“What we hear consistently from clients is that they still believe that TV is extremely effective in driving brand preference, driving store traffic, driving sales,” Gordon, who is Director of Programmatic TV, says in this interview with Beet. TV. “But it’s a much more complicated TV world to navigate” given the multiplicity of inventory sources, erosion of linear ratings and a diversity of suppliers.

Moreover, traditional linear TV needs more automation to establish a connection between audience targets and inventory, according to Gordon.

Referring to virtual MVPD’s as “truly the best of what is TV,” Gordon notes that it provides great access to content and the linear ad feed and can be supplemented with on-demand content. “All of which can be delivered, whether it’s on demand or in the linear feed, through IP pipes and the advertising can be delivered on a one to one basis instead of one to many.”

As a demand-side video ad platform from its acquisition of TubeMogul about two years ago, Adobe Advertising Cloud is using addressable opportunities that make the most sense given an advertiser’s objectives.

“One of the clearest is when you want to reach your target because of the effectiveness of a TV-like environment to influence, but your target is narrow so that traditional ways of buying TV are not efficient enough,” says Gordon. “If you buy a million adult eighteen to forty-nine impressions and only a few percent of them are your true customer, the traditional way of buying TV doesn’t match up to that.”

Addressable also offers incremental audience reach for traditional linear buys.

“Even with broad brand target, some of those consumers are going to be heavy viewers of TV and are going to be quite well reached in a traditional linear approach,” Gordon says. “Others may watch some TV but less than other people in the target.”

Using addressable to reach the hardest targets is a way of “evening out the frequency count among different groups and making sure that you’re extending the reach of that campaign to more qualified customers.”

A main focus of Adobe is providing more automation to linear TV to counter what Gordon describes as the “loss of fidelity” between a strategic target that’s developed in planning and a post-campaign buyer with a GRP goal.

“And so the view of the target that is created early in the process falls apart, really because the transaction is manual.”

There needs to be a more direction connection between linear inventory and tools used to optimize it, according to Gordon.

“So that instead of theoretically creating a target and then manually trying to find inventory that matches that target, you’re actually in platform decisioning against real, live inventory.”

Like others in the space, Adobe is seeing automotive as a category that’s widely embraced addressable owing to its advanced targeting and the high value of transactions. But packaged-goods are also coming on board “because in a lot of cases, a retailer sits in between the producer of the product and the transaction.

“It’s an area where data has been lacking, but there’s a lot of hunger in understanding that transaction better,” Gordon says.

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“What’s remarkable about what NBC is doing in partnership with us is they’re literally letting you buy what you want,” Gordon adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you only want late night on Bravo, you can buy that. And that’s never been enabled before in TV.”

Gordon, whose background includes stints at Lowe, Mediacom, Initiative and Magna Global, was referring to the recent integration of Adobe Advertising Cloud TV and NBCUniversal’s entire portfolio of broadcast and cable television.

The concept behind the integration is that data about TV viewers “is just data if it doesn’t have inventory to decision against,” says Gordon, who left Magna for TubeMogul in 2015 before its acquisition by Adobe, as Advertising Age reports. “The more accurate depiction of the inventory that’s out there that’s loaded into the tool, the better plan that is going to be built.”

While it’s not programmatic in the sense of real-time bidding for inventory, “we are taking major steps forward to make the process a lot more automated.”

Using a host of data, “We can identify very specific things, visitors to your site that took a particular action. We can match that to TV viewership and tell you how a very narrow audience behaves in TV,” Gordon explains.

Buyers using Adobe’s platform “get a live look” into all inventory on NBC’s networks and can propose a purchase order for what best matches their clients’ TV audience targets.

Until now, buyers worked with “a ranker in one hand and a phone in the other. You bought big portfolios of inventory across multiple networks. You bought broad rotations.”

Gordon spent most of his career in TV and “loves” the medium. But he’s very sensitive to the chasm that has existed between the viewing experiences available to consumers and the way the industry does business.

“The TV viewing experience is as good as it’s ever been. But the way TV is planned and bought and sold hasn’t transformed in the same way that the viewing experience has transformed.”

He praises collaborative efforts like the OpenAP audience targeting consortium launched by Fox, Turner and Viacom, of which NBCU is a recent participant. “TV inventory is a very precious resource and the attention of consumers is extremely precious. In TV we’ve spent those resources poorly.”

“If all we do as an industry is make television look like digital programmatic today and the mess of the supply chain that exists out there, then we will fail,” says Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise. “We need to keep the economics of TV today and leverage the targeting and the data available for digital but we need to do it efficiently.”

