CTV Has Room For Improvement in Ad Pods

Mike Baker, investor and strategic advisor

Differences in the way CTV and linear TV manage commercial breaks are driving a need for technical standards for advertising that will improve the consumer experience. The engineering of CTV apps and stream encoding are among the factors that need to be harmonized to avoid repeating ads in pods.

YouTube Drives Significant Share of CTV Viewership

Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence

YouTube, the video-sharing platform owned by Google, is emerging as a viable alternative to other streamed programming as more households hook up their TVs to the internet. That growth has led advertisers to look for a combination of premium content and audiences within YouTube.

More Brands See CTV Opportunities on YouTube

David George, CEO of Pixability

The pandemic led people to spend more time at home while driving a significant shift in viewing habits. As YouTube’s viewership has grown, more brands are adopting the video-sharing platform as a bigger part of their strategies to reach consumers.

CTV Ads Help to Drive Purchase Intent

Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony

Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, reached new audiences with a CTV campaign that helped to drive higher purchase intent. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were first-time customers.

CTV Success on YouTube Takes Know-How

Tony Weisman, advisor and board member; former CMO of Dunkin’

“It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube,” Weisman said, “but are you going to do it smartly, or are you going to do it with somebody who can really make sure that that investment is wise? Or are you just going to take your chances? And I would not advise anyone to just take their chances.”

Brand Suitability More Nuanced Than Safety on YouTube

Matt Duffy, CMO of Pixability

While YouTube is mostly a brand-safe platform, advertisers still need to consider whether its content is also suitable for their campaigns. Pixability found in a survey that many advertisers rely on third-party vendors to help understand brand suitability.

Consumer Intent Emerges as Key CTV Audience Signal

Rob Norman, advisory board member for Pixability

“We’ve become familiar with the Amazon walled gardens and the Facebook walled gardens, but we’re about to become familiar with device-led walled gardens, operated by people like LG, Samsung, and Vizio,” Norman said. “The use of identifiers in the TV market is evolving at really quite a space. What I’m hoping people are going to do is to stand back and look at other forms of signal other than identifiers.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

With digital advertising’s traditional signals being reduced in usefulness, many in the industry have looked toward contextual targeting as an alternative.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Norman, director at the media platform Piano, describes a three-pronged way forward.

Triple-play

“I’m not sure how much of a signal context really is,” Norman says. “But one of the reasons why I look a lot towards YouTube on TV and Fire TV on Amazon is, when I think about the most powerful signals that we came to associate with online advertising, we think about identity as one powerful signature. But we think about intent as an incredibly powerful signal.

“We think about purchasing and transactions as a valuable signal as well. You really don’t have to look much further than Google’s trove of intent data, which drives the YouTube TV advertising system and Amazon’s trove and transaction data, which drives the Fire TV system.

“If you look at this troika of intent on YouTube, of transactions on Amazon and of cross-device graphs that exist in the Roku ecosystem, particularly after their purchase of dataxu and their more recent purchase of assets from Nielsen, I think you see in those three groups, a shape of connected TV and targeting and attribution, which has moved beyond the straight identifier cookie-based world of the online advertising market. I think there’s terrific opportunity in that.”

CTV outlook

In November, eMarketer forecast US connected TV ad spending would reach $11.36 billion in 2021 – 4.2% of total US media ad spending.

The medium is going through a tipping point at which the majority of ad dollars will be automatically traded.

Today, YouTube, Hulu, and Roku take half of all CTV ad revenue.

But, for all the eyeballs they control, the hardware OEMs will want a bigger slice of the pie.

Identifying the future

“In connected TV, we have a persistent identifier, still, called the IP address, and we also have device IDs,” Norman says. “Some combination of IP addresses and device IDs is going to remain important at least for a time.

“But some people will be looking ahead beyond that and making some assumptions that maybe even those areas will start to deprecate. Who knows what’s going to happen as an even bigger range of walled gardens starts to emerge?

