That’s why online editor Odell and her team have built Cosmopolitan.com with such a strong focus on mobile.
Specifically, Snapchat, which announced weaker-than-expected user growth this week, has been a big driver for Odell.
Cosmo launched on to Snapchat Discover, the social app’s content offering, when it debuted back in January 2015. By October of the same month, Cosmo’s Discover channel was getting three million readers a day.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Odell says: “We were surprised by how quickly we grew there. We have 11mn subscribers, we reach 30mn unique visitors a month, we do tons and tons of video views on that platform.
“We (have) a dedicated team of animators and video editors who work so hard to get those editions out every single day. We also have dedicated writers who create content just for that platform.”
So what is the Snapchat strategy really? After all, many media brands have spent the last few years dumping their content out through social platforms – but some have this year concluded the pay-off isn’t as significant as hoped, and decided they are giving away too much.
“Every snap is a 10-second trailer for the content beneath it,” Odell tells Beet.TV. “So, for an article, you’re creating a 10-second trailer to sell the reader on that article.
“Young women are on their cellphones. If we’re not there, we’re not on the frontline of our audiences.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
]]>As agencies compete for talent with tech companies and their own brand marketers, which continue to bring certain activities in house, perhaps the toughest challenge is the freelance marketplace, according to Jennifer Frieman, Chief Talent Officer of Momentum Worldwide, a global agency.
“Technology has opened up the door to individual entrepreneurs and they can create their own businesses and pick and choose the work that they want to do,” Frieman tells Beet.TV in an interview at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “And it’s really challenging to attract that kind of talent to come in house.”
For a very long time, talent flowed naturally into the marketing realm. “So maybe it was kind of like catching fish in a barrel,” Frieman observes.
One of the things that need updating is the ad industry’s history of long work hours. Agencies will need to be more flexible and, frankly, creative in their approach to tending its workforce. The goal, says Frieman, is to offer a “robust talent experience” consisting of mentorship and coaching to foster long-term growth and success.
“If we’re really clued into that and thinking about it very carefully, then we can create an incredible experience,” Frieman says. “It’s about how we look at the individual and create individual journeys.”
This requires agencies becoming more comfortable with the fact that technology enables people to do their jobs from anywhere. “We don’t have to lock them in a room to do it,” Frieman says.
As for employee diversity, a longstanding hot button in the ad industry, Frieman believes that the best creative products throughout history were derived from mixed cultures.
“It’s incumbent on us to create really diverse and inclusive environments if we want to create the best environment for high performing work. That’s how we get to the best creative product,” she says.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Tagging commercials in order to track them is “a no brainer,” says Melinda McLaughlin, CMO of Extreme Reach, which is ramping up its offering to advertisers and agencies of it TRUST Tag (Talent and Rights Usage Safety Tracking) solution. It’s the signals from the tags that make sure everyone gets paid what they are due.
“The brilliance isn’t in the tag. It’s actually what that tag pings in real time,” McLaughlin says during a break at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “It pings a cloud database that houses 90% of the complex talent rights.”
According to Extreme Reach, when commercial performers and content licensors sign contracts to appear in a TV commercial, the contracts may exclude authorization for Internet or mobile use. Yet many of those commercials still run online, which means actors and providers of voiceovers, music, imagery and other services might not be compensated.
McLaughlin was interviewed by Beet.TV as the advertising and talent industries were hammering out the last-minute details of the 2016 Commercials Contracts that SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) negotiates every three years. Running afoul of talent rights agreements not only deprives people of compensation, it poses a financial threat to companies whose products and services are featured in commercials.
“Marketers are saying ‘I will not have a $500,000 hit on my errors and omissions’ policy,” McLaughlin says.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>And so it was as the industry’s dominant trade organization, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, gathered for its annual Transformation conference. Vexing subjects like transparency in agencies’ financial dealings with media vendors and combatting fraud in digital advertising would have been enough without the added headlines—generated on the eve of Transformation—of a discrimination lawsuit brought by a female senior-level communications executive against the venerable J. Walter Thompson agency.
