That is something video and TV programmers – all facing competition from digital-native ad platforms that have long offered super-targeting – need to remain competitive.

“I think there are finally real ways for them to bring addressability to television,” says Vikram Somaya, Nielsen chief data officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“I think a lot of the issues had been – certainly from the sell side when I looked at it – was, ‘How did this actually work with measurement on which everything was transacted?'”

In February, Nielsen formed Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), a new group focusing on developing addressable advertising initially for internet-connected smart TVs.

That came after it acquired Sorenson Media, which had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, for $11.25 million.

Somaya says gives Nielsen the ability to give programmers addressable capabilities which also address how the opportunity is managed against ratings.

This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen.  For more segments from the series, please visit this page.  You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.

As an example, he explained during a panel discussion at the recent Beet Retreat in the City the process involved in NBC executing dynamic ad insertion. “Through FreeWheel, there’s probably 700 right now end points of where we have to integrate into in order to be able do that. But it can be done,” said Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales.

That’s the good news. However, more than 90% of NBC’s impressions are still delivered in a live, linear fashion.

“It’s going to involve programmers and distributors, MVPD’s, virtual MVPD’s coming together both to solve for the tech as well for the business rules. We are a business of legacy. It’s hard to change that but the will is there,” said Rosen.

Moderator Laura Desmond, who until recently was CEO of Starcom, asked whether the traditional value exchange between content providers, consumers and advertisers is “broken.”

Vikram Somaya of ESPN said the value exchange “isn’t good enough. For a long time, everybody in the system was making money and it made it very hard to change. We’re getting to the point now where everyone in the system is not making the money they used to make and suddenly we have to look in the couch cushions a little more than we had to.”

Desmond described the efficiency and effectiveness of TV advertising before describing a scenario that is destined to become as antiquated as rabbit ear antennae on top of a TV set. “You push a button, the commercial goes out, it airs, time delay, you post it, done. That’s a pretty simple and easy model.”

So is lack of education inhibiting the adoption of addressable TV ads? “The ad-supported experience needs to change,” responded Rosen. “Limiting commercials, but also it is about relevancy. We do know that ads that are more relevant to the user are going to be less annoying or perhaps not annoying at all or even welcome. Data’s going to help us with that.”

Asked by Desmond about the role of automation, Metcalfe, who is GM of LiveRamp TV at LiveRamp, said technology isn’t the problem. She recalled that before LiveRamp was acquired in 2014 by Acxiom, companies like Facebook “weren’t really interested in working with us yet. We didn’t have the reputation we needed, etcetera. Acxiom brought that to us.”

LiveRamp was in the early stages of powering custom audiences for companies like Facebook, but it wasn’t easy working with them because they wanted to control every last detail. “And it’s very similar to what I’m seeing now working in the TV industry today because it started to ramp up and become a larger part of their business. Everybody has to get comfortable with losing a bit of control.”

Asked by Desmond whether ESPN parent Disney is ready to compete in direct-to-consumer content delivery with the likes of Roku, Hulu and YouTube TV, Pandit said one of the joys of sports is that “no matter where you go you will get advertising.

“We can’t put our heads in the sand and say we should not go down the DTC route because we’ve done very well with pay TV and very well with digital. We have to be open to what consumers want us to do,” said Pandit.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We do believe that the horse has left the stable in terms of us looking at audience buying on linear.”

While it’s been doing linear optimization for ad targeting, Disney has begun to see “what addressable looks and feels like for our audiences,” says Somaya. This year and next,  the company will work with addressable partners to target ads at the household level.

ESPN offers a product that “essentially takes what we’re doing on OTT, which is completely measurable from a digital perspective, and then retargets those messages across our digital footprint,” Somaya explains. An ESPN viewer who is known to have seen a 30-second spot on OTT can be sequentially targeted with digital ads across the ESPN digital portfolio.

“As part of our integration more broadly with the Walt Disney Company we’re now looking to see how we do that broadly across all of the Walt Disney Company properties,” he says.

With the retargeting offering, ESPN can take a 30-second brand spot and “connect it to a series of digital notions that can actually do something as complex as sequential advertising to a single viewer. We can take a thirty-second spot and do a series of sixes against that same audience member across our digital networks.”

Based on ESPN’s own research and that of partners it’s worked with, the retargeting “has a really positive impact.”

Another ESPN offering, called “reactive TV,” enables advertisers to build campaigns around major sports milestones that are known in advance—for example, a player’s home run tally.

Having recently reorganized its sales, technology, direct-to-consumer and international businesses under Kevin Mayer, who had been Chief Strategy Officer at Disney, “we are now open for business as a one-stop shop,” says Somaya in reference to the upcoming Cannes event. “A lot of the conversations we will be having in Cannes will be around that notion.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Somaya talks about linear optimization across the Walt Disney Co. portfolio and why advertisers are becoming more comfortable providing their first-party data for targeting linear audiences.

“We are now seeing it rapidly approaching us in the form of syndicated data notions within linear television and I think we’re seeing the beginnings of being actually able to use first and third-party data in a linear television framework,” Somaya says. “So true, addressable television if you will.”

Disney is taking those notions “and broadening them out beyond ESPN” through its other media groups.” So it’s not just about the power of ESPN’s first-party knowledge of sports fans “but more broadly, how do our guests at the Walt Disney Company become part of that audience selling notion,” Somaya adds.

ESPN is introducing linear optimization into its linear networks “and I think over the next I’ll call it 12 to 18 months we’ll really start seeing the insertion of first and third-party data into our linear networks in a very, very I think forward looking way.”

One sought-for result is being able to change how television is given attribution for the things that it does, “which today digital gets an outsized amount of attribution for.”

Things are still in the early stages for media buyers wanting to target specific audiences as opposed to demographics. So the next 12 months will constitute the experimental phase, according to Somaya.

“Once we get past that and the systems are able to do this at scale, that’s when the whole game changes.”

Somaya calls live sports “the last bastion of communal viewing” and cites the upcoming launch of streaming service ESPN Plus as “adding even more content that makes our sort of super sports fans get access to things they’ve never gotten before in an almost completely new way.”

He encourages cooperation around data “and understanding how data can become mobile as much as possible. I think the other piece of that coin is allowing consumers to have control over what piece of their data is shared and allowing for an open value exchange.”

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