After taking the year off in the aftermath from hurricane Maria, we are headed back to Puerto Rico for the seventh year of our executive retreats on the Caribbean island.   This year we will will be at the newly re-opened, icon El San Juan Hotel. It will be an incredible three days of intense sessions, tapings and networking.  Lots of discussion [...]

CANNES - It's not just morally right, but diversity in the workplace is a business imperative, explains Kelle Coleman, Nielsen's Head of Corporate Partnerships, in this interview with Beet.TV We spoke with her last month at Cannes in Color event, immediately following a session featuring Proctor & Gamble's marketing chief Marc Pritchard who implored to group to make aggressive moves to [...]

When Roku's CEO told The Vergecast podcast last week the company wasn't a hardware company but an advertising one, it seemed to surprise watchers. But he wasn’t kidding. Roku, which has been making streaming media players for TV for a decade now, generated $225 million in platform revenue last year, which includes advertising. According to this Motley Fool analysis, whilst eMarketer has forecast that will reach [...]

Two years after the launch of Discovery Engage, a data-driven linear television targeting solution, Discovery has expanded from three targetable categories to nine. Now bolstered by its acquisition of Scripps Networks Interactive, Discovery is in a pilot with Sorenson Media to offer advertisers “a complete marketing mix,” says Discovery’s Keith Kazerman. “Many clients now are using first-party data to apply to [...]

When demand-side ad platform The TradeDesk branched out its business offering last year, it was described as "betting its future on the future of TV". Fast-forward a year, and The Trade Desk is also helping Sling sell its OTT digital TV inventory through its DSP. In this video interview with Beet.TV, The TradeDesk TV strategy and partnerships director Bennett Crumbling explains why the company [...]

More than half of the advertising inventory on Sling TV’s platforms in the last month was sold via programmatic, private auctions. “The growth we see is astounding,” says Adam Lowy, Director of Advanced TV & Digital Sales at DISH Media Sales. Sling works with two supply-side platforms—SpotX and Telaria—and interfaces with all the major demand-side platforms, Lowy explains in this interview [...]

P&G endured considerable pushback for its video advertising series the Talk, a series of vignettes of African American parents speaking to their young children about growing up in a racial biased society.   Difficult as it was, it was necessary to 0pen a dialogue, Marc Pritchard,  P&G's marketing chief, told the Cannes in Color session at Cannes Lions last month. After the [...]

It’s taking awhile, but the advertising space is “progressing and modernizing” to keep up with changing viewing behavior, with virtual MVPD’s representing the best of what TV can be, according to Adobe’s Todd Gordon. “What we hear consistently from clients is that they still believe that TV is extremely effective in driving brand preference, driving store traffic, driving sales,” Gordon, who [...]

One of the easier sells when it comes to addressable television advertising is the entertainment category, where advanced targeting can give a major boost to tune-in messaging. “I think it is something that we feel is a pretty integral part of the buy. We’re beyond trying to extol the virtues of addressable. It’s a base part of the plan,” says [...]

By the time Sling TV launched in early 2015, dataxu already was an established demand-side platform with all of the pipes in place for programmatic and real-time bidded inventory. “What really set things off for us is the ability to bring in a cross-device platform that extends the type of targeting and campaign execution you’d expect from digital on to [...]

Founded four years ago, VideoAmp aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers. Now it is taking a step up by acquiring one company and partnering with another. The outfit has acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized [...]

If you set aside the semantics of “programmatic” versus “automated” television buying, one thing is quite clear to MediaMath’s Mike Fisher. “We’re there. We’re there at scale.” There are 65 million households using some type of device to access premium video content in the living room and, for the first time, more than 50% of video starts being delivered on a [...]

CANNES – Creating better television ad experiences for viewers seems to be a never-ending conversation for agencies, brands and publishers. But judging from a panel at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, ad relevance and personalization is expected to vary widely by platform and provider for the foreseeable future. Reasons for the variations include corporate financial “short-termism,” thinking in narrow silos [...]

Amid all the hubbub about "omni-channel" marketing, if there's one agency that should be best placed to execute on the opportunity, it is surely the one with "omni" in its very company name. As if that was not enough, however, Omnicom Group has just launched a new software suite for delivering a single-customer-view across all channels? Its name? "Omni." What is Omni? [...]

CANNES -- Many in the ad industry are pointing the finger inward, blaming the sector for alienating audiences through the over- and extreme use of targeting technology. That kind of consensus is forming, with executives promising to rebalance the audience relationship through better messaging. Still, even as the industry looks to correct itself, it is also challenged to respond to the omni-channel [...]

CANNES -- Together, they have partnered to raise the bar for addressable TV advertising, the new practice through which ad buyers can target viewers down to the household level. So, what do Sky and Finecast think is the future for addressable? Sky is the UK's leading pay-TV provider, whose AdSmart was one of the world's first and biggest addressable TV services. [...]

For some advertising holding companies, transformation means pruning or consolidating assets accumulated over the last several decades. For IPG, it means paying $2 billion for consumer data giant Acxiom Marketing Solutions and its assets in more than 30 countries. “We believe that the future of marketing and not just media is data driven, and that AMS can play a critical role [...]

CANNES – Marketing departments need to think more like business owners as opposed to captains or coaches if they want their businesses to grow. That’s one of the early findings in the latest iteration of Marketing2020, which is led by Kantar Vermeer and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), among others. Kantar has been collaborating with the ANA to “make sense [...]

CANNES – Even as the U.S. advertising and media industry seeks to move beyond legacy television viewing metrics from Nielsen, the company is embedding itself in data decisioning abroad. Australia and Hong Kong are two illustrative examples of its activity in 54 markets, as explained by Toni Petra, EVP of Nielsen Watch. Nielsen is about to launch its marketing cloud services [...]

CANNES – Innovative video advertising formats are on the upswing, creating the potential for “new-ad format fatigue” and the measurement challenges that accompany them. But if you can get marketer procurement people on board with the concept, that upswing could broaden considerably. These are among the takeaways from a panel discussion at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as [...]