That is according to one man whose primary medium has not always been considered adept at measuring through to actual consumer purchase – but, for Dan Riess, TV is learning new tricks.

“(Marketers’) job is now a lot more focused as a marketer on the end business result … as well as the actual campaign brand lift performance that we’re used to,” says Dan Riess, WarnerMedia EVP, Turner Ignite, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“A lot more of the work we do with our partners is around measuring the end business outcome. There’s a small handful of deals and partnerships that we do which are actually where we’re guaranteeing that business outcome.”

Many publishers these days are beginning to price ads based on outcomes – say, purchase or store visitation – that they know for sure are discoverable.

That is because, in the world of multi-channel digital signals, consumers are leaving breadcrumb trails across everything they do. Smart technology can link those breadcrumbs through to their end point – and trace back to an originator that may have led the cause to some effect.

For Riess, the secret sauce is AT&T. The former telco infrastructure company, after acquiring WarnerMedia incorporating Turner, is now a media power house with several TV networks, a mobile network and, in AppNexus, ad-tech infrastructure under its belt.

Furthermore, AT&T’s Xandr unit, dedicated to facilitating advanced TV ads, is driving offerings across the group.

“The way we do that is increasingly through the data we have with AT&T,” Riess adds. “Obviously our corporate owner who can measure a lot of things about audience behavior and purchase. They are the ones who collect the AT&T data set for advertising use and help us access it.

“We also use third parties in certain cases depending on the category and what the client is trying to learn.”

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. 

But that’s what the modern AT&T – incorporating WarnerMedia’s Turner and CNN – now looks like.

For the corporation – like Verizon alongside it – it is part of an ambitious move to tie telco and content in to a broad offering that leverages data on subscribers and consumers across a range of devices and content types.

And, for advertisers, the gateway to the kingdom is Xandr, the platform which gains access to each platform.

Beet.TV’s Identity in Focus forum heard from two executives now at the cusp opportunities at the unified entity:

• Xandr VP Research Dan Rosenfeld
• Turner SVP ad innovation and programmatic solutions Dan Aversano

In conversation with former Turner revenue chief Howard Shimmel, the two Dans opined on the challenges and opportunities in delivering multi-screen ads.

“What’s incredible about the TV viewership data is you’ve got an almost infinite, library of signals in terms of content, behaviours, interests that are indicators simply from a proclivity to tune into certain types of content,” Rosenfeld said.

“And that can really tell us about the passions and the interests of consumers in and for an advertiser to align their brand with a specific passion or try to connect to a consumer through that insight is very powerful.”

Aversano agreed, adding that using data on telco subscribers available through AT&T is a particular added boost.

“Mobility data – things like geolocation, app usage, mobile web usage –  is a vast treasure trove,” Aversano said.

It’s not just “mobile”, however. AT&T has made a big commitment to 5G roll-out. And, whilst its rebadging of some advanced existing 4G spectrum as “5ge” has ruffled feathers, the operator will soon operate 5G spectrum proper – leaving the two Dans licking their lips.

“5G is a game changer for many different reasons for AT&T but particularly in the data world, we see there being some great opportunities as that begins to roll out,” Aversano said.

“The ability to have zero-latency video streaming virtually on any device … cis a whole new ball game. And when you talk about it and things like an identity graph, there’s a lot of opportunity, we think.”

Rosenfeld agreed: “One beautiful opportunity with 5G is the idea that there’s one pipe controlling all of your video ad experiences.”

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

Such guaranteed optimization could emerge by late this year or early 2020, Turner’s Dan Aversano explains in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.

By combining behavioral and viewing data from AT&T’s digital and television assets “we can now add in some fairly simply analytics to understand when and where people are exposed to ads and then use causal analytics to actually prove that they’re taking an action,” says the SVP of Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions.

An example in the auto industry could be “being able to prove the visitation that’s driven to a particular auto dealership because of the campaign they ran on TBS or a campaign they ran on CNN Go,” says Aversano. “That’s step one. Step two, where this data gets really interesting is how we start to make it actionable.”

Many advertisers are unsure exactly who they should be targeting or uncertain when it comes to building audience segments. Those in themselves have typically consumed many weeks of conversation.

“Now that we have these analytics that we’ve built and we’re automating them so they’re fast and fairly inexpensive for us to run, we can do that at scale.” Analyzing historical campaigns to understand who actually converted provides a “seed set” that can be modeled up. “Now I have an ROI-defined segment,” Aversano adds.

Moving even higher up the value chain is the ability to optimize media campaigns based on output. “This is where you forget about the who for a second.” Historical data from Turner media can show “when I put this brand’s ad here, how many people go to the dealership, two people for this unit, three people for this unit.

