There was no doubt that consumers had completely changed their viewing television venues, but that was just one component of the larger picture, Smolin related in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science.

“You have to have the broadcasters and programmers that are in a position where they really want to lean in for what is bringing data into advanced television,” Smolin said in response to a question from Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM.

“But you also have to have on the buy side, you have to have the agency ecosystem be in a position where it’s really ready to start using that and converging maybe the TV investment team versus what had been the digital trading desk.”

Amobee made its wager after assessing a variety of technology providers and determining that Videology was unique compared to companies that had fashioned themselves to fit into the programmatic space “for a world that came out of remnant display advertising and frames every problem like that,” Smolin explained.

Given the difference between display and long-form, premium video, “Videology to their credit had designed from the ground up to solve the problems of how TV works. That was uniquely powerful, and we thought it was the right technology at the right time and it’s had a huge impact on our business.”

Now, with Videology’s assets and Amobee’s partnership with Nielsen “we are able to bring converged measurement to linear plus digital activation. When we use the term advanced TV, it’s very much about being able to take that digital-first audience, first-party data, and to use that within what is video, what is OTT, what is connected TV but also to linear.”

Noting that eMarketer predicts linear will be 50% or more of all TV budgets by 2022, Smolin said it’s important for many brands to think holistically and for Amobee to provide “true, converged media solutions.” Another thing Videology had in its favor was its sell-side presence, “and that’s also critical because if they’re not positioned with the right tools to be able to sell the way that the advertisers want to buy, then it doesn’t work on either side.”

He echoed the concerns of many in the industry that agency structure remains an impediment, as some still have siloed TV investment and digital trading teams. “They don’t have to be the same people, but getting them to look at the same measurement data and turning that same measurement data into integrated planning” needs to happen.

Asked how TV can win back ad dollars that have flowed to Facebook and Google, Smolin cites data, targetability, measurement and scale. Where TV has an edge is that premium, long-form content “is not the strength for Facebook and YouTube. If the broadcasters, the programmers, are now bringing the data that gives you the audience and the measurement at the scale they already have, they’re now in a position to compete very effectively with much higher value ad units than what Google and Facebook have been doing.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

Six months ago, multichannel video demand-side platform Amobee acquired Videology. Now the former describes itself as a video and linear-TV tool to allow advertisers to plan against and deliver campaigns “against really any format that they want to deliver, which could be display, mobile, social. But also into connected TV and linear TV,” the VP of Global Business Development says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

“With Videology, we really get increased focus and driving increased demand through our linear product and driving convergence between linear TV and digital by connected television devices.”

Amobee provides both supply partners like broadcasters and agencies a broadcast platform “to apply data to make their linear plans smarter,” Rogers says. It’s driven by what Rogers calls “the Amobee advanced-TV brain” as linear TV budgets migrate to connected TV.

“The dollars are starting flow as seamlessly as possible right now from one format to another, with data as sort of the underlying feed and baseline.”

As convergence develops, Amobee considers traditional supply-side platforms as very important partners. “What we need to work with them on is making their connected-TV inventory look like linear TV inventory for planning and execution purposes.”

Rogers alludes to a large agency client that uses the company’s linear platform to make its plans efficient against data Amobee provides. “That’s got to be at the show level, there’s daypart considerations, all those different things. Right now in connected TV you sort of see it at the broadcaster level.

“What we need to do is upgrade our integrations with them to make sure that connected TV starts to look like linear to drive that convergence. Not necessarily making digital budgets into connected TV. That’s the convergence that we’re really starting to see.”

This segment is part of Beet. TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.

Singtel’s Amobee now seeks to simplify the delivery of advertising across all channels and screens—including video, display, mobile, and social. Its platform includes the Amobee DSP, Amobee DMP, Brand Intelligence and DataMine analytics.

“With Videology, we bring to bear a lot of solutions for the sell side. We believe that the liquidity between the buy and the sell side are necessary for the ecosystem to really drive forward and to circumnavigate the disruptors out there that are emerging right now,” Yi says.

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, he names one of the biggest of those disruptors: “Amazon and their capabilities to run the gamut of the whole consumer funnel.”

Asked what he sees in the marketplace and what Amobee’s clients want, Yi says they recognize a “tremendous opportunity to improve yield both on the buy side at the portfolio level ,as well as the sell side when we’re looking at siloes and across siloes. There’s a lot of work to do, but a lot of people finally understanding the massive opportunity to do so and racing very hard to get that done.”

One common trend in the industry as a whole is the “tremendous amount of partnership” in both the U.S. and Europe in the form of OpenAP, EGTA, RTL’s television marketplace “where you’re combining television, audio, outdoor. So there’s a great opportunity even outside of the traditional television space for these media companies to own more of the that consumer funnel.

“So we have to figure out from the technology and the client side how are we going to approach the full funnel ourselves. It’s not good enough to focus in year one to three on just linear and video and television and going across screens.”

Proceeding further down the funnel requires “the right partnerships and the right relationships,” Yi 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.

These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.

Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:

“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”

Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:

“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”

Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:

“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”

Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.

To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”

Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

To hear panelists at the recent Beet Retreat Miami explain it, lunar landings might be easier to achieve than getting TV broadcasters en masse to quickly embrace the future.

Asked by moderator Ashley J. Swartz to explain the implications of ATSC3.0, Rob Weisbord, who was recently named Chief Revenue Officer of Sinclair Digital Group, stepped up to the dais from the audience and said, “It’s taking IP technology, layering it over the linear transmitter so it gives you a hybrid approach. It puts broadcasters into a bit business.”