“We’ve become familiar with the Amazon walled gardens and the Facebook walled gardens, but we’re about to become familiar with device-led walled gardens, operated by people like LG, Samsung, and Vizio. The use of identifiers in the TV market is evolving at really quite a space. What I’m hoping people are going to do is to stand back and look at other forms of signal other than identifiers.”

Shifting sands

Norman is referring to how the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the TV space are becoming powerful by running in-house ad data organizations.

They are the primary class of company that, using ACR (automatic content recognition), is able to gain “glass-level” understanding of consumers’ actual viewing behaviour.

As they do that, however, there is a growing concern that the OEMs may start to withhold that data from an industry that was getting used to using it.

In October, Vizio reorganized to integrate Inscape, its ACR business, into its main advertising and content business. Inscape, which has supplied its ACR data to other ad-tech companies, is now no longer independent.

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

But how is connected TV shaping up, and what will it look like in the next few years?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Norman, a veteran GroupM executive who is also on the board of Simpli.fi, a video demand-side ad-buying platform, runs his slide rule over the emerging opportunity.

Bigger value in a smaller hole

When many people think “CTV”, they think “SVOD”. The booming popularity of ad-free subscription video services would seem to reduce the size of the opportunity for TV-focused advertisers.

“The total number of ad funded video impressions on the big screen, as a share of all video impressions on the big screen has clearly gone down over the last five years,” Norman acknowledges.

“It’s gone down because of the rapid adoption of principally Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Peacock and others, as well as YouTube TV.”

That places a renewed importance on advertisers making heightened effectiveness in the TV areas where they are spending.

“(Advertisers) have to see the maximum value extraction from those impressions,” Norman says.

CTV’s growth trajectory

OTT streaming services accounted for 25% of all US TV-viewing minutes during Q2 2020, according to Nielsen’s Streaming Meter.

EMarketer estimates CTV ad spending will reach $10.81 billion in the US in 2021 – up 56% from two years earlier, and representing around 15% of total US TV ad spending.

Norman says the growth in AVOD numbers will have to go hand-in-hand with demand-side platforms enabling capabilities like frequency-capping, so that viewers of multiple services aren’t exposed to ad creative too many times.

New economics of TV

But, whilst CTV may look a lot like TV, albeit data-powered, Norman says the economics and value are slightly different. Put simply, those new powers should command a premium.

“What’s curious … is that the CPMs in CTV … it was higher than the CPMs in linear TV,” Norman says.

“There’s twice as many dollars proportionate to the impressions in the CTV market.

“When you think about why that is, it’s about people buying incremental and unique reach, it’s about people buying with data that they find valuable for targeting, and it’s about people buying in such ways that lead them down certain attribution paths.”

In other words – linear TV audiences may be declining, ad-supported TV viewing overall may even be declining… but the capabilities offered by AVODs delivered by connected TV platforms are relatively greater to what came before, so may yet keep TV advertising relatively stable.

The Google effect

Norman, who also sits on the board of BBC Global News, says Google will play a significant role in this space.

The giant recently re-tooled its Display & Video 360 (DV360) demand-side buying suite to enable audience targeting and purchase for its connected TV endpoints.

“Google still remains the single biggest source of supply in connected TV in the shape of YouTube,” Norman says. “Because of that, the role of DV 360 and the programmatic purchase of YouTube is a really big factor.

“Where Google goes … then, downstream, (it) leads to market automation – and there’s no reason to suspect that that’s going to change anytime soon.”

You are watching “Streaming Boom Accelerates the Adoption of CTV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Simpli.fi. Please visit this page for more videos.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Norman, senior advisor to GroupM, the world’s largest media agency, says the coronavirus pandemic will allow us to assess brands against their stated goals.

“We’ve had any number of enterprises in the package goods business, and beyond in financial services, telling us that they are purpose-driven and that their brands and their business must have a wider purpose than simply profit in order to justify their existence,” Norman says in this interview recorded remotely due to the crisis.

“Now, these are all very easy things to say at times of great prosperity, when the only way is up.”

So Norman says organizations need to assess whether they are making good on three typical pledges many have made:

• “Our people are our most important asset.”
• “We serve all constituents, not just shareholders.”
• “We are a purpose driven business.”

