The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced “Planet V” at ITV Palooza, a celebrity-filled, advertiser-facing event in the mould of the US TV upfronts showcases, in London on Tuesday.

Planet V, powered by Amobee, enables buying, optimization and monitoring of ads bought on ITV Hub, the multi-platform app through which viewers can watch catch-up and live ITV shows.

Advertisers can use ITV’s own data on 30 million registered ITV Hub users or bring their own data.

“(ITV) realized that, technologically, they were going to be relying upon third party vendors,” said Ryan Jamboretz, Amobee chief development officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV back in June. “It was important for them to actually take some ownership and control. We are working with them very closely to develop what will be their stack.”

Cheeky Piers Morgan photobombs Holly Willoughby at ITV's glitzy Paloozahttps://t.co/hcxqkTFj1v pic.twitter.com/vuFJ37Gt1c

— Mirror Celeb (@MirrorCeleb) November 12, 2019

AdSmart Gearing up

ITV’s move comes in a quickly developing UK market.

Satellite platform Sky has pioneered UK addressable TV delivery with its AdSmart since 2014, beginning by swapping out ads stored on its TV set-top box. AdSmart is now becoming an agreed-upon UK standard of sorts, signing a deal to power rival cable platform Virgin Media’s target VOD ads as well as deals to addressable-enable ads for broadcasters Channel 4 and Channel 5 on those platforms.

This week, Sky signed a technology deal with the BBC, whose UK broadcasts are not allowed to carry advertising, through which AdSmart will nevertheless power personalized BBC show recommendations in the form of video trailers.

Planet V will work with digitally-delivered programming and ads, not linear non-digital broadcasts.

Say what?#itvpalooza pic.twitter.com/qPCRLi5CGQ

— Susan McLellan (@Speedqueenie) November 12, 2019

Going it alone?

A growing collection of partnerships between rivals in both the US and UK is currently aimed at amassing greater audience scale for addressable TV. That is a response to what has become the many fragmented islands of addressable opportunities.

However, ITV – which, beside the ITV Hub software, does not own its own distribution platform as Sky does – is breaking away from the pack of main UK broadcasters by not throwing in its lot with Sky’s AdSmart.

Of those broadcasters, it arguably is in the best position to do so. ITV is the UK’s largest commercial broadcast network – regulated as a public service broadcaster but, unlike the BBC, funded by advertising.

With shows like The X Factor, Downton Abbey and Coronation Street, its inventory is still a huge draw for advertisers trying to reach large audiences.

ITV says it is “extending an open invitation to any other broadcaster to join the platform”.

ITV has been searching for a paid VOD business model to bolster its historic advertising reliance.

The broadcaster, which airs Downton Abbey and Coronation Street in the UK, recently picked Amobee as the platform through which it will distribute its digital ad inventory.

The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on its VOD catch-up service, the ITV Hub.

“ITV was keen … to take a much more proactive stance in terms of how they were going to operate in the programmatic and converged digital and TV space,” says Ryan Jamboretz, Amobee chief development officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“They realized that, technologically, they were going to be relying upon third party vendors and it was such a critical thing, not only to their future, but their future in terms of their share, that it was important for them to actually take some ownership and control.”

ITV is a public service broadcaster, meaning it must operate within a regulated environment to fulfil public purpose.

But it is also a commercial one, meaning it must fund itself to do so. Historically, that has been through advertising. Whilst it goes on upgrading its ad capabilities, however, ITV is also endeavoring to offer paid VOD services, something that is proving a challenge.

Still, Jamboretz sees the Amobee-ITV relationship as two-way.

“It’s incredibly close,” he says. “We are working with them very closely to develop what will be their stack. And in many ways, what they’re helping us develop is helping to inform what we are pushing out around the world.

“It’s quite a cherished position for us because we have a customer in the form of ITV who, in their market and across the region of Europe, is considered to be probably one of the largest, most progressive players.

“And to have them, in many ways, kind of holding our hand, guiding us on some of the more, interesting product development aspects makes it much less guesswork and makes it feel like we were actually going out into the market and other regions with a lot of confidence about what’s coming.”