Wise sees convergence “as not necessarily a buying problem but a planning and measurement problem” that it has sought to help remedy with internal solutions and partnerships with 4C Insights, VideoAmp and TubeMogul, among others, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Since Mediaocean’s sale in August 2015 to a private equity company, it has made six acquisitions, expanded globally and expanded its customer base, 90% of which had been agencies. It now deals directly with CMO’s on a planning workflow solution called Lumina and with TV broadcasters and publishers through Prisma for Sellers.

“Planning and buying need to come together and buying and selling need to come together,” says Wise.

He notes that 4C has done “an amazing job of creating platforms” to plan, buy, measure and optimize all in one system, through advanced data, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“The tricky part is being able to respect what makes TV the most efficient media marketplace in the world today and it continues to be. While moving it into the digital future.” Wise thinks the next few years are going to be “very interesting to watch” in the measurement space.

“I think Nielsen has done a really, really good job of expanding their datasets to be more relevant in the digital age,” Wise says, adding that comScore “has actually created a nice, viable alternative.”

Others will follow as MVPD’s “are leaning into platforms like 4C and VideoAmp and potentially TubeMogul” to leverage set-top box viewing data “and what we’re seeing is the market is almost open to there being another player in that space.”

Then there is Oracle with its acquisitions of Datalogix and Moat. “We will evolve as the industry evolves,” Wise says.

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

“Monetization is certainly front and center,” Jeremy Helfand, VP, M&E Industry Solutions, Adobe, and VP, Adobe Primetime, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.

He likens the shift in focus from audience fragmentation to broadcasters exercising a new muscle. “They need to think more like retailers, understanding who their audiences are,” says Helfand.

This involves having a business model that supports advertising not only of a digital nature but “converged advertising across both linear and digital,” he adds.

With the recent addition of video demand-side platform TubeMogul to its various cloud offerings, Adobe is looking to connect the buy and sell sides for “a common definition of audience to increase the value of advertising,” regardless of what screen it’s delivered to.

More recently, Adobe and video monetization technology and services provider Ooyala formed a partnership that will enable Ooyala to “leverage the playback and ad insertion capabilities of Adobe Primetime to help enhance their suite of products,” Helfand explains.

“Pairing our IVP solutions with Adobe gives even more insight into analytics and measurement, building common data sets across every function of video all with a single goal. To grow your business,” Ooyala Co-founder and SVP of Products and Solutions, Belsasar Lepe, said in a statement announcing the partnership.

Adobe’s latest report on digital video shows that “TV everywhere” has doubled in size over the last two years. “What’s really interesting is as we watch consumption of that content, TV is coming back into the living room,” Hefland says.

The highest concentration of daytime consumption is happening on mobile devices, but from 4-9 p.m. connected TV devices are dominant, according to the Adobe report.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.

“Too often, marketers forget about marketing 101,” the company’s Director of Product Marketing says in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017. “Consumer psychology. What do consumers want? What do they need? What is the hierarchy of needs?”

He suggests marketing concepts from the 1950’s and 1960’s can be useful when trying to create personalized experiences.

“Also what’s lost is the creative aspect of it,” he adds. “How do you create a better environment for consumers so that they’re more likely to make a purchase decision or more likely to have brand affinity for a particular product or service or company?”

Too often, the focus is solely on data and “we don’t focus on what people want,” says Foster. “Sort of the basics of marketing.”

While Adobe itself is slightly less than a quarter-century old, it seems to have been listening to what a lot of people in the tech space desire, particularly when it comes to video. Its 2016 acquisition of TubeMogul is the capstone in the creation of a “three-legged stool” to neatly capture both the demand side and supply side—and most points in between.

“Historically we’ve have a data management platform, we’ve had a performance marketing engine with Adobe Media Optimizer but we haven’t really had a demand side platform focused on brand building through video,” Foster explains. “And that’s really what we’re trying to accomplish with the TubeMogul acquisition.”

The next phase of the company’s video evolution is connecting the buy side through TubeMogul with the sell side via Adobe Primetime TV Media Management. This, says Foster, will create “tighter, stronger connections between media buyers, TV buyers, video buyers and broadcasters and MVPD’s that have professional video inventory to sell.”

Adobe is now equipped to assist brands from content ideation through to production and distribution video distribution, all the way through to measurement and monetization.

For the company’s media customers, Adobe’s primetime footprint and authentication touches over 99% of U.S. pay TV households, according to Foster. “That’s a significant footprint in premium inventory,” he says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The Emeryville, CA-based company has just confirmed an agreement to be acquired by the digital media powerhouse for $540m.