While that sounds exciting, reality quickly set in. Mike Kubin, EVP, Media at Invidi, explained how his company began working in 2003 with distributors to get its software into digital set-top boxes.

“It took us forever to make that happen,” Kubin said. “Right now we are in five terrific distributors in the United States. Our goals are to go international, but there’s only so much we can do. At the end of the day, they tell us what we can do or what we can’t do.”

SintecMedia CEO Lorne Brown cited a “future of TV survey” his company did in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters in which just 30% of respondents said they were ready for advanced TV. “Of those 30 percent, 60 percent said they were going to rely on legacy, in-house, home-grown technology to deliver advanced TV,” said Brown. “So only 30 percent are ready and 60 percent believe they can pull it off with the stuff that they have in house. I think that’s a major problem.”

Said Swartz: “All I’m hearing is more increased complexity.”

Jennifer Koester, Director of Global Partnerships for Google, took a positive approach. “I think the dichotomy that we keep talking about between linear and digital, it’s going away. I think we need to kind of step back from that and talk about solutions and technology that bridges the gap.”

She listed among the industry’s needs simplifying the ecosystem, making cross-screen reach and frequency easier, plus driving more value and being able to show it with regard to premium video inventory. That led to this exchange:

Koester: “The shift is going to happen and when it does, I think it’s going to happen very quickly.”

Brown: “I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be a slow, painful…”

Koester: “I think we’re in the slow painful part right now.”

Brown: “I think even ATSC3.0…”

Koester: “That’s going to be slow.”

Brown: “And so how fast can Comcast roll out addressable boxes? All of this is really, really slow.”

Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development for Videology, explained the complexity involved in trying to “be nimble” when dealing with integrations with systems for order entry, decisioning, trafficking, billing and CRM systems. While noting that media companies leverage Videology’s software to optimize the planning of data against media, it’s not always used for programmatic transactions.

“As an example, we just landed the press about Fox, a great partner client of ours, they use it for direct sales. They’re not using it in a programmatic fashion,” said Yi.

Swartz related a recent visit to a broadcaster to discuss a solution from her Furious Corp., only to experience a “not made here mentality.” She concluded that the meeting was a waste of time.

Brown summed up the differences between programmers and operators. “If I’m a national programmer, my strategy has to come from legacy linear outward. Versus if I’m an operator I can lean much more into advanced TV and impressions because I control the pipes and I have the data. Legacy linear for a national programmer is foundational and that’s really, really hard.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

So it was at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 when representatives of Tru Optik, Inscape, Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Team Arrow Partners gathered on stage with moderator Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. While there was overall cordiality, there was no mincing of words when discussing the business and technical challenges of audience measurement.

They ranged from agency compensation that accentuates cheap CPM’s over business outcomes to the speed with which campaigns can be analyzed for return on investment. After summarizing the four core ways to measure TV—panel, set-top box data, automatic content recognition (ACR) data and in-app—Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston offered these observations on device validation and audience de-duplification:

“If I spent a million dollars with Hulu and a million dollars with NBC and a million dollars with Fox and a million dollars with Crackle, that’s great that I had 100 million impressions. How many households did I reach?” De-duplicating across multiple publishers and platforms is “not anything super sexy or exciting, but it’s some of the basic things that people come to expect across linear and digital.”

Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, cited speed to market as a big challenge. “Campaigns are running longer and longer, or somebody is always on in the marketplace, so our traditional methodology of test and control is just too slow quite honestly. So we’re investing very heavily in new models that are based upon artificial intelligence and multiple models running simultaneously so that we can get faster results and so that we can get true in-flight reads that somewhat mimic what the end result is.”

Then there’s the issue of whose data are deemed to be the most useful, according to Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development at Inscape. “What we hear a lot of is ‘we think that the legacy data sets and specifically Nielsen data is flawed.’ And then people will look at our data and they’ll go ‘well this doesn’t match up with Nielsen data.’ The same people that believe that those legacy data sets are flawed have business systems and operations historically built around those datasets that you literally would have to practically blow up the entire market just to get everybody to change.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, GroupM’s dedicated agency for retailer Target, addressed one of many elephants in the room: how some agencies are compensated. “The idea that you want to target tightly to reach an audience to drive a response but you’re being held accountable to declining CPM’s is wrong, obviously. It’s misaligned. It sets up the wrong incentives.”

More than one panelist took issue with the preponderance of companies that claim to be able to do various things—leading to people at other companies burning time just trying to find the truth.

Said Swanston, whose background is in finance (J.P. Morgan), to much laughter: “I’ve never kind of experienced an industry where there’s so much smoke blown. The advertising and tech. A lot of people are full of it in this industry. And I say that in a nice way.”

Added McAfee: “There are an absolute crap-load of companies that are way out over their skies and we think it does a disservice to the market. We spend entirely too many cycles trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. As opposed to just doing our day jobs.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Such observations arise when people in key positions peer beyond what’s currently happening in the TV space, as was the case during a panel at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel. Joining Spiegel were Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid; Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising at TiVo; and James Shears, VP, Advertising at Sorenson Media.

“There will be a big emphasis on how do you actually tell a better story,” said Chalozin. “How do you respect user attention. This value exchange of allowing users to choose what experience they’re interested in.”

