To CEO Tim Cadogan, the industry as a whole can succeed as well by adopting recent policies to address widespread quality issues.

“We think that the challenge now has a clear answer. Which is adopt the existing quality standards and run with them,” Cadogan says in this interview with Beet.TV while attending RampUp 2018, the annual LiveRamp event.

He’s referring to the ads.txt initiative of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and standards promulgated by the Trustworthy Accountability Group.

“If a buyer buys based on TAG, buys based on ads.txt as P&G is doing, they solve eighty to ninety percent of the quality problems and they can trust the supply through which they’re buying,” says Cadogan.

OpenX is a new entrant in the video space. “We’ve benefitted from the fact that probably eighty percent of our buyers are existing buyers,” some of which have significant quality video inventory. “In the first two quarters of us working in video, about half of our leading partners are running video inventory through us.”

While announcing its 2017 financial results this week, OpenX said it would spend around $25 million this year on quality initiatives, up from $16 million last year, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

OpenX is the #1 ranked independent exchange for ads.txt, meaning the top 1,000 publishers rank Google first and OpenX second, according to Cadogan. Meanwhile, it’s put some distance between itself and competitors in dealing with the new overseas GDPR privacy regulations, “which puts all of our publishers in compliance with GDPR four months before the deadline.”

Cadogan is on the board of Acxiom, which owns LiveRamp, so he wore two hats at RampUp 2018.

“From an OpenX point of view, we are interested in helping buyers identify the users that they want to go after.” Two areas in particular are mobile and location data, “which we still think is a little bit sub-optimal, could be improved, and we’re very interested in ways to continue to prove identification more generally in the app environment.”

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.

Given its significant investments in premium video to date and its plans going forward, Condé Nast is in a great place at a great time. Producers of premium video content have two big leverage points—brand safety and audience reach—with which to pry traditional broadcast dollars from advertisers.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Norton discusses rising video consumption and audience numbers that rival not just television, but programming like the NBA and primetime network shows. It represents a “real blurring of lines” between dollars that could be allocated toward broadcast versus dollars allocated toward digital.

“We’re using the same writers, producers, directors that are producing academy award nominated content,” Norton says. “What you’re going to see is us moving from a very text- and image-based company to much, much more focused on video.”

Text and imaging will still be key building blocks. In fact, a number of the feature films that Condé Nast has in production derive from stories in publications like GQ and The New Yorker.

Condé Nast does “a ton” of branded content via its 23 Stories studio, including an always on, cross-platform effort with Cadillac involving more than 50 pieces of custom content. The next step is figuring out how to take that content and “bring it to life in an experience.”

To this end, the company recently acquired an experiential agency called Pop2Life, which offers ideation and strategy, environmental design and creative services, full-service event production, talent procurement and event concierge services.

“It’s really about bridging that last mile of consumer experience. Going from the screen or printed page to an actual, physical experience,” Norton says.

Norton addresses the issue of brand safety from an overall perspective of trust in this interview with Beet.TV. He’s says it’s not just digital that’s being questioned. “Consumer trust and confidence in all of media is really at a record low. You factor in fake news, alternative facts, fraud, just overall brand safety and it’s a bit of an epidemic,” Norton says. Hence Condé Nast’s story for advertisers and agencies is about “the trust of our journalism.”

As for the bigger digital picture, Norton calls on all players to pitch in and help to shape things up. “We want to challenge brands to comply with a lot of the industry initiatives that are happening right now, number one being tag certification,” he says, citing the Trustworthy Accountability Group and Condé Nast’s certification. “Many major industry CMO’s have made it a requirement. We are asking all of our distribution partners to get certified.”

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