That’s why NBCUniversal has announced it will adopt Ad-ID, a kind of “bar code” identifier for advertising, as its standard for managing ad asset in-flow through its One Platform suite.

Ad-ID was developed and is jointly owned by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

In this video interview with Beet.TV, NBCUniversal’s Brad Epperson explains what is happening.

A unique code for ads

“As we’ve got commercials across our linear television channels, everywhere on all of our digital platforms plus Peacock, this allows us to have a growth strategy that adds the commercial quality and the commercial creative as the centre with one standard of a naming convention attached to all of them,” Epperson says.

Ad-ID uses 11-digit versions of the ISCI alphanumeric codes the TV industry has been using the identify its ad assets since the 1970s.

Since 1992, the ANA and 4As have been responsible for setting standard ad asset coding. Ad-ID, launched in 2002, is a replacement for ISCI, which had previously been used for that purpose but which the bodies said was “unregulated” and non-standard, leading them to make the full migration in 2007.

The code can resolve metadata which, Epperson says, “can be scheduled or facilitated in a way that allows us to really improve the viewing experience, and it gives us a whole new set of technological capabilities that just have never existed before”.

NBCUniversal secured $500 million in upfront ad commitments for its streaming platform Peacock, the company revealed today. https://t.co/BD7XrjnMAe

— Ad Age (@adage) July 15, 2021

Peacock has already been requiring ad buyers register with Ad-ID and assign a valid Ad-ID code to each creative prior to submission of advertising creatives.

The announcement represents the extension of Ad-ID to NBC’s other properties, and the first major-media company signature to lean into the standard.

Supporting scale and new features

NBC Sports & Innovid Partner To Take Olympics Ads Real-Time

For Epperson, whose NBC channels are broadcasting this year’s Olympic Games from Tokyo, it means: “When we’ve got that one associated Ad-ID connected to the creative, we can actually start to look into ‘What’s the creative impact?’

“In any supply chain in any industry, the greater amount of standardization you have, the easier it is for you to just scale that business.”

For viewers, the hope is that it will lead to a better viewing experience.

Epperson says the metadata connected-to by Ad-ID helps NBCUniversal better achieve frequency capping, to ensure viewers are not exposed to ads too many times, across both linear and digital channels.

It also ends up driving competitive ad separation, delivery reporting, ad decisioning, storage de-duplication and collision control.

NBCUniversal, which today is hosting its One21 event to showcase its One Platform that gives advertisers a way to reach target audiences at scale, has made a big push into mixing content and commerce. Its platform marks a convergence among a variety of technologies that encompass linear and streaming TV, connected devices, online payments and high-speed internet.

‘From Passion to Purchase’

The technologies make it “possible to drive that experience where you can see something in a piece of programming and at that moment of inspiration decide that you want it, and in a couple clicks have it on the way to your home,” Evan Moore, vice president of commerce partnerships at NBCUniversal Media, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

“That’s what we’re here to do with One Platform Commerce, which is our suite of integrated commerce capabilities, is to drive those transactional moments, to drive from passion to purchase with NBCU content, wherever that content appears,” he said.

The company distributes content through linear, digital, streaming, Spanish-language, local TV stations and social media. On social networks like Facebook and Instagram, NBCUniversal provides a way for consumers to buy products directly with instant checkout features.

“We’re providing a platform for a retail partner to come in through a single point of entry and drive commerce through our content across the entire ecosystem of touchpoints that we have with viewers and consumers,” Moore said.

Shoppable TV Moments

Its Shoppable TV platform integrates programming with e-commerce by showing QR codes that viewers can scan with a smartphone camera to visit a shopping site. In the past year, NBCUniversal gave viewers of the French Open tennis tournament a way to buy the jersey worn by star player Novak Djokovic, and to order a “blonding brush” in the show “Very Cavalleri.” During the holiday season, viewers of the “Today” show on its Peacock streaming platform could buy products featured in a “steals and deals” segment.

“We can also drive commerce experience across the web through either our articles or interactive videos,” Moore said. “You can be reading a shoppable gift guide or watching a piece of video content and actually clicking on the products that are featured in that content in real time, add them to a shopping cart and purchase all without leaving the NBCU content experience.”

The company plans to widen the interactive platform beyond the current number of seven properties, which include the Today.com, E! Online and Telemundo.com websites.

“We’re going to be expanding across the rest of the portfolio this year, including national cable networks like USA, but also across all the local stations as well,” Moore said. “When I look at these new tools, it’s really changing the types of experiences and content that we create for consumers and the value we can bring to them through that experience. There’s a lot to be gained for us, for consumers and for brands.”

Last week, it announced that its FreeWheel ad serving tech unit had begun unifying its technology set, with a first stage meaning NBCUniversal now using FreeWheen’s dynamic ad decisioning capability to drive linear TV schedules.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ryan McConville, EVP of Ad Platforms and Operations at NBCU, explains what is happening, and why.

Better together

“Traditionally, FreeWheel has been our digital ad server,” he says. “So its duties have been kind of relegated to doing the ad decisioning on our digital footprint.

“NBCU is both a digital media company and a linear media company. On the linear side of the house, there’s another set of technology called a log scheduler. Historically, the information that’s housed in the TV log scheduler – all the information about our linear schedules and our linear audiences – is separate from all the information that’s housed in our digital ad server.

“So there is not one ad decisioning brain behind the company that is both aware of what’s going on in linear and what’s going on in digital.

“We made the decision that we needed to pick a piece of technology that would have intelligence about both pools of inventory.”

.@FreeWheel is now the lead ad decisioning technology across all of @NBCUniversal's inventory through its new AutoScheduler tool, which analyzes ad breaks and dynamically replaces ads, helping marketers make addressable TV buys. #FreeWheelEmp https://t.co/ydiA4e7yUo

— Antony Bar (@AntonyBarLDN) December 2, 2020

Speeding the switch

That now changes with the introduction of AutoScheduler, the name for the combined toolset.

