“Retail media”, the ecommerce spaces which are now also selling ad inventory, are booming in popularity, in part, because that inventory is so close to the bottom of the marketing funnel, the check-out.

But this emerging category of media doesn’t have to just be about retail, says one marketer who founded a company to help power shopper marketing.

In this video interview with industry analyst Joanna O’Connell for Beet.TV, Teresa Aprile, CEO & Co-Founder, Brandcrush, a company jsut acquired by Criteo, says retail media can be so much more.

Bigger than digital

“Retail media is related to all the touchpoints that reach shoppers on that path to purchase, so it’s holistic,” she says.

“It is in store, that’s one element. It’s out of store, and it’s online. In that online space, it’s more than just onsite and offsite. It’s also social, it’s circulars, it’s  loyalty, it’s all that kind of jazz,” she explains.

Aprile says the physical store site remains a key component of the omni-channel mix. She points out that 80-90% of grocery shoppers still shop in-store.

So what is an optimum in-store experience? That can include digital screens outside and inside the store, floor decals, product sampling, shelf talkers, magazines and recipe apps,” Aprile says – all much broader opportunities than ecommerce site slots alone.

Search for the holy grail

Aprile’s 20 years of marketing experience led her to create Brandcrush as an owned media platform that enables businesses, retailers, and influencers to reach shoppers more effectively.

It offers a solution for retail media orders, inventory and supplier management, enabling self-service discovery and booking of shopper media.

The platform addresses the fragmentation in the retail media ecosystem and helps retailers capitalize on their owned media opportunities.

In March 2023, commerce media platform Criteo acquired Australia-based Brandcrush, saying it would help it help clients “manage their entire media inventory across both ecommerce and physical retail while enabling brands and agencies to seamlessly discover and purchase omnichannel media from leading retailers”.

Beyond silos

Aprile believes that retailers are essentially media giants who have yet to capitalize on these owned media opportunities.

“When they look at each of those channels, they look at them in silos, they’re executing them in silos,” Aprile says.

The answer is in bringing those silos together.

“It’s like the holy grail of marketing to be able to see that single view of your supply investments and to see those moments of media impact along the shopper journey,” Aprile says.

They are gaining traction as a way for brands and publishers to layer their respective datasets in order to improve audience targeting or generate insights.

But clean rooms don’t necessarily depend on first-party data, and don’t have to be used for targeting.

That’s according to the co-founder and CEO of one clean room vendor, Habu. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Kilmartin busts some myths around this fast-growing tech category.

Wider use cases

Already in the evolution of clean rooms in advertising, which has been bedding-in for a year or two at most, we are seeing efforts to widen the use case.

“A lot of our most sophisticated clients are CPG clients, and a lot of them don’t have a lot of first-party data,” Kilmartin says.

“Clean rooms actually enable them to get much more transparent signal into transaction data, into media data.

Kilmartin also says clean rooms are not simply about targeting existing customers, but also help generate different demand.

He shared an example of a client using machine learning models on retailer data sets to inform targeting strategies, which had nothing to do with targeting existing customers.

“Targeting is definitely a use case,” Kilmartin adds. “However, there’s a lot more sophisticated use cases happening outside of just identifying common customers.”

Clean Rooms Need Connection: LiveRamp’s Clinger

Fragmentation and the cloud wars

Kilmartin says the best options are when intelligence and collaboration technology is brought to the actual source of data, on the cloud warehouses, rather than moving or copying data.

“The big trend in the clean room market right now is really the cloud wars,” he says. “You have AWS that launched clean rooms, Snowflake has clean rooms, Databricks has a clean room, and the other clouds are talking about clean rooms as well.”

Beet.TV recently heard from several executives concerned that clean room technology is not yet well enough integrated with other ad-tech tools, risking another wave of fragmentation and requiring users to use multiple clean rooms all at the same time.

Kilmartin acknowledged the need for interoperability, saying customers are asking: “Do I have to work across 10 different clean rooms?” He emphasized Habu’s focus on being an interoperable layer across distributed data sets to address this challenge.

You’re watching “What’s Next in Clean Room Tech,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Habu. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

LAS VEGAS – Online retailers such as Amazon and traditional store chains such as Walmart have built billion-dollar businesses in selling different kinds of advertising on their websites. In order for the retail media marketplace to grow and possibly overtake televised media – not including streaming or connected television (CTV) – advertisers will need more tools to evaluate campaign effectiveness.

