WASHINGTON, D.C.-When can digital media be its own worst enemy? In the heat of an election cycle, when time is finite and decisions are made minute-to-minute by lots of people who don’t always agree. This is when organizational structure is critical to political campaigns—from their agencies to their data suppliers and tech partners, was the consensus at a panel discussion at [...]

Time was, it was online delivery that required investment decisions and a strategic shift. But now, for broadcasters looking for efficiency and transformation in how to deliver live TV, online networks are the way to go. Thats according to Verizon Digital Media Services, a wing of the telco that offers CDN and live transmission services to providers branching out from their [...]

In the wake of Marriott's acquisition of Starwood, the hotel giant will continue to focus on brand marketing, but also test and lean on new technologies to reach consumers in new ways. That includes both tried and true tools like email marketing, as well as cutting-edge ones that rely on location targeting and virtual reality experiences, says Karin Timpone, Global Marketing Office for [...]

“It’s not the wild, wild West but it’s close to it,” is how Magna NA’s chief David Cohen sees the present cross-device, addressable video advertising landscape. The challenge is coming up with a standardized way of targeting and measuring the results. “It’s the front that I think will get the most amount of effort, interest and capital investment I would say [...]

The ability to target individual consumers with ads across digital devices and specific households via television is progressing well on parallel tracks. Just when those two paths will converge from a data standpoint is anyone’s guess. “Right now, that data doesn’t exist in a co-mingled way or in a way that would allow us to truly target at a one-to-one individual [...]

It's become fashionable in some circles to say TV is dead, but perhaps the definition of TV is dead, says Scott Schiller, EVP and General Manager Ad Sales and Marketing at NBC Universal, in this interview with Beet.TV. Instead, NBCU is focused on showcasing to brand partners its multiplatform approach to marketing content, he says. The media giant has built a content studio and uses [...]

Although Richard McDonald calls data the “soup de jour of the marketing world right now,” Epsilon Agency has been stirring this particular pot for a very long time. Almost 35 years ago, it created Apple’s first customer/mail order database. Now it’s helping drive millennials to places like Cracker Barrel with geo-fencing technology. Along the way, it has morphed into a one-stop [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Political candidates aren’t the only humans capable of saying one thing and then doing another. While many a campaign’s media strategists talk a great game about harnessing digital ads and programmatic television to target voters with less waste, there’s a big disconnect from what they actually do. This sentiment was echoed by all three panelists during a session at the [...]

Never a dull moment at the Internet Advertising Bureau, and 2016 is no exception. Of three key themes codified in January, better user ad experience and more precision in consumer targeting have seen healthy uptake, while the desire to add 10,000 jobs in a diversity push is understandably a longer haul. “I’m very proud of the progress that we’ve made I [...]

Call it cross-channel or cross-platform addressability. To Bank of America’s Lou Paskalis, it comes down to “orchestration.” But he wonders whether marketers are up to the challenge of adding value to spontaneous consumer experiences in what could amount to a long-tail investment commitment. “Let’s call it what it really is. Orchestration. I think it’s the Holy Grail for where we are [...]

Since unveiling its Audience Engine platform about five months ago, Experian Marketing Services has created more than 1,200 audiences for addressable television campaigns. While addressable TV is limited in scale, the data involved are being used to help inform national campaigns. “It’s always going to be one part of the media mix. But the beauty now is that you’re able to [...]

Is virtual the new reality in advertising? That’s what the Internet Advertising Bureau set out to determine when it recently consulted 24 top marketers, publishers, VR software experts and developer platform executives. “We decided that there’s a lot of interest and hype around VR so we wanted to see if there’s a there there,” Anna Bager, SVP and GM for Mobile [...]

COLOGNE -- It's no wonder MTG's VOD service looks so slick. After all, the Swedish media company's Play catch-up TV offering is based in Stockholm, whose digital designers have created brands like Spotify and beyond. Now MTG's pan-Scandinavian, free Play is changing the way it monetizes the multi-platform application. "We’re transitioning that sale model from a direct sales model to more of a programatic-direct sales [...]

There’s enough disruption in digital advertising, so a flap at Facebook and uncertainty surrounding Twitter are best dealt with quickly. That’s the view of Mainardo de Nardis, CEO of OMD Worldwide, Omnicom’s global media communications agency. Last month, Facebook apologized after major agencies became aware that the social media behemoth had erred in the way it computed one of its video [...]

The integration of Verizon Digital Media Services with AOL and Yahoo is “just the beginning” of a path that could see VDMS build its own dynamic ad decisioning technology. Until then, the company is happy to be agnostic with its integration decisions, says President Ralf Jacob. “A lot of people have asked why AOL, why Yahoo,” Jacob says in an interview [...]

COLOGNE -- When programmatic ad trading burst on to the scene, it was as a mechanism to allow real-time, automated buying of lower-value auction ads. But times are changing. In fact, the needs of broadcasters dictate as much. They don't want to give up their inventory to lack of control and poor returns. So technology vendors are now offering them a half-way [...]

Pretty much the whole of the advertising technology world these days seems to focus around targeting. The better the targeting, the better the results, many people believe. So when the world's largest advertising spender pulls back from targeted ads on one of the world's largest ad platforms, people take notice. That's what Procter & Gamble did this summer, when its chief brand officer declared it [...]

Just when you wrapped your head around “programmatic”, a new variant of the data-driven advertising technology is creeping on to the scene. In so-called “header bidding“, publishers offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges before alerting their ad servers, intending to garner multiple bids on the same inventory and so make higher prices. And, no sooner has it slithered in to notoriety, the tactic [...]

What is one of the biggest database software companies doing at an advertising conference? Wandering amongst the brands, agencies and ad-tech vendors at the just-wrapped Advertising Week New York event, Beet.TV found Oracle, the massive seller of data products. Its strategic agency partnerships global head Vik Kathuria explains the logic of the attendance to Beet.TV: "Oracle have a pretty strong presence (at Advertising Week). We are [...]

After "Hey, Siri", "Alexa" and "OK Google", comes... The Weather Company, whose partnership with IBM aims to let audiences converse with brand ads using their voice or typed questions. Acquired its digital operation was acquired by Big Blue last year, the company this summer announced it would unveil "Watson Ads", formats that tap IBM's Watson AI system to boost ad engagement through natural language [...]