Steve Ellwanger

CANNES—A direct relationship with owners of television advertising inventory is one of the core premises behind Project OAR, which hopes to develop an open standard for addressable ads on connected TV’s. “As long as there’s someone in the middle, there are levels of complication that just won’t make this work,” says Jodie McAfee, SVP of […]

CANNES—The world’s biggest agencies are “strapped” by their structure and hesitant to experiment, while advertisers are taking back control and experimenting more than ever, according to Sir Martin Sorrell. “It’s not in-housing, it’s part of a much broader trend,” the former CEO of WPP says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International […]

Having started with Facebook as its primary advertising platform, online retailer Touch of Modern tried television a couple of years ago. “And it quickly became actually the majority of our marketing spend,” says Co-Founder & CEO Jerry Hum. Touch of Modern, whose app and website cater to millennial males, started business in 2012 as the […]

It’s not just so-called direct-to-consumer brands that are trying to bring “daily rigor and accountability to video.” Effectively connecting different television environments is a common goal across the spectrum of advertisers, says EVP and Chief of the Horizon Next direct-marketing agency Gene Turner. “For most of the DTC brands and even the performance brands that […]

CANNES—Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications have launched an industry initiative called On Addressability with the goal of uniting television distributors behind addressable advertising. “It’s a call to action,” says Comcast Cable’s President of Advertising, Marcien Jenckes. “It’s really about initiating a process this year that’s going to scale addressability across television,” Jenckes adds in […]

NCC Media is “working fast and furious” on becoming the hub for television networks to make their national advertising time addressable, says David Kline, who is President of Spectrum Reach and EVP of Charter Communications. “We are aggregating all our addressability, not just for the two minutes an hour we sell to our local national […]

CANNES—A year ago at the Cannes Lions, AT&T provided a sneak peak of its future with a tease banner outside the Carlton Hotel that would presage the launch of Xandr, formerly AT&T Advertising & Analytics. “It’s been quite a whirlwind year since Cannes 2018,” says Xandr Chief Marketing Officer Kirk McDonald. What followed was Xandr’s […]

CANNES–Procter & Gamble’s first-ever P&G LifeLab installation at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is part of the company’s effort to “reimagine creativity to reinvent advertising” through a variety of new creative and technology partnerships. “We’ve been focusing on reinventing brand building for the past couple of years, a lot on media, a lot […]

Touch of Modern Co-Founder & CEO Jerry Hum’s advice for direct-to-consumer brands is quite simple. He recommends having a diversified marketing portfolio and, if a company’s just spending on digital media, “definitely look at TV.” Performance has always been a priority for the retailer geared to millennial men “because we grew up in the digital […]

When you co-mingle television-viewing data from set-top cable boxes with data from smart TV’s, you get closer to tracking fragmented consumption. But what complicates measurement of IP-delivered video content is an understanding of what IP-connected devices are actually associated with people in a given household. That’s a person-level frontier that FreeWheel plans to tackle, according […]

Extreme Reach’s creative management platform AdBridge was originally intended to help creative “move at the same speed as media” for advertisers. Now it’s being extended to simplify distribution for media sellers. “What we’ve discovered and what some of our receiving partners have come to us with is their issues have gotten more complicated. They have […]

FreeWheel’s already formidable footprint in tracking video viewing across screens got a boost when it began to factor in smart-TV data from Inscape. And with TVSquared as a partner, campaign attribution and optimization can happen much sooner than has traditionally been the case. “From a measurement perspective and understanding viewership and consumption, we are partnering […]

In the general quest for more advanced advertising resources, the overarching conversation is about “unification and interoperability” across the industry. Underneath is the day-to-day reality of competition among a variety of players with different business models. “I think we’ve got a lot of bets in motion right now,” says Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader, Media […]

Sometimes you have to push the envelope and concentrate on innovating, other times listening to the market is more of a priority. For the fast-growing Innovid, right now it’s time for the latter six years after releasing its first connected-TV product. Having helped to create Innovid 11 years ago to transform video experiences on the […]

Advertisers need to open up a bit on the way they’ve been buying television so as to best maximize their campaigns, says Comcast Spotlight’s Andrea Zapata. “For us what we’ve learned is that our clients are traditionally buying us still in ways that they’ve been doing for years,” says the VP of Research & Insights […]

Having bulked up on assets in the smart-TV space, Nielsen is targeting next year for the launch of a platform that will help scale addressable television advertising. Key to the effort will be executing ad replacement and decisioning. One of Nielsen’s most recent acquisitions was of Sorenson Media. The company now has technical underpinnings of […]

About a year after sunsetting its own apps in favor of distribution via YouTube and virtual MVPD’s, Vevo expects to sell out “a nine-figure body” of music video advertising inventory in the UpFront. It’s part of Vevo’s plan for “returning music television to the living room,” says Kevin McGurn, President of Sales & Distribution. In […]

When Calum Smeaton set out in 2012 to explore the nascent exercise of television advertising attribution, early clients were direct-to-consumer brands. Since then, other brands, agencies and media sellers/distributors have adopted the CEO & Founder of TVSquared’s vision, to the tune of 770 brands, agencies and networks in 70+ countries. In 2013 and 2014, direct-to-consumer […]

Engagement-ad format pioneer true[X] continues to focus on brand lift as “the leading indicator of conversion” as it expands into connected TV and offers its measurement technology to publishing partners. “Today we’re actually able to measure brand lift in near real time across the true[X] network on CTV, desktop, mobile for every campaign that we […]

With a host of brands seeking to unlock growth through creativity, two new awards and a new initiative called Connect, Learn, Experience (CLX), the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity “will be a little bit busier and a little bit bigger than last year,” says Chairman Philip Thomas. Although Cannes Lions started in 1954, it […]