At next week’s Cannes Lions, Gotlieb will speak extensively on the topic, from a MediaLink produced luncheon on Monday at the Carlton with Cablevision COO Kristin Dolan –  to Tuesday’s leadership program aboard the AT&T AdWorks yacht.

Tuesday’s program with AT&T will also include the two leading agency executives in the field: Mike Bologna of GroupM’s Modi Media and Tracey Scheppach of Starcom MediaVest Group.  Investment banker Terry Kawaja will moderate. The AT&T event is being produced in partnership with Beet.TV

This interview with Gotlieb took place earlier this year in Austin that 4A’s leadership conference.

For more information on addressable TV, please see our recent interviews with Dolan, Bologna and Scheppach.

Beet Retreat on Addressable TV

Bologna and Scheppach will participate in two-day executive retreat and taping session on November 12 & 13 at the W Fort Lauderdale.  More information on this will be published shortly.

“Agencies are becoming more dependent on data, and doing things faster and cheaper, and that requires automation, data science, and skills they haven’t traditionally had. The challenge is they are operating in an old business model and the ecosystem is moving on without them,” he says.

But bringing creative closer to media buying can help agencies to move forward. “Content and advertising needs to be more tightly integrated than before, especially with the proliferation of mobile devices,” he says. “All of that is changing how advertising is being done and being bought and sold.”

Hohman was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

That is according to video ad tech firm YuMe. Its chief revenue officer Scot McLernon concedes that “there is a little bit of hype around it”, with only 1% of TV ads bought using automation technology in 2014.

“Focus on the government elections for a little bit,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “These guys are going to local television stations and they’re buying it up. You see it on the local news. They just can’t buy any more GRPs (gross rating points), there’s no more reach.

“That’s where the YuMe comes in to place … you can only get so much of your audience on television; cord cutters are simply not on network or local television. YuMe adds additional GRPs on a local basis. The political guys right now are calling us, versus us calling them, to find out, ‘How do we glean a little more reach?'”

McLernon says, today, “programmatic” buying of linear TV ads is mainly done through Mediaocean at the national US level and through Strata at the local level. His company has partnered with the latter to enable local programmatic buying.  Here is the press release on the Strata alliance.

 McLernon was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“Partnership is what makes this world go around,” according to CEO Michael Kassan. “You need people who are growing toward the same goals. One shop does not fit all anymore. You have to find people to work with.

“The best partnership out there is … the idea and the technology. The idea is central, but if you can understand how to get those ideas in to the mainstream faster using technology … when precision is so available … you need that partnership.”

Kassan is so enamored with the transformational potential of partnerships, MediaLink recently hosted the Partnership Awards at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin. Winners included triumvirates of Motorola, Razorfish and Wired, and Nissan, OMD and Amazon.com.

Kassan was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

Increasingly emboldened by the guarantees that are offered by online advertising, some TV ad buyers are calling for an improvement. And that is what former Tacoda head honcho Dave Morgan‘s current business, Simulmedia, is enabling.

“We decided to put our money where our mouth is,” Morgan tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We’re going to guarantee the actual performance of a branded TV ad against a measured biz outcome – typically, that’s purchase or sales, it could be website visits or a media mixed attribution model that the client does.”

Morgan says pricing TV ads based on their actual business effect “de-risks” the buy for advertisers: “Television advertisers has never had the closed loop capabilities that online have. Brand advertisers want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to make sure they have significant reach but also that it’s accountable.”

Morgan was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“I frankly don’t know,” ad company GroupM’s chairman Irwin Gotlieb tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Most agencies were truly agents on behalf of a client. The world has moved along quite a bit.

“As soon as clients began to nudge us in to guaranteeing performance, in to putting our remuneration at risk in return for performance criteria … I think many of us ceased to function as agents do.

“If one were to fast-forward for five years, the fundamental nature of what we do … is a major question.”

Gotlieb was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

He was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place in January at the Wynnin Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show.

