Robert Andrews

CHICAGO – Connected TV (CTV) viewing is exploding with audiences, and advertisers want to follow suit. But where, once, TV was relatively straightforward to buy, how are agencies how approaching the proliferating platforms, opportunities and challenges? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Beth Weeks, VP and director of media at Digitas North America, explains. Standardization sought […]

What is it going to take for TV networks to front up and match big players like Google, Facebook and Amazon when it comes to offering advanced advertising opportunities? Answer: learning to function with the same ecosystem mentality as the tech giants. In this video interview with VAB CEO and president Sean Cunningham for TV […]

Any acquirer of a community with deep engagement and intensely loyal users had better tread carefully. And that’s exactly what Cavel Khan is doing. He is the new chief revenue officer of Tumblr, the blog network acquired by WordPress owner Automattic a year ago. Tumblr had been acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013 […]

US digital ad spend will slow from a previously-projected 17% growth this year to just 1.7%, as brands tighten their purse strings amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to eMarketer. But some executives think bold spending at a time when rivals are cutting back could help some brands emerge out of this period in the lead. […]

In a medium where more of the ad inventory is sold by the people who actually make the content, the software they use to facilitate transactions will have an increasingly important role. After a decade in which so much display ad inventory was traded through open programmatic exchanges, the emergence of connected, over-the-top (OTT) TV […]

TV networks and MVPDs want to sell ads in a new way for a new era- but they are going to need some new tools to help get them there. For example, many now want to sell more than just 30-second spots in sequence, preferring to to sell the whole of a commercial break in […]

A company which crunches the data on 85% of US ad spending in order to help agencies and others better price their business says it wants to roll the same features out to 12 other countries this year. Standard Media Index (SMI) has sight of 85% of all ad agency invoices, piped straight from booking […]

LOS ANGELES — It took its time to leap from display to video and TV, but now the ad-trading technique known as header bidding convince more connected TV programmers to make ad inventory available to buy programmatically. That is according to one agency exec whose company is rolling up its sleeves. Header bidding is the […]

EDMONTON, ALBERTA – Your average seven-year-old may not know too much about the intricacies of header bidding through programmatic OTT ad exchanges – but Daniel Riddell doesn’t need them to. The CTO of kids online TV service Kidoodle.TV is witnessing amazing growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. And he is installing a stack of ad-tech to […]

A year after Sony sold a majority stake in its Crackle video service to the company behind Chicken Soup For The Soul, things are looking up. Crackle had struggled to find its place in a world increasingly dominated by YouTube and Netflix. But the sale to Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, which produces entertainment […]

Around the world, advertisers that pinned their strategies on delivery against premium content are praying for a resumption in top-tier sports and other programming. Until then, broadcast groups are thinking creatively to give them the next best delivery opportunities – and ensure ad budgets can keep flowing. In this video interview, Amit Chaturvedi, EVP, Product […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has up-ended all the norms of traditional TV ad buying, with the usual upfront ad sales season largely suspended. That is what happens when brands, uncertain about their future prosperity, decide against making hefty upfront ad purchase commitments. But, in their pursuit, instead, of agility and flexibility, could those brands be accelerating […]

Until recently, the common understanding of connected TV services was that they were mostly popular with younger cord-cutters and the typical view of addressable TV ad targeting was that it worked mostly at the local level. But ad agencies are now enjoying recent developments which are widening both of those apertures – audience breadth and […]

Just two months after merging, programmatic ad platform Rubicon Project and video management platform Telaria are taking on a new name, Magnite. It is a rebranding that involved hundreds of staff from the companies operating under lockdown. But now president and CEO Michael Barrett says he is looking forward to reconnecting with those staff in […]

By now, ad buyers have become sorely aware of the impact of ad fraud. A study for the ANA last year pegged the problem at $5.8 billion globally. But, even though that is declining on previous years, ad fraud has primarily been seen as a problem in the display and online video arenas. When it […]

With resources constrained and a new importance placed on sure-fire customers, marketers are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by using data tools and data to find more bankable targets through advertising. In recent weeks, we have heard from several executives who have suggested ad buyers are moving further down the marketing funnel, looking to improve […]

As advertising technology evolves to serve a world that is increasingly about video and TV, traditional methods will fade to black, leaving a new class of vendor in charge. That’s the view of one ad-tech executive trying to bring about the change. “In the world we’re living in today, where you have parallel auctions, header […]

Over the last few weeks, we have heard from a range of broadcasters that have responded to the coronavirus pandemic with a single watchword – “agility”. But software vendors, too, have learned to think on their feet and find new customer categories. Case in point – Cisco’s WebEx has been supporting video calls and presentations […]

SAN FRANCISCO  —  Inscape’s addressable TV data consortium is kicking off with nine programmers this week, the latest cooperative to try bring scale and simplicity to the targeted TV ad opportunity. Fox, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, E.W. Scripps and AMC Networks will begin their tests of Project OAR, on June 24, while Disney Media Networks, Discovery Networks, […]

As the advertising world prepares for a world without third-party cookies, many of the alternative “identity graph” approaches start with email addresses. LiveIntent is looking forward to that world. It is an ad-tech vendor whose technology already has sight of more than three billion unique online identifiers. Its nonID identifier uses email newsletters – a […]