In an interview with Beet.TV during the conference, 4A’s President and CEO Nancy Hill cites two new initiatives aimed at bolstering agencies on the personnel front, as human resources is increasingly pressed to step up its recruitment and retention game.
“HR has become much more of a strategic tool for agencies, because talent is such an important part of what we do,” Hill says. “That’s all we do is talent.”
Advertising and media agencies have been waging a thus-far losing battle with tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google to recruit and retain young people, as The New York Times reports.
In response, the 4A’s has launched an online education certificate program in conjunction with its counterpart in the United Kingdom, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, for individuals with less than a year’s experience in advertising, marketing or communications. And it recently partnered with data company Quantcast to offer customized training 4A’s media agency members as part of Quantcast’s ongoing Real-Time Advertising (RTA) Academy program.
Looking out 12 months, Hill hopes the industry will have “made a crack in some of the diversity issues” and that “we have started to rebuild the trust between clients and agencies and that we’ve done it in a way that feels real.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>The San Francisco-based company offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads around the US. In this video interview with Beet.TV, WideOrbit CEO and founder Eric Mathewson talks about the company’s footprint:
Buyers plug in to WideOrbit using systems including TubeMogul, TradeDesk, Wywy, iViewDigital plus 18 other signs providers, direct placements and agency trading desks.
But Mathewson is hot on programmatic authenticity. “We don’t use segmented inventory,” he says. “Most companies holding themselves out to be a programatic seller have only a segmented inventory, doing it where they’re more or less putting a technology front-end on a manual process.
“I call that fauxgrammatic, it’s a faux process, not a true programmatic process.”
]]>By the same token, you might assume it’s not wise to advertise a bikini online to a woman who is shopping in Seattle. And that could be wrong.
“If we know she’s been traveling or staying at particular hotels, and that she wants to have the messaging, she will receive the right message” about the bikini, says Michael Davis, Head of Creative for Conversant Media, which helps more than 4,000 brands “reach real people.” Beet.TV interviewed Davis during a break at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
Davis describes as “cliché” the popular industry mantra of digital advertising delivering the right message at the right time. “That’s 10 years ago. Now we’re delivering media and advertising only to people who are interested in it based on that data we collect,” he says.
Conversant possesses some 150 million consumer identities that have been scrubbed of personal identification. Its algorithms can parse data so that three creative campaigns for a particular brand morph into seven different looks accompanied by 30 to 50 different headlines, as MediaPost reports.
“For us, the match of the creative to a real person is the holy grail for what we do,” Davis says.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>WaPo made headlines late last year, when, like some other publishers, it began serving a range of responses to users running ad blocking software – from email captures to subscription invitations.
“At some point, you do have to pay for the content – either with ads or a subscriber model, or not being able to access the content,” The Washington Post’s senior director of product strategy and operations, Jeff Burkett, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Luckily, we are producing the kind of content people are willing to pay for.”
Ad blocking indicators vary by research house. One recent stat shows 27% of Italians use the software, for instance. The practice has received a boost from Apple’s support for web content blocker add-ons in iOS 9.
For Burkett, the rise and rise of ad blocking is a symptom of a clear cause – bad ads.
“Ad blocking is, in some ways, very good for us in the publishing space,” he says. “While we may lose some revenue … Consumers are using ad blockers to communicate back to us ‘this is not the right experience for us’. We finally are all waking up to this fact.”
So WaPo has been working on delivering pages where the “ads and content fit together”, where “the ads aren’t repulsive”, Burkett adds: “While we may have a fantastic ad experience on the Post, all it takes is of someone to go to another site that’s terrible and they decide to install an ad blocker.”
A quick survey of Twitter users’ views shows ongoing frustration, however…
NY Times, Washington Post, Wired are now blocking ad-blocker users. Would you rather unblock or buy a subscription?
