“Because, in fact, we are everywhere the sports fan wants us to be,” Howe explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “One of the core messages we wanted to get across today is wherever the sports fan is in the digital ecosystem, we are their voice of sports.”

While ESPN’s owned and operated platforms garner the largest audience of its 81 million fans a month, “Social is a critical aspect of it, most importantly because that’s where some of our fans want to consume their sports content.”

ESPN customizes sports content on Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter in sync with user expectations that vary by platform. “We do not treat them the same.”

Twitter “is a great place for live breaking news. Snapchat is there for digestible content and Facebook is there to tell the story,” says Howe. “Each of those platforms has a very different purpose in terms of communicating with the sports fan.”

He considers the recently upgraded ESPN app to be “one of our crown jewels.” ESPN+, the company’s long-awaited sports streaming service, will feature thousands of live games and original programming for $4.99 a month, and will live inside the ESPN app, as The New York Times reports.

“What’s important about our app is that it engages with 23 million unique fans. Capturing that audience is very important to us and we take it very seriously.”

Two main features of the app are personalization and direct-to-consumer sports.

Personalization ensures that “every single fan who comes to our app gets a unique and different experience based off of their preferences and fan behaviors.”

He calls ESPN+ “the first direct-to-consumer sports property, which allows us to give the sports fans more. ESPN+ allows us yet another outlet for our fans to engage with even more sports content around some of the best leagues and sports in the industry.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

The relationship, which lets NBCU reach new audiences and create the right types of content that best resonates with them, began about a year and a half ago. For last year’s Summer Olympics in Rio, “We both created original content and also had coverage of a lot of different live events through their Our Stories product,” Radin says in this interview with Beet.TV.

NBCU is renewing those efforts for the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea in February 2018.

Some of the content NBCU has created for Snapchat derives from its shows, for example The Voice, along with new brands like The Rundown, “the most popular show created on Snapchat.”

Based in Santa Monica, CA, the new digital content studio will be led by Lauren Anderson, an NBC Entertainment executive who joins as Chief Content Officer, as TechCrunch reports. The venture will be shared equally in terms of equity between Snap and NBCU.

Combining NBCU’s expertise in content creation and Snapchat’s intimate knowledge of its users represents a “great opportunity to create more successes, not only for our programming and audiences but of course for our clients as well,” Radin says.

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

With NBCU making its television inventory available via application programming interfaces, “it was pretty natural for us to come together,” says Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights.

Since its founding in 2011, 4C has brought data science together with workflow to facilitate smoother and more efficient media planning and buying, beginning with digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and LinkedIn. “We started doing that with social, but of course social is not the be all and end all,” Gupta says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we’re trying to get to is cross channels. TV of course is a big share of eyeballs.”

4C decided just over a year ago to expand beyond social, choosing linear TV as opposed to video. “In the TV case, some of the brands that we work with are bringing CRM data to linear TV, which hasn’t necessarily been done before.”

In a deal announced this month involving retailer Target, 4C has access to NBCU inventory “that is available to buy, let’s say, over the next couple of months. So therefore in the 4C planner you can plan a campaign and out comes a media schedule that says ‘here is how you want to allocate your budget to reach the goals that you have across the various programs on NBC,’” Gupta explains.

With the Mediaocean combination announced in September, 4C’s platform brings together inventory bought in both the Upfront and scatter markets. “It was very important that we cover both the use cases. We tap into the inventory, build an optimized plan and push that plan back into Mediaocean by integration.”

Gupta says that in the last six months or so, everyone is talking about applying “audience centricity” to linear television “and frankly television more broadly speaking. It’s the same thing that’s been done in digital advertising.”

Calling it the best parts of digital advertising now coming to linear TV, he welcomes the ongoing wave of buyers and sellers pushing the envelope of innovation.

“I think the people who are going to be successful down the road are the ones that are experimenting with these things now, getting the kinks out of the system, learning and then moving along,” Gupta says. “And I think next year you’re going to see a lot of the stuff happening at scale is my prediction.”

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

The deal with 4C “allows us to juxtapose the value of our inventory within the same buying console that they’re buying this other inventory,” says Aaron Radin, NBCU’s SVP of Partnerships & Portfolio Products.

