Robert Andrews

COLOGNE — Last year, 4C Insights of Chicago bought itself a leg up in the fusion of social and TV advertising, by acquiring TV monitoring outfit Teletrax from Civolution, to know what’s airing when and where. Now the online ad targeting outfit is tooling up for further expansion, by taking a $26m series C investment from Kayne […]

WASHINGTON, DC — Ten years ago, blogging wasn’t new. People had been using weblogs to post tidbits and updates for a couple of years already. But Chris Cillizza saw an opportunity. The journalist launched The Washington Post’s The Fix to provide a unique take on political news, in a market that was already becoming crowded. “When […]

COLOGNE — The world’s biggest ad agency holding group may soon spend more money with Mark Zuckerberg than with Rupert Murdoch, as it aims to shrink its reliance on Google in the media mix. But its CEO is still searching for other horses to back, in a digital ad world that is increasingly led by just two runners. Sir Martin Sorrell reveals to Beet.TV […]

WASHINGTON, DC — Over the last couple of decades, there have been many extensions and plugins that aim to let web users annotate the pages they browse. The latest is Genius, the site which, previously, let users annotate song lyrics to provide greater insight but which this year opened the technology up to any web page. Chris […]

COLOGNE — In the last few years of advertising technology innovation, many ad-tech vendors’ sales strategies have looked like an aggressive playbook for disruption. But the TV industry industry looks far less tolerant to that kind of enforced change. After all, it remains fairly resilient, and holds a lot of the cards still in its […]

COLOGNE — The media agency is changing. In a world where clients can do more themselves, or go elsewhere for services, agencies may be under threat. Michael Kassan thinks he has seen the future for a rejuvenated, more relevant model. “We just completed advising AT&T … a month ago …on the largest single review in history, I […]

COLOGNE — Is a big touchscreen in a car a driving aid – or a media device? Is an internet-connected fridge one of life’s little efficiencies, or a chance to communicate with householders? And how do you dress up these innovations anyway? Those were some of the questions on lips at the big DMEXCO marketing conference […]

COLOGNE — Publishers like The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Sky News, Facebook and YouTube are now gaining traction for their 360-degree and virtual reality video productions. Could advertisers do the same? In this interview with Beet.TV, Starcom Worldwide Global Brand President Lisa Donohue joins the excitement with an emphatic ‘yes’. But how should brands and […]

WASHINGTON, DC — A presidential election cycle is a big deal for any US paper, but few more so than The Washington Post. So WaPo, now under Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ ownership, is upping the game, building on its its text reporting heritage with even more video. The difference from previous years? More kinds of video, distributed […]

COLOGNE – Google’s efforts to break in to TV seem to have had as many reboots as a dodgy old laptop. But the lingering developments in Chromecast, Google Fiber and more give broadcasters the jitters, says an ad-tech exec who meets with them frequently. “Google sees intermediaries like television networks as being unnecessary,” according to Videology‘s chief commercial […]

COLOGNE — The UK may be preparing to leave Europe, but UK satellite TV platform and ISP Sky is heading farther in to combining its European business and uniting advertisers’ opportunities, across multiple screens and across the continent. The company, which is the UK’s leading pay-TV provider, has satellite addressable TV system AdSmart and cross-platform ad sequencing system AdVance under […]

WASHINGTON, DC — If you just have to be at the next Donald Trump rally, The Washington Post back have your back. The newspaper now publishes not just regular 2D video but is also shooting video in 360-degree format from certain key events, like Democratic and Republican election rallies. In this 2D video interview, WaPo strategic […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The best branded content comes from niche publishers that care, that scale and which can help advertisers rise above clutter with a strategy that is both data- and outcome-driven. So says Jim Bankoff, the CEO of Vox Media, home to some of the web’s rising-star, pure-play publishing brands, like The Verge, Vox and Eater. […]

Video ad tech vendor Teads has already made waves for introducing auto-playing video ads in between text paragraphs – in its words, “inventing” the so-called “outstream” format. Now it is set to offer interactive video ad units, too, by acquiring Brainient of the UK. The acquisition is announced on Monday. Terms are not. But Brainient’s […]

There’s building tech products, and then there’s creating for a purpose. Too often, brands are eager to leap in to one technology or another without really considering respective strengths and applications, says IPG’s mobile and technology agency. “Two months ago, everyone was talking about virtual reality,” notes Travis Johnson, Ansible‘s global president. “Then this phenomenon came along called Pokemon Go. […]

Box, stick or platform – what shape is your internet TV experience? There are a growing number of routes to internet TV for consumers, and that means confusion and headaches for marketers, at least for now. In this video interview with Beet.TV, IPG Mediabrands global innovation officer Chad Stoller says all kinds of moving pictures – whether on […]

It’s a theory we’ve seen before – if more content becomes pay-for and ad-free, will opportunities for advertisers dry up? Media content has traditionally been funded by either consumer income or advertiser income. If the needle moves toward the former, as it is doing through subscriptions like Netflix, Hulu and Spotify, what does that mean for the traditional […]

What does IPG’s mobile and technology agency want from the future of digital advertising? A focus on experience over statistics. That’s what Travis Johnson, Ansible‘s global president, is hoping to find when he visits DMEXCO, the big advertising technology conference in Germany, next month. I hope that we move away from pure statistics and numbers and […]

In the battle between apps and the web, the web is fighting back. Having already introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to speed up loading experience, Google has also launched Progressive Web Apps (PWA), a collection of technologies to make entire sites behave more like native apps. And that development may bring a big boost to […]

Little by little, an advertising world that, over the last couple of years, succumbed to the wonders of numbers and the transformative potential of data-driven targeting and buying, is course-correcting to remind itself of one crucial ingredient – people. Now it is becoming increasingly common to hear even technologists and sales execs talk about “creative”and “engagement” just as […]