“So all of a sudden, now I’m building a media schedule not based on how many impressions or GRP’s it’s going to deliver against a demo or segment, but based on how many actual physical location visits you’re going to get. It’s optimizing for the actual outcome.”

If all goes by plan, Turner could end up providing outcome guarantees by the end of this year or early next year.

Asked by interviewer Howard Shimmel, President of Janus Strategy and Insights, how all the data can help to inform advertising from top to bottom of the purchase funnel, Aversano says “Putting that puzzle together is really, really tricky.” Backed by a lot of proprietary research into, among other things, consumer journey mapping, “We’re pushing hard on it.”

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

For nearly 10 years the industry has been aware of the challenge of “needing to do something different and better,” Rockwood explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. “I think in the last two we’ve probably made a lot of progress. I think before then there wasn’t enough of a business need but now there certainly is and I think there has been a lot better progress.”

The SVP of Ad Sales Portfolio Research says of Comscore and Nielsen, “I think that they both have started to do more that’s actually helping us” while echoing the concerns of many CIMM participants about the need to make it easier to conduct business in cross-platform premium video.

“It’s just too hard. As this measurement improves it will become easier to transact.”

She describes the fragmentation of viewing options as “so extreme that it may not be the best thing for the consumer. So I do believe that they’re going to start looking for simpler solutions that provide more value” And while the marketplace is fragmented is now, it’s “going to coalesce around some solutions that actually have more consumer value.”

Asked whether there are too many measurement options for the sell-side, Rockwood doesn’t think so. “I think you have to have competition in this marketplace and you have two major companies that are trying to solve for this,” both of which are “getting traction.”

Beyond that competition is the disparity in data sets, whether they derive from an MVPD or in Turner’s case DirecTV and NBCU with Comcast that “can all be used in different ways and I think we’re finding our way through that now. I don’t think that the complexity is getting in the way of us doing business.”

On the subject of identity graphs, Rockwood stresses their importance in how video advertising and viewing related to individual households and individuals.

“Having high-quality information around what devices belong to which households and then which people are using those devices is I think really important,” Rockwood says. “I think that the Xander data will certainly give us a leg up in that race.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Beck talks about research Turner recently conducted to see what’s top of mind with viewers who face an ever-expanding roster of streaming choices, some of them without advertising.

“The research we did recently is very interesting,” says Beck. “People kept going back to trying to simply discover content has become more of a challenge because there’s so much out there. What can I watch and where can I watch it? And by the way, do I have to pay incremental for it?”

Among the research learnings was that people want more relevant viewing recommendations in a world of increased co-viewing wherein “typically you’re getting a recommendation based on a single profile when you have multiple people who are interested in what the content is,” Beck says. “Why can’t we have recommendations that are based on multiple profiles?”

But recommendations come with nuances, he adds, one example being not everyone who likes comedy programming likes dark comedic material. “The ability to go more granular in search to really get to what you’re looking for is going to be important.”

Another research finding that stood out is “there’s so much clutter in the experience today. When you open up any screen, there’s that infinite scrolling of content and how do you de-clutter that? So I think there’s going to be a lot of focus on UI, UX to make more personalized experiences for people,” says Beck.

Asked about reducing ad loads and other ways to improve viewing experiences, he notes that while Amazon, Netflix and others have done well without ads, Hulu has done well with an ad model.

“I think a lot of the services are going to have to consider is there an ad-supported model. Consumers may be very open to that, especially if the ads get better. By better I don’t just mean the quality of the content but not as interruptive or served at the times in which people are open to that.

“I definitely think that anybody that’s in this space is thinking hard about how can advertisers help fund the experience for consumers because we know consumers are going to want a free or ad-supported version.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Roughly four months after AT&T unveiled Xandr, the company announced in early January an integration with WarnerMedia’s Turner to improve the relevancy of advertising, fueled by data and content connections.

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Welday talks about the new collaboration with Turner along with the high-level aspiration of Xander to make advertising more relevant while leveraging nearly 200 million consumer billing relationships that yield fertile data for both buyers and sellers.

And then there are viewers of premium video content, whose needs are a high priority. “Consumers should not have to tolerate sixteen minutes of un-targeted advertising for every hour of programming,” Welday says. “That’s a widely agreed upon problem. We think we can help with that.”

The Turner and Xandr ad sales teams have been working on the following four initiatives, with several enhanced products now available from Turner:

• More relevant advertising across Turner’s TV brands, with AT&T first-party set-top-box data

• Using Xandr’s data capabilities to fuel more relevant advertising on Turner’s digital properties

• Expanding the reach of branded storytelling to addressable TV

• Proving the impact of advertising through attribution

Elsewhere within the AT&T fold, Xander is using some of its audience targeting segment capabilities to inform both CNN digital and Bleacher Report across linear and digital. Meanwhile, it’s assisting the LaunchPad branded content solution extend into addressable. “So we can take the same audience they’re targeting with the branded content and find them on our addressable footprint,” Welday says.