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

This was the view shared by representatives of MEC and Videology at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and moderated by Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink.

When MEC’s Global CEO, Tim Castree, considers TV and video convergence he’s less concerned with where it’s at than he is in the context for doing it, because context “is where the motivation comes from” for the industry to move faster.

“We are in a really consequential time for our industry. For agencies, it’s a jump ball whether we’re going to more relevant or less relevant five years from now,” said Castree.

The best hedge against a lack of relevance “is solving technologically the cross-screen convergence opportunity. I actually see it as a competitive imperative that we continue to solve this challenge.”

Asked by Spiegel why agencies should fixate on that particular challenge, Castree pointed to the sheer ad dollars brands invest in television and premium video inventory and the manner in which they do so. He says this inventory will always be traded principally in an upfront, futures manner, which lends itself to media agencies’ “trading scale and the role we play in the market as the market makers.”

Adding technology to achieve more advanced optimization would seal the deal, according to Castree.

“Obviously, Google, Facebook, Accenture are never going to be traders of the upfront commodity of television and premium video. So bringing those two things together gives us a unique hedge against what others are trying to do to us,” he said.

Videology’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said that Castree “nailed it in terms of his answer” and went on to list companies that are gradually invading the space that has long been the territory of agencies.

“The number of times we’re hearing names like Oracle and Accenture and PWC in conversations these days which we didn’t hear a year ago is incredible,” Jamboretz observed.

Spiegel opined that it’s not as if the more established media players like NBCUniversal, Viacom and Turner under AT&T are going away anytime soon.

“They are essential, they probably aren’t going anywhere, but they’re in the same fight we’re in,” said Castree.

For both the buy-side and sell-side, the rate of change needs to increase dramatically, regardless of what has already taken place, he added.

“We’ve had a massive rate of change in our business in the last five years. But if the rate of change in our business for the next five years looks like the last five, we will have fallen behind,” Castree said.

Meanwhile, on the the sell side, “The more complex and advanced guys are saying, ‘How do I use this to stitch together all my distribution points into a converged offer,’” said Jamboretz.

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“That’s really more what we’re focused on versus worrying too much about getting to a fixed definition of what’s premium and what’s not,” said Tim Castree, Global CEO of MEC, during a panel discussion at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Castree was responding to a question by moderator Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink, who offered that premium content “is one of those words that doesn’t really have a definition.”

From premium content the discussion turned to the consumer video ad experience, the preponderance of tech solutions and the challenges to content sellers and buyers posed by the mixed trading model most publishers are having to deal with.

Asked by Spiegel whether Videology is seeing video stream providers paying more attention to the quality of the consumer experience then just doling out lots of ad impressions, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said things have definitely improved.

Five or six years ago, Jamboretz noted, when broadcasters “put their over-the-top television out they were over-monetizing, I would argue. They were putting way too many ads in the streams at the beginning.”

He acknowledged “some really great work being done by people like Fox around what is the appropriate ad load” while stating that “I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Spiegel asked whether there are too many technology stacks and not enough standards and commonality.

“It’s highly ambitious if a bit naïve to think that any one company is going to be the full stack,” said Jamboretz. “For us it’s all about interoperability.”

He cited as one company that is “doing it right” Sky in Europe, which is a sell-side client of Videology. “We’re their monetization solution on the supply side but we also work for Tim’s company and many others in that market as a demand-side platform,” said Jamboretz. “So we play both of those functions. And that works better than having to be the top-to-bottom stack for every cable company in Europe or in the U.S.”

According to Castree, one advancement that would greatly benefit the industry is better publisher yield management. Publishers are “dealing with a very complicated environment,” given their remnant interaction with supply side platforms, premium deals in the UpFronts, direct programmatic transactions—some of it on demographics, others on audiences.

He said this mixed trading model is one reason “we’re struggling technologically with all these home-grown solutions.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Fast-forward and you had deals like NBC and Comcast and now the pending acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, flanked by the emergence of Amazon, Facebook and Google as video disruptors.

