Traditional ad agencies have added programmatic services to their offering, even as programmatic ad tech vendors rise up and promise to to disintermediate those agencies.

One company now claims to be toeing the line between the two.

“In the broader ad-tech ecosystem, there are pure service providers like agencies, and there are also very pure tech providers who are SaaS-based companies,” according to Art Muldoon, CEO of Accordant Media, an ad-tech provider launched six years ago. “We really shoot right down the middle.”

The company was recently a finalist for “best audience measurement platform” and “best marketing analytics/attribution platform” in Digiday’s Signal Awards.

Its ATS software includes data management, audience buying, attribution, analytics and reporting.

“We provide a fully managed service with transparency and trusted relationships, but also with original technology and data that we build and provide our marketers to help them get the power that agencies don’t necessarily create, and full tech partners don’t really operate.”

This video was produced  by Beet.TV at the Rubicon Project’s Rooftop Summit on Automated Advertising at Cannes Lions 2016.   The series is sponsored by the RubiconProject.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That puts Dan Ackerman, AOL’s programmatic TV SVP, who came to AOL via its acquisition of the video ad-tech provider Adapt.TV, at the center of disruption.

“We want to help an advertiser activate their valuable data,” Ackerman tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Why should that be relegated only to the digital environments? Let’s open that up for TV.”

Whilst TV ad targeting has always been carried out using rough audience panel data, AOL is helping brands leverage their own data on existing customers in order to reach them again through TV outlets including NBCU and Univision.

It’s one example of how programmatic is beginning to make in-roads even to traditional TV as a data layer over linear.

“That creates a great value proposition for a marketer,” Ackerman adds. “They’re kind of leap frogging over being limited to just age and gender as a definition of the group of people they want to reach.”

Targeting is great, but Ackerman warns: “You don’t ever want to give up the broad reach of broadcast television. But that can be more addressable, and that’s what we’re talking about.”

This video was recorded at Cannes Lions 2016 at a Beet.TV leadership summit on advanced television and advertising hosted by Carat. For more segments from the session, please visit this page.

Whilst the former tactic aims to switch on consumer interest, the latter sees marketers pay for end results. Now there are so many ad technologies out there, things are changing, says Bob Walczak, the global CEO of Light Reaction, WPP’s performance marketing division.

“(There is) everything from viewability technology to programmatic and RTB, fraud prevention technology,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I think there’s a real opportunity with performance to be able to kind of uplevel that and talk about it more as an outcome. It’s almost a merger of branding and performance coming together to kind of deliver an outcome-based marketplace.”

Light Reaction, living in WPP’s Xaxis programmatic media company, sells marketing only with those defined customer outcomes.

“The problem is that the performance marketers have really kind of degraded the brand just to achieve that outcome,” Walczak adds. “I don’t think that’s any longer needed. I think you can leverage the technology, have quality media plus quality audiences and deliver a quality outcome leveraging the technology you have today.”

“Everybody needs to understand it and they need to understand the simplicity of it,” according to Houssein Houssaini, global head of programmatic solutions for Havas.

“We need to simplify it to get the message to our employees and to our clients to understand how the future’s going to look like

“Anything is programmatic. Anything that can be optimized from a media perspective. So it is our biggest focus for this year and it will be the biggest focus of the next coming years.”

Havas just picked up the account to run global media for Swarovski including programmatic duties.

This video was produced  by Beet.TV at the Rubicon Project’s Rooftop Summit on Automated Advertising at Cannes Lions 2016.   The series is sponsored by the RubiconProject.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“What we’re looking for is who’s going to be next,” Jez Frampton said in an interview with Beet.TV before today’s release of the Interbrand Breakthrough Brands report, which is titled Future Growth. It’s a collaboration of Interbrand, Facebook, Ready Set Rocket and The New York Stock Exchange.

The report groups the above four companies under the heading “Growing together: Building businesses around people.” It also acknowledges brands like Shinola (“Growth in action: Living stories”); 90 Seconds (“Growing potential: Performance-enhancing platforms”); and Sensorbox (“Growth for good: Purpose-bred brands”).

The purpose of a brand “fits very clearly into the world of branding,” says Frampton by way of explaining how brands and business should interact.

“The business is there to generate income and profits on behalf of shareholders,” he says. “The brand is there as a way for people to understand who you are and what you’re about.”

