Together, the pair have just bowed HealthyDay, an iOS app that shows US users local colds, flus and allergy symptoms as though they were checking the weather.  The project was implemented sister agency Mirum.

For JWT NY executive creative director Eric Weisberg, the project exemplifies how “data and technology … are both changing everything that we do here”, Weisberg tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

HealthyDay uses health information from healthcare professionals, hospitals and the Center for Disease Control, plus adds in user-contributed symptom reports.

“It literally helps you outsmart cold, flu and allergies with the same speed and accuracy that you’re outsmarting weather and traffic in things like (traffic app) Waze,” Weisberg adds. The bonus for Johnson & Johnson? HealthyDay recommends product solutions to sick patients.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“Data’s not new,” Sable tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Thirty years ago, we all grew up using data. Today, we have way more sales data available. The problem is, it is all about what I did 10 minutes ago. The trick is to turn it in to insight that might inform me what I’m about to do 10 minutes from now.”

In a recent LinkedIn post, Sable argued people often mistake applied technology for new technology, saying people tend to see everything that is new as never-before-seen. He says marketers need to know more than basic data about consumers.

“It’s not about Big Data – in our world, it’s about primal data,” Sable tells Beet.TV. “It’s about you as a person – I need to understand who you are and why you’ve done what you did. Otherwise, all I have is a record of what you did 10 seconds ago.

“I need to know more about you. We have more data about your health, we have more data about when you wake up in the morning, when you go to sleep at night, what you buy, where you’re walking. All of this adds to a picture of you as a person that we can use to give you more information.”

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this interview ahead of her visit to the upcoming Cannes Lions festival, SMG CEO Laura Desmond says:

1. “It’s a mobile-first world – it’s undeniable. Anyone who thinks that today’s youth are not mobile-first is wrong.”
2. “We’re starting to see the journeys of media to content to commerce collapse. Companies need to think about … the exposure, the engagement and acquisition all at the same time.”
3. “Using technology and data to fuel creativity and data all at the same time as media. There’s been a lot of hype around how data, data, data, data, data is driving the new media propositions of the future. But data, data, data doesn’t mean we pursue data and not people.”

We interviewed her as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“We are thinking not just data-centric but data-centric as it involves your entire media investment,” ZenithOptimedia activation standards, insights and technology EVP Julian Zilberbrand tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That means taking insights that you learn in one channel and applying them effectively in another.

“The more information you know about (consumers), the better you can communicate and give them messaging that is relevant for them. Data allows us to do that, but the opportunity to do that in a way that scales across multiple media types is an opportunity that’s still evolving.”

Zilberbrand is heading to Cannes Lions hoping the discussion about so-called “programmatic” ad buying, which he says has long happened in the US, is becoming more global.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“It’s exciting to have clients and to have people in our own organizations who normally don’t get to have their particular brand of awesome and creativity recognized,” says Lincoln Bjorkman, Wunderman’s global chief creative officer, in an interview with Beet.TV. “Now suddenly a big bright light is being shined upon excellent pieces of work.”

Work for two very different Wunderman clients — Microsoft and the UK-based newspaper The Sun — is entered in this year’s new “Creative Data Lions” category.

Bjorkman observes that the infusion of data into every aspect of the way that campaigns are designed and delivered has had a tremendous impact on client expectations. Long gone are the days when an agency would deliberate for four to six weeks on a six-month plan. Now clients expect agencies to optimize campaigns in real time based on data insights.

“[Brands] want things immediately,” he says. “They want social listening and they want content and [trends] that are happening to be reflected in their campaigns and their ideas.”

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Mindshare is working with Under Armour on the Apple Watch, rolling out in retail stores this week, as an example. “The Apple Watch is about an experience, not an ad. It’s about location, context, wearables and sensors,” he says, in identifying the value of this new product. The fact that it comes from Apple will also help move the market for wearables, he adds. Initially, Malmad expects health and fitness marketers to be the pioneers in wearables but then predicts the opportunities will expand to other marketers.

At Cannes, Mindshare’s wearable tech unit will be conducting some research on wearables as it aims to learn and to teach clients how to leverage this new platform. Malmad it also is keen on the beacon marketplace as a way to reach consumers. Push notifications to wearable watches about rebates, for instance, are a means to grow the marketplace. Caution is important though. “We don’t want to overindulge,” he says.

