In this interview with Beet.TV, Winkler mentions a conversation he had onstage with NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino during the the FreeWheel/Beet.TV forum hosted by Comcast. He says her call for an agnostic approach to media selection strikes a chord of harmony.

“It’s great to talk to Linda. What’s especially heartening is I think that she and the industry as a whole lower your temperature a little bit around the us versus them, traditional versus digital,” Winkler says in this interview with Beet.TV.

From the beginning of the digital era, people like Winkler found it challenging when broadcast networks “would come out and say digital has garbage content,” Winkler recalls. Paradoxically, some of the same networks would then implore buyers to patronize digital companies in which the networks had invested.

“The reality is any advertiser to succeed needs a nice mix of different types of media,” says Winkler. “You simply cannot deliver on your business objectives if you just pick a single medium.”

He adds that it’s “nice to see that Linda is embracing that idea of a portfolio approach, NBCU being a big part of that. Certainly they deliver fantastic content.”

OMD’s clients “have an insatiable appetite” for video content, according to Winkler. “When I say video content, I don’t mean tiny videos with no sound that are watched for 1.8 seconds. We’re talking about the full commercial experience.”

Beyond traditional TV, there are few places where brands can indulge in “the full commercial experience,” he adds. “Strangely enough, Snapchat is one of those places and it’s good to see that Linda and NBC have invested in that as well.”

Outside of “the video paradigm,” brands also need platforms like Facebook to reach audiences at scale. “You get great data, remarkable targeting with very little waste,” Winkler says.

As with any medium there are challenges. “But at the risk of saying something obvious, you have to spread the wealth when it comes to media planning because it’s the only way to deliver your business objectives.”

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.

This is the main takeaway from a Beet.TV panel discussion at CES 2017 focusing on advanced television targeting. Held at held the OMD Oasis at The Venetian, the panel featured sell-side executives from NBCUniversal and Turner, TV data specialist Kristin Dolan and Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Research Officer, Jonathan Steuer.

Steuer started things off on a positive note by opining that the industry has made more progress in using set-top box data for audience targeting and performance measurement in the last 18 months than it had in the past eight years. The elephant in the room: How buyers can use the data at scale across multiple TV networks and inventory pools in the most efficient way.

“The at scale is the tricky part,” said Steuer, whose research background includes a long stint at TiVo.

The desire for data consolidation didn’t come as a surprise to Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCU. “I think we hear that loud and clear from all the folks on the buy side,” said Colella. “People want to do more audience buying. It isn’t easy.”

She added that it’s “incumbent upon us as an industry to figure out how do we facilitate more buying of audience products.”

Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, agreed that the process must be made more user friendly, particularly in comparison with the current modus operandi of most TV ad buyers.

“Agencies are structured and can do an enormous amount of business buying on Nielsen demo guarantees and running schedules. It’s a machine,” said Strober. “You talk about audience targeting and it’s like you threw a wrench in the gears.”

Since MVPD’s “won’t share their data,” moderator Matt Spiegel from MediaLink asked how data consolidation could occur.

Acknowledging reality, Strober said, “Those guys aren’t going to send data to each other” and suggested they should “put it in some sort of common format in one or a few different common repositories that made it possible for folks on our side of the table to access it.”

Kristin Dolan, CEO of 605, which helps buyers and sellers analyze audience data, said consolidation would help everyone. “On the sell side the opportunity to have people really want your inventory because it’s going to reach the people they’re trying to reach is helpful. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?” said Dolan.

Asked by Spiegel what entity could do the consolidating, Steuer suggested it would have to be standalone companies “because the alternative is people grading their own homework.”

Dolan also cited the reluctance to share on the part of MVPD’s, but said their data could be anonymized so that it can’t be used improperly. “Everybody’s trying to solve the same problem of how do I contribute without it negatively impacting me,” said Dolan. “I want the benefit but I don’t want the negative.”

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.

This was the consensus of media sellers and audience targeting specialists who participated in a Beet.TV panel discussion about commercial loads during CES 2017 held at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink began by asking panelists what the TV world might look like five years from now, given the low tolerance many people have for watching commercials in the digital realm and their ability to avoid them via subscription services.

Kristin Dolan, CEO of 605, which provides data-driven, census-based audience measurement solutions, commended Turner Broadcasting’s drive to reduce commercial load. “I think it puts the customer first to say were not going to jam however many minutes in an hour,” said Dolan. Observing that “advertising is part of our existence, it’s not going anywhere,” Dolan said she doesn’t perceive outright antipathy toward advertising. “The more relevant the advertising is the more it actually could have a positive impact on the brand that’s surrounding the ad that’s being presented,” she said.

“We take a long-term view,” said Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, before citing audience demographics showing how much people ages 18 to 24 watch on-demand programming as opposed to live TV. “What’s going to happen five to ten years from now when they are largely the key audience that most of our clients want to reach? If they go to linear TV and it still looks like it does today, we’re going to lose them.”

The key is to start to figure out now how to show fewer commercials “but each exposure or opportunity is incredibly impactful to the marketer and ultimately to the consumer,” Strober said.

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group, noted that the main objection to digital ads is their intrusiveness. It’s not that consumers don’t understand the value exchange at play when watching ad-supported content, according to Steuer.

“I think part of it is just about having a reasonable conversation with consumers at scale and looking at the data about what’s working and what’s not working and adjusting the mix accordingly,” said Steuer.

Asked by Spiegel to imagine a TV world in which ad delivery and performance is based on impressions as opposed to units, Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCUniversal, said “It’s just a matter of time. In a couple more years the television on the wall will be able to deliver advertising in the same way that you get it on your phone or that you’re getting it on your tablet or on your laptop.”

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.

“From year to year, the changes are enormous, overwhelming,” observes Monica Karo, the CEO of OMD USA. “What our clients really come to CES for and what they love us to do for them is to really help navigate.”

It’s hardly a one-size-fits-all proposition. “It’s different for different clients,” Karo explains. “We’ve got such a breadth of our client base here. What works for one might not necessarily work for another.”

If there is a shared concern, it revolves around helping marketers connect with their customers in deep, meaningful ways. Or, as Karo puts it, “How do we talk one on one on an individual basis but obviously needing to do it at scale.”

Immersion is today’s theme for OMD’s Oasis panels and discussions, covering emerging technologies like artificial reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. At the consumer level, this translates into how marketers can provide new experiences that people cannot get on their own, according to Karo. “How do you surround a customer?” she asks.

In the television space, Karo sees two trends of particular significance. One is the “untethered” environment in which viewers can consume content whenever and wherever they want. It requires figuring out how to reach viewers “when the viewership is not happening at the same time on the same night at the same hour in terms of what we’ve been used to for all these years,” Karo says.

The second is the growing ability of advertisers to target TV households based on a slew of information particular to specific addresses, namely addressable advertising. Over the next 12 to 18 months, “That’s finally going to come to fruition and that will be something that we’ll be seeing much more of,” says Karo.

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.