Robert Andrews

FORT LAUDERDALE — Personalization of web editorial experiences has been talked about for years, with few publishers deciding to let their readers customize their own editions. BBC News last week launched its most personalizable app to date, but content recommendation service Taboola‘s CEO says publishers should go further. “We’re just getting to be overwhelmed with […]

FORT LAUDERDALE — The New York Times wants to make a bigger deal out of getting its stories out to users of social networks. Last year’s leaked NYT Innovation Report flagged challenges with building audience using social, including insufficient use of Twitter by reporters and a Facebook account being run by commercial, not editorial, staff. […]

FORT LAUDERDALE – The digital ad industry may be starting to get to grips with the problems of fraud and viewability, but next up is the creeping threat from nefarious code. “The big priority for us is switching everything over to Secure Sockets Layer (SSL),” Google’s head of media platform sales, Jay VanDerZee, tells Beet.TV […]

FORT LAUDERDALE  — Two decades in to the era of the TV set-top box, ad agencies are still not finding it easy to get access to good audience targeting data from viewers’ homes, says a marketing veteran. “There’s a lack of data,” says Tracey Scheppach, EVP, who leads innovation at Starcom MediaVest Group and who leads […]

FORT LAUDERDALE — Video ad tech vendor Teads is getting ad buyers buzzing with its new take on video ad formats – letting specialist text publishers insert auto-playing video ads between their paragraphs. But how successful can this model be when readers can simply scroll past the video ads to silence and hide them? “Our […]

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fl – Which way is the wind blowing in the “programmatic” ad space? Away from real-time bidding and toward private marketplaces, according to one leading light. The collection of techniques referred to as “programmatic” all essentially mean “automation” but, whilst the phenomenon began with allowing the real-time automation of ad buying and selling […]

LAS VEGAS — Tastemade, a food and travel publisher and community whose producers and users publish video reviews, has steadily built up over 350,000 video subscribers on its YouTube channel. Now it is hoping more brands will take an opportunity to leverage that audience. Programming head Oren Katzeff tells Beet.TV the company has a studio, a […]

LAS VEGAS — A just-announced new video series on health innovations presented by a TV news anchor will not be the only foray WebMD makes in to video this year. Earlier this month, the health publisher previewed “Future of Health with Robin Roberts”, a digital mini-series fronted by the Good Morning America co-host. It will be […]

LAS VEGAS — The way TV ads are bought and sold is about to look a lot more like the web – but the web will have to look like TV first, says the chairman of the world’s largest media investment agency. “Television is sold on a 30-second spot basis, while digital is sold on […]

LAS VEGAS — The burgeoning array of internet-connected TVs won’t change the industry just because they are connected to the internet – they also offer new ways to interact with content. “In an OTT (over-the-top) environment, it’s a more dynamic environment,” Rob Aksman, founder of BrightLine, which enables interactive ads for brands on interactive TV […]

LAS VEGAS — Cisco used its visit to the Consumer Electronics Show to talk about new set-top box capabilities it is giving pay-TV operators. Company CTO Ken Morse, in this video interview with Beet.TV, talks about: Kabel Deutschland – A new box coming next year will meld live, on-demand, catch-up and time-shifted TV with internet video. […]

LAS VEGAS — Networks technology vendor Ericsson has a conception of the media world in five years’ time. “The Networked Society… our vision for the year 2020 – everything that can benefit from connection to the internet will indeed will be connected,” Ericsson content delivery marketing head Lisa Skelton tells Beet.TV. “Of those 50bn connected devices, 15bn will, at […]

LAS VEGAS — Rights restrictions traditionally have made it a challenge for many a digital platform to grab content. But Diffusion Group senior analyst Joel Espelien says one TV content type is lagging behind the others. “We’ve seen the rise of entertainment programming making it on to multiple screens – but we didn’t really see that with sports,” he tells […]

LAS VEGAS — A digital media world in which TV manufacturers keep changing their underlying smart operating systems risks wrong-footing and frustrating content owners, says Ovum TV principal analyst Paul Jackson. “A number of manufacturers here have switched horses in terms of what their OS is going to be,” Jackson tells Beet.TV in this video […]

LAS VEGAS — Broadcast networks, peeved that TV audiences are moving to platforms for which they don’t have big live sports rights, are likely to try negotiating hard when rights are due for renewal. “Broadcasters have paid godawful sums of money,” Paul Sweeting, a media analyst who consults through his own Concurrent Media Strategies and writes for […]

LAS VEGAS — The New York Times wants to make a big deal out of crafting sponsored articles for advertisers on mobile. “Native is the ad format for mobile … discoverable in-stream right alongside our own content,” says ad products SVP Michael Zimbalist. “We see a big opportunity for The New York Times and for […]

LAS VEGAS — Oculus Rift may have been conceived for playing games, but marketers increasingly view it as a place to communicate messages. “360-degree, immersive experiences are really starting to explode now,” according to DigitasLBi technology SVP Tony Bailey. He calls virtual reality “a new way of thinking about storytelling”. “If you’re in beverages and you […]

LAS VEGAS — One year after it was merged with Group M stablemate 24/7 Media, programmatic ad tech division Xaxis expects more industry M&A in 2015. “We always talk about how much movement there is in the industry,” says Xaxis chief revenue officer Nicolle Pangis. “But the fact is, that’s the norm in this industry. Every […]

LAS VEGAS — The more social networks across which brands attempt real-time marketing, the more channels they have to monitor for resonance. One Canadian startup, DIVE  Networks, wants to help out with that. “The landscape for brands is very complex. it’ so hard to keep up with real-time marketing,” CEO Deborah Hall, who previously founded […]

LAS VEGAS — The emerging age of targeted TV advertising will mean an end to reaching viewers based on the shows they watch and instead usher in individual viewer profiling. “Advertisers (today) are overwhelmingly buying audience … using content as a proxy for that audience,” according to Adobe Primetime’s principle product evangelist Noah Levine. “That’s […]