We interviewed Malmad as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“We take that information to create customized schedules for advertisers. It’s everything you’ve been able to do on the Internet is available now for the television,” she says. This set-top box level targeting lets marketers target customers that fit particular trends, profiles, demographics and attributes, and they can also pair the Cablevision data with their own or third-party data, she says. ”

We are seeing some national advertisers redirecting some national dollars to regional because the match-back and targeting is so helpful.”

Cablevision harnesses this technology to sell the two minutes of cable network programming time it has access to each hour for local ads to deliver them to specific homes.

Dolan will discuss the topic of addressable advertising at session at Cannes Lions with Irwin Gotlieb, Chairman of GroupM.  The session is being organized by MediaLink.

We interviewed Dolan as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

She explains that creativity will be essential in delivering the right message to the targeted household.   But this renaissance is not happening quite yet.  It will follow the media and money when more cable operators provide addressable technology.  Today, only 42 million homes have that capability, explains Scheppach.

The topic of addressable TV advertising will be the subject of leadership summit at Cannes Lions this month.  It will feature Scheppach, GroupM’s Irwin Gotlieb, Modi Media’s Mike Bologna, AT&T’s Mike Welch and investment banker Terence Kawaja.  The event is being produced by AT&T Adworks in partnership with Beet.TV

We interviewed Scheppach in Chicago as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.  

Addressable works for brands, he says, but the scope of it is limited in the United States with just four operators who provide the technology to deliver the ads. The companies are Cablevision, Comcast, DirecTV and DISH Networks.  They reach 40 million households.  These boxes allow the operators to insert specific ads into the two-minutes of advertising time allotted to them per hour, by the cable networks.

The topic of addressable TV will be discussed at an event at Cannes Lions on June 24 in a program produced by AT&T Adworks in partnership with Beet.TV.  Bologna will be a speaker along with GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb, SMG’s Tracey Scheppach, banker Terry Kawaja and AT&T Adworks President Mike Welch.

We interviewed Bologna s as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.  

Ahead of the iconic festival starting June 21, a record total 40,133 award entries have been submitted. Lions Innovation, which will see data, technology and creativity intersect, has received 226 entries into the Innovation category and 619 entries into Creative Data.

Ad tech companies are shaking up the media sector by promising advertisers more precise control over consumer targeting and trading.

Cannes Lions CEO Philip Thomas, the UK magazine publishing veteran who took the helm at the awards in 2006, tells Beet.TV in this video interview the festival is adapting to reflect changes: “It’s a mirror of the industry. All of the ecosystem is now attending.

“Our festival is just about creativity, so finding a place for ad-tech has been a challenge. But this year we’ve launched our Innovation Festival, which will give them a part to show what they can do. Unilever are bringing 50 startups to a startup academy we’ve got.”

We interviewed Thomas as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.  This interview took place in the London office of SMG.

Maria Mandel Dunsche remembers. The VP of AT&T’s AdWorks division has been working with such platforms since 1999, helping brands try to exploit the emerging channel. But it’s only lately the reality has come to pass.

“I’ve been in this space for 15+ years,” Dunsche tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I’ve been shocked by the lack of activity that has happened over the years. It’s only been the last couple of years where there’s been this substantive uptick of interest.

“Digital is really putting pressure on TV to be better targeted, more accountable, more interactive. We’re going to start seeing really scalable solutions which will allow for much better targeting. The next few years are going to see substantial change in the TV space.”

AdWorks is AT&T’s division helping advertisers take advantage of new-wave TV opportunities, including linear, data-optimized, multi-screen and interactive creatives. TV Blueprint is the name of the product AdWorks uses to crunch viewing data from 15 million set-top boxes in to a media plan that can reach up to 55 million households.

At the Cannes Lions festival on June 24, AT&T AdWorks and Beet.TV are partnering on a leadership summit about advanced TV aboard the AT&T yacht. Participants include GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb; SMG’s Tracey Scheppach; Mike Bologna of Modi Media; Mike Welch and Dunsche of AT&T AdWorks.

We interviewed her as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.

“A lot of the headlines have gotten it incorrect,’ he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The headlines are ‘AOD is dead’. The fact is, AOD in automation is more alive than ever.

“What’s happening is, a lot of those employees are coming out of a centralized structure and being pushed in to the operating agency. That’s great news for the entire business. It means the experts in automation will be the folks talking to the clients, sitting at the table when strategy comes together. That means a more holistic approach to automation.”

Sears says Rubicon will be hosting panels on retail and automating advertising on a dramatic rooftop location during the Cannes Lions festival later this month.