What does Adobe want with TubeMogul? According to its announcement: “Adobe’s acquisition of TubeMogul will create the first end-to-end independent advertising and data management solution that spans TV and digital formats, simplifying what has been a complex and fragmented process for the world’s biggest brands.”

TubeMogul has software to enable planning, buying, measurement and optimizing of programmatic, cross-screen TV advertising. It went public two years ago, for half this value.

“We aim to be totally aligned with advertisers so they never second guess the incentives,” TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson tells The Wall Street Journal.

The acquisition is a further sign of consolidation in a video ad-tech ecosystem where the number of companies has grown dizzyingly.

Across the landscape, companies are bolting on point solutions to go end-to-end. Mar-tech M&A advisory group Results International Group reports 331 mergers and acquisitions took place in ad-tech and marketing-tech in the first nine months of this year. Digiday calls the TubeMogul acquisition a “tipping point” for this consolidation.

Previously, AOL had acquired Adap.tv in the space, helping its effort to form its One offering.

TubeMogul’s Wilson recognizes the need for consolidation. Back in June, he told Beet.TV: “I think what’s actually happening is it’s getting more fragmented, not less so. Yes there’s some very dominant players out there. But there’s also huge new platforms that didn’t even exist a couple of years ago like Snapchat. So the implication for advertisers is it’s getting more complicated and fragmented.”

There are a “lot of different actors on a lot of different levels,” among them stations and groups, “and getting them all together can be very challenging,” TubeMogul’s Matthew Dybwad confirmed during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV summit on politics and advertising. “I think that’s really the main reason why you haven’t seen programmatic television become a thing earlier than it did.”

Moderator Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting drilled a little deeper, asking Dybwad whether many media owners see things as “going well enough right now” for most of them.

“I hear this too in the industry,” Dybwad responded. “You’ve got station owners saying, ‘look, I’m already selling every minute of every day. Why do I need technology to make this better? How could I possibly make more money than I’m making’”?

Having spent the past 15 years in digital marketing, Dybwad, who is the Head of Politics & Public Affairs at the global advertising software platform, takes less of a status quo stance. “It’s very clear coming from a digital marketing background that if each one of those minutes were able to be bought more efficiently, against data, with more verification and measurement, people would actually pay more to get that level of efficiency,” Dybwad said.

Because programmatic buying can reduce marketers’ actual cost per engagement or per reach and frequency goal, it’s “the key to media owners throughout the spectrum getting more for their dollar and ultimately, as automation goes forward, it’s going to make their jobs even easier,” said Dybwad.

Among the brands leveraging TubeMogul’s programmatic tools—which have powered more than 300 campaigns—are Allstate, Heinekin and Mondelez.

“On a national landscape, this is an opportunity that makes a lot of sense for these brands because they can buy smartly with data, in a more automated fashion. It brings a lot more sense and logic into their process,” Dybwad said.

Within the political realm, Dybwad predicts that the 2016 election cycle will yield “a lot of really compelling case studies” involving programmatic buying.

“I think that by 2018, programmatic buying of TV across the political spectrum is going to be common place,” he predicted.

You are watching videos from Beet.TV politics and advertising summit presented by OpenX along with Intermarkets. Please find additional videos from the series here.

Increasingly, computer algorithms are beginning to take on many of the functions of ad targeting and buying themselves.

One company where that’s happening is TubeMogul, whose programmatic video platform lets buyers buy video ads in real-time, through automation.

“Because we now have this cross-screen planning engine, we’ve used it as a research tool,” says TubeMogul’s research VP Taylor Schreiner, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We’re watching how much of an advantage it can be when you use algorithms to find consumers wherever they want to be.

“It’s surprising even to us. The impacts are on the order of 20, 30, 40% of the value of your media if you’re using algorithms versus trying to do this kind of work manually. It’s going to be a revolutionary change in the industry.”

Targeting is great. Next up is discovering the real impact of messages consumed by the audiences marketers reach, Schreiner says.

This interview was recorded at the I-com Global Forum for Marketing and Data Measurement in Seville, Spain, April 18 to 21. This video is part of a series from the Forum sponsored by Xaxis.  Please visit this page for more videos from Seville. 

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of International CES 2016 presented by Adobe.

The tool “will ultimately be self-service”, the company’s TV strategy senior director Oscar Rondon tells this Beet.TV panel discussion.

