Through the eyes of a US marketing exec, Europeans are, notoriously, relatively more concerned about how ad targeting might impinge on their personal data. A recent report from Belgium's data protection agency claimed Facebook tracks computers of users without their consent, whether they are logged in to Facebook or not, and even if they are not registered users of the site [...]

The old adage used to be that digital video had to be short, that viewers wouldn't sit and watch it in long sessions. That may have been true on the desktop - but video ad tech company FreeWheel's latest quarterly market report shows new devices are now driving online video ever more toward long-form and live content. According to year-over-year changes noted [...]

The data continues to point to a disconnect - consumers have flocked to consume content and engage socially using mobile devices, over desktop alternatives. So why have advertisers still not piled in to mobile at the same rate? "It’s sometimes an afterthought," IPG Mediabrands global mobile head Travis Johnson agrees, in this video interview with Beet.TV "We’ve got clients … seeing upwards of 50% of their [...]

Interpublic Group’s chairman emeritus David Bell grew up expecting to become a litigator, but when he decided at the last minute not to go to law school and turned his sights to advertising, he got lucky with admission to Leo Burnett’s training program. “I was the only one of 19 that didn’t have an MBA, so I must have faked [...]

In Irwin Gotlieb’s view, what should make the ad industry exciting to young people is the variety of skills they’ll get to learn and clients they’ll get to serve. “If someone were to watch me in any given day, I still read scripts for television shows, I still make calls on development, and yet in the next minute I may [...]

Some creatives have continued to view data as an intrusion that undermines their work by valuing algorithms over instincts, but that may be starting to change. One development that creatives are excited about is the availability of programmatic technology that allows them to show hundreds of different iterations of creative to different customers, according to Erin Matts, CMO of Omnicom Media Group’s data [...]

Through January to October 2014, the total value of ad tech deals totalled $3.8 billion, according to a report from investment bank Coady Diemar Partners at the time. And things are about to get bigger. Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of media M&A advisory LUMA Partners, says his firm is advising on several deals, due to be announced this year, that will likely bust the half [...]

It's four years since ad tech company AppNexus first tried helping advertisers tackle targeted ad buying on digital video, an attempt it later aborted. But now the New York-based outfit is ready to reboot its video plan. AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley, in this video interview with Beet.TV, says:  "We’re going in to open beta for our new video-buying product in early August. We’re also innovating [...]

We may not yet have reached the point at which so-called "addressable TV", the ability to target individual connected televisions with unique advertising, is mass-market - but we have reached a close second, thanks to a combination of dumb TVs and smart devices. "Everyone would like to get in to ... the dream of one-to-one advertising," IPG Media Lab managing partner Chad [...]

The scope and scale of the addressable TV market is bound to grow over the coming years, but that’s not all. Addressable screens are also likely to come onto the scene as TV operators stitch more devices into their content ecosystems, according to Henry Tajer, who became CEO of IPG Mediabrands in May. “That rigor and that granularity make for a much [...]

While it seems inevitable that targeting TV audiences at a set-top box level will become a widespread practice, the targeting of individual households at massive scale seems like a less assured eventuality. “This is really about human behavior; it’s not really about what technology will allow,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which is building an inventory management platform [...]

As TV audiences start watching TV on more devices than just, well, TV, marketers face a challenge - how do they measure, target and price their advertising efforts? Companies tackling and talking about that problem are now commonplace. One such, Cadreon, believes the answer lays in what global president Arun Kumar calls "advanced TV" - a mix of household-level addressable capability, programmatic audience [...]

A host of ad tech platforms is helping marketers break down the boundaries between buying TV ads, VOD ads, digital video ads and all the other flavors of moving-image ads. That's the topic that seems set to dominate the upcoming DMEXCO digital marketing expo in Cologne. Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, FreeWheel marketplaces GM James Rooke channels marketers' concern: "How am I going [...]

The auto-playing video ads Facebook introduced a while back could make the social network $3.8 billion by 2017, a Nomura analyst recently forecast. So just how good is the new format, and what challenges remain? Ben Winkler, chief digital officer of ad agency OMD USA, says the ads were bound to be successful, given Facebook's scale - but that's not the full story. "They [...]

This year, all the hot advertising talk is about the linking of planning, targeting and buying for TV ads and ads on handheld internet devices. For TV viewers distracted by touchscreens during commercial breaks, Teletrax has been gaining attention for allowing brands that are advertising on the living room big screen to also buy ads on social media at exactly the same moment. But [...]

For marketers who still have the instinct to use repurposed TV spots for their digital video ads, mobile video remains challenging. It represents a form factor many haven’t figured out. “You have to rethink how you’re telegraphing [your] message and how you’re telling a story in as little as six seconds” or keeping it interesting enough that people watch the whole [...]

So far, "programmatic" technologies for targeting and automating online ad buying have revolutionized the display ad segment. They have also made big in-roads in to video ads. Whilst few expect such a big bang in the television sector any time soon, WPP's programmatic unit Xaxis expects to have its technology on-stream by the start of 2016. "We have made substantial progress this [...]

As the ad dollars spent on data strategy and infrastructure have exploded in recent years, so has investment in attribution in an effort to understand how marketing across channels works together and, ultimately, how to assign credit for driving purchases. “It’s almost rare these days to find brands who are not doing some kind of modeling approach,” says Rolf Olsen, chief [...]

Across the advertising industry this year, the main challenge seems to be uniting brands' understanding of how consumers respond to ads across the many different media they now use. One more vendor tackling that problem is Tapad, whose "device graph" model aims to help clients do just that. "We’re working with a (television) manufacturer that has content recognition software and has consumers say [...]

Carat’s global president and U.S. CEO Doug Ray recalls a recent conversation with a client, who admitted to thinking of media five years ago as a commodity product. Fast forward to now, and the differences between media agencies and even holding companies look stark. In Ray’s view, that’s because of factors like the growth of data and programmatic, as well as decision-making [...]