The coronavirus pandemic threatens millions of lives globally, with many health systems expected to be over-whelmed, if they aren’t already.

In business, the virus is already threatening a catastrophic effect. The closure of theaters and cinemas will cause large revenue dents. Share prices are plummetting.

But Norman thinks companies should be concerned with more than finances.

“If we fight to only minimise their losses, the consequential loss in other parts of their business, and eventually to the underlying the asset they hold, will be catastrophic,” he says, urging businesses to “think about … the less-served in our communities”.

“This really should be the communications business’ golden moment,” Norman adds.

Norman was interviewed remotely at home via the BeetCam powered by Zoom.

Norman, senior advisor at GroupM, tells Beet.TV that seed data serves as the platform for building out audience “cohorts,” which Norman says can serve stronger results than one-to-one marketing. One-to-one marketing has been held up as a golden industry standard that advertisers continue to strive to reach, in contrast to the broader reach one-to-many strategy. Addressable and targeted advertising is lauded for its efficiency and personalization, but Norman argues that in some cases, a cohort approach is more effective: It provides reach while still targeting the right consumer, and doesn’t belabor the point around needing hyper-specific audience data for every campaign. He gives the example that one brand marketing shampoo for all hair types should take a much different approach than a brand marketing shampoo for curly hair, or shampoo for curly haired people experiencing hair loss.

A focus on data is set to be at the center of CES 2020. In the lead up to the show, Norman says that he expects to see an emphasis on intelligent information and inclusive technology that extends beyond the world’s more affluent customers dominate next year’s show. While last year’s focus was on assistance in technology – the Alexas and Hey Googles – this year’s will be on connectivity.

“The world generally, and I hate to use the word at my age, is rather more woke than it has been in previous years,” says Norman. “People are right to expect that there are holistic implications of the use and progress of technology above and beyond smarter, faster services and products for what is effectively a luxury goods audience of the richest billion people on the planet.”

Norman believes that the work at the show will revolve around bringing down digital divides instead of increasingly raising them. People want to see how technology can improve the world, not separate it, and the role of technology will shift in that direction. Additionally, Norman says that he expects to see intelligence applied to information and “imagination in ways people have set about solving problems and being smarter and more aware of what’s going on.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 202, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January.  The series is presented by Samsung Ads.  For more videos please visit this page. 

A board member from one of the world’s leading news organizations thinks such organizations need to do better at cutting through the fog with facts.

“We in the communications world … have really not done the populace a great service in terms of helping people understand what’s true and what isn’t,” says Rob Norman, the former GroupM chief digital officer who also now sits on the board of BBC Global News, Knotch, comScore and Simpli.fi.

“It’s got worse and not better in the three years since 2016

The trust problem is borne out by research. According Pew Center: “Just 26% of U.S. adults correctly classified five factual statements as factual, whilst just 35% correctly identified five opinion statements as opinion.”

61% say the news media intentionally ignores stories that are important to the public.

Norman recently left GroupM, the world’s largest media-buying agency, after several years.

“The news media has got to keep its metal,” he counsels. “It has to be incredibly self-aware and … think very, very, very critically about what they choose to write, what positions they choose to take. (If) people can demonstrate that they are severely partisan … I think they create an internal vulnerability which undermines the rest of their mission.”

It is rare for advertising industry personnel to take an interest in the societal health of the news business.

But, earlier this year, responding to business challenges, we also saw the launch of United For News, a coalition comprising advertisers’ agencies, tech platforms and journalism non-profits that is working to restore the strength of local news media around the world.

“It’s tremendously difficult to completely separate opinion and news … their audience won’t know the difference,” Norman warns.

His solution? Fight the fire with facts.

“News organizations … are going to have to do it with enormous discipline, and with enormously well-researched and detailed support for what they do, and maybe reign in some of their opinion,” Norman says.

“Less is more. We need more precision and create less opportunities for that precision to be de-positioned by other people.”

And yet, this emerging world of opportunity also carries with it degrees of fragmentation and limitation.