“Any agency person that you talk to in this space that is dealing directly and having experience with retail media is going to tell you that measurement is still a challenge,” Joanna O’Connell, an industry consultant, said in this video recorded here at the ShopTalk 2023 exhibition.

“They’re still looking for more sophisticated measurement, faster measurement, more closed-loop measurement. More cohesive and holistic measurement,” she said. “And frankly, measurement will drive investment.”

Because the retail industry as a whole is one of the biggest buyers of advertising, there’s the possibility of tensions between their ad-sales teams and their marketing teams who buy ads across a variety of media outlets.

“There’s just the natural tension between the buy-side agencies and brands, and in this case, a new sell side, which is to say retailers. They are now the media companies,” O’Connell said.

As media sellers, retailers must be prepared to provide advertising services and support to brands who also supply them with products to sell in stores and online.

“Retailers really believe that they have unique and special characteristics that make them a must-buy, but buyers are used to being able to do things in more kind of holistic and sort of cross-publisher ways,” O’Connell said. “That is going to be a new negotiation point between retailers and the buy side.”

Data collaboration needs to be discussed more often among retailers that are in a position to collect the most comprehensive information about their customers’ buying habits, and advertisers that either want to reinforce those behaviors or conquest new customers.

“The future of data collaboration, where you have organizations that have direct consumer relationships that need to be very thoughtful and protective of their data, but they also need to be able to monetize that data as part of being essentially in the media ecosystem — that’s something I’m watching really closely,” O’Connell said.

You are watching ‘Inside Commerce: Retail Media & What’s Next? Reports from ShopTalk 2023,’ a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Criteo. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

SAN JUAN, PR — For a consumer, hands busy on the nozzle, it may seem like a moment of the day when digital screens have no room to play.

But the fuel pump these days is becoming a prime piece of advertising real estate.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sean McCaffrey, President & CEO, GSTV, explains how software, backed by data, is helping marketers reach motorists at the pump, and how tracking their next purchase actions can drive brand outcomes.

Station screens

GSTV is a digital video network at tends of thousands of locations in the US, including fuel stations and retail convenience stores.

It operates in 205 markets, claiming 115 million monthly unique viewers.

“We deliver a full sight sound motion content experience to people on the literal consumer journey,” McCaffery says.

The fuel moment

McCaffery talks about the value of a fuel-up.

“We’re a highly measurable moment to talk to a consumer,” he says. “Fuel day is highly differentiated consumer behavior. It’s a day for a lot more shopping, that sort of thing.

“And it’s a moment in time where you can find attention that drives an engagement and action.

“That’s a moment of attention where, as a brand or an agency, you can entertain, you can inform, you can add value, and then drive a consumer to do something that day, that week, that weekend and beyond.”

Pumping up

GSTV is one of several video networks to have emerged in gas stations and convenience stores, capitalizing on latent consumer attention.

It was formed as Gas Station TV in 2005 but merged with Verifone Pump Media in 2017.

It has OCTANE, a data and analytics solution for ad targeting; programmatic targeting; and IGNITE, an in-house creative and content studio.

GSTV even made its own IAB NewFronts presentation in 2020.

Talking tactics

McCaffery explained some of the tricks on offer.

“We know that a consumer is there because of the financial transaction,” he says.

And he talks about how brands use the opportunity.

“Sometimes, that’s trying to prompt someone who eats at a QSR once a week to do it twice a week. Sometimes it’s, it’s trying to steal a pizza occasion and make it a burger occasion.”

GSTV includes data link-ups with Catalina, comScore, Axiom, MasterCard and others to link up a motorist’s fuel purchase with other actions.

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

SAN JUAN, PR — They are billed as a software tool for bringing data back together after the demise of identifiers.

But could “data clean rooms” actually end up making marketers’ lives even more difficult?

In this interview with Beet.TV Events editorial director Jon Watts at Beet Retreat, Mike Bregman, Chief Data Officer, Havas Media Group, says he fears the rise of clean rooms could lead to a proliferation in the ad-tech stack.

Clean room benefits

Clean rooms allow companies to use and share data in a controlled and secure environment, ensuring that sensitive information is protected and that the privacy of consumers is not violated.

They are used for tasks such as audience insights, audience segmentation and activation, and measurement and attribution.

Bregman says people are adopting the tool because traditional identifiers like cookies, IDs and IP addresses are declining in usefulness, thanks to tech vendors’ changes stimulated by legislation.

