But that doesn’t mean the beauty brand thinks the internet-enabled TV ad opportunity is unblemished yet.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, L’Oreal’s SVP and head of media, Shenan Reed, a media agency veteran, opens up on how the company is navigating the opportunities and challenges opening up in a crazy 2020.

Improving CTV

“It’s a very important place, not just for us, but for many marketers to pay attention to,” she says. “It presents all sorts of interesting opportunities in targeting and better audience understanding.

“But it’s also very nascent and it has a lot of room for growth and improvement in my opinion.

“Our challenge in this space is measurement and scale. Those are the two biggest challenges I see in the world of CTV at the moment.”

Reed acknowledges internet TV viewing is booming. But she says: “We just don’t have the cross-device measurement that we’d like to see yet. I continue to challenge all of our partners to come back to us with potential solutions.”

Measuring up

L’Oreal has turned to verification partners that can measure viewability, help place ads in appropriate contexts and safeguard against fraudulent ad publishing.

“We are fairly strict as an organisation about verification and making sure that we are avoiding places with fraud, that our content is being seen our creative are being seen in environments that are appropriate for our brands.”

Some of the these issues have plagued the classical digital display ecosystem, whilst many had assumed that TV would be, by default, immune to such concerns.

But now those worries are amplifying as verification vendors uncover evidence of a growing fraud problem.

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— L'Oréal Paris USA (@LOrealParisUSA) October 9, 2020

Pandemic pivot to new normal

Reed says brands like L’Oreal have had to navigate a lot during 2020, a year in which a global viral pandemic reset the norms of advertising.

She says that, early on, that forced a re-think of ad creative that might show transmission risks like hugging, kissing or high-fiving, and brands pivoted from selling to expressing empathy.

Now she says brands want to begin selling again but must “make sure that we are more paying attention to the places where our customers are, as opposed to historically where we’ve presumed they be”.

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— shenan (@shenan) September 12, 2020

Ecommerce and discovery

The big new consumer trend she is watching – ecommerce. “I think the numbers are saying 10 years of growth in eight months, numbers that I don’t think any of us were expecting,” Reed says.

“We were already at a bit of a tipping point for the industry in that so many new payment platforms had come available to consumers to make the checkout process easier.” She cites Shopify, the ecommerce enablement platform, as leading the charge.

All of which, Reed says, is increasing consumer trust and decreasing friction.

But even that may have its down side.

“The thing that I worry about in that space and the risk that I see is a loss of potential serendipity,” Reed says. “We may actually be getting to a place where, because the targeting of our advertising is so good, because the focus of what we can put in front of a customer is so specific, that we may be taking away the opportunity for consumers to truly discover (new products).”

This video is part of CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective, a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The ANA launched #SeeHer in the summer of 2016 as an outgrowth of its Alliance for Family Entertainment’s drive for more family friendly TV programming. #SeeHer’s goal is to more accurately portray all girls and women in media.

“#SeeHer has made the importance of gender equality and diversity come to light in our space,” says McHugh.

When the ANA polled people about next steps beyond family friendly programming, they cited a lack of positive female role models. “Because they looked at the content that was out there and it wasn’t showing women in leadership positions. It was showing women waiting for their kids to get home from school reading a magazine, which, by the way is unrealistic because even if you’re home you’re working very, very hard with your children doing lots of things.”

Men are not left out of the picture. “It was about putting more positive portrayals of women and men in different roles,” she adds. “There’s lots of men I know, great men, who stay home with their kids also. It’s a family choice.”

The #SeeHer initiative has created more awareness in advertising and media about what needs to be done from both a marketing message standpoint and appropriate programming, according to McHugh. It uses a data-tracking Gender Equality Measure (GEM) to identify best-in-class advertising and programming that supports girls and women, according to the ANA’s news release.

All of L’Oreal’s commercials are rated as the result of consumers being asked several questions. “It’s not a shaming game for marketers and it’s not publicized, but it’s something that’s used to learn so that you can celebrate the successes and learn from moving forward as you create content and also so that you can learn from your mistakes moving forward and course correct.”

McHugh says marketers took a stand in the beginning of #SeeHer “and sort of drew a line” by telling its agency partners to only buy programs with high GEM rankings. That line included the proviso, “We don’t want to pay extra for this because this should really be the way of the world.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

“I think that competition is always a good thing, and I think that this new offering at Xandr led by Brian Lesser is certainly going to be a force that I’m very interested to see how it develops,” Karp says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference. “I think they have all of the right pieces to certainly make a very interesting offering.”

McHugh, who is SVP of Omni Media, Creative Solutions & Strategic Investments at the iconic personal care marketer has always been a believer in relevance. “I always said that it’s about the value exchange between the consumer and what she or he chooses to engage with. We’re all sort of attention starved. There’s too many things for us to do,” she says.

Thus Xandr’s research about just how busy people are “wasn’t surprising.” The bigger question is how, when and where brands can fit in.

“So how do we gain permission from those consumers to engage with them in a meaningful way? I think that’s part of their story, which I’m interested to see how that plays out in messaging. I think we all have to address that in an ad-blocking, futuristic world.”

Summing up the road ahead of Xandr, she adds, “They have the data behind it, they have tech, so they have a really interesting, perfect storm so we’ll see what happens.”