So, should ad buyers look to build their own, perfect solution? No, says a veteran agency executive – the imperative is integration.

“The key for buyers is to stay adaptive and agile,” says Rob Norman, the former GroupM chief digital officer who also now sits on the board of BBC Global News, Knotch, comScore and Simpli.fi. “The key for buyers is not to build their own technologies but to work out how to integrate the platforms.

“Having spent almost my whole life in agencies, there’s never been a time when it’s more important to have people that can join the dots between the complex and very, very different offers of these major players.”

He refers to ad-tech data platforms, even the largest amongst them, as merely “corners of the world” overall.

Norman recently left GroupM, the world’s largest media-buying agency, after several years.

Going forward, Norman predicts the growing crop of subscription VOD TV services will be met with “subscription fatigue and confusion”.

This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr.   Please visit this page to find more videos from the series. 

And all that comes on the heels of the prior two years of ad-tech outcry, when advertisers lamented the opaque and often fraudulent digital ad supply chain, and when the European Commission introduced legislation to govern use of citizens’ data.

Now legislators around the world are sharpening in their pens, and the possible reconfigurations of the tech industry are various – “break ’em up”, tax ’em harder, and a host more besides.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Norman, GroupM senior adviser, suggests regulators have a tightrope to walk.

“There’s not that many people that can point to harm to themselves as a result of the use of digital data in the industry,” he says.

“It’s now a run rate of something approaching $20 billion of fines (levied) in the tech industry.”

What about anti-trust? The calls are growing that say certain tech companies are now too big, that they are monopolies.

But Norman thinks that argument may have unintended consequences.

“It’s very difficult to regulate businesses that got where they are because consumers chose them,” he says. “If the consumer feels like you’re taking something away from them, that never makes for good policy.

“The most likely thing that’s going to happen is that government is going to … pursue what I think of as a laws of our land policy … companies are going to be forced to geofence parts of their business.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.

For one ad agency veteran who is now a board member at one of the world’s largest news organizations, that may not be enough.

“I do wonder from a value exchange point of view if what the news organisations produce isn’t worth a lot more from $300 million each to Google and Facebook in terms of the revenue they create,” says former GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman, now on the board at BBC Global News, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

Norman was asked about inequity in the power relationship between technology and social platforms, on the one hand, and news providers on the other.

It is a mutually beneficial relationship, with most publishers having used social to gather large audiences. But those publishers have persistently claims the platforms should do more to recompense them.

“My perspective on this is that the value exchange has been a bit one-sided, that – economically, at least – that the platforms have got more out of the publishers than the publishers out of the platforms,” Norman adds.

“I would prefer (that the) monetization that’s created by that audience was shared more equitably by the platforms with those organisations. The amount of revenue that’s accruing to the original publishers from the platforms, I think, is not enough.”

Norman says that access to quality news would be restricted if publishers are forced to put up hard paywalls.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

Now publishers are fighting back. Vice has accused brand safety platforms of censorship and others like BBC News, News Corp, The Economist and CNN are protesting that bad news can be good news for marketers.

One executive who has sat on both sides – ad agency and publisher – sees mutual benefit.

“The news has never been more valuable in every respect than it is today,” says GroupM senior advisor Rob Norman in this video interview with Beet.TV. “News audiences are up. News consumption digitally is up. We’ve had things as similar but as varied as the ‘Trump bump’ and the Brexit-related news, which has put politics and therefore the news front and center of everybody’s agenda.

“It seems remarkable to me that people can consider that not running advertising in environments that engage the public enormously is of little value. It concerns me that there is an unintended consequence of some of the ways that advertisers and by extension agencies think about the news.”

Advertisers’ alarm at what they may be appearing next to comes after the earlier outcry over brand safety control, with the PewDiePie controversy spooking some big brand backers.

But such concerns have also spilled over in to mainstream publishing, with some advertisers looking for ever more granular control over the context in which they appear. For many, placing next to negativity is a no-no.

But Norman, the former GroupM chief digital officer who also now sits on the board of BBC Global News, says there has always been a “tension” over individual placements, but not a general desire to shun news as a whole.