These elements won’t be optional. “All of those things will become table stakes and will be standard for every marketer on every platform,” Chalozin added.

Asked by Spiegel to outline the potential parameters of one-to-one interaction between viewers and what they are watching, Chalozin steered away from what a decade or so ago was standard thinking about so-called interactive TV.

“It won’t always be this I click on a sweater in order to buy that,” said Chalozin. “I don’t believe that people will actually transact on a television. You would save things for later. You would have some type of universal shopping cart and you can save it for later and it will be aggregated on your phone so you can check out.”

TiVo is headed down the road of advanced personalization to assist content discovery. In October of 2017, the company announced the availability of its VOX products, which facilitate entertainment-centric voice control and hyper-personalized viewing recommendations, Horstman explained.

“It’s all about natural language understanding,” he said. “Pick up the remote and say ‘what’s on TV tonight?’ And then based on your historic viewing and based on what we think you’re interested in based on a whole series of machine learning algorithms, we’ll make recommendations of what you should be watching.”

This gives rise to new ad products, including what Horstman termed “sponsored recommendations.” In addition, TiVo will offer sponsored videos. “You’ll be pulled into it as a consumer because we know enough about you through all of the analytics and all of the data that we’ve got. We’re not going to be doing interrupt-driven advertising. We’re going to pull them into an experience that they will get value out of.”

Meanwhile, Sorenson Media is out to create an entirely new ecosystem that does not rely on current infrastructure to provide live, addressable linear beginning in 2018. Its partnerships with TV manufacturers gives its automatic content recognition chip a front row seat to everything that happens behind the glass.

“The media player in the TV does actually take precedent over anything that’s happening, whether it’s through the MVPD or something else,” Shears said. “The bet really is about an ecosystem opportunity. It’s less about media sales and transactions. It’s actually about bringing people to the table to create an ecosystem that allows for a little more robust opportunity in addressable.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

This was the approach taken by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization, as she capped off the proceedings at Beet Retreat Miami in November.

The final panel of this year’s conference featured Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights; Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud; and Jakob Nielsen, CEO of GroupM’s Finecast addressable TV business.

Declaring that “TV needs to change,” Gupta pointed out that while so-called enemies like Facebook and Google require advertisers to “do it their way” behind walled gardens, at least those companies offer application-programming interfaces. Those API’s facilitate valuable things like ad buying, targeting, reporting, measurement, creative testing and creative trafficking.

“Where are the API’s for the one trillion impressions” that comprise traditional TV?, Gupta asked.

Harrison said the Retreat was a great place for him to gain a better understanding of the financial and technical complexities of advanced TV. His reflections:

“You have to be able to adjust and redirect to achieve your goals. Coming from an Oracle Data Cloud perspective, I’m a bit neutral to all of this because regardless, we look at data as the fuel for innovation and it’s how do we enable this data in every and any place that a client wants this to be to achieve some goals.”

Nielsen warned that progress will be curtailed if agencies and tech suppliers make things too complicated for marketers. Said he: “One thing I’ve seen with advertisers is they are super excited about what we’re talking about. They’re seeing benefits of household targeting, using their own first-party data, to be able to do creative rotation in a different way, near-time optimization. That’s a journey that we’re on. We have to remember to take them on that journey, make it simple, give them what they need but don’t give people too much.”

Swartz suggested that it’s “human problems, not technology problems, that are holding us back.” This led to a discussion about current business models and methods that, while familiar and comfortable, won’t move things ahead at the desired speed.

Gupta described attending meetings with agencies and marketers in which everyone understands the importance of more data-driven TV audience buying. When he asks how they are currently executing it, responses typically include Microsoft Excel. “Then we say okay how are you processing large-scale datasets? ‘Well we don’t have the engineers to take second-by second-data from ten-plus million devices,’” Gupta related. “The point is, you’ve got business issues around talent, around the software not being there, around the horsepower not being there. Those are the issues holding you back. It’s not the desire to do something.”

Said Harrison: “Innovation doesn’t happen because you desire it. It’s because you must do it. You really don’t have a choice.”

Nielsen said there are too many tech solutions and there should be more use of fewer of them going forward. He offered these examples:

“We use Videology within Finecast to do some of the decisioning we’re doing and we have Sky in the UK use Videology as well. We work with Invidi in Australia, they won a fantastic deal with Foxtel, and we were very supportive of that. We went in nearly hand-in-hand and said we suggest you pick Invidi because that works with our systems and that means we can spend more money with you.

“The unpleasant part of that is there’s tons of technology companies that won’t exist in the future because there’s simply too much and it’s too complex.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

In advertising, buyers are getting excited about a world in which planning moves beyond the broad demographic audience targeting of yore, to a world of advanced TV, where granular characteristics and data can help target specific audiences viewing specific content.

But this emerging world is, itself, more granular than simply “advanced TV”. So, how do companies at the vanguard of the revolution make sense of the wealth of different tactics coming in to view?

A panel convened at Beet Retreat debated that question. Here is a flavor of what they said…

Simulmedia VP, Partner Relations, Marc Goldstein:

“There’s just so much out there, and there’s so much happening. What we’re able to do in the national TV space, to be able to find a custom audience to be able to guarantee that audience to be able to guarantee on a conversion to be able guarantee on ROAS (return on ad spend). These are things that we’ve been talking about for a long time and marketers have been talking about but we’re actually seeing them in action.