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.

Now, it seems, they want to kick it up in to the next gear.

Last year, Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.

In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes the next phase.

‘Not waiting’

“We’ve been in market seven, eight months with a platform that essentially does very little … but that is not where it’s ending,” he says.

“What more can we do around planning? What more can we do around, ‘Well, I have an advanced audience; what if I want to plan against that, what if I want to buy against that?’ It’s really about ‘What do we do next?’, not ‘Where do we stop?’

“This is why we have developers. We were waiting and we were waiting for companies or ad tech to try and solve this for us, and I think what happened is when we got together and we looked at the problem, we said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna go develop a bespoke solution that is going to solve some of the foundational elements.'”

Brands ‘thirsty’ for more

That was something welcomed by a brand marketer on the panel. L’Oreal SVP Nadine McHugh said “working together is a step in the right direction”.

“We need scale,” McHugh said. “I don’t think TV any time soon is ever going to go away. We need you guys to evolve into the future in a meaningful way. We definitely want more targetability.”

Like Gordon, McHugh said L’Oreal hadn’t been sitting on its hands, waiting for technology to be invented to serve its goals.

“We’ve been trying to push ourselves forward while we waited for the industry,” she said, telling Gordon: “So, you should get some of us involved to … during the plumbing stage, so that we can move faster when you’re ready to launch some of these new things because we’ve been thirsty, and we’ll drink faster if we’re in it with you.”

Tech ‘not ready’

Another TV company, NBCUniversal, said the technology “is not there yet” and would take a couple more years.

NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said: “We have the ability now to create incredible segments in OpenAP. It’s come a long way but it’s not quite there yet.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

Several initiatives and companies are now trying to tackle that problem. But what will it really take for TV to become a “platform”?

In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes his vision.

“If you think traditionally of Facebook, Google, even Amazon as the three large advertising platforms, advertising ecosystems, then what is it about television, this thing that’s been around for 50-plus years?,” he asks, before laying out the template: “I think it really comes down to three things…

1. Unification: “Premium television content now can touch consumers across many different points within a consumption journey, whether that is a traditional piece of glass on a wall, whether that’s a mobile phone, whether that’s a tablet. The ability to unify that around content, around this premium experience of television content, that’s sort of critical piece number one.”
2. Cooperation: “OpenAP is sort of an incredible effort that has been bearing a ton of fruit over the past 12, 18 months. And over the next 12, 18 months I think it’s going to absolutely accelerate the ability for marketers to come in and buy television in a more comprehensive and cohesive way.”
3. Bridging the activation gap: “I can go to Facebook, I can go to Google, I can go to Amazon, I can bring data, I can bring advanced targeting. We’ve been limited to Nielsen demography for the past 50 years in the TV ecosystem. But with OpenAP and with other efforts that are happening across the market, we are seeing that fundamentally change.”

Other executives on the panel responses to the idea.

Consumers See TV and Digital as Joined 

NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said right now we can’t really start thinking about it as ‘TV is a separate entity from digital from addressable’, because the consumer doesn’t care.”

She said consumers don’t see TV as a single environment, because these days they consume TV content anywhere, seamlessly.

Accept inconsistency

But the panel’s brand marketer, L’Oreal’s Nadine McHugh, was skeptical. Responding to Gordon’s wish that the TV makes it easy for brands to buy in a “consistent way”, she said: “When I hear ‘consistency’, I think it’s going to take 10 years to get it to where we need to go.

“It’s about where consumers want to consume video content. And they don’t care. We have to maybe be comfortable with being inconsistent within a consistency.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.,This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018.  For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.

“It’s all about innovation, even in years like this when there hasn’t been something terribly disruptive to the industry,” de Nardis says in an interview with Bee.TV. “I think innovation is the key word and that is what attracts so many of our clients to come here each and every year.”

Once again, 2017 is the year of virtual reality “because we’ve been saying it for the last three years,” de Nardis muses. “It hasn’t been yet,” with the exception of limited audiences for the emerging technology, he adds. “I don’t think we’ve yet arrived to the final consumers because of the lack of content and amazingly expensive cost of the hardware.”

He lists three things that he particularly appreciates this year, “even if they’re not new.” The first is driverless vehicle opportunities. “Every year it gets closer to where we need it to be. In comparison to just a couple of years ago, it’s absolutely fantastic,” de Nardis says.

He calls self-driving vehicle technology “a major revolution” because it has the potential to create time. “It’s good to give back 60, 90 minutes of time every day to people over the years. People doing it for pleasure or doing it for work,” he says.

Moreover, “It’s going to change the look, feel and organization of our cities.”

The second is evolution is the Internet of things, because every year it gets a bit closer to what every family needs at home. The end goal is to realize “amazing opportunities for us to connect the brands we represent with some specific moments and partnerships at the moment of consumption,” says de Nardis.

In third place in his rankings is the application of smart data, sensors and other technology in everyday products. He cites the example of L’Oreal’s “smart” hair brush, which counts strokes, analyzes the force used when brushing and recommends the company’s Kérastase products, as CNBC reports.

Such products show the promise of connectedness for a variety of daily activities, “Even the most banal one, brushing your hair,” de Nardis says. “There is a value out of it, even at 200 dollars. But eventually we go down to 50.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.