Amid changing times and budgets for mainstay agency attendees and the arrival of a new kind of delegate, the festival is changing its own shape.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, festival chairman Philip Thomas highlights how Cannes Lions is getting both smaller and bigger at the same time.

Shorter festival

“Going from eight days to five days, we did that to try to make it more concentrated, so that people didn’t have to be away for so long. More or less, we managed that.”

Fewer Lions

“We’ve got rid of a lot of lions, rid of a lot of sub-categories, and that has meant that our entry numbers have gone down a lot, which is what the industry was asking us to do.”

Consultancies pitch up

“It’s a little bit of a misnomer to say that the consultancies are taken over. They’re taking over some very visible physical spaces, and that’s obviously their strategy. But, what I think is more interesting this year is the slightly changing mix of entrance into the Lions.”

Entries are up

“We’ve got entrants from clients increasing by 84%, that was on a 65% increase last year, we’ve got entries from consultancies up 30%, entries from media owners up 56%, and these are from low bases. The agencies still absolutely dominate the entries, but it’s just a subtle shift that we might see accelerate in the future.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“There’s that old movie expression don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” Rosen adds.

Yet so far, that’s exactly what the TV industry has done Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales, explains in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization.

Digital and social companies in recent years “have really gone after, data, technology, advanced advertising and measurement in ways that the TV industry really never either had the capability to do or never felt the need to do,” says Rosen.

So he believes “there’s some catching up to do.”

Rosen and Swartz were among the featured speakers at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, which was held at Meredith Corporation’s Luce Auditorium in Manhattan.

With assets like NBCU’s Audience Studio, the company has tried to level the playing field by bringing richer data and advanced audience targeting across all media forms—from national linear to addressable, digital, display and video.

“And now we want to go to that sort of sweet spot for the social and digital companies, which is their promise of delivering business outcomes,” Rosen says.

Like most of his peers, he sees that promise materialize as digital and social companies often taking credit “for something that may be more about correlation than causation, or sometimes just being in the right place at the right time.

“We feel that television has not gotten the credit it deserves for driving so many upper mid, lower funnel actions and behaviors on consumers. If we can get better at demonstrating that, we can get the credit we deserve,” Rosen says.

Asked by Swartz how traditional media mix modeling comes into play, Rosen’s view is that they’re probalistic models, only as good as the data that gets fed into them.

“I think part of the problem that we’ve seen is the data could be better, could be more deterministic.”

To advance its own cause, NBCU can point to advertiser case studies in which a variety of outcomes were measured. They include brand health metrics lift, sales life, driving website traffic, and incremental return on advertising spend.

“We’re seeing great results, we’re sharing it, we’re learning form it and I think that’s going to be a huge model for us going forward.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“I love what advertising affords and supports content and storytelling,” but the current “incarnation of the market” has just been between publishers and advertisers and forgetting the viewer, Marchese says.

“Joe as a person who sells advertising is bullish on it, as a content creator we want it, to support it. But as a viewer, the value isn’t there,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, which took place at the Luce Auditorium at Meredith Corporation in Manhattan.

Marchese, who is President, Advertising Revenue at Fox Network Group, sees ROI on TV ad spending as a two-step process.

“The opportunity to get someone’s attention, that’s step one of an ROI process. Step two is what are showing them and what are you telling them,” he says in response to a question from interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization.

It’s the responsibility of media companies to offer marketers “the best opportunity to talk to people, to have their attention,” Marchese says. “And so we build products that optimize for the best opportunity to talk to people.”

For the second part, “we have to be collaborative” or else the viewer loses out.

As the founder of engagement-advertising pioneer true[X], which he sold to 21st Century Fox, Marchese has a rather simple view of the world. “There’s twenty four hours in a day, people spend only so much time with media, people spend only so much time with ad-supported media, people spend only so much of that time with advertising actually paying attention to messages,” he explains. “Your greatest share of that possible, in whatever format, it could be out-of-home could be television, could be digital, your greatest share of people who you want to spend time with your message, that’s what you’re optimizing for as a marketer.”

He’s not fixated on marketing funnel parameters.

“I don’t care what part of the funnel you’re in. If you’re just learning about a product or you’re ready to buy a product, everything comes down to did you get someone’s attention.”

Asked by Swartz for a 36-month prognosis for the TV industry, Marchese narrows things down to two types of content: on-demand and live. The first will “require very different ad formats and systems” including frequency reduction and higher impact “because in the on-demand environment, people just learn that this is the way they should watch.”

Live programming “will hold advertising in a much better way but we need to be smarter about what we do with it.”

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month, Marchese will participate in a leadership forum on the Future of Television presented by FreeWheel, in partnership with Beet.TV, at 10 a.m. on Tuesday June 19. Check back to this post for the agenda and registration.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

There is a parallel here to the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. While there is a category for Brand Experience & Activation, there isn’t one for “branded” entertainment, notes Ari Halper, one of 20 judges in this year’s Entertainment category.

