As far as what’s currently working, Anson says that both devices and glass-level insights are moving the dial because they allow for scalable footprints.

“More than ever targeting is allowing buying teams and advertisers to understand the incrementality of OTT off of their TV plan,” says Anson. “More so than just competitive conquesting or sequential messaging, really understanding how OTT acts as a complement to your linear TV plan and the devices and the platforms and the glass companies are allowing us to do that through platform tools that they’re investing in or their existing ACR tech.”

For MAGNA, the approach to the marketplace started with platforms, partnering with companies like Amazon, Roku and Samsung, and investing in publisher-direct relationships. Connecting directly with publishers has been particularly fruitful.

“As platforms and DSPs and SSPs come and go, the publisher of the agency is what’s going to be standing at the end of the day.” Anson says.

Looking ahead, Anson suggests that performance and distribution of OTT should be weighed as a complement to a traditional plan. It first must be proven out as a media channel and a new definition of television in order to further invest in it. Anson cites Viacom’s purchase of Pluto as an indicator that the next year will likely bring more consolidation as we dive further into the streaming war.

“I think over the next year we’re going to see a lot more acquisitions and mergers,” says Anson. “People are finding their footing in what they want their distribution endpoints to be and their holistic video offering to be.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 202, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January.  The series is presented by Samsung Ads.  For more videos please visit this page. 

Amid the TV Upfront negotiating season, consumers are embracing streaming video options on big and small screens. As a result, “technology is definitely moving the conversation from addressable television, which we’re still talking about, to OTT,” Cohen, who is Magna’s North American President, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We see it as the big, beautiful images that linear television delivers with the added benefit of interactivity, the ability to kind of lean in.”

In addition, Nielsen is measuring OTT viewing “very similarly to the way we can look at Nielsen across linear television, so it is an apples-to-apples comparison.”

When advertising attribution metrics are added to the mix, “we are very, very pleased about the way that measurement has gone in the addressable space.”

Advertisers in many categories are taking advantage of OTT avails, but three in particular have done so more than others, according to Cohen. Those are automotive—one example being interactive ads that let viewers “see and build a car on a big, beautiful screen” before going to a showroom for a test drive, plus consumer packaged-goods and travel. “It’s across the board,” says Cohen.

He believes OTT today offers “a much more palatable kind of ad to edit ratio if you will for consumers than linear television. Far fewer ads, far fewer pods. You actually get the content that you’re looking to consume without a lot of ad interruptions.”

Cohen cites effectiveness studies that Magna has done and notes that some of OTT’s attributes have not been lost on traditional TV providers, some of whom are “taking a page out of that playbook to reduce the ad loads on their platforms as well.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“What’s remarkable about what NBC is doing in partnership with us is they’re literally letting you buy what you want,” Gordon adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you only want late night on Bravo, you can buy that. And that’s never been enabled before in TV.”

Gordon, whose background includes stints at Lowe, Mediacom, Initiative and Magna Global, was referring to the recent integration of Adobe Advertising Cloud TV and NBCUniversal’s entire portfolio of broadcast and cable television.

The concept behind the integration is that data about TV viewers “is just data if it doesn’t have inventory to decision against,” says Gordon, who left Magna for TubeMogul in 2015 before its acquisition by Adobe, as Advertising Age reports. “The more accurate depiction of the inventory that’s out there that’s loaded into the tool, the better plan that is going to be built.”

While it’s not programmatic in the sense of real-time bidding for inventory, “we are taking major steps forward to make the process a lot more automated.”

Using a host of data, “We can identify very specific things, visitors to your site that took a particular action. We can match that to TV viewership and tell you how a very narrow audience behaves in TV,” Gordon explains.

Buyers using Adobe’s platform “get a live look” into all inventory on NBC’s networks and can propose a purchase order for what best matches their clients’ TV audience targets.

Until now, buyers worked with “a ranker in one hand and a phone in the other. You bought big portfolios of inventory across multiple networks. You bought broad rotations.”

Gordon spent most of his career in TV and “loves” the medium. But he’s very sensitive to the chasm that has existed between the viewing experiences available to consumers and the way the industry does business.

“The TV viewing experience is as good as it’s ever been. But the way TV is planned and bought and sold hasn’t transformed in the same way that the viewing experience has transformed.”

