MediaTalks - a podcast series by FreeWheel

In this new episode of MediaTalks we spoke with Bee Pearson, CEO and Co-Founder of  PiqNiq, a brand new media agency, who have been making some waves with their expert approach and deep understanding of the digital and TV landscapes. 
We discussed the launch of PiqNiq and asked Bee to share her views and experiences about TV, CTV, convergence and more.

No matter how much you spend on creating an ad, if it is not being seen, or if the environment in which viewers are seeing the ad is not right, there is no impact and ultimately no ROI. 
The viewer experience has always been central to broadcasters who are constantly fine tuning and trying to establish an optimum ad experience. This is a very delicate balancing act at the crossroad between maintaining a positive user experience, ensuring advertisers reach their campaign goals and,  generating revenue to fuel new investments in premium content. 
In this new episode we spoke to Jon Lewis, Head of Commercial Innovation & Partners at Channel 4 to talk about their latest ad experiments and innovations. 

In this episode, we spoke to Cammy Cronin, SVP Global Advertising Sales Strategy at  NBCU to talk about their recent announcement bringing together leading local broadcasters and publishers across the world. Through this partnership NBCUniversal is looking to 'build a more scalable and equitable global video ecosystem’.  The aim is to create the right foundation for greater and deeper industry collaboration across data / identity, automation, ad innovation, and measurement, on a global scale.
 

To kick off the first episode of our new season 2023, I wanted to continue to explore the much discussed topic of Advanced TV, and CTV in particular! There is so much going on around Advanced (AVOD, CTV, Addressable TV), with so many platforms changing models  or new ones appearing and audiences hopping between all these new services to access their favourite content. Vevo has been on this bandwagon for some years and has recently expanded its distribution models, a perfect time to  talk to Richard Brant, Director Advanced TV at Vevo, to discuss various aspects of advanced tv and how Vevo has evolved and embraced this new  paradigm. 

Measurement remains one of the major inhibitor of ad spend and is certainly one of the biggest challenge in our media industry. It is one thing to ‘reach’ consumers with an ad, but critically there is a growing question on how well the ad performed? Or really if viewers have actually paid Attention to the ad?

Interests around Attention has grown recently due to the inability of online measurements to provide effective reports on ad exposure and the real impact of an ad on consumers. But attention is hard to quantify and measure and is often mis-understood. In this episode, I have the pleasure to talk to Nicolas Grand, SVP Transformation at Omnicom Media Group (OMG), to uncover Attention and how OMG has taken significant steps to become one of the media agency group that is pioneering the concept of attention planning and buying.

There are today so many ways to access and watch content. But one of the newest ways consumers are now watching content is on Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television, otherwise called FAST. In this episode, celebrating one year of MediaTalks, we talked to Jan Vorndamm, VP International Advertising Business at PlutoTV. Together with Jan, we discuss what's behind the exponential growth of these FASTs and why the appetite for these services is only starting. 

In this episode, we talked to Mathijs Gilissen, Director of Digital Performance and Optimisation at Talpa Network in the Netherlands. During our discussion we touched upon various topics from the new reality of the cookieless world to automation / programmatic as well as user experience, following a recent ad load study undertaken by Talpa. 

There’s a lot of talks about the rise of AdvancedTV (ATV) and, according to a survey FreeWheel’s conducted at the end of last year, agencies and advertisers are very bullish about ATV platforms which are all seeing strong and continued growth across many European markets. The ability to bring data to TV-like environments is bringing a lot of excitements to buy-side players. However, to make these platforms attractive and valuable you need scale; but how does this play out in smaller territories such as The Netherlands?  To answer our questions,  this month we talked to Remon Buter, Chief Investment Officer at GroupM in The Netherlands. 

In this episode we talked to Bart Swimberghe, advertising experience and data monetization lead at Proximus, about some of the latest advancements that have taken place in Belgium on the Linear addressable front. Proximus was one of the first telco operator to embark in the linear addressable journey, starting back in 2017. A complex journey, but one with many learnings and great innovations which have led to this interesting position Proximus now is in the market...