“The power of the traditional GRP still exists as the power of your television. I think in most cases we’re seeing marketers though realize that we can take portions of their budgets and put it towards these new opportunities.”

IAB mobile and video SVP and GM Anna Bager:

“(Advertisers) need proof points.”

“Where we as the IAB really are going to double down and do research and try and understand better… there’s a lot of questions around six second ads… ‘What does that mean for ad load, and what and in the long run does that mean for us and our profitability, and how are we going to make money here?’

DISH Advanced TV & Digital director Adam Lowy:

“The digital tech stack is opening up a whole new ballgame. You’re just finding an audience and I don’t care if it’s on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Roku… you know, the DISH set top box doesn’t matter anymore.

“We’re going cross platform pretty soon… (There are) tremendous opportunities within live TV back to the big screen. We see a lot of sessions on mobile devices and we’re seeing a lot of people watching content like this.

“Six-second ads, we will see that. Will we see a collapse of ads and, you know, shorter pods? Yes, I think that works. In live TV, we probably won’t see that.”

Videology GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development Tony Yi

“There’s certainly service providers that have capabilities technologically to do some of it right now. I think from a mass national level, though, you really need to have respondent level matching with your dataset to truly understand who you’re reaching if you can get device level even better.”

Google Strategic Partner Lead Peter Dolchin:

“Publishers just want optionality at this point. There’s still a very distinct way and legacy way of selling this inventory through upfront and so forth. But there are specific advertisers who are looking for new experiences.

“If you analyzed all your first party data in one place, and Google Cloud can help you do that, it starts to take down all of these silos that exist that have been really difficult for the entire industry. Once you have the ability to have all of your data in one place, you’re able to analyze it in a much faster way.”

The panel was moderated by MediaLink managing director Matt Spiegel.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

The CEO of linear TV and video yield optimization provider Furious Corp. probed the panelists for their thoughts on how bring together all the players that are required to advance the TV and video ecosystem in a way that benefits brands and consumers.

What follows are some of the more salient dialogue and exchanges from Brian Katz, VP of Advanced TV Insights & Strategy at Eyeview; Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer at Alphonso; Tore Tellefsen, VP of TV Solutions at dataxu; and Neil Smith, SVP, Markets at FreeWheel.

On the need for speed of data delivery:

Alphonso has an always-on, real-time index of every program and ad airing across over 200 broadcast and cable networks and major OTT services, so buyers can see the number of units plus reach and frequency for their clients and competitors. “You don’t have to wait six months any more or six weeks anymore. You can get that in real time. And that’s something that TV buyers have never had before. In real time. Speed is key,” said Gall.

On the need for speed in personalized creative:

“We’ve made the process very simple for our clients,” said Katz. “We don’t show every single creative to the creative team. We storyboard the process with their ads, we show where we’re going to come into play with various creative and then we activate it.”

Asked by Swartz whether all clients are so trusting, Katz explained, “It’s not all marketers, all brands. And that is the challenge for us to educate and to develop that trust with clients and marketers.”

How does one get people who are very comfortable with traditional TV media to embrace more data-driven decisioning? “The short answer is patience and repetition,” said Tellefsen. “What we try to focus on or try to push and emphasize is get as many people to the table as possible and not focus on sort of specific point solutions or specific capabilities but spending a lot of time talking about the art of the possible. Here’s how other people are employing it.”

Said Smith: “We want to bridge that gap between marketers and consumers. We consciously work across the value chain. We do tons of education and advocacy to brands, agencies, agency trading desks, buy-side technology companies, data companies.”

Asked how much of an influence fear has on peoples’ ability to change, Katz responded, “I haven’t seen any fear out there. I think it’s just a lack of education and the unknown that people fear and maybe the way certain businesses are set up sort of the fear of losing certain budgets or influence over decision making.”

Will vertical tech stacks become horizontal ones in the desire for a more unified TV and video ecosystem?

“Right now in the TV to mobile targeting business or the attribution business it’s still probably in the innovation or early adoption phase of our industry and we have to really work together,” said Gall.

So is it the gradual consolidation of the largest media companies that will bring the tipping point to the industry or the power of advertisers to demand faster change? “What is going to have a greater influence on us thriving and not just surviving for scraps as an industry through the current storm that we’re in,” asked Swartz.

Katz: “I think it’s a combination of consolidation and collaboration.”

Tellefsen, speaking about the impact of companies like Amazon and Netflix, called those digital upstarts “tremendous competitors and tremendous forces in the industry. And it’s forcing everyone in this room to rethink how they do business, who they do business with and how they’re going to remain relevant to brands and advertisers for the future.”

Smith: “I think it’s the ability to put all the pieces together to deliver that that’s been the challenge that we’re working through. I think that gets a lot easier when you have consolidation and you have a critical mass to bring those solutions to market in ways that they can connect together and actually work.”

And on the need for greater collaboration: “I think the marketers are demanding it,” said Gall. “Within three years if you don’t deliver it, you’re dead. So I really think they’re pushing the piece.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Some thinking holds that video is video, regardless of the platform, as sellers are more frequently combining video and TV “and selling them as one type of advertising,” says Joan Fitzgerald, a consultant who specializes in advanced TV and cross-platform data.

“But the reality is, I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of this convergence between linear television and digital video,” Fitzgerald adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

One reason for the remaining distance is that consumer experiences “are fundamentally different” depending on how they are consuming TV/video.

