LOS ANGELES -- You can't go to a digital industry conference these days without someone espousing the value of "data". For ad group Group M Worldwide's chief digital officer Rob Norman, data's value is clear: "Data is to marketing as science is to religion. The more facts you have, the less faith you need." But marketers are still unpicking exactly how to apply data [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Automaker Kia is working with the NBA for a second year on an effort to drive brand awareness via a video campaign tied to the NBA All-Star game, in an example of how user-generated video content can intersect with entertainment marketing, says Dimitry Ioffe,CEO and Founder of the agency TVGla, in an interview with Beet.TV at the [...]

LOS ANGELES -- The biggest benefit of the proliferation of big data in advertising lies in accountability, says Dave Morgan, CEO and founder of Simulmedia, in an interview with Beet.TV at the 4A's conference in Los Angeles. Data can also help marketers to "unbundle" campaigns as they learn exactly which components are driving business objectives and which aren't, he says. Much [...]

LOS ANGELES -- "Best-in-class content is alive and well" as new distributors and marketers alike take the opportunity to reach consumers, says an ad agency exec. "We've seen an explosion of the golden age of content," UM WW's north America president Sarah Personette, who was Facebook's own agency relations director until 2013, tells Beet.TV. "Consumers want and demand smarter content than ever before [...]

LOS ANGELES -- The digital marketing technology landscape may be expanding, but it isn't about to go pop, says one of digital media's most noted banker-advisers. "We've seen a change from media intermediation being an art to more of a science," Luma Partners' Terence Kawaja tells Beet.TV. "You hear about the word 'programmatic'… bringing software applications to find audiences, big data [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Digital advertising trading desks are growing up - and some are growing too big for their boots, says one video ad tech vendor. "Trading desks are starting to do more, there's lots of things the trading desks are evolving to provide ," says Videology's enterprise solutions head Pete Hagerty. "Trading desks are attempting to provide solutions to enable you [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Media agency Maxus is keen on addressable advertising and is aiming to work closely with multichannel video providers and delivery platforms by the fourth quarter on ways to make this type of media buying easier, says Louis Jones, North American CEO of Maxus USA, at the 4A's conference in Los Angeles. "A lot of agencies see addressable [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Amongst all the hype about "native advertising", one tech vendor, Kargo, claims to be signing up some big beasts. Kargo's CEO Harry Kargman tells Beet.TV it is gearing up to announce "the largest media companies on the planet" as customers for its solution, which plugs native formats in to publishers' mobile content streams. That will be a lofty claim [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Creative is just half the battle. Getting your beautiful video ad to viewers eyeballs is the way to really pay off. "You can have the best campaign ever - but, if the ad doesn't get to the right station at the right time, then everything is lost," says business development SVP Mike Palmer of ad tech vendor Mediaocean. "If [...]

LOS ANGELES  -- As marketers pore over new uses for data, media marketing firm Simulmedia wants to use the data it has access to as a way to better connect reach and frequency metrics to business outcomes,  says John Piccone, VP Sales at Simulmedia, a media marketing company, during an interview with Beet.TV at the 4A's conference in Los Angeles. "We can [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Addressable video advertising is now a reality - the problem is, it is actually multiple realities. "Addressability, to date, has been segmented in to private ecosystems," says media agency ZenithOptimedia's activation president John Nitti. "We're still at the beginning pt of the continuum as far as being able to inform our full buy with data. We haven't had something that [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Here at the 4A's annual meeting, Collective, the New York-based digital advertising technology company, and media agency Zenith, have debuted a TV analytics tool that provides TV planners with data to plan linear television ad buys. The alliance was announce in July. For an overview on the product and its introduction, we spoke with Justin Evans, Chief Strategy Officer [...]

LOS ANGELES --  The revelations of vast personal data collection by the U.S. government  has had a big impact on consumer's perception  of the advertising business, says John Montgomery, Chief Operating Officer for GroupM Activation and the 4A's privacy chief, in this interview with Beet.TV Last week, he and other advertising and media leaders met at the White House with Obama [...]

All manner of companies is shooting to make digital advertising that's "addressable" - targetable to individual users across devices. But when will, if ever, will there be a single standard for that lens? "That's still an open discussion," says global product manager Stefan Maris of TV-syncing ad technology service Civolution. "One of the discussions we are having is with Ad-ID. Ad-ID could be [...]

Advertisers are being dazzled with premium-grade publisher names by salespeople who instead give them low-quality sites as inventory, says one ad tech exec. "Right now, the whole business is getting away with it," says Jun Group CEO Mitchell Reichgut. "The client is seeing the big names (of sites on which they will appear) but they aren't to know the little names." Jun [...]

For advertisers, "viewability" - knowing whether a viewer has really watched their ad - has become an important metric. But some advertisers also want more granular information. Analytics startup Veenome wants to play that role. "We're figuring out what content is inside the video, indexing the actual imagery of the content, figuring out how many videos are on the page, where [...]

Video advertisers need to improve their data collection and processing capabilities to better target viewers, says one ad tech exec after launching a service to do just that. "TV brand advertising ... we believe it's very different from video advertising thats performance based," says YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi. "We believe video advertising for brands is all about getting the data … [...]

Mobile ad company InMobi says it is trying not only to encourage advertisers to use more data but to do so for years ahead. "Most of the media that I see spent - not a hell of a lot of data is actually being gathered," says the company's north America GM Francisco Cordero. "That could be done quite easily. "We're trying to [...]

NDN, the unseen power behind many of the videos on newspaper websites, says data is the oil fuelling the future of the business. finally there's enough information," COO Eric Orme tells Beet.TV. "What really needs to happen… we have to be able to give back tons of data to these guys (our customers) to help them understand what are people watching, why [...]

Despite the growing range of measurement options, many brands still favor GRP as a form of measurement even in the digital world, says Brian Gleason, Managing Director of Xaxis, WPP's targeted advertising division,  in this interview with Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico. "We've been measuring GRPs for a long time and clients are comfortable with GRPs so if they look [...]