The panel participants were Tim Jenkins, CEO of 4INFO, and Walt Horstman, SVP/GM of Advanced Advertising at TiVo, whose companies have launched a new partnership, along with moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

4INFO’s roots date to 2011 when it built a platform that provided proof that ads on mobile devices could drive sales. “TV came along and presented us with a whole new opportunity,” namely the creation of an identity graph tying mobile to other connected devices within households, Jenkins explained.

While Nielsen GRP metrics remain the major TV currency, ever more granular set-top box data are opening up new insights. “The most important thing is having the rights to that data to match it to an identity graph like Tim’s so then we can truly take all of the viewership experiences in linear television and understand how they are impacting other media,” said Horstman.

“I fundamentally think the big news with the identity graph is television is now playing nicely with the other children in the media ecosystem, which has not historically been the case,” Horstman added.

The new partnership between 4INFO and TiVo, according to Jenkins, will allow brands “to be able to use all of this viewership data that’s been captured via traditional linear delivery models…on a one-to-one basis at scale. It’s not a panel, it’s a whole bunch of households that you have actual viewership data on.”

As TV targeting, measurement and attribution continue to evolve, buyers fall into two camps: those still grounded in GRP’s and those using addressable and connected for one-to-one targeting and measurement.

“We try to treat them the same but have to talk to them completely differently,” Jenkins said. “One of the biggest challenges we have is helping people who are traditional digital buyers who know how to buy what we sell work with traditional TV buyers who don’t understand the measurement piece alone.”

“How are you making marketers better, faster stronger in regards to being able to deliver outcomes?” asked Swartz.

“Our fundamental goal has been to make all of this TV viewership data and traditional linear television very accessible to programmatic and digital buyers and DSP’s,” said Horstman. “The uptick is happening. It’s been a big education process.”

Amid comments about “stone age” TV versus more advanced digital media, Horstman said he believes broadcast linear TV still should serve as the foundation for media campaigns given the economics involved. That’s because road-reach TV CPM’s are still very efficient compared to more expensive, highly targeted buys, although a mix of both is appropriate.

“That’s the way that as an industry we should be thinking about this. Understand the economics of what you get across all these different properties and learn how to get the most from them,” said Horstman.

Asked about the increasing complexity that accompanies advancements in TV targeting and attribution, Jenkins said that orchestration is everyone’s responsibility. “At the end of the day, I guess the ultimate responsibility is with the brands. The brands need to really understand what’s available, they have to push their agencies to be able to buy it, be able to explain it and they need to definitely hold platforms accountable to deliver it.”

Swartz wanted to know how, with so many constituencies vying for their place at the table, “How do we make the economics work for everybody?”

Horstman cited the recent report from the 4A’s and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement showing the existence of “at least twenty different companies in the TV attribution world. So all this data has now enabled a whole new industry.”

It’s up to the buy-side to look beyond the obvious incentives that sellers have to provide their own means of attribution and be able to attribute value to each link in the chain, according to Horstman.

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

To help shed more light on the subject, Beet.TV will conduct a half-day forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World on March 5. It will be hosted by Viacom at the company’s offices at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan and sponsored by 4INFO, a provider of identity graph technology. Swartz will be one of the event’s moderators.

In this video, Swartz explains the complexity of determining who is watching what content on what device and when they are doing so. It starts with the myriad ways that individual TV viewers can be tracked—including mobile apps that can hear what’s being watched, digital IP-enabled devices, mobile device ID’s, automatic content recognition and watermarking.

Then there are companies like Nielsen and Comscore that are “trying to develop currencies that leverage all these technologies to actually track what is real reach for a specific piece of content delivered to an audience across an ecosystem and broad reaching selection of devices and platforms,” Swartz says.

So how does it all become real? For Swartz, it boils down to being confident about the data involved and data providers working together, because no one media company has an audience with the “order of magnitude of the breadth of an audience and the reach of an audience that television provides.”

Ultimately, “multiple data providers and platforms and content recognition providers are going to have to come together to marry their data sets to maximize the total audience within an identity graph they make available,” she says.

“The data I get has to be reliable, easy to use and integrated into ad delivery systems to plan against and has to be easy to buy. Not just easy to buy from the perspective of understanding the value of the inventory and what you’re getting for your dollar or what the effective CPM or effective rate is. That’s complex.”

At the Beet.TV event on March 5, Swartz will be joined by moderators Howard Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now a consultant, and Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting.  The entire program will be taped before a studio audience for publication on Beet.TV.

Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.

That has spurred many networks to rip up and re-shape the norm for what a commercial break looks like, and how long it runs.

A Beet Retreat panel convened during three days of debate in Puerto Rico to discuss ad load and the viewer experience…

The big reduction that wasn’t

The debate kicked off when the analyst leading the discussion confronted two networks that have launched initiatives to reduce ad loads with data showing, in many cases, it has not come to pass…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

“I saw this really interesting research from Kantar that ad load, for all the talk, had not actually declined from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Actually, it had data on all of your properties which was super interesting to look at…”

Peacock’s cut is coming

Answering O’Connell, a leading NBCUniversal executive re-stated the company’s intention to reduce at load by 20% in some TV formats…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really a challenge because we need to find a way that the consumers will enjoy the experience and the advertisers will get their message out, and of course we will make money … How do we produce content that’s meaningful to consumers? It’s something that we’re very focused on for the next year.”

Linear is hard to change

Another network exec echoed recent industry sentiment about the pace with which TV is turning itself around, suggesting that the traditional TV business as defined by its legacy medium may not change any time soon…

Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks:

“In the linear format, we have an existing business model that unless I can figure out a way to sustain it and grow it the way I have to in my role, yeah, it isn’t just necessarily going to change. You have the opportunity in OTT and in new formats to build the ad model from the ground up.

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“We obviously still have challenges as it exists today, I think, beyond just the consumer we’ve all experienced where you see the four ads. There are a lot of technical reasons why that happened. With video on demand, the ad load is a bit reduced compared to linear TV, but more importantly for the consumer experience, there are caps put in place. An ad can’t run more than two times per hour.”

Tech can solve for excess

If linear is hard to change, panel speakers suggested that technology platforms could help the networks and all parts of the value chain to make good on promises to reduce the frequency with which ads are seen, if not quite yet the number of them…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really incumbent on the technology providers to solve (it), regardless of who buys the ad, who puts it out there. It needs to be frequency-capped.”

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“NCC’s point of view is through partnering with the likes of Freewheel, who is really focused on this topic, and can help control for frequency across platform, but then also building scale.”

