Marketing Leaders Weigh In on the Most Important Trends in Advertising

The ANA Masters of Marketing conference, held in October in Orlando, Florida, attracted marketing leaders from the world’s biggest brands. At the conference, Innovid picked the brains of executives from P&G, Ford, GM, and other advertising industry leaders in a joint video interview series with Beet TV called The CMO’s Guide to CTV Advertising in 2025 & Beyond.    

In the interviews, these leaders explored the most important trends in television advertising, including the move of live sports to streaming, the rise of shoppable advertising, the growing importance of AI, and more. 

Read on (and view on) for a closer look at where CTV advertising is headed and how you can take advantage of this transformation of TV.  

Hershey Is Hungry for Advertising on Live-Streamed Sports

Name: Vinny Rinaldi

Title: VP-Media & Marketing Technology 

Company: The Hershey Company 

In his Beet TV interview, Rinaldi discussed how reach is the company’s number one KPI and how live sports, which are moving to streaming, are increasingly a pathway to garnering that reach. 

"For brands, live sports are incredible. … It is the most watched content. It's shifted (into streaming). YouTube now has all of the Sunday Ticket. Amazon's got Thursday Night Football. Netflix has a Christmas game this year. So when you think about live sports, it's not what we used to buy; it's much broader now. It's got targetability. It's in the moments that probably matter the most to consumers. The engagements are through the roof." — Hershey's Rinaldi

‍

Live-Streamed Sports Offers Huge Upsides for Advertisers 

Name: Dan Mouradian

Title: SVP-Global Client Solutions

Company: Innovid

In his Beet TV interview, Mouradian discussed the shift of live sports away from linear to streaming, the power of data to optimize campaigns in real time, and the rise of shoppable advertising with its ability to compress the purchase funnel for brands.  

“How do they take what has historically been a linear-only medium and adapt it for this new digital age? I think the opportunity that comes from that is taking some of the best practices that have existed for a long time in digital and applying them to the largest screen in the house, the television.” — Innovid's Mouradian

‍

How CTV Enables Frequency Management and Relevant Creative for GM

Name: Shenan Reed

Title: Global Chief Media Officer

Company: General Motors

In her interview, Reed offered her take on how CTV is changing how GM uses TV advertising. In the not-too-distant past, television campaigns were about achieving mass scale. Now, CTV enables GM to target specific audiences more precisely. Reed also commented on how she anticipates that AI will increase the capability to optimize media.

“The beauty of CTV is it often allows us to actually pick across not just different platforms, but also across the different programming. It allows us to be more targeted with our audiences, and understand the exact frequency that we're getting within the platform, of course — but also make sure that we're in a place that's resonant. That resonance also allows us to change the creative to be most relevant to the consumer at that time as well.” — GM's Reed

‍

How Alltold Uses AI to Measure Inclusiveness in Advertising 

Name: Morgan Gregory

Title: CEO & Co-Founder

Company: Alltold

In her conversation with Beet TV, Gregory described how Alltold uses AI to understand bias, stereotypes, and inclusion in creative content. She discussed how studies have shown that inclusive content drives bottom-line results for brands. Alltold collaborated with Innovid on a report, The State of Representation in CTV Advertising 1H24, that analyzes how six identity dimensions — age, gender expression, skin tone, body size, observed sexual orientation, and visible disability — are represented in the top 1,000 ads delivered by Innovid’s ad server in the first six months of 2024.     

“The representations of people that we see in the media that we consume every day is very important, and it also is really great for business. Inclusive content has been shown to drive bottom-line financial results for brands. … The thing that was the most surprising to me was a positive surprise. The distribution of feminine to masculine gender expressions that we see on screen was just about 50/50.” — Alltold's Gregory

‍

‍How CTV Is Poised to Transform Advertising for Ford 

Name: Marla Skiko

Title: Global Head of Consumer Connections

Company: Ford Motor Company 

In Skiko’s Q&A with Beet TV, she discussed the many ways that the continued growth of the CTV audience is piquing her interest: the attractiveness of interactive advertising, the potential of shoppable advertising for the automotive market, and the capability to target audiences more granularly. 

“During COVID, there was so much growth in streaming and consumers were spending a ton of time watching, which certainly made us spend more time paying attention to that trend. We want to be wherever consumers are spending time. As the rise of streaming grew, so did our interest.” — Ford's Skiko

‍

Why CTV Viewers Tend to Be More Engaged

Name: Roseann Montenes

Title: Head of Strategic Audience Solutions/Partnerships 

Company: A+E Networks

In her discussion with Beet TV, Montenes lauded the power of CTV. She said CTV viewers tend to be engaged, because they have actively chosen what they’re watching. Interactive CTV ads, highlighted by QR codes, help A+E Networks advertisers accurately measure that engagement. Keeping pace, she said, will require a commitment to innovation as the television landscape will only continue to change.  

‍“If you think about your own viewing experience, especially within the CTV environment, we already know that a consumer has sat in their living room and selected that piece of content. They’ve leaned in already. So for us to be able to put on a QR code (in an interactive ad) and have that consumer scan the QR code, we then know that the engagement is already up.” — A+E Networks' Montenes

‍

How P&G Uses Its AI Studios to Predict the Effectiveness of New Ads

Name: Marc Pritchard

Title: Chief Brand Officer

Company: Procter & Gamble

In his video interview with Beet.TV, Pritchard said Procter & Gamble is using an in-house tool called AI Studios to predict the effectiveness of new ads. The tool relies on decades of advertising testing data. He also discussed the increasing power of retail media and the promise of cross-media frequency management to prevent waste in media spending. 

“The new frontier is cross-media frequency capping, and that's the work the ANA has been doing (with Aquila). Our teams have been working with them very closely to create the capability to be able to identify how we can cap frequency across different platforms, including major digital platforms as well as broadcast.” — P&G's Pritchard

‍

ANA’s Aquila Venture Promises Cross-Screen Measurement

Name: Bill Tucker

Title: Group EVP

Company: ANA

In this video interview, Tucker described the goal of Aquila, an ANA effort to “govern, operationalize, and execute” cross-screen measurement. In addition to his ANA title, Tucker is the CEO of Aquila. This effort aims to help ANA members conquer a long-time problem by enabling advertisers to gain more insight into how many times they reach an individual consumer with their ad campaigns across all media.  

“(Aquila) allows for reinvestment into strategic areas versus excess frequency, which frankly annoys consumers quite a bit. So there’ll be a better consumer experience when we implement.” — ANA's Tucker

‍

Learn more about how your company can harness the power of CTV advertising. 

‍