As the U.S. addressable linear television footprint continues to grow, OTT is “here and now and scaled, and we are definitely seeing dollars flow in that direction,” says Magna Global’s David Cohen. “Whether it’s Roku or whether it’s Amazon, it’s a very, very big growth engine for us.”

Amid the TV Upfront negotiating season, consumers are embracing streaming video options on big and small screens. As a result, “technology is definitely moving the conversation from addressable television, which we’re still talking about, to OTT,” Cohen, who is Magna’s North American President, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We see it as the big, beautiful images that linear television delivers with the added benefit of interactivity, the ability to kind of lean in.”

In addition, Nielsen is measuring OTT viewing “very similarly to the way we can look at Nielsen across linear television, so it is an apples-to-apples comparison.”

When advertising attribution metrics are added to the mix, “we are very, very pleased about the way that measurement has gone in the addressable space.”

Advertisers in many categories are taking advantage of OTT avails, but three in particular have done so more than others, according to Cohen. Those are automotive—one example being interactive ads that let viewers “see and build a car on a big, beautiful screen” before going to a showroom for a test drive, plus consumer packaged-goods and travel. “It’s across the board,” says Cohen.

He believes OTT today offers “a much more palatable kind of ad to edit ratio if you will for consumers than linear television. Far fewer ads, far fewer pods. You actually get the content that you’re looking to consume without a lot of ad interruptions.”

Cohen cites effectiveness studies that Magna has done and notes that some of OTT’s attributes have not been lost on traditional TV providers, some of whom are “taking a page out of that playbook to reduce the ad loads on their platforms as well.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

By Steve Ellwanger on    @steveellwanger