“When people have (brand) safety on their mind, the easiest way to react to it is to take a belt and braces approach and think of every eventuality,” he says.  “The idea that a whole category of content, and eventually almost all of what I would referred to as hard news could be determined as bad news … is patently absurd.

“News organisations can only produce great news if they have great funding. Advertising is a principle source of that funding. And so, the net, net is the advertisers end up contributing to an under informed public. I don’t see how that can be good for anyone.

The trend also comes as more publishers are looking to make money from consumer subscriptions, buoyed by the success of subscription entertainment platforms and by the swings of the advertising market.

But Norman says publisher-produced brand content could allow advertisers both to have control and gain effectiveness.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

Norman, who recently retired from GroupM and is an Advisor to Beet.TV, kicked things off by noting a level of “sturm and drang” surrounding a desire in some circles to quickly abandon the traditional Nielsen demo-based ratings as a transaction currency. But will it actually happen?

Ray, who is President, Product & Innovation at Dentsu Aegis Network, said that it will, predicting a more addressable marketplace in 3-5 years and the accompanying changes in measurement that marketplace will bring.

As a former researcher, Schwartz painted a broad swath of change resulting from addressability. “It fundamentally changes how and what we do,” said Schwartz. “Because once you start getting to person–level addressability or even device-level addressability, the word research is out the window.”

Taking its place will be a mix of census, response and counting. “So we don’t have all those situations where the systems go down, the set-top box isn’t working or we have an underrepresentation. You’re seeing actual response and analysis,” Schwartz added.

The drawback? Not all households will be capable of being addressed, according to Schwartz, who is President of Investment, North America, GroupM.

Norman questioned whether those households will hold the least amount of value for advertisers. “I think some of them might be, but some of them might be all the way at the other end of the spectrum, that have the ability to be reached in a manner and not addressed. There’s the evolution of technology so I still believe that the top end will have a way to find out how to basically take themselves off the grid,” said Schwartz.

Ray predicated a bifurcation of how buyers and sellers look at video content. “The role of live content is going to be more valuable because it’s going to be tied to the cultural moments,” he said.

Asked by Norman whether all video is “born equal” and how advertisers should consider various screen sizes, Ray said much of that calculation depends on the desired outcome, be it click-through, engagement, response or “trying to change fundamental beliefs about the brand.”

Noting that hand-held screens are of better quality than some of the TV sets he grew up with, Schwartz said it’s not about size but environment and also proximity to what people are about to do, including buying something. “We have to take that all into account. So not all video is the same, but we need to know how and where to use it,” Schwartz said.

Norman wanted to know whether the industry is within “seeing distance” of a time when significant parts of the video market will be traded on business outcomes rather than exposure to commercials.

Schwartz said there is “a desire for a lot of people to get there,” but there are so many factors in the marketing spectrum “I don’t think we’re at the point where the buyer and seller want to predicate the price and the value on the return on investment yet.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Around the industry, new attribution and tracking technology is drawing executives to seek pricing ad pricing models that involve paying only when outcomes like product purchases are recorded.

That is likely to be one of the topics discussed this week at DMEXCO, the big ad industry gathering in Cologne.

For many, it is the holy grail of “performance” marketing. But GroupM chief digital officer Norman doesn’t think brands should have a one-track mind.

“What advertisers are seeking above everything else is predictable outcomes,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Adding predictability and certainty that the inputs, being the budget, match the outputs, being the intended results, has become a sharp focus.”

But Norman seems to have a more nuanced approach. “We’re trying to avoid going down the rabbit hole of singular definitions for performance as opposed to holistic definitions of performance,” he says. “We take a holistic view of performance.”

Here is an example Norman gives: “You may have a metric that’s about ecommerce sales in a particular channel. But you may be able to prove the, if you can raise awareness or preference by 2%, that you drive more sales through the ecommerce channel than if you focused very narrowly on just deliberately trying to buy ads that drive in to ecommerce.”

Welcome to the Vibrant Future,” a video series of thought leadership from DMEXCO 2017 presented by Criteo.   For more videos please visit this page.

