That transition is “about three or five or seven percent of the way there,” the Chief Research Officer of Omnicom Media Group opines during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016.

Steuer recalls that when he started in the media business, data availability was a major obstacle. “And in particular, the combination of what I would call small data, the data that lets us understand how individuals are using a bunch of different media devices across the day, with what’s now big data,” Steuer explains.

He defines big data as “the device-level data that’s giving us very precise mounds of data that’s hard to connect together because you can’t connect it across the different platforms.”

Even though the industry is on the path to rationalizing the data piece, “The supply side plumbing is what’s missing to get us all the way to the IP-based, highly targetable, very audience-based future of television,” Steuer says.

Then he shifts to a food metaphor to address the combination of highly targetable and broad reach options available today.

“The problem of today is figuring out what’s the food pyramid of TV circa 2016, 2017 where I can have a balanced diet of my addressable as a sometimes food and still deal with the broad reach,” says Steuer.

He notes that clients like McDonald’s want to say something to everybody, but “what they say to different groups is something advanced television can help them to get to in a more and more focused way.”

Panel moderator Tim Hanlon, Founder & CEO of The Vertere Group, asks Steuer whether traditional media agencies, with their broad-based approach to marketing and media, are up to the task of becoming more data driven.

By way of response, Steuer says client wins of AT&T and Procter & Gamble by Omnicom’s Hearts & Science agency were rooted in the belief that “data is a key ingredient of the full stack, all the way from how do you inform building the right creative plan and the right messages all the way through to how do you target and measure it.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

This is one takeaway from a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016 on the value of advanced TV advertising. Moderated by Tim Hanlon, CEO and Founder of The Vertere Group, the discussion began with an examination of the usefulness of addressable advertising and ended with a critique of legacy ratings.

To Jonathan Bokor, advanced TV is defined as addressable, audience index programmatic and over-the-top. “These are three very distinct and different tools,” observed the SVP and Director of Advanced Media at MediaVest | Spark. “They are not currently easily melded together. That’s where we have to go.”

Larene Mantel, the Director of Advanced TV at Cadreon, said it “might not make sense for all advertisers to be in the addressable space,” a sentiment echoed by Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media. “On average, about a third of every addressable analysis we do for an advertiser the recommendation back to them is this isn’t the right approach,” said Bologna.

Nonetheless, all three panelists agreed that addressable can be a valuable, bottom-funnel tactic and that in general, TV needs to be more effective, efficient and accountable. “This is really an opportunity to deliver more frequency against your best prospects,” said Bokor. “And as a consequence, to spend a little bit less on demo-targeted media that has a lot of waste associated with it.”

But there’s still the top of the funnel, which is why traditional TV isn’t going away anytime soon.

“There’s always going to be that top of the funnel and there’s always going to be the mass GRP’s being pushed there,” said Bologna. “But now that most of these advertisers understand who their real target is, we can balance it.”

Added Mantel, “It’s finding the balance” and for advertisers “not caring where your airing but who you’re reaching and that you’re reaching the right person.”

Asked by Hanlon to reconcile increasingly longer Nielsen ratings windows like C30 with the move toward more targetable impressions, Bologna said that both are needed. “It’s absolutely both. There’s nothing wrong with improving the legacy metrics.”

Bokor was hard pressed to assign a value to C30. “The market forces that are applied to determine the value are really insufficient,” Bokor said. “We have a marketplace that doesn’t truly reflect the actual value of each impression. C30 is going backwards in the extreme.”

Bokor would like to be able to bid on every advertising impression, a situation that Bologna suggested would result in “all hell is going to break loose” because the CPM’s could skyrocket.

“I want a holistic marketplace so that it’s not just about TV,” said Bokor. “I want to look at the entire marketplace of all advertising impressions and find where the value is. And if I can truly get that, then I know exactly what I’m paying for and I might be willing to pay more.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

“We definitely have a perspective that eventually everything is going to go IP,” says Brian Jankovsky, Director of Entertainment & Sports Partnerships at Google, during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016. “It’s going to take some time.”

Jankovsky calls enabling programmers to better connect with viewers “really our core DNA” before citing two examples. Google recently began ingesting TV schedules that show up in organic searches. And it will “eventually roll out” a feature that give programmers more control on where they drive users who through search end up on a particular TV program’s landing page.

On the content distribution side, in addition to Play and Android TV Google is “investing a ton in the cloud,” says Jankovsky. He cites the company’s acquisition of Envato, which TechCrunch reports is a platform for encoding, editing, publishing and distribution video across platforms.