Asked about Xandr’s desire to be a supply-side platform for competitors, Welday says it’s “very, very grateful” to be representing both Altice USA and Frontier Communications, with which it has agreements to aggregate and sell national addressable TV advertising inventory.

“Our intention is to build a marketplace where we can provide premium content in a brand-safe environment with visibility and transparency into how the campaign is being delivered across platforms. That by definition is open. We want all comers to be able to access that marketplace,” says Welday.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Now we are living in a world which is swimming – or, perhaps, drowning – in the sticky, digital substance.

For many in broadcasting, data is proving to be transformational to the way they sell advertising, reinventing a discipline that has long relied on manual operations and sketchy viewer targeting.

In this Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV, executives discussed the application of data to their businesses.

Data is a product

Panel leader Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by positing that “data is a product”…

Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:

“100% data is a product. We just announced the fact that we’re launching our own Warner Media D2C (direct-to-consumer) product itself, which will be driven by deep insights on consumption, on behavioral insights, personalization, recommendation engines, dynamic ad insertion built into the overall interface, as well as dynamic content insertion, and dynamic framework of how the actual product itself gets built out. That’s all data driven.”

Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:

“Typically. what we see is in a programmatic delivery or even in a direct sold model, we see anywhere from 15% to 20% lift on the value of media when that kind of data is applied to it.”

Data needs more

But speakers also said that data alone won’t be a game-changer…

Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:

“I would say it’s not just the value of the data. It’s the value of the addressability itself. You’re also enabling this household-level dynamic insertion ability. It’s the combination of those two plus the media I think that gets you to that.”

Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:

“They have to work together.”

Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:

“Where I see the convergence of these two is traditional linear and then you have this audience data. The challenge is, what is the value of that? Is it about outcomes? Is it about time spent? Is it about consumer lifetime value?

“I think we’re not getting to that. We’re not starting to understand the value of combining data and linear television in a way for brands and buyers to truly value it in a sophisticated way.”

Quantifying value

Turner’s Redniss argued that this value actually is becoming clear. But Swartz asked panelists whether it can really be quantified…

Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:

“There is not a significant interest in proving the value from a buying standpoint at the moment, because they’re not incentivized to do so. They’re incentivized to efficiencies and reach.”

Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:

“I think we have the talent. I just think the costs of trying to understand the end ROI is still so high, and every marketer has their own metrics for success. It’s just hard to make it a universal standard.”

Industry must come together

Swartz said she feared different companies, all hoping to burst the bubble of traditional TV measurement currencies, would simply pick their own solutions, leading to silos…

Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:

“We as an industry need to come together to identify some key data points that we can all trade on. That’s it. If we can all baseline around that – and it’s not just one currency, it’s probably going to be five or six – that’s when it really starts to come together.

“We all need to do a better job of educating … the end consumer. Right now we’re giving them a shit ton of opportunities and a shit ton of choice. How do we help teach them and educate them on what those things mean?”

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.

That was one of the many tricky balances debated in a fireside discussion at Beet Retreat between Turner EVP of data strategy and product innovation Jesse Redniss and Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

Swartz set up the distinction as a juxtaposition of “EQ” (emotional intelligence) and “IQ” (intelligence quotient), noting that the ongoing human characteristic of TV involves a heavy dose of the former.

Agreeing, Redniss said: “If you don’t have a great consumer experience, you’re never going to capture data.

“TV traditional business was never based on PII (personally-identifiable information), it was based on panels that Nielsen drove for a long time. Then along came all mobile platforms, web-based platforms, which are capturing IP, device IDs, you’re capturing a lot of behavioral insights.

“Now a lot of companies are blending emotional responses that can be gleaned from everything from biometric measurement to social conversation. All that (is) flowing into now how you’re actually really truly trying to understand consumers.”

After watching the digital display ad business convert largely to programmatic modes of ad trading, the broadcast business has spend the last couple of years looking for similar ways to inject data and automation in to TV and video advertising.

But, so far, a fraction of the US TV ad business has converted, and the evolution is now happening amidst a new global concern over practices which use consumer data in ad targeting.

Is the pendulum suddenly swinging back toward the human touch?

“I think right now, we need to put a pause, quite frankly, into the free fire hose of how data is accessed and utilized to strategically align use cases of how data can be leveraged,” Redniss added.

“Facebook is now in a position where they took too much liberty in how they’re leveraging data and who could actually access it.

“That’s the balance that every single company and every publisher is trying to solve right now – how do you scale content creation, how do you scale direct-to-consumer relationships in a way that respects that balance?

