NEW YORK – Harley-Davidson has turned to customers for creative ideas by relying on crowdsourcing, says Mark-Hans Richer, global chief marketing officer for Harley-Davidson during an interview with Beet.TV at the Digitas NewFront 2013 in New York. "You can say you are close to customers, but how much control are you keeping for yourselves and how much are you giving to them?" he [...]

How to amplify advertising in social channels is a key area of exploration for marketers, says Scott Zalaznik, VP of Digital at Sprint, during an interview with Beet.TV at the Digitas NewFront 2013 in New York. "I have seen some fun stuff in custom content...and how to amplify that in social and drive that and take our earned media from our paid [...]

LONDON – Videology, a platform that allows brands to connect with specific audiences, reaches viewers across devices. Users that once watched television primarily can now be targeted via screens they are using more frequently – tablet, mobile and PC, says Anne de Kerckhove, managing director of France and Southern Europe for Videology. Beet.TV spoke with de Kerckhove in this video interview at [...]

LONDON -  While second screen apps for TV shows can have a big and immediate  impact, their use is fleeting, and the industry needs a more standard approach, says Simon Daglish, Group Commercial Director at Britain's ITV  network in this segment from recent Beet.TV leadership event at GroupM's offices. For the app for "Britain's Got Talent" app, he says that while [...]

LONDON -- Programmatic online advertising technology isn't yet good enough, and will never match human salespeople for brand ad sales. That's according to BBC Worldwide's strategy and operations VP for global advertising sales, Tom Bowman. "There are some websites that have gotten rid of their salespeople," Bowman told me during our one-on-one interview at Beet.TV's London Video Ad Strategy Summit last [...]

While most of the NewFronts events were focused on Web-original video, the theme at the Digitas event was around real-time advertising.  In this conversation, Digitas North America CEO Tony Weisman tells BeetTV why real-time advertising matters, what the agency is doing with the HuffPost Live and the role of video in all this which he calls "the default" element.      

AOL is registering rapid growth in video views, now ranked second to YouTube in monthly views according to comScore, thanks in large part to the editorial "DNA" of putting videos in nearly all stories, says Ran Harnevo, SVP for Video at AOL, in this interview with Beet.TV recorded at the Digitas NewFront event. He says that video views of AOL videos [...]

LONDON – TV engagement app zeebox is developing new features that will let Pacific-time and VOD viewers revel in the same social experience as live audiences. "We're going to try to replay the entire experienced synchronised to the catchup," co-founder Anthony Rose told Beet.TV in this interview. "You recorded Downton Abbey; we'll bring you the timed tags and, very shortly, even [...]

At the Digitas NewFront event last week, the Huffington Post and Digitas announced an arrangement by which the agency can activate real-time, native advertising cmapaigns on HuffPost Live within two hours, says Arianna Huffington in this interview with Beet.TV. We spoke with her briefly at the Digitas NewFront event after her presentation, and just as she was leaving for Tokyo for [...]

LONDON - With little access to the raging civil war in Syria, the Associated Press has been relying on a citizen journalists with smart phones with the Bambuser app to stream live coverage of the conflict, explains Sandy MacIntrye, the London-based head of global news for the AP, in this interview with Beet.TV Not necessarily just observers, he notes that many [...]

Digitas, the big digital agency that started the NewFronts six years ago, has seen a dramatic growth in the marketplace for Web original video and an expansion of its industry event to now include over a dozen big content producers including AOL, Conde Nast, Google/YouTube, Hulu, Microsoft, Vevo, Yahoo and others. With the explosion of content, the agency sees its evolving [...]

Larry Tanz, CEO of Hollywood television production studio Vuguru, founded by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner in 2006, says that the quality of Web video debuted at this year's NewFronts has taken a big leap forward.   He says the Web original industry is where cable was some years ago when it's content went on to surpass broadcast television. Last week at [...]

Justin Ezarik, better known as web video superstar iJustine, was in New York last week the Digtal NewFronts  to announce her new show on AOL On about wearable tech.  We spoke with her at the AOL show about her new show and her advise on how to succeed with original Web video. Justine recently signed with Hollywood powerhouse agency UTA.  

LONDON -- The Financial Times famously replaced its iOS app with a HTML5 web app, after losing a fight for control over customer data and pricing. But its Apple absence doesn't mean the FT hasn't gone native elsewhere. "It's not like we have a problem with native apps," FT emerging platforms product manager Chris Smith tells Beet.TV in this interview at [...]

Audio Content Recognition (ACR) software*,  which synchronizes TV watching with a tablet or mobile device, will "change the world," says Lou Paskalis,Vice President, Global Media, Content Development and Mobile Marketing at American Express, in this wide-ranging interview with Beet.TV He explains that ACR will provide  brands with a full "sixty minutes" to market to an audience, not just during the commercial [...]

Outrigger Media, which has developed a proprietary analytics platform  called OpenSlate to track the impact and influence of thousands of YouTube channels, is partnering with Digitas to spot new, influential channels for the agency and its brands, the companies announced on Thursday at the Digitas NewFront event. At the conference, we interviewed Mike Henry, CEO of Outrigger.  Handling the interview for [...]

LONDON - Rather putting resources around widely reported journalism stories such as the Leveson inquiry, Britain's leading journalism blog, Journalism.uk.co, has decided to focus on original reporting.  This has meant lower article count but greater page views says Sarah Marshall,  Technology Editor, in this interview with Beet.TV We spoke with her recently at the FT Digital Media Conference.   In the interview, [...]

FreeWheel, the video ad management platform for many top digital publishers including NBC, has an integration with TV ad platform Mediaocean to allow TV ads to be bought and sold on digital sites.  The first integration is with AOL, FreeWheel and AOL announced earlier this week at the AOL Digital NewFront event. At the event, we spoke with FreeWheel's SVP Frans [...]

LONDON – Nielsen may soon announce the success UK advertisers are having placing video ad campaigns on both TV and the internet when it unveils first results from the British test of its new Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings (XCR) system. "For the UK, we recently deployed beta trials at the beginning of this month," Nielsen VP Andrew Bradford told us during Beet.TV's [...]

LONDON – Reuters has begun a "major" program to digitize 25,000 hours of analogue video content it hopes to license to content-hungry brands and to publishers eager for material to serve ads against. "It's sitting in a basement," Reuters' global multimedia head Greg Beitchman told Beet.TV in this interview. "If you want that content today, you've got to wait three to [...]