TV Ads Move Toward Cross-Platform Delivery: ViacomCBS’s Travis Scoles

Improved measurement of addressable advertising will underpin its growth as marketers and programmers have more tools to determine its effectiveness and hone their strategies in a cross-platform environment.

Making those platforms more comparable is a key goal as TV audiences grow more fragmented among a growing number of choices among linear and over-the-top (OTT) channels.

"Consumption truly is going cross-platform in that people are interacting with full-episode content in many places and many ways," Travis Scoles, senior vice president of product management, advanced advertising at Vantage at ViacomCBS, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

"They’re sort of agnostic to the pipeline behind it, whether that’s from the cable box or an OTT server.

A lot of advertising is moving in the direction of true cross-platform 'serves.'" ViacomCBS in August announced plans to launch EyeQ to bring together its connected video assets including BET, CBS Television Network, CBS All Access, CBSN, CBS Sports HQ, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, Pluto TV and VH1.

The initiative also includes custom audiences on its Vantage platform for advanced advertising, according to an announcement.

"It’s a big initiative of ViacomCBS.

We’ve been over a year now in market with fluid offerings within the Vantage products," Scoles said.

"We have the largest addressable footprint in the industry with over 40 million households." Holistic View of Audiences Scoles is optimistic about the outlook, expecting the development of more measurement solutions to come to market in the next six months to a year.

"As people continue to look at ad campaigns holistically — at the campaign level as opposed to the individual endpoint — measurement is going to become even more important," Scoles said.

"A lot of advertising is moving toward this cross-platform format, where we’re enabling folks to really implement overarching marketing strategies across all the screens we have access to." Source: eMarketer Advertisers have sought improved measurement, with 57% of agency and marketing professionals saying the lack of standard measurement was the biggest challenge to cross-screen video advertising, according to an Advertiser Perceptions survey cited by researcher eMarketer.

Concerns about standard measurement ranked ahead of other challenges like managing audience deduplication and ad frequency capping.

"We need to have a shared understanding of how things are being counted," Scoles said.

"That way, we can all agree upfront for a campaign that based on a standard understanding against both the sell-side and the buy-side what are our goals and how can we measure this." This video is part of Advancing Toward a Common TV Measurement Currency, a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comscore.

For more videos from the series, please visit this page.