DoubleClick is the prime source of Google’s monetization efforts, according to Jankovsky. Two big areas of activity are user experience and dynamic ad insertion for “true one-to-one addressability of linear signals” delivered via IP, along with a major emphasis on programmatic.

“That feels a lot like mobile felt five, six years ago,” Jankovsky says of programmatic. “It’s coming together. We’re seeing more adoption on those screens.”

Asked by panel moderator Tim Hanlon of The Vertere Group to explain the value Google provides while “selling into the ecosystem,” and whether Google will be a means of simply re-aggregating lost audiences as defined by Nielsen ratings, Jankovsky offers a neutral response.

“I think as an ad tech player in an open ecosystem, we have to support whatever currency the buy and sell side wants to use,” Jankovsky says. “There is some data that we think we can lend to the conversation. Like brand attribution through search.

“Where we can make a real difference is on the programmatic platform. That’s true one-to-one targeting and as the signals get better I think that’s only going to get more precise.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

In the meantime, unless programmers and MVPD’s come together to make more inventory available for addressable ads, digital “will start to eat television’s lunch,” the Director of Advanced Media at Mediavest | Spark opines in an interview with Beet.TV.

Once all TV migrates to Internet Protocol delivery, advertisers will be able to determine what’s reach and what’s frequency—a distinction now blurred by the rise of different delivery mechanisms over the past few decades. “Eventually, all TV will be delivered by IP and I think that will open up a lot of possibilities and make things simpler,” Bokor says in response to a question from interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group.

Those possibilities include the ability to re-aggregate reach caused by viewing fractionalization. “Once you move towards all IP and now we have a limited number of identifiers that we can match in a DMP, you can know exactly what is reach and what is frequency,” Bokor explains.

Marketers will still have mass reach against broad targets, along with being able to do more granular audience targeting on an impression-by-impression basis to reduce or eliminate waste, according to Bokor. “Those two tools will be used in combination for a more sophisticated way of blending those two techniques to get at whatever goal a marketer has,” he says.

Asked by Hanlon why there isn’t more addressable TV inventory available, Bokor points to the age-old relationship between networks and MVPD’s. It’s a union that has centered on subscriber fees and distribution.

“And that has been a contentious relationship” that has typically favored the programmers, says Bokor. “That’s why those fees go up regularly and the cost of a pay TV subscription goes up regularly,” he adds. “But I think you’re starting to see that that’s fraying.”

He thinks the situation has reached the upper limit of what marginal subscribers are willing to pay for cable TV packages. “I think we’re starting to see that the two sides need to come together a little bit and hopefully they will come together and find a way to share the cost and benefits of implementing addressable,” Bokor says.

While 1% of TV spending now devoted to addressable is “pretty impressive,” the industry cannot get to 25% using just local inventory controlled by MVPD’s. This problem does not exist on the digital side, which is why digital as a whole is bigger than TV and soon, mobile alone will be bigger than TV, according to Bokor.

Digital “will start to eat television’s lunch if television doesn’t start to make these capabilities available,” he says.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

The buy side needs to understand that “questions and strategy” have to have top priority, “then you look for the appropriate research tools to answer those questions,” Steuer says in an interview with Beet.TV.

“It’s how the strategy side of agency life appears to work, but it’s certainly not how the buy side has worked because the data there has always been Nielsen,” Steuer says in response to a question from interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group. “And since that’s the currency, people have said we’re not going to worry about anything else.”

Steuer’s views are shaped by a five-year stint at TiVo and a long career in research. “When I started in research and data in the media world, the great limiting step was availability of data. Now there’s plenty of data available. The question is how does the buy side use it,” he says.

Asked whether the continuing evolution of Nielsen’s measurement solutions will satisfy the industry’s needs, Steuer responds that those are the answers to the wrong test.

“They’re still solving the local ratings problem and the world is moving on to trying to think about impression based television,” says Steuer. “I don’t think their evolutionary path ever gets us to the new world.”

While Nielsen panels are useful calibrations for understanding individuals’ media usage across devices, other inputs are needed. Steuer mentions TVision, “which basically does attribution of who’s in front of the TV set using a camera,” and RealityMine, which did comprehensive measurement of cross-device viewing of the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“If what you’re trying to do is understand that cross-device usage, that super deep data set from a sample is awesome,” Steuer says. “But what you then need to do is take that small data world…and marry that to big data datasets that measure actual delivery of impressions.”

Omnicom’s clients are indicating they’re ready to take the plunge into impression delivery, according to Steuer. “They’re not going to do it with every dollar they spend, but they’re certainly willing to experiment,” he says. “And step off the single currency train and try something else because I think they realize they’re not being well served by the existing measurement tools.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.