Robert Andrews

Looked at the ad tech lumascape lately? It’s not pretty; it’s confusing. But it may not be that way forever. The boom in advertising technology is just a natural, cyclical response to a world of complexity, says one of the sector’s top execs. At times, it’s pushed to the background as an enabler. And at […]

LONDON — So far, The Guardian division that produces branded content for marketers has published that content only on The Guardian’s own properties. But that could change soon, MD Anna Watkins tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “At the moment, we are looking to confirm one of our first global deals, which will mean Guardian Labs […]

If you had tracked two trillion video views since 2006, you would probably know quite a lot about how people respond to video ads. Sarah Wood has, and her video ad tech firm, Unruly, is helping brands understand. “What are the drivers of shareability?,” she says. “Some people think it’s cats, some people think it’s […]

LONDON — So far, the discussion of so-called “programmatic”, automated digital advertising trading has centered on online display and video advertising. But what about advertising in content that no-one can see? Last month, GroupM’s Xaxis programmatic unit announced Xaxis Audio, a program to let advertisers buy at-scale ads in digital audio platforms, including both big mainstream UK radio stations and […]

If a tree falls in a forest and no-one was around to hear it, did it really make a sound? Many advertisers have asked themselves that question in years gone by, unable to know whether their analog media spend really made a difference. But digital ads that lead to digital actions mean attribution can delight marketers, says eXelate CEO […]

LONDON — Back in March, The Guardian and four other UK publishers with global ambitions announced they were forming the Pangea Alliance, a shared scheme to pool first-party ad data for ad buyers to target their combined 110 million users in a “programmatic”, or automated fashion. In beta testing since, now the alliance – which numbersThe Guardian, CNN International, the […]

Do technology and creativity mix? They do if you are attending this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “Cannes has evolved over the last couple of years to be this nexus of creativity,” Universal McCann chief investment officer David Cohen tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Now we’re seeing an influx of technology and […]

Through initiatives like the Media Ratings Council defining what truly constitutes a “viewable” ad, the industry has come a long way to eradicating fraudulent practices. But the spectrum of viewable ad-measuring platforms spawned by the search for accuracy means video ad sales are still in a pickle, says one video ad tech boss. “There’s a lack […]

Last year’s deal in which WPP’s Xaxis programmatic unit divested its ad-serving technology to ad tech outfit AppNexus was forged in the snowy hills of the Swiss Alps. “For five years, we had a good relationship,” AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Last January in Davos, I found 15 minutes with […]

Media measurement firm Nielsen and programmatic ad tech outfit eXelate had already worked together for five years before the former’s acquisition of the latter this March. Now they are working on the same journey. “We act as their data management backbone, taking a lot of their offline data and activating it in the programmatic world,” eXelate […]

Ad group Publicis’ VivaKi digital division may be moving its programmatic experts out around the group, but that doesn’t mean VivaKi is dead. “VivaKi still lives on,” says SMG programmatic SVP Mac Delaney in this video interview. “It operates the SkyScraper platform, the database for all of the group’s campaign reporting. You still have VivaKi employees dedicated to the AOD operating […]

It is not just brands that can use “programmatic” tools to buy ads on exchanges. Brands’ agencies, too, can use similar technology to buy advance ads on an order basis, says ad tech outfit Rubicon Project‘s SVP Jay Sears. “We’re seeing automation go deeper and deeper in to the operating agency,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.” Case […]

In his career, Tom Rogers has overseen countless TV channels, hundreds magazines and thousands of websites. Now he just wants to run one channel – your channel. Ask the TiVo CEO and president to see the future of media and he’ll tell you clearly – personalization, something which will forever break the editorial control of Big Media and the tyranny […]

In the last few years, a dizzying number of technology platforms have come to market, promising to help online publishers sell ads more efficiently. But, with so many individual products now catering to so many individual business functions, how do customers avoid a headache? By using one more platform that connects all the others together, answers Ashley J. Swartz, the digital video […]

Advertising on mobile cannot benefit from user-tracking, on-device cookie files like it can on desktop devices. So Adelphic made its own alternative to cookies, to help advertisers target not just mobile users but those same users across devices. “The fundamental challenge in the mobile landscape right now is the lack of a standard user identification method,” says Adelphic co-founder Jennifer […]

By now, you might have already heard plenty about “bots” defrauding advertisers. But what are bots and how do they actually work? “Bots are not big server farms, they’re individual computers like your own that have been infected by some malware that was wrongfully downloaded -it might be sitting dormant until the botnet operator decides to […]

Newspaper newsrooms have been saying for years that their future is in video. But video remains hard and expensive to produce for organizations whose core competency is the “inverted pyramid” of text news stories. Enter Wibbitz, an Israeli company that wants to help them out. Wibbitz ingests client publishers’ news articles, runs artificial intelligence on the text and applies […]

LAS VEGAS — No longer is it enough for broadcasters to regard online channels as the shop-window for core analog platforms – now digital is part and parcel of their core business, says one man who powers web output for hundreds of TV stations. “A lot of the broadcasters used to have websites as a […]

LAS VEGAS — Online video delivery is an evolution and, just as humans evolved from apes, so, too, is the next generation of video streaming evolving from primates – Digital Primates, to be exact. The Chicago-based consultancy was amongst the firms to have developed dash.js, a Javascript library that helps web publishers embed video players […]

LAS VEGAS — Most parts of the industry seem to think it will be a while before 4K, super-high-definition content is being streamed en masse. But network company Akamai says it can see consumer bandwidth increase positively toward that time. “We’ve started seeing growth not only in traffic on the network but growth in individual bitrates,” Akamai product management […]