She explains the rising value of contextual marketing, the need for unified identity solutions, and “clean rooms.” Addressing the upside of the pandemic for Meredith, she says the publishers’ editorial focus on home and family has become more relevant during these times.

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“Because we do believe that the need to depict women positively is not just incumbent on our female focused brands, but it’s important that all of our brands show up in the right way.”

Launched by the Association of National Advertisers in 2016, #SeeHer and GEM have prompted “a heightened level of awareness and much more sincere conversations around the quality of our communications,” Dilley explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Dilley, who is responsible for PepsiCo’s Better For You & Premium Brands, says that shoppers are basing their brand decisions in part on strong diversity messages and positive depictions of females. Moreover, diversity pays dividends.

“Those businesses that are invested in diversity perform better, and the statistics show that now,” she says. “I think also we know that the GEM score drives better business results, so that’s incredibly important, particularly when you’re speaking to the finance director.”

Dilley has found that GEM helps PepsiCo have wider communications about the depiction of females in its communications. It can also act as a prompt to “get the right message across” and avoid making mistakes.

In addition, #SeeHer has fostered more constructive collaborations with the company’s agency partners. “In the last few months, I’ve been personally involved with a number of my brands and as we’ve developed new creative starting off with the conversation that #SeeHer has enabled us to have and putting that front and foremost as a critical factor of success within creative development,” Dilley says.

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.

In this interview with Beet.TV earlier this week at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference, Quinn discusses the year ahead and the importance of Meredith Corporation’s adoption of #SeeHer across its digital and print content.

Advertisers that are using GEM scores based on consumer surveys about advertising and content are “using that spend and the influence that they have for the good of their businesses as well as for the good of society. The initiative started as a business initiative, it’s all about growth,” Quinn says.

As #SeeHer has built momentum, business cases were developed showing the impact that GEM scores can have on sales and other ROI metrics. The ANA now has GEM metrics on how females have been depicted in some 600 television shows.

“What’s really exciting that Meredith has done is they’re the first publisher ever to apply GEM scores to their own content,” Quinn says. “The reason that’s important for advertisers is that we’ve proven the business case that when you have a strong GEM-scoring ad and you put it adjacent to strong GEM content, that’s how you get the synergistic affect on your sales and your return on investment.”

Quinn believes advertisers will be “really open to the idea that now Meredith is able to put strong GEM advertising into their books and their other content in a way that’s really accretive to the whole equation of gender equality.”

Asked for a male’s perspective on the #SeeHer movement, Quinn cites gender inclusion as a key component. “For this initiative to be successful, we need everybody to be involved in this. It’s something that’s a real opportunity overall for the whole content creation industry.”

Over the next 12 months, he sees three main priorities, starting with getting more marketers involved. “We talk about that as democratizing #SeeHer. Let’s get every ANA member, for example, involved in #SeeHer.”

Second is the ANA’s response to “a huge demand to take it globally, and so we are in the process of doing that and it will be available globally in 2019 because many of our marketers are obviously operating in multiple countries.”

Finally, “We need GEM to become much more prevalent in the content world. We’ve got an opportunity for GEM to become really the gold standard measurement across all content.”

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.

“Demand it from your agencies, demand it from your media partners, and threaten to withhold the dollars unless they fulfill that demand, because that’s how the world works,” says the President of TBWA\Chiat\Day NY. “It’s powered entirely by money.”

One of the more widely known industry efforts for accurate portrayals of girls and women in advertising and media is the #SeeHer movement started by the Association of National Advertisers in 2016, the same year Reyes started at TBWA\Chiat\ Day NY. In this interview with Beet.TV, Reyes talks about the need for female influence in the creative process and the agency’s Circle of Women mentoring program that Reyes has spearheaded.

“In marketing, media and advertising we pride ourselves on being a microcosm of the larger world,” Reyes says. “And we can’t pride ourselves on being that microcosm if we actually don’t reflect what the real world looks like. So without that woman’s voice in the creative process or any part of the process, we’re not really being genuine to the mission we have.”

That necessitates not only mentoring younger talent at agencies but looking for different kinds of talent in places agencies have overlooked, according to Reyes, who rose from Managing Director to President of TBWA\Chiat\Day NY in July of this year.

“I don’t think that women, I don’t think women of color, I don’t think they’re all hiding in some secret place that we all haven’t found,” says Reyes. “I think they’re probably right in front of us the entire time but we have to grow them and nurture them and develop them in ways that we haven’t really been doing in the past.”

Going a step further, Reyes advocates “over-hiring” such prospects “because we have to correct the system. In over-hiring, I think if we can mentor these folks and develop them, then we will even it out in a better way.”

The agency’s Circle of Women initiative began after executives asked female employees what they needed and how they felt about being a woman in the business. “Their main feelings were around a lack of voice, a lack of presence and a lack of confidence,” Reyes says.

Circle of Women identified 17 women “on the cusp of leadership” and gave them free executive coaching. In return they were asked to mentor two to three women underneath them “so that in that way we would constantly create this everlasting pipeline of female leaders. The most important thing for me is more than half of the 17 are women of color.”

As for demanding more inclusion from companies with which agencies work, Reyes says, “we have to put our money where our mouth is on the topic.”

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.