“All of a sudden, the U.S. really woke up as it became apparent that audiences were fragmenting and ratings were declining, especially among some key audiences,” recalls Ryan Jamboretz, CRO of TV and video software provider Videology.

This awakening has forced traditional cable companies and MVPD’s to face the reality of “competition from old foes, people in their own competitive set, and these kind of new barbarians at the gate,” Jamboretz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions gathering, where he was a panelist on the Advanced TV Summit.

Previously, companies needed only be proficient at distributing other peoples’ content or creating it. “Now they’re having to become both. If not become experts at monetization within that as well,” Jamboretz says.

As a “pretty global company,” Videology had a ringside seat to “bleeding-edge stuff on TV and video combining” as the result of its work with pioneers like Sky TV.

In the U.S., it’s companies like AT&T that “are really the ones we’re seeing with most of the innovation,” says Jamboretz.

Videology never sought to be a “jack-of-all-trades” in the digital arena. “For us it’s been a wonderful kind of awakening of the industry over the last two or three years as this challenge of how do we tackle TV turning digital has now kind of hit on all fronts,” he says.

One of the company’s keys to success is that it’s still privately held. “We have the luxury of not having to kind of expose all our state secrets, and I think we have every intent to keep doing that.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

But hold your horses. Whilst many tech vendors are trying to usher a tradable marketplace economy in to television ad buying, the current system – in which 90% of US TV ad dollars are actually agreed way before transmission – is not going away any time soon, according to one video ad-tech exec.

“Do the ‘upfronts’ continue in the television world?,” asks Videology chief revenue officer Ryan Jamboretz, in this recorded panel interview with Beet.TV. “The whole balance of the TV content system works off the back of futures.

“Upfronts play a very fundamental world in how a scarce market trades. When you have a scarce asset that people need, they are willing to pay for a futures contract to take some of it off the market.”

The 2017 US Upfronts and NewFronts season, in which TV networks and digital publishers tout their upcoming content roster in a bid to secure ad spending, began early in March and is set to continue through to mid-May; here is the calendar.

And Jamboretz thinks the whole construct remains critical. The opinion represents a maturation of the view in video ad-land, where many vendors, early on, had enthusiastically believed they could make the same in-roads in TV as they are in video.

eMarketer forecasts 69% of US digital video display ads will be transacted programmatically in 2017. But the proportion remains only a fraction for traditional TV.

There is one good reason for that – most of TV is still broadcast over analogue or otherwise linear channels, with little opportunity to customise ads. Even if that is overcome, as more internet TV boxes are plugged in, vendors are coming to realise, that doesn’t mean TV networks will consent to their intrinsic ad sales model being changed under their feet.

“If you are a retailer and you need to advertise on Thanksgiving Day weekend, or if you are a media seller and you want to take 30%, 40% or 50% of your inventory and sell it at the upfront of the year so that you can fund content… that’s not just a nice-to-have, that’s a must-have,” Jamboretz added.

This interview with conducted by MediaLink managing director Matt Spiegel.

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.

Many tech vendors these days are fond of boasting their “end-to-end” status, claiming to be able to the Swiss Army knife of services. But is it best to pick a specialist solution for each problem?

Ryan Jamboretz doesn’t think so. As the chief commercial officer of TV ad-tech company Videology, he travels the world, meeting broadcasters in the globe’s top 10 markets, and he thinks there’s no point in so-called “point solutions”.

“What you’re seeing is heavy device proliferation, consumption of traditional television fragmenting, while, at the same time, total consumption of content going through the roof,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “So how you tackle that problem without a series of point solutions is the common problem these guys are facing.

There are fantastic companies out there who are experts at each one of those point solutions. Whether it’s set top boxes or whether it’s IPTV or whether it’s over-the-top, there are experts who have developed businesses to work in that environment.

“What the industry now needs is something to elevate above that content-specific silo into a way where they can use their data and unify all those siloes.”

This interview was conducted at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Google sees intermediaries like television networks as being unnecessary,” according to Videology‘s chief commercial office Ryan Jamboretz. I don’t anticipate Google giving up on breaking the back of the TV industry any time soon. That seems to be a long-run plan for then, to get in to that market.

