Career paths and opportunities need to be surfaced to young people starting in high school, he says.

In this interview he also addresses essential changes in corporate culture which need to “pursue differences.”

We spoke with him at the Cannes in Colors program presented at Cannes Lions.

McDonald is a board member of I.D.E.A Initiative, the group that organized Cannes in Color program.

This video is part a series of interviews with members of the I.D.E.A. Initiative produced at Cannes Lions 2018, at the Cannes in Color event hosted by Spotify and P&G.  This series is sponsored by true[X].  Please find more segments on this page.

But, despite years of talk about “omni-channel” marketing, the truth is – for many – that future is still some way off.

That is according to one agency exec turned tech sales honcho.

“I think in their hearts, advertisers are omni-channel,” says Jordan Bitterman, the former chief strategy officer of Mindshare in North America, who is now VP of IBM’s digital strategy and sales. “I think in the way they’re spending and how they’re operating, probably less so.

Omni-channel and the talk about breaking down silos has been in the industry for what seems like years now.

But talk only gets you so far. Why is real evidence of omni-channel practice still thin on the ground?

“The tools have to be in place for us to be able to really do that at scale in the industry, and we’re not there yet,” Bitterman adds.

“The breakage point starts with an understanding. We’re still in a point right now where we’re looking for results on a very quick, short term basis. It’s really a shame.”

He says that leaves advertisers exposed to accidentally showing too many ads to users who have already seen them on one screen or another.

“We’re doing a ton of damage,” he says.

As Masters Circle was being established in the U.S., the ANA “started to recognize fundamental flaws in the way we manage ourselves,” says the organization’s CEO, Bob Liodice. “We’ve lost sight of being able to pursue brand and creative excellence. We’ve lost sight of our efficiency and our infrastructure,” Liodice says in this interview with Beet.TV.

The 12 pillars of the Masters Circle are based in large part by the fact that about half of all Fortune 500 companies have declining revenues and after-tax profits, according to Liodice.

“We can interpret that lots of ways. But in many ways, it’s an indictment on our marketing system. It could be one of the reasons why CMO tenure is as short as it is.”

The 12 pillars of Masters Circle are:

Advocacy; Brand and creative excellence; Brand safety; Digital media supply chain; Future growth; Gender equality; Inclusiveness; Measurement; Media transparency; Organizing; Purpose; and Talent development.

“To be a transformative force, you have to focus in on the one or two significant issues perhaps in all of the areas and attempt to make a difference with them,” Liodice says.

He cites as an example the joint effort by the ANA, 4A’s and IAB to combat digital advertising fraud under the auspices of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG).

“What we needed to do was create an institutional presence that allowed for confidence to grow in the entire digital supply chain that we could attack fraud at its roots.”

As a result, research has indicated that ads that go through the TAG certification process show an 84% improvement in fraud rates versus the general market.

“That’s the type of progress we’re looking to make,” says Liodice.

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

Kimberly-Clark, whose – brands include Andrex, Corronelle and Huggies – was one of the companies announced by IBM and Mediaocean this week as joining “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain,” along with Unilever and Kellogg.

So how can blockchain, which is a decentralized ledger of activities that occur within a given system, help advertisers like those?

“This will create a level of speed and agility and enable innovation,” says Josh Herman, Global Director, Integrated Marketing, Media, and Analytics, IT at Kimberly-Clark, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“The blockchain will allow people to have more comfort and confidence about what we bought, what got delivered, and whether it made an impact. And the faster that we can do that, makes it easier to try new things.”

Specifically, for advertisers, blockchain could shine a spotlight on every fraction of a cent that might be taken by links in the chain, after a couple of years plagued by the creeping realisation that much of their money is siphoned off by intermediary platforms.

“It’s hard to keep up with the consumer when your business systems can’t tell you whether or not you’ve succeeded in delivering your message to the consumer,” Herman adds.

“The (consortium) programme includes everyone that participates in that value chain of getting the digital media message to the consumer.”

The consortium setup involves IBM’s Hyperledger blockchain fabric helping to power a system connected to DSPs, SSPs and more through Mediaocean.

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

“There are a lot of us that are hungry for different solutions to get it right with how we need to go to market,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “We value the consumer experience. We value our relationship with the consumer more than anything.”

Companies like L’Oreal want to “get it right moving forward,” including messaging and creating meaningful engagements with consumers, according to McHugh, who believes “there’s great learning” that can emerge from working together.