Viewers are revolting

Beyond these implementation challenges, though, a bigger threat is evident. In 2019, the booming success of subscription video on demand, which often comes minus ads of any kind, is inculcating an ad-free viewing culture. Steadily, viewers used to immediate content are discovering a disdain for advertising they always knew was latent but which has now bubbled to the surface…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“Our woes are certainly existent, but really the reason why (consumers are) fleeing the ad model is because we make it unbearable.”

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Generally, so far, television has fared better from an attitudinal standpoint than digital channels, but I fear that that will change because of the exact things that we’re talking about right now. (Consumers) understood the role that the ads played (in linear television).”

Re-think the ad unit

Panelists agreed that the very nature of an ad needs to be re-thought – and not just in terms of its length. Custom creative and interactivity should all be on the table…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Creative management platforms and DCO (dynamic creative optimization) technology is the most-under appreciated category of technology out there. The things that you can do with these technologies are really amazing, and yet the awareness is almost null in the industry. These guys are (just) playing around in formats like OTT.”

Proof of the pudding

Networks are more likely to respond positively and fully implement consumer-friendly advertising breaks if they can see data showing effectiveness – one panelist said that poses a problem in TV…

Lisa Lutz, VP, Product Management – Advanced Advertising TiVo:

“If I replace my (traditional advertising) pod with two 30-second (spots), instead of seven spots, what’s the retention? What’s the migration? Where are people going? Did this work? Did this not work? There’s always been such latency in terms of being able to get the data and measure it. (But) now (there is) the ability to have data at your fingertips and be able to really measure a few days after you run something.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.

The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

“I think it’s a wildfire right now,” Lutz adds in this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018.

She sees more agencies wanting to use TiVo’s MVPD and box viewing data to create targets for viewers of connected-TV and non-linear devices “and export that out as part of a segment.”

It could be in combination with data about, say, politics or location. Based on viewing behavior, ads for a new horror movie could be targeted to people who are known to be theatre-goers and horror aficionados.

Then there is the concept of exposed and unexposed ads and how to achieve desired frequency and measure it. TiVo can help to determine how to retarget people who have been exposed to specific ads or help to find “those viewers who I wanted to target but are light TV viewers and I didn’t actually find them on TV,” Lutz explains.

TiVo’s second-by-second viewing data also provide insights into how to retain audiences and how effective efforts are to improve the commercial experience by adjusting pod lengths. While there’s planning, measurement and attribution, “they’re all very much in parallel. If I plan, I create my target, I will most likely model that target today because I want to get the scale that I need to find those viewers on platforms.

How does one determine whether a particular target is effective?

“The only way to know that is to start looking at attribution. During the course of that campaign, of that model segment who converted and look at how those converted viewers score against that model target. Was that model effective?

“There are so many different questions and measurements and evaluations that need to happen that are just iterative across a process,” Lutz says. “I don’t think you can look at things in a silo.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

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.

With a successful 13-year career at Walmart and having spent eight years on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, Ramos had decided it was time for a change.

“What I did was great in the business sector, but then I think that as a Puerto Rican myself I have to make sure that I leave a legacy and that I work to make a difference,” says Ramos, who was a featured guest at the recent Beet Retreat in the City. In this interview with Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services at GroupM, Ramos explains how the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico—which is affiliated with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and has just celebrated its 50th year—had decided to shift its focus in the face of an economic crisis that has lasted for more than a decade.

Several years before Hurricane Maria, “We decided that we needed to do things differently. In order to prepare our kids and youth to be prepared for what the future has in store for them.”

At one of its 13 club houses, the organization set about trying to change “the systemic conditions in which our kids live” by concentrating on training them to benefit from tourism. From ages six to 12, youths began to learn about the tourism culture. “When they’re teens, we work with them on entreprenuership. We start putting that seed in their minds that there are things you can think through, there are things that you can come up with. You can have your own business or you can work through another business,” says Ramos.

Part of the effort involved training parents and guardians as well. “It’s about home stability and changing the conditions for the kids. The kids do not choose to live poor or to be born poor,” she adds.

This is different than in the U.S., where the focus is mainly in children, notes Cowdell, who along with many other GroupM representatives became active in Puerto Rico relief efforts immediately after Hurricane Maria struck. However, in Puerto Rico, “You can’t just help the child, you have to help the parent as well,” he says.

Among the success stories at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, one in particular stands out to Cowdell and Ramos, who had mentored a young girl in her high school years and was determined to help her succeed through college and beyond. “We had to involve her mother because it was a single mother trying to let her only girl go out and study,” Ramos recalls. The girl had posted grades of 4.0 in both high school and college, where she studied chemical engineering and won summer internships to Harvard, Georgetown and Ohio State University.

She eventually made her way to NASA with assistance from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.

“Everyone has human potential,” says Cowdell. Then he asks Ramos about the future.

“I think there’s hope,” she says. “Puerto Ricans are resilient.”

At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised more than $20,000.

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.

Meanwhile, because linear television hasn’t given up the Upfront negotiating mainstay, it’s still going to have a longer purchase cycle than other media, Horstman explains in this one-on-one interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.

Swartz senses that the buy-side and sell-side are comfortable blaming each other for a lack of progress.

“People are using data as a mechanism or an edge to try to get a competitive advantage whether you’re a buyer or a seller,” replies Horstman, who is SVP GM, Advanced Media & Advertising at TiVo.

When the sell-side embraces advanced TV, “they want to use data to find inventory that surfaces for a targeted audience to actually make it more valuable.” On the buy-side, it’s akin to arbitrage in the search for “opportunities of inventory that that sell-side doesn’t understand is as valuable as it is. But I’ve got some insider proprietary data that I’m using to find those opportunities.”

With this dynamic as a backdrop, Horstman sees more flexibility on the buy-side.

“For the sellers, there may be a little bit of risk aversion to say what inventory are we going to promote as data-driven because we want to sort of control how much gets used and control the messaging and control what data gets put against it,” he says. “But if you’re a buyer, you can apply it to everything.”

One of the brightest spots that Horstman sees in the agency world is within the digital ranks. “Because for the first time, they don’t view TV as this mysterious media vehicle which has only been posted or measured or targeted using just your traditional Nielsen panel. Now they can get incredible insights around the matching of data from TV to their digital campaigns, social, mobile, connected TV, all the linages they can now have converged measurement and targeting.”

Digital practitioners “are taking a leadership role in this world” because they’ve not only lived with data and analytics but are used to doing things like attribution and media mix modeling very quickly, according to Horstman.

“Now for the first time, they’ve got access to what’s been going on over in the TV world and can understand the influence of what’s happening in TV on their digital campaigns and start to influence it.”

