Robert Andrews

SAN JUAN — If you are a national cable TV network these days, how do you go about crafting an ad sales pitch to big-brand clients? For Davina Kent, it is increasingly about data. Kent is the Comcast VP of advanced TV sales who, earlier this year, came on board at NCC Media – the […]

SAN JUAN — Across the media business, the emergence of new TV platforms and new legal limits on ad targeting have sent people scrambling toward a single goal – creating people-based profiles that describe individual consumers in their entirety, not just the life they represent on individual devices. But, whilst adding consumers’ TV, video and […]

SAN JUAN — As marketers embrace advertising across the growing plethora of devices, their campaign naturally spreads to new devices. As that happens, they risk exposing the same person to the same ad on different channels. But, on the flip side of “reach”, technology can also help control the “frequency” with which an ad is shown, […]

It is a problem faced by many broadcasters around the world – do they want to be a distributor of programming in order to build an ad or subscription business, or do they want to produce shows they can syndicate to other platforms? An already-healthy global acquisition market is now buoyed further by the emergence […]

Across the TV world, many broadcasters have historically operated a number of different ad pricepoints, charging more or less depending on the volume of commitment from ad buyers. But what if, after two years of international outcry over the way that media are sold, you went in the opposite direction? What if, incentivising a bigger […]

Digital is in the ascendancy and traditional media are “dying” – that has been the stock industry narrative for the last few years. But Jan Isenbart isn’t buying it, and he says the TV industry needs to start telling a more confident, more truthful story that communicates the real picture. “In the last years we’ve […]

The credits are not ready to roll just yet. In fact, by staking out its unique value and by tweaking the way it sells advertising, television could yet retain its historic leading edge amongst marketers. That is what the Swedish TV network TV4 has done, and TV4 sales director Malin Häger claims the company is reaping […]

Traditional media folk often look enviously at the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon – massive tech companies they see as disrupting and cannibalizing their advertising income. Even when it comes to marketing their own products and services, it  can seem like the giants have their own platforms through which to reach consumers. In fact, […]

We already know that IBM is building a blockchain for media buying. But could the technology also help companies understand the truth and the reach of content? At Cannes Lions, IBM and Mediaocean announced “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain,” along with Unilever, Kellogg and Kimberly-Clark. A blockchain is a public, distributed, […]

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and SBS‘ addressable advertising technology wasn’t deployed that quickly either. But, now that the Belgian TV network broadcaster has rolled out its offering to help advertisers target individual viewers, it is finding it can make more money from more advertisers. “We can sell it much more expensively than we […]

It is now a decade since UK competition authorities prohibited Project Kangaroo, a proposed, Hulu-style video-on-demand service in which three UK broadcasters would offer their content through the same ad-supported platform. So the intervening decade has seen individual broadcasters double-down on their own-brand viewing platforms. In the case of Channel 4, the ad-funded public service […]

Each holiday season, people look forward to presents, spending time with family or good food. Kim Portrate is looking forward to a big industry milestone. “We’ve got about 50% penetration of connected TVs – or we will have that sort of by Christmas in Australia,” says Portrate, CEO of Think TV, an association advocating for the […]

The newest technology to get TV people excited is “addressability”, the practice through which internet-connected TV devices allow for granular targeting of individual audiences. That would move the world beyond the old system of selling ads against shows, to one in which advertisers buy actual audience members. But getting there globally may not be straightforward […]

The biggest mass medium of them all is facing its challenges – but television remains the best way marketers can build a brand. That was the view of EGTA, a trade body representing European broadcasters’ advertising sales units, as it took its members on a study trip to meet US peers in New York. “If […]

What if your TV ad could follow you from the living room, to the bedroom, to the restaurant? In 2018, that is the reality that many TV companies are now engaged in – ensuring that advertisers can get guaranteed outcomes, like driving footfall from people who watched an ad. And it’s one which A+E Networks […]

When it has the world’s largest media market right at its border, how is a national broadcaster supposed to compete? For CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, it is about thinking big. In this video interview with Beet.TV, CBC GM of revenues Jean Mongeau says he is turning on its head the traditional phrase, “think global, […]

When you run a mass medium like TV and the largest advertising channel in the world, you hold all the cards. At least, you used to. TV operators are familiar with setting the terms of the deals through which marketers get to buy air-time – even the very process which leads to deals getting done […]

If you believe some of the hyperbole, as new ad tech and tools give brands greater ability to plan and buy for themselves, the role of the ad agency is now over. Disintermediation is the order of the day. A recent ANA survey showed 35% of marketers expanded their in-house media buying capabilities in 2017 […]

It may be across an ocean, but the advertising challenges faced by main broadcasters in France are little different from those in the United States. In other words, operators are striving to upgrade their TV services with more digital targeting and reporting capabilities in order to satisfy ad buyers that have rapidly been turned on […]

In a world of fragmentation, partisanship and increasing separation, there is an untold story of cooperation in the media business. Around the world, operators are coming together in partnership, seeking scale to fight common challenges. That is what Germany-based broadcast group RTL is doing with more than 400 partners. Its Adconnect unit is an ad […]