“We leverage traditional media with digital. We have a combined strategy of building awareness and focusing on where is the future and how do you get there,” he says, adding that Esurance has relied on both big tentpole opportunities like the Superbowl as well as performance-focused digital ads. Gellman joined Esurance a year ago.

“We are a large spender but we are tiny compared to our competitors. So you have to build a brand and get people to pay attention through entertainment,” he says. As an example, he points to the marketer’s use of “Beatrice, The Facebook Lady” in a range of its video content. Esurance works with agency partners like Leo Burnett and Starcom. The company has also had success producing long-form videos about biking to drive its motorcycle insurance.

Gellman was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“The distribution channels have changed so dramatically and we need to look at content in a different way,” he says. In the past marketers could build creative with a “wonderful” long shelf life. That’s no longer the case. Now, the demands on creative agencies are even tougher because the focus is volume along with creativity, he explains. Speed, quality, and expense have become the watchwords in creating content.

Newer advertisers are learning that if they want to hold their position as first movers they need to build brands, and that comes through top-notch creative, Weil adds. “If we can drive the dialogue around how to create value, then this is a growth industry,” he says.

Weil was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“The advertiser is competing with the regular newsfeed and the rest of the user-generated newsfeed. It remains a challenging environment,” GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

Norman also criticizes how Facebook charges advertisers for video: “The idea that, the moment a video enters the feed, the charging event takes place (when) people scroll using movie devices… I do not believe advertisers will find entirely acceptable.”

He reckons Facebook’s rival has a better offering right now: “Twitter’s six-second .gif preview for video is very effective and very interesting. Twitter’s video product for advertisers is attractive, both from an impact point of view and a pricing initiation point of view.”

One study out this week reckons more advertisers will pick Facebook than YouTube this year, but Norman thinks: “This race has a long way to go.”

Norman was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

Nielsen pairs its real-time audience insights with eXelate’s consumer segment data to create detailed views into consumer behavior and buying tendencies.

“They are taking our data sets and making them available to platforms, agencies and advertisers based on TV behaviors, buyer graphics, segmentation. Data is being used to find audiences based on what consumers are doing online, what they’re interested in,” he says, in explaining how data is increasingly at the epicenter of digital advertising, but especially for programmatic offerings and precision marketing. Nielsen has been using eXelate for some time, and just completed its acquisition of the data firm last month.

The key to using data though is to employ it in such a way to drive business outcomes. “It’s not just about finding an audience, but getting them to take an action. It’s no longer sufficient to get your message in front of the right group. It needs to be relevant with regard to the timing, the message, and the platform the consumer is on,” he says.

Hohman was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“As TV changes, TV is no longer tethered to the living room. TV is still the most potent form of messaging, so we offer video in this new day and age where people are out and about more than ever. We reach them as they make product decisions,” he says.

As this sector grows, the players are starting to incorporate programmatic techniques as well as targeting, he says. For instance, many place-based advertising venues are partnering with mobile firms to retarget consumers on mobile phones who might have seen an ad on an elevator, for instance, he says.

“We extend the reach of TV in other venues with a video message,” he says. He adds that fraud and viewability issues are not impactful in the digital place-based world as all the ads are viewable.

Frey was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

One of many initiatives in which publishers are working to do so for brands, this partnership is different from most, in that Huffington Post staff are embedded with the ad agency for at least part of their working week.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Leo Burnett chief platforms and partnerships officer Mark Renshaw explains how it works.

“Collaboration is critical to figuring out what to do with content,” he says. “We need differences of thinking to bring diversity

“We have their people working in our office. We share our business plans with them, they share their business plans with us. We’re jointly working on things at a very strategic level.

“Huffington Post has been a fantastic social publisher, we’re learning from that and they are learning how to be a brand storyteller. The partnership allows us to create content in new ways.”

Renshaw says content the pair create starts out life published on Huffington Post but could live on in any medium.

Renshaw was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

Ad tech supplier Kargo is betting on giving advertisers and publishers something different, eschewing performance-driven banner sales for high-touch brand campaign placements.

Founder and CEO Harry Kargman tells Beet.TV his technology “allows us to take over the page and create a custom site skin”, “woven in to the editorial page”.

