Future of TV Advertising Forum, London 2018, presented by Finecast

LONDON — With old-fashioned TV, things were simple. The gross-rating point was the predominant ad-buying currency. Now that the world is exploding in to on-demand TV, premium video and a host of other channels, ad-buying currencies are up in the air again. Lorne Brown wants to pin them down. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the […]

LONDON — As the number of TV platforms proliferates and the range of buying options across them explodes, ad buyers need to seek out simplification. That is why the new owner of Cablevision has launched what it’s calling a “one-stop shop”. Altice USA’s a4, a division which helps brands and agencies advertise to citizens across […]

LONDON — It may often be analog and it certainly doesn’t have the luxury of advanced foresight through on-demand – but that doesn’t mean live, linear television can’t benefit from the same kind of automations that have also come to programmatic VOD. That is the view of one exec who spent two decades in ad […]

LONDON — TV isn’t dying, it’s just changing. Whilst that isn’t necessarily the view of tech aficionados who like to declare telly “dead”, it is the view of many within the TV industry who are trying to march the medium on to a brighter future. TV isn’t without its challenges, of course. But, in this video […]

LONDON — Across Europe, in multiple media industries, what once were competitors are coming together, forming a variety of ad sales cooperatives in a bid to pool inventory they hope can match the vast scale of Google and Facebook. In another such initiative, French TV channel operator M6 is teaming with rival TF1 and public […]

LONDON — The UK’s pay-TV company Sky has blazed a trail by serving billions of addressable TV ads, those targeted at individual households. But German addressability is limited by regulation. Yes, for addressable TV as for plenty else besides, in Europe, things can get fragmented. The new unit established by GroupM to smoothe the path […]

LONDON — Europe’s leading pay-TV company was executing on household-level TV ad targeting before it was even being called “addressable TV”. Six years after launch and having just been acquired by Comcast, Sky suggests this new method of selling TV ads is now commonplace across the company. It was back in 2013 that the UK […]

LONDON — Ahead of the tenth anniversary of its online TV catch-up player, Irish public broadcaster RTÉ is planning to add new features it thinks could please both viewers and advertisers. RTÉ Player launched in April 2009, offering hundreds of hours of TV shows available to catch up with through online and some TV platforms. It […]

LONDON — Over the last two years, the growing realization that Amazon brings significant skin to the digital advertising game has ballooned. And that is crossing off its ecommerce platform and on to online TV, too. In a recent terms of service update for Fire TV ad sales, Amazon says “Fire TV Ad-Enabled Apps must […]

LONDON — Thirteen years in business and $72 million in funding tends to give you a certain authority position in the marketplace. For Amobee, the demand-side platform and analytics suite operator, that position seems to be getting bigger. After already acquiring Ringring Media, AdJitsu, Gradient X, Adconion, Kontera and Turn, the Redwood City, CA, company this […]

LONDON — So far in the evolution of addressable TV advertising systems, the big secret has been the extent of operations that are actually performed manually. Next up, ad-buying agencies and other users deserve to jettison some of that manual work, says an exec from one company trying to make it happen. In this video […]

LONDON — Just a few short years ago, the worlds of media had become islands. Online, supremely trackable, was selling ads in a vacuum. TV, disconnected, looked isolated by comparison. Now, digital TV and identity resolution technologies are building a bridge, however. In its latest report entitled Assigning TV Credit: A Practical Guide to Attribution, FreeWheel […]

LONDON — It is now more than a year since GroupM launched Finecast, a new subsidiary to bring together various strands of addressable TV advertising. What comes next? Maybe getting it in to the hands of media agencies, says the man who runs the product. “We’re looking to bring that out into markets, so the […]

LONDON — It’s not so long ago that marketers were getting excited about how their jobs could be fuelled by data, that data was becoming “the new oil” powering their industry. Fast-forward to 2018 and it seems the pendulum is swinging a little bit away from the new dataism. GroupM director of audiences research Simon […]

LONDON — It owns several of the leading pay-TV platforms in Europe – but Liberty Global says enabling addressable, targeted TV ad opportunities for channels may involve a mix of third-party partnerships. “It’s (about) picking the right model for the right market,” says Liberty Global MD, advanced ads and data, John Paul in this video interview […]

LONDON — Eight months after NBCUniversal rolled out its new measurement currency for quantifying time-shifted and on-demand viewing on any platform, one exec thinks the deployment is a game-changer. NBCU’s aim with CFlight was to give advertisers a sense of how their marketing campaigns are being seen, regardless of time or location. In this video interview with […]

LONDON — If ads and subscription payments sit on two sides of the media see-saw, the trick is in getting the balance right. Whilst many broadcasters are now keen to copy Netflix’s subscription model, what could be the impact on ad sales? “There’s maybe less premium content available for the ad sales team to monetize,” […]

LONDON — UK cable operator Virgin Media is replicating its evolving addressable ad strategy in Ireland, after acquiring a TV channel operator. Like in the UK, what is now branded “Virgin Media” is the product of a roll-up of several historical roll-ups of regional cable operators, offering telco and TV service, and is now owned […]

LONDON — For the UK’s main cable TV operator, targeted advertising was a long time coming. Although the cable distribution method, coupled with its use of a connected TiVo set-top box, seemed to offer distinct advantages, it was not until relatively recently that Virgin Media began offering addressable ad targeting capabilities. For that, it can […]