Some 200 brands were nominated for the inaugural Breakthrough Brands report and of those 60 are featured, based on four initial criteria: Less than a decade old, driving change by responding to a unique marketplace need, a demonstrated ability to grow, and “buzz”—is the brand grabbing attention and gaining “momentum”?

Noting that breakthrough entities in the last 10 to 15 years were companies Facebook, Google and Amazon, Frampton says the brands cited in the report not only can portend the next big success but “more importantly, actually what can we learn from these fast growth businesses. How do I grow?”

The FreeWheel Council for Premium Video was formed last year to develop a strong and unified position on topics that matter to the premium video ecosystem. FreeWheel’s Agency and Brand Relations VP James Rothwell says the Council is focusing on four areas in its first year:

1. Defining premium video (see recently-published paper).
2. The need for programmatic systems built specifically for premium video (see recently-published paper).
3. Understanding and refining ad experiences for users.
4. Unifying measurement in a fragmented world.

Rothwell says the Council will explore how to make ad experiences more engaging in order to discourage ad blocking. And he says measurement technologies have not caught up to how consumers are viewing content.

Bitterman, whose career includes full-service ad agencies and digital companies like Alta Vista, one of the early Internet search engines, refers to a recent report from Morgan Stanley during an interview with Beet.TV. The Wall Street firm noted that something in the neighborhood of 85% of incremental digital ad spend is going to Facebook and Google because they’re considered to be safe havens.

“We’re essentially seeing a flight to safety,” says Bitterman. “With all of these issues going on in the ecosystem like ad fraud and ad blocking. That will probably drive a good portion of the remainder of the ecosystem to get their house in order” by making sure they are “brand-safe and dollar-safe environments.”

Bitterman divides ad fraud and ad blocking into two camps: short-term and long-term problem. Digital ad fraud, he says, “is a much larger short-term issue” because there is an immediate problem for advertisers whose money is being wasted.

Ad blocking represents a longer-term threat because there’s no immediate waste of advertiser dollars as a result of people rejecting marketing messages.

“The reason why it’s a long-term issue is because as an industry we have to make sure that we’re delivering messages to people in environments that they want to see it,” Bitterman says. “If not, we’re messing with the whole ecosystem.”

As brands tackle the challenge of how to properly engage with consumers via widely popular messaging apps and platforms, the opportunity for one-to-one conversations that some people hoped would happen with Facebook might finally be at hand, according to Bitterman.

“That type of communication and servicing of customers is super exciting,” he says of messaging.

In an interview with Beet.TV, the SVP of Global Communications, Media & Media Measurement at Bank of America draws a contrast between the three aforementioned companies and media providers for whom data was “something that was sprinkled over the top of the cupcake” of their Upfront presentations.

“Folks that have been in the business for a long time on the data side are now coming over to the linear side and saying, ‘We can provide you something that works within your digital ecosystem’” Paskalis says, mentioning Stefano Kim at Turner and Denise Colella at NBCU.

As he surveys the landscape of media offerings, Paskalis says “We now have a pretty complete ecosystem with digital, mobile and addressable.”

The real value in that ecosystem isn’t strictly about consumer targeting.

“This is important for relationship marketing,” he says. “As we move into this era that is increasingly deterministic, we need to know a little bit about who we’re talking to. Whether or not they saw my last message so if I’m doing sequential messaging I can serve the next one.”

The most important thing advertisers must cultivate is the consumer experience, according to Paskalis.

“Let’s face it. We have been so focused on optimizing the advertising math that we sometimes forget the consumer equation,” Paskalis says. “Anything we do that enhances the consumer equation, including reducing ad load, is really a good thing.”

While he’s been struck by all of the hoopla surrounding the potential marketing benefits of virtual reality, he doesn’t think there are enough headset-equipped people at this point to justify the cost of producing VR content.

“But I’m intrigued by how consistent the message is with VR, so I’m trying to think if I’m missing something here,” Paskalis says.

“Increasingly over time, this is really where the advertising industry, technology industry surrounding advertising brands and media are coming together,” says Howard Homonoff, SVP at MediaLink.

Part of their challenge is creating these different types of relationships with agencies, brands and technology companies, he says.

This video was recorded at Cannes Lions 2016. For more segments from our coverage of Cannes Lions, please visit this page.