“We’ve been actively supporting #SeeHer for the past year and a half,” during which time AmEx “got to know a lot of the best practices in understanding gender bias,” Hamilton adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

The Association of National Advertisers launched #SeeHer in 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 by 2020.

AmEx has used the data-tracking GEM to identify best-in-class advertising and programming that supports girls and women so that it could “more accurately portray women and move them into hero positions in our messaging,” Hamilton explains.

Within the company’s most recent campaign, AmEx focused on how it could use GEM “as an additional measure to” achieve greater breakthrough and effectiveness.

“The increased focus on gender equality and diversity of thinking and perspective as we work on our messaging and advertising is really critical,” says Hamilton. “We’ve long embraced diversity and inclusion but I think really focusing on women in particular in that has been an important area of focus for us.”

Asked how to communicate to creative teams the value of diversity, she says that in a data-driven organization, “certainly case studies are really effective when you can tangibly show the impact of pulling diversity into our messaging or accurately portraying women and the impact that can have on our overall effectiveness.

“It’s very easy to get people engaged and excited about that. Featuring best practices and really effective case studies was a helpful way to bring additional focus to the need.”

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.

By that she means she doesn’t feel obligated to talk about women who represent a given cause or movement, Brown explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“I want to be like, ‘this woman is an amazing artist or astronaut or immigration lawyer.’ I tell the story of the woman, and then the woman happens to represent something broader.”

Meredith’s digital and print brands are the first to undergo certification for the #SeeHer initiative started by the Association of National Advertisers in 2016. #SeeHer’s goal is to more accurately portray all girls and women in media by 2020.

Whether it’s women taking care of immigrant children, fighting sexual discrimination or exploring space, “I go at it from ‘here is Jenny and this is Jenny’s story. Jenny is married or Jenny is single.’ I always focus on one particular woman and her story, because behind that story is something to support,” says Brown.

By way of example she cites a recent InStyle story about lawyers from the RAICES organization helping children who were separated from their parents while crossing the U.S. border. “Here’s five women from RAICES. Here’s how you can donate to RAICES. But I always put the woman first because she has a character and a story and a life and I’m a storyteller.”

In an age when there is no shortage of social causes, too much is not necessarily a good thing, according to Brown. It just produces exhaustion.

“We’re exhausted by hashtags, we’re exhausted by movements, we’re exhausted by pro Trump, anti Trump, wear this T-shirt, it’s national this day, it’s this walkout day, it’s everything else. I can’t handle it. I’m overwhelmed by it. So imagine everybody else when it’s just noise and we can’t just keep contributing to the noise.”

Following the “hideousness” surrounding the recent Supreme Court nomination process, Brown interviewed feminist and human-rights activist Gloria Steinem and discussed how today’s “female resistance” mirrors that of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

“I go at it from, ‘here’s this woman who is magnificent, here’s a perception she has on something. You want support her? Great.’”

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.

In 2017, Kellogg became involved with the #SeeHer initiative of the Association of National Advertisers, starting with its Special K brand. The ANA launched #SeeHer in the summer of 2016 to encourage a more accurate portrayal of all girls and women in media, as Advertising Age reports.

“What I’m really proud of is beyond Special K we have embedded the #SeeHer thinking across all the brands within Kellogg and have really embraced the #SeeHer principles to influence all of our marketing,” Crouch says.

During Advertising Week 2018 in New York City earlier this month, Kellogg announced that it had submitted its Special K “Own It” campaign to be evaluated with the ANA’s Gender Equality Measure (GEM) score, which is used to quantify consumer reaction to the treatment of women in advertising and programming. IRI then leveraged its IRI Lift solution to uncover correlations between the Kellogg advertisements’ GEM scores and offline sales lift.

Just knowing that Special K ads scored very well with its GEM scores was “a huge step in really validating and understanding how we were going to market as a brand and building our capabilities as a creative team,” Crouch explains.

The IRI research showed that Special K ads with the highest sales lift had the highest GEM scores, whereas ads that generated the lowest sales lift had the lowest. Moreover, the highest sales lift occurred when advertisements appeared during commercial breaks of TV shows with above-average GEM scores.

“We’re really seeing that brands that take a distinct point of view on reflecting the vales of a huge segment of our population, we’re connecting our brand benefits to the values of consumers much more effectively than we have in the past,” says Crouch. “So we’re thrilled to say that when we have high-testing GEM scores, we’ve seen a significant increase in our brand sales.”

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.

Zalis partnered with the ANA’s Alliance for Family Entertainment in 2016 to launch #SeeHer to increase the accurate portrayal of women and girls in advertising and media by 20% by 2020, the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. The #SeeHer Gender Equality Measure module measures ads and programming in the form of a GEM score.

With more than 40 major national advertisers as members, #SeeHer “making a conscious effort now from a creative perspective as well as from media distribution and media placement to be better and to consciously as we think about content make it reflective of who we are today,” Zalis says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Zalis made the transition from market research to the business of equality when she launched The Female Quotient in 2015, of which she is CEO, to advance gender equality in the workplace through collaboration, activating solutions for change and creating measurements for accountability. Residing within The Female Quotient is Girls’ Lounge, which Zalis started in 2013.

As originally executed, GEM asked survey respondents four questions:

• What is the overall opinion of the female presented?

• Is she portrayed respectfully?

• Is she depicted inappropriately?

• Is she seen as a positive role model for women and girls?

