Joanna O’Connell

This week was amongst the biggest of the year for ad-tech deals, as over-the-top (OTT) TV platform provider Roku announced its plan to acquire dataxu, a demand-side ad-buying platform, for $150 million. Roku is the leading provider of add-on OTT devices, according to Strategy Analytics, and is also present natively inside many TV sets. In […]

Pumped up by the foundational waves of programmatic and digital measurement, many advertisers in the last couple of years have pushed publishers to price their ads based on real business outcomes. After a recognition that proxy metrics like “clicks” didn’t necessarily translate in to real goals, like sales, certain publishers and even TV operators are […]

CANNES—A year into the work of the CMO Growth Council, its participants are looking beyond individual brands to embrace the realization that they “touch all of humanity” and human purpose has risen to the fore, says Deloitte Digital CMO Alicia Hatch. The Association of National Advertisers and the Cannes Lions Festival started the CMO Growth […]

CANNES—As a caretaker of the world’s eighth-largest brand, Tencent’s CY Lau believes that marketers must be both the ultimate trustees of brand legacy and “defenders of consumers.” As a member of the “Group of 25” under the aegis of the CMO Growth Council, Lau is hoping to create “congregations of marketing organizations” to restablish the […]

SAN JUAN — How long should a commercial break be? How lengthy should a TV ad be? And how many is too many? Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption. That has spurred many networks to […]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Analyst Joanna O’Connell spends much of her time at Forrester these days researching how consumers think about advertising. And while “it’s not an awesome story,” she sees marketers taking the steps to better understand things like identifying overlaps in their user base and considering needed organizational changes. “To think that somehow everyone […]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Consumer reported engagement rates across different advertising media show that “the digital channels are kind of in the toilet,” says Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell. Changing that will be a bit more complicated than just figuring out what constitutes premium ad environments, where engagement tends to be higher. The VP and Principal Analyst says […]

SANTA BARBARA — For years, marketers have tried combatting growing consumer resistance to advertising with a hopeful refrain – if only they could make their ads more “relevant”, perhaps marketing would cross a rubicon and become useful. The theory is all well and good – but how do you actually make it happen? Perhaps inconveniently, […]

CANNES – Creating better television ad experiences for viewers seems to be a never-ending conversation for agencies, brands and publishers. But judging from a panel at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, ad relevance and personalization is expected to vary widely by platform and provider for the foreseeable future. Reasons for the variations include corporate […]

CANNES — Many in the ad industry are pointing the finger inward, blaming the sector for alienating audiences through the over- and extreme use of targeting technology. That kind of consensus is forming, with executives promising to rebalance the audience relationship through better messaging. Still, even as the industry looks to correct itself, it is […]

CANNES — A lot of industry insiders are talking these days about how the traditional ad agency is dying. That may or may not be true, depending on your persuasion. But a 2018 intervention by new blockchain technology could at least improve the quality of agencies’ lives in the foreseeable future. That was the hope […]

Just because you can reach a consumer through super-targeting, doesn’t mean you should. That is the new advice from one leading marketing analyst who has worked at an ad-tech platform but who also benefits from reams of consumer insights. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell says many marketers are […]

MIAMI – From a perch like that of Joanna O’Connell at Forrester Research, it’s hard not to see the big picture in the roiling television business and what needs to change. Whether it’s the “insane” practice of continually chasing lower CPM’s or the “chicken-and-egg” Netflix business model. Overall, the Principal Analyst believes that things are […]

COLOGNE – Despite the many innovations birthed by the advent of digital marketing, there’s still much to be done to deliver ads to people that don’t annoy them. This is why IBM and its Watson artificial intelligence assets are teaming up with demand-side platform pioneer MediaMath to create an infrastructure that supports cognitive bidding. The […]

VIEQUES, PR — Age, gender and demographic just don’t cut it anymore. In the new age of advertising super-powers, marketers want to target consumers with more more granularity and certainty than traditional measurements allow. Fortunate, then, that a whole new raft of data sources is coming on-stream to help them do that. In a panel discussion convened […]

Analyzing the impact of video advertising reveals not only incremental lift in offline store visits but also the vast difference in quality of inventory from one programmatic exchange to another. These are just two of the takeaways that emerged during a panel discussion by industry professionals at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes, presented […]

With his multi-decade background at NBC, CNBC and TiVo, Tom Rogers knows a bit about television audiences. Given continued viewing declines, he believes the only way for broadcast and cable networks to maintain decent pricing is personalized ads with measurable business outcomes for advertisers. “I really don’t see any other answer given this confluence of […]

VIEUQES, PR — A lot of people will give you a lot of different answers about how marketing should work. For Joanna O’Connell, it comes down to valuable conversations. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the marketing analyst turned marketing chief gives Beet.TV her prescription for advertising effectiveness. “How do you help a marketer or an agency […]

As measuring the outcomes of digital video ad campaigns gets more sophisticated, what excites Placed’s David Shim is video as a direct-response channel. The same advances in measurement can only improve the performance of traditional linear television. In this interview at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes, presented by video marketing technology provider Eyeview, […]

HOLLYWOOD, Florida – The year 2017 will see WPP’s Xaxis increasingly focus on performance outcomes for its clients’ video ad campaigns. “Every campaign that we will run will have a KPI that is considered very important to the advertiser that we will achieve,” says David J. Moore, who is President of WPP Digital and Chairman […]