Clean Rooms’ Second Wave: Easier Onboarding & Cross-Room Orchestration

Forward and back

But he says the rise of a diverse clean room offering could be a problem.

“There’s almost a confusing amount of technology that’s in the way of consolidating that,” he says.

“The challenge is that each of the publishers, media companies, are doing it individually.

“You have a thousand different clean room technologies that are all independent and somewhat fragmented, which takes us forward in terms of privacy and security and what the audiences consumers are looking for – but a step back in terms of the usefulness”.

Clean Rooms Need Connection: LiveRamp’s Clinger

No garden in the room

Bregman says clean rooms should not be a “dead end” and should not have a “brick wall”, meaning they need to offer interoperability – lest clean rooms look like just another “walled garden” platform.

“You need a way to push (data) back and, in a great world, sync it with other data sets when it’s coming out,” Bregman says.

If there’s individual experiments that are run in all of these different walled gardens or clean room tech, you want to be able to bring it together and be able to tell an advertiser, ‘Here’s how everything is working, how all your dollars are working together’.”

Converging clean

Bregman’s Havas Media Group has its own ad planning and buying platform, Converged.

It partnered with LiveRamp to enable a data collaboration service within Converged.

“We’ve spent the last couple years, invested quite a few millions of dollars into it,” Bregman says, adding he will continue to partner for the platform.

“What we’re trying to do is to start off with a partner-and-build mentality. Instead of making a $1 billion-plus acquisition and buying some old technology, we’re going to build it from scratch.

“We’re going to assemble our Avengers superheroes. We’re going to create something that’s going stand us of time.”

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

L’Oréal, a cosmetics giant with a diverse range of consumer and non-consumer brands, has already begun leveraging clean room technology to gain deeper insights into consumer behavior.

Now the company is ready to use the tools to buy next year’s TV ads.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Shenan Reed, SVP, Head of Media at L’Oréal, explains the value of clean rooms and how the company is applying this technology to various aspects of the business.

Disney partnership

In advertising, data clean rooms allow companies to use and share data in a controlled and secure environment, ensuring that sensitive information is protected and that the privacy of consumers is not violated.

They are used for tasks such as audience insights, audience segmentation and activation, and measurement and attribution.

L’Oréal has started to explore the potential of clean rooms in television advertising.

“We have started to work with partners like Disney on clean room capabilities to start to see how our audiences and their audiences are behaving and how we might be able to tell better consumer stories in the data that we bring to these consumers and pull those insights through both into our creative, but also into how we create better consumer experiences through media,” Reed says.

Disney has previously told Beet.TV how it works with companies like Habu to enable data collaborations with brands like L’Oreal.

Disney’s McGraw Sees Maturing Adoption For Ad Clean Rooms

Small can be clean, too

L’Oreal is one of the world’s top spenders on advertising.

While L’Oreal and Disney are both large companies sitting on plenty of respective data, Reed says that isn’t a prerequisite for benefitting from clean rooms.

She says: “If you don’t have a lot of first-party data at your disposal, clean room technology can still be very powerful for you.”

“Even with little subsets of first-party data, understanding cookies that are visiting your site, bringing those audiences over and creating robust lookalike sets that help you understand who this consumer is, how they’re behaving, what they’re engaging with, can really help you.”

Navigating the upfronts with new tech

With new currencies, attention measurement, and clean rooms coming into play, the upfront process in television advertising is becoming increasingly complex.

However, Reed is optimistic about the changes and sees opportunities for collaboration.

“The upfront this year is going to be an interesting one, for sure,” she says. “I’m actually personally looking forward to it because I love having access to new data, to new currencies, to new technologies, to clean rooms.

“It is a complicated space, but those will be conversations that I think are going to be most interesting.”

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SAN JUAN, PR — When you don’t have the raw materials, you need to mine a different seam.

That’s what Field Garthwaite did when he co-founded IRIS.TV, contextual targeting enablement software company for video.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Garthwaite explains why it is crucial that connected TV can approximate the same kind of data transparency enjoyed by digital media before it.

Link to the future

“In digital, you had webpage URLs provided for tools like contextual suitability, verification, measurement, all based off of the URL,” Garthwaite says.

“That type of transparency doesn’t exist (in TV). All the technology built off of URLs doesn’t exist at all in streaming.