“When you look at what’s going on with GDPR and soon to be CCPA, which we believe and I believe should be an overall regulation that the US has to stand by. We’re going to have to do it.”

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.

“What we have seen over the past twelve months is almost like a smoothing out of the market,” the EVP of Advanced Advertising explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of that starts with the question around who do I want to reach.”

In February, it will be two years since Fox, Viacom and Turner launched the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to facilitate the creation of common segments across publishers, including NBCUniversal and Univision.

Besides the cost and inconvenience of targeting specific audiences publisher by publisher, the lack of common segments had “held back the notion of driving currencies across television publishers that are now anchored in advanced segments instead of traditional demography,” says Gordon.

To underscore the emerging mindset among larger, more sophisticated advertisers, he recounts a recent meeting with a marketer for which the adoption and integration of advanced-TV techniques happens in the planning phase. The marketer was launching three sets of products in 2019 had “lined up different approaches to media buying and different KPIs against all of those.”

It’s also an example of how more campaigns are bringing together media and creative so that “for the distinct custom audience segments that they are building for these product launches, every distinct segment has a distinct creative,” says Gordon.

He goes on to explain how the investments Viacom has made in its Vantage targeting and optimization offerings are “not just about optimizing against linear inventory on a national basis but we have the capability to extend optimized linear campaigns into addressable inventory,” be it MVPD, OTT or other VOD inventory.

“When you can do that, not only can you do things like truly understand how to maximize reach against an individual audience segment, but you can also really start to understand how a particular creative is performing against a segment and against the KPI that you’re trying to drive.”

Vantage has primarily been oriented toward optimizing for either audience concentration as a KPI or achieving de-duplicated reach, according to Gordon. But Viacom is seeing a move toward what he terms outcome optimization.

“Maybe I’m driving a campaign where I’m trying to get people to sign up for a service, product or whatever. We now have this ability to actually look at the outcome data, conversion data, plug that back into the optimization process and throughout the campaign start to actually optimize for that outcome and for that strategic audience segment,” says Gordon.

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

As he looks ahead to CES 2019, he talks about “redefining” television, outdated audience metrics and the need to preserve the traditional cable/satellite/telco distribution business as viewing fragments across devices.

“Television has to be redefined and has to be redefined in a few different places,” prominent among them the big screen that hangs on a wall, Levy says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Television programing is still a very, very popular thing that people watch.”

Also in need of reordering is Nielsen’s “outdated metric system that we’ve been using really since the 1960’s. Television isn’t about primetime only. It’s about all dayparts. “We need to think about not selling this in dayparts but selling it in audience segments.”

He expects that among the topics of conversation at CES will be addressable targeting and attribution of campaigns to business outcomes.

Asked about the effect of AT&T’s bringing Warner Media into its arsenal of advertising and media assets, Levy points to premium content. “On the AT&T side, they were looking for that quality, premium programming and I think that’s one of the reasons why they purchased us.”

For Turner, “why I think it’s so attractive from an AT&T perspective is the data they’re going to provide,” encompassing 170 million consumer touchpoints. “That data, coupled with our first-party data and mapping it together, is going to allow us to have better information around a few things.”

With viewers as the top priority, the data will help to inform program production, provide a better understanding of viewers and facilitate better targeting for clients. But there are more fundamental issues as well.

“First and foremost, we need to keep the ecosystem that we live in today very healthy,” Levy says. “We have a great relationship with our cable operators, with our satellite providers and with our telco companies and now the virtual MVPD’s. That is a very healthy business and is going to continue to be a very healthy business at our company.”

But as a modern media company, on top of that ecosystem “we also need to have a one-on-one relationship with the consumer. Personalize content for them if need be.”

He notes that truTV has reduced almost 50% of all the primetime inventory to half of what it was three years ago, while all of TNT programming originals are now produced with about 50% fewer ads. “We’re trying to give the consumer a better experience, which is very, very important.”

Using data to generate more contextually relevant advertising amid less commercial load “is going to be a better consumer experience also.”

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

“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.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference, Viacom’s COO of Ad Sales recaps the progress of OpenAP, which began as an initiative of Fox, Viacom and Turner and offers observations on future growth based on current use by advertisers in several categories. Newer members include NBCUniversal and Univision.

A big impetus behind OpenAP was the fact that publishers had their own advanced-advertising products but the way they defined audiences differed.

“We were all using our own fusion methodologies to, say, come up with an in-target segment list for movie enthusiasts. It was defined differently. The response from buyers was “I’m not buying the same thing.” By providing the “element of currency” that had been missing, OpenAP unified audience target definitions, according to Halley.

The platform has a tool that allows advertisers or agencies to define their target segments using “a wide variety of data sets, and then share that segment across multiple publishes who will then guarantee the buy against that common audience definition,” Halley says.

