He explains that means changing how “we speak, act and even how we walk.”  He says it’s exhausting and a distraction from being productive.

In this interview, he also speaks of his pain over recent instances of racial injustice and how the public outcry makes him hopeful about change.

He implores corporations to bring more people of color the C-suite and to the board.  This is the goal of the I.D.E.A. Initiative, a group he helped form and serves on its board.

This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here. 

In this interview with Beet.TV, Midha provides details about how the use of a one-question survey in a TV ad pod with the true[X] Uplift product can provide a myriad of insights about viewers in relation to their status in the purchase funnel.

Formerly a unit of FOX Networks and now owned by Walt Disney Co., true[X] is used across most broadcast and cable networks plus the Twitch gaming platform and OTT services, among others. “We really focus on high-attention environments. Places where there’s a really engaged consumer on the other end and where we think we can make the experience better,” says Midha.

Calling CTV an “incredibly rich canvas,” she talks about engagement ads for a variety of brands from Amazon to Lego to Harley Davidson to consumer packaged-goods, “which shows that this is a format that works for any number of categories.” A voice-enabled, engagement ad for Amazon’s Echo used speech-to-text conversion so that viewers could verbally interact with the ad.

Whereas ad attribution “only tells about a sale,” when brand lift occurs “you usually will see conversion down the chain,” says Midha, adding that because not all viewers are always in market for something, all ads provide value to brands.

“It’s still seeding an awareness, it’s still driving perception and it may even be creating preference so that when that consumer is in market, they will convert for that brand.”

The company is working with “several partners to use Uplift to measure video performance on their own sold campaigns” via the Uplift technology but apart from true[X]’s own engagement-ad units, according to Midha.

Giving viewers a choice of their ad experience and collecting the resulting data at scale can turn a one-question survey into a gold mine of information, she says.

“You can imagine it’s not very hard to get a lot of people to choose to take that survey, especially when it’s only one question. We let consumers place themselves on the purchase funnel by asking them how they would describe their relationship with a brand.”

A “control and expose group” can number 500-plus within days of a campaign launching, “and we also are able to make sure that the cohort for exposed looks like the cohort for control, both of which look like the cohort that was actually targeted for the campaign. So your survey group mirrors your campaign targeting.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel prefaced the conversation by calling into question the age-old format of 40 minutes of TV content leavened with 20 minutes of commercials. Encountering no disagreement, Spiegel elicited the following condensed thoughts from the varied panelists.

Amanda Richman, CEO, Wavemaker US: “This battle for attention is really sparking different ways of working. And we’re excited about now it’s becoming less of a focus just on the precision and data and targeting and keeping that within the realms of digital media only. And maybe back to the creative agencies and a different level of collaboration to recognize that we need to actually help develop the stories and messages that are bespoke to these new ad formats and platforms and broader distribution.”

John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA: “I think media more and more is just as innovative and in some ways just as creative as the creative storytellers in a creative agency. No one’s ever gone wrong by considering the consumer first and foremost. You’re seeing I think some real evolution in terms of innovation in different formats if you think of what Fox is doing with JAZ pods or NBC with Prime Pods and you’re seeing a variety of different formats coming to life. But I think a lot of the conversation is around formats. I think more and more we have to change and tilt the conversation more to experiences.”

Allyson Witherspoon, GM, Global Brand Engagement, Nissan: “Relevancy becomes what the experience is because we know so much more about who our consumers are and what their interests are that we need to be serving up content and experiences to them that’s relevant. In the case of automotive, we know when they’re going to be in market, we even know what type of vehicle that they’re in market for. So we should not be advertising a van to them if they’re interested in a sedan and we know that type of information. And then it’s to the point of how you can combine media and creative to actually deliver that message, which I think is still not something that we’re able to do at scale but it’s definitely something that we’re trying to build towards.”

Pooja Midha, President, true[X]: I’m heartened and I love the discussion that’s happening these days around bringing the consumer back to the center. While I’ve not been with the company terribly long, true[X] has been around for years and really from the beginning said we need to think about the consumer. We need to respect the consumer. We have got to think about messaging and context, advertising and an experience that is worthy of that consumer’s attention. If we’re not delivering that, then we really have no right to be there and to be expecting something back. It’s nice to be in Cannes because everyone we work with is represented. The creative side of the business, the media side of the business, the agency side, client marketers even the technology companies and measurement companies we partner with to deliver.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

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.

“Chances are, we’ve probably done some work for someone with a similar objective or we’re actually working with an ad studio that has the creativity, the flexibility and the prowess to help them think through how we can do that in our ad format.”

Just after the Cannes Festival concluded, true[X] said that it has reached a one-year deal with GroupM digital agency Essence to develop and test new approaches for connected TV advertising. As Advertising Age reports, the aim is to develop consumer-friendly and compelling brand experiences that can scale to connected-TV offerings like Roku and Apple TV. In addition, Essence will be the first agency to access engagement ads programmatically.

At Cannes, true[X]’s focus on brand lift as a measure of success “is really resonating here,” says Midha. “There’s no better personal primetime than the OTT viewing we see happening across our publisher partners.”

Asked to comment on developments in OTT measurement, Midha says, “It’s unfortunate that it’s a little bit nascent because it’s such an incredible viewing environment. There’s a lack of standardization in those platforms. Each one is a little bit different, which makes rolling measurement across very difficult. It’s not something that’s happened quickly.”

True[X] has already built a measurement tool that can live in all OTT environments called Uplift, which measures brand lift.