— Smashing Magazine (@smashingmag) March 10, 2016
Hey @washingtonpost, this is why people use ad blockers. No ad blocker on the left. Ad blocks ALL content. Obnoxious pic.twitter.com/BIubWzM8iT
— Barret (@_barretme) March 2, 2016
Okay, @washingtonpost. The number of intrusive ads on ONE PAGE? I can't imagine dealing with you sans ad blocker. pic.twitter.com/lkBkVEu1l2
— Eric Robbins (@ThayerAvenue) February 19, 2016
Great xp reading on @washingtonpost. Can't imagine ever running an ad blocker again (!). @MicrosoftEdge TPL please pic.twitter.com/MXVqgrTL3r
— Jordan Hofker (@jhofker) November 30, 2015
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>The equally brief message from Koenigsberg, who in addition to his Four A’s role is President, CEO and Founder of media agency Horizon Media, is that advertising is a personal business.
“What it all comes down to, when I started my agency 26 years ago I started it on the philosophy that business is personal,” Koenigsberg says as the Four A’s holds its annual Transformation conference. “When you talk about culture, environment, retention, recruitment, gender quality, it’s a ‘business-is-personal’ business.”
Of the approximately 800 attendees at Transformation, some 65% represent agencies, 20% brand marketers and 15% various industry suppliers, according to Koenigsberg.
“What that tells you is that we’re living in the age of collaboration,” he says. “It’s the sum of the parts. Each one of them cannot operate independently. They all have to operate together.”
Next year, when the group marks its 100th year in existence, “We should have thousands of people here, when you talk about where the world is going and the messages that we are trying to convey. We can’t keep talking to ourselves.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Donnie Williams, Chief Digital Officer of media agency Horizon, cites data showing there are 200 million global ad block users—about 45 million of whom are in the U.S.—an increase of 50% year over year. It’s the main reason why ad blocking is one of the more talked-about issues at this year’s Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
“Today we’re right at that breaking point where growth and adoption of digital media is still outpacing ad blocking usage a little bit,” Williams says during a break at the conference. “But the second that relationship changes, ad blocking outpaces growth of media consumption, you’re going to run into a bunch of publishers that have challenges monetizing their sites.”
This would mean less media opportunity for advertisers and their agencies. Near term, individual publishers have to learn how best to deal with people using technology that prevents them from being served ads on those publishers’ sites.
“One of the big challenges is it will be a publisher-to-publisher approach,” Williams says. “Forbes, The Washington Post, CNN. They individually have to work on [ad blocker] detection and that’s going to take a little while to come to fruition.”
Williams believes it’s a fait accompli that advertisers will see the price of some digital advertising inventory rise as a result of ad blocking. Publishers with shorter-term approaches to monetization who are hurt by ad blocking “will turn around and charge folks like myself, and a 150 clients or so, more money for the same advertising real estate.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>This worldview comes from Chris Weil, CEO of the global brand Interpublic agency Momentum, as he takes in the early sessions at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Amid the talk of client relations, compensation, competition for new business and social concerns within the ad world, Weill sees a direct link to the election primaries.
“I think what you’re seeing on the Republican side is they have lost the connection with their consumer. They have forgotten who their consumer is and they don’t know what they’re looking for, and they’ve been talking to themselves in Washington,” Weil says.
He believes advertising and media agencies can stumble down the same type of rabbit hole.
“When we start talking to the client and we get thinking about the wrong things, we can get disconnected with the consumer. The consumer is first,” Weil says. “What we’re seeing on the Republican side is you have a guy who walked in a said, ‘Hey, nobody’s listening to the people and I’m going to tell them what they want to hear.’”
With more ways than ever to measure and engage with consumer sentiment in social media and on other platforms, agencies have never had more tools at their disposal. Couple this with the outgrowth of ways to measure the return on advertising investments and the future looks bright to Weil.
“I’m still a big believer that we’re in a growth business,” he says. “Technology is going to allow us not just to connect, but to measure what we do. Then we really are in a growth industry and not a share game business.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Adopting CPH requires recalculating digital audiences after stripping out bot and fraud exposures, says Phil Cowdell, CEO of GroupM media agency Mediacom North America.
