Steve Ellwanger

ORLANDO, Florida – After testing 4,000 television ads with its proprietary Gender Equality Metric, the Association of National Advertisers’ Alliance for Family Entertainment is giving marketers a toolkit for eliminating gender bias. It’s a move that AFE Chairman Stephen Quinn says is aimed in part at “unconscious bias” both in ads and the content in […]

ORLANDO, Florida – Offering to help people reduce stress “by doing some simple steps” sounds more like a pitch for yoga than financial services. “But in our sector, we know that stress around finances is a huge problem,” SunTrust SVP of Consumer Marketing Beth Ventura says. The purpose-driven theme that SunTrust dramatizes in its advertising […]

ORLANDO, Florida – If you are Deluxe Corp., a longtime player in the printed checks business, how do you get a documentary on Hulu? Enlist Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec to help conduct a “revolution” and bring it to small-town USA. Amanda Brinkman is one of the stars of the eight-episode series Small Business Resolution—along with […]

ORLANDO, Florida – Having afforded three major brands 100% share of voice for 30 minutes at a time, it will be interesting to see how Spotify measures return on that exclusive consumer exposure. The streaming music service is still in a beta test of its “vertical video experience” with Baccardi, Bose and Gatorade, according to […]

ORLANDO, Florida – Against a backdrop of headlines calling into question digital business practices by media agencies, the digital supply chain needs “clean up” its duplicative players or else marketers could pull back on their participation. That’s the prognosis of MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel, who sees way too much duplication in that supply chain. […]

ORLANDO, Florida – From its humble roots as a hot dog cart in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, Shake Shack now boasts locations as far-flung as Russia and South Korea. Along the way, it has relied heavily on social media to communicate how it has “upped the ante on what to expect from a restaurant that […]

The television industry has made great strides trading on alternatives to selling advertisers exposure against demographic targets. But true, biddable “programmatic” broadcast inventory remains a longer-term goal . This is how Viacom’s Julian Zilberbrand sums up the semantics surrounding the current state of programmatic television. In an interview with Beet.TV, the company’s EVP of Audience Science […]

Fifteen months after AT&T acquired DIRECTV to become the largest pay-television provider, AT&T’s transformation from a telecom company to an entertainment company is bearing fruit in the addressable advertising space. “Addressable advertising is pinnacle to our advertising offering and certainly core to our growth,” says Maria Mandel Dunsche, VP and Head of Marketing for AT&T […]

Being able to cap the frequency of ad delivery across multiple screens is a big desire among advertisers. It’s also why AT&T’s DIRECTV-U-verse-AT&T Wireless cross-screen addressable offering is “very intriguing,” according to Jonathan Bokor, SVP, Director of Advanced Media at Mediavest | Spark. “AT&T has taken the lead and I think they’re probably the best […]

Viacom’s Colleen Fahey Rush longs for the day when target definitions that fuel the proprietary advanced television solutions built by individual media companies can be standardized. However, “I think it’s going to take a little longer than 12 months for what comes next,” Rush says in an interview with Beet.TV. The company’s EVP and Chief […]

Within the triad that is advanced or precision television advertising, household addressable has clearly moved ahead of programmatic and over-the-top in terms of marketer adoption for clients of Mediavest | Spark. “Addressable is now regular course of business for a number of our clients,” says Jonathan Bokor, SVP, Director of Advanced Media for the Publicis […]

ORLANDO, Florida – Shortening the brand name TIAA-CREF to TIAA was the easy part. But how do you convince millions of people of various age groups that they should trust their financial assets to the nearly century-old Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association? “The reality is we did a ton of science” about TIAA customers, says […]

Playing both ends against the middle is an age-old tactic with which most children and parents are familiar. For TiVo, in its new iteration after being acquired by Rovi, the idiom sums up the combined forces being brought to bear on the business of audience targeting. Working the front end and back end of television […]

ORLANDO, Florida – What do llamas know about banking? Probably not much, but Bank of America is more concerned with being where its customers are, hence the financial giant’s quirky llama-with-red-scarf lens on Snapchat. “You wouldn’t expect to see us” on Snapchat, says Meredith Verdone, SVP Enterprise, Consumer & Wealth Management at BOA. Nonetheless, its […]

Arun Kumar deliberately avoids the term “programmatic” when talking about advanced television’s audience targeting potential. “All we’re trying to do is take some of the principals behind programmatic. We don’t want to buy space for the sake of buying space,” says the Global President of Cadreon, Interpublic Group’s ad tech unit. Semantics aside, Kumar is […]

ORLANDO, Florida – As the Association of National Advertisers continues to shine a spotlight on the issue of non-transparency in marketer/media agency relations, its Chairman says there’s a bigger issue at play. If he could, Tony Pace would “hit the reset button” on the entire digital media supply chain. In an interview with Beet.TV at […]

ORLANDO, Florida – Roughly half a billion video views later, it’s easy to see why Procter & Gamble’s Like A Girl narrative for Always feminine products has been a big hit. It’s hard to disagree that the creative debunking—mainly via video impressions both purchased and earned—of how girls run or throw a ball “Was good […]

How does “advanced” television in all of its forms—OTT, VOD, online—come to resemble good old-fashioned network TV? When its ad inventory and viewers are concentrated among a few big players. To be sure, the advantages of advanced TV include the ability to use data for better audience targeting and results measurement, Babs Rangaiah, Partner for […]

ORLANDO, Florida  – For the first time, the digital advertising industry—via the Trustworthy Accountability Group—has a formal partnership with federal law enforcement agencies to combat criminal activity, TAG President and CEO Mike Zaneis says in an interview with Beet.TV. Since its founding, TAG members have been sharing intelligence about bad actors in the digital advertising […]

Whereas an advertising agency used to be the “right hand” to chief marketing officers, now it’s one of many fingers typically owned by a holding company. “The way the holding companies work is they buy a bunch of agencies, but they don’t really work together,” says Babs Rangaiah, Partner for Global Marketing Solutions at IBM […]