“Because if you want to create a brand, you need emotion. That’s the difference between a brand and a product. The first thing you need to do that is you need to have attention, which is what our format is about, and once you have attention you want to make sure you’re lifting your brand and you’re having impact. We’re trying to follow the whole thread.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

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.

The technology company, owned by 21st Century Fox, helps consumers see fewer ads in digital video when they engage with an initial interactive commercial – effectively bartering their input for a benefit.

Over the last year, consumers have become more aware than ever of the same kind of value exchange – the one in which they are trading their personal data for free online services. That could be good timing for true[X] president Pooja Midha.

“If we want to capture better quality of attention, then we need to give the consumer back something for giving us that,” she tells OMD chief investment officer Ben Winkler in this fireside chat at Beet Retreat.

“And so the opportunity as it manifests in video is to either watch the rest of the episode ad-free in exchange for engaging for 30 seconds at a minimum, or to skip the rest of a commercial pod in exchange for engaging for a minimum of 30 seconds.”

Growing awareness of the economics of attention in technology are not the only way in which business is coming in to true[X]’s orbit. In broadcasting, too, networks are falling over themselves to reduce their ad length, ad load or pod duration, in response to booming ad-free subscription video consumption.

For broadcasters, fewer ads may sound like it would add up to fewer dollars. But, Midha says, when you manage to engage viewers, the opposite is true – advertisers will pay more for less.

“In our experience they will,” she says. “we’re operating in a business that has, for many, many years … transacted on a couple of very specific metrics. And, as a result, we’ve built an entire planning system at the agencies, we’ve built an entire evaluation system at the clients of those agencies, and we’ve built an entire culture inside the media companies, of focusing on a couple of numbers.”

When partners are shown alternative numbers – the ones that illustrate how engagement moves the needle – a light goes on.

“We get people nodding along, and they’re like, ‘Yup, this is exactly the kind of thing I want to buy’,” she claims.

Operators like Turner, Fox and NBCUniversal have been experimenting with reducing their ad load or length in response to growing consumer resistance to interruptive ad practices.

But it’s a furrow true[]X] has been plowing for a while. “A couple of years ago what we were doing was seen as bananas, and now you see every network head talking about it,” Midha suggests. “I’m really heartened by some of the changes that we see, and some of the movement we see.”

This fireside was anchored by OMD chief investment officer Ben Winkler.

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 video ad-tech firm has spent the last few years trying to popularize technology that helps consumers see fewer ads in digital video when they engage with an initial interactive commercial – often met by raised eyebrows.

Whilst allowing viewers to eliminate the majority of ads may seem like a recipe for lost revenue, finally, in 2018, broadcast networks are racing to reduce their ad load, ad length or commercial pod duration in response to growing consumer resistance to interruptive ad formats.

“The idea that a better viewer experience and a better advertiser environment are not in conflict,” says Marchese, who founded the company and later sold it to Fox, in this Beet Retreat fireside with Rob Norman.

Operators like Turner, Fox and NBCUniversal have been experimenting with reducing the size of their ads, as more viewers flock to ad-free subscription video on demand.

But, whilst fewer ads may delight viewers, won’t fewer ads mean fewer dollars for broadcasters?

Marchese says he is still “working on” developing the metrics that show advertisers who high-engagement ads in a low-load environment can drive better outcomes. But some things he knows instinctively.

“Just by having less ads on a night and less commercial messages, you can make the ads that you do have more effective to your audience because they’re not confusing as many commercial messages,” he says.

Marchese says plenty is still in flux and plenty yet to be worked out.

But there is something he knows for sure: “Engagement is just proof of attention. The only currency is attention.”

This fireside was anchored by Rob Norman.

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.

“I love what advertising affords and supports content and storytelling,” but the current “incarnation of the market” has just been between publishers and advertisers and forgetting the viewer, Marchese says.

“Joe as a person who sells advertising is bullish on it, as a content creator we want it, to support it. But as a viewer, the value isn’t there,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, which took place at the Luce Auditorium at Meredith Corporation in Manhattan.

Marchese, who is President, Advertising Revenue at Fox Network Group, sees ROI on TV ad spending as a two-step process.

“The opportunity to get someone’s attention, that’s step one of an ROI process. Step two is what are showing them and what are you telling them,” he says in response to a question from interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization.

It’s the responsibility of media companies to offer marketers “the best opportunity to talk to people, to have their attention,” Marchese says. “And so we build products that optimize for the best opportunity to talk to people.”

For the second part, “we have to be collaborative” or else the viewer loses out.

As the founder of engagement-advertising pioneer true[X], which he sold to 21st Century Fox, Marchese has a rather simple view of the world. “There’s twenty four hours in a day, people spend only so much time with media, people spend only so much time with ad-supported media, people spend only so much of that time with advertising actually paying attention to messages,” he explains. “Your greatest share of that possible, in whatever format, it could be out-of-home could be television, could be digital, your greatest share of people who you want to spend time with your message, that’s what you’re optimizing for as a marketer.”

He’s not fixated on marketing funnel parameters.

“I don’t care what part of the funnel you’re in. If you’re just learning about a product or you’re ready to buy a product, everything comes down to did you get someone’s attention.”

Asked by Swartz for a 36-month prognosis for the TV industry, Marchese narrows things down to two types of content: on-demand and live. The first will “require very different ad formats and systems” including frequency reduction and higher impact “because in the on-demand environment, people just learn that this is the way they should watch.”

Live programming “will hold advertising in a much better way but we need to be smarter about what we do with it.”

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month, Marchese will participate in a leadership forum on the Future of Television presented by FreeWheel, in partnership with Beet.TV, at 10 a.m. on Tuesday June 19. Check back to this post for the agenda and registration.

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.