That’s the theory. So who’s responsible for the execution? Truth is, the new practice of dynamic ad creative is still shaking out – and whether it should be owned by creators, targeters or a mixture of each is still a matter for debate.

“There’s a lot of data in the media, the real-time bidding and programmatic has taken off, and the creative has been left behind a bit, acknowledges Joseph Pamboris, the chief product officer of Flashtalking, a vendor whose technology lets people make dynamically-created ads depending on a range of input factors.

“Who is responsible for the creative, in particular, the dynamic or data-driven creative, is still a little in the air. Is it the creative agency who actually create the sum for assembling ads? The media agency? The advertiser?

“What we really need is someone to actually take the responsibility for the multitude of creatives you can actually run within any media campaign.”

This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.”  This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore.  For more segments from the series, please visit this page.

But now the company, whose IQ platform is used by clients including Bayer, Bose, Condé Nast, Toyota and Johnson & Johnson, is enjoying another time in the sun, after a recent investment.

In June, the company took investment from You & Mr Jones, the “brand-tech” group founded by former Havas CEO David Jones.

As The Drum reported it: “Jivox’s personalized digital marketing platform dynamically constructs all the creative components of a campaign to deliver thousands of potential variations – customized on the fly according to each user profile – using first-party and third-party data, and factors such as browsing behavior, demographics, weather, location, local events, time of day, and social data.”

So how will Jivox use the money? Jivox CEO Diaz Nesamoney tells Beet.TV:

“We’re pretty excited about that because it’s two things:

1. “It’s a recognition by David Jones and team. David Jones was a former CEO of Havas Media, so he knows a thing or two about advertising.”
2. “But also, as a team, an acknowledgement that we have market-leading technology in this particular area and making the investment.”

“What that investment allows us to do is:

1. “Continue to grow and scale the business. We plan to invest some of it in technology, because we think this is a very vast and big field. We want to stay ahead of the game.”
2. “And the other is just expanding our global footprint, particularly in Europe and Asia. We’ve got the beginnings of an office in both of those areas, but we plan to spend a lot of that money growing in those two markets.”

This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.”  This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore.  For more segments from the series, please visit this page.

Digital video ad-tech outfit FreeWheel says it sees a “tipping point” coming after the recent US TV upfronts season saw a range of new formats and techniques debut. But it is already seeing a march from traditional desktop internet video, to internet-enabled TV platforms.

“If you look across our customer base, 20% of our inventory is now in set-top box VOD,” according to Neil Smith, the VP of FreeWheel’s FourFronts marketplace. “There’s a significant amount of inventory in OTT device.

“Being able to use data in those environments that are more closed and more restricted have more technical limitations than desktop is incredibly important if you want to have scale and premium.

“Set-top box VOD and the ability to apply buy-side data there is something we’ve started to execute on this year.”

But the zeal with which executives are embracing the transformation reads like a menu of enthusiasm.

Slavi Samardzija, global CEO of Annalect, the New York-based data analytics consulting and technology company for marketers, says: “I think the industry is divided on the three tracks or three groups:”

• Data refuseniks: “I’m not going to name the agencies, they know who they … some big, big creative thinkers ignore the data, and they’ll say, ‘Oh this data is bad, it has a bad influence on the creativity’. They are very public and very loud about the topic at the moment.”
• Data obsessives: “There’s a school of thought of, ‘The world is going to be run by data, and the data and the artificial intelligence is going to give us all the answers, you don’t need the creatives’.”
• Half-way housers: “The third is in the middle … saying, ‘Well, it’s really how the two work together’.”

Samardzija knows which camp he agrees with. “That (third one) is the one that is easiest to agree with,” he says.

“The challenge is that nobody has figured out what does that mean. So most people get up there and say, ‘No, no, no, it’s not about data, it’s not about creativity, it’s how they work together’. That clearly sounds good, but in practice, nobody has figured that out.”

This video was produced at the OMD Oasis at Cannes Lions 2016 as part of  the Future of TV Advertising Leadership Forum, a series presented by true[X] and hosted by OMD Worldwide.  Please visit this page for additional segments.

While user-generated content has driven audiences, it’s also created concern on the part of traditional television. But,  Spangenberg says, traditional TV is once again at the forefront of providing a platform for storytellers and connecting to mass audiences quickly.

