“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.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, A+E’s EVP of Ad Sales discusses why advertisers haven’t taken the full plunge into advanced targeting and the likelihood that the ad-supported model is in the future for companies like Amazon, Netflix and the planned Disney service.

He says advertisers are “getting so pressured to prove the effectiveness of every nickel they spend. Everyone’s known for a long time TV works, especially on the upper-funnel metrics of awareness and all that. But there’s been like a vagueness to that. It doesn’t really tie back to ROI as cleanly as some other things.”

Being able to more closely tie TV ad exposure to tangible business results “gives the ammunition that the marketers need to keep recommending premium video as that centerpiece and not be shifting money somewhere else,” Olsen says.

Advertisers are looking to strike a balance “between what digital is claiming it can do and what we’ve always known TV could do, and then just really getting to kind of the right balance to answer on the effectiveness of both,” he adds.

It’s worth noting that while age and gender has been the transactional TV demographic for years, secondary targets have been available for more than three decades, Olsen observes. TV networks have the tools to go beyond, say, trying to reach everyone ages 18-49 to more strategic targets.

“Clients I think are interested but they’re not jumping in with both feet yet” given questions about data quality and scalability. “So I think it’s finding the right balance between what is still mass, what is targeted and then you take it a step further, what should go to addressable, et cetera.”

Then there’s the viewer balancing act. While many are seeking to avoid ads, that comes with a higher cost.

But Olsen points to signs of hope. “Some of the stuff we’ve seen, though, isn’t as daunting as it may look right now,” he says. “Some of the S-VOD penetration is kind of hitting a ceiling here in the U.S. and I think those companies are actually looking at ad models themselves.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix has an ad model, Amazon, the new Disney service. All those things eventually have ad models as part of that product. I think they will be more tailored ads and more personalized will be kind of the magic to it.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

Corbelli puts reasons for all those machinations into three buckets: vertical integration on the technology side, reach across screens and distribution points and “the ability to offer great content in this three-screen, streaming world,” the Chairman and CEO of BrightLine says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Originally known for its pioneering dynamic television ad solutions for brands, BrightLine early in 2018 launched DataCast, a unified OTT data platform that enables advertisers to target and measure across mobile, desktop and television screens. DataCast links commonly sought audience segments to TV screens—for example automobile purchase intenders—then identifies specific households within the BrightLine OTT footprint that match the target audience segments. Targeted campaigns using enhanced and/or traditional TV commercials can be sent to those households.

For DataCast, BrightLine’s media partners integrate the company’s technology within their OTT apps across the full OTT device footprint, including FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Samsung, IOS and Android. Household reach is currently 68 million.

Corbelli’s perspective helps to make sense of the seemingly frantic consolidation happening in the TV space. “You see AT&T trying to combine its distribution assets and the content that Time Warner owns. You see the AppNexus acquisition as being part of how digital becomes truly integrated with not just desktop and mobile but also telecom and television.”

She sees something similar happening with “the fight for Fox, as I call it. Very specifically, there’s a content play there, a content rollup, there’s a distribution play. It’s why Sky is as important as it is to Comcast.”

Meanwhile, she considers Hulu as the strongest ad-supported asset “that any media company could own in a space that is exploding. They’ve got 60% of all streams right now in the ad-supported environment. Not surprisingly, it feels a little bit like a free-for-all for who owns Hulu.”

Finally there’s Netflix, which in some quarters is considered to be an eventual convert to ad-supported content. “I think folks like Netflix are in for some challenges with all this consolidation going on,” says Corbelli, noting that Amazon is talking about offering ads on pre-roll. “I think that’s how the models start to shake out. You’re going to see a combination of subscription revenue and ad revenue and you start to see a lot of common models out there.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.

There are 65 million households using some type of device to access premium video content in the living room and, for the first time, more than 50% of video starts being delivered on a connected-TV device are ad-supported, the Head of Advanced TV & Video explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“You’ve seen the viewership change, you’ve seen people embrace it as their primary source of content and you’ve seen these devices take over control of HDMI1 on the TV, which is the most important thing to control,” Fisher says. “No longer is a Roku device a way to get Netflix on your TV. A Roku device is a way to get TV.”

While connected TV definitely is the “low-hanging fruit for what we’re doing at MediaMath today,” within three to five years all linear impressions will become one-to-one addressable and targetable through the rise of IP video, “so we want to be well positioned to be able to play in that space as well.”

MediaMath doesn’t buy or arbitrage TV inventory. Rather, it sees itself as the connection point between buyers and sellers, according to Fisher.

