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 [...]

When is good enough not good enough? For Brian West, it describes the current state of measuring viewing audiences on mobile and connected-television devices. “There still is this tendency to prioritize measurement on desktop and kind of treat mobile and connected TV as also-rans in the measurement space,” says West, who is Director, Multiplatform Research, Disney-ABC Television Group. The situation is acute [...]

If bigger is better for companies like Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable, it’s also a boon to cross-platform measurement providers like comScore. Often overlooked by headlines heralding the continued merging of cable providers are the gains made in tracking consumer behavior and the ability to match it with product and service consumption—benefitting both programmers and advertisers. So it was when [...]

When programmatic burst on to the scene, it was mainly in the guise of real-time bidding, an auction system for remnant and low-value inventory that has since fallen out of favour with many big publishers. But, though those publishers seek higher prices normally transacted through direct or human-sold deals with advertisers, auctions are still super-relevant in the video world - and [...]

Do advertisers need agencies anymore? As programmatic ad buying platforms have risen up and as many are now switching to a self-service online model that allows advertisers to control their own campaigns, many in the industry are wondering: is the agency about to be disintermediated? But, while brands are certainly now putting a hand on the tiller of their ad-tech, that [...]

When mobile devices emerged as platforms for video viewing, there was a steep learning curve for ad buyers. Fast forward to over-the-top viewing on big-screen television sets and it’s déjà vu all over again. There’s no denying the trend of OTT viewing in the living room environment. As FreeWheel reported earlier this week in its release of new OTT research, FreeWheel [...]

Now that OTT devices are responsible for the lion’s share of premium video viewing, there’s no shortage of content on the publisher side. What is lacking is a deep understanding of how best to buy and sell OTT inventory, which FreeWheel is addressing with its new research track called Signature Insights. The first installment of Signature Insights is titled The Power [...]

In the last year and a half, yet another new tech terminology has popped up in digital advertising, as platforms try to fix and enhance some of the wonkier off-shoots that programmatic has wrought. In "header bidding", rather than publishers entertain bids from multiple bidding sources in a "waterfall" sequence, they can see them all at once, and decide on the [...]

The future of data-driven TV ad buying is moving in to sharper focus, after number-two US cable operator Charter invested in TV analytics company 605. The deal involves Charter giving 605 access to its second-by-second TV nationaL viewership data, so that programmers and advertisers can better target their material. But it also involves 605 building an app to help Charter itself [...]

For advertisers who want to start reaching consumers through new video platforms in the same way they are familiar with from TV, Nielsen had good news last week. The media measurement agency announced it would now provide measurement for viewing through the Hulu and YouTube TV platforms, which some see as new-look digital alternatives to traditional cable TV subscriptions. In this video [...]

What’s the difference between bidding on real-time, digital advertising avails and addressable television inventory? Not much, thanks to aggregation and automation. While the national addressable TV footprint grows bigger with each passing year, many advertisers are making use of household targeting to hone in on specific audiences. And those capabilities are getting more sophisticated, as Brian Wallach, SVP, CRO, Advanced TV [...]

When it comes to the connected TV opportunity, many people are most excited about the opportunity to precision-target individual consumers using granular profile data. But that doesn't mean demographics are done as a targeting mechanism. Tru Optik, a technology vendor that offers a data management platform for over-the-top (OTT) TV advertisers, is now partnering with comScore to offer the latter's demographic [...]

Viewing of premium video is certainly fragmented. But the same holds true for selling ad inventory programmatically, regardless of whether “pipes are connected” from the desktop all the way to set-top box video on demand. “There are different levels of maturity in terms of the ease or liquidity of programmatic transactions and there are different challenges across each of them,” says [...]

Television networks whose programming is seen in such out-of-home venues as airports, restaurants and offices are getting a welcome lift from Nielsen. Lift as in the incremental size of OOH audiences beyond traditional ratings metrics. Time Warner’s CNN and Turner Sports this week signed on for Nielsen’s OOH measurement service, which uses a panel of 77,000 people across the top 44 [...]

Pleasing television viewers while meeting advertiser goals is the constant balancing act facing ad-supported content providers. With this in mind, Fox Networks Group recently embraced YouTube’s six-second ad format as it continues to experiment with limited-ad offerings and enhanced audience targeting. “Our biggest form of competition in human attention in the entertainment television space is ad-free viewing environments versus ad-supported viewing [...]

Coming off of its best TV Upfront ever, NBCUniversal has seen at least a tripling of its data products. While it’s a testament to the company’s investments in data capabilities and the NBCU Audience Studio, there’s still work to be done to deliver the best possible ad experience to consumers. This is the assessment of Denise Colella, NBCU’s Senior Vice President [...]

CANNES -- From May 2018, strict new regulations governing how companies can handle European citizens' data will pose a challenge to everyone who handles customer or audience data. Amongst other stipulations, the European Commission's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) measures include: tighter consent conditions for the collection of citizens' data. consumers can instruct companies to stop processing their data. automated decision-making and [...]

CANNES – Are media buyers too preoccupied trying to define “TV” and “video”? It’s worth approaching the issue from the sell-side, by way of Fox and ESPN. The answer rests on delivery systems, according to Joe Marchese, President, Advertising Revenue, Fox Networks Group. “The idea is, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you know who’s watching and, secondarily, [...]