But that was just one of the controversies that has come to live under the moniker of ad industry “transparency”.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, one major agency chief now points the finger at other causes.

“The transparency debate was really kicked off by suspicion about the relationships between intermediaries like ourselves in the agency business and our customers … about how we made our money,” GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman says.

“The debate has moved on considerably. People are very focused on supply chain transparency and the presence of fraud and other forms of invalid traffic such as viewability in the market.”

Some agencies have sought to demonstrate they are cleaning up not only their own practices but also are pushing to help clients navigate through a vendor ecosystem that can sometimes be rife with unviewable, fraudulent and unsafe inventory.

GroupM, for instance, appointed John Montgomery to a new role as EVP for brand safety.

There remains a swell of opinion in the industry that agencies should change their pricing structure to separate their service fees from actual media spending. demonstrating a greater commitment to transparency between agencies and their customers.

That is likely to be a topic discussed this week at DMEXCO, the big ad industry gathering in Cologne.

But Montgomery says GroupM is making in-roads to combating transparency.

“We always think we’re getting closer to getting it under control,” he says. “But it’s a bit like the Tour De France – the dopers are always quicker to the game than the detectors are. Each time we think we’re getting control of the situation, we find a new variation of fraud.

“It’s causing a considerable amount of alarm. Our compliance team has never been busier. The development of automation and tools is key area for us but with that comes even higher standards of compliance than we had before.”

This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“I’ve never really come across anything in my career that has caused as much disturbance as the concern of advertisers about the money flows and the validity of the traffic they are buying,” GroupM’s Chief Digital Officer says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Blockchain, which is the underlying technology of the digital currency Bitcoin, refers to an open, real-time database or ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data or transaction records. When a new transaction happens, it is instantly pushed to all participants in the distributed network.

At this year’s Cannes Lions festival, Comcast unveiled its Blockchain Insights Platform, developed in collaboration with NBCUniversal, Disney (USA), Channel 4 (UK), Altice (USA), Cox Communications (USA), Mediaset (Italy) and TF1 (France). The platform is designed to help advertisers use aggregated insights from data sets, including their own, for ad planning and buying, without having to give away their own precious customer data to traditional data warehouses.

Entities as varied as GroupM, the Internet Advertising Bureau and the Nasdaq are already experimenting with blockchain systems, as ADWEEK reports.

“I think the word blockchain is going to come up at DMEXCO and it’s not that we’re suddenly going to move to a blockchain trading system,” says Norman. However, it’s clear that “the industry needs to move to some kind of secure, permanent and transparent ledger to record what’s occurred in the processes that we’re involved in.”

This will become “an inevitable demand from advertisers and from agencies and all of the people in the ad tech business are going to have to get their heads around that.”

DMEXCO 2017 will take place on Sept. 13 and 14 in Cologne, Germany.

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. 

This is the prognosis from GroupM Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman, who thinks advertisers will be “super interested” in the Internet of things for the data that it collects and the new interfaces people have with content and commerce.

“Everyone’s seen what Echo can do and what Google Home can do and those will be big focuses,” Norman says in an interview with Beet.tv.

He sees “huge competition” in the coming year is how different channels and program creators will incorporate themselves into skinny bundles. For many people, Netflix and Amazon Prime can almost be considered single-asset skinny bundles.

“One of the interesting bits of calculus for the consumer is going to be how do they go about assembling their entertainment portfolio,” says Norman, citing a data pipeline to the home, a mobile data plan and perhaps bundled home security and management services.

“We’re actually asking the consumer to put together a really complicated puzzle,” Norman adds.

This is because of the plethora of choices for watching traditional broadcast channels and streaming video. “They’ll be thinking about their entertainment lineup in terms of where they consume it, in terms of the devices in and out of the home,” Norman says.

He suspects there might need to be changes in the way that entertainment products are marketed.

“I get this feeling that expressions like Double Play, Triple Play and Quad Play are feeling a bit old and I think there’s going to be a new dialogue,” says Norman.