It analyzes ad breaks within linear campaigns, as well as other business parameters, and automatically fills the complete schedule for advertisers, enabling the automatic placement of ads and dynamic placement of spots across NBCU’s footprint.

“All of now of our linear inventory is inside FreeWheel,” McConville says.

It is another example of ad-tech folks’ favorite hobby – breaking down silos. McConville says this latest blurring of the line would make it easier for advertisers to change strategy from linear to streaming, as many did early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

.@NBCUniversal and @FreeWheel have very closely aligned visions for the future of TV, and we are proud to be coordinating closely with them as they build One Platform, an all-in-one ad system. https://t.co/pmv6jLatel

— FreeWheel, A Comcast Company (@FreeWheel) January 9, 2020

Toward One Platform

It is also the latest step in the consolidation of FreeWheel after its 2014 acquisition by Comcast.

The companies are now engaged in an initiative called One Platform, aimed at bringing together their ad platforms.

McConville says viewers don’t differentiate between content by channel type, so he is trying to similarly unify the experience for advertisers.

“One Platform is our desire and our technology roadmap to bring together linear and digital ad serving, so that we can optimise advertising to find the most relevant audience for an advertiser,” he says.

“(That is) whether they’re watching that piece of content through a streaming platform, which is served digitally or through a traditional cable subscription, which is served linearly.”

The roadmap

AutoScheduler is the first step along the One Platform journey for McConville.

He says the next steps won’t necessarily come in 2021, but rather 2022 and beyond.

He imagines: “If they find an audience in linear that they had booked in digital, they can move those spots back and forth.”

NBCUniversal has become the latest media owner to launch its own effort to quantify impact for advertisers.

It’s called Total Investment Impact, an attempt to measure the effectiveness of advertising across campaigns, screens and platforms, focused not on simple impressions but on business results.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kavita Vazirani, EVP, Insights & Measurement and NBCUniversal, explains the idea.

Introducing Total Investment Impact, our industry-first measurement capability demonstrating the power of an advertiser's NBCU cross-platform investment.

Read more from @kavitav, EVP, Insights & Measurement, and Pankaj Kumar, SVP, Advertising Impact, on scaling impact with NBCU.

— NBCU Together (@NBCUTogether) September 17, 2020

Ongoing relationship

“Advertising isn’t just about buying and selling spots,” Vazirani says.

“We really want to shift the dialogue from impressions and exposures to measurable impact. How are we driving sales for our advertisers? How are we moving cars off of lots?

“So we have invested significant amount in our data and modelling capabilities to build a model that’s going to allow us to look at performance on an ongoing basis.

“We’re able to make recommendations on what is the best plan for you, for a marketer, to activate on, that is going to drive sales? And all of those results get fed back into our model to have this ongoing optimization on a metric that is more important to the marketer, which is sales, than just impressions.”

Changing behavior

The launch comes as NBCUniversal also launches an insight report into how audience behavior is changing.

Its One Audience Trends report used proprietary data from across NBCUniversal services.

NBCUniversal’s brand new “One Audience Trends” report provides marketers with informative and actionable insight into consumption trends and how these shifts can have a transformative impact on ad buying and planning.

Download the full report below.

— NBCU Together (@NBCUTogether) September 24, 2020

Interesting results are:

• Amongst 18-to-34s, a huge 76% of viewing is now time-shifted.
• NBCUniversal content has seen a 20% year-on-year bump in digital consumption.
• That includes a 95% growth for connected TV and 37% for personal devices.
• TV still accounts for the vast majority of the company’s consumption.
• But cross-platform ad exposure significantly boosted visitation by more than 75% compared to TV-only exposures
• Fear of missing out (FOMO) drives a halo of on-demand viewing in the couple of days after live transmission.

Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic has up-ended traditional business practices, a growing school of thought, amongst those that are successfully pivoting, posits that these changes were overdue and are, ultimately, beneficial.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy at NBCUniversal, says the group has made a series of rapid adjustments that will lead to a better TV ad experience.

‘Accelerated innovation’

“A very unfortunate situation has taught us new ways of working, increased productivity, how to deal with consumers in different ways,” Colella says.

“We’ve been able to create accelerated innovation with our data partners, our technology partners, agencies, and advertisers, and we’re so looking forward to seeing that continue.

“This accelerated innovation is really going to help with all of our efforts in data-informed advertising, programmatic, getting into new platforms and improve platforms like streaming and also linear

“We see the industry is never turning back. We hope to continue this accelerated innovation throughout.”

Changing times

Recent NBCUniversal innovations have included:

• ShppableTV, a system NBCUniversal launched last year to add ecommerce sponsors’ QR code links to programming, was used to raise $6 million in donations during a recent Parks And Recreation fundraiser for Feeding America.
• Through Stay-In-Theater, NBCUniversal has staged “family movie nights” across its networks, radically reducing ad time thanks to a content sponsorship from Target.
• The company has been more accurately targeting COVID-19 public service announcements at different demographics by leveraging One Platform, the combined tech line-up it is now offering with Comcast stablemate Sky.
• As TV show production and viewing habits have been shaken up, NBCU is using technology to find viewer groups – for example, “golf enthusiasts” – who may be watching entirely unrelated programming.

Granular targeting

“We were able … to reduce advertising load from over 30 minutes to just under two,” says Colella of Stay-In-Theater. “That is something that we’re incredibly proud of and we’re hoping to take reduction in ad time forward

“We’re seeing our technology and our data vendors cooperate and learn how to use data in conjunction with one another.

“Through the pandemic, we realized that not everybody requires the same message. Parents want to speak about the pandemic to their children different than millennials need to hear message, different from people who are high-risk.

“So we were able to segment the data alongside our vendors to make sure that we could get the correct creative to the correct people across all platforms, using One Platform. And that allowed us to contribute to society’s education about a very important topic.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page.  