“TV buyers think about having program-level information, they know when their spots ran, they have a lot of transparency then in streaming environments.”

Understanding video

A host of software vendors has been working to bring extra data to help advertisers understand more about digital video inventory.

IRIS.TV’s technology peers into video content to produce a range of buyable “contextual” targeting cues, to make programming descriptors like ratings, genres and celebrities in-show classifications actionable.

LiveRamp has bundled IRIS.TV’s IRIS.TV ID and its own RampID two together in its unified TV platform, along with an integration with the SpringServe ad server platform.

Measurement integrations

For Garthwaite, that’s about increasing transparency in connected TV.

“It’s been very opaque,” he says. “The growth of viewership has been far faster than I think anyone thought in 24 months.

“What you need is new technology that can allow for kind of some parallel between the two.

“The IRIS ID, which didn’t even exist at all three years ago, went  into the bid stream for the first time in 2021, was at a fraction of a percent. Now we’re hearing reporting from individual DSPs … that they’re seeing it up to 30% of their global video avails.”

Garthwaite says IRIS.TV is beginning to build its ID into new measurement solutions and some of the traditional ones, with upcoming announcements due.

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Brands and their agencies are continually bombarded with pitches on technology that promises to improve the outcomes of advertising. Their goals ultimately determine the need for these solutions.

“The way I see the world is we’re playing a 3D chess game, Sam Bloom, chief executive at Camelot Strategic Marketing & Media, said in this on-stage discussion at the Beet Retreat San Juan with Beet.TV correspondent Tameka Kee.

“There’s a chess game around inventory. It’s very fragmented. There’s a chess game around audiences. It’s very fragmented. And there’s a chess game around measurement. It’s very fragmented,” Bloom said. “We have to string solutions through those three pieces of the chessboard.”

Advertisers are looking for simple solutions to complex problems, winnowing down the partners that can handle a wide range of tasks. Streaming platform Roku is an example of a company that can provide hyper-specific targeting based on the information it gathers about people’s viewing habits and other characteristics.

Roku Is One Model

“I’ve always loved Roku, because I know that when someone signs up with the Roku service, they have a credit card, and the Roku ID matters,” Bloom said, referring to Roku’s audience identifier. WWhat’s embedded in it is you’ve got scale, you have identity, and you also have the ability to target, and do the things you want, and it’s a massive addressable place. It’s a straightforward solution for clients.”

Meanwhile, the media environment is highly fragmented as people divide their time among a bigger variety of channels and connected devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to reach a deduplicated audience across these outlets.

80/20 Rule

“I wan to go to where the eyeballs are, and I want to go to the places that have the relationship with the consumer,” Bloom said of campaigns. “Almost everything we do, it’s 80/20. We focus on the 20%, that’s gonna deliver 80% of the value, and that is our focus. Not that adtech isn’t important. It’s a means to an end for what we’re trying to achieve.”

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

NEW YORK – Terry Kawaja, CEO and founder of Luma Partners, knows the ad tech/martech ecosystem better than most. He’s not so sure there is room for a flurry – let alone a whole Lumascape slide worth – of clean room startups.

“I have a mixed view on clean rooms,” Kawaja told Beet.TV. “Do you need solutions to help companies propagate first party data? Of course we need that functionality. But I push back on this notion of data clean rooms – so what?”

Kawaja’s contention is that standalone data clean rooms are likely companies build around a single product feature, one that is best suited to be combined with a fuller suit of marketing cloud tools and services.

He’s pushing for a new acronym – data collaboration platforms, which in his view will offer brands a fuller range of features and use cases.

If you’re a startup betting on building just another clean room product, “I wouldn’t want to rely on that single proposition,” he said. “In the long run, it makes sense to combine.”

The good news is, that even in this uncertain economy, investment and opportunities abound.  “The beauty of this ecosystem is that’s there’s always new money and new innovation,” he said.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Marketers are always looking for more insights to improve the effectiveness of their advertising. With that in mind, Havas Media Group has made the idea of “meaningful” a key part of adopting technologies that help brands to reach their business objectives.

“’Meaningful’ defines our agency model, and we’re going to be spending this year creating a new series of technologies all based around the meaningful concept,” Mike Bregman, chief data officer at Havas Media Group, said in this interview at the Beet Retreat San Juan with Beet.TV contributor Rob Williams.

These initiatives include the development of a Meaningful Rating Point (MRP) to measure people’s attention to television advertising, which has become increasingly important as consumers divide their time spent with media among a wider variety of media channels and connected devices.