Fitzgerald, whose background includes stints at Arbitron, comScore and TiVo, cites Fox’s experimentation with six-second ad units in the industry’s quest for greater understanding of the value of unit lengths.

“The reality is, you can’t just simply say that a six-second spot is worth less than a fifteen or a thirty because it’s shorter. There are many more dynamics in play from the consumer experience,” says Fitzgerald.

Meanwhile, impression metrics still reign supreme, even though advances are being made to link exposure to advertiser business outcomes. The key is being able to place a tangible value on viewer attention.

“We haven’t yet as an industry gotten beyond this notion of opportunity to see and an impression as a metric to something that might be more meaningful to the marketer,” says Fitzgerald.

Asked about video completion rates as a barometer of viewer attention, she says there’s “really a question as to how often a completion actually occurs on a fifteen or a thirty or a sixty just because the measurement tools that we’ve traditionally used really don’t measure that granularity. There are companies trying to measure completion rates, but it’s an art and not a science at this point.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Citing the FreeWheel Video Monetization Report for the second quarter of 2017, combined OTT, connected-TV device and set-top box VOD represented 49% of consumption in its ad management platform, says Neil Smith, SVP, FreeWheel Markets.

“It’s really shifted to the actual television screen,” Smith says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

It’s been about a year since FreeWheel and StickyADS.tv came together via acquisition. One of the biggest yields has been a unified solution for publishers that have traditionally sold most of their inventory through direct-sale insertion orders.

Now, having added a programmatic sales channel facilitates “a unified ad decision against any demand that publisher has access to,” says Smith.

As a result, there’s more unification of sales efforts as digital and linear work together. FreeWheel is seeing “a much bigger appetite and focus on programmatic guaranteed deals.” Switching from paper insertion order deals into programmatic pipes “but still fixed price guaranteed,” is how Smith explains it.

Being able to safely deliver programmatic executions in premium environments has led to more opportunities for sellers and buyers.

“We have a number of publishers that have major live sporting events and they’re now starting to use programmatic monetization in those events,” says Smith. “And the reality is it’s a great use case for it.”

For example, if a game goes into overtime, if a series runs to a seventh game, the ability exists to “tap into that impression by impression demand in a way that’s safe and doesn’t disrupt the user experience or cause sales channel conflict with direct-sold ads.”

One of FreeWheel’s main priorities has been extending the programmatic solutions it’s long offered for desktop, mobile, OTT and set-top box VOD into the traditional linear TV realm.

“We’ve got a good idea of what brands and markets are looking for as we move in the next generation of premium video and television. It’s really now a matter of execution,” says Smith.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

The Chief Revenue Officer of Eyeview says the desire for more predictability involves helping marketers figure out how various inputs—among them audience, calibration, media and creative—actually drive business outcomes.

“I think you’re going to hear a lot that brand advertisers want greater accountability, to manage that entire thing and how to be more predictable. To get performance and manage all of the variables,” Baadsgaard says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2018.

Knowing the role that video plays in reaching consumers emotionally and rationally, Eyeview has “done some subtle changes to personalize and make that creative resonate,” including overlays, in-cards and maps, with “huge” results. That lead to this question: If small changes have huge results, what about big changes?

“We believe it’s changing the edit, in a brand friendly manner. Taking B-roll and other footage and editing it specifically to resonate with consumers,” Baadsgaard says.

One example would be touting the tech chops of an automobile in videos viewed by tech enthusiasts and promoting that same car’s eco-friendliness to viewers known to be eco-oriented. Eyeview calls it advanced storytelling.

“You can have a great brand message, you can have pieces that speak to the features that are going to resonate with the consumer and you can have your overlays and in-cards,” says Baadsgaard.

The fastest-growing part of Eyeview’s business is addressable television, and one of its more popular offerings is an integrated digital video and addressable TV campaign. Among other attributes, this solution provides scale that addressable TV alone typically lacks.

The company derives learnings about creative iterations from the digital video campaign side and then applies that creative “weekly to the addressable TV campaigns that we’re running.”

Baadsgaard believes that some measures have been successful in curtailing digital ad fraud but it’s still “a huge problem. It’s essentially theft and it’s a real issue for our clients. We spend a lot of time eliminating fraud. We have a zero tolerance belief structure around that.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

With over-the-top and set-top box viewing at about 50%, the big TV screen still accounts for four out of five hours daily. But shifting viewing habits pose challenges for buyers and marketers, according to Herve Brunet, GM, FreeWheel Markets.

“We still plan in a very siloed fashion,” Brunet says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have planning processes for TV and planning processes for digital video.”

A single inventory pool would make things a lot easier.

“You can do things like de-duplicated reach, you can do frequency capping across linear TV and digital devices,” Brunet says.

A typical example would be someone watching a program on linear TV who can then be targeted with ads on an OTT device, which is connected to the same TV set.

“And we actually know that we’ve been targeting you twice. One time in a linear fashion and one time in an OTT fashion. So that’s a real value for the marketer.”

On the matter of currencies, transacting on a mix of gross rating points and impressions holds back progress in unifying inventory pools.

“As the TV world evolves more toward like digital decisioning, it’s going to evolve into an impression-based world. It’s going to be easier to unify the currency towards probably an impression-based currency or unit-based currency,” Brunet adds.

Asked about the evolution of the Comcast Advanced Advertising group, which includes FreeWheel, Brunet talks about helping to transform linear TV and digital video into one industry.