He praises collaborative efforts like the OpenAP audience targeting consortium launched by Fox, Turner and Viacom, of which NBCU is a recent participant. “TV inventory is a very precious resource and the attention of consumers is extremely precious. In TV we’ve spent those resources poorly.”

Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.

“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”

Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.

“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.

As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.

“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?

“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”

At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.

“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”

OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”

When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”

That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”

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.

So it was when Comcast presented a panel at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity featuring Amplifi US’s Lucas Cridland, Magna’s David Cohen and David Penksi of Publicis Media Exchange. Moderated by Matt Spiegel of MediaLink, the discussion tended to underscore the reality that while agencies would like to move faster on their clients’ behalf, many aspects of measurement just take time to coalesce.

First the metaphors from Cridland, who is President of Amplifi US, with regard to measurement challenges. “A game of football or soccer isn’t as interesting without a referee,” said Cridland. “And for the moment we have different tools and different rules and different referees trying to adjudicate what is essentially the same game.” And there’s nothing wrong with different tools, Cridland added, noting that golfers use different clubs on different holes.

Cohen, who is President of Magna North America, said that agencies are always juggling “tradeoffs” from one platform to another and trying to understand the implications for clients.

“For lack of a better one, Nielsen DAR is a kind of equalizer for today,” he said. “We see today 30% of video consumption is not linear, going up to 40% by 2021. So this is a thing that is not going away, is growing.”

Penski, who is CEO of Publicis Media Exchange Americas, opined that his industry has a tendency to swing pendulums from one direction to another quite quickly. It’s not always a good thing, particularly regarding audience targeting—say, “Mothers who are exactly 33 years old, live in these two states with this many children. “We have a tendency to move far one way. There’s a line we need to draw. It goes back to scale. Sometimes what we’re doing now is going the other way.”

Asked by Spiegel why agencies seem to be wrestling with producing a great number of creative iterations, Penski gave them credit for what they have been able to achieve.

“Not that long ago, a marketer might do 6 to 20 ad spots and now it’s 600. The problem is we want 6,000. It’s improving and I think it’s moving almost as fast as the media side. I’ve definitely seen huge progress within the last two years,” said Penski.

When the discussion turned to walled gardens and the resources required to figure out and transact with them, Cridland said it just takes time. “Not all of our clients are saying you can have more resource to investigate this and fund it,” Cridland said. “Everybody believes that digital addressability is going to take labor and people out of the equation. At this moment in time, we’re nowhere near that because it’s increasingly complex.”

Asked whether Magna will embrace Facebook’s going Hollywood, Cohen said “Definitely” because it provides more opportunities to reach audiences at scale.

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

This is why the company “is very focused on using data and interactivity to boost the value of the advertising that the consumer sees on our platform,” Rosenberg says in an interview with Beet.TV during a break at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We feel ad loads are likely to go down, and so ad value has to go up.”

Roku has a three-pronged approach to its ad business, starting with its endemic vertical that works with companies like HBO, Hulu, Netflix and others to garner more downloads and subscribers and to sell more movies. Second is its outreach to brand marketers “who are focused on the fact that TV viewers are moving their TV time to devices like Roku and they need to follow with their investments,” Rosenberg explains.

The third part of Roku’s ad business is its platform strategy, wherein it makes the technology and data originally built for its own networks available to publishers on its platform. “It’s more of an ecosystem enablement strategy,” says Rosenberg.

The recent expansion of Roku’s partnership with IPG’s Magna is the fruit of Roku’s efforts to develop the programmatic tools, data, its DMP and ad stack—all of which are necessary for more advanced advertising. In a separate interview with Beet.TV, Amanda Medeiros Kigel, Magna’s VP of Partner Innovation, says the exclusive arrangement provides advanced targeting “that we really don’t have access to with other partners” in the over-the-top TV space.

“The Magna partnership is really about creating a tighter, deeper link between the two companies so that Magna can bring those capabilities to their clients,” says Rosenberg. “Programmatic is a big part of the relationship as well because as you infuse more and more data into a transaction from the buy side and the sell side, you really need programmatic pipes to transact it properly.”

Roku’s free, ad-supported collection of apps is now the fastest-growing segment on its platform in terms of app count and growth of usage, according to Rosenberg. “Free is clearly still very important to our viewers and to OTT viewers,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.