NBCUniversal, for the past four years, has been investing time and resources into its addressable advertising systems, work that has so far resulted in AdSmart, the company’s audience targeting platform. Now, Colella tells Beet.TV in an interview on site at CES in Las Vegas, NBCUniversal is ready to debut One Platform, an addressable advertising system that lets clients plan, schedule, optimize and measure across both digital and linear channels. Previously, separate systems oversaw digital and linear channels. The future of addressable for NBCUniversal is holistic.

One Platform, Colella says, is the result of work with partners like Project Oar, the industry consortium setting addressable advertising standards, and other industry leaders like Comcast. “We’ve been working tirelessly to test how we’re going to create linear, addressable opportunities for our clients who want them and ask for them, and we’re finally able to deliver.”

According to Colella, while the launch of One Platform is a milestone for the company, there’s still progress to be made, particularly in defining new modes of measurement. “We’re looking for a lot of players to get involved and understand how this is going to change measurement for the ads that it replaces, so I don’t want to say we’re exactly there yet,” says Colella.

What’s important, though, is that linear television is now on par with digital streaming services in terms of targeting and performance capability. That’s particularly crucial in a year that Colella says is set to see the launch of six new streaming services.

“It’s the year of the video platform,” says Colella. “But we can do a lot more for our advertisers and agencies than we ever have been able to do in the past. We’re making investments in content and bringing that together is a great user experience.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  

But buyers need to be walked through the transition, and an ultimate conversion to 100% addressable may not be the end outcome regardless.

In a panel at Beet Retreat In The City, “What Programmers & Brands Want from Advanced TV”, three industry executives were asked why around 10% of national TV ad spend goes toward advanced TV targeting, rather than around 50%:

• A+E Networks – SVP, precision, Ethan Heftman
• LiveRamp – John Hoctor
• NBCUniversal – Dominick Vangeli

They were questioned by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel..

Transition is hard

A+E’s Heftman said: “The reality is, doing business outside of Nielsen age, gender demos is time consuming.”

NBCU’s Vangeli agreed: “The process of onboarding a first party data set … think about how much more complicated that is than transacting on adults (aged) 25 to 54.

“There’s a legacy business with decades and decades of a specific way to transact, and then all of a sudden all the viewership behaviour started to change and fragment.”

No race to bottom-funnel

Although connected TV and advanced targeting capabilities hold the potential to use attribution methods in order to offer performance-driven TV ads, A+E’s Heftman thinks assuming that will be the norm is a misconception.

“Sophisticated marketers at brands and at agencies have always known the value of television for upper funnel, awareness and consideration metrics,” he said. “And now we’re finally able to put lower funnel, foot traffic sales, those types of metrics against it.

“I think the fear of throwing the baby out with the bath water, the idea that we’re all just going to focus on the lower funnel value of television at the expense of the upper funnel… that’s really overblown because we’re all pretty sophisticated.”

Learn to love incomplete

LiveRamp’s Hoctor warned advertisers not to over-estimate the powers of the new medium.

“You have to go into the problem realising you’re never going to have all the data,” he said. “You have to know that out of the gate. Because you’re never going to know if your neighbour recommended the car, or something like that. That’s just not something that’s publicly available, or even privately available for you to do analytics against.

“We have to really calculate a baseline and what would have happened in the absence of the media that we’re measuring”

Context optimizes inventory

NBCU’s Vangeli detailed how NBCU is offering advertisers the ability to buy inventory adjacent to particular show moments, based on machine learning analysis of scripts and closed captions, plugged in to ad sales platforms.

“Let’s pretend a movie is starting to segue into a commercial break, and there’s a great scene where James Bond is shaving in the mirror,” he said. “And this is exactly something that we saw and we tested internally.

“Well then right after that, why is there not a Gillette ad or Dollar Shave Club ad? And so there’s a way to bring context at greater scale on a lot of the programming.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

But it turns out those same capabilities may also trickle up to the big brands that were more commonly thought of as TV advertisers.

That is according to one long-time TV ad exec who recently added a three-letter acronym to his role.

NBCUniversal ad sales senior vice president Brian Norris recently took charge of a “D2C” push.

“These brands were born in social, and they get to a point where they need to scale their businesses,” he told EY’s Janet Balis during Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.

Norris was talking about how advanced TV ad capabilities allow emerging direct-to-consumer brands to get the appeal of TV whilst also enjoying the measurability of digital.

But, asked if those same capabilities can be used by more than just the “emerging” set, he said: “These brands are primarily thinking about how do they succeed against their KPIs. When you’re looking at brands that are new to television and you’re looking at established brands, the one thing that they have in common is that they have to achieve against KPIs.

“Whether that KPI is site conversion (for new brands) or brand lift (for mature brands), they have to achieve against those.

“There’s really no difference in success when you’re thinking about a direct-to-consumer brand and a legacy brand. We ultimately, we need to perform for those brands in order for them to grow and ultimately stay with our platform.”

In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them. Commonly described as including Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Chubbies ,they typically got their early lift by leveraging targeting online ads, but many have come to view TV advertising as the next stage in scaling their business.

An umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.

All of which places Norris and his peers under greater pressure to prove the effectiveness of TV as a medium.

“I get the question pretty often, ‘Why did you leave direct response?’,” he says. “Part of my answer is around attribution… not really believing (until now) that television was getting the credit that it deserved for attribution.

“I think that it’s really important to give television the credit that it deserves and not just have that value siphoned off by a social platform.”

Comcast, owner of Norris’ NBCUniversal, has developed and acquired its way to offering such a solution, including taking on AdSmart through its acquisition of Sky and its earlier acquisition of video ad-tech software FreeWheel.

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Sky launched AdSmart back in 2014, using its own customer data to analyze viewers on advertisers’ behalf and sending household-specific linear TV ads to their set-top boxes – one of the first and widest-scale addressable TV deployments anywhere.

