LONDON -- Making cash registers ring is one ultimate aim of TV advertising. But, in the new era of targeting, it can also be a starting point. Sky, the UK's leading pay-TV platform, is amongst the broadcaster platforms whose addressable TV systems now afford targeting based on the in-store purchase behavior of identified viewers. Its AdSmart addressable TV system allows targeting of Sky subscribers identified using [...]

CANNES – The television industry needs to act less “precious” about its assets and be more aggressive in finding ways to expand measurement options. This was the view shared by NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino at a discussion sponsored by global media agency Carat. After laying out her company’s three priorities—content investment, data and analytics development and more partnerships—Yaccarino reflected on the immediate [...]

LAS VEGAS – That people constantly multitask is yesterday’s news. How they allocate their time across devices within a given time period—and what that allocation will look like five years from now—is what’s important to Brian Hughes. As he attends the annual Nielsen Consumer 360 event, the SVP of Audience Analysis Practice Lead for Interpublic’s MAGNA GLOBAL media agency network says [...]

CANNES -- For the last couple of months, a big number has been rattling around the media industry - "85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook", a Morgan Stanley analyst observed in The New York Times. The two big platforms are super-dominant when it comes to ad spend. And that is causing some [...]

CANNES -- If consumers are revolting against advertising because ad-tech has been too aggressive, why would anyone trust ad-tech to clean up the mess? That seems to be the rationale at AOL, whose content division is now taking a stronger role in making ad formats that don't piss off its readers and viewers. "People are pushing back - we’re taking that very seriously on the [...]

LAS VEGAS –Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Research Officer has a message for cable television providers: unlock your viewership data and it will be mutually beneficial. “If I could wave a magic wand to have the right data set for TV targeting and attribution, right now what I’d love to see is all the MSO’s start top open up access to their [...]

First, it was a letterbox. Then, it was vertical. But is the future of video actually... square? Zohar Dayan thinks so. He's the CEO of Wibbitz, a company helping publishers make videos out of text articles. And, when it comes to distributing those videos through social media, one format wins "Eighty-five percent of the most shared videos on Facebook were square format," he tells Beet.TV. [...]

CANNES – Many people in the advertising industry are quick to bemoan high levels of turnover among younger employees. But not the president and CEO of TBWA\Worldwide. Given the rapid pace of consumer behavior and the ongoing melding of creativity and technology, Troy Ruhanen advises agencies to get used to filling open positions. “You have to get much more comfortable with [...]

CANNES – "Music is one of the easiest connection points with a consumer," says Chad Stubbs, vice president of marketing for Pepsi Trademark, during an interview at Cannes Lions. "Wasn't it an easier time when you could have one superstar, three networks and some TV and print, and you had the nation covered? Of course, that is not the case anymore." Despite the increasing complexity of [...]

LAS VEGAS – Despite tremendous growth in consumer use of connected-TV devices, traditional media have stabilized year over year and thus “the report of their demise appears to be premature,” says Glenn Enoch, SVP of Audience Insights at Nielsen. At the same time, DVR penetration and that of streaming video on demand (SVOD) have met in the middle. Half of all [...]

CANNES – When Canada’s Toronto Raptors basketball organization wanted to revamp the way it drafts players, it was elementary to turn to IBM. That’s because Watson helped the team analyze the social media engagement of potential draftees. Specifically, the Raptors chose IBM iX, a unit that stands for Interactive Experience, has grown from 10 to 30 “global studios” in the past [...]

CANNES -- John Marchese has seen the future. It's a world where consumers really like ads, and want to get more of them, because they enjoy interacting with commercial messages. That's a world away from where we are today, says Fox Networks Group's advanced advertising president. Because the truth is, consumers don't really like ads at all. "We have a market that’s out of kilter [...]

CANNES -- USA Today's weekly virtual reality news show "VRtually There" may not even have launched yet - but that isn't stopping the news publisher from touting the product to advertisers, all the same. Publisher Gannett announced in March that VRtually There would launch in the spring, bringing scheduled weekly news to consumers in virtual space. Speaking at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in June [...]

LONDON -- Advertising creatives schooled for a world of TV spots are going to have to think very differently in the age of newsfeed messaging. That's according to one such exec who offers this fantastic observation to Beet.TV. "The social news feed is your personal curation of what’s going on - you just jump in, ‘what’s going on?’," Saatchi & Saatchi digital executive creative director Ricardo [...]

LAS VEGAS – Nielsen veteran Karthik Rao senses a resurgence of engagement as a metric for marketers. If that’s so, then the sky is the limit because while advertising reach has its limits, engagement does not. As he attends Nielsen’s annual Consumer 360 gathering, the theme of engagement "seems to be what everybody’s building their mousetrap around,” says Rao, who is President [...]

LAS VEGAS – The term “total audience” doesn’t necessarily mean “total currency” to Turner Broadcasting’s Howard Shimmel. While he doesn’t think the advertising industry will ever adopt a single currency for trading traditional television and digital video, he’s happy that measurement giant Nielsen is moving ahead with its Total Audience offering. In an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Nielsen Consumer [...]

LAS VEGAS – The biggest takeaway to date from Nielsen’s work with Roku in examining the connected device landscape is that it’s a lot like linear television, given the amount of co-viewing that takes place. “If you looked at the connected device landscape and all you looked at is the server counts coming off of those machines, you would be [...]

Back in the eighties, Eamonn Store piloted Royal Navy ships around the Caribbean. Now the former advertising executive is the latest chief at the helm of The Guardian's New York-based US division. In choppy waters filled with threats and opportunities ahead, Store is plotting a course for a publisher that will swerve around advertising revenue chances if they don't fit The Guardian's overall mission. "We don’t run [...]

CANNES - It is just two months now since Comcast-owned video ad-tech enabler FreeWheel acquired France-based TV ad-tech platform StickyADS, as it looked to extend its US digital ad expertise in to European TV. We have heard lots about the complementarity of the two companies. But what does the deal mean for existing and new customers of the joined-up entity? FreeWheel strategic development VP Brian [...]

CANNES -  With numbers this big, it's no wonder ad-tech vendors re vying to turn even the traditional media space programmatic. "Worldwide, (advertising) is $170bn, in the US it’s $77bn," according to Herve Brunet, CEO and co-founder of StickyADS, one TV ad-tech vendor recently acquired by another. "The linear side of TV is eventually going to go programmatic. Even if 20% of that [...]