Connections

NEW YORK — Executives from A&E Networks, 21st Century Fox’s Fox Networks Group and Time Warner’s Turner Ignite are promoting their brands and content using new ad formats, platforms and technologies, executives said March 27 at the Advanced Advertising conference.

Some of the content they demonstrated made use of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, including a short video cross-promoting the Fox TV show “24: Legacy” and the Samsung Gear VR headset, and an AR app with AT&T promoting Turner’s Conan O’Brien talk show that airs on TBS. However, Dan Riess, EVP of content partnerships and co-head of Turner Ignite, offered a word of caution regarding emerging entertainment technology like VR and AR.

“At the end of the day, there’s not enough” people using emerging platforms like AR and VR “to drive actual” return on investment, he said. Still, as many as 80 million people might be exposed to a Turner spot via an entire campaign across multiple channels and platforms – and “they drive actual sales,” he said, adding such a campaign may drive a 3-10 percent positive “blip” in sales.

Meanwhile, the “24: Legacy” video is being used by Samsung to demonstrate Gear VR at retail, so consumers are being exposed to the TV show via that non-traditional method, Geoff Katz, SVP of advertising product management at Fox Networks Group, pointed out, saying the number of traditional impressions measured don’t tell the whole story.

VR spots can also be viewed by many people on “big platforms” including Facebook and YouTube – whether they have VR headsets or not, although the experience is obviously better when viewers do watch them with such a headset.

Earlier at the conference, Mike Law, EVP of Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi media investment division, said his company was “very encouraged” about the recent announcement by Fox, Time Warner’s Turner and Viacom that they joined forces to create OpenAP, an open platform standard that will make ad targeting efforts easier.

“We love the idea of what they’re doing” because it’s helping to move the industry away from legacy ad measurement systems, Mike Rosen, EVP of portfolio and strategy at Comcast’s NBC Universal division, said, telling the conference his company was “offered the opportunity to be a part of OpenAP.” But “we already have scale as NBC Universal,” he said, noting his company has “90 percent plus of virtually every customer target segment that’s out there.” It might have to either “give up or pare back” its current Comcast set-top box data platform “in order to be part of something that creates some industry standards, and I think there’s sometimes a danger that if we rush too quickly with a standard, it might be at the expense of” the “competitive advantage” it has, he said.

NBC Universal has been a “leader” in the space for a couple of years and “we don’t want to slow down” its innovation “for any reason – even if it’s a worthy reason” like helping to create a standard, he told the conference, adding his company was, therefore, “taking a wait-and-see” approach and will “go it alone for the foreseeable future.”