Following the acquisition, Comcast in March announced it would merge NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, whilst the pair said Sky’s Sky Media ad sales house, which sells inventory for both Sky’s owned-and-operated channels and others’, will adopt NBCUniversal’s CFlight metric across all content and platforms in the UK from autumn and in its other European territories next year.

This panel discussion at Cannes Lions saw executives who have driven the companies’ advanced TV initiatives talk about going even larger…

• Jamie West – Deputy Managing Director Sky Media UK & Group Director of Advanced Advertising, Sky
• Denise Colella – SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCU

The pair revealed to their host, MTM co-founder Jon Watts:

• Sky’s AdSmart will be enabled across new TV channels in the next few weeks.
• AdSmart will reach 65% to 70% UK household penetration in the future across all platforms, based on West’s projections.
• The duo imagine bringing the functionality to South America.
• It’s all being driven by brands which have an increasingly global outlook.

“We’re all now gunning for the same end game, which is consistency for an appetiser across global markets,” West said.

“We’ve enabled more and more channels and hopefully there’ll be more announcements about that in the coming weeks, rapidly scaling and the conversations with Denise and the team mean that we can go beyond little old Europe into the US and ultimately South America.”

In its home UK, AdSmart benefitted early by being deployed on the largest pay-TV platform, Sky’s own. It will soon be lit up also on rival Virgin Media’s cable network, taking penetration to 40%.

NBCU’s Colella explains the logic in using tis approach around the world.

“I think the benefit really comes down to our advertisers and their agencies,” she said. “They all are thinking of how do they take these audiences and leverage them in a global way that they’ve never done before.

“It really comes down to planning globally, but then activating locally … CFlight was an actual evolution of that because it gave us the ability to measure across channels.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

Although Cannes Lions started in 1954, it wasn’t until the last decade or so that brand marketers began to attend, represented by the likes of Procter & Gamble. “They’re coming in a slightly different way,” Thomas notes in this interview with Beet.TV. “I think historically they were brought by their agencies but now they’re kind of coming on their own volition.”

Last year’s event saw the launch of the CMO Growth Council, a partnership with the CMO Masters Circle of the Association of National Advertisers featuring 25 CMO’s from some of the world’s biggest global brands. “Cannes Lions really is about how creativity will drive your business and that means growth. One place they believe they can unlock growth is through the use of creativity,” says Thomas.

The CMO Growth Council has since met in such locales as Dubai, Los Angeles, New York and London. “They’re coming together again at Cannes this year to continue to develop the conversations, publish white papers talk about the specific issues that marketers have.”

In adding two awards this year—the Entertainment Lions for Sport and the Creative Strategy Lions—the folks at Cannes had some doubts about the latter. “We didn’t know how the industry was going to respond,” Thomas says. Given initial estimate of perhaps 250 entries, “at the last count we’ve more than three times that many.”

CLX is designed around immersive and interactive experiences with some of the world’s best-known media and entertainment creators, including Activision Blizzard, Adobe, NBCUniversal and Tik Tok from China. “I think if we look across the festival over the last few years, that’s the most interesting thing is the number of different organizations that want to get engaged, who think they can provide solutions for clients and brands.

“It used to just be an advertising festival and it’s just not that anymore,” Thomas adds.

He mentions in passing last year’s Cannes Lions and the absence of Publicis Groupe, plus some shrinkage in the adtech space over the last few years. But events continue to be in demand because of a “human need, which is to be face-to-face and to be with other people,” Thomas says.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“One of the newer and exciting announcements for us is Sky with AdSmart,” says Mike Reidy, SVP, Digital Ad Sales, NBCUniversal. Sky being this amazing international leader but also in the OTT space as well.”

In this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan, Reidy also talks about the migration of video viewing to big screens and evangelizing the opportunities of connected-TV and programmatic advertising transactions.

“I think it’s interesting because when digital video viewership first began, it was seen as taking viewers from the big screen to the small screen” amid concerns like viewability of content and ads. “But now with the advent of connected TV, OTT you’re seeing those viewers migrate back to the big TV screen,” Reidy says.

It’s one thing to have “the largest canvas for a brand to communicate via sight, sound and motion” and another to have advanced TV sitting on a digital platform. “So that lends itself to all the capabilities of dynamic ad serving, new interactive ad units as well as data.”

Last month, Comcast united NBCU’s Audience Studio targeting solutions with Sky’s addressable advertising tools. Operating under the AdSmart name, it’s designed to enable global brands to reach customers in international markets and measure results across NBCU and Sky’s TV portfolio, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

Asked about AdSmart’s plans for the United States, Reidy says, “That’s what we’re working through right now, identifying what are the strong points from each of us respectively. But ideally, the long term is that if we have a client that’s looking at things from a global landscape through a global lens, we now have this incredible domestic and international reach to have a much more strategic conversation with them.”

As for working with DSP’s, Reidy says NBCU is “really excited about what MediaMath is doing. They’re leaning really heavily into the connected TV space and this programmatic landscape. We look at them as people we can partner with, collaborate with, to evangelize what the capabilities are here.”

This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.

The other appeared in 2016, tying together four suites for buying ads across devices.

Now Comcast is merging NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, after the owner acquired the European pay-TV company last year.

In this interview recorded in London in December, Sky advanced advertising group director Jamie West explains AdSmart’s journey – and future.

What is AdSmart?

Sky launched AdSmart in 2013, storing ads on satellite subscribers’ set-top boxes for subsequent targeted playback. It has since spearheaded the UK’s addressable TV revolution, which, despite the existence of several broadcasting networks, is still largely confined to Sky’s AdSmart, and is a European leader in addressable technology.

Sky has served billions of impressions this way using 1,200 customer categories (many of them for newcomers to TV advertising), and later  added a cross-platform ad sequencing platform called Sky AdVance and an analytics offering, too.

What is Audience Studio?

NBCU launched Audience Studio as a data management platform under Denise Colella three years ago, tying together its Audience Targeting Platform (for targeting linear TV viewers), NBCUx (for digital media targeting), NBCU+ (for using Comcast set-top box data) and Social Synch (for extending out through social networks).

