As someone who is responsible for television advertising sales, Joe Marchese is bullish on the medium. But as a viewer, he wants a lot more in return for his investment of time.

“I love what advertising affords and supports content and storytelling,” but the current “incarnation of the market” has just been between publishers and advertisers and forgetting the viewer, Marchese says.

“Joe as a person who sells advertising is bullish on it, as a content creator we want it, to support it. But as a viewer, the value isn’t there,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, which took place at the Luce Auditorium at Meredith Corporation in Manhattan.

Marchese, who is President, Advertising Revenue at Fox Network Group, sees ROI on TV ad spending as a two-step process.

“The opportunity to get someone’s attention, that’s step one of an ROI process. Step two is what are showing them and what are you telling them,” he says in response to a question from interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization.

It’s the responsibility of media companies to offer marketers “the best opportunity to talk to people, to have their attention,” Marchese says. “And so we build products that optimize for the best opportunity to talk to people.”

For the second part, “we have to be collaborative” or else the viewer loses out.

As the founder of engagement-advertising pioneer true[X], which he sold to 21st Century Fox, Marchese has a rather simple view of the world. “There’s twenty four hours in a day, people spend only so much time with media, people spend only so much time with ad-supported media, people spend only so much of that time with advertising actually paying attention to messages,” he explains. “Your greatest share of that possible, in whatever format, it could be out-of-home could be television, could be digital, your greatest share of people who you want to spend time with your message, that’s what you’re optimizing for as a marketer.”

He’s not fixated on marketing funnel parameters.

“I don’t care what part of the funnel you’re in. If you’re just learning about a product or you’re ready to buy a product, everything comes down to did you get someone’s attention.”

Asked by Swartz for a 36-month prognosis for the TV industry, Marchese narrows things down to two types of content: on-demand and live. The first will “require very different ad formats and systems” including frequency reduction and higher impact “because in the on-demand environment, people just learn that this is the way they should watch.”

Live programming “will hold advertising in a much better way but we need to be smarter about what we do with it.”

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month, Marchese will participate in a leadership forum on the Future of Television presented by FreeWheel, in partnership with Beet.TV, at 10 a.m. on Tuesday June 19. Check back to this post for the agenda and registration.

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.

By Steve Ellwanger on @steveellwanger