“We’ve curated our list of supply sources that we do most of our transactions with down to, say, the top twenty percent of supply sources that drive eighty percent of the meaningful impressions that marketers are looking for,” he says.

Those sources include five network groups and three big virtual MVPD services in a fraud-free environment. “We’re never more than one hop away from the end seller,” Fisher adds.

MediaMath’s pitch to traditional TV buyers is one of reach and frequency and how they can shift a portion of their spend “to the same inventory and the same viewer model and the same screen they know how to buy but doing it in a smarter, more measureable way.”

The company tells the same story to digital buyers but with a twist since they already know how to buy audiences, measurable impressions and retargeted campaigns. “For the first time, a digital buyer has the ability to transact on the biggest most trusted screen in the house in a way that they know how to do and in a way that fits into their business model.”

With its cross-device graph and audience targeting capabilities, MediaMath sees itself as leading the charge in tying back actual down-funnel attribution to upper funnel branding metrics.

“Being able to say the first time a viewer is exposed to an ad campaign or a brand’s message should happen in video. Whether or not that’s web, mobile, tablet or TV, video is the best way to tell that upper-funnel branding story,” says Fisher.

“But that doesn’t get you all the way there as a marketer. You want to be able to find that household, find the users in that household, and tell a down-funnel story to drive attribution and actual action on the right screen with the right message at the right time.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Such was the case at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity when Marchese was interviewed on stage by Dave Clark, GM of Comcast’s FreeWheel, as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.

Never one to mince words, Marchese described the complexity of trying to figure out just how many commercials a given consumer is willing to watch on a given platform and how sellers like Fox should price newly emerging ad formats.

What’s not complicated is the silent clock ticking in the background for an industry that is known to advance in capsulized increments, according to Marchese.

President of Advertising Revenue at Fox Networks Group, Marchese was blunt about “what sucks” about television. “TV and advertising have been for so long negotiating with each other and they didn’t have to worry about a third party in the negotiation. Building a business model for consumers first, that’s what’s different,” Marchese said.

“Why does anybody like you?” asked Clark.

“I’m not sure anyone does. I say what other people I think are thinking, I hope,” Marchese responded.

The ticking clock analogy refers to the two or three years he estimates might pass “before you start to see massive, tectonic shifts in how viewers behave.”

Clark: “Is there a simple way to think about the amount of advertising that consumers will accept?”

“It’s variable,” said Marchese. “The real problem is we haven’t even gotten to how complex it’s actually going to be.”

Since consumers are not “some giant, homogenous group of people” but individuals who value their time differently at different times, “I think we have to have a test and learn approach to what’s intrusive and what isn’t.”

That approach will reveal that there is content people are willing to endure ads to access “and there’s content people won’t sit through ads to get,” Marchese said. “Google’s already doing this in a lot of places. On YouTube, not everyone sees the same ad load. I think TV has to get a little bit smarter about when and where.”

Asked by Clark whether advertisers are willing to pay more for exclusivity in a commercial break, Marchese said “They have and they are” while noting that Fox’s two-ad JAZ pods “sold out early in the Upfront.”

Nonetheless, there’s no easy formula at this point for exactly how much to charge because marketers in certain categories might be willing to pay more, according to Marchese.

“The real problem is, saying what are they worth or how much more is so relative to who buys it. And so until these things are out there and the market can get set, we don’t know how much more yet.”

As a founder of engagement-ad pioneer true[X], a startup that Fox acquired for approximately $200 million, surely Marchese has some advice for TV networks, said Clark.

“Be prepared to work in chaos, things are going to change,” said Marchese before explaining that companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix are in the video space “because they want to be the operating system for peoples’ lives, but people choose their operating system based on where the best stories are.”

Citing FX, Clark asked whether the highly awarded network holds lessons for other networks. Marchese said it was among the first to abandon the model of producing cheap programming in bulk to fill a 24-hour schedule. This helps to explain why when it comes to Emmy and Golden Globe awards, the most have gone to HBO, Netflix and FX, “and only one of those still sits on a cable-operated system, ad-supported,” Marchese said.

Asked by Clark whether he’s worried when he sees people like Shonda Rhimes leaving ABC and Ryan Murphy exiting Fox to join up with Netflix, Marchese said Ryan indicated that interruptive ads weren’t his main motivation.

“Shows had to be exactly 42 minutes and the episodes had to have exactly these arcs,” Marchese observed. “Then you add in the fact you’re scheduling to a clock that has ads in very particular breaks. When they add a new break, they actually have to add a new act to the show and that’s a lot of actual work and creativity.”