What is happening?

Comcast will now badge both offerings as “AdSmart” – specifically, “AdSmart from NBCUniversal” and “AdSmart from Sky”.

That is the starting point. Over time, the pair will aim to learn from each other’s capabilities (Sky’s talent in advanced addressable, NBCU’s in linear optimization), applying them in their respective territories.

An NBC spokesperson tells Beet.TV: “Sky and NBCU’s teams will both gain insight into each other’s advanced advertising capabilities. The long-term goal is that over time, each team will look at how to apply the learnings and solutions from the other to their own markets.”

It’s not yet clear how fully that means a merger for the products.

What is the impact?

Such synergies were always likely as a key component of Comcast’s much-heralded Sky acquisition.

Comcast hopes the closer alignment will help large global brands more easily target and optimize ad campaigns on a more worldwide basis.

“The world is getting smaller, and the opportunity for international marketers to make an impact with consumers is getting bigger,” says NBCU’s advertising chairman Linda Yaccarino in a statement.

All told, the combined product feature set includes:

• Optimization of linear TV ad campaigns againstusing consumer data segments and set-top box data from Comcast and Sky, totalling 50 million households.
• Addressable TV ad placements.
• Digital targeting.
• Commercial break targeting using AI piloted by NBC to better describe contextual moments in shows, using closed-captioning data
  video description and scripts of shows.

Comscore’s seat at the table was its “data-centric, panel-informed” data assets across digital media, TV and OTT, according to Carol Hinnant, who is EVP, National Television Sales. “We bring that together in a single-source panel and then we really use that to drive our outcomes,” says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.

NBCU had the benefit of data from Fandango, the movie ticket business of which it is majority owner. STXFilms was guaranteed that NBCU and its Audience Studio team would produce ticket sales and searches for information about the movie, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

With Comscore’s matching its digital and TV data with Fandango’s data, “those outcomes were based on Fandango ticket sales and online searches for the film. So we really were able to tie that entire marketing ecosystem and have it be outcome based on how we actually drove that,” says Hinnant.

Asked by interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., how agencies and marketers manage to bring together all the data needed for outcomes-based campaigns, Hinnant says “it really takes a collective effort of everybody.” She cites Comscore’s relationships with such third-party data providers as Polk, Experian and IRI.

“We also invite first-party data to come in. In the case of Universal, they brought in their Fandango data set, we did a match on that.”

So what is required to reach a tipping point of sorts for similar campaigns? “I think that you have to get the ecosystem to be able to accept those outcomes. So it’s not only just looking at those audiences but you have to have that be able to flow through the whole planning and posting cycle and we’re starting to see more and more of that happen.”

Although planning based on outcomes is “at kind of a small scale today,” Hinnant observes that Viacom is “winning with their advanced audiences structure so I think we’ll see more and more of that as these media networks and publishers have more success with that.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

For nearly 10 years the industry has been aware of the challenge of “needing to do something different and better,” Rockwood explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. “I think in the last two we’ve probably made a lot of progress. I think before then there wasn’t enough of a business need but now there certainly is and I think there has been a lot better progress.”

The SVP of Ad Sales Portfolio Research says of Comscore and Nielsen, “I think that they both have started to do more that’s actually helping us” while echoing the concerns of many CIMM participants about the need to make it easier to conduct business in cross-platform premium video.

“It’s just too hard. As this measurement improves it will become easier to transact.”

She describes the fragmentation of viewing options as “so extreme that it may not be the best thing for the consumer. So I do believe that they’re going to start looking for simpler solutions that provide more value” And while the marketplace is fragmented is now, it’s “going to coalesce around some solutions that actually have more consumer value.”

Asked whether there are too many measurement options for the sell-side, Rockwood doesn’t think so. “I think you have to have competition in this marketplace and you have two major companies that are trying to solve for this,” both of which are “getting traction.”

Beyond that competition is the disparity in data sets, whether they derive from an MVPD or in Turner’s case DirecTV and NBCU with Comcast that “can all be used in different ways and I think we’re finding our way through that now. I don’t think that the complexity is getting in the way of us doing business.”

On the subject of identity graphs, Rockwood stresses their importance in how video advertising and viewing related to individual households and individuals.

“Having high-quality information around what devices belong to which households and then which people are using those devices is I think really important,” Rockwood says. “I think that the Xander data will certainly give us a leg up in that race.”

Founded in 2010, Adaptly partners with some of the leading digital platforms, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Instagram and Snapchat, for a client roster that includes Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint.

“What attracted Accenture Interactive Operations was the fact that they really are leaders in terms of the whole platformization of marketing,” Mendonca explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “They really know how to leverage platforms properly to be able to give a step change in business outcomes.”

Adaptly will significantly bolster the capabilities of Accenture Interactive Programmatic Services, whose core offerings are helping marketers in-house programmatic media; media strategy, planning and activation; and adtech implementation and support.

“We’re very much starting with the world of programmatic delivery because we do firmly believe that all media will be programmatically delivered” as early as 2025, inclusive of TV, Mendonca says. “That’s really where our lens is so we’re starting first with programmatic activation and then we’ll scale that through to myriad number of touchpoints including TV, outdoor, radio, et cetera.”

The acquisition of Adaptly comes as Accenture is creating “experience activation centers” for clients “everywhere from Warsaw to Sao Paolo. What we’re finding is our clients really want us to have a very integrated offering across all paid, owned and earned channels and touchpoints, and that’s really what we’re focused on.”

In all, Accenture has “a whole scaled operation” of 16,000 people across the globe “developing new marketing operating models for clients and new solutions to their growth challenges.”

Because content lies at the heart of marketing experience activation, “We very much are building our product and service offering around a data-driven, tech-enabled content powered way of going to market, which is exactly what are clients are asking for.” Even when building new marketing models, “building a new content operating model is at the heart of that solution,” says Mendonca.