Asked by Swartz where the industry is on the overall timeline for advanced TV, Horstman says it depends on the speed at which different types of media can be transacted.

“We still have the Upfronts we still have a longer purchase cycle within linear television compared to digital, connected TV, what have you.”

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.

As an example, he explained during a panel discussion at the recent Beet Retreat in the City the process involved in NBC executing dynamic ad insertion. “Through FreeWheel, there’s probably 700 right now end points of where we have to integrate into in order to be able do that. But it can be done,” said Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales.

That’s the good news. However, more than 90% of NBC’s impressions are still delivered in a live, linear fashion.

“It’s going to involve programmers and distributors, MVPD’s, virtual MVPD’s coming together both to solve for the tech as well for the business rules. We are a business of legacy. It’s hard to change that but the will is there,” said Rosen.

Moderator Laura Desmond, who until recently was CEO of Starcom, asked whether the traditional value exchange between content providers, consumers and advertisers is “broken.”

Vikram Somaya of ESPN said the value exchange “isn’t good enough. For a long time, everybody in the system was making money and it made it very hard to change. We’re getting to the point now where everyone in the system is not making the money they used to make and suddenly we have to look in the couch cushions a little more than we had to.”

Desmond described the efficiency and effectiveness of TV advertising before describing a scenario that is destined to become as antiquated as rabbit ear antennae on top of a TV set. “You push a button, the commercial goes out, it airs, time delay, you post it, done. That’s a pretty simple and easy model.”

So is lack of education inhibiting the adoption of addressable TV ads? “The ad-supported experience needs to change,” responded Rosen. “Limiting commercials, but also it is about relevancy. We do know that ads that are more relevant to the user are going to be less annoying or perhaps not annoying at all or even welcome. Data’s going to help us with that.”

Asked by Desmond about the role of automation, Metcalfe, who is GM of LiveRamp TV at LiveRamp, said technology isn’t the problem. She recalled that before LiveRamp was acquired in 2014 by Acxiom, companies like Facebook “weren’t really interested in working with us yet. We didn’t have the reputation we needed, etcetera. Acxiom brought that to us.”

LiveRamp was in the early stages of powering custom audiences for companies like Facebook, but it wasn’t easy working with them because they wanted to control every last detail. “And it’s very similar to what I’m seeing now working in the TV industry today because it started to ramp up and become a larger part of their business. Everybody has to get comfortable with losing a bit of control.”

Asked by Desmond whether ESPN parent Disney is ready to compete in direct-to-consumer content delivery with the likes of Roku, Hulu and YouTube TV, Pandit said one of the joys of sports is that “no matter where you go you will get advertising.

“We can’t put our heads in the sand and say we should not go down the DTC route because we’ve done very well with pay TV and very well with digital. We have to be open to what consumers want us to do,” said Pandit.

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.

Overall, this year’s Upfront is “not all that different from a marketplace that’s reflective of a relatively healthy economic backdrop,” Geraci, who is President of National Video Investment at OMD, says in this interview conducted by OMD’s Ben Winkler at the recent Beet Retreat in the City. “There is a significant amount of pressure in certain areas, mostly due to supply dynamics in linear television and fragmented viewership, combined with some increased spending from advertisers that rely heavily on television,” says Geraci.

He pinpoints that reliance in large part as relating to older-skewing brands for which “television is still really the best place, the most fertile hunting ground.”

Asked about efforts by providers like Fox and NBCUniversal to roll out reduced ad-load offerings, Geraci responds, “Time will tell.”

While there are potential positives in making the linear TV experience more like what viewers can get with digital offerings, reducing commercial load comes with a big caveat. “When you restrict supply, there are going to be pricing issues, and we get that,” Geraci explains. “The astute buyer tries to pay the lower price and we’re making efforts in that regard.”

Asked by Winkler about the efforts by Fox and NBCU, Geraci says, “I don’t know that we’re there yet in terms of finding that price-value relationship, for at least the two being discussed now.”

Looking ahead, Geraci outlines his desired outcome. “Our hope is that over time, if the expectation is that the viewing experience is better, more people will interact with the programming, ratings will ultimately increase. That’s the hope is that if you improve the experience you’re going to ultimately further down the road build back supply simply by higher ratings of at last live or slightly delayed commercial television. That’s sort of the holy grail.”

As for his thoughts on OpenAP, the audience targeting consortium started by Fox, Turner and Viacom that both NBCU and Univision recently joined, Geraci calls it “sort of common ground if you will for the optimization systems. If you can bring standardization to anything that is not standardized, in general you create more interchangeability in the marketplace and basically a more level playing field, and you allow the advertiser to make better decisions and selections.”

Geraci notes that OpenAP is for planning using common audience target definitions across networks but not for actual purchasing of inventory. So buyers are still “forced to optimize within just their set of offerings. It’s not the completely fluid situation that we’d like to see.”

One thing that has changed for the better over the decades that Geraci has experienced the back and forth of Upfront dealings is the temperament. He says there’s “more of a sense of fair play I think nowadays than I think than there was in the earlier times.”

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.

“National advertisers don’t want 40 million. It’s a good start, but I think we’ve got some catch-up to play,” Kline says in this one-on-one discussion with Tatta at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.

Upon the sale of Cablevision to Altice, Tatta joined the startup 605, on whose board Kline now sits while also holding the roles of President of Spectrum Reach and EVP of Charter Communications. Tatta is President of 605.

Asked by Tatta to define the state of addressable TV, Kline points to the traditional business model of the cable providers whose participation is needed to expand the national footprint by using their two minutes of local ad time.

“I think a big reason for that is many operators, many distributors are in the subsection television business. They’re not in per se the advertising business, and I think that perception is starting to change,” Kline says.

“They’re always going to be in the subscription business, selling video products and high-speed data and telephony and soon mobile phone service for some of us,” Kline adds. “Advertising has always sort of been, ‘hey we’ll take that money, it’s great high margin, but we’re not going to invest that much in it.’”

Having just launched linear addressable in Los Angeles, Charter’s “footprint in New York will be months away. I think it’s not moved fast. Maybe it’s moved fast in cable years, but it hasn’t moved fast in anything else,” Kline says.

On the way to additional scale, addressable is providing a foundation upon which TV networks can enhance the value of their national inventory, according to Kline.

“If they really want to make their network inventory more valuable, they need to get it better targeted. More relevant. And we have the platforms that can do that.”

