If anyone could discern a possible sea change in the formerly one-day event called the NewFront it would be Michael Kassan. The Chairman and CEO of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink witnessed its birthing by Digitas and has become an integral player as the event morphed over the years. And so it is that Kassan possibly senses “a little [...]

While some news organizations struggle for credibility and survival, Bloomberg Media keeps investing in and growing its portfolio of products across all platforms. These include its impending, 24/7 news service with Twitter, the Bloomberg Lens offering, Bloomberg Trigger for advertisers and its OTT presence in Apple TV. “Personally I think there’s never been a more exciting time to be in the [...]

Twitter’s first-ever NewFronts presentation, in which a raft of new live-streaming and premium original programming deals were unveiled, takes the company further along a particular path: taking two-screen experiences to one screen “in a way that no one else can,” according to CMO Leslie Berland. The company announced a dozen new collaborations for hundreds of hours of new exclusive, live original [...]

If you’ve ever dressed like a Ninja Turtle or a SpongeBob character, you know what it’s like to be a passionate fan of a television show. Viacom spends a lot of time studying what its fans do online and offline and uses the data to best connect them with brands. “Fans are at the heart of everything we do at Viacom,” [...]

Twitter’s new partnership with Bloomberg for 24-hour, live news reporting gets a big thumbs up from Bank of America. “I really believe that this is as good as a combination of chocolate and peanut butter. This may be the Reese’s peanut butter cup moment for the media industry,” says the banking giant’s SVP, Enterprise Media Planning, Investment & Measurement, Lou [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Manually tagging your videos with all the possible people, things and phrases that appear within would be a time-consuming task for anyone, much less for content owners operating at scale. So Microsoft has brought its Cognitive Services machine learning suite to bear on video. Hosting a booth at NAB Show, Microsoft Azure Media Services principal program manager Martin Wahl explains [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Advanced advertising techniques are coming on stream around the world - but variation in the pace of roll-out, coupled with discrepancies in how to measure consumption, is posing a challenge to global channel operators. That is the view of one consultant helping broadcasters navigate a path through international waters. "Each individual geography is moving at its own speed," says MTM [...]

As skinny television bundles proliferate, so does Awesomeness, which on May 20 kicks off an original series in a deep, multilayered partnership with youth-oriented retailer Hollister. “We think that it is an amazing time to be a premium content provider,” says Awesomeness Chief Business Officer Kelly Day. Given that many brands are looking to connect with distinct audiences and create custom [...]

The OpenAP linear television audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom will spend the next several months reaching out to other national TV sellers, educating the buy side and working toward a rollout in the fall. While the second phase of OpenAP is a work in progress, it will involve digital media as well. The roots of OpenAP, an unusual collaboration [...]

LAS VEGAS -- While there’s lots of people populating video content, it takes too many others to screen and label it. That’s where artificial intelligence can provide a big assist. While “it’s early days” in such use of AI, “it’s an exciting solution to bring to market,” says Scott Braley, GM, Advertising Platforms, Ooyala, which recently announced a partnership with Microsoft’s [...]

In the three years since it was formed, The New York Times' sponsored content production agency T Brand Studio has made plenty of custom creative work for clients - now it wants to more tightly integrate its newsroom with the offering. "The big shift this year was… if you look back at the the last three NewFronts, a lot of our ad [...]

It's not often a company sees its share price rise despite reporting a fall in revenue. But that's what happened to Twitter last week. On Wednesday, the social network company reported Q1 2017 revenue down 24% on the prior year - and yet, Twitter's share price is up nearly 20% at time of writing. What's behind the contrasting trends? For one, Twitter's net [...]

From its vantage point in the digital cloud, Adobe has a unique view of video publishers around the globe. Lately it’s been seeing a shift in emphasis from cross-screen reach to monetization. Concurrently, U.S. video viewing has bifurcated along two lines: mobile devices during the day and living room big screens at night, with many implications for programming and advertising [...]

LAS VEGAS - How can traditional television broadcasters survive in a world of digital disrupters like Amazon, Apple and Google? By using data to drive user engagement, in the process adopting more of a direct-to-consumer than business-to-business model. This is easier said than done in a world marked by the proliferation of skinny programming bundles and rampant cannibalization. The capital demands [...]

Lyle Schwartz isn’t known for sitting back and letting things happen at their own pace, particularly when it comes to television and video audience measurement. GroupM’s President of Investment for North America feels he’s at “the 50-yard line” in his company’s push for the industry to be able to measure commercial impressions across screens, despite the number of players involved. In [...]

AT&T AdWorks chose to go vertical in 2017 with what it calls the industry’s first-ever Addressable Upfronts. Its 100 events across the country are tailored to specific industry product and service categories and clients with a focus on the attributes of both television and cross-platform addressable advertising. “Instead of a one-size-fits-all, one big event, we take a more tailored approach,” Maria [...]

Discovery Communications’ Discovery Engage audience targeting offering has been well received from a mix of product and service categories going into the 2017 TV Upfront. And the company is always open to new ways to standardize audience targeting beyond traditional age/sex demographic targets, says Ben Price, President of National Ad Sales. Having pushed its content out across a variety of platforms, [...]

LAS VEGAS -- It’s not Google TV’s second coming, but the tech giant’s new integration with WideOrbit will make it easier for marketers to buy inventory from more than 600 local television stations. The deal means Google joins 14 other demand-side platforms to essentially “connect $7 billion of programmatic digital video spend back into linear TV,” says WideOrbit’s EVP of [...]

LAS VEGAS - Having acquired Videoplaza a couple of years ago, video software supplier Ooyala is positioning itself as an "integrated video platform" (IVP) - and it's not afraid to call on help from some major players to offer customers a richer service. Exhibiting at NAB Show, Ooyala - whose offerings include media logistics, video platform and video advertising - announced two partnerships: [...]

Every television advertiser is trying to identify what their specific audience means outside of broad age and sex demographic targets. While the latter represent a “fairly blunt instrument that we use as a currency,” more media owners are executing in ways that line up better with how buyers want to execute their plans. An audience target for a client “that is [...]