“But the whole definition of television has to expand beyond that because we still associate it with a box on a wall and that’s really not what television is all about today.”

But the new accusation of “theft” is harsh, and forgets that companies are also robbing from the very users they hope to reach, says one ad tech executive.

“There is a lot of theft occurring the other way,” says Fox Networks Group’s advanced advertising president Joe Marchese in this panel discussion recorded by Beet.TV. “If I go to a web page and a HD truck ad loads, there’s 3 or 4 cents of data in my wireless time I just paid – I didn’t ask for that.

“So there is theft occurring one way or another. I’m not sure I have a problem with it going the other way.”

If you believe the oft-quoted PageFair data, 198 million around the world use ad blocking software, while22% of smartphone users are even now blocking mobile web browser ads.

Ad blocking is now cited alongside fraud, viewability and more as amongst the existential threats to advertisers and publishers. but Marchese thinks the fear may be overblown.

“I don’t know whether there was the same outrage when DVRs came about,” he says. “When gets DVRed, we get no credit for it, but no-one is calling it a theft.

“All of a sudden, the gravy train of these sub-prime impressions start falling off and everyone starts calling it a ‘theft’.”

This video was produced at the OMD Oasis at Cannes Lions 2016 as part of  the Future of TV Advertising Leadership Forum, a series presented by true[X] and hosted by OMD Worldwide.  Please visit this page for additional segments.

But it’s one that might have been advanced quicker, a panel of marketers discussed during the Cannes Lions festival.

“The biggest challenge is that clients haven’t stepped up to the pressure on the measurement industry – it’s hard work,” said Mondelez International’s chief media and ecommerce officer Bonin B. Bough.

NBCUniversal ad sales chairman Linda Yaccarino agreed with Bough: “Clients haven’t stepped up yet.” But she said it has taken time for everyone to figure out the lay of the land. “We had to put our money where our mouth is and say, ‘we’re going to guarantee (audience) for you’,” she added.

MasterCard global media group head Ben Jankowski blamed media measurement agencies that are still now connecting the dots between device usage. “There hasn’t been enough investment and attention on the part of the research companies,” he said. “It hasn’t been a high enough priority and we need to ratchet it up.”

But AOL programmatic TV SVP Dan Ackerman said the pace of technological development had been a factor. “The technology hasn’t been there,” he observed. “… only (in) the last couple of years when there’s been the availability of data and the technology to apply that in the linear space.

“Now advertisers can take the data they’ve been using in digital for five or 10 years and apply that to TV. It seems nonsensical that there’s … $70bn (in linear TV ad spend) that hasn’t been pushed faster.”

This video was recorded at Cannes Lions 2016 at a Beet.TV leadership summit on advanced television and advertising hosted by Carat. For more segments from the session, please visit this page.

“It’s a confluence of a number of events happening at the same time,” says Karo during an interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes festival of advertising creativity.

Reflecting on a panel discussion about audience measurement, she cites as an example the choice between a 15-second ad and a 30-second spot.

“As soon as currencies start changing or evolving or there are fewer restrictions, we’re going to see even more choice out there from our standpoint as to how we can talk to these consumers,” Karo says.

Along the way, the key is to try to stay on top of all of the different things that consumers are choosing to do.

“Some things start small and then they really grow to be a much bigger trend,” Karo observes. “And some things start to happen simultaneously but in different pockets of a particular audience or consumer group.”

When she started in the ad agency business, all agencies were full-service: creative, account management, strategic planning and media departments all under one roof. Then agencies unbundled their media departments for a variety of reasons.

“The need for integration and collaboration is even more important today because there are so many choices that have to be made,” Karo says.

This video was produced at the OMD Oasis at Cannes Lions 2016 as part of  the Future of TV Advertising Leadership Forum, a series presented by true[X] and hosted by OMD Worldwide.  Please visit this page for additional segments.

Adhering to this line of thinking, HPE has committed to a research project called The Machine – Hewlett Packard Labs’ biggest project.

“We have committed to this very important piece of research,” Palmer says. “It’s looking at fundamentally how we transform the very basic core computing architecture.”

The goal is to reduce energy consumption and increase performance, she says.

“We’re talking about energy saving around 99 percent of what is achievable today.”