In the meantime, he sees the model for networks as acquiring the widest possible amount of distribution and collecting license fees from distributors. “But I’m not naïve. We know that things will evolve and viewership will move to other places. But there is still a ton of viewership on what we would call traditional platforms, and I think that’s going to continue for quite some time,” Kline says.

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.

“The future of how TV is being delivered is changing. We believe all or virtually all what we now call television impressions will be addressable,” says Brett Hurwitz, Oath’s Business Lead for Advanced TV.

At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Hurwitz sat down with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz to discuss the path to that advanced-TV future and how more big-brand marketers are embracing addressable TV.

“I still believe that indexed-based television is smarter for marketers than traditional TV buying,” says Hurwitz. “But Oath has made the decision that with the changes that are taking place in the way television’s delivered, having an offering in that space is not something that makes sense for us to be investing in.”

Instead, “We’re investing in what we see to be the future of premium video and the future of television.”

The Fios TV addressable offering was launched in the fall of 2016 and initially ran in parallel with One TV, as Multichannel News reports.

While the term “household addressable” has mainly been the province of MVPD-based offerings, advanced TV encompasses a broader set of solutions. They include index-based offerings by networks (for example OpenAP) along with OTT and connected TV.

Asked by Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp., whether the ultimate goal is for advertisers to be able to use the same dataset to target audiences across all platforms, Hurwitz says it goes beyond that basic application.

“Going a step further, you can do things like based on a certain level of exposure to a television commercial then place a target on a digital kind of lower-funnel activation tactic,” Hurwitz says.

So will Oath’s previously programmatic offering revert to direct-sold inventory?

“I think the way we’re beginning to view these types of pieces of inventory is as super premium video, and so ultimately having that type of inventory available in our video programmatic environment is something that we’re exploring,” says Hurwitz.

He believes there will always be a place for the Upfront negotiating season and does not see the future becoming “one audience, one price.”

What Hurwitz is seeing right now is advertisers that originally were staying away from addressable now starting to come in.

“Because what they’re realizing is the data that you can get from addressable campaigns has tremendous application to what creative you run on your larger linear campaigns,” Hurwitz says.

“The kind of conventional notion that the only advertisers who should pay a premium CPM to work with addressable television are advertisers who have a relatively small target we’re seeing really start to change.”

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.

With more than a decade in the media industry, including interactive TV pioneer Canoe Ventures, Schaffer likens his role to bringing “fire to cave men” in this interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat in the City on June 6 in Manhattan.

What has long been done in other industries—process automation—has proven to be “very challenging” in the media industry because of its deep legacy infrastructure, closed systems and “a lot of challenges to being able to transact business electronically with trading partners,” Schaffer says.

Having “started life as a Price Waterhouse CPA,” Schaffer thinks the media industry is going through the latter stages “of what we have been studying for a long time and expecting. This notion of convergence. This notion of linear television becoming digital.”

With so much change being forced on the industry because of the way consumers are receiving and consuming content, the future must be one of “open systems, open communication, more efficient delivery of transactional information back and forth among trading parties. It seems to me it’s time to harmonize and streamline the transaction process.”

And it’s not just between buyers and sellers of media but within media companies themselves, according to Schaffer.

“There’s still the requirement of dealing within very siloed business units that are very, very separate, and there’s very little connecting those various systems inside an entity that allow them to transact with outside third parties in a more effective way,” he says.

Asked by Swartz whether change involves simply “chasing platforms,” Schaffer says it goes well beyond what consumers have largely become indifferent to: how they consume content.

Along with more open systems and data-driven decision making, “new measurement tools are going to be required, harmonization, being able to deal with multiple different measures and multiple different currencies.”

Asked to cite three major challenges facing media companies, Schaffer identifies becoming platform agnostic, achieving more efficient distribution and gaining scale. “Scale is incredibly important to media companies as we’re seeing a lot of pressure for each of them to become larger and frankly more global,” Schaffer says.

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.

“A lot of the conversations now are not such much about the promise of all the stuff we talk about. Data-driven, advanced TV, whatever. But it’s about how to practically make it happen,” he adds in this interview during a break at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City.

“And the challenges that people are facing who kind of said, ‘hey okay, I want to do this, now let’s roll it out to teams and what’s the process and how do you educate teams that have been doing it a certain way.’”

Asked by Beet.TV contributor Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal of Prohaska Consulting, to recap the progress of 4C, which was founded in 2011 under a different name to operate in the social media space, Gupta says it’s been a journey on disparate platforms.

“So we started out in paid social, we extended to TV, toward the ultimate dream that what marketers need is really one platform to do audience-driven, cross-channel marketing,” says Gupta. “That’s really kind of what we’ve been moving towards.”

What he’s seeing now in the market is that brands and agencies alike “absolutely get it. They know that these media need to work together. They know that it can’t just be silos.

“So they get it but we’re in the process of deploying it. People, process, technology. How all these need to work together.”

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.

“Time has proven that making the long-term bet is a good idea for both sides in the equation,” says Chris Geraci, President, National Video Investment, OMD.

Geraci was one of the featured speakers at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, along with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. In this video, they discuss the dynamics of the video marketplace and parse the semantics of what now constitutes “television.”

Geraci has seen lots of change since starting his advertising career in 1987 at BBDO New York. Yet amid a rapidly changing media landscape, the bedrock role of advertising hasn’t changed all that much.

“We support a crucial part of the entertainment industry by way of advertising dollars, that allows for production and better quality content to come forth if they can count on a longer term advertising commitment,” he says.

The economics of what is often referred to as a “futures market” remain in place during the negotiations that typify the Upfront.

“For the advertisers and agencies that service the advertisers, we know we’re generally getting a better deal by working in the Upfront model,” Geraci says. “It’s just more efficient from a cost-per-thousand basis, which is usually the metric that’s being used. It’s just a better deal in the Upfront.”

Asked by Swartz to describe the change he sees year to year, Geraci notes the increase in digital options available. “I think the consideration set keeps widening. We now have definitely more online opportunities to interact with what we consider to be premium content. So the choices are broader.”

Given a “solid economic backdrop,” Geraci says that with consumer marketers “having decent results” some are putting that money back into media. “There’s a little bit more supply in some areas, including sports, perhaps a little less in some of the linear TV dayparts. So that’s creating a little bit of pressure there.”

Asked by Swartz whether there remains a distinction between “television” and “video,” Geraci says he believes it’s all video right now.

“In fact, we removed the TV designation from all of our job titles to prove that point publicly. Television is simply a physical device as a way to deliver what quality content and ad-supported content is what we transact in.”

OMD’s clients have the same mindset, according to Geraci.

