CANNES, France --  Advertisers will spend less on US broadcast TV this year because viewers are moving gradually to other platforms, according to media agency OMD's regional boss. "We will end up seeing US upfront total spend being slightly down versus a year ago," OMD US CEO Monica Karo tells Beet.TV. "That is this natural progression of more and more viewing shifting to [...]

CANNES -  Yesterday's news that consumer products giant Mondelez is using video ad tech platform TubeMogul marks the company's commitment to go one hundred percent programmatic in time.   "Data is having such a profound effect on brands that television planning will go fully programmatic eventually," says B. Bonin Bough Vice President of Global Media and Consumer Engagement at Mondelēz International. He [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Disney/ABC Television Group says it has increased kids' engagement with its mobile apps by refreshing the line-up through adding games to video last month. "We’ve already seen some of the stickiness increase," the group's video products and technology VP JR Grant tells Beet.TV. "(They place) an emphasis on getting more content types and activities for kids to interact with [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Lifestyle TV company Scripps Networks Interactive is already doing plenty in digital media - now it wants to better marry those activities with its core TV strategy. "Ninety-five percent of our revenue comes from linear - and yet we have a gargantuan digital side," the company's senior advisor Channing Dawson tells Beet.TV. "The digital side is not aligned [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Can crunching gigabytes of data help TV companies give viewers more of what they want? Christy Martin, chief technology advisor at search and recommendation firm ThinkAnalytics, thinks so. "There’s tons of opportunity that’s still untapped," she tells Beet.TV. "With all the fragmentation that’s out there - for programmers making sure that their content stays relevant - as people are [...]

The online ad industry's recent embrace of TV-style gross rating point (GRP) metrics for audience measurement has come largely thanks to roll-out of GRP systems by individual metrics groups. But the whole industry will have a sector-wide agreed GRP within a year, according to an advertising representative. "Now that everyone is agreeing that GRPs are an important part of the buying and [...]

Mondelez,the giant consumer packaged good company, know for its Oreo brands and other popular  products,  is in an ambitious program with TubeMogul to buy video media programmatically, according to this report in Adweek.   The program is being implemented in collaboration with Mondelez' global agency MediaVest. Recently, we spoke with TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson about the opportunities for brands to manage [...]

The reality that many of the online ads paid for by advertisers are not really viewed by human users - or, worse, fraudulently viewed by artificial bots - has risen up the industry's agenda of late. ComScore chief research officer Josh Chasin characterizes it as "arms race": "You have the good actors working to eliminate fraud, you have the bad guys working [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- One of the social TV space's most talked-about apps has apparently succeeded in driving up its user base after recently renaming and rebranding. "Traffic is up 25% to 30% month-on-month, so it’s going very well," says Beamly co-founder Anthony Rose, who in April rebranded Zeebox, the service he launched in 2011, to be more female-friendly and to better [...]

CANNES -- Seeing the emerging role of data in the creative process of advertising and media, Cannes Lions is planning a new track dedicated to the area, explains Philip Thomas, CEO of Cannes Lions, in this interview with Beet.TV In the Wall Street Journal today, Jack Marshall reports on the numbers of data and programmatic advertising companies who are here in [...]

Advertisers don't just want cheaper ad rates - they will increasingly search for more insight in to how their spend is really working, predicts one ad agency exec. "Client transparency is certainly going to be a big hot topic," according to Zenith US CEO Dave Penski. "Are they getting what they’ve been promised? "Driving down costs is really important - but (advertisers [...]

The emergence of stream-based content units popularized by mobile apps like Twitter and Facebook promises to simplify a confusing mobile advertising space, says an ad agency exec. "We’ve had an explosion of formats," says Maxus' north America chief strategy office Mark Egan We’re seeing a lot of this roll in to a common unit which is represented in the stream format that [...]

There are no longer any advertising "channels", just technology, says a Publicis division exec. "We should no longer think in 'channels' anymore - we think in connectivity and user experience," according to ZenithOptimedia north America corporate development EVP James Shoreland. Shoreland is working on breaking down silos between technology, data, brands and content: "This is the very best time to be in [...]

Does the adage "you get what you pay for" ring true when it comes to online video advertising? Although advertisers are often keen to drive down the prices they pay in a world now threatened by fake views, TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson warns that logic could be detrimental. "We get a lot of information requests - 'Can we buy pre-roll, only on [...]

Inevitable consolidation of video ad tech vendors and the emerging standards around video viewabilty and ad operations will bring more ad dollars to video advertising, says Matt Prohaska, industry consultant and former head of programmatic advertising sales at The New York Times. Prohaska was one one of the moderators at the Beet.TV Video Ad Fraud Summit.   You can find all [...]

Who's to blame for the rising problem of online ad fraud? Ad tech vendors aren't the frauds themselves - but they should accept responsibility for keeping customers happy, says one platform boss. "We take the burden," says says Brett Wilson, CEO of video ad tech vendor TubeMogul. "Anything you buy that isn’t what you think it is, we’re gonna take care [...]

Dave Morgan says  Simulmedia, is taking an important step by participating in upcoming US TV ad-buying upfronts for the first time. "It’s been something we’ve watched from the sidelines as a spectator," Morgan tells Beet.TV. "For the first time, we have positions on both the sell side and the buy side." Simulmedia brings an avalanche of data to bear on TV ad buying, [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -  Showtime sees smart TV's as powerful platform for immersive, interactive experiences, explains David Preisman, VP for Interactive Television at the premium cable network.  In this interview with Beet.TV, he speaks about the company's Sho Synch app and its growing popularity.   The app is available on LG sets. We spoke with him at the TV of Tomorrow Conference [...]

The UK may not have a joint "TV Everywhere" initiative like that in the US - but subscription satellite TV and broadband operator  BSkyB is seeing mobile viewing boom despite (or perhaps because) of that. "We are seeing ... a third of our customer base using 'TV everywhere' every month," says BSkyB's business developer VP Hilary Perchard, who is one of the [...]

Over the last couple of years, media measurement's big titans have both rolled out new ways to quantify online video consumption for advertisers - Nielsen's Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) and comScore's Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE). Who will win? That's the wrong question to ask, says an exec from the comScore side. "The market has come to believe it’s very tidy when everybody but one [...]