“Mobile is really challenging. The screen sizes are small,” he says. “Getting a consumer to consider buying that product is a really hard thing to do. That requires something more than a banner – we don’t think that a 320×50 banner is long-term sustainable in mobile. It’s not going to get the consumer to make the purchase.”

Clients include McDonald’s and Target. Kargo aims to grow its staff headcount from 130 to 200 by year’s end, partly by opening up a London office meet growth.

Kargman was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

Last month, the pair announced video ad tech vendor Videology would plug in to FreeWheel to help advertisers buy video inventory programmatically on publisher sites through its FourFronts program, an extension of its private marketplace.

“Historically, they’ve been buying planned media against a show-level set of data,”Videology north American development SVP Brent Gaskamp tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Now they can bring in first-party data or leverage third-party data and apply that in a more strenuous way for the outcomes of their campaigns.

“This is not programmatic from the last mile. This is about programmatic automation and workflow to enable data exchange in the planned media environment.

Gaskamp was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“Apple just rolled out the Beacon API last year,” MEC Global’s north America lead for mobile and emerging technologies, Rachel Pasqua, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Because you haven’t seen a lot of stats come out, you think it’s not happening. But it’s happening everywhere. Every big box store, supermarket, stadium, concert venue, every public space from train stations to airports to government buildings are putting beacons in to their infrastructure to enable all sorts of interactions.”

Bluetooth beacons, which Apple is calling iBeacons, have existed in one form of another for several years. Unlike GPS, they enable precise targeting within buildings by detecting proximity to a user’s smartphone.

Some retailers are getting excited about pinging messages to customers as they walk by product shelves.

Pasqua imagines “everything from quietly measuring foot traffic … to seamless delivery of useful information… about a public monument or something as useful as a coupon delivered at point of sale”.

Pasqua was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“Because marketers are moving their budgets to digital, there is an incentive for bad players to create bad ads,” Hunter says in this interview. While much of the fraudulent traffic originates from second-tier and less transparent sites, it is still a cause for concern. Hunter, as well as many others, wants to see industry associations continue to take a stand on the need for verified, human traffic in their metrics. Organizations like the IAB and 4As have been vocal about the importance of viewability.

“We want to make sure the reach and frequency is of humans. We are seeing non-human traffic get into digital measurements and you have to deliver a GRP that is a human GRP,” she says. Hunter also discussed the shift to mobile video and video viewing on alternative devices, both of which underscore the need for accurate measurement.

Hunter was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“We are seeing partnerships across agencies, across ad tech, tech vendors, with clients, with media platforms,” she says. At the recent 4As event in Austin, the association gave out “Partner Awards” for the first time to honor this new spirt of collaboration that has become vital in the advertising business today.

While this type of teamwork is helping to yield success in ad campaigns, the industry as a whole still needs to work better to nurture and find young talent, Hill adds. More effort needs to be made to draw young people to advertising as a career option, she tells us.

Hill was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

Fullscreen works with various brands and connects them with YouTube influencers to integrate into their content. “Millennial are our core targets,” McGurn says. “They love brands but they don’t like ads, so content marketing is where you cut through for tremendous reach and scale, and influencers provide that reach,” he says. Fullscreen relies on pre-rolls, TrueView ads from YouTube, but especially on content marketing.

“This is a revolution in content creation. You’ve never had the ability before to get such scale with social platforms,” he says. About 63% of millenials said they would be more likely to try a product or brand that was recommended by a YouTube star, compared to only 48% who said that about a traditional TV or movie star, according to a Defy Media study, a YouTube content shop, about millenials.

Fullscreen has a network on YouTube of 500 mllion subscribers that generate 5 billion views a month across their videos and channels. Otter Media, a joint venture of At&T and Chernin Group, owns Fullscreen.  The company will present its latest offering at the upcoming Digital Content NewFronts event in New York.