“For the most part, they’re in the same place,” he says. “I think it’s been very helpful that a lot of the linear TV based companies have sort of morphed what they serve the consumer to be a multiplatform experience.”

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.

In this interview with Beet.TV contributor and Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz during a break at the Retreat, Reyes acknowledges that there’s been “a pretty sturdy debate” over the role of data when it comes to creating advertising campaigns.

“Specifically, does data prevent creativity from happening because it’s all about measurement or it’s all about numbers? And also, does data take humanity out of the creativity, which is one of the things we always in the industry pride ourselves on,” says Reyes, who is managing director of the advertising agency.

The bottom line for Reyes—who began her career at Ogilvy & Mather and D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles—is that if data are used to inform campaigns from the start as opposed to strictly measuring campaign results, the utility of data is unquestioned.

“We really feel like there are ways for data to inspire the work to be better and to be that much more poignant,” for example “data unlocking creative that would never have been possible without that data.”

To demonstrate how data can inform campaigns, Reyes explained her agency’s work for the postal service in the Netherlands. By examining the type and volume of mail to certain residences, the agency was able to locate people who were most likely to be lonely and encourage the general public to reach out.

“And the point is that they were able to ship some letters to those lonely people to make them feel great over the holiday season,” says Reyes. “But we wouldn’t have known who those people were and really if they were truly lonely people who lived alone if it wasn’t for the fact of data helping us through that example.”

The second campaign involved data not only providing insight and inspiration but becoming the creative itself.

“That’s one of the things that we struggle with a lot in our business,” Reyes says. “An idea can be really beautiful and simple, and then lots of people jump on top of it and mess it up. But sometimes data itself is the story.”

Helsinki has the highest per capita incidence of domestic violence globally. Using 911 data, “We know exactly where those people live,” so over a 48-hour period the agency studied the concentration of calls.

“So really, all we needed to do was put posters and television ads and radio ads in those specific areas, because one of the things that we found out was that when people know other people who are going through a similar experience they are more likely to seek help,” Reyes explains.

She believes “data is at the center of everything we do from now on. But I think it’s more beneficial to think about it in the beginning of any kind of campaign or effort than it is where it’s been today, which is mainly at the end.”

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.

At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Midha—whose background includes ABC, Viacom and Dow Jones—was one of the featured speakers along with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. In this one-on-one interview, Swartz asks about the utility of voice assistants in what she terms the “straddling of platforms and experiences.”

To Midha, it comes down to “breaking down that third wall. You want to bring someone into your ad creative. That’s when you really get to create that emotional connection that makes the difference between a product and a brand.”

Given the rise of in-home, voice-activated assistants and other ways consumers can talk to digital devices like laptops and mobile phones, Midha explains how the technology can induce viewer participation.

“So you can say, ‘turn off the lights.’ And the lights are going to turn off in the scene that you’re watching. You could say, ‘turn on the TV,’ and the TV inside the scene you’re watching of a living room is going to turn on and play your show.”

Asked by Swartz whether engagement with interactive ads is a generational thing, Midha says it’s all about the most appropriate creative. Her view is supported by the more than 10,000 engagement ads true[X] has executed in virtually every category “and pretty much every advertiser KPI we can think of.”

true[X] will be rolling out a new set of what Midha terms “engagement blueprints” based on “really strong database insights and learnings. So that’s how we see ourselves scaling.”

With the company having proven the efficacy of engagement ads in on-demand programming, she sees a huge opportunity in live programs like sports events and awards shows.

“Nothing captures people like live. What hasn’t evolved is the fact that we are streaming so many of these events and great moments on digital platforms and taking advantage of none of the capabilities that these digital platforms offer.”

One aspect of human behavior while watching live events is to pause the content. “When they come back, we give them the opportunity, if they’ve been gone long enough, we say ‘would you like to engage for thirty seconds or do you want to just pick up where you were?’”

If a viewer decides to engage for 30 seconds, they can skip the next commercial break and catch up in real time to where other viewers are with the game or program. “We have done a little bit of testing in terms of focus grouping the concept, we’ve built a live demo, we got really strong feedback,” says Midha, adding, “I just love the idea of not accepting live for what it is and saying, ‘this is already an amazing experience, let’s make it better.’”

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.

“So when we first came in we took this decision that said set-top data must move at the speed of digital,” says Walt Horstman, TiVo’s SVP, GM, Advanced Media & Advertising. That meant “in a matter of seconds.”

The underlying motivation, Horstman explains in this interview at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: “We’re in the golden age of TV, but we’re also in the golden age of TV data.”

Now advertisers and media companies “truly can understand how TV advertising changes consumer behavior,” he says in response to a question from Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

This means “No longer using proxies, no longer using correlation metrics, but truly in a deterministic fashion understand how we can change consumer behavior through TV advertising, and that’s what’s really exciting,” says Horstman.

What’s gratifying to see on the buy-side is that the siloes between TV planners/buyers and digital planners/buyers “are really coming down. We are now using TV data with digital planners, analytics folks at agencies or brands.”

He says the “real momentum” is reflected in the realization that everyone needs to comprehend how TV and any kind of digital campaign work together.

“It’s all about integrating the effectiveness, the targeting, the measurement and understanding the impact of TV on digital campaigns and vice versa,” Horstman says.

In addition to bulking up on viewing data, TiVo has been advancing the cause of deeper audience engagement with its Personalized Content Discovery Platform, which groups viewers’ favorite shows, genres, interests—even actors and directors—into personalized carousels.

“We’ve given the consumer everything they ever wanted, which is all the content available on demand on any device. That has created a challenge for the consumer because it’s harder to find things.”

Content recommendation drives longer engagement, “which of course increases more advertising units, more monetization,” Horstman says.

Among the insights derived from the Personalized Content Discovery Platform is that from Monday through Friday of a typical week, “consumers are much more focused on watching what they’ve currently been watching, catching up with whatever their favorite shows are.”

Conversely, on weekends people are “much more interested in exploration of a broader set of offerings, and that’s where we can expand catalog consumption either for a content provider or for a service provider.”

An overarching goal is to keep people in the ad-supported TV environment.

“As we know, the biggest advertiser on television is television. And so we’re starting to bridge that story between personalized recommendations with also marketing content and merchandising in the same offering,” Horstman says.

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.

“People are still pretty confused about what’s possible and how it works,” Metcalfe explains in this interview with Laura Desmond at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose.

LiveRamp helps several hundred brands make the best use of their CRM data to implement people-based marketing across more than 500 publishers and digital marketing platforms, “and so there’s a natural extension in talking about television as well,” says Metcalfe.