What should be a constant is that any form of brand communication “is actually more engaging and enhances the customer experience,” she adds, “to make sure that advertising is not a tax and it’s not an annoyance for the consumer because ad blocking is only going one way.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Since gaining, keeping and growing customers involve different phases, being able to discern them leads to knowing what messaging to deliver across platforms. “Linking those two things up we think is the next phase of where the business is going,” Spengler opines in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “It’s data, but then you have to know what to say and it’s creativity.”

Powering much of this progress within Dentsu is the M1 platform developed by the Merkle agency prior to its acquisition by Dentsu in 2016. M1 now has an identity graph that comprises 95% of U.S. adults by way of personally identifiable information codes, according to Spengler.

“That gives us a tremendous ability to work with our clients to identify true targets based on all the data they would want to know about somebody,” and then to figure out “how to connect them at various end points so we can actually speak to those exact people. So it’s making media more precise and more powerful.”

Part of the process is connecting audiences with media owners. “The conversation we’re having is about audiences, it’s less about GRP’s,” Spengler says. “It’s about content and environment, because content and context will always be important. We’re coming together on that.”

Understanding the differences among audiences goes hand in hand with being able to determine how specific targets are consuming media, according to Spengler.

“You’ve got five different devices. Am I going to waste money and talk to you five different times when I only want to talk to you once? So you’ve got to really understand who you are and what device you’re on so we’re not wasting the money.”

Asked about the value that media agencies need to provide, Spengler says “It’s very complex. It used to be strategy and save me money.” Now its data, technology and creativity working together.

“It’s higher level work but that’s what our clients need and that’s what we’re trying to build ourselves to be able to deliver.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“Before us there was YouTube and Netflix and that was it,” says Chief Revenue Officer Mark Rotblat. “We are across all the major platforms, eighteen of them, mostly on televisions.”

Those platforms include Roku, Amazon Fire, Samsung and Sony smart TV’s, along with gaming consoles, mobile devices and Android TV. In November of 2018, Tubi expanded its footprint by adding 20 million homes in the Comcast Xfinity X1 footprint.

A free app for a service that doesn’t require subscriptions, Tubi sells adds through both programmatic partner channels and direct to agencies and marketers, Rotblat explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “Really, whichever model works best for the buyer. What they love is that it’s only movies and TV shows.”

Since there’s no digital short-form content among the more than 9,000 movie and TV titles available on Tubi, “It really looks like what they buy in television and it solves the problem of linear ratings in decline, making it harder for them to reach their target audience through linear. It’s the cord cutters and cord nevers that are spending more and more time in OTT,” says Rotblat.

Asked about the growing number of direct-to-consumer video services slated for launch by major media companies, Rotblat says, “You’ll see in all these announcements are subscription services. Whether it’s skinny bundles or otherwise, there’s competition for that type of content. But we’re really feeling that there’s going to be some subscription fatigue.”

He describes Tubi viewers as “media enthusiasts who typically have one or two subscriptions “and they kind of bounce around. They might have Showtime for a month, Hulu for a month for this show. But we’re kind of the consistent that they know they can go and find just a massive library and it’s free. They’re willing to have ads if it’s a light ad load that’s unobtrusive.”

Tubi’s ad load around four to six minutes an hour, about a third of what’s on linear TV, according to Rotblat. Ad inventory is mainly 15- and 30-second ads managed through the company’s own ad server, “and we have on average three to five ads per pod every fifteen minutes or so.”

Tubi is similar to Pluto TV, which was recently acquired by Viacom for $340 million. Pluto TV is expected to complement Viacom’s cable distribution, as USA TODAY reports.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Beck talks about research Turner recently conducted to see what’s top of mind with viewers who face an ever-expanding roster of streaming choices, some of them without advertising.

“The research we did recently is very interesting,” says Beck. “People kept going back to trying to simply discover content has become more of a challenge because there’s so much out there. What can I watch and where can I watch it? And by the way, do I have to pay incremental for it?”

Among the research learnings was that people want more relevant viewing recommendations in a world of increased co-viewing wherein “typically you’re getting a recommendation based on a single profile when you have multiple people who are interested in what the content is,” Beck says. “Why can’t we have recommendations that are based on multiple profiles?”

But recommendations come with nuances, he adds, one example being not everyone who likes comedy programming likes dark comedic material. “The ability to go more granular in search to really get to what you’re looking for is going to be important.”

Another research finding that stood out is “there’s so much clutter in the experience today. When you open up any screen, there’s that infinite scrolling of content and how do you de-clutter that? So I think there’s going to be a lot of focus on UI, UX to make more personalized experiences for people,” says Beck.

Asked about reducing ad loads and other ways to improve viewing experiences, he notes that while Amazon, Netflix and others have done well without ads, Hulu has done well with an ad model.

“I think a lot of the services are going to have to consider is there an ad-supported model. Consumers may be very open to that, especially if the ads get better. By better I don’t just mean the quality of the content but not as interruptive or served at the times in which people are open to that.

“I definitely think that anybody that’s in this space is thinking hard about how can advertisers help fund the experience for consumers because we know consumers are going to want a free or ad-supported version.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Its goal is to “evolve the consumer experience of watching live, primetime television into a better experience because we know that they have an immense amount of options to be able to watch television,” says Mark Marshall, NBCU’s President of Advertising & Client Partnerships.

Along the way, NBCU has trimmed ad loads to evolve the consumer experience. The days of 42 minutes of content and 18 minutes of interruption “are going to have to be behind us if we want to continue to make this ad sales ecosystem continue to be healthy,” Marshall adds in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

Reducing ad loads began two years ago when the company trimmed 35% from its digital properties. Last year NBCU said it had cut 10% out of its top 50 shows across eight networks.

In sports programming, it faces restrictions but “we’ve tried some different things,” says Marshall. One is during hockey games, “when a puck is iced and we have the transition before the next face-off of having a drop in-ad in that period of time. It’s in the flow of the sport, it’s not disruptive and it actually has performed very well for us.”

