Norman, who recently retired from GroupM and is an Advisor to Beet.TV, kicked things off by noting a level of “sturm and drang” surrounding a desire in some circles to quickly abandon the traditional Nielsen demo-based ratings as a transaction currency. But will it actually happen?

Ray, who is President, Product & Innovation at Dentsu Aegis Network, said that it will, predicting a more addressable marketplace in 3-5 years and the accompanying changes in measurement that marketplace will bring.

As a former researcher, Schwartz painted a broad swath of change resulting from addressability. “It fundamentally changes how and what we do,” said Schwartz. “Because once you start getting to person–level addressability or even device-level addressability, the word research is out the window.”

Taking its place will be a mix of census, response and counting. “So we don’t have all those situations where the systems go down, the set-top box isn’t working or we have an underrepresentation. You’re seeing actual response and analysis,” Schwartz added.

The drawback? Not all households will be capable of being addressed, according to Schwartz, who is President of Investment, North America, GroupM.

Norman questioned whether those households will hold the least amount of value for advertisers. “I think some of them might be, but some of them might be all the way at the other end of the spectrum, that have the ability to be reached in a manner and not addressed. There’s the evolution of technology so I still believe that the top end will have a way to find out how to basically take themselves off the grid,” said Schwartz.

Ray predicated a bifurcation of how buyers and sellers look at video content. “The role of live content is going to be more valuable because it’s going to be tied to the cultural moments,” he said.

Asked by Norman whether all video is “born equal” and how advertisers should consider various screen sizes, Ray said much of that calculation depends on the desired outcome, be it click-through, engagement, response or “trying to change fundamental beliefs about the brand.”

Noting that hand-held screens are of better quality than some of the TV sets he grew up with, Schwartz said it’s not about size but environment and also proximity to what people are about to do, including buying something. “We have to take that all into account. So not all video is the same, but we need to know how and where to use it,” Schwartz said.

Norman wanted to know whether the industry is within “seeing distance” of a time when significant parts of the video market will be traded on business outcomes rather than exposure to commercials.

Schwartz said there is “a desire for a lot of people to get there,” but there are so many factors in the marketing spectrum “I don’t think we’re at the point where the buyer and seller want to predicate the price and the value on the return on investment yet.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But, whilst that strategy has undoubtedly allowed marketers to reach consumers in new places, a growing school of thought holds that it has also created a whole new array of silos.

That’s the view of one ad agency man at the sharp end of making decisions about where brands’ spending should be allocated.

“We are starting to stop talking about ‘digital’ and ‘linear’ TV or ‘print’ and ‘online’ magazines,” says Lyle Schwartz, president of investment for Group M in North America.

Instead, he says, the agency is getting “to just the mere fact that there’s ‘video’, there’s ‘audio’, and there’s ‘image’ – ‘image’ being pages or it could be a billboard”, he says.

Variety previously called Schwartz “a new sheriff who would like to shake up the way advertisers pay for TV”.

That’s because Schwartz wants to break down the barriers which see buying agencies pay for campaigns in a different way depending on which devices are used. Schwartz thinks differently.

“It’s not the device the consumer’s interested in, it’s the content that they want,” he says.

“I think what we really do need to get is to holistic. Forget about the devices, forget about the ways which we do this, and understand what is working and at what levels with the consumer.”

The interview was conducted at the Beet Retreat in the City by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event, the media veteran talks about the three buckets of TV ads—broad distribution, indexing by overlaying data and “served”—along with the risks of not doing addressable well.

The “served” bucket “can be digital, but addressable fits into served, which is we’re sending an ad right to the household or person that we want to receive that message,” says Schwartz. “That area over time is growing and the distribution capabilities are growing.”

Many marketers are very targeted, something has limited their use of traditional television advertising. “They can’t afford it because their target may be one or two percent of the United States,” Schwartz says.

Addressable “allows us to serve those ads to that small population and allows our communications options to grow for those type of ads.”

Another benefit to addressable is that it can facilitate lots of testing, according to Schwartz. “By looking at people, you no longer have to go county-to-county or state-to-state. We can do on-off right next door to each other and make sure that the people are very similar.”