“The Meaningful Rating Point is where we want to advance how TV linear and traditional channels are tracked,” Bregman said. “We want to think about it in terms of not just reach-based metrics but really attentive reach and how to get consumers that are paying attention.”

Havas has worked with a variety of measurement providers such as VideoAmp, iSpot.TV and Comscore to develop newer ways to set the value of advertising transactions, or what are known as currencies, among different media platforms.

“We’re in the multi-currency conversations, and all of that is going to lead into this idea of meaningfulness,” Bregman said.

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

SAN JUAN, PR — These days, ad agency holding companies don’t only build media plans and buy.

Many have also become full-fledged data operators, offering their brands measurement, audience profiling and more.

In this discussion at Beet Retreat San Juan, Laura McElhinney, Chief Data Officer, Horizon Media, explained how that is changing her agency.

Tech investment

“We’ve invested a lot of money over the past few years in technology, that’s in our own internal tech stack,” she said.

“It does get very expensive. You now have operational expenses on top of that for the long term. I not just, ‘hey, this is going cost me $10 million to build’.

Horizon Media is the largest privately-held agency in the US with clients like A-B InBev and Geico.

It has its own data platform for creating people-based audience identifiers, Blue, built using TransUnion’s own identity graph.

Break The TV Mould: Horizon’s Koenigsberg Wants To Rip Up The Rules

Nevermind the cookies

It’s not just about a product offering, however. McElhinney says Horizon is increasingly aiming to gather first-party audience data so that it can be sure it is dealing with privacy-compliant ad opportunities.

She says she wants to offer “a value proposition with the consumer and pushing towards that consumer consent”.

“We’re doing that for ourselves internally to build out our own internal panel, if you will, with consented people, but also working with our brands as they’re building out their first party (data),” McElhinney says.

“Then it doesn’t matter about the cookies.”

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

Havas Media Group is launching a new attention-tracking metrics in a bid to give its clients a new spin on measurement, going into this year’s TV upfront ad sales season.

Mike Bregman, Chief Data Officer, Havas Media Group, said the company is working on a proprietary solution.

He explained it is driven by a goal to delivery “meaningful experiences”.

Meaningful media

“Attention is something that’s been hugely beneficial to us as we’ve started deconstructing how meaningful experiences work,” Bregman said.

“Measuring the effectiveness of the touch points, measuring the types of consumer journeys, measuring how the eyeballs are actually tracking and engaging with content on screen… all of that brings us to our own proprietary metric that we’re calling the Meaningful Attention Unit.

“We’re going to be testing a lot of that in in the upfronts. We’re going to be engaging with our top performance clients …”

The currency of attention

Brands and their agencies are looking for new waves to measure their media, now that traditional user-targeting methods are waning after the deprecation and limitation of digital identifiers.

Dentsu has launched its own EACPM, an effective attention cost per a thousand.

Whilst metrics like viewabilty have tended to focus on how the technical framing of an ad makes for the possibility of it being rendered on screen, the real attention given by consumers to an ad has remained murkier.

Meanwhile, many premium publishers are trying to pivot the industry away from traditional buying metrics, toward a measurement technique they feel is more their strong suit, attention.

Attention to data

“We’re trying to hook up the pipes,” Bregman said. “We’re trying to get the ad tech world to really embrace new ways of thinking and to really challenge a lot of the conventions that have been out there for a long time.”

Bregman’s Havas Media Group has its own ad planning and buying platform, Converged. It partnered with LiveRamp to enable a data collaboration service within Converged.

And now Havas is also set to launch its own data offering.

“We’ve delved into the data science space,” Bregman added. “We’ve formed our own engineering team. We have our own consulting offering. I think we’re now at a point where we’ve achieved the scale in market, the successes to go in and brand our own independent data offering.”

Last year, the in-game ad tech company Anzu helped American Eagle launch a virtual store in Roblox. The Israeli-startup also announced a partnership with NBCUniversal. The message seemed clear – Anzu and in-game advertising gaming was ready to go big.

But not every brand is ready to, or needs to, build out their own custom bespoke gaming activation, according to Itamar Benedy Co-Founder&CEO at Anzu.io.

“A lot of marketers don’t yet have a gaming strategy,” he told Beet.TV. Or they are asking basic questions such as “Where does gaming fall in the sense of different channels that are scaled today?”

