Robert Andrews

COLOGNE — Many operators out there are busy launching initiatives to super-target digital TV viewers. But, when you’re a telco with paying subscribers, you’d better be sure you don’t do anything that annoys your paying customers, says a Belgian quad-play provider. “As a telco, we see our users not only as an audience, we see […]

COLOGNE — Medialaan, the commercial media operator serving the Flemish-speaking Flanders region of Belgium, began making full shows available online last year. Now it is gearing up to better-monetize its full-show assets with online advertising. “It’s been better than we expected,” Medialaan digital head Olivier van Zeebroeck tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “After one year, without […]

COLOGNE — As an acronym, it doesn’t seem to make any sense. But “IVT” (that’s “invalid traffic”) is now the new industry jargon for what had been called “non-human traffic”, the scourge of online ads being triggered to defraud advertisers using fake views. The Media Ratings Council this summer put together guidelines for tackling the problem, […]

COLOGNE — Soccer is big in Germany – and that means soccer is watched a lot, not just on traditional TV but also on new online TV services. That’s what the satellite and telco operator Sky Deutschland is discovering in its multi-platform online viewing service brand, Sky Go. “If you look at the Bundesliga, for example, we […]

COLOGNE — This summer, Gabe Greenberg left his post as general manager of advanced and programmatic television at The Trade Desk to launch a conference about programmatic TV advertising. Dubbed GABBCON (the Global Audience Based Buying Conference), the new LA-based enterprise is more than an event; Greenberg is also hoping to harmonize some of the many different interpretations about what, […]

COLOGNE — When it comes to technology adoption, conventional wisdom goes that the UK, France and Germany – in that order – tend to take on new practices ahead of the continent’s pack. But that belief has been up-ended by an IHS research report which shows another country leads the way. “The top market is the […]

COLOGNE — Advertising technology platforms are giving advertisers and ad buyers unprecedented and ever-greater abilities to plan, control, buy and monitor their digital ad campaigns. But with this new power comes, also, degrees of complexity. For starters, now that advertisers rely on more and more external technology partners, they are one step away from the nuts and […]

COLOGNE — Programmatic ad-trading technology has been used to automate and refine the process of buying and selling online display ads. Now it is also making in-roads to online video. Next, many hope it will similarly revolutionise TV advertising. But is programmatic automation really all it’s cracked up to be? “When people talk about programmatic and they […]

COLOGNE — These days, a plethora of advertising technologies gives brands analytical insight in to a whole array of campaign data points. As the tech burgeons, many advertisers, scratching their head at all the results, speculate about combining those data in to a single score. But that would not be the right way to go […]

COLOGNE — The ad director of one of France’s biggest telcos has explained how French operators can sometimes be hamstrung by rules when it comes to new-wave ad tech and digital targeting. “We have a legal question,” according to Luc Vignon, the director of SFR Regie, the ad sales house of SFR, one of the country’s […]

COLOGNE — The TV times are a-changin’ – but that change won’t necessarily come all in one go. For TV industry professionals to adopt newfangled advertising technology already popular on the internet, it must first work alongside the very linear industry many believe it will unseat. “Consumption of TV content is changing…,” Jana Eistenstein, EMEA MD of Videology, […]

COLOGNE — European video ad tech vendor StickyAds is hailing its recently-announced tie-up with video-buying platform FreeWheel as signifying US growth for the company. FreeWheel has launched its Preferred Partners Initiative, a programme which will enable deeper integration of third-party supply-side ad platforms. Details of the deeper integrations were not available in FreeWheel’s announcement. “We share the same […]

COLOGNE — Today, the price advertisers pay for ads in online videos is set by the number of impressions or clicks from that video. But things are starting to change, says one ad tech vendor. “The pricing for video right now is predominantly CPM,” Tal Chalozin, CEO of Innovid, which helps turn video ad spots in […]

COLOGNE — Traditionally, in many markets, they have been distinct entities in the TV access world. But now broadcast access operators and the programmers whose content they depend on are working more closely together in the programmatic advertising future. “In the US in the also quarter, about 20% of the volume we were trafficking on our platform […]

COLOGNE — If UK government papers photographed by the press this month are to be believed, Channel 4 – the publicly-owned, advertising-funded broadcaster with a remit to be daring and creative – could be sold off, in the latest dimunition of state-linked organisations. Until and regardless of whether that happens, the company is shooting toward a future in which […]

COLOGNE — Over the last couple of years, many broadcasters and advertisers have been getting excited about so-called “addressable” TV – the ability to target advertising at individual households, in which consumers have distinct characteristics. But “addressable” may not take off everywhere. “Each market is a little bit different,” says Conor Mullen commercial director of RTÉ, the Republic of Ireland’s […]

COLOGNE — Mobile advertising is exploding, demanding focused investment and new strategic approaches from those who deliver it. “I only think mobile – I honestly think that’s the only thing we should be concerned with; we hear that from publishers. ” says LiveRail’s EMEA head Yoav Armstein, whose ad tech company was acquired by Facebook. “Mobile is […]

COLOGNE — They are the twin trends reshaping media and, with them, advertising. The surge of mobile and video consumption is the biggest opportunity in front of marketers, says one of Facebook’s advertising chiefs. “Where it took TV and radio years and years and years to reach 50 million users, it took just seven years to […]

COLOGNE — A couple of months back, we reported how AppNexus, the programmatic ad tech firm, told us it would reboot its video advertising offering after a troublesome start. And now it’s claiming initial results as promising. According to the company: “Based on conversations with clients who tested our product over the past few months, we’ve consistently […]

COLOGNE — Time was, Bloomberg was just a business terminal. But now the financial news behemoth’s empire stretches across print, web, TV, video, radio and whatever-next. Paul Caine acknowledges the strength in traditional media – but wants to monetize all the new opportunities, too. “Over the next 12 months at Bloomberg, we’re all about disruption,” the […]