McGum was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising = Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

Horizon Media national TV SVP David Campanelli tells Beet.TV the company is using ad tech vendor Rovi’s Ad Optimizer tool together with ad spots on A+E Networks: “We’re going to take portions of our upfront spend on the books now, run that through the tool to optimizer against a higher index to reach our target customer for that particular advertiser.”

Campanelli likes the tool because “it’s built by people thinking from a TV standpoint, not from a digital standpoint and trying to translate that to TV”.

But Campanelli sees “programmatic TV” as meaning automation, data targeting and real-time optizisation of a schedule and dynamic ad insertion. But, on the latter, he says: “TV doesn’t work that way. We can’t have full programmatic until we have the ability to dynamically insert ads. That is a way off from a technology standpoint.”

Campanelli was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is also busy producing premium research and events for readers beside the main Economist.com brand – and giving marketers an opportunity to create their own, to boot.

“We’ve been doing content before content was popular,” The Economist content solutions unit MD Elena Sukacheva tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “With Economist Intelligence Unit, we publish a lot of research sponsored by mostly B2B companies.

“(Previously), it was very traditional forms of content – 7,000-word white papers that were often missing the vast majority of the audience; who has time to read 7,000 words?

“Instead of doing one massive paper, we break down the findings of the research in to multiple pieces and feed them through a social network, or create a content hub (for brands).”

Sukacheva was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

The exec whose company powers the so-called Pangea Alliance says such comings together, once considered rare in the cut-throat world of media, are beneficial.

“(In advertising), there’s always been that trade-off between scale and quality,” Rubicon Project marketplace development SVP Jay Sears tells Beet.TV. “Publishers are seeing Google and Facebook with the ability to provide that scale. With cooperative arrangements, they can do the same thing.

“By coming together, this group of media owners has created a global footprint of 110m monthly uniques that’s pretty significant in an environment that denotes quality.

“The phenomenon of the cooperative is something we’ve seen quite a bit of. You can see La Place in France, the Czech Publisher Exchange in the Czech Republic, the Danish Publisher Network in Denmark.”

These networks along with the Pangea are powered with technology from the Rubicon Project.

Sears was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

In a closely watched quarterly report titled  Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, the big media agency ZenithOptimedia has just reported that online video grew last year at a blistering rate of 34% to $10.9 billion globally – and it is on track to double by the end of 2017.

In Austin last week, at the annual 4A’s conference, we sat down with Amanda Richman, President of Investment and Activation of Starcom USA.  She talks about the growth of the medium and its momentum from data, cross-screen consumption and by an increasing creative content creation process.

Our coverage is of the 4A’s summit was sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

Given that shift, it’s important to look at various metrics and brand goals for campaigns today. They might be brand lift or direct sales, but all can be impacted with this storytelling focus, she says, in explaining how brands and agencies can work together more effectively. “You don’t have to tell the story in full in each medium, but to collectivey tell it across mediums,” Finucane says. “As a brand, you have to develop a purpose, positioning and proof point, but the way to execute is different.”

In addition, agencies need to focus on inventing for the future and on hiring the right people for the new ways of marketing. “We are bringing in data analytics people, creative technologists, and behavioral scientists into our business. We are bringing in all kinds of new skill sets to navigate, paint, invent and create,” he says. Koenisberg also discusses the changes in creative needs and approaches, given the shifting dynamics in media, content, and storytelling.

He is the chairman of the 4A’s.  Horizon is the largest privately-owned media agency in the world.

Bill Koenigsberg was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“Given that the world is changing rapidly, the benefit is that they have no status to break, only rules to rewrite,” she says. The best way for an agency to help to build these type of brands is to be quick, agile, and in sync with who they are as a brand. “We immersed ourselves with them as a company. We set up shop at their offices and met everyone at Airbnb to truly understand the ethos of the company and how they operate.”

Starcom’s focus with this client has been centered around content creation and storytelling, rather than on flowcharts detailing reach and frequency, she says. More established brands can learn from these upstarts about how to be more agile and not be controlled by process, while newer brands can benefit by embracing process more, she says in explaining what newer and established brands can learn from each other.

Donohoue was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.