On a positive note, Marchese said that when Fox announced its JAZ pods, Seth McFarland said he wanted them for the entire season of The Orville. “That’s a creator being excited about a better ad system,” said Marchese.

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

“I think what’s most exciting, and this might sound odd from an agency person’s perspective, is Netflix,” Seiler adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

Why is that?

“Because subscription has led to way better content. And like all things free capital market, that’s led to more choice means got to be better. Content’s better everywhere you look.”

He calls pay-TV content “extraordinary.” That, in turn, has made free TV content “have to be that much better.”

But there’s a need for aggregation of all that content because we can’t all possibly keep track of where it is, according to Seiler.

“And I think that the notion of that really good content being interrupted by nasty ads is wildly anachronistic. I love the platforms that are pushing for fewer interruptions that are being smarter about how brands are integrated.”

Integrating brands into “the really valuable stories that are being told and ensuring that they’re there in a way that’s reasonable” is paramount. Brands should not engage in integrations just because they’re just looking to insert themselves. “They’re there because they’re making the content better.”

He thinks this year’s Upfront rituals will produce “a lot better partnerships with the content creators and the brands and the agencies that work with them to ensure that when a brand’s showing up that’s a good thing.”

Along with proliferation of choice comes the need for aggregation and therefore a few trusted partners. “They’re probably not going to be the few trusted partners that you and I had growing up of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, et cetera. Those channels are going to look more like Prime and Netflix and YouTube as well as NBC, as well as some of those other channels,” says Seiler.

Nonetheless, he believes it’s a great time to be a brand and a marketer. “It’s confusing, but the choices are so much better and the idea of integration in the truest sense of the word is I think here.”

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.

“We preplanned out a lot of how we wanted the social to work around it and how we would activate social channels and key opinion leaders to do a really smart push full strategy,” says Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Procter & Gamble media agency Hearts & Science. “It worked out really well.”

Well enough that ADWEEK dubbed the four Tide spots collectively as “the runaway winner” ahead of efforts for Amazon, Doritos/Mountain Dew, Tourism Australia and the NFL’s own campaign.

Hagedorn says the strategy for the Super Bowl work, ads for which were produced by Saatchi & Saatchi, started with the client. The idea was to cast actor David Harbour, known to Netflix viewers as scruffy sheriff Jim Hopper in “Stranger Things,” as a kind of narrator in sparkling clean clothes who talks to viewers about commercials they are seeing.

Tide was able to co-opt its ads “into other Super Bowl ads to make them Tide ads, and they ultimately became P&G ads,” Hagedorn explains in this Beet.TV interview following his speech at the 4A’s Data Summit.

Tide had purchased a 45-second spot in the first quarter to set up the narrative and one 15-second ad in each succeeding quarter. “The interesting thing about marketing now is you can create kind of a multidimensional solution. You can plan for the social ramp up and the social ramp down,” Hagedorn says.

Last year, Bradshaw appeared in a Tide spot with a fake stain on his shirt during what appeared to be a live broadcast but was shot weeks earlier. “This year that was all a tease” to make fans believe that “were going to do a repeat of last year’s Super Bowl stunt.”

In 2015, Hearts & Science won the P&G media account in North America, setting the stage for the agency’s launch the next year. It has since won business from AT&T, “quietly started working on QuickBooks with TBWA,” won the Barclays account with OMD in the U.K. and had a hand in the New York Times Golden Globes “He Said, She Said” work with Droga5.

Hagedorn credits four tenets—agility, empowerment, intelligent scale and open standards—for the agency’s “hot and heavy” new business winning streak. “We’re hoping to wrap a lot of the pitches up that we’ve been working on and carry it through into Q2, but then I look forward to slowing us down a little bit and trying to ingest it and bring it all in.”

This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.

This means that things like self-driving cars, drones, artificial intelligence and virtual reality take a back seat to the “undercurrent” that drives merger and acquisition activity.

“The single biggest driver in terms of what we see here at CES and how that translates into deal activity is convergent TV,” Kawaja says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2018. “You see all of the big linear TV companies, both content and distribution, are here.”

So what are those players discussing? Not shows or content in general.

“They are talking about technologies that allow the targeting and delivery of specific content and specific advertising to individuals and homes because of the new way that TV is consumed by consumers.”

Citing ongoing deals involving AT&T and Time Warner and Disney’s desired acquisition of certain Fox assets, what excites Kawaja is that the industry is complex, fragmented and dynamic.

