Robert Andrews

LONDON — Just a few short years ago, the worlds of media had become islands. Online, supremely trackable, was selling ads in a vacuum. TV, disconnected, looked isolated by comparison. Now, digital TV and identity resolution technologies are building a bridge, however. In its latest report entitled Assigning TV Credit: A Practical Guide to Attribution, FreeWheel […]

LONDON — It is now more than a year since GroupM launched Finecast, a new subsidiary to bring together various strands of addressable TV advertising. What comes next? Maybe getting it in to the hands of media agencies, says the man who runs the product. “We’re looking to bring that out into markets, so the […]

LONDON — It’s not so long ago that marketers were getting excited about how their jobs could be fuelled by data, that data was becoming “the new oil” powering their industry. Fast-forward to 2018 and it seems the pendulum is swinging a little bit away from the new dataism. GroupM director of audiences research Simon […]

SAN JUAN — It recently became the first vendor to gain accreditation from the Media Ratings Council (MRC) for video ad measurement in a connected TV environment. But what if the future of connected TV was one with fewer advertisements? In this video interview with Beet.TV, video ad-tech firm Innovid says it is working with publishers […]

LONDON — It owns several of the leading pay-TV platforms in Europe – but Liberty Global says enabling addressable, targeted TV ad opportunities for channels may involve a mix of third-party partnerships. “It’s (about) picking the right model for the right market,” says Liberty Global MD, advanced ads and data, John Paul in this video interview […]

LONDON — Eight months after NBCUniversal rolled out its new measurement currency for quantifying time-shifted and on-demand viewing on any platform, one exec thinks the deployment is a game-changer. NBCU’s aim with CFlight was to give advertisers a sense of how their marketing campaigns are being seen, regardless of time or location. In this video interview with […]

LONDON — If ads and subscription payments sit on two sides of the media see-saw, the trick is in getting the balance right. Whilst many broadcasters are now keen to copy Netflix’s subscription model, what could be the impact on ad sales? “There’s maybe less premium content available for the ad sales team to monetize,” […]

LONDON — The new owner of Ooyala’s adtech unit has promised to “reinvest” in the company as it bids to embrace a continuing digital advertising opportunity. INVIVI, which facilitates addressable advertising systems for global TV platforms, is acquiring what it calls “the advertising technology division (formerly Videoplaza) of Ooyala”. That amounts to Pulse, a software-as-a-service […]

LONDON — UK cable operator Virgin Media is replicating its evolving addressable ad strategy in Ireland, after acquiring a TV channel operator. Like in the UK, what is now branded “Virgin Media” is the product of a roll-up of several historical roll-ups of regional cable operators, offering telco and TV service, and is now owned […]

LONDON — For the UK’s main cable TV operator, targeted advertising was a long time coming. Although the cable distribution method, coupled with its use of a connected TiVo set-top box, seemed to offer distinct advantages, it was not until relatively recently that Virgin Media began offering addressable ad targeting capabilities. For that, it can […]

SAN JUAN — By now, we are familiar with the idea that software engineers in Silicon Valley can pretty much name their own salary. But it’s not just in technology that certain key staff are in-demand. In this video interview with Beet.TV, an ad agency boss says that all sides of the marketing industry are […]

SAN JUAN — The day is dawning when advertisers will be able to reach individual TV viewers using a mixture of data, connected devices and customized creative. Already, around 70 million US homes are reckoned to have this kind of “addressable” capability. But getting this won’t happen overnight. In this video interview with Beet.TV, DISH Media […]

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, […]