This means that among other things, buyers will be able to decide whether buying a 15- or 30-second ad on the hit show This Is Us “will be a more effective use of a client’s marketing spend than a three-second autoplay video in a news feed,” Radin says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“What’s particularly notable about this relationship is that 4C has been used to buy social media platforms” including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn. And while they are still considered to be social media platforms, nearly half of the advertising transactions that occur on them are for video inventory.

“We saw this as an important place where we could provide the efficiency and targetability that clients have been able to enjoy on those platforms,” Radin says.

Retailer Target is the advertising partner kicking off the self-serve offering, which in the future will expand beyond NBCU’s linear TV inventory to digital as well.

“We’re super lucky to have Target as our launch client for that partnership. I think they’re the perfect client to do so.”

Target is known for its digital targeting prowess and CRM savvy. It’s also been “laser focused on being able to leverage that information against television inventory,” says Radin.

NBCU has created application programming interfaces for its television inventory, a move that Radin describes as “a landmark” in the industry.

“The initial results have been super exciting. We couldn’t be more excited not only that we got it off the ground but about the types of opportunities it opens up to our clients by being able to present our inventory to the market in this way.”

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

“We’re seeing a lot of that now with the Entertainment Lions, the awards for content and creativity, the Creative Data awards as well,” Haxby, who is Global Marketing Director, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Making waves is the responsibility of MEC’s WAVEMAKER unit, which uses data and analytics showing how consumers behave and how they buy to inform content creation. The goal is to figure out which points in consumer’s journies are the most valuable to particular marketers.

With “tons and tons” of data available to her teams, “Our job is to try to make sense of that and really glean the insights that come out of that data,” Haxby says.

MEC brings to the table its own research study—called MEC Momentum and running for several years now. Its purpose is to close gaps in understanding what buyers do during the purchase journey, how their perceptions of brands influence their behavior and how they make their choices.

“We’ve surveyed more than 350,000 people in 30 countries, 60 categories to look at how they go around the purchase journey. We use that data and blend it with our clients’ data to create really targeted messages at certain points throughout the purchase journey,” Haxby explains.

Knowing that MEC itself has audiences that it needs to reach, the agency is constantly evaluating its own presence on platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. “It’s a learning curve for us all, but we would be remiss if we didn’t do what we said our clients should be doing,” says Haxby. “We have to do it for ourselves.”

She references an MEC session at Cannes in which iHeart CEO Bob Pittman talked about the power of radio, a medium sometimes overlooked.

“Ultimately, 250 million people listen to radio in the U.S. every day, so that’s something we have to tap into. We forget sometimes that it’s another platform. It’s called podcasting now, but it’s still radio.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

And it’s probably not going to get much easier going forward, Reed explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“I think we’re going to learn some things over the course of the next year that are really surprising,” says Reed. “We know that consumer attention us dropping every time we turn around. We have less attention span than a goldfish. We’re not getting any better.”

The implications are profound because “as we start to look at ad formats, we’re going to have the expectation that those ad formats need to be shorter and faster to grab attention.”

The need for speed will ultimately rest on the shoulders of creative because they won’t be thinking of “that anthem 30- or 60-second unit that they used to build but how do I build something that’s fast, gets to the point and engages instantly.”

On the subject of data and walled gardens, Reed is asked whether her agency gets everything it needs from Facebook. “Does anyone get the information they need from all of the walled garden partners?” she says with a laugh. “No. Certainly not.”

On a positive note, she believes the caretakers of the gardens “have actively taken an approach to say that they are willing to try to find a solution with all of our clients. It’s going to take time.”

Nonetheless, the clock is ticking. Reed thinks that in the next year or so Facebook and its ilk might have to get more magnanimous and “figure out how to give data back to the advertisers in order to be able to truly address ROI, or it will significantly affect their investment levels.”

In the meantime, new players are emerging all the time that could become the next Amazon, Facebook or Snapchat. “Let’s not forget that AOL was the behemoth many years ago, and now they’re starting that resurgence again with Oath,” Reed observes.

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

“I think it’s one of the things we’re kind of missing,” Dave Penski, CEO of Publicis Media Exchange Americas, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Although he’s encouraged by conversations at Cannes about such a value exchange, it’s still very much a work in progress.

