Robert Andrews

MIAMI — He famously under-spent his rival on TV ads, making greater hay from late-night tweets and sometimes outlandish monologues. So does Donald Trump’s eventual election suggest a crisis in TV ad effectiveness? When the most important political period in US democracy turns back the clock on what had been accelerating ad spend, is it time […]

MIAMI –The possibilities are endless, the data-points are infinite and opportunities to reach consumers abound. You want to allocate human staff to run all that? Good luck, says AudienceXpress‘s Walt Horstman – this level of complexity, in the new TV ad ecosystem, needs a fallback to code. “You apply an advanced dataset that is looking at … the audience impressions against […]

LONDON — In what is beginning to look like a season of exits for video ad-tech startups, addressable TV specialist INVIDI was last month acquired by AT&T, DISH and WPP. The 16-year-old company has come in to its own of late, by helping advertisers serve household-targeted ads in to TV streams in the two minutes per hour […]

LONDON — It just launched its new V6 set-top box and a weird Android tablet this week and, though the kit reportedly does not upgrade the advertiser offering, according to The Drum, UK cable operator Virgin Media is already helping serve targeted ads inside catch-up programming. Virgin Media, formed out of a merger of regional cable operators […]

MIAMI — Take two bottles in to the shower? In advertising these days, strategies appear to have bifurcated along just two such lines. In one, clients continue buying inventory around content deemed to match their target demographic. In the other, they buy super-targeted specific customers, regardless of where they are reading or viewing. But strategies don’t have […]

MIAMI — It needs to get bigger, but it’s not jus a scribble on a whiteboard anymore – the idea of targeting individual households with custom-placed TV ads, even in linear, is here and now. So says the man who used to run programmatic advertising at The New York Times, no less. “And the audience data […]

MIAMI — In some ways, it was the usurping of the old guard by the new school. Earlier this year, TV data company Rovi acquired set-top box outfit TiVo in a deal valued at $1.1bn. Then the combined entity took on the TiVo name, creating a corporation that own box the boxes and the data. So you’ll […]

MIAMI — Addressable? Advanced? The way that television advertising is bought, targeted, sold and measured is changing. The new connection of TVs and TV boxes to the internet is offering up household-level targeting, when ads are fuelled by smart data sets. In this panel video interview at Beet Retreat 2016, Group M’s MODI Media president Mike Bologna, […]

MIAMI — Want to target new TV ads with scientific precision? More and more US TVs are getting lit up with connectivity, making the real problem a back-end one. In other words, getting hold of the right data, and combining it in the right way, is becoming the new transformative opportunity in future TV advertsiing. […]

MIAMI — It’s become known as one of the major video ad-tech platforms on the block, allowing publishers and ad buyers to plan and executed targeting campaigns using an online dashboard. But Videology didn’t start here. Nearly a decade ago, things were a little more hands-on – and the company had to hold its customers hands […]

MIAMI — What do Santa Claus and a stick of gum teach marketers about the future of advertising? Turns out, plenty, according to one ad-tech firm helping advertisers leverage social data to target TV and other commercials. 4C Insights’ Anupam Gupta calls it “affinity targeting”, and he says the new technique could be powerful. “So, if you think […]

MIAMI — “Never the twain shall meet”, the saying goes. But, in the historically-separate worlds of TV and online ad sales, the walls are finally starting to come down. “Convergence is a word that comes up in every single panel that we’re all at, but convergence is real,” says Jason Burke, VP of strategic development […]

MIAMI — This year, it’s launched new services to help advertisers overcome viewability issues for mobile video. Next year, it scales up to the big screen. Integral Ad Science, whose technologies help advertisers and agencies understand the viewability and quality of the inventory they are buying, is coming to TV. “2017’s going to bring a lot […]

MIAMI — It’s the outfit that promises advertisers guaranteed business returns, even from television advertising. So what does Simulmedia say is the key to unlocking results? Brands win best when they bring first-party data to the table, says the company’s Jeff Storan. “The types of advertisers with which we’ve been able to deliver the most value are […]

MIAMI — If you thought advertising technology was becoming like rocket science, you may surprised how right you are – next up, TV ad-tech is going in to space. TV ad technology provider INVIDI, which enables household-level TV ad targeting for broadcast companies more used to beaming out a single message en masse, is getting excited about a technology […]

MIAMI – The great video ad-tech consolidation wave is continuing, with a twist.  AT&T and DISH have announced plans to acquire addressable TV ad-tech vendor INVIDI. But they are not doing it alone – the pair are joined in the deal by fellow acquirer WPP, the world’s largest ad agency holding group, though it is AT&T […]

MIAMI — “Multi-screen”, “converged”, “transmedia”, or “platform-neutral”? The number of ways you could describe the new challenge of reaching consumers across multiple devices is mindboggling. But one word is inarguable – “complex”. That’s why the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video, a collection of video providers advocating alongside the video ad-tech vendor, is aiming to stitch back together […]

MIAMI — TV is changing, and advertising with it. As TV services light up with internet connectivity, so, too, does the promise of serving individually-targeted ads to TV, in the same way as they already are online. Just don’t expect that prospect to go large any time soon. “There’s a lot of experimentation going on […]

MIAMI — Big brands are used to using mass media to reach mass audiences. Now that they can use the same media to reach tightly-defined ones – like individual TV-viewing households – they are having to learn new tricks. “The juggling act between scale and targetability is the fulcrum that we have to juggle,” says MasterCard’s media […]

BOSTON — If data is “the new oil”, it pays not to spill any. But publishers are too readily emptying the can over to middlemen who are taking its value for themselves. That’s according to one boss whose position at the top of a programmatic video ad platform has led him to conclude publishers need to […]