“When you get significant sea changes like these technology applications to a $160 billion television market, obviously people make their moves,” he says. “There’s a lot of moving parts right now, and companies in both legacy and the sort of digital world are positioning themselves for that by making moves that aggregate distribution, content, getting scale.”

Considering the TV advances and desires of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix, everyone else has “clearly figured out that scale is now on a whole new level and they have to get ready.”

This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018.   Please visit this page for more coverage. 

Overall, the Principal Analyst believes that things are moving from “conversations about how the TV industry is evolving to action in the TV industry,” O’Connell explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

“It’s a massive industry. It was been very, very slow to change. And I think it’s still moving relatively slowly in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. But the energy this time feels meaningful, as though we are graduating to action.”

Because of her grasp of the complicated adtech ecosystem, it’s easy for her to boil things down when the issue is consolidation of players. She notes that some companies are interested in owning the full technology stack, “everything from data management and analytics and data as an asset” through to execution.

Then there are “the other set of companies who, at least so far, seem less interested in getting into the execution game. When you look at consolidation, to me that’s the most interesting dynamic,” O’Connell says.

The bottom line: will execution inevitably become “part of these massive clouds? It sort of feels like it will. And yet if you ask them, some of them deliberately take a stance that it won’t.”

While she appreciates the efforts of media companies like NBCUniversal to accelerate the shift from buying demos to audiences, O’Connell believes that things can only progress so quickly. There’s a lot of inertia in basic business dynamics.

For example, the traditional, procurement-driven practice of “getting CPM’s lower than the CPM’s that the agency achieved the prior year. Which is insane. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s a crazy model.” A model of “rewarding efficiency and effectiveness needs to become more of the norm,” she adds.

Asked whether Netflix will go the ad-supported route, O’Connell evokes the chicken-and-egg causality dilemma. Are consumers demanding ad-free services like Netflix, or is the company driving change that consumers embrace?

Either way, Netflix has made some companies up their game, according to O’Connell.

“So when we are in an ad-supported model, it’s one that consumers don’t hate but actually find valuable. Let alone not annoying, can you imagine if they actually found it valuable?”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

For both, the question becomes “How can we enhance the speed of change,” says Matt Spiegel, Managing Partner at MediaLink.

Thus the strategic advisory and business development firm grounds its marketer clients in a basic reality.

“We often say that if you’re going to participate in new things, you’re going to have to start with new measurement models,” Spiegel says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “What a lot of marketers are going through is what often is called the precision marketing journey.”

That voyage begins with accepting that measuring reach and frequency and exposure “is not going to be the sufficient metrics of the future in order to try new advanced things,” Spiegel says.

The new media world values a much more complex list of things. “That transition is semi easy to say and very hard to do.”

Choices must be made on the TV side as well. A major challenge common to traditional broadcasters is that their revenue streams “are much more finite and refined” than newer players like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix.

“They benefit from seeing the creation of content and monetization, i.e. the ad business, the media business, being a secondary or tertiary revenue stream to their core business,” Spiegel says. “That has a huge implication for how you think about the economics of funding content development and the decisions you’re able to make in that business.”

The question for big, traditional broadcasters: what is the role they think they can play? Do they use other companies’ technologies, go direct to consumer, try to handle their monetization options?

“I think there’s a future where not everyone that’s premium, high-end content creators will be in the ad sales or ad monetization business,” Spiegel adds. “They’re likely to choose other partners to help with that potential piece of the pie. That’s years out there. But I think those are the plates that have to shift.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

So it’s a bit ironic that brands’ best hope derives from a trend dating to the 1990’s: one-to-one marketing, but with a twist. “Storytelling is dead,” says Rajamannar, who is CMO & CCO of the financial services company. “It’s all about story making.”

Not that pursuing this strategy comes easy, Rajamannar explains in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“Many of the CMO’s have bigger technology budgets than the CTO’s. And that really calls for a level of understanding,” he says before declaring that finding the marketing talent that is required these days “is going to be a nightmare.”

While one-to-one personalization became something of a fad in the 1990’s, there’s no reason why the concept won’t work today, according to Rajamannar. But there’s a hitch.

“Should we be focusing on advertising the way we always focused on advertising at all? Whether it’s one-to-one or one-to-many, consumers are telling you ‘I don’t want your stupid ads. I want my uninterrupted experience.’”

As evidence, he points to the continued rise of ad-blocking software, with some 200 million active users at the end of 2016. By the first quarter of 2017, this had increased by about 25 million, driven in part by manufacturers preloading the software into their devices.

