“Guess what happened? Nobody was buying,” recalled Carl Fremont, Global Chief Digital Officer at media agency MEC.

That’s because there was no measurement around digital viewing and digital really couldn’t be compared to broadcast buys, Fremont said in a keynote interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

“It was a complete buyer’s market,” Fremont added, in response to a question from Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz. “It forced us to really look at the measurement pieces of it, both the planning side and the buying side.”

While some things have changed since those first NewFronts efforts, much remains the same in the absence of uniform digital video audience measurement. This is a source of much frustration given the universal appreciation for the sight, sound and motion characteristics of advertising messages delivered every second of the day to ubiquitous screens small and large.

“It’s so fragmented,” Fremont continued. “It’s still a confusing marketplace.”

Swartz sees it more an issue of EQ (emotional intelligence) as opposed to IQ, requiring buyers and sellers to come together and forge solutions. “It’s not about cherry picking problems. It’s about providing solutions,” she said.

Both agreed that removing complexity from the ecosystem would lower costs as more brand marketers embrace addressability and an audience-based world. “We do need one way of measurement. We need one way of planning,” said Fremont.

One of the challenges of planning video buys is there’s no line of sight to inventory, particularly premium video. A system that could look across different platforms like OTT and connected TV would be akin to utopia if buyers could gear the right content to the right consumer experience in the right channel.

To Fremont, programmatic is a key component but not just for the sake of technological convenience. There still must be human interaction among partners whose interests are common but whose approaches vary.

“It has to be done in a dialogue manner,” said Fremont. “The relationship that I think we need to have is less about the complexity of the buy side and more about how do we use data to find audiences at scale.”

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.

One key competitive advantage is that it only charges advertisers for impressions that garner a 75% view-through rate, its Group Director of Advanced Advertising, Jamie West, says in this interview with Beet.TV. West was one of some four dozen advertising and media leaders who gathered for the Beet Executive Retreat 2017 titled Video Everywhere: The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

Sky is Europe’s largest entertainment company, serving the UK, Austria, Germany, Ireland and Italy, West explains in response to a question from Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., the inventory and supply chain management company serving premium publishers.

“When you think about Sky from an advertising perspective, we’re most known for our advanced advertising products and scale,” says West.

As The Drum reports, Sky takes an agnostic approach to competing for advertising budgets not only with the likes of ITV and Channel 4 with with digital giants. “We as a broadcaster and an innovator have to compete head-to-head and toe-to-toe with the likes of Facebook and Google to truly compete in the digital age,” he told The Drum.

Asked by Swartz about the biggest change to Sky’s business over the last three to four years, West cites data enablement. It’s been a driving force behind not only Sky AdSmart but also Sky AdVance, which West describes as the ability to serve ads in a digital environment “as the result of some kind of consumption, whether viewing to apps or programs.”

The third pillar of the company’s operations is its analytics capabilities, including its viewing panels that now reach some 3- 3.5-million households and provide insights into second-by-second viewing. “With that appended to device ID’s and IP addresses means that we can serve ads across the whole digital estate as a result of that viewing consumption,” says West.

With Sky AdSmart, advertisers are charged only for impressions that have a 75% view-through rate. “On a 30-second commercial, that will be something like 20 seconds of incremental value versus some of the digital players that charge on one or three seconds,” West says.

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.

“Until now it was email, text messaging, website traffic, even point of sale,” says Netter. “But not video. Video was considered TV, top of funnel advertising.”

Breaking down silos, the new solution links consumer activity in other channels with the ability to interact with video ads. In the same manner, if someone interacts with a video it can trigger a separate, targeted marketing actions.

“If you see an ad and are interested about a vacation or something and interact with it, if the brand has information about you in its database two days later it could follow up with an email about an offer,” says Netter.

ConAgra Brands—whose products include Orville Redenbacher and Bertolli—is a launch partner for the Innovid Marketing Cloud Suite, The Drum reports.

Innovid was an early pioneer of dynamic creative insertion, which can now be fueled in real time by even more customer data from non-video channels.

“What’s unique here is it’s the first time they are connected to the back-end CRM system,” Netter says of programmatic creative elements.

