the fact that there’s still so much more to do and it’s still not really what we want it to be,” O’Connell says. “It hasn’t fully realized the promise.”

Shortcomings include such infrastructure features as “pixals, header tags, waterfalls” and the like. “Would we have built it that way if we knew how big this industry was going to become, how material, how important? Probably not,” O’Connell says.

IBM and MediaMath say they have a shared worldview and the desire to take the next evolutionary steps together. Under the partnership, those steps are:

• Develop infrastructure that connects brands, consumers and all of the companies in between in a way that is enterprise-class, open and smart.
• Infuse AI into real-time marketing decisions across all channels, arming the marketer to do her job better with insights as opposed to reports.
• Delight the human behind the screen with advertising people don’t just tolerate, but appreciate as entertaining, informative and meaningful.

O’Connell talks about an infrastructure that’s open and extensible, totally secure and safe. And one that provides ad experiences that don’t alienate consumers.

“Imagine if a consumer didn’t only tolerate it but actually loved it. We want to be able to do that. So that’s really what we’re working on.”

This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Fortunate, then, that a whole new raft of data sources is coming on-stream to help them do that.

In a panel discussion convened by Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat, executives from advertising technology and data vendors got excited about:

• Audio Content Recognition (ACR)
• Set-top box data
• Second-by-second TV viewing data
• App-level measurement
• Open-network data

Here is a flavour of what they said…

Alphonso CEO Ashish Chordia:

“In 10 years’ time, there’s no reason to believe that every device in your house runs ACR – we’ll get there.”

Chordia says his technology, running on consumers’ mobile phones amongst other devices, has already helped a mobile studio know for sure whether a consumer is in a movie theater watching its movie.

TruOptik CEO Andre Swanston:

“We marry the app data we get from OTT and connected TV with the open network. You get content viewership data, second-by-second, across half a billion unique IPs in every market in the world. For people coming from desktop and mobile, this is what they’re used to.”

Neustar strategic partners head Ted Prince:

“(We have) a persistent key across household, phone number, address, cookie, mobile ad ID, set-top box, IP address, mobile phone number.

“We try to make sure you, as a marketer, can get to the household you want. You can put your CRM file on there, the segments you want to reach. We have 200m individuals. Set-top box data is about 40 to 45m households.”

605  Group VP Gaurav Shirole:

“We’ve been focused on achieving scale around census-level set-top box data.”

Shirole said there is an opportunity to use data-targeted TV ad technologies first to sample limited precision-targeting, before going all-in with a targeted campaign.

Amid this proliferation of new data sources, it is becoming a more complex media world for marketers. Whilst some vendors may profess to do it all, TruOptik’s Swanston said it is important for brands to piece together multiple specialist vendors.

“There’s nobody in the industry can be a one-stop shop for everything, and there have to be the ability to sync different data together,” he said. “That’s pretty commonplace across the industry – you have to be able to work with different partners.”

The panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.