“So as a consumer, with two clicks you block the marketers form your interface altogether.”

It gets worse when one factors in services like Netflix, with nearly 100 million users. “That’s millions of hours of viewability that’s gone,” Rajamannar says.

About four years ago, Mastercard pivoted to experiential marketing. One example from early 2017 was its campaign for the Grammy Awards that included an experiential record store and interactive music experiences for fans who unlocked special offers via a $1 Masterpass purchase, as RetailDIVE reports.

“Give experiences to consumers which are memorable, which are positive, which are maybe once in a lifetime. Then they will tell the story of the brand to their circles. They become your brand ambassadors.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

“We talk about bundling products and we talk about bundling video products together, but I think what’s interesting is the opportunity to bundle more than just video with video,” says Peter Naylor, SVP, Advertising Sales, Hulu.

“Even Amazon is bundling shipping with video. So I think bundles are going to leap beyond video and go multidimensional, multimedia,” Naylor adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and media trade show.

Founded in 2007 by three traditional broadcast networks, Hulu earlier this year debuted its own live package consisting of more than 50 channels. Since then it’s added The CW Network and more than 200 local TV affiliates. “Depending on where you, are you’re getting not only national feeds but local content as well. So that’s going very well,” Naylor says.

Beginning on Sept. 12, subscribers to the T-Mobile ONE plan with at least two phones on their plan were able to stream Netflix programming at no additional cost.

“While the big bundle collapses, people will reassemble their own bundles in more of an a la carte fashion. It will be interesting to see how many relationships viewers want with different services.”

Naylor says advertising on Hulu is “healthy and vital right now,” given that the majority of people who sign up opt for the ad-supported version. And while 15- and 30-second ads “are totally welcome” on the platform, he sees creative opportunity in interactive advertising.

“We partner with people like Brightline, for example, for interactive advertising. We’re doing a lot of integrations.”

Naylor cites as examples the season and series finale of The Mindy Project, in which brands like McDonald’s, Sprint and Volkswagen have show integrations. “So we have some of the best of old school TV with integrations and the best of new TV with interactive ads.”

At the 69th Emmy awards, Hulu achieved a milestone when it not only tied for most wins of the night–five, along with HBO–but its original production The Handmaid’s Tale made it the first streaming service to take home the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, as The Verge reports.

While many advertisers are still content to transact on age and demographics mostly with 15’s and 30’s, “I think you’re seeing a more layered and nuanced approach because data is only increasing with advanced TV capabilities.”

This is accompanied by a rise in attribution measurement. “It’s not just did my ad get served in a way that’s viewable and, frankly, non- fraudulent but did it move the needle for my business,” says Naylor.

This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

It’s all part of the evolution not only of Condé Nast itself but also of its advertiser base, notably in the fashion and luxury space. The company’s Chief Business Officer and President of Revenue, Jim Norton, has had a bird’s eye view of that continuing transformation since his arrival 11 months ago.

As Norton explains in this interview with Beet.TV, Condé Nast Entertainment, led by producer Dawn Ostroff, now creates everything from short-form digital video to Hollywood caliber movies.

“When you think about the spectrum on which CNE operates, everything from short-form digital video all the way up to potentially award-winning feature films, it runs the gamut,” says Norton.

A 2014 story in GQ was the genesis of Last Chance U, a series that follows the East Mississippi Community College’s football team and landed on Netflix. It was just extended to a third season on the streaming video giant, as The Hollywood Reporter notes.

Next month, Sony will release CNE’s Only The Brave, which chronicles the efforts of a team of firefighters battling a wildfire in Arizona in 2013. Meanwhile, Condé Nast’s Vogue has had “great success” with the video series 73 Questions (Answered By Your Favorite Celebs), Norton says.

In video monetization, Condé Nast’s business is split about 50/50, according to Norton. There are traditional, CPM-based audience buys and “a cost-per-view buy where we’re actually creating content on behalf of brands and then going out and ensuring a certain level of distribution and traffic.”

A veteran of both AOL and Google, Norton says it’s been interesting to witness the evolution “in a very short amount of time” of such time-tested brands as Cartier, Chanel, Gucci and Prada as they’ve ventured beyond their print advertising roots.

“They’ve been very cautious about how to move into this new digital world. The first meeting you have it’s still very much print centric,” maybe with a dabble into video and digital. “Next meeting I have less than six months later, it’s a programmatic discussion.”