SMG programmatic SVP Mac Delaney previously told Beet.TV that VivaKi, too, is not dead. “VivaKi still lives on. AOD is just one component of VivaKi.” Rubicon recently helped Publicis’ Digitas enable ad orders programmatically.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.  This interview took place in the London office of SMG.

But, whilst the new smartwatch category may whet appetites with the prospect of advertising to audiences’ wrists, the reality will have to be more sensitive, more nuanced, and may be more about input than output.

“Nobody’s really cracked what the Internet Of Things opportunity is. Will we deliver advertising? Probably, but not in the way that we’re currently used to it,” SMG digital managing partner Isabelle Baas tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Will we use it more as a way of saying, ‘I know that you’re here, would you like to see a message on a display in store that’s around you?’? I think that’s probably more the type of advertising that we’ll play in.”

In April, Juniper Research forecast marketer spending on smartwatches will reach $68.6m by 2019. But that estimate could be far too small if you consider the smartwatch and mobile as interlocutors, rather than distinct devices.

“I think there’ll be much more data,” Baas adds. “What do we learn about the different sensors, what can we read from the information that will be made available to the screen? Rather than say, ‘I’m going to try to fit a display ad on the watch’.

We interviewed her as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.  This interview took place in the London office of SMG.

Case in point – programmatic, automated sales of display advertising are now gobbling up a large portion of the digital industry. Now ad tech house MediaMath is working to bring programmatic even to offline media.

MediaMath‘s OPEN global media partnerships VP Sam Cox calls it “media enablement”.

“You’ve seen some of that in programmatic print with (our deal with) Time Inc,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It’s about taking things that are not necessarily programmatically-addressable today and making them programmatic.” As AdAge put it recently: “Machines are now selling some print ads at Time Inc.”

This new-wave ad tech is one of the trends MediaMath will be discussing at this month’s Cannes Lions festival. “It used to be we were going because the media people were there. Now I think the media people are coming because we are there as well, and ad tech is not an afterthought,” Cox adds.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.  This interview took place in the London office of SMG.

Since then, the programme has been kept somewhat under the radar. But the man who runs it now opens up on the rationale and its early progress.

“In the past, we thought we could create everything ourselves,” SMG strategic development director Jim Kite tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “As technology is changing people’s lives, we can’t do it ourselves – we have to make new partnerships.”

NextTECHnow sees SMG representatives build relations with tech startups and groups around the UK, auditing their efforts for “business-ready” state.

“We have people on the ground in the tech hubs, constantly going to the accelerators like BBC Ventures, Collider or Seedcamp, feeding us new startups,” Kite says.

“We take (client) briefs out to TechCity and the other tech hubs (like) Newcastle, Bristol, Hull… connecting brands and technology solutions. We’re a kind of match-maker.”

So far, NextTECHnow has seen SMG bring brands tech from:

• Formissimo, for improving sign-up form conversion rates.

• Seenit, for helping brands use user-generated video in London Underground real-time out-of-home ad campaigns.
• Sopost, which helps turn  brand assets in to socially-giftable items.
• Visor, an augmented reality startup helping auto brands give customers try-before-you-buy experiences.

“We never have a problem with anyone turning up to our meetings, because everyone wants to see all this technology,” Kite adds.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.  This interview took place in the London office of SMG.

“Standards like the RTB spec and the exchanges need to wake up start adding more metadata to these requests to enrich that buy for the brand,” according to Coull product VP Nick Forsberg.

His company analyzes videos to deeply understand the content and context contained within their frames, making that information available as more refined data against which to buy video ads.

“A lot of tech vendors in the world doing post- analysis are still very behind in terms of the moment we need to say, ‘Yes it’s okay to show an ad’.”

Coull of Bristol, England, in April unveiled a software development kit allowing mobile publishers to have access to video advertising.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

Pippa Glucklish, UK co-CEO of SMG, tells Beet.TV the “tension between data and creativity” should be de-fused.

“People should be trying to weave those two things together,” she says in this video interview. “We need to let go of the idea that data is all about efficiency. Data unlocks and informs creativity.”

Glucklish will be looking for just such marriages when she helps judge Cannes Lions awards at the upcoming advertising festival this month.