“This allows buyers the opportunity to look at publishers on a relative basis so they can evaluate share and how much they’re willing to pay for advanced segments. It has done a great deal to provide momentum around the volume of investment in advanced advertising.”

Still, these are still the “very early stages,” says Halley, noting that for some advertisers, advanced buying “is exactly where they should be.” Examples are response-based advertisers and categories like studios, automotive and quick-serve restaurants. One thing they have in common is “they tend to work a lot with data in the first place. They tend to be predisposed to buy it because they have the capabilities in-house to activate in that fashion.”

Over time, as other kinds of consumer products become more data-centric, “you’re going to see an increase in the buying against advanced segments. I would also say that this is really prep for an addressable marketplace, where we’re going to be matching advanced audience segments on a one-to-one basis more broadly.”

Halley places OpenAP’s combined member footprint at 50% of the domestic television impression supply, “so we do think feel like we’re at a critical mass as it is. But I would expect there to be additional key publishers joining the consortium in the near term. We’re going to be taking on other problems. I would look for other kinds of ease of buying type solutions coming up in the near term.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

“We have now developed our own algorithms, we have a full development team, and we’re able to really custom develop it to match our inventory,” Colella says. “Nobody knows our inventory structure better than us. So this allows us to innovate more quickly and to respond to the market more nimbly as well.”

NBCU makes all of its advertising supply available through its audience optimization product. “Whether it’s programmatic TV or linear optimization, whatever’s available will be made available through those platforms. We don’t differentiate,” Colella adds.

“Typically, the live sports programs and our big-ticket items will obviously go on sponsorship. But if something hasn’t been sold we make it available.”

In April of 2018, NBCU joined the TV audience-targeting consortium OpenAP led by Fox, Viacom and Turner. In so doing, it brought its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.

“We’ve been spending a lot of time to really understand what we can bring to bear and how best to work with the group so that we can make it easier for our advertisers to buy on an audience basis,” Colella says of OpenAP.

This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.

“I’m thrilled to be attending the conference in the next week or two,” she says. “I want to hear Brian’s vision from him and his team,” she adds in a reference to Brian Lesser, who is CEO of the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics unit. “I think it’s going to be so exciting.”

Speciale, who is President of Advertising Sales at Turner, is already in sync with Lesser and his people, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.

“We’ve been working together for the past few weeks collaborating with both our teams,” she says. “And what’s so exciting is that both his side and our side, our visions have been so much aligned. So I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say and what our clients have to say.”

Like many others, Speciale is keen on knowing how AT&T plans to use customer data for better targeting of ads across media. “At Turner, we’ve always put the consumer at the center. We have been doing that for years.”

She talks about the company’s efforts to reduce commercial load “because the experience is so important to us of how our viewer really feels, making content more relevant, targeting obviously is definitely something that we have been focusing on over these years.”

With advanced targeting data, “I think addressability is what’s really going to be popping. That’s really where our vision has been for the past few years.

“It has to start with audience, that’s what we’ve been focusing on, now getting the data from AT&T is going to make that even more rich and viable and the next portion of that is going to be addressability.”

This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Horizon’s client roster includes A&E Networks, Scripps and Turner, in whose category “in terms of driving viewership and tune-in to programs that we’ve seen a lot of success with addressable TV because you can really hone in a specific audience,” O’Connor adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

“You can really identify who the target is, see how that target performed when you delivered the message and then also see how that target performed when you didn’t deliver the message. We’ve seen that there can be a lift of twenty, thirty percent in terms of tune-in, which is obviously a huge lift when you’re trying to drive next day ratings.”

For clients in other categories, addressable is not as easy a sell. It all begins by deciding on particular campaign results, according to O’Connor.

“We have to dig in and look at the target we’re trying to reach. Is it worth going the addressable route? Is there enough waste there? Is there a specific enough target that we can deliver a message to, or are we okay with kind of the spillover into a larger buy?”

Although advertising inventory of the various virtual MVPD’s is “still a pretty small portion of the overall universe,” it does have its values.

“We do have clients that are reaching out and buying those specifically, particularly a lot of our digital-first accounts, whether it’s ecommerce or brands like that. We use that to drive down costs to some degree,” says O’Connor.

He sees huge opportunity for the VMVPD’s “particularly when you think about something like a DISH and a Sling, is where you can supplement something like an addressable TV buy and you can use the Sling as a portion or complement to what you’re doing through the traditional or satellite set-top box.”

A constant thread regardless of the platform is more advanced audience targeting. “I don’t think that there are many advertisers out there saying ‘just give me adults eighteen to forty-nine,” says O’Connor.

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 we’re hearing from buyers and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says in this interview with Beet.TV in which he also discusses the early impact of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.