In the aftermath of the television UpFront season, Sorrell thinks traditional networks have done pretty well price-wise. ““I think they’re quite bullish about the UpFronts in the U.S. They’re seeing reasonably significant prices increases in the mid single-digit area at a time when we’re seeing deflation elsewhere,” says Sorrell, who is Founder & CEO of WPP. “So I think owners of the inventory feel pretty good about it.”

He then cites “obviously broader and much more significant opportunities” for advertisers in the programmatic space. It’s an area where WPP has made significant investments in its Xaxis unit and [m]PLATFORM technology.

“We’re offering something a little bit more than programmatic as it overlays brings in data and technology inputs, which make it far more sophisticated in terms of targeting,” Sorrell says.

Clients that had been concerned about some aspects of programmatic buying are thinking differently, he adds.

“We are seeing I think the start of a groundswell of change in attitude toward programmatic,” Sorrell says, citing marketers’ in-house operations “perhaps becoming less attractive” for reasons that include the need to keep updating the technology.

Turning his attention to newer content providers like Amazon he notes, “The amount of money that these companies are willing to invest in content is quite considerable.”

He says it’s not uncommon for Amazon to spend $10 million on one, hour-long episode, “Netflix maybe $7 million and the more traditional producers spending about three.”

As for whether Netflix, which according to Sorrell loses money on a cash flow basis, can ever turn that around, the answer will lie in its subscription and advertising policies. “In a way Netflix is already advertising, it has product placement warnings in front of some of its series already. So we are starting to see advertising in one form or other start to invade the Netflix platform.”

Companies like WPP, which traditionally had concentrated their investments outside of the content creation sector, have changed their thinking and are ramping up on the sell-side. Sorrell points to investments in Vice Media, Refinery29, 88rising and Mic as examples of his company’s need to experiment “to see how we can learn more and how are clients can be involved in it.”

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

David Sable is quick to point out that algorithms for TV buying are nothing new, as spot TV was traditionally purchased based on CPM’s—the algorithm of the day. In this interview with Beet.TV, the Global CEO of Y&R discusses the seeming dichotomy that is TV everywhere and the growing urge to micro target audiences.

“It’s complex because the promise of so much data and so much targeting makes one think that that’s what they have to do. That you have to be super targeted,” Sable says.

He references Facebook, Mars and Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard as advocating a wider approach to reaching audiences. “We’ve always looked for better ways to target,” Sable says. “I think the problem is we’re in a world of because we can we do, as opposed to people taking a step back and thinking about it and saying ‘what am I actually targeting.’”

He was experimenting with what is now known as addressable TV advertising roughly 15 years ago at direct-marketing agency Wunderman. And while he believes addressable is “going to be important,” he fears that “hyper micro targeting is creating an echo chamber” that keeps getting smaller.

“Do I really only want to talk to people who are going to buy a car in the next six months, who have a propensity to buy a Ford or a Mercedes and only talk to them? If that’s what you do, you’re going down the wrong path,” he says.

In a parallel vein, he points to analyst prognostications a decade ago about the bleak future for TV programming because it would all go the way of CGI.

“There’s more stuff on location than ever before. Less stuff in studio. Less CGI,” Sable notes. “On the content side, we in the golden age here.”

He agrees with NBCUniversal ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino on the need for ad-supported programming that fuels the content of popular platforms like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, as The New York Times reports.

“They’re selling the stuff that advertising has allowed to be created,” Sable says. “They’re just reaping the benefit.”

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

These were among a variety of possible scenarios explored at the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat during a one-on-one keynote session with Adam Shlachter of Publicis and Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. Among the agreed-upon certainties five years from now: 15- and 3-second ads will not be the predominant video ad units and gross rating points will be a currency, not the currency.

When YouTube launched its paid channels about four years ago, Shlachter, who was at Digitas at the time, viewed the company as a modern day MSO. “A vessel for programming, distribution, monetization and ultimately for audience,” is how he recalls it. While many people weren’t surprised that YouTube launched a premium subscription service, “That it exists now built into television sets or any device and any screen and it’s with you everywhere is something that I don’t think people were thinking about initially,” he said.

While both Facebook and YouTube have such massive audiences they cannot be ignored, “We’re also still trying to figure out the right way to engage with them,” particularly since their respective viewing experiences are so different, according to Shlachter.

Asked by Spiegel whether 15- and 30-second ads will dominate five years hence, Shlachter responded, “I hope not.” But he was skeptical about a headlong rush to reduced commercial loads wherein many units are transformed into content that could be more valuable to sellers.

“They have to figure out economically how to make that work,” Shlachter said, referring to companies like Fox. “We have to make the experience a little bit cleaner and we have to make it smarter.”