It’s actually a lot simpler to get started than many brands realize, argued Benedy, and possibly more strategically sound to “crawl, walk and then run.”

In fact, for brands that are active digital advertisers, companies like Anzu enable them to extend current campaigns into gaming without much heavy lifting. Often they can use existing creative and employ the same programmatic partners they do every day.

We have all the pipes in place,” he said. It’s more around awareness of the capabilities that exist.”

Awareness and education are key, Benedy added. It helps to have the endorsement of a big, trusted player like NBCU.

“Things are definitely headed in the right direction,” he said.

You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB PlayFronts conference in New York. For more videos from this series, produced in partnership with the IAB, please visit this page. 

SAN JUAN, PR — Uber is known for getting you from A to B, and for bringing you a KFC – but now it could also deliver ROI.

The company’s riding app offers ad inventory, its cars have started to include ad-supported touchscreens and its food app now includes ad spots allied to purchase data.

In this discussion with industry analyst Joanna O’Connell at Beet Retreat San Juan, Mark Grether, General Manager, Uber Advertising, explains how he is pitching the line-up.

Mobile media

“When you’re in a car, you are in a lean-back situation, which means that you’re actually open-minded to be distracted,” Grether says.

“We know, if someone is on the way to this hotel here, or on the way to the airport or on the way to a Walmart, we can then target an advertisement.

“We have recently launched an in-car opportunity, which gives us the opportunity to engage for about 20 minutes on average.”

Uber’s New Formats Light Up Ad Screens, From Back Seat To Entrée

Uber’s ad drive

The company recently told investment analysts it has passed a $500 million annual run rate for ad sales after growing its advertiser count by 80% year-on-year to 315,000. It charges a $45 CPM for in-app ads, claiming 3% click-through rate.

In addition to offering car tops (ad space fixed to the top of vehicles) as buyable spots, the company recently announced the roll-out of tablet video screens inside many of its drivers’ vehicles in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It is another example of how the advertising industry is coming to view the car as an ad opportunity, whether it be an autonomous drive or a back-seat ride. In doing so, the industry is finding some unexpected alignment between connected TV formats and the automobile.

Expose and track

At Beet Retreat, Grether explained how Uber Advertising is selling its service to marketers.

“How can you provide incremental bookings, incremental trips, incremental dollars?,” he asked. “It’s all about incrementality.

“At Uber, we have the opportunity to, on the one hand, create awareness on our mobility app, and then measure transactions on our Eats platform … If the restaurant participates in the smaller listings program, they know how many views they will generate. They know how many orders they’ll generate.

“The first dollars work actually harder on our platform compared to where you have already (been)  at your max or close to your max. Having that conversation about incrementality is a good way to (position) Uber as another player in the media mix plan and why money should actually be shifted (to us).”

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

SAN JUAN, PR — Little by little, media measurement is evolving from from single-channel panel data gathering to census-based viewing data sets and identity graphs, with real-time capability.

And, with the emergence of a US Joint Industry Committee (JIC) to tackle the issue, even more development is set to happen.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Kris Magel, VP, Head of Agency & Publisher Solutions, Samba TV, says agencies and others need to engage to help redefine what media measurement looks like.

Do it yourself

“The agency world needs to really think about including measurement in its scope,” says Magel.

“A lot of times clients are using third parties or working with publishers to source their measurement.

“Agencies really will benefit because they are the closest to activating those advertising and media schedules if they’re doing some of that measurement themselves.”

Agencies are often amongst the most vocal proponents for multi-screen, advanced media measurement.

But they are also amongst the most concerned that proliferation of value-chain participants makes work ever more complicated.

Stick with the JIC

Earlier this year, US national TV programmers agreed to form a Joint Industry Committee (JIC) with OpenAP to create a measurement certification process for cross-platform viewing.

It came as a response to the hole left by the removal of Nielsen’s MRC accreditation, and the growing interest the companies are taking in an array of alternative measurement providers.

Samba TV’s Magel welcomes it as “a really positive development” because the current setup is “not optimal”.

The JIC is inspired by other such bodies around the world, where industry partners come together, sometimes at the behest of governments, to align working practices.

Agencies aboard

“Right now, it is exclusively made up of multi-channel TV publishers,” Magel said.

“Agency stakeholders need to be involved. I think marketing stakeholders need to be involved. And of course, companies like Samba – data companies and measurement companies like ourselves – we want to be involved in the process in some way.”