Referring to #SeeHer’s GEM score, Zalis says, “Let’s create GEMs, let’s celebrate GEMs, let’s really work hard toward doing more and more of them.”

Beyond gauging viewers’ perceptions, GEM correlates high-scoring ads with advertisers’ campaign results. “We now can prove the business case for when you have high scoring ads with GEM, you also will produce more sales in the marketplace,” Zalis says.

Referring to recent IRI research results from beta testing with Kellogg and its GEM scores, Zalis says the results “are really nothing shy of remarkable. Money does talk. It’s not just the right thing to do for social good, but it also is the right thing to do if you want to see your business grow.”

She then identifies GEM five traditional ad performance metrics—purchase intent, recall, persuasion, relevance and likability—before adding a sixth. “Now we have a measure for equality called GEM.”

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.

“We see it play out with the holding companies and how they’re doing and how they’re under pressure, and that impacts every other part of the ecosystem,” says Desmond, who is Founder & CEO of Eagle Vista Partners. “I fully believe we can get out of this crisis of confidence, but we can’t keep doing the same thing.”

Desmond was one of many advertising and media veterans who assembled at Meredith Corporation’s Luce Auditorium last week to participate in Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose. In this interview with Beet contributor Ashley J. Swartz, Desmond discusses the need to “disrupt ourselves from a new place in marketing and communications and really begin with a new value exchange with people.”

Alluding to Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker’s adage in the 1800’s that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half,” Desmond says measurement’s not the issue.

“That’s not true anymore. We have more accountability, more modeling, more smart measurement in what media and advertising is doing than ever before,” says Desmond.

What has changed is the rise of digital communications and the concurrent advent of so-called direct brands, which bypass traditional means of producing, promoting and distributing their wares.

“The problem is, with the advent of the digital marketing ecosystem, there’s so much fragmentation and people are building brands now. Brands and marketers and agencies aren’t building brands.”

Desmond cites the emergence of brands like Dollar Shave Club, which disrupted a marketplace long dominated by Gillette and Schick.

“Gillette never saw dollar shave club coming, yet they’ve completely upended the category,” she says.

While the television industry is often criticized for lacking change amid the rise of digital media, it’s still “the most perfect model that we’ve ever created over the last 75 years. It’s scale, it’s got reach, it’s got engagement.”

The real problem with television is the waste involved for advertisers trying to achieve effective reach when targeting desired consumer segments, according to Desmond. Therefore, the $100 billion TV marketplace “needs to be absolutely disrupted.”

She believes that innovations like data-informed addressable and connected TV will provide that disruption, but there’s work to be done before they can be fully leveraged.

“The supply side is somewhat ready to sell this way, the demand side is not as completely ready because mostly they don’t know how to plan and buy for it,” Desmond explains. “Because they need to have more software and automation to help them make sense of all the complexity. You can’t do addressable advertising on a spreadsheet.”

Asked by Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp., for an update on her work life after leaving Starcom at the end of 2016, Desmond says she is an operating partner with Rhode Island-based Providence Equity Partners. She’s involved in two deals: one for adtech firm DoubleVerify and one for a sports marketing firm in Europe.

“The other part of my week is I’m working with a select group of CEO’s and startup companies, helping them on branding, on purpose, on go-to-market strategy,” Desmond says. “I’ve been working really heavily with LiveRamp, with Anaplan and with a company in Chicago called Uptake Technologies.”

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.

“There’s that old movie expression don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” Rosen adds.

Yet so far, that’s exactly what the TV industry has done Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales, explains in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization.

Digital and social companies in recent years “have really gone after, data, technology, advanced advertising and measurement in ways that the TV industry really never either had the capability to do or never felt the need to do,” says Rosen.

So he believes “there’s some catching up to do.”

Rosen and Swartz were among the featured speakers at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, which was held at Meredith Corporation’s Luce Auditorium in Manhattan.

With assets like NBCU’s Audience Studio, the company has tried to level the playing field by bringing richer data and advanced audience targeting across all media forms—from national linear to addressable, digital, display and video.

“And now we want to go to that sort of sweet spot for the social and digital companies, which is their promise of delivering business outcomes,” Rosen says.

Like most of his peers, he sees that promise materialize as digital and social companies often taking credit “for something that may be more about correlation than causation, or sometimes just being in the right place at the right time.

“We feel that television has not gotten the credit it deserves for driving so many upper mid, lower funnel actions and behaviors on consumers. If we can get better at demonstrating that, we can get the credit we deserve,” Rosen says.

Asked by Swartz how traditional media mix modeling comes into play, Rosen’s view is that they’re probalistic models, only as good as the data that gets fed into them.

“I think part of the problem that we’ve seen is the data could be better, could be more deterministic.”

To advance its own cause, NBCU can point to advertiser case studies in which a variety of outcomes were measured. They include brand health metrics lift, sales life, driving website traffic, and incremental return on advertising spend.

“We’re seeing great results, we’re sharing it, we’re learning form it and I think that’s going to be a huge model for us going forward.”

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.

So while Winkler believes creating a good consumer experience will yield good returns for advertisers, he’s “not as bullish on that as I’d like to be because I kind of feel that most media is still consumed on a passive basis, and people just don’t want to have to make any effort whatsoever.”

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat in the City, where Winkler was one of several moderators, he also identifies the key challenge of measuring TV ad ROI in response to questions from Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp.