So why on earth would Netflix get into the advertising game? “Right now if you ask anyone they will tell you absolutely not because there’s no need,” he said. However, if net neutrality laws go in a certain direction and Netflix is taxed for its bandwidth consumption on different operators’ systems “maybe they have to look at alternative ways,” Shlachter added.

As for five minutes of commercials in one hour of content, he agreed it’s possible. In addition to ads taking different shapes in the next several years, cross-channel planning will see great advances along with closed-loop measurement models, according to Shlachter.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Nine years ago, Innovid chose the latter path, providing an open platform approach to personalizing video targeting and integrating it with customer data and insights from other channels. Now, about one-third of all video served on the Internet is done so by Innovid.

It’s not been the easiest of paths, according to CTO and Co-Founder Tal Chalozin. “Clearly, it’s been an uphill battle fighting existing ways of doing businesses, existing processes and existing players,” Chalozin says in this interview conducted during the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes, presented by video marketing technology provider Eyeview.”

Chalozin puts early innovators in two buckets. First are those that can prove success in the easiest way, including online sellers and data-centric players like Netflix. “It’s way easier for them to dabble into better creative, personalized storytelling, one-to-one messaging. That’s the easiest ones,” he explains in response to a question from Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting.

In the other bucket are innovators who seek to “cater to the vast side of the market,” for example packaged-goods companies that haven’t traditionally tried to figure out specific creative to promote a household product based on gender, geography, different times of day and so on. Helping these marketers through a maze of sources and suppliers “is a hard business to be in,” Chalozin says.

Having planted its flag early in the video space, Innovid believes it has succeeded in moving the industry forward by focusing on technology and solving complicated problems. “Someone needs to be the operating system that makes this all work,” he adds.

Chalozin has two messages for marketers: the investment in personalized targeting “is not that hard” and not all outcomes need to be measured by sales lift because “in many cases it’s close to impossible.”

Besides, “There are many other ways today to find your metrics of success”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.

Buying TV broadly on demographics without being able to match exposures to purchases leaves little opportunity for measuring spending efficiency, says Rogers, who is Executive Chairman of WinView Games and Chairman and CEO of TRget Media.

Since the financial crisis, most companies have implemented spending cutbacks and increased productivity to help drive profitability. Yet with more than $70 billion spent on TV, it’s been an overlooked line item.

“You would have thought by now that we would have a marketing sector that was infinitely more steeped in being able to deliver ROI based on television advertising expenditures,” Rogers says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes and presented by Eyeview. “And we’re still in a fairly primitive state.”

He recalls that when he was President and CEO of digital video recorder pioneer TiVo, Procter & Gamble was among the first major advertiser to recognize the value of minute-by-minute set-top box data that could be matched with purchase data.

“That’s the future,” says Rogers, given the long downhill slope of linear TV audiences.

For the last 25 years, broadcast network audiences have been dropping by a compound annual rate of about 3% each year, according to Rogers. Since 2014 alone, the traditional linear TV world has lost about 581 billion impressions—or roughly an 18% decline in audience delivery.

“Yet when you look at pricing over that same 25 years, you’ve had compounded annual growth of CPM’s at about 2.5% a year,” he says.

The only way TV networks can adapt is being able to show the value of reaching audience segments based on sales results, or being able to deliver an addressable ad “that can really be connected to an outcome.”

Without such a tool, “pricing I think is going to be dramatically diminished. This will finally light a fire under both networks and ad agencies.”

Even with the rise of video providers like Facebook, Hulu, Netflix and others, “they haven’t filled the bucket of the 581 billion we’ve lost,” says Rogers. “So we’re still dealing with a bit of scarcity relative to total television audience impressions.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The company’s technology is now in 12,000 households, each with an average of 10 Internet-connected devices—hence its measurement of media consumption on some 120,000 screens.

“What we’re finding is pretty amazing in the way that different devices are being used and how they’re being used,” Fulgoni, who is CEO and Co-Founder of comScore, says in an interview with Beet.TV during a break at CES 2017.

For example, there’s no particular loyalty to iPhones versus Android phones. “A lot of the homes have combinations, which is kind of interesting,” he says.

comScore’s also seeing “a wide variety” in the way that over-the-top devices are being used to deliver content. According to Fulgoni, the company is measuring consumption of OTT for services like Netflix. (comScore’s take on the current state of digital media is available here.)

Gone is the era when a research provider could build its own panel and measure pretty much what its clients needed. “I think those days are over,” Fulgoni says.

