BACKGROUND: Paul Alfieri joined the advanced advertising company Cross MediaWorks in September 2017 and is responsible for driving all strategic marketing, messaging and branding efforts there. Previously, he was senior VP at Turn, the digital-advertising vendor, and before that was a VP at Limelight Networks, the Content Delivery Network vendor. Earlier, though, he was a marketing executive at Motorola, including in the mobile device and connected home divisions. Before that he held account management roles at Interpublic Group.
2017 HIGHLIGHTS: Since joining Cross Media- Works and “returning to my TV and cable roots” after six years in digital realms, Alfieri has focused on doing the behind-the-scenes work to bring the CrossMediaWorks assets together “into a really simple story for brand advertisers to understand.” Those assets include tech provider Cadent, media agency TCA and addressable-video experts One2One Media. Cross MediaWorks also recently teamed with data and analytics specialist 605 to create a measurement standard for addressable TV. “We did a great deal at 605 to bring data into the ecosystem,” he notes. He points out that One2One Media won a 2017 ABBI (Audience Based Buying Innovation) Award for its buying platform.
WHAT’S AHEAD: “Brand advertising is undergoing a fundamental change,” Alfieri says, moving beyond buying broad reach via traditional television ads to applying digital methodology to buying audiences and meeting advertiser goals with techniques such as high indexing and addressable TV to move beyond just age and gender targets. “Now that we can do both at scale, I think this is the year you will see advertisers doing both and spending on both in mass, with the right [key performance indicators] underneath to measure that.” For operators, that means finding the right mix on the ad-sales side, and for content providers, it means making their content more discoverable, he says.