Based on what a marketer knows, “if you did something on the brand website, opened an email or bought a product, the next time will see ad on NBC, AOL or Hulu it would be based on other activities you have done beyond the video channel,” says Netter.

Innovid’s platform includes a Video Delivery Suite, an Analytics Suite, a Video Experience Suite and an Optimization Suite.

In June at Cannes Lions, we spoke with Mastercard’s Ben Jankowsky about advanced advertising. Jankowsky will be one of the keynote speakers at the Retreat.

The participants for the event are:

Keynote Speakers:

Mike Bologna, President, Modi Media

Brian Cordes, Director of Client Solutions, AT&T AdWorks

Scott Ferber, CEO, Videology

Benjamin Jankowski, SVP Media, Mastercard

Bill Livek, President, comScore

Andrew Deming, SVP for Marketing, Bank of America

Tracey Scheppach, CEO & Founder, Matter More Media

Featured Speakers:

Jason Baadsgaard, CRO, Eyeview Digital 

Jonathan Bokor, SVP, Advanced Media, Mediavest l Spark (Publicis)

Jason Burke, VP, Product, clypd

Dan Bruinsma, Chief Investment Officer, GroupeConnect (Publicis’ unit for Bank of America)

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCUniversal

Brendan Condon, President, AdMore

Michael Dean, VP, Programmatic & Data-Driven Sales, Disney ABC Television Group

Cordie DePascale, VP, Product, Mediaocean

Brad Danaher, Television Partnership Director, Experian

Lock Dethero, TV Partnerships Lead, Neustar

Dave Downey, CEO, Invidi

Lauren Fry, Senior Account Executive, AT&T AdWorks

Brent Gaskamp, SVP North American Development, Videology 

Joan FitzGerald, VP, Product Management & Business Development TiVo

Adam Gaynor, VP, DISH Media Sales

Archie Gianunzio, VP of Sales, Videa (Cox)

Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights

Walt Horstman, President of AudienceXpress (Visible World/Comcast)

Brian Jankovsky, Director of Entertainment and Sports Partnerships, Google

Nick Johnson, SVP, Digital Ad Sales Strategy, Turner

Rob Klippel, SVP, Advanced Advertising & Strategy, Spectrum Reach (Charter)

Jennifer Koester, Director, Telco & Video Distribution, Google

Kevin Lenane, General Manager, Video at Integral Ad Science

Noah Levine, SVP, Revenue Operations, Fox Networks Group

Stefan Maris, VP, Product Marketing & Partnerships, Sorensen Media

Ryan Moore, Global Agency Development Lead, Twitter

Jamie Power, Managing Partner, Modi Media, GroupM

James Rothwell, VP. Agency & Brand Relations at FreeWheel

Eric Schmitt, VP, Advanced Advertising, Acxiom

Kevin Patrick Smith, SVP, Comcast 360 Media

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom

Jeff Storan, VP, Marketing, Simulmedia

Tore Tellefsen, VP, TV Solutions, DataXu

Nick Troiano, CEO, Cadent

Andrew Ward, Group Vice President, Comcast 360 Media

Faculty/Facilitators: 

Tim Hanlon, Founder & CEO, The Vertere Group, LLC

Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal, Proshaska Consulting

Matt Spiegel, SVP, MediaLink

Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp

Special Participants:

Alex Aigner, COO, DataLab Digital

Mary Barnas, Vice President, Platform Adoption, Videa

Will Beaty, Senior Director of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, NAB

Craig Berkley, Director, Sales, Acxiom

Boaz Cohen, GM, Advanced TV. Eyeview Digital

Stacy Daft,   GM, Enterprise Business Development,Videology

Frank Ferrans, TV Partnerships Manager, Cardlytics 

Laith Massarweh, Broadcast, Media and Entertainment Specialist, Google 

Michael Kubin, EVP, Invidi

Jack Rotherham, CMO, FreeWheel

Ronan Shields, Digital Editor, The Drum

Dave Wilson, Founder, Wilson

Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development, Videology

Gordon Young, Editor & Chief & Co-Founder, The Drum