“For a very long time in this business, the reason that commercials weren’t an issue is because the consumer realized they had to watch those in order to get the content they wanted,” Penski says. “Now with so many different options on getting that content without the commercial viewing experience is where it’s challenging.”

In the meantime, he feels that reducing ad loads would be an improvement, but it has to be balanced somehow. “Our clients are not going to pay a 100% premium to cut ads because it doesn’t feel like it’s quite their responsibility. I think it’s going to be a mixture of how you value that impression,” he says.

Part of achieving a value exchange requires that agencies evaluate “what we are producing, what type of ads we’re putting against it and what is that value exchange for the consumer.”

Having attended Cannes for about a decade, one of the things that strikes Penski as a “large surprise” this go-round is the number of U.S. clients on hand and their level of engagement.

“You expect the digital and tech clients, but it’s really across all of our categories,” he says. “They’re looking at this as a place to kind of stop, pause and think about what they’re looking for from an innovation standpoint.”

Mentioning Snapchat and Twitter, Penski has a more positive view of them as partners because they realize they need to do a better job of “putting the advertiser first and having the right ad experience for our clients.”

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

Therein lies a paradox of sorts, given NBCU’s public bashing of some of the new generation of content providers. So it’s noteworthy to hear the company’s sales chief, Linda Yaccarino, discuss issues like brand safety, premium video and “shiny new toys” in this interview conducted by OMD’s investment chief Ben Winkler at the FreeWheel/Beet.TV New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum, which took place at the Comcast beach cabana.

Winkler set the stage by asking Yaccarino to square her comments about advertisers over-allocating spending to digital platforms with a wave of negative comments about brand safety on some of those platforms. Were the two connected?

Yaccarino responded by citing a “dangerous soup of an environment that we live in today. I don’t think anyone has the answer yet of what’s the right magical number of the mix, of premium content to digital.”

At the next Cannes festival, the subject may very well be moot, as far as Yaccarino is concerned. “Next year, I hope we stop talking about digital versus linear. In a year or two it’s all going to be the same thing,” she said. “But the turf war isn’t about digital versus linear. It’s how can we come together and help our clients sell more product.”

Winkler asked why NBCU disparaged “shiny new toys” in the digital space but proceeded to invest in and partner with some of them. That all depends on how one defines shiny objects, Yaccarino said.

Citing Apple News, BuzzFeed, Snapchat and Vox, she said, “It’s all populated by one thing and that’s premium content.”

Consumers have already dispelled any semantical differences between traditional TV content and video, according to Yaccarino. “The consumer is already there. They see no difference between accessing content via the big screen on the wall in their home or the screen in their lap or the screen in their hand.”

However, barriers still remain in the “ease of transaction for our customers,” she noted, “and the ability to offer them unified measurement or, God forbid, a currency in which to transact.”

NBCU’s Symphony initiative is credited with, among other things, raising NBC from “worst to first” in ratings by pooling the resources of all company units—from linear digital to theme parks. Among the beneficiaries has been the program “This Is Us,” as The Los Angeles Times reports.

“The difference this year is that we’re able to spread that messaging through the partners that we’ve been talking about, Snapchat, Buzzfeed, Apple News so it’s very exciting,” said Yaccarino.

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.

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.

“From an advertiser perspective, we’re seeing a lot of that right now. Brands that are actually taking sales impact as a KPI and then adjusting all of their media tactics to meet that,” Feigenson says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Meanwhile, on the publisher side, what interests Feigenson, who is Chief Revenue Officer at Nielsen Catalina Solutions, “is a wholescale embracing of this.”

The company has about 90 million households worth of frequent shopper data garnered from retail partners frequent shopper data. “That means we can go really deep in terms of creating segments for activation or in doing closed-loop attribution,” Feigenson says.

That data is complemented with insights from the Nielsen Homescan panel, “which allows us to create a representative view of what’s going on in the market beyond the retailers that participate with us through Catalina.”

Since the beginning of 2017, Nielsen Catalina Solutions has announced new relationships with Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify.

With regard to business outcomes for advertisers, TV is still an easier medium to mine, according to Feigenson.

“It’s somewhat easy to look at effectiveness because you have one format and you can take that format and put it against a media mix model and get pretty predictive about what results are going to be,” he says.