Nonetheless, addressable will likely never constitute 100% of an advertiser’s spending “because you still want to feed the top of the bucket. But when you get to the actual sales and last step, last quarter mile, addressable focused in that manner seems to have a very good return,” Schwartz adds.

He’s still optimistic about the growing penetration of addressable TV, as more MVPD’s warm to it, despite current constraints on the available volume of inventory.

“So I just think that this area is going to continue to grow, and as the economies and capabilities grow and technology is dispersed in the United States, it will have a tremendous upside potential.”

Schwartz cautions that “potential” can be “a very dangerous word.” In the context of addressable TV, one challenge is learning how to use it “in the right manner and make sure that it’s an appropriate use of the vehicle.”

This is because with addressability, “you’re either going to hit the person or not. And if the targeting is off, the person’s not going to get any impressions. That’s why I only think that addressable is going to be a component of the communications platforms used, not the sole.”

This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit.   You can find more videos from the series here.   The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.    

The President of Investment for GroupM North America acknowledges that advertisers know more about TV households than ever before. “The plethora of data out there is tremendous,” Schwartz says.

The limiting factor to addressable TV advertising, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV, is not how many houses but “the amount of available inventory that we can use to reach those people. But I do believe that as the industry grows, more and more money will follow that.”

Targeted TV is different in that there are various ways to reach particular audiences and apply various data “to really hone in and value the inventory based on what your marketing clients are trying to achieve.”

Asked for his thoughts on the audience targeting consortium OpenAP, which Fox, Turner and Viacom began to roll out this month, Schwartz says the good thing is “is that the media companies are working together, which is something that’s positive. But I need to have more visibility on my side and be able to do stuff behind the curtains, you might say.”

Using household-level data from Rentrak is one tactic for advanced targeting in which price negotiation is still done based on demographics. Schwartz cites a “value differential” he can return to clients based on being able buy more of the impressions his clients actually want.

“I may have 10,000 customers but 3,000 drive 40 percent of my business, and I can now look into things like that,” he says.

A veteran of innumerable Upfront negotiating seasons, Schwartz says this year’s was better for sellers than some people had anticipated. “I think coming out of the marketplace, demand was a little bit higher than most pundits on Wall Street thought.”

A major challenge isn’t people shunning TV but not getting good measurement of how and where they are doing so. “We’re measuring too many times the device and not the content,” Schwartz says. “We have to move to the content and the ads that are in the content.”

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Schwartz recaps his push for commercial impression measurement while sharing his thoughts and concerns about the new audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom called OpenAP.

While he thought that Nielsen’s Total Content Ratings “was a very good start” a few years ago, GroupM’s clients were increasingly “rumbling” about TV ratings being down and commercial pricing going in the opposite direction. That was the impetus for the media investment giant to meet with an unidentified network, as originally reported by Variety, to explore the concept of counting commercial impressions and, in the process, identifying six barriers to completion.

Thereafter followed meetings with Nielsen, comScore, five broadcast networks, the Video Advertising Bureau, 20 media sales heads and assorted researchers. Schwartz predicts progress on the initiative will be made by “multiple research companies,” not just Nielsen and comScore.

“There could be a joint venture with the cable operators, it could be a third party that pulls all the data together, or it could be one of these technology companies like an Adobe who has massive knowledge of how get all this data integrated together,” Schwartz says.

As for Total Content Ratings, TV networks are deciding individually how to encode commercials and content by program, episode and device. “I think it’s important for the networks because then they can dimensionalize the value of their content,” he adds.

He believes that more media sellers will join OpenAP, as it needs to be broader and deeper. Two questions rise to the fore from a buyer’s perspective.

“If I put my information in their system they get to know who the true target is. They get to revaluate how they price the inventory,” Schwartz says. “I want that difference in value between demographic and the behavior to go back to the client.”

Additionally, potentially having 20 clients with 20 different audience targets could be a drawback. “It would be really hard to create a corporate buy and monetize the corporate buy like I do now in that environment.”

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.