On the segmentation side, worked with an outside firm to create a tool called the “content code.” Starting in primetime, NBCU wanted to figure out not only why people were coming to its shows but what mood they were in when they were watching. “And then we layered on top of that what ads performed best within that. Putting the right tone of the right ad in the right show we saw the brand metrics jump.”

This year, it will continue to refine its artificial intelligence-informed optimization to target ads down to the scene level. “Our goal is to make to advertising as effective as possible. And we know that it does two things. It works for brand metrics and it also helps with retention, making sure people stay with it,” Marshall says.

Meanwhile, “challenger” brands like Peloton have added TV to their options “ and they talk in terms of how it really influenced their brand as soon as they went on television.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Meanwhile, advertising sales rose to just under $1.5 billion from $1 billion. “We’re getting TV’s largest advertisers,” says Naylor, while direct-to-consumer brand revenue grew 86% “and we’re super serving them with some new tools.”

Foremost in that expanding toolkit is an attribution offering from the company owned by Comcast, Fox and Disney plus an ad format that would appear when Hulu viewers pause what they’re watching.

Hulu will develop customized attribution deals depending on the types of customer-relationship data its advertisers can share—information can be matched with customer behavior metrics from Hulu, as Variety reports.

“We can elegantly put our census level data with their census level data” resulting in a “census-to-census marriage of the data to show that an exposure resulted in a sale,” says Naylor.

Working with Telaria, Hulu is enhancing its programmatic private marketplace for ad inventory so that “we can put people in a biddable environment for the most coveted segments.” It’s a closed market because “we’re very protective” to avoid “category collision with our advertisers” and to be able to fully vet the ad creative, Naylor adds.

“Happily, the majority of people choose the advertising-supported Hulu but that doesn’t mean we can just feel free to just jam ads at them. If anything, we have to be as respectful as possible because they’re one click away from going to the commercial-free Hulu.” While the company is “conventional TV with conventional breaks,” it welcomes ads of any duration plus interactive units, working with partners like BrightLine and Innovid.

The “latest kid on the block” that Hulu is beta testing is “a pause ad.” When viewers hit the pause button “we’re going to serve up a little image” but not a display or video ad. “Imagine a Coke can with language like ‘the pause that refreshes.’”

The goal is to exploit the opportunity of “knowing situationally what viewers are up to with kind of a respectful ad execution. It’s an experiment that we can take because of who we are,” Naylor says.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

While the People’s Choice Awards had long been owned and produced by Procter & Gamble, “We wanted to make it new young and fresh in E!’s voice. And we recognized that if we just did it in the linear space it really wouldn’t be new and fresh. So we had to use our partnerships to offer marketers even greater opportunities for their content they were doing with us,” Molen says.

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, she explains how NBCU custom builds programs for marketers that span various channels and platforms in “one cohesive plan.” At the awards ceremony, Ebay sponsored backstage views while Subaru had a commanding presence near the red carpet, as Variety reports. Metro by T-Mobile sponsored a “live look-in” of a music performance by Rita Ora that garnered 2.3 million social media views—an audience that was 90% composed of 18-24-year- olds, according to Molen.

“So it’s that kind of impact that we’re looking to help marketers make by distributing their content wherever the consumer is. On Telemundo, we see this all the time.”

NBCU has social partners that include Snap and Twitter, while its Social Synch offering makes it easy for brands to reach audiences across various social media platforms.

“We sell all of our content, even if it’s distributed across other people’s platforms,” Molen says. “We give our marketers one cohesive plan, making it very easy for them to buy.”

She draws a parallel between premium content and most of social media because “that’s where the conversation is around premium content and long-form content.” Her conversations at CES include improving the commercial experience so that consumers enjoy the content better “but they also engage more deeply around a marketer’s brand.”

Some advertisers are rediscovering the value of premium content, having seen “a lot of shiny objects” and had issues with certain platforms. “Working with NBCUniversal we can give them the things that they need in data, in distribution, in commercial innovation, in ROI and attribution.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“There’s a functional need for our product in the market and an emotional one and a community to belong to,” Away VP of Brand Marketing Selena Kalvaria says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “The problem is we haven’t reached all those people.”

Away’s experience with television thus far has focused on direct response. This year it’s looking to find out “what other roles can TV play, not just reach but driving culture, emotional resonance and return on brand equity via premium programming,” says Kalvaria.

“How do we start to think about the full marketing funnel, the full strategy, in order to grow our reach and to really be able to have those conversations with those people?” she says. “And at the same time think about how that impacts and actually makes our bottom of the funnel more efficient.”

It’s not just about commercials per se but “there is customer alignment, there’s emotional alignment, there’s values alignment” while creating “mental availability,” another term for getting into more peoples’ purchase consideration set.

While most direct-to-consumer companies think about channels they can measure easily, Kalvaria embraces traditional brand health metrics. “Awareness, consideration and ultimately market penetration.” For her, consideration is one of the biggest metrics for a brand whose key brand attributes include being stylish, innovative and unique.

“How are we moving those metrics through the stories that we tell on television, through the stories that we tell through upper funnel?” asks Kalvaria. “As your awareness and your consideration moves, your penetration will move too and that’s your bottom funnel.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV, U.S. CEO Gerhart discusses the “perfect balance” between TV’s scale and addressability along with the challenge that accompanies the need for increasing amounts of consumer data for targeting purposes.

“One of the biggest things that we’re starting to see is the unbundling of services,” says Gerhart, citing the Consumer Technology Association’s projection of a 27% increase in streaming revenue in 2019. “That’s huge and it has massive implications when you think about the control that it gives to consumers in terms of building their own packages with their own channels, their own networks.”

Byproducts of this customization can be positive or negative. Among the former is greater fragmentation, while the latter includes “understanding more about who those consumers are through the data that we have, from the suppliers providers and carriers that are actually starting to create some of those bundles,” Gerhart says.

