Robert Andrews

Do consumers want to speak to their ads? IBM and The Weather Company think so. After the latter’s digital division was acquired by Big Blue, the pair this year launched “Watson Ads”, using the artificial intelligence system’s natural language-handling capabilities to power a conversational new ad format. So what’s the big idea? For Weather Company CMO Jordan […]

Last year, estimates pegged Hulu revenue at $1.5bn. Even without sight of the split, it’s fair to say that advertising is becoming big business for the VOD joint venture. Now it’s considering its options for the next generation of advertising – virtual reality. Hulu began putting content in to VR in March, and is now looking […]

When Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013, we knew the paper was about to become a lot more techy. Indeed, Beet.TV has already chronicled how the Postbuilt its own in-house ad server (Prizm),software to write better headlines (Bandito) and a semantic software analysis tool (Clavis). That may sound like a departure for a […]

LONDON — When your ad is spreading across TV, pre-roll video, in-stream ads, mobile, tablet and umpteen other platforms, how do you begin to measure its success? That is one of the key challenges occupying the minds of brands and their agencies these days.  And it’s certainly one troubling GroupM unit Mindshare. “One of the […]

LONDON — The US is not the only TV market where census-level data has begun to be used to target television advertising campaigns. The technology is also being deployed in other markets, too, according to one of the industry’s top media measurers. “I think census-level data is very much a reality now,” says Margo Swadley, […]

LONDON –It may own several of the leading pay-TV platforms on the continent but, in Europe, group operator LibertyGlobal says its subsidiaries are enablers of the addressable ad opportunity for broadcasters themselves. “It’s about keeping the value and dollars in the content ecosystem – equipping our content partners with more tools,” Liberty Global advanced advertising […]

LONDON — Recent estimates are that around 46% of US households can receive household-specific, individually-targeted TV ads, through so-called “addressable” TV advertising. But, whilst US penetration is high, it is not necessarily the country leading the tech charge, says one exec with a multi-country view of the opportunity. “We see, in the addressable TV world. very much […]

LONDON — European satellite TV operator Sky is far more than a one-trick pony. As well as beaming satellite TV for the last couple of decades, Sky is also a telco, a TV channel operator and an ad sales house. That diversity gives it breadth that extends beyond its own platform, and beyond its own content. Case in point […]

MIAMI — Back in July, when the sun was still high in the sky and the presidential election was yet to rip the US apart, an event took place in ad-tech land that united two disparate tribes. Mediaocean, whose software helps advertisers automate their operations, acquired INVISION, a peer whose technology helps TV companies do […]

MIAMI — New technology means changing priorities. And marketers’ top priority is now being usurped, as new opportunities present new primary goals. That’s according to one ad-tech exec who spends his life talking with brands about the changing nature of their work. “Used to be, marketing was perceived as a cost center and the primary mission was […]

MIAMI — There are now several technologies coming to the table that aim to help broadcast operators dynamically switch commercials in their ad break to specific viewing households. But, by and large, just like connected TV itself, they depend on boxes, dongles, consoles or widgets connected to a television set. What if you could do dynamic ad replacement in […]

MIAMI — It’s called broad-cast for a reason. TV advertising, especially when its national, reaches a big audience. But in that reach also lays inefficiency. If TV ads reach consumers who can’t even access the buyers’ services, that’s wastage. But new-wave TV-buying techniques, infused with data, can help the problem. “I live in Manhattan,” Videa sales […]

LONDON — When you are facing the challenge both to beef-up your technology capability and to roll out across channels at the same time, should you pick multiple tools that can help each deployment, or one that claims to do it all? Many tech vendors these days are fond of boasting their “end-to-end” status, claiming to be able […]

LONDON — The organization charged with measuring UK TV viewing for channels’ advertisers, Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB), used to be criticized for its traditionalist approach to the task – a 5,1oo-household panel method supposed to represent country-wide viewing in a multi-media age. But BARB is reinventing itself. The board already measures laptop, desktop and tablet TV viewing […]

MIAMI — For a modern advertiser, it’s a thorny problem. These days, your customers are reachable on all manner of different screens and devices that, whilst connected to the internet, are not connected to each other. It makes consumers schizophrenic. In other words, they have multiple identities, scattered across services. And that is a targeting nightmare. But many […]

MIAMI — The ability to target individual households with a medium that is traditionally more used to shouting at mass audiences is here and now. But it’s not universal – and it’s not yet living up to some of the wilder dreams of ad industry executives. But “addressable TV” is about to go large, and it’s time to […]

LONDON — About 42% of US homes are now able to receive so-called “addressable advertising” – TV ads custom-targeted at individual homes thanks to one of a variety of return-path TV systems. But how much of the multi-billion-dollar TV advertising industry could be funnelled through that channel in the years ahead. It’s early days, but […]

LONDON — In the emerging world of “addressable TV advertising” – in which operators can swap out a standard 30-second spot for one custom-targeted at a single viewer – cable and online platforms may appears to have the upper hand. But satellite is far from out of the game. UK satellite pay-TV operator Sky had its AdSmart […]

MIAMI — Celebrating its third birthday this quarter is Admore, it’s a division of Frank Canella’s Canella Media, a company aiming to bring direct-response mechanisms to television. Led by president Brendan Condon, a former AOL international ad exec, the Temecula, CA-based outfit’s platform numbers an automated system for using a single insertion order to buy across TV, […]

MIAMI — You may find yourself deciding between two cars, or cans of beans or a hotel chains this week. But when did your judgements about the brands involved really begin? Earlier than you might think, according to one ad-tech exec helping brands capitalise on targeted video and TV ads. In fact, in a world increasingly dominated […]