“I think that we need to be part of the piping part, not just the ‘here, we’ve got a solution for you. Isn’t it great?’ And it works for the networks and maybe it’s not so great for how we would want to go to market. I think that is huge and I think we’ll get there together.”

What she’s seeking is a true partnership with the sell-side in a test-and-learn-together mode. “We rely very heavily on our agencies and they should absolutely be at the table as well, but marketers need to more and more be at the table and we’re hungry for that.”

At last year’s Cannes Festival, L’Oreal revealed that it would experiment with Google Labs on six-second creative spots. As BusinessInsider reports, the companies would work together to examine data on what people are engaging with on YouTube so that L’Oreal could produce timely, six-second ads running prior to content on the video platform.

“We also do tutorials that run much longer,” says McHugh. “It should be about the consumer experience and what they’re looking for and the value exchange between the messaging and what you’re providing and whether or not it’s valuable to the consumer.”

While 30-second ads play a certain role, “it’s certainly not the be all and end all and we need to test and learn our way into the future.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

“The digital ecosystem is fraught I think, as we’ve all seen with a host of challenges,” says the VP of Global Media. “We believe that the blockchain is a potential opportunity to help give us a better understanding of how the whole ecosystem works and really empowers us to make better business decisions as we go forward.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Master talks about Unilever’s efforts to monitor ad viewability, weed out non-human traffic and seek brand-safe environments. “There’s a host of things in that ecosystem that we’re tracking,” he says.

He’s hoping blockchain will provide a more efficient and effective way to manage and monitor the whole process.

“It really starts with us as the advertiser with that dollar, and how much of that dollar is actually spent showing our great creative to the consumer. Where along the way are we spending that dollar to make sure it gets to the consumer in an appropriate way?”

Given the circuitous route that “a great piece of creative” can take on its way to a publisher and, ultimately, an audience, “Along the way I think there’s a lot of different things that have to take place to make sure it’s seen by humans.”

Gaining a better understanding of how the amount money invested with various publishers and platforms actually performs will help Unilever determine which ones are most valuable. “And it allows us to prioritize our dollars,” says Master.

“We spend a dollar and a host of things have to take place to understand how that dollar’s being spent. If we could do it much more efficiently and effectively, we could understand much quicker what’s working and what’s not.”

As it stands, it’s not uncommon to be waiting “waiting weeks or months to understand what was spent, whether it was seen. In a potential blockchain solution, we could do it in a matter of hours or days and the efficiency of our spend becomes that much better.”

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

“Accountability in marketing to me means growth. Ultimately, I think marketing are the growth architects of the business. Every thing we do should inspire, lead and shape towards that growth vision,” Wakely adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Being a self-described “evidence-based marketer,” the company has made it “a bit of a life mission to identify what are the key levers of growth at Mars,” says Wakely, who expects her marketing teams to be “enterprise-wide leaders and to really influence the growth agenda at the board.”

Having consulted with Wharton and other institutions, Mars did a deep dive on what makes some 50 global product categories grow, along with the brands within them, according to Wakely, who spent several years at Procter & Gamble before joining Mars in 2001.

“And from that we’ve tried to distill a very clear philosophy of growth, which of course advertising plays a big part in, but it’s certainly not the only lever for growth,” Wakely explains.

The company codified its resulting “Laws of Growth” philosophy into an operating model that identifies “all the key levers we think that grow categories, that grow our brands, and our whole business now cross-functionally is geared toward driving into that operating model for growth.”

Asked about established brands versus startups, Wakely dismisses provocative headlines proclaiming, among other things, the death of big brands or the demise of mass advertising.

“The question we asked ourselves as an evidence-based marketing company is what is real, changing dynamics in the marketplace that we need to address and what is hashtag fake news,” she says.

Having analyzed its 20 top markets and 35 categories, Mars found on average that about 50% of category growth is being driven still by big-scale brands and the other 50% by small, more disruptive players.

“That is a dynamic we need to respond to. But what I would say is that big brands are certainly not dead. There are big brands that are winning and there are big brands that are losing.

“To win, we really have to harness what we know drives growth. Mass penetration, mass reach, mass distribution. But we also have to be very agile and innovative to respond to the new digital age.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

“We have GRP’s, we have declining linear audiences around 18-34 and we have the unreachables that are on non- ad-supported platforms or non-measured platforms,” says Fiona Carter, Chief Brand Officer, AT&T Communications. “So what are we going to do about that? How are we going to move to an all-screen measurement that works across all of the networks, all of the digital players?”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Carter applauds the coalescence of competitors joining forces to facilitate not only reach and engagement with audiences but also the ability to measure the ROI of those engagements.

