“By and large, if you have a sizable amount of advertising dollars to spend in national television we try and get you into the Upfront, because history has proven it’s an advantageous position to be in,” Chris Geraci says in this interview with Beet.TV.

For a variety of reasons, some advertisers can’t make a long-term commitment for TV inventory. In those cases, Omnicom tries to structure shorter, multi-quarter deals if possible, according to Geraci.

Even with the arrival of digital publishers and their inventory, giving brands more choices of where to run their ads, supply and demand still dictates pricing during the Upfront. This is particularly the case when audience fragmentation and audience losses ultimately impact the available supply of gross ratings points.

“We actually saw a little bit of growth in last year’s Upfront in terms of advertiser spending,” Geraci says. “That combined with what was a pretty horrendous year in terms of ratings performance certainly produced a significant amount of inflation.”

He doesn’t expect to see similar TV budget growth in 2017, “But inflation is part of the deal when you’re talking about a supply and demand environment.”

Advertiser demand for better audience targeting beyond traditional age/sex demographics spawned the recently announced OpenAP consortium involving Fox, Turner and Viacom. Geraci describes the move as be “great” because it provides a uniform metric in the advanced targeting arena.

Asked if he expects to see more programmers join OpenAP, he doesn’t see why others would not. “You’re basically offering something to the agency and advertiser community that is going to be simpler to use, it will be easier to make comparisons,” Geraci says. “I don’t really know what the downside would be of not being part of it.”

When the subject turns to the continued emergence of brand-safe environments for video ads, he believes it’s going to be “shouted from the mountaintops” during the Upfront season. But he offers perspective as well.

“I think that there are still plenty of places in the online world where brand safety can be all but ensured,” Geraci says. “We’re talking about a very specific problem dealing with what is, for the most part, user-generated, non-professional content that has always been an obvious concern.”

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.

“Bloomberg Media is now a majority digital video company,” Smith tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We reach about 8 or 9 million viewers a month on US television. On Bloomberg digital platforms, we reach 14 million viewers a month.

“It’s a significantly larger number of viewers. One could view that as a weakness, but, given the trends… it’s a tremendous advantage, fuelling a lot of our advertising growth.”

The outweighing of TV by digital media may not be surprising for a company that has, to some, best been known as the provider of terminals and stock data over digital wires.

But the Bloomberg Media division is tackling more than just provision of data. A year ago, it set out to create five new thematic vertical brands alongside its core Bloomberg business news – Bloomberg Markets, Bloomberg Politics, Bloomberg Technology, Bloomberg Pursuits and Bloomberg Opinion.

The sites have variously adopted bold designs, alongside a Businessweek site that nowadays mixes regular business reporting with vivid, web-specific visual tricks. It’s a feast for the eyes that evokes something of HotWired, one of the web’s earliest tech content sites.

Now Bloomberg Politics is coming into its own, with five million monthly uniques, pushed by show carriage across Bloomberg and MSNBC plus a co-production agreement with Showtime, Smith says: “Our audience cares tremendously about the US presidential election. It’s the single largest business story every four years.

“So Bloomberg Politics is quite core. A lot of the content is resonating extremely well with our business audience who want to understand the implications of the race on their businesses.”

This interview took place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, in March.

The publisher relaunched playboy.com to remove nudes, and the magazine followed suit in the fall in what was a big move for the company.

Now Playboy chief content officer Cory Jones is busy assembling video and other programming to pitch to ad buyers in the annual sales showcase for digital media. Could cleaning up its act make Playboy a bigger draw for household brand marketers?

“In the 60s and 70s, nudity was provocative… it pushed the boundaries of America,” he tells Beet.TV. “But with the advent of the internet, nudity was ubiquitous, it wasn’t as provocative. (The magazine) was up on the top shelf in a poly bag, we were up against magazines we didn’t feel were our competitors.

“If we took the nudity out, we’re going to be down next to the Vanity Fairs, New Yorkers, GQs and Esquires – the magazines we consider our true competitors.”

Abandoning what seemed like its core content hasn’t hurt Playboy online – playboy.com web traffic rocketed from four million uniques to 20 million after the no-nudes switch to safe-for-work content, the company previously said.

“Being out of the poly bag, it’s a second chance at a first impression,” Jones continues. “We cover things like gaming a lot more, our audience loves it.”

And the new status has given Playboy ample room to embrace social network audiences, building a 16 million-follower based on Facebook as well as touching users of the other main platforms, by producing some 25 videos every week.

“When we upload directly there (to Facebook), we get crazy numbers, 20 million-plus views,” Jones says. “Video is permeating every aspect of the brand. We’re ingraining that in the whole Playboy culture.

“We’re still sexy, we still have women, it’s still part of who we are – it’s just presented differently. It’s sexier when you leave a little bit of mystery.”

This interview took place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, in March.

That’s an opportunity for certain publishers, and People magazine is amongst those showing interest.

“It’s all very new at this point. Our approach to live has been opportunistic – trying to zero in on those moments that matter to the pop culture audience,” People Executive Director, Business Development,  Joe LaFalce tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “For the finale of The Bachelor, we had our editor-editorial director Jess Cagle do Facebook Life videos during commercial breaks.”

People is, of course, already producing video, distributed on its own site as well as through platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat Discover, where it is learning to produce in a vertical format. But live is different.