Another hot topic at Cannes was “what we politely call next Nielsen, and next Nielsen could involve Nielsen obviously, but sort of what’s next beyond age and demos,” he adds.

OpenAP is not yet one year old, having been announced by Fox, Turner and Viacom in March 2017 and activated that fall, so the current Upfront is its first. Earlier this year, NBCUniversal joined in, as did Univision.

“What we’re hearing from buyers, and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says.

He cites comments by, among others, OMD’s Chris Geraci—who was Prohaska’s boss at BBDO back in the day—to the effect that “there’s some usage there. But the real upside of being able to have proprietary data sets that you keep as a buyer or seller but be able to dip into this great pool and leverage these standards that have been worked on for awhile hasn’t fully been realized yet. I think there’s a lot of energy and excitement about trying to do that more while the legacy television and advanced television buyers and sellers sink their teeth into this marketplace.”

At the outset of Cannes, Prohaska heard of “a couple other” media that should be joining OpenAP in next couple of months, “and that’s all great. But not as much transactional, put to use on a campaign-by-campaign, brand-by-brand basis yet.

“We think we’re sort at that start of the hockey stick and hopefully next year this will become just become the way everyone does business in advanced television and we hope to be helping with a couple of our buyer clients and then one or two sellers maybe, we’ll see.”

GDPR has impacted the EU temporarily, but while many people still think of programmatic in traditional display mobile as sold by open auction, Prohaska says that’s not the case.

“Fortunately, what we’re seeing is a strong move to PMP’s in digital, strong move to deterministic versus probabilistic data strategy. As we’ve been saying for about a year, classic short-term pain for sure with a lot of organizations but long-term upside.”

Prohaska Consulting recently signed its 260th client in the company’s 230th week of business as it expands globally, with its publisher practice representing one-third, tech-one third, the buy-side 20% and the rest investors and trade groups. “Fortunately, that idea of kind of helping everyone move forward under the prism of client first and if we’re there to receive some thanks and compensation, great. It’s been paying off,” said Prohaska.

“We understand that brands are going to demand their own special measurement. It’s not our place to determine exactly who they should use,” says Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy, NBCU. “So we’re allowing them to use a suite of attribution partners that we partner with to make sure they can measure anything they do.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Colella expresses enthusiasm for NBCU participating in the OpenAP audience targeting consortium and the need for added speed in moving the TV industry forward.

When NBCU looks at cross-platform viewing, it tries to deliver a “premium experience” regardless of where its content is being consumed by using a device graph that reflects that consumption, according to Colella.

“We’re able to use OpenAP to make sure that our planners can plan and the brands can plan across publishers” and then use a suite of offerings that are “great towards being able to measure these campaigns across platforms.”

Having recently joined OpenAP, “We’re very excited to work with Fox, Viacom, Turner to make sure that the industry is really moving ahead at the breakneck speed that we need to be going at. They’re our first partners that we’re so excited about.”

For attribution, NBCU is working with iSpot and is testing with Data + Math, among others. With iSpot, the company works with advertisers to define the outcome they want to measure and then tracks the success of the campaign, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

“Not every partner is going to be the best at every vertical, so we make sure we have a good host of those,” says Colella. “So we have an entire group that’s dedicated to just managing our data and partnerships.

“The overwhelming effect is that everybody wants the same thing. They all want to be across platforms, they all want to be able to plan that way and they all want to be able to measure that way.”

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.

“We’re actually introducing something that we think is really informative and revealing things about the new brand identity that’s going to be associated with this advertising company,” McDonald adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

Earlier this month, AT&T prevailed over the Justice Department in its bid to acquire Time Warner’s assets, foremost among them HBO, Turner and Warner Bros.

“We are very excited about the outcome of the trial,” says McDonald. “For sure, this actually allows our business to actually go forward and execute against the strategy that we believe is really going to be very, very valuable to consumers, to the marketers and publishers we work with as well as to the AT&T business for all.”

The branding effort at Cannes introduces “a new business that reflects a welcoming of the creative canvas, tied together with informed by technology and data in a way that truly advertising companies haven’t existed before.”

There are no words in AT&T’s branding unveiled at the Carlton, just colors, starting with “trusted blue on one end” signifying the company’s 140-year roots and the brand’s “credibility and high integrity,” says McDonald.

“And that transitions across the face of the Carlton to produce a new color, bright coral, which has all of what that color embodies. Energy, passion, innovation. And that is the brand color of the new name for this advertising business and we can’t wait to talk more about what we’re going to be doing inside that business later this year.”

Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.

“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”

Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.

“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.

As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.

“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?

“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”

At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.

“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”

OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”

When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”

That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”

This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.

“Certainly the more partners that join OpenAP the more it allows us to really have that standardization across a greater amount of networks within the portfolio,” Bosetti says in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.