“In the end, although we’re very keen on brand building and we’re very keen on measuring how well our brand engages with our audience, we’re also here to sell at the end of the day,” Carter says. “And so trying to get the ROI out of everything we do so that we can prove we’re an investment and not a cost I think is an ultimate goal for a CMO.”

Among the offerings at Cannes, she identifies artificial intelligence from IBM, Quantcast and others as “one of the most fascinating conversations here at Cannes.” She echoes the desire to harness AI to improve marketing while wondering about its impact on advertising creativity. “Can they coexist? Can machine learning actually inspire greater creativity or will it be the end of creativity as we know it.?”

Asked for her thoughts on blockchain technology, Carter says AT&T is “doing a lot on blockchain” while noting that “everyone understands the murkiness of the digital advertising ecosystem. As a marketer, I feel many of us have been asleep at the wheel in understanding when our budget goes in through our agencies how much comes out to meet the publishers and eventually the consumers.”

She praises “these companies that are trying to help us work out the tradeoff of all of these service taxes and tolls and what the value is ultimately and frankly what the real price of operating in the programmatic supply chain should be.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

“We have so much available data in our hands now that we’re able to customize content and have more personal conversations with consumers, as opposed to just kind of talking at them whether or not it’s relevant to them in their daily lives,” Witherspoon adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Addressable advertising is enabling Nissan to find people who are actually in-market for certain vehicle groupings. “The way we look at our vehicles, it’s by segments. So if you’re interested in an SUV, let’s concentrate and focus on providing messages based around an SUV.”

This is much more effective than the traditional broad-brush approach to selling things, according to Witherspoon. “For example, in a global market, we don’t need to be communicating about convertibles in Russia,” she says. “We can find much more relevant and personalized experiences for people that are in market, currently shopping for automotive, as well as by segment. So if they’re shopping for sedans or SUV’s or trucks, we can actually customize those messages.”

Asked for her opinion about the offerings of the various TV networks, Witherspoon would like to see different types of content, having long been locked in to certain levels of ad formats. “It’s not really based on consumer behavior, it’s just based on how they’ve been sold for decades. So if we can have more types of content that are more relevant for consumers and the way that they consume content.”

She notes that it’s common knowledge that people are using multiple screens as they’re watching content. “But even if you’re looking at something that’s on television and you’re actually engaged in a program, maybe a 30-second isn’t the best type of format. Maybe there’s something else we can use to capture peoples’ attention to drive interest and consideration and move on to the next message.”

As for video ad formats with which viewers can interact, Witherspoon sees that space as a work in progress. “Right now, I think the formats for that are not quite up to speed. I think there are a lot of expectations for it, which I don’t think have necessarily been delivered on yet.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

“If you look at the digital media supply chain, as an enterprise, the jury is still out because we still have a LUMAscape which is as complex as Einstein’s theory of relativity,” says ANA CEO Bob Liodice during a break at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“And because of that, marketers don’t understand how to best leverage that supply chain to their advantage.”

As proof of the extent of dysfunction, he says that only 25 to 40 cents on every digital dollar reaches the consumer. “That’s awful. We need to find a way to improve that productivity. We haven’t gotten there yet.”

The ANA has been working with Digital Content Next to support TrustX, a programmatic advertising marketplace designed to help maximize marketers’ digital advertising expenditures. “The early read is that we can get twenty percent improvement, but there’s so much more work to be done,” says Liodice.

This year, the Cannes Festival is an opportunity for the ANA to “globalize” its CMO Masters Circle initiative. It’s composed of 1,000 executives from leading brands across ANA member companies who are trying to help solve what Liodice calls “the universal problem in our industry, which is growth.”

According to Liodice, 50% of Fortune 500 companies have declining after-tax profits while 40% have declining revenues. Masters Circle has crafted a 12-point strategic and is “building machine around that effort.”

He says Cannes recognized that the program is working and “they thought that this was a good opportunity to spread that message on a global basis.” Some 20 to 25 of the leading CMO’s around the world will “discuss the issue, come together and decide what it is that we want to do to attack the growth agenda worldwide.”

Among the ANA’s other ongoing initiatives is providing its members with more of a grounding in various futuristic technologies that have marketing implications, like artificial intelligence, blockchain and virtual reality. To this end, the ANA recently acquired the Data & Marketing Association, which was founded in 2017 as the Direct Marketing Association, as Advertising Age reports.

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean.    Please find more videos from this series here.