From Forbes: Five 'Advanced TV' Takeaways From NAB 2017 Convention

After years of hopeful whispers and crossing of fingers about “advanced” TV, signs of it were everywhere at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual convention in Las Vegas last week. Despite my disappointment at having to leave Vegas without seeing Ice Cube (he plays the Strip this week), I did come away with several important takeaways about the broadcasting business and the relevance of the venerable NAB convention, all in some fashion related to the evolution of the TV business:

“Advanced” TV discussions are more about advancing money than advancing tech

Terminology gets in the way of a lot of conversations about “advanced TV”, namely what is “TV” anymore and what is “advanced” about it? From my point of view, advanced TV is a world with advertising buyers and sellers using multiple new sources of information such as set-top box data and consumer buying habits to identify specific audience segments to not only deliver relevant commercial messages but to enhance the overall TV customer experience. If you want to find digital-like growth in the TV business, this is the place to find it.

I’ll acknowledge my own bias as the moderator of a panel conveniently entitled “Advanced Advertising is Here. Let’s Make Some Money.” But it was meaningful that panels like mine drew hundreds of attendees and representation well beyond the crowd that usually congregates at the Society for Cable Television Engineers (although some of my best friends…well you know). My fellow panelists included long-time evangelists on the need for re-inventing TV (such as Videology CEO Scott Ferber), a new leading-edge seller of advanced (in fact addressable) advertising (Nick Troiano of One2One Media), an advanced TV operational expert (Lorne Brown from Sintec Media), and of course two “masters of the universe” (James Rooke from Comcast/FreeWheel and Rany Ng from Google, but I jest). Each of these panelists came to NAB with a crowded calendar to help drive not only the conversation about but the realization of advanced TV deal-making.

TV and digital convergence will be a two-way street 

The TV business certainly still has much to learn about the digital world’s embrace of rapid change, agile development cycles, and mining both voluminous data and millennial talent. Clearly, Facebook and Google are an intimidating pair of competitors (not to mention the other members of “FANG” – Amazon and Netflix). And moves such as the creation of Open AP (the FOX-Viacom-Turner partnership on TV audience segmentation) and NBCU’s goal of $1 billion in audience-based selling indicate an acknowledgment that adapting to digital’s advantages is essential.

But TV has a still-emerging hand of brand safety to play. As many advertisers grow increasingly nervous about just what they are getting with digital media, including from Facebook and Google, you hear and see the elements of TV’s “comeback” (or maybe survival) story. It will be very interesting to watch how quickly and effectively the agile digital marketplace is willing to change itself to draw upon TV’s existing advantage of a predictable and safe environment for marketer messaging.

ATSC 3.0 will probably need another new name soon

ATSC 3.0 is broadcast TV’s next transmission standard and offers among other attributes the ability for broadcasters to deliver two-way communications through the airwaves, which will among other financial benefits facilitate targeted advertising to valued audiences. A long time in gestation, the tone of discussion indicates on the one hand how close this now is, yet on the other the fear that if it doesn’t happen soon it may be too late to bother. NAB’s President Gordon Smith and the broadcasting industry have dubbed this “NextGen TV” but it better be this generation very shortly if broadcasters want to participate in the fruits of advanced TV.

Local and global is intersecting very nicely at NAB 2017

The broadcasting business still rightly trumpets its foundation as serving local communities. But during my brief time at the NAB convention I spoke in-depth with a United Nations-like series of companies either partnering with broadcasters today or banging down the door to offer solutions for the future. Just in my sphere I spoke with companies and executives from the UK, India, Israel, Canada, Finland, China, and the Slovak Republic (not to mention denizens of lower Manhattan). With a wide variety of innovations, they claim to offer a bridge to greater automation, streamlined workflows, new avenues for content distribution and monetization, and a better experience for broadcast content consumption. The only geography that needs more of a presence? Silicon Valley.

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing

I’ve been among those for years advocating a greater focus on advertising and the future of advertising at NAB. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a cacophony on this front. In addition to the slate of programming in which I participated, there was an entirely separate string of advanced advertising-related sessions at an offsite hotel and a hard-to-find mini-theater for yet more of this on the convention floor. You’re on to something here NAB, but it’s time to move from wildcat drilling to a more refined approach to delivering convention content gold.

Howard is a regular contributor to Forbes.com, in which this piece originally ran. He helps clients manage the dynamically changing media business through his work at MediaLink, and is also available at www.homonoffmedia.com and on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.