“If you start with a TV plan, we’re trying to find what’s the incremental reach if you come to TubeMogul and you execute the buy,” Rondon says. “And, if you start with a digital plan where you have an audience, where can you find that audience across television networks?”

TubeMogul is partnering with measurement services like Nielsen and Rentrak plus Experian but also letting customers use their CRM data, to find audiences on addressable TV services.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The panel was moderated by Xaxis SVP Christine Beaumier.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page. 

So what’s next?

“Right now … we’re able to buy across Dish’s different segments of their data,” says the company’s TV senior director Oscar Rondon. “But, over time, where this goes is really leveraging first-party customer data and being able to match it through a third party in order to find those audiences on the Dish footprint.

“Over time, where we see it going is where it’s a one-to-one distribution of the creative asset to a specific household that actually meets the criteria that a marketer’s after.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“Programmatic is changing the media landscape,” according to video ad tech platform vendor TubeMogul’s managing director Nick Reid, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“IHS predicts €2 billion spend in European video by 2020,” Reid added, citing an IHS study, released last week, to quantify the European programmatic video advertising sector for platform vendor SpotX.

Reid says TubeMogul’s focus is on helping advertisers plan video-based advertising in a world in which devices and consumer attention have fragmented.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“All of this change is precipitating discussions around the tech platforms, what is good, what is great, is there one solution or multiple solutions, so that is culminating in a massive plethora of new business pitches,” he tells us.

Another key area of change in the media business lies in programmatic buying models. But programmatic often gets attention for the wrong reason — because of cost. “Programmatic is about understanding data and automaton at its highest level. The world is becoming more digitized and there will be a high degree of programmatic, and unless you embrace it you’ll be left behind,” he says. What’s more, the better marketers understand consumers the better they can connect with them to make brands more relevant, and programmatic drives that opportunity.

This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event.  Please find additional videos from the series here.

“Right now, we do a really job at automating the buying a desktop pre-roll buy or a mobile video buy or a linear television buy – but you still have to buy these individual silos,” CEO Brett Wilson tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“You’ll see us begin work on removing the silos of buying video. Over the course of the year, you’ll see us build products that make buying video across any screen a lot more seamless.”

That channel neutrality will give vendors like TubeMogul a leg-up from their digital heritage in to the much larger business of TV. But Wilson speaks out for platform independence, complaining that rival ad tech vendors owned by broadcast networks may not operate in clients’ best interests.

“Our largest competitors are also media owners – they also sell software. We think a lot of advertisers think it’s uncomfortable to use the software from a media owner,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event.  Please find additional videos from the series here.

“We’ve seen … 40% more demand in the UK from Q1 to Q4,” according to video ad tech outfit TubeMogul’s UK MD Nick Reid. “We’ve also seen a 20% increase in CPM prices. Different regions are at different stages of understanding.

“We’re starting to see broadcasters like Channel 4 embrace the concept of automation. They’ve opened up their VOD to to automation – not yet linear but, it is the first iteration of automated trading.”

Reid says different regions around the world are at different stages of understanding when it comes to adopting programmatic automation.

“Programmatic TV won’t be an instant reality in markets like the UK because there are nuances when it comes to broadcast and supply,” he says. “However, broadcasters are starting to embrace the data they have in a way that can enable advertisers to be more specific when it comes to reaching target audiences.”

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

The pair say TubeMogul’s platform will connect with Videoplaza’s Konnect suite to allow access to Videoplaza’s inventory on a programmatic basis.

Speaking with Beet.TV recently, TubeMogul platform strategy SVP Max Mead said programmatic means efficiencies: “It’s used as a tool to fill in your reach around the core TV schedule across a broader swathe of networks (and to support) targeting beyond age and gender, starting to take on some of the attributes of digital targeting.

“You’ll start to see more automation in the workflow… we’re getting beyond the fax machines.”

Ooyala acquired Videoplaza last October.

He was interviewed by Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Beet.TV coverage of the IAB meeting was sponsored by SpotXchange. Please find Beet.TV’s coverage of the event here.

PTV, launched last week, works by aggregating relationships with several providers that already offer this functionality, including AudienceXpress, clypd, placemedia and WideOrbit’s WO Programmatic-TV marketplace, from which many local TV stations take their advertising on an automated basis.

For ad buyers, that means “much easier access to television inventory and the ability to automate things”, whilst, for broadcasters, it means “new revenue streams in to local broadcast markets with national brands”, says WideOrbit’s digital EVP Brian Burdick.

He was interviewed by Beet.TV in Manhattan at TubeMogul’s event to launch its new programmatic TV advertising suite.