According to Winkler, accountability and integrity of data take a back seat to inconsistency. He likens it to what happens to evidence in the police world. “That chain of custody just does not exist. Each piece of data is in a different language, so they just simply can’t connect from piece to piece to piece,” Winkler says.

Consumer choice was one of the key topics as hundreds of Beet Retreat attendees gathered at the Luce Auditorium at Meredith Corporation in Manhattan for an event titled Television Advances as Consumers Choose. After a welcome from Meredith Video SVP Andrew Snyder, the sharp-witted Rob Norman took to the stage as moderator and quantified his own attention span now that he’s retired from GroupM. “My girlfriend told me not to look out the window all morning, because you’ll have nothing to do in the afternoon.”

Norman was joined on the dais by Fox’s Joe Marchese, who is no stranger to irreverent discourse. The founder of true[X] discussed proper commercial lengths and what constitutes ad effectiveness before addressing what he see as the bigger problem of attribution—specifically, the “bullshit of some of the attribution methods out there. The math just doesn’t add up.”

Asked by Norman how TV providers can increase the supply of coveted ad inventory, Marchese responded, “You don’t. You get better with the supply you have.” The only real currency for transacting, according to Marchese, is attention. “Engagement is proof of attention.”

Next on stage was Kristin Dolan, co-founder of TV data analytics firm 605, which was formed in 2016 to parse set-top box data for the benefit of programmers and advertisers and recently launched its Impact Index. Rather than focus solely on sales results, Impact Index is a scientifically-based approach for measuring the impact of TV advertising on both branding and sales.

Dolan described the work 605 has done for clients like Walmart, which conducted a “reputational ad campaign” with no specific call to action. According to Dolan, among people who were exposed to the campaign ads, attribution metrics showed that their in-store spending increased along with their affinity for the Walmart brand.

Nancy Reyes, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY, presented three visual case studies centered on “data empowering creativity,” labeling them Bionic Creative, Data As Content and Data As A Canvas. For Bionic Creative she cited a campaign by postal authorities in the Netherlands that induced the general public to send Christmas cards to some 230,000 people who were deemed to be “lonely” based on the amount of mail that they did not receive. Data As Content was exemplified by an out-of-home campaign that sought to reduce Finland’s world-leading domestic violence statistics by publicizing them in the hopes that more people would report abuse. For Data As A Canvas, Reyes walked the audience through a campaign for the New York return of the Grammy Awards that used an Uber car outfitted with augmented reality to “create” music based on pedestrian activity.

Under questioning by Furious Corp.’s Swartz, Walt Horstman of TiVo said one positive sign in the advancement of data-informed TV advertising is that “digital teams within agencies are taking a leadership role” and that they don’t see themselves bound by the ways TV has been bought and sold for a half century.

605 Co-Founder Ben Tatta was joined by David Kline of Charter Communications and Spectrum Reach in a discussion about the rise of addressable linear TV. “We’re further along but we’re not far enough along,” said Kline, who noted that this week Charter launched household addressable in the Los Angeles market. He predicted that cable companies and networks will engage in more collaboration going forward to increase the national addressable footprint.

For buy-side dialogue, Norman asked Dentsu Aegis Group’s Doug Ray and GroupM’s Lyle Schwartz about the progress in moving to new measurement currencies. “The best experience will win,” is how Ray summed things up. “The ad industry that I joined is not here today,” said Schwartz. “It will evolve. It may not be dead but it may be on life support in 20 years.”

OMD’s Winkler dubbed true[X] “the platypus of advertising” before its new President, Pooja Midha, explained how “engagement is a perfect impression” while noting “We operate in a business that has for many, many years transacted in a couple of very specific metrics.”

Winkler then welcomed Chris Geraci on stage and asked the Omnicom Media Group veteran about this year’s Upfront market. “There are more moving parts than ever,” Geraci responded, with dollars “shifting in many ways away from linear TV.” He identified as pricing factors a strong economy and a significant increase in TV spending by some brands.

Norman’s setup for his talk with IBM’s Babs Rangaiah about blockchain was his own definition of the technology, likening it to “teenage sex…everyone’s talking about it but no one’s doing it.” Rangaiah’s view: “It’s everything you don’t understand about finance and everything you don’t know about computers combined.” On a more serious note, Rangaiah described his work for his former employer, Unilever, on using blockchain to help rein in media-buy discrepancies, a topic he will showcase at the upcoming Cannes International Festival of Creativity.

To top off the proceedings, GroupM’s Phil Cowdell gave an emotionally vivid presentation with slides and video footage chronicling the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and how he and others in the ad industry have been helping the survivors put their lives back together. “Problems can seem so enormous,” said Cowdell, suggesting that people use the word “dot” to help them focus: “Do one thing,” he advised. “There’s so much more to do.”

Cowdell was followed by Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, who described herself as being “in the business of providing hopes and opportunities for our kids” to help break the cycle of poverty. “I’m not asking donations. I’m asking for investments,” Ramos said. During a reception that followed, an auction was held to raise additional funding for hurricane victims under the auspices of Stand By Puerto Rico.

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.

This video is a highlight compilation our several of our conversations.

The first three are a related trio of concerns. Quality storytelling derives from consumer data and insights, the end product of which can be ripe for brand integration. Meredith Corporation’s extensive presence at the NewFronts was crafted to address all of these concerns.