The change largely derives from the fragmentation of viewing consumption. “To be able to measure all of that with the granularity you need you have to have the cooperation of the content owners and the device owners to tag the content,” he adds.

So in a sense, he adds, “The providers of the research data have become dependent on the entities that they’re trying to measure. And that’s something that we’ve never seen before in the media research business. A case in point is comScore’s database populated by 52 million set-top boxes that it doesn’t own.

He believes the trend of television advertisers asking media companies for the ability to reach specific audiences beyond traditional age and gender targeting is heading in a distinct direction. “I suspect that that’s going to be in many ways the future of how advertising is bought and sold. That’s my personal view of where we’re going to go,” Fulgoni says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In an interview with Beet.tv, Marchese traces the path to the current state of consumers and their tolerance—or lack thereof—of ads from a longstanding blind spot.

For too long, the TV industry “thought too little about what consumers want and just thought this was a negotiation that was happening between content owners and advertisers,” says Marchese, who is President of Advanced Advertising at Fox. “In reality, it was a three-party negotiation: content owners, advertisers and viewers.”

The last group have “fought back” as evidenced by the rise of ad blockers, DVR’s, Netflix, Hulu Ad-Free and other choices, according to Marchese.

He cites “the rash of virtual MVPD’s” like AT&T’s new streaming offerings and as he looks ahead to CES 2017, believes there’s no doubt that TV and video content will increasingly be delivered via IP.

“If that’s true and people are going to be logging in to watch television even on the big screen at home, what does that finally mean for advertisers?” Marchese posits. “How do we realize that?”

Among other things, he sees IP delivery fostering personalized ads and enabling advertisers to become “smarter about targeting and reduce ad loads because the ads get better and more relevant.”

To Marchese, creativity doesn’t always mean interactive ad design. “Sometimes it means designing different length commercials for different viewing experiences,” he says. “Sometimes it will mean designing sequential commercial messages.”

In an IP environment, “We know that a person has seen commercial one,” Marchese says. “Let’s show them commercial two now. That’s a whole new way to think about advertising than a simple reach and frequency.”

In any event, more consumer choices have put the market in a very different place. “Content owners and marketers are going to need to work together more than ever before,” says Marchese.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017.  The series is presented by FreeWheel.   Please find more vidoes from the series here. 

A new thorough analysis has shed some hard light on the possible impact to the subscription VOD service.

Ampere Analysis‘ report, Commercial Gain: If Netflix Moved Into Advertising, finds:

“At current consumption and subscriber levels, a pre-roll model could make Netflix an additional $270m per quarter, assuming an $15 average CPM. This equates to an aggregate $1.6 billion in quarterly subscription revenue.

“By contrast, a full broadcast-style ad-load could make Netflix nearly $2 billion per quarter, assuming a CPM average of $8.

“Netflix would have to be very careful in managing such a process, however, as its customer base has indicated sensitivity to advertising. Low-level churn could wipe out financial gains from a pre-roll model, while heavier churn from a full ad-load would combine with a higher cost-base to result in minimal positive impact on the bottom line.”

Speaking with Beet.TV, Ampere‘s Richard Broughton says Netflix has an attractive demographic for advertisers. Adding a pre-roll model would grow Netflix’s business by 15%: “As little as 10% churn could wipe out those gains.”

But Broughton says, if Netflix introduced a full ad model, it could sustain a loss of up to 50% of its subscribers without losing revenue.

This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.

“We’ve seen the rise of entertainment programming making it on to multiple screens – but we didn’t really see that with sports,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That started to change in 2014 with the World Cup being heavily distributed on streaming platforms by Univision as well as by ESPN.

“That trend is going to continue in 2015, where we see a combination of the sports leagues themselves going in to IPTV – NFL Now has been big as well as NFL and the NBA and even MLB – … we have a strong move by traditional providers as well as new services like Dish being able to land ESPN.”

He was interviewed for Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where analyst Paul Sweeting told Beet.TV he forecasts a big fight for sports rights, as live linear rights holders become frustrated at viewers going elsewhere for digital streams.

She says that as Netflix expands its own marketing with programmatic buying, it focuses on premium publisher sites only. “We don’t use long tail sites, no mom and pop shops, nothing with lots of ad clutter” she says, adding that Netflix avoids auto-play sites as well. “If we are going to be seen as a premium brand with award-winning programming content, we need to be surrounded by content of equal value.”

For more insight into Netflix’s approach to programmatic buying, check out this video interview.

We interviewed O’Dowd at the Beet.TV programmatic television summit where she was a speaker.