SAN JUAN, PR — At this point, many executives in the advertising industry might have hoped that the mechanisms for buying traditional TV ads and new digital video ads would have aligned.

But, whilst technology has brought buyers to that point, institutional factors mean many ad buyers still plan their clients’ spending in separate lanes.

That is according to video ad-tech platform Amobee‘s chief strategy officer Philip Smolin.

“The bigger challenge right now is organisational and operational,” Smolin says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“For a lot of agencies, you still have a pretty big silo wall between what is the TV investment team and the digital trading team. And they’re planning differently, certainly, they’re executing differently, but oftentimes they’re measuring differently.

“If you don’t have a common measurement framework for both of them to look at, you cannot get those teams to work in a collaborative, orchestrated way.

“That requires a lot of change organizationally and operationally, and in this industry, I think we sometimes over focus on looking for technology to solve everything. And I would say the technology and the data at this point is really a couple of steps ahead of the state of the industry and now it’s about implementing.”

In December, Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.

4Screen works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.

Smolin was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page