Advertising Week was back this week, after a pandemic-induced hiatus.

While attendees reported that Monday’s sessions were fairly full, many of the sessions were also available online, something that may prove to be the norm in the years to come as a way to allow even more people to participate in these events.

We asked members of the TVREV Thought Leaders Circle for their hot takes on the event, what innovations they were hearing about and what was most exciting to them.

For Flashtalking by Mediaocean’s John Nardone, who spoke about The Big Picture: Preparing for the Converged Future of TV + Video, (you can also check out the white paper) the need for convergent media planning was top of mind.

It was great to be a part of Advertising Week and share in all the energy surrounding TV and video convergence. We've been talking about this topic for some time but it's clear we've passed the tipping point. With all the different stakeholders involved, there's certainly a lot of complexity but solutions are emerging that put consumers first and make it easy for marketers to execute. The key thing to remember is that, while there's understandably a lot of excitement around CTV, those other screens aren't simply going away. So the path forward requires a holistic and nuanced approach that encompasses linear television, digital video, and CTV.

Field Garthwaite, CEO and Co-Founder at IRIS.TV was intrigued by the convergence of data and content.

The convergence of video data and content is a key theme moving forward for advertisers. Video data is unlocking more value from the content—for both advertisers and publishers—and content-based (versus identity-based) data is providing a much needed alternative for the privacy challenged industry.

MadHive’s Christiana Cacciapuoti, SVP Marketing & Innovation, saw renewed attention to local TV along with the shift to impression-based measurement as key themes.

One of the big takeaways was the importance of local TV, where broadcast revenue is on track to increase 27% in 2022. As stay-at-home orders drove audiences to streaming platforms, local TV’s ability to target specific audiences in the US became increasingly important due to different mandates across different areas. Now, this has been cemented as an important approach for both national and local advertisers.

Another big theme was measurement, and how OTT is shifting from a GRP-based methodology to impression-based. In other words, it’s moving from one-to-many to one-to-one. This new type of measurement will allow advertisers to understand the value of every viewer and to customize storytelling.

VIZIO’s Vice President of Business Development, Katherine Pond was focused on the growing importance of data-informed programming and advertising on CTV.

We need to think about who is watching content and how audiences are engaging, to better understand how content should be produced, distributed and relevant ads are delivered. That means working to drive context not only on TVs but across audiences which enables advertisers to target consumers on other devices

The proper usage of CTV data can help inform investment strategies and consumer engagement opportunities. The idea is that if you are using data in order to inform these plans in a way that maybe you haven’t been able to historically in linear, you are going to resonate more with consumers—both from a content and advertising perspective.

Our TVREV take?

They’re all right.

Or more precisely, that as the industry focuses in on the need to reach consumers across a variety of platforms, it will need to rely more heavily on data for everything from measurement to planning to understanding the type of content where an ad campaign will resonate most.