Creation of a shared, collaborative media ecosystem is limited only by the willingness of buyers, sellers and everyone in between to work together to solve individual and common problems. Videology Chairman and CEO Scott Ferber believes there is no better venue in which such competitive camaraderie can be nurtured than Beet Retreat Miami 2017, where some of the industry’s leading [...]

Although it may feel like programmatic advertising has been around forever, it’s actually “still new and it’s still very much involving,” says Condé Nast’s Jim Norton. Along the way, the industry has gone from an open-bidded marketplace where it was “a bit of spray and pray and hope you get good impressions and good audiences” to a much more refined way [...]

Think local, act local could well describe the mindset at Advance Local during its two-decade evolution from a newspaper group to a print and online publisher. Now generating some 50 million monthly unique visitors across 10 sites, the company is the #1 news and information site in each of its markets, per comScore. “We’re really very much a regional player. However, [...]

Sara Badler is quite direct when discussing programmatic advertising at The New York Times. Much like the Times itself. “We are still very much a direct business. We are a programmatic direct business,” Badler, who is Director, Programmatic Advertising for the Times says in this interview with Beet.TV. One thing that distinguishes the Times is it’s quite picky about who it will [...]

While converged television and video advertising software provider Videology started on the demand-side of the ad business, it’s also had good traction on the supply side. Now it wants to be the unifying factor in making advanced TV the most effective and efficient it can be for both sides of the table. “What we’re trying to do is effectively create that [...]

Modern brands can only get on to people's radars if they provide value - but, in a modern market, there is more than one kind of value. Customer data is the key to understanding what prospects and customers want from a brand - and that should inform how brands talk with them, according to IBM chief digital officer Bob Lord. In this [...]

No wonder he just sold his new company's demand-side operations. Whilst there is ongoing consolidation of ad-tech players catering to advertisers and their agencies, video ad-tech outfit Tremor Video's new CEO Mark Zagorski says the same is not true amongst platforms serving publishers. "You haven’t seen a ton of consolidation, particularly on the sell side of the business, because there’s still [...]

Modern business strategy is no longer just about "technology" generally - these days, the technologists who can map out, mash up and mine data for strategic benefit are pivotal to an organisation's direction. That is according to an ad-tech exec who now runs digital operations at IBM. "The developer and the data scientist now is a very big decision-maker in where businesses [...]

Can industry optimism and collaboration defeat fragmentation? From the viewpoint of Marcien Jenckes, the answer is a resounding yes. Jenckes, who is President, Advertising, Comcast Cable believes now is the time to be very optimistic about what premium video can be. “It is the best way for marketers to reach their audiences. We’re coming off of the greatest Upfront in history. There’s [...]

About four months from the merging of MEC and Maxus, Starcom veteran Amanda Richman has been chosen as CEO USA of the as-yet unnamed entity. Coming on board in October, Richman will report to MEC Global CEO Tim Castree. “Amanda is a fantastic choice to be our US leader,” Castree said in a news release. “She is universally liked and respected [...]

When video ad-tech operator Tremor Video sold part of its business to Taptica of Israel in August, it meant a $50mn price tag for the sale. But, to Tremor CEO Mark Zagorski, it means more than that. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Zagorski says ad-tech platforms which count both ad buyers and sellers as customers can suffer from a conflict [...]

When IBM engineers developed their artificial intelligence engine Watson to compete in the TV game show Jeopardy! 10 years ago, they may not have expected that it would, one day, also help power the targeting of TV and other ads. But that is now the prospect Big Blue finds itself with, now that Watson is being sold as a way to improve [...]

Nielsen is giving its media clients a standardized way of measuring their content viewing on distribution heavyweights Hulu, Facebook and YouTube with the latest expansion of its Digital Content Ratings. Participating TV and digital publisher clients can now capture incremental viewing of their content within their reported audience numbers. They will receive credit for video distributed on Facebook and YouTube within [...]

Digital media have become infinitely trackable. But what if you want to track a consumer from a web property to a bricks-and-mortar one? And what if you want to figure out whether an online ad buy really motivated an in-store purchase? These days, that kind of digital-to-physical attribution is totally achievable, and agency Mediacom is amongst those taking advantage of technology [...]

The early 1960’s were interesting times for radio and television, as Congress considered regulating audience research. How simple those days must seem now that the Media Rating Council—formed as the media industry’s self-regulating body—has tackled cross-media audience measurement. This becomes more evident when one considers that the MRC is still dealing with standards for digital ad viewability and traffic fraud. It’s [...]

It is now two and a half years since NBCU launched its Audience Targeting Platform (ATP), a way to let advertisers use data to reach specific audiences. In that time, the company has offered up viewing data from 22 million Comcast set-top boxes, combined with other data from first- or third-party sources, to help marketers create more refined viewer segments. Now Mike [...]

The complete cross-platform view of audiences' consumption may not be fully in place today, but the industry is getting there, says a Nielsen executive responding to concern from a leading programmer. Speaking with Beet.TV, Disney-ABC Television Group's multiplatform research director Brian West had said the current state of multiplatform measurement was not good enough, and looked like taking a decade to [...]

As mantras go, “know thy audience” certainly speaks volumes about cross-platform television viewing. Content providers that take this to heart will become preferred partners to agencies and advertisers as innumerable publishing options are inevitably winnowed out by their capabilities and the quality of their offerings, says Nancy Dubuc. The President and CEO of A+E Networks views cross-platform opportunities through the lens [...]

Left-leaning political video network The Young Turks has raised $20 million in its latest and biggest funding round, with participation by Jeffrey Katzenberg’s venture firm WndrCo. Also backing the startup of former MSNBC anchor and TYT co-founder Cenk Uygur were 3L Capital, Greycroft and e.ventures. In 2014, TYT received $4 million in backing and executed a Series A funding round in [...]

Just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a television network based on age and gender attributes alone. “Most networks are going to look somewhat similar. Although the audience size may be different, they’re going to have similar audience comps,” says Ben Tatta. Hence the gradual shift toward audience-based selling, which allows for much more granular [...]