SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Beet Retreat 2018 brought together the entirety of the advertising industry value chain to help define the semantics surrounding advanced television and provide a clearer picture of measurable business outcomes. What follows is the five-minute synopsis of Ashley J. Swartz, who serves as “dean” of the annual event as well as CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization.
“We realized very quickly after the first evening that we needed to level set with definitions,” Swartz explains. “It’s interesting that our industry is still at a place it continues to be where language is something that holds us back in having conversations that help us move the agenda forward.”
Parsing the various interpretations of complicated subjects like addressable TV, audience targeting and advanced TV served to “really help us make sure that we were at the table having the same conversation with the same intention,” Swartz adds. “What was so great about this event more so than any other is that the entirety of the value chain was represented.”
Attendees included programmers, broadcasters and MVPD’s “that are taking risks and really starting to figure out how to tackle the challenge of looking at audiences instead of spots or GRPs to actually productize their inventory and take it to market with a different value proposition for marketers.”
As always, a big topic of discussion was data and whether, as Swartz puts it, it’s “actually becoming a product.” The industry was “data rich, insights poor” not that long ago. Or, as Retreat participant Jesse Redniss of Turner quipped, “I think we’re data rich, we’re insight rich, now we’re outcomes poor,” Swartz noted.
By the final day, “We were so oriented around business outcomes and it was incredibly refreshing for us to get there as a set of peers and thought leaders who are making it happen.” She also is encouraged by a common sentiment of “how do we start to transact” that goes “beyond the handshake to actually forging partnerships that are driven by and defined by qualitative, measurable business outcomes.”
Swartz says she departed with the sense of a shared set of values, needs and desired outcomes. “There’s no us versus them anymore. It’s just how do we get better, faster and stronger.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