In March, LiveRamp extended its IdentityLink platform to the TV space. Its Connect Select solution is designed to empower MVPD’s on the sell-side.

Educating LiveRamp’s brand clients has sparked a “tremendous movement on their behalf. I think we’ve got 40 brands that had never been in addressable TV working with us and executing campaigns in the last two quarters alone,” says Metcalfe.

Desmond was one of the early pioneers of addressable TV while at Starcom, beginning with a trial in Huntsville in 2005 with Charter and Comcast followed by more trials in 2009 and 2012.

“We actually were the mover that put DirecTV into the addressable business,” Desmond recalls. “In all four of those use cases, what we saw was a tremendous business case. Zapping was down by 33 percent, engagement increased anywhere between ten to forty percent. Yet the dollars aren’t flowing.”

Says Metcalfe, “There’s overwhelming evidence this works.” She notes that MVPD’s and companies like one2one Media “talk about how the majority of their business is repeat business. They have such high retention rates because once you try it, you see how well it works you come back.”

Underlying hurdles to adoption include brand procurement people not understanding why a CPM for an addressable campaign may be higher even though the effective CPM can be lower. Using a hypothetical household CPM of $25 for a non-addressable campaign, Desmond says, “It’s a good buy, it’s targeted but it comes with waste.” And while reducing waste can mean a higher effective CPM, “People have a hard time wrapping their arms around that.”

In a recent earnings call, LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe CEO said the company’s addressable TV unit is growing at a rate of 70 percent this year. What are the drivers of the growth?

“The activation of the buy side, I just can’t underplay that enough,” responds Metcalfe.

Another priority at LiveRamp is bringing TV-specific identifiers into its identity graph.

“Currently, our graph is PII based and email and mobile ID and device ID. We need to get to a point where we have IP to household that scales as well as the Roku ID or the Hulu ID or the Chrome stick ID. To really unlock those connected-TV cases to empower the networks to have a better understanding of true viewership of their content as well as the advertisers,” says Metcalfe.

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.

In this interview at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, Kline talks about bringing scale to addressable linear television and testing a self-serve platform for small advertisers to complement direct-sales efforts at the local level.

Charter this month launched household addressable TV in the Los Angeles market, to be followed by New York “and then rolling out throughout the rest of the country in our footprint over the next, I would say, twelve to eighteen months,” Kline says.

He thinks cable companies are “really, really well positioned to help not only their customers, but I think that same infrastructure that we’re building we’re going to be able to help some of our network affiliates as well.”

Noting that that the traditional linear business “is still several billion dollars for us and we’ve got to make sure that we bring that in and secure that,” Kline discusses the quest for scalable addressability and automated reporting.

“Ultimately, what we want have happen for our customers is they go on a secured website and they can see television, they can see online, they can see on demand, they can see on our IP streaming services how many impressions they got on each platform.

“That sounds lovely and it sounds easy, but it takes an awful lot of the organization’s attention and time to start to start to build those systems,” Kline says in response to interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, who is a Beet.TV contributor and CEO of Furious Corp.

Asked by Swartz to look out a few years, Kline says “we’re going to be selling impressions, we’re going to be selling them highly targeted, highly data infused. I think you’ll see not only us but other MVPD’s doing similar things to make advertising much more front and center than it is today as a revenue stream for their companies.”

While agencies are big users of cable interconnects for their clients, many local businesses have direct client relationships with Charter, “which is still for many of us billions of dollars worth of revenue.”

He mentions a test being done in Raleigh, NC, involving a self-provisioning platform “for very small customers that can go on, pick the schedule they want, pick the creative that they want and put in their credit card and be right on our air.

“Five years ago I would have said never. But with Facebook and Google and all these other self-provisioning platforms, small advertisers are used to this. And we think we can quadruple the number of customers we have at any given time.”

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.

“We see it play out with the holding companies and how they’re doing and how they’re under pressure, and that impacts every other part of the ecosystem,” says Desmond, who is Founder & CEO of Eagle Vista Partners. “I fully believe we can get out of this crisis of confidence, but we can’t keep doing the same thing.”

Desmond was one of many advertising and media veterans who assembled at Meredith Corporation’s Luce Auditorium last week to participate in Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose. In this interview with Beet contributor Ashley J. Swartz, Desmond discusses the need to “disrupt ourselves from a new place in marketing and communications and really begin with a new value exchange with people.”

Alluding to Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker’s adage in the 1800’s that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half,” Desmond says measurement’s not the issue.

“That’s not true anymore. We have more accountability, more modeling, more smart measurement in what media and advertising is doing than ever before,” says Desmond.

What has changed is the rise of digital communications and the concurrent advent of so-called direct brands, which bypass traditional means of producing, promoting and distributing their wares.

“The problem is, with the advent of the digital marketing ecosystem, there’s so much fragmentation and people are building brands now. Brands and marketers and agencies aren’t building brands.”

Desmond cites the emergence of brands like Dollar Shave Club, which disrupted a marketplace long dominated by Gillette and Schick.

“Gillette never saw dollar shave club coming, yet they’ve completely upended the category,” she says.

While the television industry is often criticized for lacking change amid the rise of digital media, it’s still “the most perfect model that we’ve ever created over the last 75 years. It’s scale, it’s got reach, it’s got engagement.”

The real problem with television is the waste involved for advertisers trying to achieve effective reach when targeting desired consumer segments, according to Desmond. Therefore, the $100 billion TV marketplace “needs to be absolutely disrupted.”

She believes that innovations like data-informed addressable and connected TV will provide that disruption, but there’s work to be done before they can be fully leveraged.

“The supply side is somewhat ready to sell this way, the demand side is not as completely ready because mostly they don’t know how to plan and buy for it,” Desmond explains. “Because they need to have more software and automation to help them make sense of all the complexity. You can’t do addressable advertising on a spreadsheet.”

Asked by Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp., for an update on her work life after leaving Starcom at the end of 2016, Desmond says she is an operating partner with Rhode Island-based Providence Equity Partners. She’s involved in two deals: one for adtech firm DoubleVerify and one for a sports marketing firm in Europe.

“The other part of my week is I’m working with a select group of CEO’s and startup companies, helping them on branding, on purpose, on go-to-market strategy,” Desmond says. “I’ve been working really heavily with LiveRamp, with Anaplan and with a company in Chicago called Uptake Technologies.”

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.

There will be more storms and “people are still living under roofs with plastic tarpaulins…there are still people who don’t have power. So what we have to do is help to sustain relief to make sure that people live their own lives and be independent.”