Digital involves many different formats and ways of targeting, so outcomes can vary widely. “So from a publisher perspective, first and foremost they need to show that what they’re doing works.”

Some publishers exceed these expectations by using outcomes to influence their own product strategy. “In other words, they use outcomes as a way to figure for them what works, they work backwards to make it better.”

At Cannes, Feigenson is optimistic that all parties can come together in the common interest of advancing the ad industry and lifting certain clouds that have lingered overhead, among them digital ad fraud.

“I’m hoping here we address issues honestly and creatively and we come up with ways to make this industry better.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“I think the creative agencies are wrestling with two things,” the media company’s Chairman of Advertising Sales & Client Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV in advance of the 2017 Cannes Lions festival.

One is the power of a 15- or a 30-second ad. “Because In the right context, there really is unparalleled impact so that’s still going to be part of a media plan,” Yaccarino says.

She also believes that agencies are going to experience “a time of incredible opportunity as they figure out how to create content for the different platforms.”

NBCU’s mantra is screen agnostic, platform specific, according to Yaccarino.

“Creative, whether it’s the content itself or the advertising that goes along with it, really needs to be specific to that platform experience,” she adds.

This is because a user on Snapchat has different expectations and can consume and ingest content in very different ways than it does on Facebook or YouTube or when they’re watching This Is Us on NBC.

“So I think that’s a great opportunity for creative development,” Yaccarino says.

Astronauts Wanted’s three main formats are premium episodic series, movies and “experimental storytelling” on social platforms. It pushes its programs “across anywhere you can think of,” SVP of Branded Entertainment Christine Murphy explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Anywhere” includes YouTube, YouTube Red, go90, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Hearst Complex and Condé Nast’s The Scene. “Anywhere you can put video, we’re on it,” Murphy says.

“The places that people have started consuming this content have changed but the actual appetite for the content hasn’t changed,” she adds. “That TV episode, really high-quality content is still on demand. They just looking at it in different places.”

At the Digital Content NewFronts, Astronauts Wanted announced a new scripted comedy series titled AUSSIE GIRL, which is based on the real life experiences of actress/writer/director Tammin Sursok, along with the series UNDERBELLY, which features rapper and social sensation Timothy DeLaGhetto. Also unveiled was a new incubator program in partnership with Ripple Entertainment and the company’s SNARLED network for progressive, Gen Z women, and the third season of hit series HEYUSA with Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart.

Sharing the Astronauts Wanted NewFronts presentation was Rumble Yard (formerly Sony Music Originals) with a look its new original programming, including TURN TABLE, in which TV personality Al Roker fuses his love for cooking and music.

The company works with brands “in the spirit of partnership,” weaving series concepts and marketer needs together with the right talent. “Everything we make, we don’t cast talent, we create with the talent and with the brand together,” says Murphy.

This typically involves discussions about what keeps a particular brand up at night and then figuring out how to create a meaningful series that can move the needle for whatever the brand’s trying to accomplish.

Astronauts Wanted then finds the appropriate director, writer and producer, “making sure there’s chemistry. And then just blowing the roof off the house.”

Murphy says they’ve created “a ton of hits” that can continue season after season and they can live on “versus just one and done.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

While emotional storytelling is not in short supply on social platforms, POPSUGAR does it “with the power of brand,” Schiller explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts events.

One of POPSUGAR’s missions is powering the optimism and dreams of women around the world. Its offerings to marketers span from written native to original video sponsorships to co-development and integration deals.

“It really runs the gamut,” says Schiller. “In general we want to prove out that everything starts with an insight. It’s not just ‘here’s a fully baked offering that we want to slap a logo on.’”

The realities of its audience preferences have led POPSUGAR to “fully embrace a distributive model.” While traditional .com destinations will always serve as an anchor, it’s seen massive distribution on platforms like Facebook.

“Instagram Stories is growing like a weed in a good way, a nice beautiful weed. On Snapchat we reach thirty million organic a month,” Schiller says.

POPSUGAR also boasts four YouTube Google Preferred channels.

“It’s really not just a distributed model. It’s a very democratic distributed model,” says Schiller, adding that POPSUGAR finished 2016 with 1.8 billion video views. “That placed us number one.”