The Emeryville, California-based outfit has unveiled PTV, allowing data-driven buying of TV advertising. Ad buyers can already use this “programmatic” technique on the internet, but PTV brings the same tools to bear for access to ad slots on over 80 US cable networks.

“Advertisers will enter in a demographic target along with a secondary or strategic target,” TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson told Beet.TV in this video interview recorded at the launch. “The software is going to assemble the best mix of cable networks, broadcast networks, given day parts and days to achieve the lowest target CPM for that strategic target.”

PTV works by aggregating relationships with several providers that already offer this functionality. “We want to be the pipes for true cross-screen buys,” Wilson adds.

WSJ observes that the commonly-held view is that programmatic will not be adopted as easily in TV as it has been in display, with many powerful vested interests likely to hold on to their positions.

The partnership sees advertisers use their own audience data to buy video ads via TubeMogul, whilst TubeMogul lets publishers do deals using that data – but sensitivities are safeguarded, Rooke tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We need to ensure brand advertisers’ data is protected and the advertiser is never going to pass their data to the publisher,” he says. “On the flip side, our publishers don’t want to pass their inventory across to the buy side.

Rooke adds that FreeWheel has seen a 250 percent year-on-year growth in viewing coming via TV Everywhere services.

We spoke with him recently at the TubeMogul partner meeting.  For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

“We obviously don’t have that utopic state in linear TV right now,” says TubeMogul CMO Keith Eadie in this video. “We don’t have it perfectly in programmatic digital media either – but we’re a lot closer to it.”

TubeMogul this month announced it would bring its own targeting data to bear on cable TV ad inventory aggregated by AudienceXpress, allowing its customers to “programmatically” buy ads on cable TV just as they do for online video.

“It is the first step of many toward realizing the promise of programmatic TV for brands and agencies. There’ll be more to come on this,” Eadie adds.

We spoke with Eadie for “The Road to DMEXCO,” a series of interviews with industry leaders produced in New York, London and San Francisco.    It is sponsored by the automatic content recognition (ACR) technology provider Civolution.

Please find more videos from the series here.   Beet.TV is a media sponsor of DMEXCO and will be covering the conference extensively.

“Not all broadcasters are embracing a programmatic approach,” according to Nick Reid, UK MD of the programmatic video ad platform TubeMogul.

“We see a lot of our partners using both open RTB (real-time bidding) and programmatic-direct – publishers like the Daily Mail, The Times. Broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 4 are not quite there yet – but it’s not really an ‘if’, it’s  ‘when’ (they adopt programmatic).”

He was speaking during Beet.TV’s Programmatic Summit with SpotXchange and TubeMogul at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more clips from that event here.

“Programmatic is getting to be less scary,” says TubeMogul’s CEO Brett Wilson. “You’re seeing more brands embrace it directly.

“It doesn’t mean they’re going to log in and do everything themselves. We’ve trained the MediaVest (agency) team on how to launch digital video campaigns (for Mondelēz). But increasingly they’re involved in their media technology decisions.”

“You’re going to see a lot more of the world’s biggest brands do direct deals with programmatic companies.”

Wilson spoke with Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more coverage of the festival here.

Although advertisers are often keen to drive down the prices they pay in a world now threatened by fake views, TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson warns that logic could be detrimental.

“We get a lot of information requests – ‘Can we buy pre-roll, only on targeted audiences, only viewable, only at $10 CPMs?’,” he says. “No, of course you can’t.

“There’s unnatural price pressure – often, if the advertiser spends just a little bit more, the quality goes up, the effective pricing goes down.”

We spoke with him at the Beet.TV Video Ad Fraud Leadership Summit where he was a panelist, interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz.  TubeMogul was the presenting sponsor of the summit.

“We take the burden,” says says Brett Wilson, CEO of video ad tech vendor TubeMogul. “Anything you buy that isn’t what you think it is, we’re gonna take care of it.”

Wilson says site-level reporting and proactively identifying botnets that fake ad views are two ways to bring clarity to the problem: “This isn’t an issue we’re responding to – we’re creating the issue, we found these botnets. We published a list of sites that were driven by non-human traffic – any clients that bought a significant number of impressions on the site, which was very few, we gave them the money back.”

Wilson added that smaller, overseas advertisers are adapting their business back-office to programming trading techniques quicker than US agencies.

We spoke with him at the Beet.TV Video Ad Fraud Leadership Summit where he was a panelist, interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz.  TubeMogul was our presenting sponsor.