He sees opportunity in the “perfect balance between the scale that TV can afford and actually the addressability that it creates. I don’t think we have many clients that are on one extreme or the other.”

Mindshare has a lot of small “challenger brands” that use addressable TV and new technologies to precisely target people who may be in market for a particular product or service. Then there are clients that need traditional scale and eyeballs, reach and impressions.

“And it’s the combination of those two and understanding where and how they intersect, that’s the art and science of what we do,” Gerhart says.

He believes there’s a paradox now in that “everybody wants to be as addressable and precise as possible. But in order to do that it means that we need more data and more information from consumers from providers, third party, first party, you name it. That’s the tension that we’re constantly faced with.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

The end goal is “how you can get a holistic view from television viewing across the same audiences across different platforms into one place so you can offer video viewing to the buyers in a more holistic fashion,” Clarken adds in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

Nielsen has been working the industry on cross-platform measurement “and it’s been complicated.” Signs of encouragement, according to Clarken, include the “fantastic job” that Linda Yaccarino and her team have created in the form of CFlight.

Within CFlight, Nielsen provides foundational data from its traditional television ratings plus Digital Ad Ratings and Total Ad Ratings “as the underlying data, and then they put those things together inside of this platform. It’s great. It’s a place where it’s a starting point,” says Clarken.

“I think it’s great for the industry. It shows movement across a problem that’s been there for some time where there hasn’t been movement. We’d love to continue to work with them and see how this can be adopted more broadly.”

She considers calculating cross-platform reach and frequency as “the first place to start. How many people saw it, how often did they see it, how long did they see it for. And that provides an underlying platform for everything else.

“And what’s really important is that when you measure reach and frequency across platforms you’re doing it in a comparable way. Buyers want holistic view. They don’t want to try to cobble together their TV data with the data from mobile, with the data from PC, with data from multiple providers to try to get some sense of their ad spend on video themselves.”

As more advertisers extend their audience targeting beyond age and gender into different demographics and biographics, the next step is to show actual business outcomes.

“You have to start with the base before you can get to the sales targets, but ultimately the holy grail is to put the base in place and then start to building the pieces on top of that to the ultimate outcome. Which is did I actually sell something on the back of my advertising,” says Clarken.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.

That has spurred many networks to rip up and re-shape the norm for what a commercial break looks like, and how long it runs.

A Beet Retreat panel convened during three days of debate in Puerto Rico to discuss ad load and the viewer experience…

The big reduction that wasn’t

The debate kicked off when the analyst leading the discussion confronted two networks that have launched initiatives to reduce ad loads with data showing, in many cases, it has not come to pass…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

“I saw this really interesting research from Kantar that ad load, for all the talk, had not actually declined from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Actually, it had data on all of your properties which was super interesting to look at…”

Peacock’s cut is coming

Answering O’Connell, a leading NBCUniversal executive re-stated the company’s intention to reduce at load by 20% in some TV formats…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really a challenge because we need to find a way that the consumers will enjoy the experience and the advertisers will get their message out, and of course we will make money … How do we produce content that’s meaningful to consumers? It’s something that we’re very focused on for the next year.”

Linear is hard to change

Another network exec echoed recent industry sentiment about the pace with which TV is turning itself around, suggesting that the traditional TV business as defined by its legacy medium may not change any time soon…

Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks:

“In the linear format, we have an existing business model that unless I can figure out a way to sustain it and grow it the way I have to in my role, yeah, it isn’t just necessarily going to change. You have the opportunity in OTT and in new formats to build the ad model from the ground up.

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“We obviously still have challenges as it exists today, I think, beyond just the consumer we’ve all experienced where you see the four ads. There are a lot of technical reasons why that happened. With video on demand, the ad load is a bit reduced compared to linear TV, but more importantly for the consumer experience, there are caps put in place. An ad can’t run more than two times per hour.”

Tech can solve for excess

If linear is hard to change, panel speakers suggested that technology platforms could help the networks and all parts of the value chain to make good on promises to reduce the frequency with which ads are seen, if not quite yet the number of them…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really incumbent on the technology providers to solve (it), regardless of who buys the ad, who puts it out there. It needs to be frequency-capped.”

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“NCC’s point of view is through partnering with the likes of Freewheel, who is really focused on this topic, and can help control for frequency across platform, but then also building scale.”

Viewers are revolting

Beyond these implementation challenges, though, a bigger threat is evident. In 2019, the booming success of subscription video on demand, which often comes minus ads of any kind, is inculcating an ad-free viewing culture. Steadily, viewers used to immediate content are discovering a disdain for advertising they always knew was latent but which has now bubbled to the surface…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“Our woes are certainly existent, but really the reason why (consumers are) fleeing the ad model is because we make it unbearable.”

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Generally, so far, television has fared better from an attitudinal standpoint than digital channels, but I fear that that will change because of the exact things that we’re talking about right now. (Consumers) understood the role that the ads played (in linear television).”

Re-think the ad unit

Panelists agreed that the very nature of an ad needs to be re-thought – and not just in terms of its length. Custom creative and interactivity should all be on the table…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Creative management platforms and DCO (dynamic creative optimization) technology is the most-under appreciated category of technology out there. The things that you can do with these technologies are really amazing, and yet the awareness is almost null in the industry. These guys are (just) playing around in formats like OTT.”

Proof of the pudding

Networks are more likely to respond positively and fully implement consumer-friendly advertising breaks if they can see data showing effectiveness – one panelist said that poses a problem in TV…

Lisa Lutz, VP, Product Management – Advanced Advertising TiVo:

“If I replace my (traditional advertising) pod with two 30-second (spots), instead of seven spots, what’s the retention? What’s the migration? Where are people going? Did this work? Did this not work? There’s always been such latency in terms of being able to get the data and measure it. (But) now (there is) the ability to have data at your fingertips and be able to really measure a few days after you run something.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.

The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.