“We’re trying to create advertising that becomes what people are interested in, rather than simply interrupting what they’re interested in,” is the way that Shane Akeney, President, Havas Media Group NA, sums things up in this video compilation, which Meredith presented in its NewFronts event on the big screen at Manhattan’s Hudson Theatre. “Big leaps can be made in creating content that is so compelling that consumers want to watch it, want to see it, want to actually be experiencing it.”

Rather than “insert” themselves into content, brand should be there “because they’re making the content better,” says Matt Seilor, President Brand Solutions, Dentsu Aegis Network.

Accountability means measurable returns on advertising spend. “I think the days of an advertiser just kind of spending money and hoping for the best are over,” says Jason Harrison, President and Client Partner, Essence.

Brand safety was a major theme during the week of NewFronts events, echoed by most participants and those featured in this video. They are:

Marla Kaplowitz, President & CEO, 4A’s.

Will Warren, EVP, Digital Investment, Zenith Media.

Yin Woon Rani, VP Integrated Marketing, Campbell Soup Company.

Christine Peterson, Managing Director, Digital Investment Lead, Mindshare.

Shane Akeney, President, Havas Media Group NA.

Matt Seilor, President Brand Solutions, Dentsu Aegis Network.

Jason Harrison, President and Client Partner, Essence.

Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas, GroupM.

Ben Winkler, Chief Investment Officer, OMD.

Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas, GroupM.

Louis Jones, EVP, Media & Data, 4A’s.

This video was presented on May 4 at the Meredith NewFronts presentation on the big screen of the Hudson Theater.

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For the full version of videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Great presentations, the right amount of great content, sales, customer engagement. I really thought it was extraordinary,” Bager says in this interview with Beet.TV.

For the first time, the IAB will hold a second NewFronts event this year. Titled the Digital Content NewFronts West, it’s scheduled for Oct. 9 and 10 at NeueHouse in West Hollywood, a central location for all media presentations.

Of the New York event, Bager talks about common themes that were unique to 2018. “I think there was a clear tendency to talk about diversity, diverse content,” she says.

In her NewFronts speech, Bager told the audience that for brands these days, “It’s about creating movements, not just moments. And with digital video, you can really, truly do that. The platform is so impactful.”

Other highlights for Bager were themed events like Meredith Corporation’s Help Puerto Rico effort and Hulu’s Huluween programming, along with Hulu’s ability to dynamically insert ads into its live television service, as ADWEEK reports.

“You can kind of see that the industry through the lens of the NewFront is growing up and knows what it’s doing and really starting to think about the audience that’s out there,” says Bager.

In West Hollywood, the focus will be on branded and sponsored content and how brands and media companies can work together to “capture those moments that mean something to individuals that can help brands build more direct connections with their audience. So we’re really excited about that event.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

Meredith used its NewFronts presentation to announce additions to its over-the-top PeopleTV service, including “Chatter,” a live talk show hosted by actress Rosie Diaz that will appear on both PeopleTV and Twitter. Meredith also debuted “Search History,” a comedy in which Michelle Collins “digs deep and peruses through the phones of unsuspecting, shocked bystanders.”

In this interview with Beet.TV, Kozo, who is in addition to being Manager, Digital Partnerships, at Initiative is a self-professed comedy lover, reacts to Meredith’s latest efforts “as a marketer who has seen everything being pitched to me that’s under the sun.” She also discusses the benefits and pitfalls for brands that engage in live content.

“I definitely thought Meredith did a great job with who they brought on to represent and to showcase the programs and the live feeds that they’re doing,” Kozo says. “I mean, clearly it worked. Everyone in the room was laughing and was enjoying what they were engaging with.

“I know I’m going to start looking at People now and Chatter. I don’t even, like, really use Twitter and I’m like, ‘I should get back on Twitter.’ I just want to follow this program because it’s funny and it’s light, but it’s also doing a good job of connecting with their consumers,” she adds.

Kozo thinks live content is “a great opportunity” but cautions that brands “need to have a lot of trust in who you’re aligning with, especially since it’s typically fairly unscripted. You can’t plan for how things are going to go and you can’t really take back your message after it’s been shown.”

More to the point, live content entails advertisers giving up a large degree of control, “which I think is really tough for marketers to do.”

Nonetheless, she thinks live is a great opportunity.

“I think it’s when people are most leaned in. People want stuff right away. They want to be cutting edge. People are always connected and they just want to be at the forefront of whatever’s happening.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

“One of the things that you’ll see is that e-commerce tends to end up over on the side in some cases,” Meredith’s VP, Innovation, Corbin de Rubertis says in this interview with Beet.TV. “But we really try and weave it into the experience itself. As when you’re looking at a recipe, for example, you should be able to see the ingredients from local stores or Amazon Fresh, for that matter.”

The weaving results in “a discreet button” at, say, the bottom of a recipe. “You can push the button and all that stuff goes into the cart and you’ll have it on your doorstep that afternoon,” says de Rubertis, adding that Meredith has a “really interesting network of partners” on the retail side.

“Then we also work with the brands, because the brands are often positioned inside the retailers. We want to make sure there’s a place for them as well.”

Sometimes Meredith will work with both at once, for example a L’Oreal skincare product that can be purchased online at Target.

