“As a fan experience company, it’s really coming to its own now the EVP of Data Strategy & Product Innovation says in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.

So how does a company with such vast resources seamlessly connect platforms and experiences? “That’s basically the crux of my job is to figure out across all the different divisions how are we gathering all the insights and all the data points,” says Redniss. “How do you set a standard across every app that we have at Turner, and there’s a lot of them.”

Much hinges on instrumentation of different tracking methodologies. “If CNN sets up their data instrumentation one way to measure video or measure a touch or a click and TBS or sports does it a completely different way, you can’t bring those two things together and reconcile.”

Turner’s salespeople, researchers and product teams can mine the Turner Data Cloud for core insights. “We’re getting to a point where we’re going to start using all those insights to create dynamic content experiences where what my actual experience is on CNN’s home page could be completely different then another’s. Not just from the content you’re seeing but also it could be the framework in which the actual platform or CNN site is then kind of materialized for the consumer,” Redniss says.

Given complications like the GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California, dealing with different data sets is “really challenging and interesting.” It pays to take a pro-consumer approach, according to Redniss.

“The way we think about it is when you are building a world based on consumers at the center and it’s all about fandom, you absolutely have to respect that relationship with the fans and the consumers at the center.”

Thanks to digital technology, more consumer engagement means more data to seed more product offerings.

“That to me is really exciting because that means you’re actually winning at the game of trying to scale something. Data is a massive asset for us now. When you can actually get positive consent to build something off of or provide something to consumers using what they’re provided to us, that’s a win-win for everybody,” Redniss says.

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

The idea was to smooth the path to a future in which data would play a much bigger role in how TV ads were targeted.

But OpenAP 1.0 wasn’t the end of the story. After a year of talks, the consortium got some big new members this year.

“We just recently had NBC Universal join us, along with Univision, which is exciting because, now, we represent more than 60% of the television market,” says Turner Ignite VP ad innovation and programmatic solutions Larry Allen in this video interview with Beet.TV.

But Allen says OpenAP has already had an impact in a TV world, once premised solely on ads placed against show types, that is now fast moving toward more data-driven targeting.

“The OpenAP platform, I think, really had a big role in the upfront this year in helping to establish standards with regard to audiences that clients and the advertising agencies wanted to use to buy on throughout this coming season,” he adds.

“Generally, we see it as a really amazing, collaborative effort where the television industry can come together around setting these standards and working with clients to execute audiences at scale.”

OpenAP is one part of a “programmatic” opportunity whose tendrils are now reaching from the internet in to television.

But, as it makes the transition, it begins to look different. Whilst, online, programmatic technologies launched to help fill inventory, in VOD and OTT TV it will have more of an automation and planning function, Allen says.

The interview was conducted at Advertising Week in New York.

Turner Ignite Sports is the latest iteration of Turner Ignite, which was created to offer content and data solutions. It’s described as an in-house, full-service sports marketing agency focusing on intellectual property, live events and experiential marketing, creative services and data solutions, as ADWEEK and Digiday report.

In an interview with Beet.TV, Kavilanz says Turner Ignite is well into virtual reality video creation along with finding niche audiences for marketers across Turner’s massive social, digital and linear presences.

One example is Turner Ignite’s work to promote Sully, the Warner Bros drama film about the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Calling VR “a fascinating place where we love to experiment,” Kavilanz explains how a VR camera affixed to the underside of a helicopter simulated the flight path of the crippled airliner, generating video that was augmented by CNN footage.

Having created a compelling piece of content, the next challenge was locating and targeting VR enthusiasts, according to Kavilanz.

“Given the fact that we are able to access all of Turner’s social handles, we’re able to find people who like VR,” Kavilanz says. “We have found that there are certain people who will watch anything that’s VR-centric on YouTube or Facebook. Because of our unique structure, we’re creating an audience of people who love VR in addition to people who are fans of a respective show.”

Turner initially believed its Turner Ignite clients would consist mostly or solely of its linear TV advertisers. But with so many marketers of all sizes having jumped onto the content marketing bandwagon, they need help finding audiences for it, according to Kavilanz.

Most of Turner Ignite’s work involves traditional one- or two-minute videos. “The way we typically structure these deals there is a content component and a media component,” Kavilanz says.

Using its data and insights to make sure the content reaches right audience, Turner Ignite guarantees video views or impressions. “About 70% of our deals are on a cost per view basis and the balance on a CPM basis,” says Kavilanz. “We’re also offering the opportunity for guarantees of a minimum of 30 seconds of view time, which is very unique and something advertisers are increasingly asking more and more to participate in.”

One code in particular that Turner Ignite would like to crack is video sharing, according to Kavilanz. “What we’re going after is not just deriving a quality view, we’re trying to unlock the share,” he says. “That’s something that we’re spending a considerable amount of time figuring out how we can do both.”

Ignite evolved from the realization that the TV industry had “overstuffed the bird” with too many ads and that creative content had to work harder for marketers, Dan Riess, EVP of Content Partnerships, says in an interview with Beet.tv.

During this “test and learn” year for Ignite, Turner has already cut the number of ads in its programming, according to Riess.

“What we are learning is that the shorter the ad breaks, in general the better performance for advertisers that are in that ad break,” he says. “Makes total sense, less clutter. We’re seeing it as less is more.”

After the self-imposed commercial “diet” came the “workout,” as Riess explains it.

“The workout part is to make the creative work harder in those pods. Start taking what would be a traditional ad pod of four, six, eight sometimes spots and putting in custom branded content,” Riess says.

Normally, viewers would emerge from a program segment and encounter a pod with several commercial messages, none of them related to the other. In its tests, Ignite swapped out the traditional pod and substituted a two- to three-minute exclusive branded content piece from an advertiser, then returned viewers to the program.

At the next commercial break, viewers were shown a 30-second ad for the company whose branded content they had previously viewed. This is a formula that Turner has executed 30-40 times across its networks, according to Riess.

Biometric testing with 4,500 viewers revealed that “you have a huge bump in engagement when you put a story in front of someone for two minutes plus,” Riess says. That has a huge effect.”

As for the 30-second ad, it “starts to perform extremely well” following the branded content “because it’s been essentially set up by the content piece,” says Riess.

Ignite does audience targeting via both contextual means and “a huge array of data sets, being Nielsen, be it MRI. Pretty much any dataset that a marketer would want to use we actually have in house and are willing to target against,” he says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.