At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, Cowdell provided an update on those relief efforts.  He presented an overview of what he and his colleagues from GroupM undertook in tthe weeks after the storm.via slides and video. In this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, Cowdell explains how a GroupM team including people from agencies like MediaCom, Media Edge and Wavemaker responded after Maria struck on Sept. 16, 2017.

“What happened immediately after the storm is I reached out and said, ‘how is everybody’? It took a couple of days to find out at least they’re all okay and they’re alive,” says Cowdell, who is Global President, Client Services. “And then when you get a message from a colleague who says ‘but I have no drinking water for my 13-month old baby,’ what do you do? You have a choice.”

While some people donated money or made pledges to do so, Cowdell chose to “get on a plane and you can take water purification. I managed to get on a phone, collected water purification, filters, solar lamps, medications, etcetera.”

Cowdell expresses frustration when he recalls seeing events on the ground versus what the news media was reporting during the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. He says the national narrative the weekend after the storm was characterized by people tweeting “about the NFL and taking a knee. They weren’t about thousands of Puerto Ricans at risk and potentially thousands dead.”

Some news reports conveyed the impression that there were lots of relief efforts going on by individuals and the military.

“What was being told didn’t reflect reality on the ground. I know we’re in a world of fake news now, but for me personally it was my first real experience of seeing the reality of a situation on the ground and what’s being communicated through the storytelling of the media,” Cowdell says.

His focus going forward is to continue to help marshal continued assistance to Puerto Ricans in the face of inexorable threatening weather conditions.

“The real issue is, the storm when it first hit was a weather disaster. What happened after it became an economic disaster. People who are very rich paid $25,000 they flew out and moved to their houses in Miami. Then it got to the next class and the next class.”

Meanwhile, in places like the hills of Campos, “They are still in desperate need. There was no real tolerance for a storm like this. Those are the people who need help.”

At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised some $20,000.

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.

So while Winkler believes creating a good consumer experience will yield good returns for advertisers, he’s “not as bullish on that as I’d like to be because I kind of feel that most media is still consumed on a passive basis, and people just don’t want to have to make any effort whatsoever.”

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat in the City, where Winkler was one of several moderators, he also identifies the key challenge of measuring TV ad ROI in response to questions from Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp.

According to Winkler, accountability and integrity of data take a back seat to inconsistency. He likens it to what happens to evidence in the police world. “That chain of custody just does not exist. Each piece of data is in a different language, so they just simply can’t connect from piece to piece to piece,” Winkler says.

Consumer choice was one of the key topics as hundreds of Beet Retreat attendees gathered at the Luce Auditorium at Meredith Corporation in Manhattan for an event titled Television Advances as Consumers Choose. After a welcome from Meredith Video SVP Andrew Snyder, the sharp-witted Rob Norman took to the stage as moderator and quantified his own attention span now that he’s retired from GroupM. “My girlfriend told me not to look out the window all morning, because you’ll have nothing to do in the afternoon.”

Norman was joined on the dais by Fox’s Joe Marchese, who is no stranger to irreverent discourse. The founder of true[X] discussed proper commercial lengths and what constitutes ad effectiveness before addressing what he see as the bigger problem of attribution—specifically, the “bullshit of some of the attribution methods out there. The math just doesn’t add up.”

Asked by Norman how TV providers can increase the supply of coveted ad inventory, Marchese responded, “You don’t. You get better with the supply you have.” The only real currency for transacting, according to Marchese, is attention. “Engagement is proof of attention.”

Next on stage was Kristin Dolan, co-founder of TV data analytics firm 605, which was formed in 2016 to parse set-top box data for the benefit of programmers and advertisers and recently launched its Impact Index. Rather than focus solely on sales results, Impact Index is a scientifically-based approach for measuring the impact of TV advertising on both branding and sales.

Dolan described the work 605 has done for clients like Walmart, which conducted a “reputational ad campaign” with no specific call to action. According to Dolan, among people who were exposed to the campaign ads, attribution metrics showed that their in-store spending increased along with their affinity for the Walmart brand.

Nancy Reyes, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY, presented three visual case studies centered on “data empowering creativity,” labeling them Bionic Creative, Data As Content and Data As A Canvas. For Bionic Creative she cited a campaign by postal authorities in the Netherlands that induced the general public to send Christmas cards to some 230,000 people who were deemed to be “lonely” based on the amount of mail that they did not receive. Data As Content was exemplified by an out-of-home campaign that sought to reduce Finland’s world-leading domestic violence statistics by publicizing them in the hopes that more people would report abuse. For Data As A Canvas, Reyes walked the audience through a campaign for the New York return of the Grammy Awards that used an Uber car outfitted with augmented reality to “create” music based on pedestrian activity.

Under questioning by Furious Corp.’s Swartz, Walt Horstman of TiVo said one positive sign in the advancement of data-informed TV advertising is that “digital teams within agencies are taking a leadership role” and that they don’t see themselves bound by the ways TV has been bought and sold for a half century.

605 Co-Founder Ben Tatta was joined by David Kline of Charter Communications and Spectrum Reach in a discussion about the rise of addressable linear TV. “We’re further along but we’re not far enough along,” said Kline, who noted that this week Charter launched household addressable in the Los Angeles market. He predicted that cable companies and networks will engage in more collaboration going forward to increase the national addressable footprint.

For buy-side dialogue, Norman asked Dentsu Aegis Group’s Doug Ray and GroupM’s Lyle Schwartz about the progress in moving to new measurement currencies. “The best experience will win,” is how Ray summed things up. “The ad industry that I joined is not here today,” said Schwartz. “It will evolve. It may not be dead but it may be on life support in 20 years.”

OMD’s Winkler dubbed true[X] “the platypus of advertising” before its new President, Pooja Midha, explained how “engagement is a perfect impression” while noting “We operate in a business that has for many, many years transacted in a couple of very specific metrics.”

Winkler then welcomed Chris Geraci on stage and asked the Omnicom Media Group veteran about this year’s Upfront market. “There are more moving parts than ever,” Geraci responded, with dollars “shifting in many ways away from linear TV.” He identified as pricing factors a strong economy and a significant increase in TV spending by some brands.

Norman’s setup for his talk with IBM’s Babs Rangaiah about blockchain was his own definition of the technology, likening it to “teenage sex…everyone’s talking about it but no one’s doing it.” Rangaiah’s view: “It’s everything you don’t understand about finance and everything you don’t know about computers combined.” On a more serious note, Rangaiah described his work for his former employer, Unilever, on using blockchain to help rein in media-buy discrepancies, a topic he will showcase at the upcoming Cannes International Festival of Creativity.