He believes the NewFronts are good opportunity to “cement in the minds of buyers of decision makers that we are a real brand. All the things that we think POPSUGAR stands for, this is a platform for bringing that to life.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

“We come here because we like to learn what the partners are doing in the digital space,” Hughes says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We like to understand what’s new, what do they have in terms of data, technology and how are the content platforms changing and evolving with the rapid-fire digital space,” she adds.

What has occurred to Hughes and others about the current state of digital affairs is that everyone’s gone live. “Hulu is doing live this year. Everyone is reporting from Facebook Live or Instagram Live and Snapchat Live. So live is a big thing.”

She surveys the array of content opportunities that can help connect brands with consumers and is about what she sees for the coming year.

“Our challenge is to break through the clutter and to be always relevant. We look at lot to our digital partners to help us stay relevant with consumers,” Hughes says.

Front and center for Conagra are content integrations because they “have been huge for us and they really work well. We are definitely looking for integrations for the next year.”

The conglomerate also is interested in data and analytics and for publishers “to tell us how our brands are performing on platforms in ways that we can constantly push our content to our consumers.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

It was Davis, of Monumental Shift, who kicked off the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes, presented by video marketing technology provider Eyeview, with a frenetic and humor-laden presentation about what’s wrong with marketing today. Before building and selling a digital marketing agency, Andrew was a producer for NBC and also worked for The Muppets.

MFOMO is what happens when brands chase what seems to be the next big thing just because they can. “If we hear somebody’s making money on Snapchat, all of a sudden everybody’s on Snapchat,” said Davis.

Likening social media to the decades-earlier additions to the marketing pie of events and promotions, websites and search engine optimization, Davis concluded that the “CMO pizza” isn’t getting any bigger. “It’s just sliced more and more ways.”

He traced the advent of the marketing funnel to 1898 when Elias St. Elmo Lewis sketched out his AIDA funnel model. All these years later, marketers are still obsessed with one iteration of the funnel or other.

“We have to rethink the funnel,” said Davis. “We’re focused entirely on winning market share. This market share battle is just an awareness play.”

One of the most illuminating parts of Davis’ presentation was when he shared insights from Breville, which makes juicers and other kitchen appliances. Without giving away the bottom line, part of the company’s success in increasing the size of the juicer market came from Google Trends, which Davis called “the most underutilized marketing tool on the planet today.”

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.

“We’re trying to get brands, agencies and the ecosystem to move away from all this arbitrary proxy metrics of clicks and completions and demo targeting,” says Oren Harnevo.

It’s as basic as “Did I help to sell more cars off the lot, did I sell more product, did I win more market share?”

Eyeview’s solution centers on its VideoIQ® programmatic video platform. The company doesn’t actually measure results of video campaigns but uses third-party vendors like Nielsen Catalina, J.D. Power and Cardlytics.

“We make sure every campaign we run for our brands has third-party measurement on it,” Harnevo says in this interview during the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes and presented by Eyeview. “We think that’s where the industry is going to get.”

Optimizing toward third-party measurement cures many ills. “Suddenly, you buy media better,” says Harnevo. “Suddenly it’s viewable because you know what, if it’s not viewable it’s not going to sell. You see less fraud. You create more advanced story telling.”

Just as consumers watching video don’t make distinctions about which screen they happen to be using, neither does Eyeview. It’s looking to target specific people and bring them the most personalized stories possible.

Eyeview sees its mainstays as desktop and mobile, but addressable television “is growing really fast,” Harnevo says. “That’s a growing part of our business.” Social media also is on an upswing “and is only going to grow more,” he adds.

Eyeview currently works on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and soon Snapchat and other platforms.

Harnevo stresses the distinction between a company that buys media, which it does not, and one that buys audiences. Eyeview’s in-house designers, visual effects and animation specialists produce and edit broadcast-quality video ads tailored to specific business goals.

“We’ve found that it’s really important to be able to be that creative storyteller and the people who actually decide which audience to buy,” Harnevo says.

To learn more about Eyeview’s approach to using data, audience, media and creative work in tandem to drive measurable results across video and digital media, visit this page.

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.

“There has never been a time with more challenges, but there’s never been a more intellectually interesting time to be in the business,” Martin says in a reference to the explosion of both content and consumer choices for consuming it.