“Instead of buying a bucketful of impressions and not knowing how many of those are human and how many are not human, can I just buy the ones that are human?” Cowdell says.
Although this sounds easier said than done, GroupM uses a mix of technology and operating practices, some of which involve plain old common sense.
“It’s a very simple thing,” Cowdell says in an interview at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “If there’s this site that somebody recommends for a client, saying ‘I must use dog and a cat in a garage.com,’ if I pick up the phone and phone them, does a human answer the phone? Is it real?”
GroupM’s approach involves shortening the list of websites with which it works, verifying the people it works with, establishing proper terms and conditions and “making sure what we deliver to our clients is a relevant audience in the right format for the right price. With a high CPH,” Cowdell says.
He scoffs at viewability guidelines for video that stipulate playing for two seconds but not initiated by a user and having no audio.
“That’s a bit like me driving at 70 miles an hour down the road and there’s a poster site under a bridge covered in pigeons and saying that counts as an impression because I saw it,” says Cowdell. “I think there is a difference between exposure and engagement,” he adds. “Viewability is not an engagement metric, it’s available to be viewed metric. It’s the old fashioned opportunities to see. I think there’s still a lot more to do.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>“Most advertising today isn’t relevant,” according to Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman, whose company measures web audiences. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Feldman sees a parallel with another online business that, once, was nascent but which has certainly now grown up.
“Think about our experience with search,” he tells Beet.TV. “Whenever we conduct a search, most of the results that come back are relevant and useful to us. That demonstrates the power of data and technology. Web search is only 20 years old. The same opportunity exists for all other forms of media.”
Looking beyond what digital ads look, feel and perform like today is only natural. Despite growing to represent the largest-grossing ad medium in many countries now, online ads are suffering from audience aversion and often plummeting effectiveness. It’s no wonder a smorgasbord of ad-tech vendors is claiming to bring a whole new, more upbeat paradigm shift to a gloomy sector.
For Feldman, that will come not from rerouting existing ad practices through programmatic channels but in the ability to crunch data en masse, better targeting to achieve better relevance.
“The much larger opportunity is how we make advertising relevant for consumers and drive better outcomes by using data and technology modify content in real-time,” he says. “It’s still quite early.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>“In the last year, we pushed heavily into the proposition that media could be a growth driver, and using data and analytics could tie media towards business objectives and optimize to growth, rather than cutting the bottom line,” she says.
The abundance of data as well as the improved integration of teams within an agency are making this transition possible. “What we have leaned into is clients want a business result — a perception change, ROI, or an action. Our goal is to pull many pieces together to deliver on the business objective,” she says. That process relies on a foundation of data and analytics across channels and media forms.
“We have the capability to get more strategic and focused on the target. We have always been able to execute in digital and we can execute that way in multiple channels now. So it’s less of a single plan focused on reaching that big broad target, and more mini plans against smaller targets that are reacting and being optimized. And that is a different paradigm shift,” she says.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>“What candidates are looking for is an experience. They ask, what experience can one organization give me over another?'” she says, explaining how job seekers are changing the conversation in advertising hiring.
MEC has paired up with LinkedIn to access data on how to better reach new candidates who might be ideal fits. In addition, the agency also urges its employees to help ‘create content’ about what the work environment is like at MEC on job sites like Glassdoor.
For more insight on the talent search today, check out this interview.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>The measurement firms’ new Total Audience Measurement system, to ascertain audiences from across many media types, has been delayed and is now in “evaluation” stage, but Nielsen US media president Lynda Clarizio says the yardstick is coming soon, while new systems offer enhanced connected TV viewer measurement.
“We completed the infrastructure in 2015,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Now we have a number of clients that have seen the data, are evaluating the data. The next stage will be syndication, which we expect to be later in Q2 or early Q3.”
Nielsen has previously told AdAge that, when multi-platform viewing is made visible by Total Audience Measurement, TV networks see, on average, viewership is 10% higher than previously thought, and as high as 50% higher.