“What we love about Facebook Live is that it’s the next step in the connection between the audience and the content,” LaFalce adds. “It feels more urgent and more recent. Facebook Live is a really interesting way to celebrate the video experience in a new and fresh way.”

This interview took place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, in March.

“In the old days, publishers’ sales process was just about filling that vessel,” Gawker Media executive director Paul Sundue told Beet.TV at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado. “Now every engagement is like a snow flake.

“We have to work with brands directly to determine exactly what they’re trying to articulate, and come with a blend of programs and deliverables that run the gamut from standard display ads to events … I’m building an interactive game right now for a .org that will run on tablets … to custom video, VR and AR.”

These are the advertising opportunities on offer to all publishers and advertisers in a world rendered fragmented by media plurality.

One of those is the booming video opportunity, and Sundue is happy to give ad buyers familiarity, with Gawker now employing more than 15 people to make videos carrying ads.

“The atomic unit of advertising for the last 30 years has been the 15- or 30-second spot for broadcast,” he says. “Giant ad agencies are built to generate those. They’re not as deft at generating Instagram posts or pure-play content. Pre-roll video enables them to do what they do best, and continue doing it.”

Digiday is soon to expand in to other topics and regions, Morrissey tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We’re looking to launch new brands in other verticals, take our model and tweak it and apply it to similar models to media and marketing but different industries,” he says.

For anyone hoping that may suggest mission creep on Digiday’s part, Morrissey says staying true to a USP is key – for his site, and all other publishers. He calls it “the power of building a differentiated brand”.

“At Digiday, we believe in having a focused brand,” says Morrissey, speaking at his own Digiday Publishing Summit in Colorado. “There is going to be a reckoning for publishers that haven’t focused solely on audience development.”

Digiday ha grown to number 54 people, including expanding its London team from two to three and a growing roster of events in Europe.

Next up, Morrissey aims to be big in Japan. Having struck a JV with local publisher Infobahn in September, a first Asian conference is coming up in Kyoto in June.

This interview took place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, in March.

Newspapers and magazines face a thorny challenge – do they ride the wave and distribute to millions of social media users, even if they don’t make much money from the partnership?

The Atlantic Digital VP and GM Kimberly Lau thinks its a net gain for her title.

“There’s still a lot of people that have never heard of us,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “So part of our strategy about distribution has been about broadly distributing – the more people that see your content, the more opportunities you have to convert them in to fans. Platforms like Facebook, where there are huge audiences, become important in that quest.”

Such distribution is a double-edged sword. Many publishers complain that, whilst Facebook brings them to large new audiences, the ecosystem is self-contained, with too few opportunities to monetize the readers. But Lau sees value, when such syndication is executed responsibly.

“If we can have consistent branding and control of monetisation, the ability to connect with the audience… it makes sense to push as hard as we can on those distribution points,” she says. “It doesn’t mean putting all our eggs in the Facebook basket. It’s not the only source, not the majority source. It’s more about going where the audience is and using the opportunities to convert them back.”

This interview took place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, in March.

“We act as their data management backbone, taking a lot of their offline data and activating it in the programmatic world,” eXelate CEO Mark Zagorski tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “This is the culmination of that relationship.

“We’re bringing together two amazing data sets – the census-level data that eXelate captures in the online world, and the very detailed panel-level data that Nielsen has been known for. It’s something that the marketplace has been looking for. We bring to them the new world DNA of the ad tech world.”

Zagorski is excited about “how we take the product roadmaps and combine those to start co-building products from day one”.

More on Nielsen’s expansions reported in the Wall Street Journal last week.

“We see consumers in the US around 800 to 900 times a month – we process around 30 petabytes of data every day,” according to company SVP Adrian D’Souza.

“We’re able to predict very well what that propensity of consumers on the web (will be) in response to certain advertisements.”

Eight-year-old Quantcast’s two core products are Measure, giving website owners free stats, and Advertise, supporting real-time ad trade decision-making.

He was interviewed by Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Beet.TV coverage of the IAB meeting was sponsored by SpotXchange. Please find Beet.TV’s coverage of the event here.

“Our job is to take creative and put it in the market. When we can be there from the very beginning of the process, the quality of the product we get is much better,” she says. Creative, however is expensive and the high cost opens opportunities for content partners to produce the creative and also for smaller creative agencies to land more work, Reed adds.

The business of a creative agency is shifting these days, given the focus on programmatic and targeted buying. Ideally, a creative partner should be able to work with the technology partner to weave together a variety of creative options that can be delivered to different audience segments, she said. “The creative agencies need to shift how they work. If your agency isn’t excited about getting those audience segments and using them to your benefit, I question whether the agency is there to drive your business or to put awards on their walls.

The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by  AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.

“I think ‘digital media’ maybe a little narrow,” Starcom MediaVest global operations president John Sheehy tells Beet.TV in this recorded video interview at DMEXCO. “We’ve been through a digital era, that’s probably behind us and now we’re seeing all the advances in technology and what’s possible.”

For Sheehy, that’s a complex but opportunity-laden world in which focusing on identifying and understanding audience for advertisers is key: “You can have millions and millions of people which you able to segment on a much finer basis. Your core competency is audience and audience management.”

In September, SMG was amongst the Publicis agencies to have signed up to use a new internal planner, Always On, powered by Adobe Marketing Cloud.

This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO.  Please find all of our coverage of the show right here.