Turner has set an ambition for itself to “literally reinvent the company from the inside out.” While it intends to dominate its core businesses with premium content, Turner also knows it must keep abreast of shifting distribution venues, according to Martin.

“With these new distribution mechanisms and with so much choice available for consumers, we really want to be a fan engagement company,” he says. This is because engaging with fans “who come back over and over and over again are the easiest people to monetize.”

Such engagement needs to span all age groups. While the average age of a CNN viewer on linear TV in the U.S. is 58, the equivalent figure on Snapchat is early 20’s. “Nobody would have thought that people in their early twenties would have been interested in CNN, but that’s not true,” Martin says.

“Massive investments” in technology have enabled Turner to reach these varied audiences, in addition to new distribution partnerships, according to Martin.

And then there is the proposed merger with AT&T, which Seeking Alpha believes is on a track toward approval. Martin sees the deal as being able to “supercharge our growth” with the addition of 25 million DIRECTV subscribers and AT&T’s 130 million mobile customers.

While Turner won’t offer its content exclusively to AT&T’s customers “because we make money by being agnostic, we’re going to be able to learn a lot.”

Martin is optimistic about this year’s Upfronts and Newfronts negotiations with media buyers, given its lightened commercial loads and the improved quality of ads on its networks. “We’re seeing really great early success and I’m quite confident going into the Upfront this year. I think it’s going to be healthy,” Martin says.

This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017.  The series is sponsored by Turner.  Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.

Mobile in particular is characterized by “an entire ecosystem of people creating new platforms that live on mobile and therefore new ad vehicles that live on top of those platforms,” Treuhaft says in an interview with Beet.TV.

With an advertising background spanning almost two decades at agencies like Grey, Young & Rubicam, VML and 24/7 Real Media, Treuhaft is no stranger to the digital world. Going from creating one 30-second television spot to “lots of different types of creative” for the likes of Facebook, Snapchat and Google is a big industry challenge.

“I believe that proliferation will just continue,” he says. “It’s incumbent on all of us as an industry to make that adaption, because the format changes will continue to come fast and furious.”

Hearts & Science sees that concurrent with platform proliferation, some of the dynamic will be less ad interruption. “Less sort of brands getting in the way of consumers seeing things that they want and more brands creating things that people want and bringing those things to people,” says Treuhaft. “That’s a lot of where we see opportunity in the future.”

He cites as an example Millennials who “overwhelmingly use the phone as the most important screen in their lives. We need to figure out how to be in front of them in the environment where they are consuming content.”

Treuhaft describes Hearts & Science as agency built with data and consumer understanding at an “atomic” level. “The data is all there and available. It’s just a question of how you action it,” he says.

This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising. The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.

EXPLORING CROSS-SCREEN ADDRESSABLE VIDEO ADVERTISING, PRESENTED BY AT&T ADWORKS

Instead, NBCU is focused on showcasing to brand partners its multiplatform approach to marketing content, he says. The media giant has built a content studio and uses that to create custom content for brand partners that can be distributed across its digital ecosystem. That lets NBCU rely on its assets and sound stages, for instance, on behalf of marketers. As an example, NBCU worked with Sabra to introduce a guacamole dip via a series of parodies of cooking videos that it pushed out across its digital platforms. “We had great results with that in driving customers to purchase Sabra dip,” Schiller tell us.

Schiller says that what brands want from media partners is premium content, quality data about customers, and also premium distribution. He adds that NBC was able to do bring that all to bear recently for the Olympics by working with SnapChat and BuzzFeed to create content advertisers could participate in.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB MIXX Conference, 2016, presented by The TradeDesk. Please find additional videos from the Conference here.

At Cannes, we spoke with Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer of GroupM Worldwide about the new venture and the opportunities to create native advertising for a specific platform.  He calls this this “platform native” and sees a big upside for brands and publishers.

He says that Snapchat has proven its value to brands and publishers as a platform to generate real-time, dynamic content.   As an example, he points to the collaboration with WPP and the Daily Mail to create a  joint marketing enterprise.

We interviewed Johnston at the Mindshare party at Cannes Lions on Thursday evening.

This video was part of a series about video advertising sponsored by Teads. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.