In the meantime, starting this month, Nielsen is lighting up new visibility of TV viewership via Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Google Chromecast, Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii and smart TVs. The move comes via a 50,000-strong panel of viewers owning those devices and will help brands understand how viewership breaks down by device type, not just by media channel.
All in all, Clarizio hopes the new data points will help influence the season in which around $70 billion of TV ad spend is up for grabs.
“We’re hoping that the data is influencing the upfronts and people are starting to make different decisions about how they’re going to transact,” she says. “We’re starting to hear that from some of our clients already.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Such a transition puts creativity front and center in what until now has been largely a technological arms race to harness automation.
“As an agency, we want to be designed around the idea as opposed to just the media,” says Steve Williams, CEO of Maxus, Americas. “If we can get the rate of creativity to match the rate of programmatic if you will, in terms of technology and the data around it, I think we’ll be doing justice for our clients.”
This requires more of a focus on planning and strategy. Or, as Williams explains during a break at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, progressing to “a world of thinking.”
The prospect of addressable TV, encompassing some 60 million households by year’s end, being bought programmatically provides more urgency to the progression. In an increasingly data-driven world, media agency talent will need to adapt new skills to not only do things faster, but more intelligently.
“We are looking for different skills and different talents from our people to be able to really understand that data. That’s the issue,” Williams says. “There’s lots of data there. We are really exercising very different muscles these days from the ones we exercised when we were just placing ads.”
As to source of creative output derived from the fullest understanding of consumer data, Williams doesn’t think there will be a “turf war” among the various constituents working on behalf of marketers.
“Who isn’t producing content these days?” Williams says, citing sister company Xaxis along with Maxus. “We produce creative work also. “I think it’s going to be about who has the most proximity to the idea.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>“It’s already 50% of our revenue and it’s going to become an even bigger part, because it just performs extremely well,” LinkedIn global director of agency holding companies Jann Schwarz tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We’re going to be working to make it even more efficient. We’re doubling down very heavily on the format. It’s the fastest-growing product in the LinkedIn product line-up across all business lines.”
So what is Sponsored Updates, and how is it used?
Simply, companies on the platform pay LinkedIn to put editorial articles in front of the right users – and LinkedIn can target those users due to carrying a large amount of professional data.
Two years ago, LinkedIn opened it up to API access, meaning third-party platform could begin buying its native ads. The format was the main driver behind a 20% year-on-year bump in LinkedIn’s quarterly advertising revenue last Q4. Our calculations suggest LinkedIn made about $91.5 million from Sponsored Updates in that quarter alone, representing more than 10% of total company revenue.
“People on LinkedIn are willing to hear from companies,” Schwarz adds. “It requires middle-weight content to really be successful. A lot of other platforms have more lightweight content.”
“What does really well on LinkedIn is, if IBM talks about cloud computing… they would create sponsored updates that would feature content that is quit substantial and interesting in terms of the depth and seriousness of the content and would then lead you to take an action such as download a white paper. It’s more about telling a story.”
Schwarz also talks about partnerships in which LinkedIn is working with both the 4As and individual advertising agency groups to help them understand recruitment behavior and movements in the industry.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Unlike some other video platforms, however, insight in to individual performance is relatively hard to come by inside the app. That’s why Innovid, the video advertising technology company, sought a way to get more detail.
Announced a month ago, Innovid’s analytics platform has been upgraded to take sight of Snapchat’s 10-second, “3V” vertical video views on marketer’s behalf.
Innovid CTO Tal Chalozin explains the origins of the development: “Snapchat is a massively-large property for 13-to-34s. The biggest problem is, it’s not measured by anyone aside from Snapchat themselves. “One of our very large agency clients … came to us and said, ‘Can you work with Snapchat to create something that enables data to flow to Innovid?’
Digiday reports Snapchat is attempting to get its Discover news publishers a connection with comScore, enabling them to measure the audience they earn there.
Innovid’s measurement capabilities claim to have sight of viewability, time earned, video views, impressions and completions, awareness, engagement and activity inside ad units.