This video was produced at the OMD Oasis at Cannes Lions 2016 as part of  the Future of TV Advertising Leadership Forum, a series presented by true[X] and hosted by OMD Worldwide.  Please visit this page for additional segments.

And marketers are getting excited, because targeted advertising is one of those things.

“The writing is on the wall,” Mediavest | Spark ad tech and platforms EVP Oleg Korenfeld tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“As people cut their cord more and more … we will reach a critical mass, where it becomes a true TV on-demand platform.

“The core difference from linear television is that it operates similar to desktop and mobile, which is great for targeting. Digital television promises us efficiencies that we expect today from desktop and mobile.”

This video was produced  by Beet.TV at the Rubicon Project’s Rooftop Summit on Automated Advertising at Cannes Lions 2016.   The series is sponsored by the Rubicon Project.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Credit it to the age of instant and viral digital communication.

“Your brand is really all about how you behave and to be honest it is the power of the smartphone that has revolutionized that approach to authenticity,” says Mendonca, the CEO for Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Because everything now can be captured with a camera on a smartphone. So it really has to be incredibly transparent, the relationships that brands have with consumers.”

In fact, authenticity translates to live or die. “If you do not have an authentic approach to communicating your brand, your company might not actually live very long,” Mendonca says in an interview with Beet.TV.

OMD, a unit of Omnicom, has had great success for clients like Doritos, Pepsico and Nissan by eschewing generic corporate speak in reaching out to target audiences that include the LGBT community, according to Mendonca.

“It’s almost like changing the language, dropping any kind of corporate language, and making it a part of the brand’s DNA,” she says.

What excites Mendonca about story telling for brands are the choices they have for message distribution. “What’s really interesting is that in the amplification space, there are many more technology companies to choose from to actually start to scale that storytelling,” Mendonca says. In addition, “to also do it in a way that’s relevant locally so that you get the double benefit of global communication but landing locally,” she says.

Mendonca led a panel discussion about the power of influencers like bloggers in their role as content distributors. “They almost represent the breadth and depth of channels, and we’re getting much more sophisticated at being able to ascertain what influencers should we actually hook brands up with and why,” she says.

This video was produced at the OMD Oasis at Cannes Lions 2016 as part of  the Future of TV Advertising Leadership Forum, a series presented by true[X] and hosted by OMD Worldwide.  Please visit this page for additional segments.

After a year in which executives have begun to apologetically refer to “the ‘P’ word”, we are now seeing some go back to basics. That’s the switch Rubicon Project is making.

“The lexicon shifts because the approach is becoming more holistic,” Rubicon marketplace development SVP Jay Sears tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Ad holding companies and operating agencies are starting to really organize to get a holistic view across orders and auctions … and across the mobile app world, desktop world and all the different display and video formats. We’re even seeing the emergence of automation around native as well. In many ways, that’s the holy grail – an open marketplace and private deals.”

EMarketer reckons two thirds of US display advertising is also transacted programmatically, rising to 72% or $27.47bn in 2017.

But, in a separate interview, Beet.TV found more evidence the practice, as named, may be splintering.

“Programmatic is losing its meaning,” Mediavest ad tech and platforms EVP Oleg Korenfeld said. “In the end, it’s precision. Programmatic is technical activation, automation is how you actually do it.”

As the world of opportunities and challenges in front of brands expands ever-greater, the core concept of automation seems like a worthwhile, functional touchstone to bear in mind.

“Advertisers are starting to get very savvy about how they approach automation… how to manage not just their trading relationship but also the wave of data that’s coming in with the convergence of march and ad-tech,” Sears adds. “CRMs are coming online so that they can have very precise conversations with customers and folks they imagine will be their customers in the future.”

This video was produced  by Beet.TV at the Rubicon Project’s Rooftop Summit on Automated Advertising at Cannes Lions 2016.   The series is sponsored by the Rubicon Project.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But, if you thought that was small, just look at the Asia-Pacific region, where things are still in their “infancy”, according to the Group M programmatic exec trying to boost the tech in the area.

“It’s very limited still,” says Michel de Rijk, Singapore-based CEO of Group M’s Xaxis division for the APAC region.

There’s some initiatives mainly in Australia, in China and a few small companies just launched to try to cover the South-East Asia region.

