The union of AT&T and WarnerMedia comes at a time when digital and television advertising formats are constantly changing. “It’s kind of unlimited at this point. Linear TV formats are changing quite rapidly,” says Turner Ignite EVP Dan Riess.
As it happens, speed also is one of the key attributes that WarnerMedia is touting to advertisers, along with a one-stop intersection of digital and TV audience opportunities fueled by AT&T Communications data, Riess explains in this Beet.TV interview.
In the formerly constricted world of linear TV ad formats, “We’re using full ad pods to tell brand stories that are longer. We are also using much shorter snippets of space and opportunities that we have to tell small, eye-opener pieces for brands.”
On the digital side, in addition to ad overlays and viewer interactivity, Turner Ignite is bringing commerce to social media posts in a new way. “So if we do a branded content piece with an insurance company through our Great Big Story brand and it goes out into Facebook, we’re actually driving directly to insurance signups,” Riess says.
Asked about the balance between ad loads and the viewing experience, he believes it’s in the “adolescent” stage across the industry right now. “Consumers don’t really want a whole ton of ads. I think there’s a lot further for it to go if we want to compete with the SVOD services that don’t have advertising.”
AT&T’s advertising company, Xandr, generates “an incredibly powerful consumer data set. As that data comes into WarnerMedia, we have tons of different opportunities to use it in many different ways,” Riess says.
Given that confluence of data from set-top boxes, Internet and app usage via broadband and mobile plus geo location insights, “we know what was seen, what was interacted with and what was the behavior that came out of that. The great thing about it is it’s fast.
“Most of the time, companies are stitching together different companies that have one of those three things,” he adds. “We have it all in one place so it’s much faster, the matching and accuracy is much better and it allows our advertising clients to be that much more efficient and powerful with what they’re doing.”
Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.