Understanding true viewership is important because ad blocking is threatening the industry. Chalozin says Innovid is working to the IAB’s LEAN initiative, reducing ad bloat so that fewer viewers may be put off by excessive ad sizes.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>The emerging formula of success on Madison Avenue is speed and quality, she says. She also explains the value of diversity in building a relevant, successful company.
While media platforms available to marketers are quickly changing, the core importance of advertising is story telling.
In the interview, Clark talks about her move from the marketing to the agency role.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>During a session at the annual Transformation conference of the Four A’s, it was revealed that among nine industries (including ad agencies) that compete directly for the same talent, ad agencies ranked last when it came to perceptions of its “work/life balance” and “long-term strategic vision.”
Moreover, the agency sector ranked next-to-last in “compensation and benefits,” “strong career path,” “job security,” and “values employee contributions,” according to the new research.
To Jill Kelly, Chief Communications Officer, DigitasLBi, the “sobering statistics” drive home the need for agencies to pay more attention to the influence that their managers have on attracting and maintaining young talent.
“One of the top five reasons that people leave is because they cannot see a portrait of themselves in the agency,” Kelly says in an interview at the conference. “That portrait is determined almost exclusively, or highly influentially, by the manager.”
According to Kelly, when one looks at agency teams that have the highest attrition rates versus those with the lowest, there is a direct correlation between effective managers and ineffective managers.
“What we are looking at is manager modeling,” Kelly explains. “If we have a high-performing team under a highly effective manager, how do we translate that behavior into our other managers within the system?”
While acknowledging that it’s very difficult for agencies to compete at the entry salary level with professional services companies like Accenture, IBM and Pricewaterhouse Coopers that have been encroaching on agencies’ turf, Kelly says agencies need to “up our game” in terms of how job prospects perceive them. She likens the situation to potential home buyers.
“If you’re in the market for a home and you enter a house and you can’t see your future in that house, you can’t see expanded family in that house, it’s very unlikely that you will walk through that front door as a resident of that house,” Kelly says. “Same thing for a potential employees. If they can’t see a future at your company, it’s highly unlikely that they will walk through the front door as an employee of that company.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>As CNN recently reported, ahead of the recent Super Tuesday, Republican groups supporting rivals spent heavily on TV attack ads to stop Trump’s runaway train, spending an estimated $5.9m in airplay for just a single day.
But that is a waste, according to one advertising expert.
“He built his brand using television,” says Publicis’ chief strategist Rishad Tobaccowala, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Now he uses free media, controversy and Twitter to spread his brand. Television advertising against him doesn’t work – he can overwhelm it.
“Most importantly, the messages don’t work. In Florida, I believe The Republican anti-Trump advertising helped them because it verified that ‘these people want to stop me’ but ‘they cannot control me’.”
Trump only bought his first TV ad in January, six months in to his campaign, having up-ended the usual campaign tactic, in which attention is bought via television, in favor of causing uproar using speeches that reverberate around television newscasts and social media, for free.
About his strategic addition, Trump had said: “Honestly, I feel guilty. All these people are spending all this money on ads. We have spent the least amount of money. I am very proud of this ad. I don’t know if I need it, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
So, does Trump’s success suggest TV ads are useless? Not quite. Trump may be benefitting from reams of coverage earned for free but Tobaccowala says any campaign – for brands or politicians – benefits from using both free and paid media.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Having run Internet advertising agency Tribal Worldwide back in the day, DDB Chicago CEO Paul Gunning admits to being old enough to have been on Myspace. So the whiz-bang consumer tech arms wars don’t really impress him.
“Today’s environment doesn’t seem new to me at all. What’s remained constant is you have to have a great creative idea,” Gunning says while attending the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
DDB won plaudits for both the Skittles and Jeep campaigns. For Jeep, the agency commissioned an original song by a relatively unknown artist (Morgan Dorr) to celebrate the brand’s 75th anniversary and propel it forward, as opposed to simply offering an historical retrospective. “And it really resonated with Jeep owners. Jeep sales have been very strong since the game because it’s a strong brand and that kind of work resonates with people who like Jeep,” Gunning says.