“Customers are saying, ‘We have legacy ad-serving technologies’. That’s not enough to defeat $10bn in R&D investment by Google every year.”

Videology’s recently-published Q2 insight report on the US video market found a growing proportion of advertisers picking viewability as their primary campaign objective.

That’s something TV networks can offer in spades. But Jamboretz says that the big guns from the online world still spook TV companies.

“It’s a factor that comes up in pretty much every one of our discussions – our knowledge of Google and Facebook, and how what we’re doing helps a broadcaster compete against that,” he says.

“Whilst it presents great challenges competitively, it presents opportunities, too, in that there are a lot of companies that don’t want to be disintermediated by Google.”

This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders at the exposition.   The series is sponsored by Videology.   For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.

Video advertising platform Videology’s chief commercial officer Ryan Jamboretz is talking about “outstream”, the format which inserts auto-playing video ads between text publishers’ written paragraphs.

And Jamboretz thinks that will help solve a problem.

“The biggest single constraint is the amount of high-quality supply,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It’s a positive development. Being able to bring more inventory to the publisher base is going to allow this industry to grow more quickly.

“As long as it’s quality and of a premium nature, it’s a fantastic thing. If the outstream business starts to become a lower-quality way to access the market, then it starts to be of concern to us.”

Agencies think out-stream video ads will be more important than in-stream or banner ads to their clients, according to a Forrester report published last year.”

This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

He says that more than half of the company’s revenue is now coming from outside the U.S.

We spoke with the London-based executive about global trends and his expectations for the conversations at the upcoming Cannes Lions Festival.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

“The interaction between TV and digital distribution channels is actually way more linked up than we’ve been seeing in the US,” according to video ad tech platform Videology‘s chief development officer Ryan Jamboretz.

“The European markets have actually been a leader in the shift of television money in to digital. The US markets are developing those solutions today.”

Jamboretz, whose company has been operating in Europe for four years, says he has seen Germany’s Axel Springer and the UK’s BSkyB rapidly take their content to new platforms and sell ads using new targeting techniques.

We spoke with him  for “The Road to DMEXCO”, a series of interviews with industry leaders produced in New York, London and San Francisco sponsored by the Civolution.

Please find more videos from the series here. Beet.TV is a media sponsor of DMEXCO and will be covering the conference extensively.

“There is an absolute expectation that consolidation will have to happen at some point,” Ryan Jamboretz, the EMEA SVP of one vendor, Videology, told Beet.TV in this video interview during Cannes Lions. “There’s too many people racing at the opportunity. so there will be shake-out.”

Videology’s technology helps advertisers move money from TV to digital and understand the relative success of campaigns in each. The firm recently took on $60 million in new investment to fuel its own tilt at the opportunity.

“We’re delighted,” Jamboretz told Beet.TV. “Raising $60 million is no small feat. I think it’s  of the biggest raises in the sector this year. It’s a big part of our international expansion plan.”

“The general notion when we first started our international business three years ago was, markets outside the US were 18 to 24 months behind,” Ryan Jamboretz told Beet.TV’s recent London Video Ad Strategy Summit. “It’s compressing. It’s now starting to feel like six to nine months.”

But Jamboretz said that evolution is happening at different speeds in different markets. “When we go to Asia, the majority of our distribution of our video assets for our clients… TV isn’t morphing to PCs; it’s morphing to mobile.” Much European video consumption remains PC-based, he added.

“It is borne of the television world, but it’s being used as the dominant mechanism by which television money is shifting into digital,” the video ad tech firm’s international managing director told us during Beet.TV’s recent London Video Ad Strategy Summit.

“We’re seeing guarantees being mandated as part of media shifting out of television into digital, that it be audited and guaranteed against those metrics.

“That’s something that hadn’t existed in digital before. The idea that you would under-deliver or over-deliver on a campaign was very normal. In the TV world, that’s completely not normal and not acceptable.”

Disclosure: This Beet.TV event was hosted by GroupM and sponsored by Videology.