LONDON — Buoyed by the digital growth in programmatic buying, TV networks in the United Kingdom are developing a bigger appetite for data-driven media, says Liam Brennan, Digital Strategy Director of Starcom MediaVest Group, in an interview with Beet.TV. As an example, Sky TV is overlaying targeted ads into shows based on the the demographics of viewers, and tailoring ad breaks accordingly. That may be a sign of what’s to come.

“That’s where networks want to go, but measurement is a big issue. The more we can put all our online buying and our TV buying through the same system, we will start to overcome some of those measurement problems,” he says, adding that one of the keys to success in a data-centric world will lie in running TV and VOD buys together at an agency. “You are seeing the networks have  an appetite for introducing some of the programmatic buying for VOD buying into their programs and an appetite for consumer data.”

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

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