“I think the only way to make this industry work is look at the entire value chain, from the viewer to the marketer. And I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to address as a group.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Overall, the Principal Analyst believes that things are moving from “conversations about how the TV industry is evolving to action in the TV industry,” O’Connell explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

“It’s a massive industry. It was been very, very slow to change. And I think it’s still moving relatively slowly in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. But the energy this time feels meaningful, as though we are graduating to action.”

Because of her grasp of the complicated adtech ecosystem, it’s easy for her to boil things down when the issue is consolidation of players. She notes that some companies are interested in owning the full technology stack, “everything from data management and analytics and data as an asset” through to execution.

Then there are “the other set of companies who, at least so far, seem less interested in getting into the execution game. When you look at consolidation, to me that’s the most interesting dynamic,” O’Connell says.

The bottom line: will execution inevitably become “part of these massive clouds? It sort of feels like it will. And yet if you ask them, some of them deliberately take a stance that it won’t.”

While she appreciates the efforts of media companies like NBCUniversal to accelerate the shift from buying demos to audiences, O’Connell believes that things can only progress so quickly. There’s a lot of inertia in basic business dynamics.

For example, the traditional, procurement-driven practice of “getting CPM’s lower than the CPM’s that the agency achieved the prior year. Which is insane. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s a crazy model.” A model of “rewarding efficiency and effectiveness needs to become more of the norm,” she adds.

Asked whether Netflix will go the ad-supported route, O’Connell evokes the chicken-and-egg causality dilemma. Are consumers demanding ad-free services like Netflix, or is the company driving change that consumers embrace?

Either way, Netflix has made some companies up their game, according to O’Connell.

“So when we are in an ad-supported model, it’s one that consumers don’t hate but actually find valuable. Let alone not annoying, can you imagine if they actually found it valuable?”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

dataxu started down the road of expanding its OneView audience management platform some four years ago. Back then, the focus was to “solve the problem around mobile advertising” and being able to tie digital and cookies with mobile devices.

“What dataxu did at the time is they had designed the platform and the system with an eye toward TV in the future. So we built in the notion of household and individuals,” Tellefsen says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

With OneView, a variety of marketer’ data, when combined with mobile data about consumers, facilitates targeting people at the household level for connected-TV.

Another key piece of the solution pertained to inventory. This involved working with publishers and demand-side platforms “to bring to bear all of the best publishers and apps that are available across the connected TV universe and make it available on the platform for our clients to activate against,” Tellefsen says.

It represents a shift from contextual buying of connected-TV to deciding which audiences are most attractive and “do that across connected-TV and online video and mobile video.”

Tellefsen cites the example of a dataxu mobile streaming client that’s using its device ID’s and targeting those customers on connected-TV to do subscription upgrades. Other uses are taking first-party data—people who have visited a website or signed up for a subscription—translating that into digital audiences “and then reaching those same consumers with offers around their product and their service.”

Given the paradigm shift from context to audience targeting, educating advertisers and agencies requires “patience and repetition,” says Tellefsen.

“It’s not so much about describing the Swiss Army Knife and what it can do but how have other people employed these tools and these capabilities to solve business challenges.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

For both, the question becomes “How can we enhance the speed of change,” says Matt Spiegel, Managing Partner at MediaLink.

Thus the strategic advisory and business development firm grounds its marketer clients in a basic reality.

“We often say that if you’re going to participate in new things, you’re going to have to start with new measurement models,” Spiegel says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “What a lot of marketers are going through is what often is called the precision marketing journey.”

That voyage begins with accepting that measuring reach and frequency and exposure “is not going to be the sufficient metrics of the future in order to try new advanced things,” Spiegel says.

The new media world values a much more complex list of things. “That transition is semi easy to say and very hard to do.”

Choices must be made on the TV side as well. A major challenge common to traditional broadcasters is that their revenue streams “are much more finite and refined” than newer players like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix.

“They benefit from seeing the creation of content and monetization, i.e. the ad business, the media business, being a secondary or tertiary revenue stream to their core business,” Spiegel says. “That has a huge implication for how you think about the economics of funding content development and the decisions you’re able to make in that business.”

The question for big, traditional broadcasters: what is the role they think they can play? Do they use other companies’ technologies, go direct to consumer, try to handle their monetization options?

“I think there’s a future where not everyone that’s premium, high-end content creators will be in the ad sales or ad monetization business,” Spiegel adds. “They’re likely to choose other partners to help with that potential piece of the pie. That’s years out there. But I think those are the plates that have to shift.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

LiveRamp has long been active in the digital space, using both personally identifiable and anonymous information from device ID’s and cookies to provide a single identity graph—for people or households—across all platforms. Acxiom, meanwhile, worked with pay-TV operators to create a safe haven for matching subscriber files.

“Now we have a scenario where Acxiom and LiveRamp are, in fact one company and so we have these capabilities across all of these platforms,” Craig Berkley, VP, Television Partner Development at Acxiom, says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

MVPD’s and linear TV providers use Acxiom data to inform the placement of TV commercials “by indexing the commercial viewership against the segment that the advertiser is trying to reach,” says Berkley. Addressable campaigns are done in a similar fashion.

Lacking a linear presence, OTT providers are focused on addressable video or display ads on their interfaces, “but the process from an identity perspective and from a data provisioning perspective is pretty much the same,” Berkley says.

