Robert Andrews

In the days after the desktop web was the only channel game in town, many publishers struggled to adapt to a world without cookies. Then, new regulations and changing consumer sentiment put the brakes on advanced ad techniques which sought to solve the cookie problem. But the latest emerging tech promises to give open-web publishers […]

Back in November, we reported how MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan was seeking out some big-name entertainment companies to serve as foundational partners for Connect Learn Explore (CLX), a new strand at Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity. With just a few weeks to go before the annual ad industry shindig kicks off in June, it […]

The TV ad-buying landscape remains a highly analog business – but, no sooner have digital platforms begun making in-roads to the process, already the newfangled technology of blockchain is staking its claim. After a year or two of talk and theory, now several vendors are out there, promising to enhance media-buying transparency with blockchain, a […]

For publishers which want to take advantage of header bidding but which find the main open-source technology too onerous to manage, Rubicon Project thinks it has an answer. Discovery Inc., Clearing House, AutoTrader, Southern Cross, Austereo and Domain are amongst the publishers participating in a closed beta of the new Demand Manager. a solution which […]

The little TV startup that began when a couple of college kids hacked together a satellite dish, tinfoil and a wireless transmitter is now dreaming of a world in which viewers are put in control. Philo was formed out of Tivli, after a pair of Harvard students devised a way to give viewers a better way […]

Around the marketing world, everyone is talking about the rise of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands – those that don’t rely on anyone else’s retail channels and which exert great control over their advertising capabilities. But, whilst not every brand is a Casper, Allbirds or Soylent, many other traditional companies which are reliant on marketing partners could […]

It’s the mother of all roll-ups. Engadget, TechCrunch, HuffPost, AOL, Yahoo, Flurry, Verizon and a host of other media properties, all part of what once was called “Oath” and is now just “Verizon Media”. But how do advertisers take advantage of that mega media platform, and what exactly is Verizon Media’s offering? In this video interview […]

With YouTube’s TV and Originals still evolving, the company is trying new ways to bring more valuable ad inventory to this year’s digital content NewFronts. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tara Walpert Levy, YouTube VP, Agency and Brand Solutions, says YouTube TV, the cable-free $49.99-a-month TV service, is now being offered to advertisers outside of Google Preferred, […]

The global combination of Sky and NBC Universal’s ad operations is continuing apace, with news that the European platform will adopt NBCU’s CFlight unified advertising metric. Sky’s Sky Media ad sales house, which sells inventory for both Sky’s owned-and-operated channels and others’, will adopt CFlight across all content and platforms in the UK from autumn […]

Twitter has gone in to the 2019 NewFronts with a new raft of content, revealing that last year’s line-up didn’t just benefit brands – it also led to a 60% hike in payouts back to the publisher partners. “Payouts to our publishing partners grew 60% over 2018 and they did the same in 2017,” says Laura […]

Why do some of the best innovations emerge out of college campus hacks? Once upon a time, Mark Zuckerberg bestowed The Facebook on Harvard, soon joined by four other founders including another Vardian, Andrew McCollum. By the time Facebook was busy turning cashflow-positive, in 2009, two other Harvard students, Nicholas Krasney and Tuan Ho, were busy […]

Over-the-top TV services are booming, and marketers are scrambling to understand how a new world with so much ad-free subscription TV can add up to an opportunity for them. But, in that sizeable portion of OTT which remains ad-supported, an emerging strain of strategy thinking is this – OTT doesn’t just offer hope of precise […]

In the exploding world of online TV viewing, it may seem like all the real gravity and momentum is with subscription and on-demand providers. Netflix, Amazon and, soon, Disney+ will have garnered significant market share. But a growing school of thought posits that, whilst the subscription video-on-demand rivals scrap it out in a segment increasingly […]

The US TV consortium set up to ensure advertisers can buy advanced TV ads using consistent audience segment descriptions may have just lost a key member, after WarnerMedia decided to approach the same problem on its own. But that isn’t stopping the remaining members of OpenAP from launching in to a new phase with the […]

Subscription video-on-demand services are booming, as a new generation of viewer decides the combination of at-your-service TV without commercial breaks is worth paying for. That growth, coupled with networks’ reduction in linear ad times, seems to put advertisers in a tricky fix – if the size of the ad hole is diminishing, where do ad […]

In the face of the digital ad duopoly, many rival publishers in parts of Europe and South America have, over the last three years, began begun putting aside their differences. In search of bigger audience scale and more user detail, they have began pooling audience ad data, in a bid to impress ad buyers who are […]

Connected TV has gained massive consumer penetration. Now comes the monetization part. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Eric Ferguson, Nielsen VP media analytics, reveals the sheer scale at which over-the-top TV devices have gained US traction: “238 million Americans in a given month have access to a Connected TV device.” “That’s almost 80% of all […]

Compared with the outgoing medium of linear, analog TV, internet-connected over-the-top (OTT) transmission seems to offer unrivalled opportunity for advertisers to target and measure their ads, and to attribute those ads through to business lifts. But that opportunity could be squandered if marketers don’t use technology which has full sight of the addressable market. That […]

A 1980s TV commercial for the combined shampoo-and-conditioner Wash & Go made famous the catchphrase: “Take two bottles in to the shower?!” Now ad-tech firm FreeWheel is effectively uniting the “shampoo” and “conditioner” of TV ad sales – creating a unified product in which A+E Networks can manage two different kinds of ads. Comcast-owned FreeWheel has […]

As subscription video-on-demand services have gained enormous up-take with consumers, traditional cable companies feel threatened enough to launch their own takes on the online bundle. But what if, for a cable provider, video wasn’t the thing worth paying for at all? What if market evolution suggests MVPDs should open their platforms to the new competition, […]