If you thought mobile advertising was hard to measure, Nielsen reckons over-the-top TV and video services is much harder - so it aims to integrate its ad measurement systems with box makers at the system level. "Over-the-top is a really challenging space," Nielsen product leadership SVP David Wong tells Beet.TV in this video interview. "A year or two ago, people were saying, ‘Mobile [...]

CHICAGO -- If you haven't yet heard of 4C Insights, the data science company that just acquired Teletrax, the scale of insights it is processing suggests you soon will. The Chicago-based company is helping advertisers better understand how to target users of social networks by comprehending their response to brands, interests and media behaviour. "We look at over 1.5 billion user profiles, 250,000 interests, [...]

Fresh from announcing a deal with Associated Press, content recommendation engine Taboola also says newspaper publisher Gannett will adopt its technology to show readers related stories. The deal, which is a three-year exclusive, will see Taboola suggest next articles to be read by readers of sites including USA Today and will earn Taboola $45 million to $55 million, CEO Adam Singolda tells Reuters. But Singolda these days is [...]

CANNES -- When Mike Perlis decided to accept the invitation to become the first CEO of Forbes Media from outside the Forbes dynasty, many industry insiders wondered why he would take on such a challenge. "You all were well-mannered and good friends enough to not say it too loudly to me, but I did feel it," Perlis tells Beet.TV in this video [...]

CANNES – The growth of the scope of Cannes Lions, from a handful of categories – print; 30- and 60-second spots – to what it has become today, is, in the words of Icaro Doria, chief creative officer for DDB NY, “crazy." "Today I come here, and it’s so inspiring because you literally can do anything,” says Doria, who has been [...]

DDB Worldwide’s chairman emeritus Keith Reinhard considers his role as a co-founder of Omnicom in 1986 to be his greatest career accomplishment, but bringing disparate agency cultures together wasn’t easy. Concurrent with the three-way union that formed Omnicom was the merger of Doyle Dane Bernbach, a New York agency, and Needham Harper Worldwide, which had its roots in Chicago and was [...]

New York-based AppNexus' real-time ad bidding platform has built the company a position as one of the leading advertising technology vendors out there, at a time when contenders are racing to hail the virtues of their own suites. But CEO Brian O'Kelley sees one big differentiator between his company and the likes of Facebook, which recently rebooted Atlas as a cross-platform [...]

TV may not yet be fully addressable to advertisers in the same way the internet is, but that isn't stopping a collection of platform operators and ad tech vendors from trying to make it a reality. The Trade Desk, a demand-side advertising platform, is working to bring more ad targeting to Roku, the connected TV box in 14 million US homes. "Because [...]

Arun Kumar, global president of IPG's Cadreon unit, sees AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV as a watershed moment in a new era of television.  He says that the merger will mean more intelligent targeting of consumers with data on the household level. He says that inevitable evolution of the new medium will bring new muscle to an already powerful TV.  He see the [...]

In the battle of the content recommendation titans, the two leading contenders routinely trade new client announcements. Amongst the latest is Taboola, which says it will power content recommendations inside Associated Press' mobile apps and websites. The deal is a two-year exclusive, meaning Taboola will serve links to related stories when a reader is reading an article in AP's website or apps. Taboola CEO Adam [...]

Despite the rapid pace of media and technology innovation, Procter & Gamble's former top marketer Jim Stengel observes that the fundamentals of brand building haven’t changed. “A lot of companies lose sight of that,” says Stengel, who left P&G in 2008, in an interview with Beet.TV. “They get consumed by the activity that is possible now, and they don’t ask those really [...]

Integral Ad Science, the New York-based tech company that describes itself as  "the leader in quantifying digital media quality" has raised $67 million: $27 million in venture funding from Sapphire Ventures and $40 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. In this previously published video, company CEO Scott Knoll talks about  how the company identifies various forms of ad fraud [...]

Going back a decade, when Millward Brown’s annual BrandZ study tracking the 100 most valuable global brands was first released, only one Chinese company made the list. Now there are 14, including the tech giants Tencent and Alibaba. “Most of them are big brands, but they’re not truly globalized brands yet,” says Doreen Wang, Global Head of BrandZ at Millward Brown, [...]

CHICAGO -- The latest incarnation of a leading TV-synced online ads enabler is coming in to focus, with the announcement, by ad data company 4C Insights, that it has raised funds to acquire Teletrax, aiming to beef up its activities in social and TV advertising. "We’re playing aggressively in the decisioning process for addressable TV and we’re hoping to streamline some of the [...]

The Jun Group, a New York-based video ad platform that places ads in custom video players on publisher sites and within mobile apps, has taken its first venture round since being formed in 2005, the company announced today. The company, founded in 205, has taken some debt financing and is profitable, CEO Mitchell Reichgut tells TechCrunch's Anthony Ha in this report. This  [...]

Steven R. Swartz isn’t the only business reporter to make it big on the business side of reporting. Sequoia venture capitalist Michael Moritz wrote for Time magazine before making tech investments, for example. But he is one of the few to have risen to the very top of the company he has worked in for so long. Swartz began his career [...]

CANNES -- One consequence of the rise of data-driven marketing is brands creating tens of even hundreds of ads for various audience segments for a single campaign, not just two or three like in the old days. It’s “great from a sales perspective and not so great from a marketing cost perspective,” says Richard Guest, president of Tribal North America, in [...]

When J. Walter Thompson’s Non-Executive Chairman Bob Jeffrey got his start in advertising, it was normal for agencies to present a single TV spot to prospective clients in order to prove their credentials. For example, at Chiat/Day, where he worked early in his career, they showed the “1984” Apple spot. However, today’s top creative directors probably wouldn’t be showing off TV [...]

CANNES -- So-called "addressable TV", in which TV sets can now speak back to broadcasters, are tantalizing with the promise of household-level ad targeting. But addressable TV is not just about more refined TV targeting - the device in the living room is one platform that will feed in signals to an overall system which will produce unprecedented customer granularity - that's multi-touch [...]

Less than 10 percent of e-commerce and advertising is powered digitally --  but that will inevitably change. And the looming transformation will provides a twenty to thirty-year "tailwind" for the entire adtech and media industry which will mean vast opportunities for young people entering the industry, says Tim Armstrong, CEO and Chairman of AOL Inc in this video. Also in this segment about careers, Wenda Harris [...]