Robert Andrews

In advertising, “attribution” technology is promising is the holy grail – the ability to track a consumer outcome (like spending or sign-up) and correlate it back to an ad exposure. The trouble with holy grails is, once you get a taste of what’s on offer, you just want more. Namely, attribution technology today is great, […]

US linear TV audiences are declining – so how are national TV operators managing to wring higher prices out of ad buying agencies? The secret has been in the emergence of TV as a performance channel, one which can be measurable enough to support clear campaign outcomes over and above mere branding uplift. “Through the […]

The emerging future in which software can measure all TV viewing and link viewers’ consequential outcomes back to ad exposures is coming in to view. But is full attribution really available today – or is it just a mirage? In a spicy panel at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a trio of […]

In the emerging world of targeted marketing, knowing your customers and prospects is becoming essential. As that importance grows, so does the position of companies offering identity “graphs”, records of consumer profiles built from the various breadcrumbs they lay down in their digital activity. Evan Hanlon, GroupM’s US chief strategy officer, thinks getting customers’ identities […]

Fewer relationships with better partners. That’s what the world’s biggest media-buying agency wants. And, in this video interview with Beet.TV, a company executive lifts the lid on how the organization is redefining its relationships with publishers and their supply-side platforms in order to do so. Max Jaffe, managing partner and programmatic practice lead at GroupM, […]

David Campanelli,  EVP at Horizon Media, the largest independent advertising agency,is one of the ad buyers beckoning the industry away from its traditional methods of proving efficacy, toward a future in which ad exposure can be linked to eventual consumer outcomes – and priced accordingly. Many third-party ad vendors have been moving in the same […]

The TV ad measurement company formed by two ex Cablevision executives is being enlisted by Discovery Inc. to provide advertisers with outcome attribution for TV ads seen by 40 million households. Discovery, whose portfolio includes Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network and TLC, will work with 605, which provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition […]

Media-buying agencies want to have greater control over how they transact, with fewer links in the chain. That is certainly the case for Jenkintown, PA-based Goodway Group. The company’s origins go back a century, to the day a 14-year-old errand boy decided to learn the printing trade. Today, it operates a programmatic buying service and […]

GDPR may have been just the start. The new European data protection regulation caused shockwaves last year when it forced stringent new consent limitations on how companies gather and use audience data. But a collection of new developments promises to mean ad land must continue to respond and evolve to the changing privacy landscape. That […]

Direct-to-consumer brands are growing, and they want more ad exposure. So how should TV platforms best exploit that opportunity? In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them. Commonly described as including Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Chubbies, they typically got their early lift by leveraging targeting online ads, […]

These days, media-buying agencies don’t want to accept cookie-cutting technical solutions. After years in which they felt at the mercy of software platforms, more are now exerting more control than ever over how they find and buy ad inventory. Case in point – Magna Global sets stringent requirements for the supply-side platforms (SSPs) it works […]

Some world-changing technologies explode overnight, others take years to burn so brightly. Addressable TV may be in the latter category. The ability of marketers to target individual viewing households with specific messaging seems revolutionary. But, though it has existed for several years now and though consumer technology deployment is wider than ever, discussions from successive […]

Comcast’s cable TV ad sales unit is launching a new agency dedicated to making creative ad assets for smaller advertisers. Speaking at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” , Brendan Condon,  Comcast Spotlight CEO, said: “If you don’t have good creative, your ad’s not going to work … especially when you’re thinking about […]

Is “relevance” still… relevant? Over the last few years, advertising “relevance” has, for many ad-tech execs become the holy grail of advertising effectiveness. For AT&T’s Xandr, however, it is more than that. This September 16 to 18 in Santa Barbara, the company hosts its second Relevance Conference. In its first year, 2018, the conference effectively […]

The emergence of digital attribution technologies plugged in to local TV ad sales promises to bring “significant” levels of ad spending back to local TV operators. That is according to an executive whose software company’s insights have been encouraging hundreds of advertisers to greatly increase their spending in the medium. TVSquared helps power Instant Impact, an […]

After several years of hand-wringing over advertising concerns like fraud, viewability and brand safety, it is only to be expected that the digital ad world ponders its next big hurdle. For Jordan Linville, that means understanding the true nature of the outlets where people are really spending their media time. “I’d say the biggest challenge […]

Pumped up by the foundational waves of programmatic and digital measurement, many advertisers in the last couple of years have pushed publishers to price their ads based on real business outcomes. After a recognition that proxy metrics like “clicks” didn’t necessarily translate in to real goals, like sales, certain publishers and even TV operators are […]

Ad-buying agencies are keenly watching the supply-side digital ad tech platform to examine how M&A and competitive pressures affect where they should place their money. On this video interview with Beet.TV, Rahil Berani, Digitas North America VP programmatic, says his agency is having to respond to the changing dynamic by cutting the number of supply-side […]

Major TV platforms are intent on selling ads targeted at individual households. They just would like to see a few industrial changes in order to fully realize that dream. In a panel discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, three TV platform representatives discussed their take on “addressable” TV. Ahead of next […]

Three years after the ad “transparency” outcry exploded in media land, it seems like many of the issues have settled down, that solutions have partly been implemented. But transparency issues still remain on the publisher side of the industry, according to this agency executive. “As programmatic has evolved, there has been tremendous inconsistency in how […]