Exclusive Interview: The Recount’s John Battelle Weighs In On ‘The Holy Grail’ Of Convergent TV

This week, we continue our ScreenBytes executive interview series with a fantastic discussion with John Battelle, CEO/Founder of The Recount and board member at LiveRamp, where we cover developments, trends, and challenges across the industry. See the full interview here!

Excerpt from our conversation below:

Which development(s) are you most excited about within the Convergent TV space
It’s always the Holy Grail: Understanding who your audience is, matching them to your own data, and delivering contextually appropriate messaging that respects that person’s time, their privacy, and the bargain implicit in the context of the interaction. Our business isn’t fully provisioned to do this quite yet, and some key players are hoarding data and acting like old school monopolists, but overall we’re moving inevitably in the right direction. As always, the first movers here are going to gain significant advantages...

What is the biggest change you have seen in the video ad marketplace in recent years?
Probably the slow (far too slow) rise of “connected TV.” It’s a testament to how entrenched old habits and models can be. Intellectually it just makes sense to bring the television marketplace into the digital world, but the industry has fought it – sometimes openly, more often through a more structural aversion to change. I also think the impact of the big platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Netflix etc.) on video advertising has been profound – skippable sixes, microsecond video views, and the contraction of the “linear” TV model is forcing brands to imagine new approaches to telling their stories, and that shift has yet to fully play out...

More: See the full interview