MIAMI – At the POSSIBLE conference, Kevin Krim, president and chief executive of media-measurement firm EDO Inc., arrived with a message that probably startled at least a few ad executives wandering Miami Beach meeting halls in search of cold brew and attribution models: the future of TV measurement apparently runs through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Yes, that Maslow. The pyramid from Psych 101.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Krim compared the evolution of TV measurement and AI-enabled advertising tools to the climb from basic survival toward “self-actualization,” which isn’t usually a phrase heard near a retail media cocktail reception.
“In our industry, AI can help us move up that pyramid,” Krim said. “Get the basic needs solved so much more easily and readily, and give us back more time, and in some cases, more money, to pursue those higher order needs.”
This may be the first time in advertising history that “share of voice metrics” and “human fulfillment” have appeared in the same sentence without irony.
Krim said EDO is trying to accelerate that climb through ChatEDO, the company’s LLM-powered interface that gives marketers quicker access to TV intelligence data. Or, put differently, fewer people trapped in dashboard purgatory exporting CSV files until midnight.
TV wants credit for more than ‘awareness’
Krim spent much of the interview making the case that television deserves to stop being treated like the decorative throw pillow of the media mix.
“TV is a brand and demand medium,” he said, arguing that TV advertising now drives measurable consumer behaviors including searches, website visits, app usage and even interactions with AI chatbots after viewers see ads.
That matters because the industry has spent years worshipping at the altar of closed-loop attribution from search and social platforms while TV sat in the corner muttering, “I helped, too.”
According to Krim, the data increasingly supports television’s role deeper into the funnel.
“What we’ve revealed by watching the customer journey and seeing the behaviors that are triggered by exposure to TV,” he said, is that viewers often move directly into action after exposure to ads.
Sports continue printing money for everyone involved
Krim also weighed in on why live sports rights continue costing approximately the GDP of a small island nation.
“Live sports and other live events are really the engine that drives this ecosystem,” he said.
According to EDO’s data, engagement rates for ads in live sports programming are “significantly higher” on a per-person basis compared with other types of content.
Which helps explain why media companies continue backing armored trucks full of cash up to leagues for rights packages while executives publicly insist they remain “disciplined allocators of capital.”
Krim said sports create uniquely engaged audiences who care not only about the game itself but also the ads surrounding it. In media terms, that is basically the Super Bowl’s entire business model.
AI creative means more ads, not fewer humans
On the creative side, Krim took a relatively balanced position amid the current AI gold rush, where every software vendor now promises to “unlock storytelling at scale,” usually while generating six-fingered consumers holding melted hamburgers.
“The human will stay at the center of creativity,” Krim said. “Taste and judgment are just unique human traits.”
Still, he argued AI dramatically lowers production costs and allows marketers to generate far more creative variations than before.
“The idea that we need one or two perfect creatives for a campaign, were really based on a scarcity mindset,” he said.
Krim’s broader point was that marketers should stop obsessing over a single perfect ad and instead let performance data determine which creative executions work best for different audiences and campaign moments.
In other words, the future of advertising may involve fewer “big swing” creative bets and more machine-assisted Darwinism for 15-second spots.
ChatEDO tries to rescue marketers from dashboard captivity
Krim also detailed the scale of EDO’s data infrastructure, which includes 375 million ad airings and 2.6 million creatives collected over roughly a decade.
Before ChatEDO, extracting insights often required specialized power users navigating complicated dashboards while the rest of the organization waited helplessly nearby asking Slack questions like digital Oliver Twists begging for another pivot table.
“What ChatEDO does is put that powerful database at the fingertips of users,” Krim said, allowing marketers to ask simple or complex questions and get answers “in 15, 30 seconds instead of minutes or hours.”
That speed, he argued, frees agencies, brands and networks to focus less on hunting for data and more on optimization and business outcomes.
Or, in Maslow terms, finally escaping the bottom of the pyramid where ad ops teams survive entirely on caffeine and screenshots.
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