When Fox, Viacom and Turner announced OpenAP in March of 2017, Bosetti says Initiative was excited by the opportunity “because one of the challenges that we’ve had with audience buying is the limitations to optimize within different walled gardens versus trying to optimize across the entire cable or broadcast landscape.”

On April 19, NBCU disclosed that it has decided not only to participate in OpenAP but will bring its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.

“With NBCUniversal aligning with the consortium, we are all accelerating the industry’s efforts in providing more premium scale to drive greater adoption of advanced audience targeting, while laying the groundwork for future innovation.” the sales chiefs at Fox, Viacom and Turner said in a joint statement.

Bosetti sees advanced audience targeting as a complement to the traditional way of buying primetime shows and daypart mixes, something that isn’t about to change.

“But layering on an audience-based approach allows us to extend that reach across other channels or other platforms that we not be reaching them through those more traditional, fixed-TV buys,” she explains.

OpenAP also offers transparency into buys instead of a “black box” approach to reaching audiences. This gives advertisers increasing confidence to continue investing in advanced TV targeting.

“Clients more and more obviously want to make sure that every dollar that they’re putting their investments into places that are driving the most effectiveness to drive their business,” Bosetti says.

In an interview with Beet.TV one year ago this month, NBCU’s EVP of Business Operations & Strategy, Krishan Bhatia, expressed support for OpenAP while underscoring his company’s efforts to help advertisers target audiences beyond traditional Nielsen demographics.

Bhatia said NBCU was “generally supportive of any efforts that help the TV ecosystem go above and beyond the traditional age/gender based way of measuring and transacting on audiences, including this one,” a reference to OpenAP.

This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit.   You can find more videos from the series here.   The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.    

“We have a roadmap that takes us through essentially a 1.5 release and it’s going to go even beyond that,” Dan Aversano, SVP, Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions at Turner, says of OpenAP in this interview with Beet.TV. “We have some very big, progressive and we think exciting ideas that we look forward to telling the marketplace about as we move through 2018.”

OpenAP, whose founding partners are Turner, Fox and Viacom, was designed to bring consistency to audience targeting in terms of how segments are defined and the data being used. Right now, Nielsen and comScore data are the options.

“But in the future, we firmly see that expanding based on marketplace demand,” says Aversano.

OpenAP users can on-board first-party data, “Which is actually I would say the biggest trend we’re seeing. The most sophisticated advertisers and agencies are moving that way.”

One challenge in particular that OpenAP users face—the process of matching first-party data in the platform—is something that will improve with time, according to Aversano.

“We want to make that process easier, faster, more cost efficient. Right now matching first party data can take a little bit of time. It can also cost a little bit of money,” he says.

OpenAP is strictly for planning purposes, not for buying inventory. “That’s today. Who knows what tomorrow holds.”

Once OpenAP users create audience segments they wish to target, they can use the platform to share those segments with Fox, Turner or Viacom. Buying negotiations take place in the traditional fashion. Information about campaign impression delivery then shows up in the OpenAP platform.

Turner is working with beta products “a little bit outside OpenAP” to map audience segments across digital delivery venues, “an FEP, potentially OTT and potentially even VOD when and where we’re addressable,” says Aversano.

Noting that TV audience fragmentation is being driven by media sellers, he believes the onus is on them “to build an advertising ecosystem and advertising products that enable us to consistently re-aggregate that audience and use data to drive value.”

This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.

Advertisers are looking to solve two particular types of problems, Levine explains in this interview with Beet.TV. They are seeking more concentration of impressions against “whatever it is that they looking to target,” or “looking to get incremental reach beyond the audience that they’re currently able to be exposed to.”

He dubs “exciting” some synergies that exist between the way Fox offers its inventory and how agencies plan. The latter wants to optimize against a precision target across all the media sellers within the TV ecosystem. This is typically done by networks and dayparts.

“We can optimize down to the selling title level, we can optimize down to the quarter hour level, we can optimize down to the spot level,” says Levine. “That’s a really big part and then the other part is frequently what we do with this new type of conversation about buying against precision audiences is we help de-risk.”

This is done by offering guarantees against advertisers’ actual audiences “that the advertiser and the agency is investing a lot of time and energy and money and resources into planning against.”

Levine divides the video market into three segments: linear, addressable TV and digital.

Linear is extremely well-defined with a currency and rating system that, while still panel-based, provides “a concept of unduplicated reach” along with “an agreement for calculating impression delivery.”

Calling addressable TV “a younger market,” Levine notes that while early movers tended to be MVPD’s, Fox currently can offer advertisers access to between 10 and 12 million addressable households.