Likening consumer choices to those involved in putting together a portfolio of stocks, Norman has a whimsical suggestion for making things simpler.

“I think we need to create a sort of eHarmony for personal entertainment and communications,” he explains. “It’s your date with technology because it’s getting harder and harder and harder for people to work out.”

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 videos from the series here.

This isn’t to suggest that GroupM does not have clients advertising in feed-based video. The media investment giant takes into account data showing the duration of views and uses that data “as a modifier when we’re advising clients as to how they allocate their money between different video platforms,” Norman says.

GroupM also is working on evolving viewability standards for such formats as outstream video, according to Norman. Outside of the mobile environment, the company “increasingly and almost exclusively” uses its standards for making client investment decisions.

Norman expresses disappointment that the market hasn’t “responded in the way one had hoped in terms of producing platform-specific creative.” In many environments, “I think for a lot of advertisers, very short format video remains a problem other than for simple brand recognition and depth point of view,” he adds.

It’s GroupM’s view that most media will end up embracing standards that the company can trade to, but for a lot of feed-based media it will examine duration data “and use that as a modifier about what we’re prepared to pay and how we allocate it,” Norman says.

When discussing standards and modifiers, Norman says the goal is to find the best instruments to value the duration of a view in any given platform.

“The outstream issue is different from the feed-based one because you’re not looking at it in a scrolling environment, you’re often not looking at it in an autoplay environment,” he says.

As for the difference between a standard and a modifier, Norman says it comes down to the specific use case.

“We thought the standard was absolutely necessary in the desktop display environment because we felt the physical nature of desktop publishing needed to be cleaned up to make ads viewable,” he explains.

It’s not the same scenario with regard to the mobile, feed-based environment. “It’s the actual measurement of time and exposure that needs to be established. They’re different use cases,” Norman says.

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 videos from the series here.

He explains the power of Google and Facebook via the tech giants’ component parts and by the vast number of logged-in users.

These two tech firms may bring about the biggest societal changes since big oil, Norman adds.

We spoke with him in for our series “The Road to CES” – our preview of the big show next month in Las Vegas.   The series is sponsored by YuMe.

Also in the interview, he speaks about the big changes in media consumption which puts the consumers more firmly in control. He speaks about the implications for marketers in this new scenario.

We spoke with Norman as part of our lead-up to CES, titled the Road to CES, presented by YuMe.  Please find additional videos from the series here.

Succeeding Lesser at Xaxis as CEO will be Brian Gleason , CEO of Xaxis Americas.

Rob Norman, the global Chief Digital Officer of GroupM Worldwide, will have the added post of Chairman of GroupM North America.

Clark announced he would stepping down earlier this week.

More on the announcement can be found in this report on Advertising Age.

Earlier this year, we sat down with Lesser for our series, the Media Revolutionaries. In this segment about his career journey, he is interviewed by Dave Moore, his long time colleague at 24/7 then Xaxis where Moore serves as Chairman. This video is part of series sponsored by Xaxis.

Norman points out that more than 80 percent of people’s time spent using smartphones and tablets is with apps, not the mobile web, and people with smart TVs are increasingly engaging with apps in that environment. The app landscape is much less diffuse than the web, since there are relatively few apps that have become everyday destinations for people.

“The assertion that I am making is that apps actually signal the end of fragmentation and a return to scale,” says Norman, GroupM’s chief digital officer, in an interview with Beet.TV prior to giving a keynote on the topic at DMEXCO.

Norman observes that the rise of apps is going to give advertisers the opportunity to take “franchise positions” the way that some brands did when the TV and magazine markets were gaining maturity. They bought prominent media space and “projected those franchises by negotiating them year after year after year and doing so at a point or two below inflation and over time building the delta of competitive advantage in media value versus their peers,” he says.

In the dawn of the internet age, staking out a franchise position wasn’t considered possible, since there was a seemingly limitless supply of web inventory. But now, especially in the app ecosystem, there will be supply constraints.

“Advertisers that go fast, go hard and go big will rebuild the platform of durable competitive advantage,” Norman says.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.