He believes that creating great work begins by thinking outside of the 30-second box and making sure the creative is unique to its own platform, be it display or Snapchat.
“The work has to be literally cut different. It has to be malleable, if you will,” says Gunning.
To his chagrin, too many agencies don’t steer their talent acquisition efforts behind the technical side of the business, according to Gunning, who says DDB is “relentless right now in finding the best creative” to hire.
Asked about what he’s looking for most during the Upfront season, Gunning zeroes in on program integration. “Clearly the ability to take a brand and weave it into the story line is a unique way to expose consumers to a brand,” Gunning says. “It can be highly impactful. So we’re working with some of the content creators to try and make that happen.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Paul Rossi thinks he has a radar for both. That’s why the publication’s president is pushing the respected, independent and sometimes straight title to produce content on behalf of advertisers.
“There is huge disruption happening with viewability, ad blocking, ad fraud, putting a real question mark around the viability of purely-advertising businesses,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The future is around premium brands and business models that have two legs to the table.”
By that, Rossi means both advertiser and consumer funding – the historic duality that has been the news publishing industry’s strength.
But Rossi is pushing to augment that first leg with something of the new advertiser landscape – branded content, produced by The Economist, for brands.
“That side of our business grew last year by nearly 40%,” he says. “We can see that graph continuing. We’re very confident we’ve got the right structure to service where marketers are pushing their money, which is increasingly owning their own content and storytelling for audiences.
“We have a whole legacy business built on storytelling. We are increasingly working directly with clients, there are no agencies in the mix, we’re creating programs … in a way that is game-changing for everyone.”
The title has now built a social media following of a combined 35 million, according to deputy editor Tom Standage, an Economist veteran.
Even as more marketers begin to pay for a different kind of marketing, however, Rossi doesn’t want to neglect the other leg to his table – paying readers. In fact, it sounds like his top online circulation priority is to grow the base of subscribers in the world’s biggest market, the US.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Amid the transition from cookie-centric targeting to the world of mobile devices, tablets, video, unique identifiers, offline purchases and the like, agencies can secure their seat at the table by taking charge of their clients’ first-party data, says Andy Monfried, Founder and CEO of Lotame.
“It is critical for agencies to remain hugely relevant,” Monfried says in between sessions at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “The ownership of the first-party data will always remain with the clients, but agencies need to take control over managing the data.”
Lotame has been working with top TV manufacturers, along with companies like Tremor Media, YuMe and TubeMogul, so that brands can better target people who watch connected TV’s based on their household IP addresses. That data is matched to mobile devices and offline purchase data. To Monfried, “portability and real time” are the current buzz words describing data.
“We will be telling brand advertisers who’s watching in real time and if the ad and the content are having an impact on purchase,” Monfried says.
When released, Lotame’s TV viewership audiences will be available for purchase in DSPs and platforms including Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager, The Trade Desk, Tremor Video, Turn, Videology, and Yahoo’s Brightroll.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Xaxis is currently doing “a lot” of upfront deals for premium publisher inventory, something that’s lacking on the video side due to a lack of supply, according to Sweeney, who is CEO of North America for the unit of WPP’s Xaxis unit.
“Publishers should be excited about what’s happening as we evolve away from a marketplace where their impressions and the data associated with those impressions were basically flat bid against,” Sweeney says during a break at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “I think you will see prices go up for those folks who do have something truly valuable to market.”
The lack of quality video inventory is a bigger problem, in part because of the “incredible standards” Xaxis has set for viewability and non-fraudulent activity.
“We’re working with all the third-party video viewability partners to ensure that we only buy inventory that we know is a full-episode player where someone actually takes an action to get that audio and video going,” Sweeney says.
To better inform its digital buys, Xaxis has invested north of $50 million on platforms like Turbine and Spotlight Xaxis, the latter of which has brought more transparency to the fore. Key to these efforts is a focus on the science of building out algorithms to inform more precise consumer targeting.
On the subject of transparency, Sweeney says of Spotlight: “Our best partners have seen it, they have access to the tool, they can log in themselves.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
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