Like other publishers, Meredith has long positioned relevant products nearby its editorial content, separated from the content itself. A recipe in Better Homes & Gardens might be accompanied by suggested cooking utensils.

While the concept of e-commerce is nothing new, de Rubertis says it should be better integrated into the content consumption process.

“I think in a way, it’s almost just getting started,” he says. “It’s been relegated to kind of the back page or a shopping section on most sites and we’re really betting on the fact that consumers want to see that as long it’s relevant.

“As long as it’s relevant and useful, contextualized and appropriately targeted at the audience, we believe it’s part of the content in a lot of ways. It saves the consumers from having to go off to retailers’ sites sometimes and kind of ping pong in between so they get the inspiration and they can act on it immediately.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

“For me, the thing that’s really standing out the most is it feels like this year’s really the tipping point in which people feel like their content needs to speak to a larger purpose and tap into some of the cultural and political movements that are happening,” Cooper says in this interview with Beet.TV.

It’s not just about brands having content that can entertain and content that serves utility, “whether it’s how to style your white jeans or what I’m going to make for dinner,” Cooper adds. “But now really highlighting these stories of change makers and people who have not necessarily had their story told before.”

The Advertising Manager for Cotton, Inc. talks about Meredith Corporation’s NewFront presentation involving people who have stepped up after national disasters and how they’ve been able to make real changes in their communities.

“And not necessarily at the moment of that natural disaster when the cameras are still on but later when the cameras are turned off. And that’s when the hardships really set in.”

Brands can be in a good position to become involved because they often have resources that some community causes might not. Plus they “have the microphone” and can amplify the need for help.

“We know that consumers take it really seriously when brands support a cause and they’re that much more likely to engage with the brand and, if you sell something, shop your products,” Cooper says.

Given that consumers want the path to purchase to be as easy as possible, Cooper noted “a number of different technology innovations this week” that make it as easy as possible.

“Whether it’s shopping in video or shopping within an article. However you can minimize the amount of clicks to the purchase I think will be a win for consumers,” says Cooper.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

“We’re working hard to combine and collect that across all of our properties, all platforms, and have one unified identity database that we can use in a variety of ways,” says Meredith’s Chief Digital Officer, Matt Minoff.

“We collect a wide variety of data across all of our assets,” Minoff says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Those assets include magazines, “understanding who our subscribers are and all the different titles that they subscribe to.”

America’s largest magazine publisher maintains a digital database that encompasses both implicit and explicit data. This includes what type of content people consume “and what data points have they given us, whether that’s their email address or some information about them that helps inform our understanding of what their interests are.”

Minoff says the unified identity database will yield three primary outcomes:

• “The first is the ability to drive insights, to understand what are people interested in, which informs our editorial strategy as well as our product strategy.”

• Second is “to improve our targeting capabilities for our advertising clients, to help improve the return on ad spend by leveraging that data to improve targeting.”

• Third is personalization. “To create a better consumer experience using all the data and knowledge we have about a consumer to surface things to them that we believe they will be interested in.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Just like we’ve done in print and just like we’ve done in digital, one of the things that we’ll be talking about with brands this year at the NewFronts is our new ability to guarantee positive ROI against video ad campaigns,” says Andrew Snyder, Meredith’s new SVP, Head of Video.

Advertisers have always been focused on increasing their understanding of the true performance of their video advertising, Snyder, who most recently was SVP of Sales at Meredith, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“And as marketers have become much more adept at measuring the impact of digital video, of course they’re more attentive than ever to the performance of their video ad campaigns.”

In addition to its massive scale following the company’s acquisition of Time Inc.’s publishing holdings, Synder says a main point of differentiation is “our willingness to actually guarantee positive ROI performance.”

He talks about the magnitude of change following the Time Inc. deal and the ongoing integration of “two amazing, iconic portfolios of powerful media brands.” Across the combined portfolio, “our focus is programming video content for each of those brands, not unlike how you might program a cable network.”

The company now generates 275 original series.

Snyder says Meredith is the dominant player in categories like food, where it has the “number one reach among all digital media companies, more video viewers than even the Food Network in Meredith’s food category.”

Its other strengths lie in such areas as parenting and homes, celebrities and entertainment.

“No matter the topic, no matter the vertical category, we likely have a solution for you in our portfolio.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“It’s great to have data, but you need to turn it into the so what?” says Alysia Borsa, the company’s Chief Marketing & Data Officer, whose team is responsible for all consumer data and insights across the merged assets of Meredith and Time Inc.

“The common goal for all of my team is really to understand our consumers. When we understand our consumers we drive advertising, we drive product, we drive editorial, we drive consumer revenue. So we have this common goal.”

One element of that goal is capturing and understanding user data not just based on the life stage of a consumer and their interests but on capturing the “billions” of intent signals that Meredith sees.

“Every time someone clicks on a video or opens an email or creates a shopping list or clicks to buy, they’re helping us to understand their intent. So life stage, plus interest, now intent,” Borsa says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Complementing intent signals is the capability of creating profiles to understand consumers who are always changing. This is where persistent and dynamic means intersect.

“Persistent is I am a mom, I’m interested in sports. There are persistent aspects about who I am and what I’m interested in. But on Monday mornings versus Saturday afternoons I have different needs.”

Bringing everything together to create the “so what?” is what really unleashes the power of consumer data, according to Borsa.

