SAN FRANCISCO -- These days, TV companies have a lot of new data sources with which to better understand viewer behaviour and with which to help advertisers better reach the right audiences. Could voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home be the next big technology to light up the data-collection opportunity? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comcast's FreeWheel data platform GM [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Acxiom acquired LiveRamp back in 2014, the potential pairings were clear to see. But one tie-up that was not immediately obvious was video. Relative to modern consumption habits, video viewing had still not truly taken off, and video didn't even garner a mention in the companies' announcement. Fast-forward, however, and video is all the rage and, last year, [...]

SAN FRANCISCO – While there’s little question that being able to identify and target individuals across devices and screens will play a huge role in future marketing, we should not think that everything will go one-to-one. This might seem unusual for those with their roots in digital media, but not to Matt Spiegel. “I think we have to back up from [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Since it started in 2012, supply-side platform Clypd has focused on building an ad sales platform for TV owners. It has started to unpack its technology, making it available to a wider set of customers. That started this month, when Nielsen launched Advanced Audience Forecasting, a tool for TV audience forecasting, built on Clypd technology. In this video interview with Beet.TV, [...]

The year 2018 is one of “convergence” for Dish Network and its streaming Sling TV service, which combined now offer addressable advertising to about 9 million households. “We spent a lot of last year tying together the existing data partnerships on the Dish side with the Sling side and making sure that attribution and reporting can run across both platforms,” [...]

SAN FRANCISCO – One of the many positive outcomes that have emerged as the result of major marketers demanding greater digital transparency is a renewed focus on data quality. “I think what’s actually exciting is that we’re coming back to a sense of quality after a large period of flux,” says Simmons CEO Andrew Feigenson. Over the course of many months, [...]

Tim Castree likes to think about audiences “as the nests that sit inside that larger purchase journey context to opportunity.” Until you can completely understand those consumers, you cannot target them to fulfill those opportunities. Wavemaker uses a two-step process that begins with identifying “the gaps, barriers, challenges, opportunities” associated with the purchase journey, the agency’s Global CEO says in this [...]

For advertisers, the US local cable TV market has historically been bought using broad geographies, demographics and programming day-parts to try reaching the right audiences. But Comcast's ad sales division is now helping buyers use data and advanced analytics to more precisely reach the viewer of their dreams, no matter what screen they are watching on. Comcast Spotlight is bringing advanced audience [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- It is often said that, when it comes to advanced TV advertising, the UK has a lead through the Sky's AdSmart offering. But, when it comes to insights in to advanced TV advertising, one company is now bringing capabilities to Europe that it says have existed in the US for years. Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers [...]

While the glory days of reaching 75% of television households with just one commercial are long gone, automatic content recognition (ACR) stands to help advertisers calculate incremental reach. “That can certainly be valuable, says Jonathan Bokor, SVP, Precision Video, Publicis Media. Bokor discusses the challenges posed by using disparate datasets depending on TV/video tactics in this interview with Beet.TV. Where ACR can [...]

SAN FRANCISCO – Offering marketers mass reach is what television’s always been about. But in this age of advanced TV, it’s becoming more about “mass, targeted reach,” according to Mike Rosen. The EVP of Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales at NBCU talks about taking an agnostic approach to more advanced audience targeting and why the Super Bowl and Olympics made for [...]

SAN FRANCISCO – It can be pretty scary when a Chief Growth Officer forecasts a big decline in advertising spending in the next five years, as Publicis Groupe’s Rishad Tobaccowala did recently. To his former comrade Laura Desmond, it’s a call to action that agencies are in a unique position to fulfill. That’s because agencies are best equipped to “understand people, [...]

Consumer purchases aren’t made in a vacuum. Which is why understanding all of the variables that precede actual purchases is the key to unlocking the consumer journey. “The idea that you go somewhere, you decide you want something, you make that purchase and then you’re done is incorrect. Inherently it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t really exist in real life,” [...]

SAN FRANCISCO - Investing in quality seems to be paying off huge for OpenX, the world’s largest independent advertising exchange. It just capped its 10th straight year of revenue growth, fourth consecutive year of profitability and its nascent video business saw 5,000% revenue growth in 2017. To CEO Tim Cadogan, the industry as a whole can succeed as well by adopting [...]

Although using first and third-party to target linear television audiences is in the testing phase, it stands to increase the attribution TV gets for prompting consumer behavior. “At ESPN, we certainly think the audience buying future is upon us,” says Vikram Somaya, SVP, Global Data Officer & Ad Platforms at ESPN. In this interview with Beet.TV, Somaya talks about linear optimization [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Brands are rushing to spend on advertising in connected TV platforms - and agencies remain important to helping them do so. That is the view of one of the leading ad-tech platforms helping to inject ever-more video in to its historic programmatic operations. "Connected television spend on our platform from Q4 2016 to Q4 2017 grew over 500%,"The Trade [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Often, the end goal for a TV advertisement is to drive a consumer to purchase a product in a store. But what if the point of purchase was the start, not the end, of the whole strategy? That's a question IRI, a marketing data company, is posing to advertisers.  Founded to capitalise on the advent of point-of-sale (POS) [...]

Is Cannes Lions still relevant? That's the question occupying Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity managing director Jose Papa. The festival has long been a Mecca for advertising types - and, increasingly, those from other industries, too. But, last year, the Wall Street Journal reported ad agencies were cutting costs amid a downturn that was just beginning. At the time, it said WPP wanted to spend 25% [...]

An infamous no-show from most of the technology and marketing industries' biggest annual gatherings, Apple looks like breaking its usual policy this year. Execs from the company will take to the stage at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this coming June, despite typically not attending. "We've got Angela Ahrendts and Tor Myhren," says festival content director Charlotte Williams in this [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- An initiative from three big ad-tech players to create a single pool of user identities is nearing technological completion and could go live from this coming Q2, according to an exec from one of the players involved. AppNexus, Index Exchange and LiveRamp created The Advertising ID Consortium last May in an effort to reach scale versus the two big giants [...]