Magel was speaking at Beet Retreat San Juan 2023 in February 2023, before the agencies Dentsu Media, GroupM, Horizon Media, IPG Mediabrands, Omnicom Media Group, Publicis Media and RPA announced they were joining the committee.

Dentsu Media, GroupM, Horizon Media, IPG Mediabrands, Omnicom Media Group, Publicis Media, RPA join JIC to Help Set Standards for Premium Cross-Platform Video Ad Currencies

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

TV advertising is becoming more complicated.

At the same time, TV ad buying and selling needs to become much simpler.

That’s why Paramount is looking to bring together its sales teams to better reflect advertisers’ budgets and needs, while also striving to not over complicate things.

Thus, the media giant is, “thinking about total video in really a convergent way,” said Travis Scoles, SVP, Advanced Advertising, Paramount. “It’s not like we want to have linear in one bucket, and on the other side we have addressable media and then digital media and CTV.”

Increasingly, all these channels are informing each other, and becoming more addressable. Plus, advertisers want a single, uniform strategy as much as possible so they can better control reach and frequency. “The payoff is worth it,” Scoles told Beet.TV.

The challenge of course, is just as buyers and sellers are striving toward a more straightforward way of working, more data sets and currencies are being introduced and adopted by the TV ecosystem. Paramount is looking to weave all of this together without having to adopt entirely new systems and workflows, Scoles said.

Ultimately, however TV buys are tracked and executed, getting deals done is “about creating a mutual agreement between buyers and sellers,” he said. “That concept is intact.”

You’re watching “The Future of Addressability in CTV,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by LiveRamp, produced in New York at a Beet.TV Leadership Dinner. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

You may know PokemonGo. But if Niantic has its way, Pokemon chasing will become a gateway to Campfire, a platform build around augmented reality and an eventually flood of new games.

Among the new titles accessible via Campfire is NBA All World, which launched earlier this year. Players can embark on various challenges that blend virtual reality and the real world at thousands of basketball courts across the US.

Campfire is “really going to serve as a great way for our communities to connect and meet up,” said Ryan Griffin, head of brand partnerships at Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go. “A strategic and fundamental unpinning of everything we’re doing.”

Brands should be play a big role in Campfire, and each of the individual Niantic games going forward. AR ads are coming to Pokemon Go, and next season they’ll find their way to All World.

Of course, many marketers may not have much experience or know how in developing AR. That’s where Niantic’s pool of developers comes in. The company can help marketers connect with experts, who can help then build original AR experiences “We provide the same tools we use for games to let brands build,”  Griffin told Beet.TV. “Generally that’s a great way for brands to start…before they go bigger.

Already, marketers such as Nike and Gucci have worked with Niantic to create campaigns that bridge digital and physical retail. “We look at gaming as the tip of the spear for scaled consumer engagement with AR,” Griffin said.

You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB PlayFronts conference in New York. For more videos from this series, produced in partnership with the IAB, please visit this page. 

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Television historically has provided one of the best ways for major brands to reach a national audience most efficiently. With technological advances, it’s increasingly becoming more addressable in showing different ads to different households during the same live programming.

“Linear addressability for us, it’s not just about incremental reach,” Steve Silvestri, senior vice president of audience solutions at Warner Bros. Discovery, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Rob Williams at the Beet Retreat San Juan. “Seventy percent of the audiences are actually falling outside of prime time, so we know when clients are buying against our portfolio, there is a lot of audience to find and mine.”

The merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery brought together media brands including CNN, HBO, TNT, Turner Sports, Discovery, Animal Planet, TLC and HGTV. The combined company offers advertisers a way to target consumers one-to-one across a portfolio of 18 networks in all 210 designated market areas (DMAs).

“We have 50 million addressable endpoints – that’s both cable, satellite and OEM [makers of smart TVs],” Silvestri said. “We truly have a national addressable offering that we can offer the marketplace.”

The next steps in advancing its addressable offering include the ability to target consumers across more devices. For many younger consumers, their primary way to watch video is on a smartphone or other connected device.

“We want to be able to actually leverage a single audience set from our clients as we build up our data and identity spine across WBD, and apply that targeting across the entirety of our distribution footprint,” Silvestri said. “If we make those endpoints addressable and we can stand up an identity spine, which is in the works, we know that we can address those audiences regardless of anywhere, anytime they were consuming our content.”

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.