LONDON -- With old-fashioned TV, things were simple. The gross-rating point was the predominant ad-buying currency. Now that the world is exploding in to on-demand TV, premium video and a host of other channels, ad-buying currencies are up in the air again. Lorne Brown wants to pin them down. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CEO of ad-tech firm Operative says broadcast TV and [...]

Smart-TV manufacturer Vizio is teaming up with nine major media and technology companies to create an addressable advertising standard. Called Project OAR (Open Addressable Ready), the participants will define technical standards for targeting specific households and Vizio will build the technology. Along with Vizio and its data unit Inscape, the consortium’s members are AMC Networks, CBS, Discovery, FreeWheel, Hearst Television, NBCUniversal, [...]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—iSpot.tv has been a third-party television data provider for the past five years. So when Robert Bareuther hears someone at Beet Retreat 2018 talk about third-party verification and measurement as being “royalty right now,” he takes a bow of sorts. “It’s like de facto. And that’s pretty cool. Maybe iSpot should get our crown pretty soon, because we’re [...]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—When it comes to matching consumer datasets, Comscore should be considered more of a chef than someone who actually produces food. “We offer these audiences tied to the viewing behavior of television and to digital audiences as well. What you have to understand is that we don’t have a hand in creating that first-party data,” says EVP [...]

For most of the three decades that David Levy has been with Turner, it's been advertising first, distribution second and consumer experience third. “We’ve now flipped that over the last couple of years and consumer experience is number one, distribution second and advertising third,” Levy says. As he looks ahead to CES 2019, he talks about “redefining” television, outdated audience metrics [...]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—For local television, the 2018 election cycle was tantamount to an early Christmas present. And although 2020 promises to be even better sales-wise, TV providers have to speed up their efforts to roll out targeted, impression-based advertising without cannibalizing their “core bread and butter traditional linear inventory,” says Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz. In this interview, Swartz, [...]

LONDON -- As the number of TV platforms proliferates and the range of buying options across them explodes, ad buyers need to seek out simplification. That is why the new owner of Cablevision has launched what it's calling a "one-stop shop". Altice USA's a4, a division which helps brands and agencies advertise to citizens across screens, launched Athena, a system for agencies [...]

LONDON -- It may often be analog and it certainly doesn't have the luxury of advanced foresight through on-demand - but that doesn't mean live, linear television can't benefit from the same kind of automations that have also come to programmatic VOD. That is the view of one exec who spent two decades in ad agencies and who now helps run [...]

LONDON -- TV isn't dying, it's just changing. Whilst that isn't necessarily the view of tech aficionados who like to declare telly "dead", it is the view of many within the TV industry who are trying to march the medium on to a brighter future. TV isn't without its challenges, of course. But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Finecast chief product officer [...]

LONDON -- Across Europe, in multiple media industries, what once were competitors are coming together, forming a variety of ad sales cooperatives in a bid to pool inventory they hope can match the vast scale of Google and Facebook. In another such initiative, French TV channel operator M6 is teaming with rival TF1 and public broadcaster France Télévisions to mix audience data [...]

LONDON -- The UK's pay-TV company Sky has blazed a trail by serving billions of addressable TV ads, those targeted at individual households. But German addressability is limited by regulation. Yes, for addressable TV as for plenty else besides, in Europe, things can get fragmented. The new unit established by GroupM to smoothe the path to buying addressable campaigns by aggregating inventory [...]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—To TiVo’s Lisa Lutz, it’s not that people aren’t asking the right questions about creating audience segments and targeting them across platforms and devices. “It’s just that there’s so many questions and so many problems to be solved, we’re just not there yet,” says the VP of Product Management. “I think it’s a wildfire right now,” Lutz adds [...]

LONDON -- Europe's leading pay-TV company was executing on household-level TV ad targeting before it was even being called "addressable TV". Six years after launch and having just been acquired by Comcast, Sky suggests this new method of selling TV ads is now commonplace across the company. It was back in 2013 that the UK satellite and telco company launched AdSmart, its [...]

LONDON -- Ahead of the tenth anniversary of its online TV catch-up player, Irish public broadcaster RTÉ is planning to add new features it thinks could please both viewers and advertisers. RTÉ Player launched in April 2009, offering hundreds of hours of TV shows available to catch up with through online and some TV platforms. It has since expanded to offer a [...]

LONDON – Which should be more important to television advertisers: viewer attention or ad "performance"? The answer poses risks for TV providers given the increasing march toward all things performance, according to Fox Networks Group’s Joe Marchese. “I feel that more and more TV is getting baited into trying to become a performance outlet,” the President of Advertising Revenue says in [...]

LONDON -- Over the last two years, the growing realization that Amazon brings significant skin to the digital advertising game has ballooned. And that is crossing off its ecommerce platform and on to online TV, too. In a recent terms of service update for Fire TV ad sales, Amazon says "Fire TV Ad-Enabled Apps must provide 30% of total advertising impressions in the [...]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—All the first-party television viewing data in the world won’t parse out co-viewing by individual human beings. In the meantime, Hulu is working with third-party providers like Comscore and Nielsen “to get at who are the people who are most likely to be sitting in the room,” says the OTT pioneer’s Head of Research, Julie DeTraglia. Hulu harvests [...]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Anyone can sympathize with traditional television networks given the transformational challenges they face. But to empathize, one has to have been there, as has Adam Gerber. In this interview, the ABC and agency veteran details the responsibilities for change of each constituency—from media to measurement companies, marketers and agencies—as he assays the rate of change thus far. “I [...]

LONDON -- Thirteen years in business and $72 million in funding tends to give you a certain authority position in the marketplace. For Amobee, the demand-side platform and analytics suite operator, that position seems to be getting bigger. After already acquiring Ringring Media, AdJitsu, Gradient X, Adconion, Kontera and Turn, the Redwood City, CA, company this summer even bought up digital TV ad [...]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—For marketers, addressable television advertising should not be an either-or proposition, according to DISH Media’s Kevin Arrix. It’s all about deciding its appropriate role within the mix of advanced-TV options. In this interview at Beet Retreat 2018, Arrix talks about the partnership between Sling TV and audience measurement provider Comscore and the need for a fuller understanding of [...]