Acxiom’s rationale for advertisers needing a single source of identity data, providing unduplicated reach among other goals, is ease and uniformity of matching.

“Otherwise, if you’re using various and sundry companies for identity in this space and identity in this space, then oftentimes you’re not going to have an accuracy across all of those,” says Berkley.

What’s the difference between omni-channel and cross-channel? Acxiom believes that “omni-channel is what cross-channel will be when it grows up.” For a full explanation, see this blog post.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Agency units dedicated to specific clients were also more the norm a couple of decades ago. But it’s probably going to happen more often now given the enormous complexity of what marketing has become, according to Jason Harrison, CEO of Team Arrow Partners.

Target not only runs 1,800 stores but also sells online and has a “publisher-side business where they leverage their vast guest database for the benefit of other advertisers,” Harrison explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We needed an agency model to be able to manage across the breadth of everything that Target needed.”

Following a pitch by GroupM global CEO Kelly Clark to Kristi Argyilan, SVP of Media & Guest Engagement at Target, the foundation was laid for Team Arrow Partners. GroupM’s Gain Theory consultancy, of which Harrison was the founding CEO, had worked with Target on measurement and would provide talent to Team Arrow, along with assets from other GroupM entities and an integrated planning team built from scratch.

“And all that came together as one team physically sitting together working for Target,” Harrison says.

One of the more prominent Team Arrow ventures has been to team Target with NBCUniversal, providing the retailer access to the company’s ad inventory using an application programming interface. “We really viewed the NBCU partnership as a way to learn,” says Harrison.

While in the test phase, Team Arrow has been participating in NBCU’s Audience Studio targeting and linear optimization offering and with the media company’s partnership with 4C Insights programmatic TV. “So we’re looking at that to assess whether or not that makes sense as part of the larger video mix for target. What we’re doing is probably a microcosm of what’s going on more broadly in the industry.”

Asked if there will be more such dedicated agencies, Harrison says “You can’t help but probably see that be the case. You’ve got so much happening in corners of the marketing ecosystem where the complexity just continues to accelerate. It’s very difficult for a single agency to be excellent at all those things.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

“For every single one we actually underestimated how fast and how rapid the growth and adoption of OTT and connected TV would be,” says the company’s CEO, Andre Swanston. “Ad-supported, connected TV adoption is growing way faster than I think anybody predicted.”

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Swanston insists that the future is right now for OTT and connected-TV viewing and explains his company’s impending rollout to consumers of a data opt-out solution for advanced TV.

His future-is-now stance rests on the belief that it’s not lack of technology that’s holding back advanced consumer targeting via new and emerging venues. To Swanston, It’s “more of a speed of adoption across leading advertisers and networks and logistical and bureaucratic things that are kind of slowing momentum down.”

Want to use third-party data sources on indexed linear buy and then use that same data source for your addressable set-top buy? It can be done, along with using that same data source across desktop and mobile and connected TV. Attribution of commercial exposure to store visits and purchases? That, too, can be done.

“There’s just very little that an advertiser can want to do now across advanced TV that we can’t actually do,” Swanston says.

Despite the growth of OTT and connected-TV viewing, no industry association has thought to provide consumers with a way of opting out of the data collection associated with advanced targeting. So Tru Optik is leading the charge behind OptOut.TV, a one-stop solution.

“We just thought that it made more sense to be proactive in terms of trying to allow for consumers to have those type of privacy and opt-out controls as opposed to waiting for some issue, some lawsuit to happen or the government to put in place some sort restriction or barrier that really hampered the business,” Swanston says.

In January 2018, when OptOut.TV becomes available to consumers via the Web and through an array of OTT apps, Tru Optik will only support data providers, demand-side platforms and publishers that are compliant with OptOut.TV.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Thus says Tracey Scheppach, the former Publicis executive who spent upward of 15 years charting the future of more one-to-one targeted TV before forming Matter More Media. “At this event, what I have heard over the last three days is lots of talk about collaboration. And that is really encouraging because the infrastructure is getting there,” Scheppach says during a break at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have the tools to make media more efficient, more precise and now it takes the ecosystem to work together.”

One of her business goals is to bring more money to the TV space. She suggests catalogers take a page from marketers that have long known the power of the medium.

“They’re taking a list, they’re sending an asset which happens to be paper and putting it in a mailbox. Here we’re taking a list, we’re taking an asset that happens to be video and putting it into a set-top box or over the top in some IP-delivered way,” Scheppach says.

The 2018 TV Upfront “is going to be I think a watershed moment because the data is available and the programmers are starting to cooperate,” she adds. “We all know that TV works but they’re going to be able to prove it in a way that the Facebooks and Googles have been able to prove it to clients. Now TV is at that place.”

Looking back at the naming of her company just over a year ago, Scheppach recalls a meeting with Maurice Levy and other Publicis executives in which she presented “the future of addressable and data-driven television and what creatively Publicis needed to do.” When she made “waste less” one of her talking points, Levy chided her by advising “don’t ever say waste. That makes our clients feel like we were wasting their investment before.”

So she tried to make a positive out of it with Matter More. “We’re moving to a more precise one-to-one conversation that’s a progression. That’s the more part. You can’t just matter now. The world didn’t just change over night. It’s a progression to be able to matter more,” says Scheppach.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Two of the company’s newest products are a measurement solution for local broadcasters and addressability for linear TV, according to VP of Advertising James Shears.