Announced last month, the deal sees GroupM and WPP constituents gain a “creative residency” amongst BuzzFeed content producers and a creative group at BuzzFeed’s video studio, meaning the two sides will jointly work on viral content for advertisers. But it also includes preferential ad rates and access to BuzzFeed’s POUND, a data technology platform showing the Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion – in other words, how content flows across multiple online platforms.

“We’ve been reticent historically about announcing partnerships with media vendors,” GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman concedes, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The BuzzFeed one is different. The future of our business lies at the intersection of creativity, media and technology. BuzzFeed has exploited this as well as any other.

“Unlike Facebook, BuzzFeed is a creator of content… distributes that content across many platforms other than its own and, unlike any other media vendor, they gave a very complete, thoughtful and sincere approach to off-platform distribution.”

The deal involves “no binding guarantees of money”, Norman says, although The Guardian reckons it to be worth “tens of millions” of dollars. Norman likes that, with POUND, “you can observe, if something starts on Snapchat, what happens when it gets pushed to Twitter”.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.

You might expect that vertically-oriented video would present a challenge to advertisers, who, traditionally, have redeployed ad creative first designed for TV’s landscape screen. But GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman has a positive spin on the problem – don’t think TV, think bus stop ads.

“I was having a meeting with JC Decaux. the biggest out-of-home (advertising) company in the world,” Norman tells Beet.TV in this landscape video interview. “I was looking at some of their digital (ad) installations. Guess what? They’re in the portrait video format!

“People are (now) having to think ‘portrait’ and ‘silent’ and ‘subtitled’. It turns out, in out-of-home (advertising), in many mobile use cases, people aren’t going to consume video with sound.”

Whilst TV has often provided mobile platforms with the creative they need for video ads, the idea that out-of-home ads – like those seen on bus stops or digital displays in bars and lobbies – is a fascinating one. If social platforms like Twitter, Periscope, Meerkat and Snapchat succeed at advancing the vertical video format, that could recalibrate the tectonic plates of the creative industry.

According to Norman: “Clients have said, ‘Wow, this is kind of interesting, because we haven’t thought about the creative process in that way’. It sounds so obvious, given the nature of the devices.”

We interviewed Norman as part of a series on video advertising at Cannes Lions, presented by true[X].  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Indeed, many tech and data vendors are already trying to make this happen today. But GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman thinks the industry should walk before it can run.

“Digital natives who don’t have the context of pre-digital have a somewhat naive view of the integrity and the intricacy of the television market,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“There are people who have had a mission for years now to take all the data that’s available … and apply it as close to the time a decision has to be made as possible. The upfront market… isn’t going away any time soon.

“The bit of automation we are most interested in is addressability… (it) is rapidly becoming a reality. That’s not the same thing as programmatic television. The technology doesn’t exist in any way that is scaled.”

GroupM’s own Modi Media unit is focused on exploring programmatic TV ad buying, but Norman sees programmatic being applied more valuably in online video, with traditional TV benefitting from addressability for upfront-bought ads.

Norman was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.

“It’s very easy … to take a view that the fast-streaming, uninterruptable, buffer-free, over-the-top experience is the actual experience of humans at large – it turns out not to be the case,” GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman tells Beet.TV in this panel discussion with LUMA Partners co-founder and CEO Terence Kawaja, recorded at DMEXCO.

“People’s preoccupation is producing 4K experiences now, (but) the number of people in even in the United States and Europe capable of consuming those is a fraction of the ambition of those people that are making them.

“The alleged inefficiency of television is somewhat overstated.  The broadcast age facilitated enormous simultaneous reach and proved to be profoundly effective in changing consumer behavior and building brands.

“We’re dealing with the biggest revolution we’ve ever dealt with now. This is even bigger than black-and-white to color. But we handled that well – and I think we’ll do fine this time.”

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

The big transition will come with the migration of live sports programming in an Internet delivered scenario – which could happen with the next World Cup, Norman suggests.

We spoke with him about the transition of video at the Cannes Lions festival.   You can find all our coverage of Cannes on this page.