“What’s different between a lot of the programmers and MVPD’s is that we’re selling our national ad minutes,” Levine says. “We have a lot more frequency, depending upon if you have broadcast only or cable network only, or a mix of the two. It’s somewhere between five to eight times the amount of ad minutes that an MVPD has.” As for digital, the “vast majority” of Fox’s inventory “is actually viewed on the TV set.”

Digital TV impressions, he adds, are “actually the same type of impressions as addressable and, by the way, they’re not all that different from the impressions that are delivered in the linear world.”

This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu.   Please find more videos from the series here.

Earlier this year, after Fox, Turner and Viacom announced the formation of OpenAP, details emerged about how comScore’s advanced audiences would be one of the first data sources integrated into the new system. And while OpenAP is just up and running, comScore’s Cathy Hetzel believes it’s a tipping point.

That’s because definitions of audience targets—say, automobile intenders—tend to vary. “What you find is that targets are defined differently” Hetzel, who is EVP of Commercial at comScore, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

One of the best things about OpenAP, according to Hetzel, is that the networks involved are using common definitions of audience targets as supplied by comScore. It can then “measure the effectiveness of that target on the back end and it’s exactly the same target. The advertiser is not having a slightly different definition of a specific target that they’re in the market to find.”

With everyone within OpenAP doing business off of a unified target, its “a true tipping where we have the opportunity as a measurement company to really see the power of big data sets working together,” Hetzel says.

She would like to see the concept expand to other media sellers, regardless of whether it’s under the auspices of OpenAP. Given the possibility of competing audience-targeting consortiums, “we’re happy to oblige, obviously.”

It’s also a good sign that the industry is thinking about ways in which it can reach scale because “We’ve always been about scale.”

OpenAP isn’t the only partnership in the advanced TV landscape, along with acquisitions and mergers and the vertical integration of networks and operators. Meanwhile, some newer startups are maturing and converging with one another.

“I think that’s good for the industry. There’s been a lot of noise the last several years and I think some of that noise is starting to settle down,” says Hetzel.

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

The President of Investment for GroupM North America acknowledges that advertisers know more about TV households than ever before. “The plethora of data out there is tremendous,” Schwartz says.

The limiting factor to addressable TV advertising, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV, is not how many houses but “the amount of available inventory that we can use to reach those people. But I do believe that as the industry grows, more and more money will follow that.”

Targeted TV is different in that there are various ways to reach particular audiences and apply various data “to really hone in and value the inventory based on what your marketing clients are trying to achieve.”

Asked for his thoughts on the audience targeting consortium OpenAP, which Fox, Turner and Viacom began to roll out this month, Schwartz says the good thing is “is that the media companies are working together, which is something that’s positive. But I need to have more visibility on my side and be able to do stuff behind the curtains, you might say.”

Using household-level data from Rentrak is one tactic for advanced targeting in which price negotiation is still done based on demographics. Schwartz cites a “value differential” he can return to clients based on being able buy more of the impressions his clients actually want.

“I may have 10,000 customers but 3,000 drive 40 percent of my business, and I can now look into things like that,” he says.

A veteran of innumerable Upfront negotiating seasons, Schwartz says this year’s was better for sellers than some people had anticipated. “I think coming out of the marketplace, demand was a little bit higher than most pundits on Wall Street thought.”

A major challenge isn’t people shunning TV but not getting good measurement of how and where they are doing so. “We’re measuring too many times the device and not the content,” Schwartz says. “We have to move to the content and the ads that are in the content.”

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

Time Warner’s CNN and Turner Sports this week signed on for Nielsen’s OOH measurement service, which uses a panel of 77,000 people across the top 44 DMA’s to capture viewing that has typically gone uncounted.

“This really enables the industry as a whole to assign value to the audiences that are being captured and not currently tracked in the traditional ratings up to this point,” Kelly Abcarian, Senior Vice President, Product Leadership, Nielsen says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Under terms of the agreement with Nielsen, the Turner units will get viewership credit for both program and commercial ratings for up to seven days of viewing of various pieces of content, as Variety reports. CNN is the first news network to make use of the Nielsen technology. Disney’s ESPN and 21st Century Fox’s Fox Sports already subscribe to the service.

For cable sports or cable news, Nielsen has seen lifts on a total day of 8 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively, according to Abcarian.

The OOH metrics are a separate number that do not contribute directly to C3 or C7 ratings. “But it is a Nielsen metric that then gets made available to the buying platforms as well to allow buyers and sellers to transact on those audiences,” Abcarian adds.

As Nielsen adds more networks on a national level to its OOH offering, it’s also making it available to local stations and cable networks.

“We really see this as a broad coverage play to ensure that these audiences are being counted across our national ratings and our local ratings alike.”

The 77,000-person panel, when projected out, represents about 65% of U.S. TV households, according to Abcarian.