Robert Andrews

SAN FRANCISCO — These are heady days when an advertiser starts making TV shows to sell ads – but they are headier still when they plan to sell those ads programmatically. In February, Group M announced it will co-produce a sport documentary series, My Side Of The Sky, with Hulu. “There’s not enough good content […]

LONDON — Time was, investors wouldn’t look a content startup in the face. Lately, we have seen some financial energy go back in to ambitious, content-related companies. But that doesn’t change the challenging outlook, says one leading investor. “Content as original programming remains a very hard category to invest in,” says Saul Klein of Index […]

LONDON — Advertisers are being urged to quit viewing spending allocation as an “either-or” between TV and online video, and instead buy both together for campaigns. “We’re entering in to an economy where there are friends with benefits – video and TV working together,” says video advertising technology platform vendor Videology‘s head of global TV […]

LONDON — From Google’s Loon to Facbeook’s drones, the internet that Silicon Valley’s giants will create in Africa will be quite different to the one back home. With many first-time consumers adopting mobile devices before desktop, Africa may be a vision of the west’s media future. “The rate at which the mobile phone has grown […]

LONDON — Quartz, Atlantic Media’s online-only journalism offshoot, may be pitched at providing premium-grade analysis, but don’t expect the site to start charging any time soon. “Social mechanisms (are) the primary way that traffic is derived for most content sites today,” Quartz publisher and Atlantic Media SVP Jay Lauf tells Beet.TV. “Anything you do in […]

LONDON — With added TV and video features, the recent launches of the next-generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles has seen Microsoft and Sony move further increments closer toward their dreams of being living room entertainment super hubs. But that’s a “flawed strategy”, says one analyst. “The Xbox One strategy is … based on […]

SAN FRANCISCO — So much greater are video ad prices compared with standard display, there is a more pressing need to inject programmatic platforms with price control mechanisms, if video advertisers are to adopt the mechanisms, says one programmatic expert. “There’s such a limited quantity of video … there hasn’t been the need to have […]

LONDON — The Washington Post already invested in its Post TV online video brand last year. Now it plans to increase editorial video volume and to make more video available to native ad brands. “We’ll be telling more stories using more video content than ever before,” chief revenue officer Kevin Gentzel tells Beet.TV. “We’ll lead […]

LONDON — The Guardian’s publisher will post annual digital revenue up by a quarter to over £70 million ($116 million) for the year ending March, CEO Andrew Miller tells Beet.TV. Although many in the industry report worsening ad rates, the Guardian Media Group CEO says: “We’re seeing a hardening of our CPMs.” The group will […]

LONDON — The BBC’s proposal to close its linear youth TV channel BBC Three in the UK but to go on publishing its shows online under the same brand will have little impact for a service already heavily consumed online, says the corporation’s future media director. “The BBC is the first broadcaster to go online-only […]

LONDON — It may be forbidden from running even traditional display ads at home in the UK, but elsewhere in the world, the BBC’s commercial wing is embarking on blending marketing and editorial material, having recently embarked on sponsored content production effort. “There’s no reason why a brand … shouldn’t have a voice; anyone can […]

LONDON — Media people are talking a lot about “barbells” – Tim Armstrong’s metaphor for an advertising world that is coalescing around the seemingly polar forms of sponsored content on the one hand and data-driven display sales on the other. But one ad exec reckons those opposite ends aren’t as distinct as the metaphor suggests. […]

LONDON — BuzzFeed’s commercial stock in trade is offering sponsored editorial articles to brand marketers. Now it is extending the offering to digital videos. “We’ve done roughly 1,300 videos, 20% of them have over a million views.” says the publisher’s agency strategy VP Jonathan Perelman, who also recently took on its video GM role. BuzzFeed […]

LONDON — Nearly two years after launching, HuffPost Live, Huffington Post’s effort to reinvent rolling TV news, is on the verge of breaking even, says HuffPost’s CEO. “We’ve gotten to more than 100 million video views on a monthly basis now,” Jimmy Maymann tells Beet.TV. “We need scale to appeal to TV buyers – we’re […]

LONDON — The New York Times must halt its digital advertising decline as a priority, says CEO Mark Thompson in this interview with Beet.TV Advertising, which historically has only ever grown since digital media are themselves growing platforms, fell again by a small amount during the publisher’s last quarter. “We are absolutely determined to get […]

In a sign of the growing importance of online video advertising technology, two of the sector’s vendors are merging – and say they plan to go public next year. Ebuzzing, which was co-founded by French web entrepreneur Pierre Chapaz, and Teads, a French ad tech firm bringing new formats to market, say they are combining to […]

LOS ANGELES — Agencies have to find new ways of connecting brands to consumers, now that viewers are paying for video that doesn’t have ad support, says one exec. “People are paying for that content. Advertisers have, all along, been supplementing the cost of that for the consumer,” agency MEC‘s North America CEO Marla Kaplowitz tells Beet.TV. […]

LOS ANGELES — You can’t go to a digital industry conference these days without someone espousing the value of “data”. For ad group Group M Worldwide’s chief digital officer Rob Norman, data’s value is clear: “Data is to marketing as science is to religion. The more facts you have, the less faith you need.” But marketers are […]

LOS ANGELES — “Best-in-class content is alive and well” as new distributors and marketers alike take the opportunity to reach consumers, says an ad agency exec. “We’ve seen an explosion of the golden age of content,” UM WW’s north America president Sarah Personette, who was Facebook’s own agency relations director until 2013, tells Beet.TV. “Consumers want and […]

LOS ANGELES — The digital marketing technology landscape may be expanding, but it isn’t about to go pop, says one of digital media’s most noted banker-advisers. “We’ve seen a change from media intermediation being an art to more of a science,” Luma Partners‘ Terence Kawaja tells Beet.TV. “You hear about the word ‘programmatic’… bringing software […]