“The whole team is focused on how do we develop insights to create, for example, video programming that impacts a client or that can drive engagement.”

Two recent examples are when the Better Homes & Gardens team “saw a really interesting trend toward an interest in whipped cream and decorating eggs,” Borsa explains. They created a video about dyeing Easter eggs that garnered 60 million views on Facebook, was shared one million times and was “cross-promoted across multiple brands where we saw a seventy percent completion rate.”

Meredith’s Real Simple title created a “momfessions” video based on insights. The resulting brand-sponsored video got 17 million views, according to Borsa.

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“At the end of the day, we’re not saying to brands ‘you have to jump in and pick sides in the culture wars necessarily.’ But we are saying ‘you have to stand for something these days.’ People want to deal with brands whose values align with theirs,” says Scott Donaton, Chief Content Officer, Digitas US.

On Thursday, Digitas executives will share a stage with a range of figures who have made headlines associated with all manner of controversies and protest movements. “We try to be very provocative and to bring forward themes and topics that we think our audience needs to care about,” Donaton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Not that long ago, the age of “interruptive advertising,” brands could say whatever they pleased without having to worry about being “timely or topical,” Donaton says. “When you want people to interact with stories, which is something they can choose to spend time with or not, you have to be relevant to them. There’s this idea that brands are becoming activists and almost have to. This doesn’t always mean controversy.”

The agency’s featured guests will include:

• Scott Hudler, SVP & CMO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, who will explain how the company has changed the way it sells guns.

• Jodi Kantor of The New York Times, who with Megan Twohey just won a Pulitizer Prize for their reporting on the Harvey Weinstein saga.

• New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, who will discuss the publisher’s Truth Matters campaign.

• Nola Weinstein, Global Head of Culture and Experiential at Twitter, to reflect on the We Are Here Movement.

• Awesomness CEO Jordan Levin on the company’s coverage of the March for Our Lives student anti-gun violence movement.

“We like to bring in speakers who are outside of the ad business per se,” says Donaton. “For this year, a lot of it is not just how are brands reacting to all the social, cultural political upheaval out there but how’s it going to change storytelling of all kinds.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“When I’m on Facebook, I’m in browse mode. I’m scrolling through a feed and I’m looking for things that capture my attention. When you’re coming to us, you’re coming with a purpose,” Minoff adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

That purpose varies by title, generating “both the implicit and explicit data” the company collects from its reach consisting of some 175 million consumers monthly.

“You’re coming to our recipes because you’re looking to make dinner or you’re thinking about going grocery shopping. That’s an ideal moment for a client to capture consumer attention and to be part of that experience.”

Visitors to Better Homes & Gardens are considering “planting your garden or doing some type of home improvement project. When you’re coming to Shape, you’re thinking about how do you improvement your fitness,” says Minoff.

When you pair intent, data, creative capabilities and scale, “I think we have something that very few others can offer.”

On the branded content creation side, Minoff mentions the Foundry, Meredith’s New York-based facilities where data, insights, storytelling and scale are leveraged to connect brands with consumers. The Foundry was recently nominated for three Webby Awards, presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and two Emmy nominations from The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in the Outstanding Innovation category for virtual reality projects.

“I think how all great branded content starts is an understanding of what consumers are looking for and then figuring out how do I weave a brand into that in a way that still drives return for them,” says Minoff.

Asked to assess the near future of the publishing business, his “deepest hope” is that most publishers are able to find business models that support the great content and products that they create.

“I think there’s been a challenge with advertising shifting a lot toward the platforms, that a lot of publishers have been trying to figure out what’s the next generation business model,” Minoff says.

Subscriptions are one such model. With some 50 million print subscribers, Meredith sees “a big opportunity to extend that into our digital properties as well.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“It’s just what do you use as the measuring stick? In the digital sphere, we have a lot of measurement at our fingertips,” Peterson adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “It is a custom question for every single client. It’s not something I can easily say is one-size-fits-all for every client out there.”

Results can range from changing brand perception to “opening the eyes of new consumers, different audiences, that this brand is right for them,” to measuring footfall in-store or actual sales, online or offline.

“It’s built in. No matter what the original objective is, it comes down to driving performance, driving brand goals and key business objectives.”

Striking a balance between precision targeting and mass messaging requires a balance, according to Peterson. Some clients need to speak to a very specific set of audiences. “And for others, it’s less about isolating and more about sub-segmenting. So you’re talking to everyone and selling a product that has mass appeal.”

So how do you custom tailor the message within those segmentations?

“So even where it might feel like you may not need to apply data to get very, very niche targeted, it plays its role,” Peterson says. You can be mass but use data to tailor the message “to each individual nuance of an audience, from people who are in market today to people who might be in market six months down the road. Somebody who’s considering your product and somebody who’s never been exposed to it before,” she adds.

Even if a brand or product appeals to everyone, “You can’t talk to everybody the same. So data plays a role not only for niche but also for messaging.”

Peterson believes the most unique opportunity digital media affords is co-creation of content. As she describes it, it’s about bringing a brand’s message to life “with the authority and the authenticity of that brand or influencer voice. And that’s just so much more easy and flexible to do in the digital space.”

She’s always looking for those opportunities.

