• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, August 9, 2019

This marks the start of a new weekly blog on… you guessed it: advanced television.

This isn’t an entirely new venture for me. In addition to covering some advanced TV as part of my Digital News Daily editor's role, a few of you MediaPost diehards might recall that I wrote a column called “Audience Buying Insider” from 2016 to 2017, which also focused on so-called advanced TV.

I say “so-called” because, as with so much of today’s media landscape, there’s no universal accord on how advanced TV (which I'll sometimes shorten to ATV for this venue, knowing you won't confuse it with "all-terrain vehicle") should be defined.

I hasten to add that having written about ATV for a year by no means qualifies me as a “pro” on the subject (despite the blog’s “Insider” name).

This is not false modesty. One thing I learned very quickly was that keeping all of the moving pieces in this complex puzzle straight — particularly as the players and technology evolve — can sometimes be challenging even for the media buyers, platform partners and media folks who toil in the ATV vineyards day in and day out.

Competing ATV solutions — and frequently conflicting claims about same — as well as ongoing debates about best practices and metrics, can also make writing about this area challenging.

On the other hand, all of that, combined with ATV’s incredible (if as yet unrealized) potential — not to mention the exceptionally smart and helpful group of professionals who are leading the way in this arena — make it interesting and even fun to cover.

The goal here is to explore the ongoing challenges, issues and opportunities in the sector, primarily from the perspective of clients and agencies on the demand side.

Seems to me that this presents an opportunity to try to offer a useful forum for advancing dialogue about key issues, as well as for sharing successes and productive learnings from tests and concepts that didn’t pan out as hoped. (The latter being perhaps more important or useful than the former, even if names are omitted to protect the innocent.)

My intention is mix up the format to include not just news/analysis, but Q&As with buy-side executives, and case studies from client and agency sources.

I’ll need your input on ideas for (non-self-serving) column topics, your learnings, your help as expert sources, and your feedback and criticism.

As a foundation for embarking on what I hope will be a reasonably interactive venture, I’ll throw out a rather broad definition of ATV to use as a launch pad and boundaries-definer: ATV includes new forms of TV, including OTT/online video that most consumers would tend to think of as “television” (as opposed to video forms such as branded content and UGC).

It also includes new forms of technology enabling new ways of distributing and programming television (such as ATSC 3.0 and 5G).

And most important for our purposes, of course, it includes new ways of advertising and reaching consumers, including addressable, programmatic TV and shoppable TV — and new ways of measuring and analyzing television, such as ACR, people-based targeting and TV attribution.

So there you have it. Feel free to start the dialogue by commenting on the parameters described above.

Next time, once more unto the (ATV) breach, dear friends…

Karlene Lukovitz is the editor of MediaPost's Digital News Daily and author of the weekly Video Insider blog, as well as Advanced TV Insider.