Using automatic content recognition, “We understand what’s on the screen and we can actually measure what people are doing on the TV,” Shears says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “It’s not panel based, it’s not leveraging set-top box data. It’s just doing something that’s not been done in market before.”

Use cases for local broadcasters include informing their promotional activity and bringing insights to newscasts, both based on the entire life cycle of viewers. “During the newscast or local broadcast, did they leave the channel when a particular story was coming on or did they come back and stay and were heavily engaged? Maybe they need to push happier stories or do something they hadn’t really thought about.”

This represents a more holistic approach “where there has been a hunger for measurement that’s a little more informed and a little more second by second,” Shears says.

With addressable, Sorenson Media “takes out the traditional and starts understanding how you can leverage the digital ecosystem to do something that has been done in the linear TV side, but maybe not at the speed with which we can perform. The key for our platform is that we’re essentially creating an ecosystem.”

Because of everything it sees on TV screens, the company says it’s in a good position to “think about the stream itself” and improve viewers’ experiences. That could involve shrinking the 18 minutes of commercial time per hour and other ways “we can think about breaking the paradigm.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

“TV shouldn’t be looking at Facebook or Netflix and saying they’re stealing our revenue,” says Alfieri. “TV should be saying what are Facebook and Netflix and Amazon and Google providing that the customer, the marketer, needs today and how can we also provide that.”

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Alfieri also posits that brand marketers that do not take control of their data and have in-house data science capabilities are going to lose to those that do.

Alfieri is a recent addition to Cross MediaWorks, the network composed of video specialty firm Cadent, full-service agency TCA and one2one Media. He’s returning to the TV side from technology platform company Turn and admits to a particular “bias” for marketing, of which he learned the classic version in pre-digital college.

He cites a gap between people like himself who graduated from college in the early 1990’s and recent grads who possess more data chops and affinity. That gap has posed a problem for many brand marketers that “don’t understand the importance of a data foundation or a technology foundation in their own shop.”

Going forward, marketers that lack control and ownership of their data—along with the in-house capabilities of continually gathering data to comprehend the changing needs of their audiences—will be left behind.

“You’re going to lose to those companies who can. If you’re outsourcing those activities and you don’t have those core competencies internally, you’re ultimately going to fail,” Alfieri says.

He adds that it’s incumbent upon marketers to stay on top of data and technology so that they are in a position to drive change in the industry. They can “put pressure, positively, on the marketplace to be creative and start working together.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Case in point: Videology, one of the leading providers of technology to enable advanced TV ad buying, just launched a tool giving advertisers access to thousands of targeting criteria and up to 18 broadcast networks – with no service fee.

The company launched DETV Go effectively for free, with the goals of simplifying the buying process and removing the traditional fee structure.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Videology CEO Scott Ferber explained why – and his answers focused on two areas…

Simplicity:

“Our whole idea was, ‘How do we make it so that you don’t have to be an advanced television planner or buyer to actually come in here and do it?’

“We believe the ability to bring up to 60,000 beyond-age-and-gender, targetable segments to linear TV planning, trading, and execution should be just as easy as it is to go online and buy a concert ticket today.

“We wanted to start with what we thought were the three basic elements that TV planners today and how they’ve been looking at TV planning and buying over the last 50 years, we want to make sure that we nail those right from the get go.

“You will literally be able to plan, buy, execute, and report on advanced audience based opportunities at scale.”

Cost:

“We have been licensing technology in an enterprise fashion. The big thing that’s different is that we’re basically offering this up for free access to advertisers.

“Now, if they choose to go in there and actually make a buy, they’ve got to pay for the media and the data associated with that, and there’s contracts between media and data providers – but, historically, you needed to get involved in this very long enterprise services agreement.

“We’re trying to say, ‘Can we just remove all that, allow people to come in, and start seeing what’s available, and then once they decide to transact, sure the economics will flow.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Media technology provider 4C Insights cut its teeth on digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others. As it shifts into the linear television space to enable more precise audience targeting, it’s an instance of TV “borrowing a plan from the digital playbook,” says Chief Product Officer Anupam Gupta.

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Gupta explains some of the more important learnings gained from the social media space and reflects on the company’s programmatic venture with NBCUniversal.

Given their advanced advertising infrastuctures, which enable granular audience targeting, the big social media platforms provide fast measurement for campaign optimization.

“Those are good and those are learnings that I think you can apply to, let’s say, the world of TV where you want to target better, you want to have more programmatic tools and you want to measure and optimize faster.”

Another learning is that the data in social media “is huge and it’s real-time,” providing brands with consumer insights that can be used to identify the kinds of consumers they want to target. “We call it the unlimited focus group,” says Gupta.

The third learning he cites is the huge reach of social media. “So when you’re doing a true cross-channel campaign and if you need to find more reach or more frequency, you can use social media as an additive channel let’s say to television.”

Asked about the industry’s quest for uniform cross-platform audience measurement, Gupta says the focus should be on business objectives. Some brands are after upper-funnel lift, others actual sales impact and yet others everything in between.

“At the end of the day yes, there is a strong desire to measure things, but to has to tie back to the objectives that a marketer has,” says Gupta.

In a deal announced in October, the 4C platform has programmatic access to NBCU inventory that isn’t sold in the Upfront.

“Now you can bring the audience intelligence to bear against that inventory, build a plan that essentially hits the audience you’re going after and execute on that just like you do digital campaigns,” Gupta says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.