SMG owner Publicis recently acquired the demand-side advertising platform and data management platform operator RUN to pull some of these functions in-house. Glucklish says agencies and clients are often confused by the number of vendors on the scene: “By buying our own … we’re not dancing to anyone else’s tune.” SMG continues to use other platforms, too, however,

We interviewed Glucklish in the London offices of SMG as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

“We’ve seen … 40% more demand in the UK from Q1 to Q4,” according to video ad tech outfit TubeMogul’s UK MD Nick Reid. “We’ve also seen a 20% increase in CPM prices. Different regions are at different stages of understanding.

“We’re starting to see broadcasters like Channel 4 embrace the concept of automation. They’ve opened up their VOD to to automation – not yet linear but, it is the first iteration of automated trading.”

Reid says different regions around the world are at different stages of understanding when it comes to adopting programmatic automation.

“Programmatic TV won’t be an instant reality in markets like the UK because there are nuances when it comes to broadcast and supply,” he says. “However, broadcasters are starting to embrace the data they have in a way that can enable advertisers to be more specific when it comes to reaching target audiences.”

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

“Our industry in the UK is absolutely split 50/50 at entry level, and by the time you get to the top it’s only 25% [female], so that is a concern,” says Glucklich, the co-CEO at SMG London in this interview with Beet.TV.

Outside of the industry, Glucklich observes that there have been encouraging developments for gender equality of late, like the appointment of Katharine Viner as the first female editor-in-chief of The Guardian. She also notes that the ad industry fares much better in terms of the percentage of women in leadership positions than other sectors like finance and manufacturing. Her own boss, SMG’s global CEO Laura Desmond, is a woman.

But there’s still one glass ceiling in the ad industry that women haven’t broken through.

“I do hope that in my time in the industry we will see a female CEO of one of the major networks,” she says.

Later this month, Glucklich will represent the UK as a judge on the Media Jury at the Cannes Lions Festival.

We interviewed her as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

He says that more than half of the company’s revenue is now coming from outside the U.S.

We spoke with the London-based executive about global trends and his expectations for the conversations at the upcoming Cannes Lions Festival.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

It’s a charity ride in which Parker is one of 11 competitors. “We’re hoping to raise over £100,000. We’re racing our friends and colleagues at GroupM,” he says.

When he gets to the Cannes Lions advertising festival, creativity will be the watchword on the industry’s lips. Nothing new there – Cannes has been discussing creativity every year since its inception. But achieving that is changing over time, Parker says.

“Creativity now comes from collaboration … different people from different departments in different businesses coming together to try and bring simplicity,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We have a couple of media owner partners who work on this floor (of our office). We’ve also got clients on this floor. We are in a world where you have to be more naturally open and collaborative. One or two people just do not own the answer. You have to remove all the walls. Cannes is a great celebration of that.”

We interviewed Parker as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

“Technology has really focused on the area of targeting and direct response and unfortunately has left the creative industry behind,” Marco Bertozzi, global clients president at Publicis’ VivaKi unit, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“On both sides, we need to work harder at how we incorporate creative in to everything we do programmatically. We’re great at targeting thousands of different people, segments – we’re not very good at bringing the requisite creative to mirror that.”

The difference between the two sectors – creatives and technologists – can be summed up with some toys. Bertozzi says the ad industry likes playing with a fully-finished Lego spaceship, whilst programmatic practitioners just want some Lego bricks to build new things with.

The fusion of the two disciplines will be on minds at the upcoming Cannes Lions festival, which includes an innovation award and will be much attended by ad tech execs, as well as creative industry stalwarts.

We interviewed Bertozzi as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

Marketing the missing services using video is something video ad tech firm Videology is helping one UK telco do, according to UK MD Rich Astley, who would not name the client.

“Video tends to be used as a branding and attitudinal medium,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “In this instance, we’re seeing great results, from an ROI perspective, in terms of driving product sales.”

Think about serving up an ad for an IPTV subscription to a customer who is currently only taking phone and broadband, for example.

That is the kind of creative and innovative thinking Astley says typifies the relatively small UK market and which he says will be on display at the upcoming Cannes Lions festival.

We interviewed Astley as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

MediaLink will showcase a number of adtech companies in its large suite at the Carlton in a program called the Daily Dose, a daily seminar held at the Carlton.

This video is part of a series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.

“We have jumped over a significant hill, and it is a time where you are seeing publishers legitimately producing quality content while weaving in addressable capabilities and making programmatic and audience-driven buying possible,” Delaney says.

The conversations that began at the upfronts will carry on to Cannes as companies like Netflix and Hulu become legitimate competitors to broadcast and cable. “They were borne from digital and future proofed in their foundation so they are building something that can be addressable.”

We interviewed Delaney as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.