Takeaways From the 2018 TV Data Summit: “The Audience Is Now in Charge”

As Tim Hanlon, founder and CEO at the Vertere Group, explained at the 2018 TV Data Summit, the media business is going through a transformative time. TV grapples with data as tech navigates strategies and solutions. “It is revenge of the nerds,” he concluded, “leading to an amazing future of data and targeting.”

Panelists at the NYC Television Week event offered their insights:

Data Changes Everything

Data is taking on greater importance from content creation to campaign deliveries. More aspects of the business are touched by data through machine learning and artificial intelligence. As technology advances, it’s possible to dynamically insert different advertising messages to individual households based on audience profiles and viewing behaviors.

“Data is everything,” stated Eric Schenk, a technical director at Google Cloud. But data is often fragmented, clustered in silos and walled gardens. Analysis, depending on data sets, algorithms, and applications, often leads to different results and conclusions. Machine learning’s capabilities help address these challenges. These capabilities include video intelligence (enabling better viewer content identification and curation), translation (allowing for fast global expansion of content offerings), and custom data extensions (offering new ways to analyze and gain insights from data sets).

Business Pivots

Previously, “Sales used to be the last mile, but now it’s content,” Hanlon warned. Schenk added, “Audience is king,” requiring a pivot to audiences and what they want in content.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.