Steve Ellwanger

Dentsu Aegis Network sees the annual television Upfront rituals as less a once-yearly negotiating stint with media sellers than an ongoing conversation about how to unlock more consumer targeting data and find the proper balance between TV and digital video. Like other media buyers, the company still “lays a base” with TV buys during the […]

In what he sees as an “unprecedented” television UpFront negotiating season this year, the U.S. CEO of media agency Carat sees more TV budgets migrating to venues like online video and believes his company will work with fewer providers to extract the most value in the marketplace. Doug Ray says the current UpFront buzz centers on […]

Reflecting on recent Upfront presentations by media companies to advertisers and their agencies, television advertising veteran Chris Geraci sees more price parity between TV and online video while acknowledging that premium pricing is warranted in certain instances. Geraci, who is President of National Video Investment at the OMD unit of Omnicom, cites as memorable Upfront […]

The word “scarcity” as applied to commercials within television programming typically has pertained to programs or hit series. But with addressable TV ads, “the scarcity comes around an attribute,” meaning the ability to target coveted audiences, according to Jason Brown, VP of National Ad Sales at AT&T AdWorks. “In certain categories like automotive, where all […]

Brands have never had more scale to reach targeted television viewers, but the future rests in large part in harnessing their own first-party data and being able to better correlate offline behavior with viewing. In the meantime, scale can be a limiting factor as it relates to the cost of more precisely targeted TV ads […]

LAS VEGAS – Amid the wave of technological change sweeping the television industry, the NBCUniversal local stations believe that a measurement change to impression-based from cost based on ratings points for local TV would enable it to better unify content across platforms. “Media everywhere except for local TV and local radio is measured in impressions […]

Calling addressable television advertising “an incredibly valuable and powerful complement” to traditional TV ads, the world’s largest independent media agency believes it’s time to stop thinking about the medium as digital versus linear. “I don’t think the digital versus linear discussion is even valid anymore because there’s plenty of ways to deliver live TV through […]

Having shifted away from television advertising buys based solely on gross ratings points, it is been a few years since General Electric made any buys during the annual Upfront negotiating season. “We’ve changed our strategy quite a bit in terms of taking packages kind of off the shelf,” Alexa Christon, Head of Media Innovation at […]

If the acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Charter Communications becomes reality, the resulting entity’s customer base—when added to that of Cablevision, DirecTV and DISH Network—will represent “beyond critical mass” for addressable television advertising, according to a top programmatic ad executive. Until then, supply and demand realities surrounding addressable ad inventory will impact its continued […]

CHICAGO – Being able to target ads to television households based on their cultures and languages could be a boon to MillerCoors, but only if there’s a direct linkage to sales from addressable advertising and the costs of customizing creative messages is not prohibitive. The beer marketer is considering the best strategic approach to addressable […]

Having successfully tested addressable television advertising for its MerrillEdge investment platform, like other marketers Bank of America longs for greater scale and more variability in being able to serve the most appropriate creative messaging. One challenge for BOA—which offers nine core products—is that the current footprint of addressable TV households is small. MerrillEdge is one example. “We were […]

NAPERVILLE, IL – Having used addressable television advertising for almost three years to better target certain consumers, ConAgra has established deeper relationships with addressable households because they are driven by people, not media. According to Fernando Arriola, the consumer packaged-goods marketer’s VP of Marketing, who Beet.TV interviewed at the company’s headquarters, addressable TV is a […]

LAS VEGAS – While witnessing the digitization of television is “not for the faint of heart,” near-term agreement on multiple viewer measurement currencies is a step in the right direction for the digital and TV camps, says consultant Tim Hanlon. Hanlon, who is Managing Director of FTI Consulting, brings to the playing field decades of […]

LAS VEGAS – At the end of the road to television convergence—beyond advertising stacks, ad pricing and viewing metrics across devices—lays a single insertion order. So easy to imagine but so very elusive in the here and now, in the view of Lorne Brown, who was chosen this month to head the new Digital Committee […]

LAS VEGAS – As matchmakers go, few are busier than the PILOT group within the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), as the trade organization continues to help develop standards that enable local television broadcasters to keep pace with technology and viewing habits. To PILOT Executive Director John Clark, the concept of what a local broadcaster […]

LAS VEGAS – Virtual reality and 360-degree videos might be the sexy new things, but Brightcove is happy to keep pace with the needs of over-the-top (OTT) streaming video services—some three dozen of which launched in the last year. Brightcove used the occasion of the 2016 NAB Show to showcase its cloud transcoding for Ultra […]

LAS VEGAS – Brand marketers should spend more time trying to figure out how to engage with consumers as they are viewing live sports events than they do thinking about which devices are providing the viewing experience. This has been one of the takeways for WatchESPN, which offers all of the live, streaming services of […]

LAS VEGAS – While the convergence of television and digital media requires much desired industry standards for viewing metrics to effectively sell advertising, with such standards will come the need for media companies to address yield curves across platforms. “That’s something that everyone’s taking very seriously when they’re talking about this idea of coexistence of […]

Who would have thought that something so 1990’s as the digital video recorder (DVR) would help to transform political advertising? In the first presidential election to benefit from the granular targeting capabilities of addressable TV advertising, the joint venture between DISH and AT&T-owned DirecTV is helping political campaigns target more than 20 million households at the […]

The leader in addressable television advertising, with some 13 million households, AT&T is using a humorous commercial during the TV Upfront negotiating season to sell the power of addressable while speaking to concerns about its cost and scale. The commercial, “Stop Showing the Right Product to the Wrong Customer,” offers up three vignettes: a grownup […]