Nielsen is stepping up its game to measure up against its measurement rivals, launching a new product that aims to give content owners, and their advertisers, a single view of audience consumption across all platforms. Digital Content Ratings is the latest chapter in the group's Total Audience Measurement roll-out. Why is Nielsen doing this? Product leadership SVP Jessica Hogue explains: "Marketers don’t want [...]

COLOGNE-Being a big ship that cannot turn quickly is not a ship you want to be piloting when it comes to technology platforms, according to Diane Yu, CTO and one of three co-founders of premium video solutions provider FreeWheel. Unless you are agile enough to grow while anticipating all customers’ demands, “You then fall behind your competitors,” Yu says. On the [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-It’s common wisdom that the growth of programmatic television advertising has been constrained less by technology than by the difficulty in herding together all the players that own the inventory. But at a more basic level, human instinct is in play. There are a “lot of different actors on a lot of different levels,” among them stations and groups, “and [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-When competitors DISH and DIRECTV came together in 2014 to offer addressable television advertising solely for political campaigns, early takers were traditional TV buyers. But in the 2016 election cycle, digital buyers wanted in. “I was amazed at how quick the political ad agencies were to accept this and to want to use” D2 Media Sales, its Director of Political [...]

Buoyed by trial campaigns involving major brands and its own advertising spend, AT&T has big plans for expanding its addressable cross-platform offerings. By year’s end, its targeted ad solutions will encompass nearly 14 million addressable television households, more than 30 million mobile devices and new inventory within its DIRECTV app. In an interview with Beet.TV, AT&T AdWorks President Rick Welday explains [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Like many newspaper publishers, the transition to digital and then to programmatic sales rendered the value of Advance’s traditional consultative approach to audiences and advertisers moot. But that has been changing. “We’ve found that as programmatic continues to evolve, we’re seeing more and more consultative demand coming our way where we’re being asked to help unlock value of our audiences,” [...]

Few people have experienced the transition from “analog transactional media buyer” to the “almost full-service provider” that is today’s media agency than Steve King. The CEO of Publicis Media had a bird’s eye view of the birth of Zenith Media in 1995, back when the notion of unbundling the media department from the full-service agency structure was heretical at best. “When [...]

While media planning and buying giant Carat USA would like to replace the industry’s current viewability standards for digital ads with a time-based currency, it thinks there isn’t enough quality content to trade on such a metric. The agency’s preferred metric would focus on things like time, cost per view or cost per completion, USA CEO Doug Ray says in [...]

To some, it may have gone under the radar a little, but Google operates an in-house team dedicated to working with ad agencies and brands. "Zoo is Google’s creative think tank for brands and agencies," explains Zoo's global chief creative officer Lars Bastholm, in this video interview with Beet.TV. "We help brands and agencies think more about how you can use Googles [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-The Washington Post has gone to great lengths to create a unified auction for its ad inventory that is sold programmatically as it tries to make it easier for buyers to understand and manage private marketplace deals. “If you don’t have a direct relationship with the buyer, you’re just line on the spreadsheet,” said Jason Tollestrup, the publisher's Director [...]

The Internet Advertising Bureau wants to make digital ads more responsive to the screens they’re served on and easier for agencies to create, so it’s unveiled a complete overhaul of the IAB Standard Ad Unit Portfolio. Now the advertising industry gets to respond to the new global guidance. “The beloved ad units of yore are now becoming responsive,” is how Alanna [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-If there’s a misconception that political content is not the best platform in which to advertise political campaigns, “We completely disagree with that,” is the response from Politico’s Randon White. Just about a month ago, qualitative research showed that 60% of the Politico audience was undecided on specific policy issues and that 30% were undecided voters, White said at [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Sometimes success has less to do with how you do something than with letting people know you can actually do it. So it is with publishing giant Hearst—whose local newspaper reach extends from California to Connecticut—and political advertisers. Hearst has been “very aggressive with adopting technology and very flexible with executions. There’s nothing we restrict in programmatic channels that we [...]

So far, the discussion of so-called “programmatic”, automated digital advertising trading has centered on online display and video advertising. But what about advertising in content that no-one can see? Programmatic trading has already come to a number of audio platforms - Xaxis enabled an audio offering last year. And now one of the biggest out there, Spotify, has enabled the technology, after signing deals with Rubicon Project, AppNexus [...]

COLOGNE-Traditional “last touch attribution” for measuring advertising is out of touch with today’s analytics and could help to explain some of the headlines about how television just isn’t working as it used to, according to Jean-Philippe Durrios. “The industry has known this for a awhile. But more and more it’s becoming more democratized, that you need to take into consideration offline [...]

COLOGNE-Matt Gee has his own take on the nature of the transformation sweeping the advertising industry. He envisions advertising as evolving into a kind of “service design” provider, which helps to put technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality in an interesting perspective. Gee, who was recruited to Aegis Dentsu’s Isobar UK as Head of Digital Transformation from R/GA earlier this [...]

COLOGNE-To the world at large, the fate of Yahoo had been a long-running saga that seemed like it would never end. But to AOL CMO Allie Kline, the deal joining AOL and Yahoo is a big momentum boost for the “flywheel” of data-driven advertising and content under the Verizon umbrella. With Verizon already having scooped up some of the biggest and [...]

These days, it takes a lot to move an audience. In fact, it looks like all the all tricks in the marketer playbook don't work so well anymore - nowadays, it's going to take money, too. That's according to an Adobe's just-published Digital Insights Advertising Demand Report - a survey of 800m North American customers - which found a worrying trend. "Organic traffic in [...]

COLOGNE -- What's the best way to deliver commercial viewing experiences to viewers in the interactive TV age? The new platform opportunity is considerable, but could be squandered by overly aggressive or jarring messaging. That's why Interpublic's IPG Mediabrands is partnering with interactive-TV advertising firm Innovid. The pair are collaborating to find the right recipe for the over-the-top viewing experience. "Not a lot [...]

COLOGNE -- Imagine if advertisers and broadcasters could know, with certainty, which TV shows viewers were watching, for how long and how attentive they were? That's what companies like Samba TV are claiming to offer. Launched in 2008 and backed by investors including Mark Cuban, the outfit works by having software embedded on some 180m viewing devices. "That consists of smart TVs, [...]