To top off the proceedings, GroupM’s Phil Cowdell gave an emotionally vivid presentation with slides and video footage chronicling the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and how he and others in the ad industry have been helping the survivors put their lives back together. “Problems can seem so enormous,” said Cowdell, suggesting that people use the word “dot” to help them focus: “Do one thing,” he advised. “There’s so much more to do.”

Cowdell was followed by Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, who described herself as being “in the business of providing hopes and opportunities for our kids” to help break the cycle of poverty. “I’m not asking donations. I’m asking for investments,” Ramos said. During a reception that followed, an auction was held to raise additional funding for hurricane victims under the auspices of Stand By Puerto Rico.

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.

According to Midha, upon its founding in 2007 true[X] “never meant to build a measurement system” as it sought to give TV viewers a choice of commercial options with interactive ads priced on cost per engagement. Rather, it was built out of necessity, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“What I think is important is that this was something that when you explained it to an advertiser or an agency and you said this is what you can accomplish in this environment, people lean in they think this is great,” says Midha. “And then you get down to talking about pricing, because again you have to make sure you account for what you’re missing, and it becomes a bit harder.”

The company considered simple commercial delivery—measured with the help of entities like White Ops and Moat—to be “our baseline metric.” The answer was to be able to prove impact. “There was no solution that existed in the marketplace that could measure impact of the ad,” Midha adds.

That’s why true[X] developed Uplift to measure brand benefits at scale, across platforms, in real time and in a consistent manner. “Today we run Uplift across every single true[X] campaign on every platform that we exist on and we’re measuring brand lift, which we think is such a fundamentally human metric and actually the metric that matters most.”

At the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Pooja will explain how true[X] plans to bring engagement ads into live digital streams and how the company plans to expand measurement options.

Beet Retreat in the City will be held a the Luce Auditorium at Meredith Corporation, 225 Liberty Street.  Participants include:

Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services, GroupM

Laura Desmond, CEO, Eagle Vista Partners

Kristin Dolan, CEO, 605

Christopher Geraci, President, National Video Investment at Omnicom Media Group

Walt Horstman, SVP Advanced TV, TiVo

David Kline, President, Spectrum Reach, Executive Vice President, Charter

Allison Metcalfe, GM LiveTV, LiveRamp

Rob Norman, Advisor

Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing iX at IBM

Nancy Reyes, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY

Lyle Schwartz, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY

Doug Ray, Chairman, Dentsu Aegis Media

Mike Rosen, EVP, Advanced Advertising and Platform Sales at NBCUniversal

Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp.

Vikram Somaya, SVP, Global Data Officer & Ad Platforms, ESPN

Ben Tatta, President, 605

Jamie West, Deputy MD, Sky Media UK & Group Director of Advanced Advertising Sky PLC

Ben Winkler, Chief Investment Officer, OMD

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

Titled Television Advances as Consumers Choose: The Beet.TV Town Hall, the event will bring together leaders in the advertising and media industry for a full day of conversation and interaction presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. Topics will include the rise of distribution platforms competing with linear TV, advanced audience targeting and how creative units are evolving to complement shifting consumer viewing preferences.

“Rewind only a couple of years and the Upfronts were about here’s our shows with almost no discussion about the things that make up fifteen, twenty percent of that hour, which is advertising,” Winkler says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I think we got to the point where even people in advertising realize and recognize the ad experience is not a great one, and that’s bad for the entire industry.”

When everyone starts to see “the entire experience, not just the shows, through the eyes of consumers, that’s when you start to get creative,” Winkler adds. “That’s when you start to deliver better experiences.”

The bottom line: help advertisers grow their businesses, regardless of whether their ads run six seconds or six minutes. “As long as it’s a good experience and not just the same thirty seconds one after another after another after another in a pod of eight or nine spots. That’s a good thing.”

OMD embraces the search for the most optimal ad experiences, according to Winkler. “We’re testing the hell out of it. No one has ever gone wrong by considering the consumer. And more and more, we’re seeing that shift happening.”

Beet Retreat in the City will be held at Meredith Corporation’s Luce Auditorium, 225 Liberty Street. Joining Winkler on the dais will be, among others:

Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services, GroupM

Laura Desmond, CEO, Eagle Vista Partners

Kristin Dolan, CEO, 605

Christopher Geraci, President, National Video Investment at Omnicom Media Group

Walt Horstman, SVP Advanced TV, TiVo

David Kline, President, Spectrum Reach, Executive Vice President, Charter

Allison Metcalfe, GM LiveTV, LiveRamp

Pooja Midha, President, true[X]

Rob Norman, Advisor

Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing iX at IBM

Nancy Reyes, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY

Lyle Schwartz, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY

Doug Ray, Chairman, Dentsu Aegis Media

Mike Rosen, EVP, Advanced Advertising and Platform Sales at NBCUniversal

Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp.

Vikram Somaya, SVP, Global Data Officer & Ad Platforms, ESPN

Ben Tatta, President, 605

Jamie West, Deputy MD, Sky Media UK & Group Director of Advanced Advertising Sky PLC

Note: To request an invitation to the June 6 event, put your request in here.

“So that’s been very successful and we have a large population of TV viewership data, beyond just from the TiVo devices but where we have software embedded across providers and even beyond that,” Horstman says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent RampUp 2018 conference by LiveRamp.

TiVo just announced that it’s reached two million active matched households across all DMA’s “and that number is growing quite rapidly.” The company’s goal is to reach three million “very shortly and then throughout the year scaling up to five to seven million plus,” Horstman says.

“The company TiVo today is much bigger than TiVo the device and that’s part of the story that we’re taking to market.”

He stresses that TiVo has unfettered rights to use the TV viewership data in matching with multiple datasets so that it can “understand the science of what is changing consumer behavior when a household is exposed to a TV campaign, and that is very exciting.”

All personally identifiable information about TV viewers is removed before it reaches TiVo, according to Horstman. Identifiers appended to the TV dataset can be matched across the advertising ecosystem for first- and third-party data.

In the wake of its launching the Targeted Audience Delivery platform, which sits atop all of the company’s TV data, TiVo has been meeting with agencies and advertisers about providing deterministic, exposed households to a specific TV campaign.

“What’s exciting about this is we can go to a brand and say ‘bring your first party data into a safe haven like LiveRamp match it to our TV viewership data.’ We can then run that against the campaign that you just did in the last quarter and then provide you the exact households that were exposed an unexposed to your TV campaign.”

Besides revealing whether TV ad exposure drove incremental activity through an existing customer group, brands can then use those segments to activate those same households “in any kind of digital, mobile or connected-TV activation as well,” Horstman says.

This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.