“It’s great to see what original content is coming out, but it’s also good to see what is really still in idea stage where brands can get involved early on and have a really authentic voice within the content.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Leading up to the 2018 Digital Content NewFronts, “We offer an unparalleled combination of things no one else has,” says Jon Werther, President of the company’s National Media Group.

The industry’s leading publisher now reaches 175 million people monthly, 110 million of them women, plus 80% of all Millennial women and nearly two-thirds of all Latinas. It leverages insights from this audience via a combination of proprietary technology platforms and capabilities that range from shopper marketing to branded content, over-the-top video to augmented and virtual reality.

“Video is a massive opportunity for us as a company, and we’re very excited for our capabilities together with the combined company,” Werther says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We have a unique ability to provide premium video content to consumers, from short-form to long-form wherever consumers want to consume that content.”

Live video in particular is a pathway to reaching consumers who may not be familiar with the content—primarily print—that Meredith has produced for the past 116 years. The company does about 1,500 hours of video programming annually and now offers 50 live-streaming programs each week.

“Live video is incredibly important,” says Werther. “Ultimately, live to us is an opportunity for us to continue to engage new consumers, often younger consumers, perhaps different consumers than we traditionally engage on our more traditional owned-and-operated, short-form video.”

The upcoming royal wedding of Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will showcase Meredith’s live-streaming offerings, which will differ by title and provide the company with the opportunity to “bring that iconic moment to life across multiple brands.”

For example, PeopleTV will live-stream the wedding while Martha Stewart Living will focus on beauty tips. In Style’s coverage will detail “shoppable moments” from the wedding and Real Simple will cover “the things we would envision the royals doing leading up to that wedding.”

Asked about the state of the digital media ecosystem, Werther says, “Our brands have never been stronger. Our traffic is pristine in terms of real users consuming our content each and every day. We have industry leading viewability.”

As for Meredith’s value proposition for advertisers, “We can drive results as no one else can” and the company is “willing to stand behind that with results guarantees like our sales guarantee to drive unparalleled return on advertising spend,” Werther says.

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

By itself, “First-party data, although powerful, it limits scale, and if you can’t scale in this environment, scale with the pace of a consumer, it becomes very limiting,” says Musi.

One of five global Publicis brands, Blue 449 calls itself “the open source media agency.” Its goal is to “move the equation to create a tighter connection between marketing and business,” Musi explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference.

“I think what’s happened in this day and age with the abundance of information is that the first-party data has become so expansive, it’s lost in its core focus of what we ultimately need it for.”

The key to leveraging first-party data is how to structure the information so that “it’s most meaningful for me as a business so that I can work with my agencies in order to connect the right data sources, second party, third party.”

Musi believes that just because micro-targeting, particularly with digital media and increasingly via television, exists doesn’t mean it’s applicable in every instance for every brand. “So I have a philosophy that’s saying you don’t really want to be too precise,” he says. “Pizza, everybody loves pizza, everybody loves hot dogs. Why do we need to be one-to-one at that level?”

Contemplating the “past, present and future of our business,” Musi thinks the fundamental things have not changed. “We’re still trying to connect a consumer to a brand. What’s changed is everything in the middle. I don’t know why we think performance or accountability is a new thing. It’s always been around.”

What is different is marketers’ expectations of the pace of ROI for their media investments. “What I think the expectation is today, which is maybe sacrificing the long-term health of a brand, is the short-termism of the ROI that is expected today,” says Musi.

So it pays to think both short- and long-term. “For every dollar we’re going to invest, we expect the return to be X, that X will be delivered today, because we’re meeting the demand that people are presenting today. The Y will be delivered as we meet the demands in the future.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“If somebody really doesn’t have a strong bias towards a brand and you decide to serve them what we would call active phase content, utility content, ultimately that’s wasted because they’re not predisposed to picking you anyway,” Acampora adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s a lot about customizing content to the platform and then starting to personalize the right kind of content to the individual or the segment.”

The Wavemaker agency takes its lead on clients’ creative needs by considering their existing partnerships and what’s best for them. “There are definitely instances where we’re creating new custom content, everything from what we call hero content to utility content.”

Wavemaker works with vendors like VidMob, a technology platform that connects marketers with a global network of expert editors, animators and motion graphics designers.

The agency’s Momentum consumer insights database is the largest of its kind, with some 400,000 “individual journeys” across a host of categories and countries. “That data is the starting point to help us segment and sub-segment audiences,” says Acampora.

He relates how Wavemaker worked with Ikea to promote its living room offerings. “For one segment, it might be way more about quality and design, so those are the things we drummed up about their living room message. Another might be way more about price and ease of putting it together, more utility content.”

MEC, which along with Maxus constituted the basis for the combined entity called Wavemaker, had handled Ikea’s media planning and buying for more than a decade. Last month, Wavemaker successfully defended the U.S. business, as ADWEEK reports.

To help clients navigate the maze of segments and creative iterations, “We try to make that as turnkey and bite-sized for them as possible. You want to limit it to a certain number of meaningful segments that will actually help to unlock growth for the brand,” says Acampora.

The proof point or benchmark Wavemaker has used “is roughly a one and a half times increase in ROI. Whether through attribution modeling or longer-term market mix modeling results, we see a significant increase in the overall ROI. That or if we go more toward a performance level we’ve seen roughly a two times decrease in the cost per acquisition when we start to customize and personalize messaging.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.