“The most developed market is Australia, the most proactive, but still there it’s in its infancy right now.”

Almost half of APAC marketers have bought programmatically, according to recent Forrester research for MediaMath. But that is much smaller when it comes to TV specifically.

While TiVo in the States expects the US industry to hit 5% to 10% programmatic TV spend in the next 12 months, AsiaMX, a Singapore-based premium cross-media monetisation service provider, only launched Asia’s first programmatic TV advertising sell-side exchange in March.

“When we launched Xaxis in Asia four years ago, we had to approach advertisers and agencies and explain what programmatic was,” says de Rijk. “Now the big markets have adopted programmatic at a pretty decent scale.

There’s a lot of work to do. Programmatic is seen as bringing more efficiency to the media buying process. But I think programmatic brings a lot more opportunities to the table – specific audience messaging, overlaying of data opportunities. A lot of Asian markets still need to adopt that in a more proactive way.”

This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.”  This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore.  For more segments from the series, please visit this page.

Providing closed-loop activation and measurement of ad campaigns, the Neustar deal is designed to optimize brand marketers’ “most precious asset”—their first party data, according to Simulmedia CMO Michael Zimbalist.

“What we do is to allow brands to take their customer file and use that as the basis for targeting on linear television,” Zimbalist says in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Cannes advertising festival. “You can now create a panel representative of the U.S., of your own customers, and target lookalikes on television at scale.”

It’s reflective of decades of advertising research having shown that targeting purchasers in a particular category—even if they don’t buy your brand—returns the most from an advertising investment, Zimbalist says.

After Simulmedia runs a national TV campaign, it can provide Neustar’s MarketShare DecisionCloud analytics solutions with the ad delivery and conversion data to verify the true business impact of linear TV.

“We bring the reach of linear television and the performance and targeting of digital together,” says Zimbalist.

But now broadcasters have caught up, and are beginning to use software to manage the ad-trading process, too.

“The agency and the brand side of the business woke up and embraced programmatic technologies as well as audience-centric targeting much more quickly than the supply or sell side of the industry did,” according to Ryan Jamboretz, chief commercial officer of one video ad-tech platform serving customers, Videology.

“It wasn’t until two years ago, when the television industry started to show some sign of weakness on the edges, that we started to see the supply side of the industry really wake up to the need to embrace technology.”

Jamoretz says customers are looking to adopt technology over and above the traditional function of an ad server.

Videology has been amongst the tech vendors to benefit from what is now adoption on both sides of the industry’s business.

“The last 18 to 24 months have been a pretty transformative time for us at Videology – a lot of work with big broadcasters, cable companies and distributors around the world, as well as major content creators.”

It sounds so simple considering all of the time, money and hoopla that has been spent on calling into question things like kickbacks and rebates. The recent report by the Association of National Advertisers and consultancy K2 certainly provided plenty of (anonymous) assertions showing that sketchy practices do exist.

In an interview with Beet.TV, Wieser—who worked for Lehman Brothers and Deutsche Bank before becoming Global Director of Forecasting for IPG’s Magna Global network and then returning to Wall Street at Pivotal Research—gives everyone involved the benefit of the doubt.

“The real issue as I see it is somewhere between a misunderstanding, disingenuity and in some cases deception,” Wieser says. “But the vast majority of the problem, it could really be a misunderstanding, where the agencies genuinely believe that they are working within the limitations, namely the language of their contracts.”

Nonetheless, Wieser believes this is an inflection point in the relations between advertisers and their creative and media agencies. One of his takeaways is that at the bare minimum, there will be continued dialogue, and most likely more scrutiny.

“The specificity in the K2 report is more than enough to make sure that most marketers will explore their contracts, do a little bit more auditing if the have the budget,” Wieser says. “Make sure that they are mindful of their factors in their negotiations going forward.”

Wieser acknowledges that the impact of the K2 report on publicly traded agency holding companies could have been worse.

“The funny thing is that stocks arguably traded up a bit on the release of the report,” he recalls. “Partly because I think there were concerns about specific holding companies being called out for specific practices. There were concerns that it would actually illustrate fraud or criminal activity. It was less bad than it appeared.”

This video was produced by Beet.TV at the Rubicon Project’s Rooftop Summit on Automated Advertising at Cannes Lions 2016. The series is sponsored by theRubiconProject. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.