So Entertainment entries have to go “above and beyond what we typically considered to be entertaining content that was on behalf of a brand and rise to the level of entertainment at large,” the CCO of FCB New York explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We need to create experiences for people and content for people that rises to that level, that caliber of entertainment to the point where they want to engage with it regardless of knowing that it may be on behalf of a brand.”

Halper cites as an example work FCB is doing “with the top people at Xbox” to develop a video game for teenagers that “needs to be at the level of other video games that they play out there.” The goal is to make the game experience itself “organic to the message that we’re trying to get across to the teens.”

The same concept applies to long-form content and short films, “where the brand is while linked appropriately to what you’re bringing forth to the consumer is not so overtly mentioned to the point where the consumer repels from it because they feel like they’re being advertised to.”

Halper invokes FCB Global CCO Susan Credle’s 2017 Tweet about storytelling being over “when the world is perfect” in discussing the short attention span of consumers and their ability to “skip everything or fast forward through it on their DVR’s.” Thus the onus on great storytelling has never been higher “because it’s more pervasive than ever.”

Halper also believes “we need to tell fresher stories in new mediums.” Although lots of people equate film with television, the overwhelming majority of video content is online video. “Whether or not you’re telling a narrative in that space or whether you’re telling a narrative on the television doesn’t necessarily really matter.”

Like others in the advertising industry, Halper notes the limitations of creative versioning to achieve one-to-one messaging—one being manpower. This is where data and automation come into play.

“Knowing that there’s only twenty four hours in the day, it’s incredibly important to be able to tap into data to mine for this ability to reach people on this more customized basis, to have this versioning and make things more programmatic so that it’s automated.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

Amid the TV Upfront negotiating season, consumers are embracing streaming video options on big and small screens. As a result, “technology is definitely moving the conversation from addressable television, which we’re still talking about, to OTT,” Cohen, who is Magna’s North American President, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We see it as the big, beautiful images that linear television delivers with the added benefit of interactivity, the ability to kind of lean in.”

In addition, Nielsen is measuring OTT viewing “very similarly to the way we can look at Nielsen across linear television, so it is an apples-to-apples comparison.”

When advertising attribution metrics are added to the mix, “we are very, very pleased about the way that measurement has gone in the addressable space.”

Advertisers in many categories are taking advantage of OTT avails, but three in particular have done so more than others, according to Cohen. Those are automotive—one example being interactive ads that let viewers “see and build a car on a big, beautiful screen” before going to a showroom for a test drive, plus consumer packaged-goods and travel. “It’s across the board,” says Cohen.

He believes OTT today offers “a much more palatable kind of ad to edit ratio if you will for consumers than linear television. Far fewer ads, far fewer pods. You actually get the content that you’re looking to consume without a lot of ad interruptions.”

Cohen cites effectiveness studies that Magna has done and notes that some of OTT’s attributes have not been lost on traditional TV providers, some of whom are “taking a page out of that playbook to reduce the ad loads on their platforms as well.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

Fast forward to the present and Cohen, like other advertising and media professionals, is glad to see a slimmer, more focused Festival, the President of North America for Magna Global explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“As we all know, Cannes has morphed quite a bit over the past 12 or 15 years. It’s become much more about technology and data and the creativity using that. I’m excited this year that Cannes has kind of contracted a little bit.”

Likewise, Cohen and his industry peers “are getting much more concentrated with the number of people that we’re bringing to Cannes” along with “lots of our clients.”

He expects to see a refocus what Cannes is all about, “which is the most creative work in the business across media, data and tech and messaging and storytelling.”

With a shorter schedule of activities this year, Cannes should be more suited to substantive conversations. “Everyone is in the same place for a limited period of time, so we get a lot accomplished both with clients and with partners,” Cohen says.

Asked about the progress of creative versioning of advertising messaging, Cohen notes that IPG Mediabrands has “an entire practice” focused on dynamic creative in the form of its Addressable Content Engine (ACE).

“We’ve spent a lot of time focused on the media side of the equation and not a ton historically on the messaging or the creative side of the equation.”

ACE is designed to match message relevancy with media reach. Plans and content are tailored to the right person, in the right place, the right moment and in the right voice.

“We now have the tools and the technology to actually think about templative creative, to think about versioning in a much more efficient and effective way,” Cohen says. “That is an area of innovation that we’re excited about over the next couple of years.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“We’ve sort of gotten away from the core essence of the reason for Cannes, which is creativity. It’s a creativity festival. It’s about celebrating the work.”

Ray welcomes an anticipated move back to brand storytelling, complemented by data and technology that when combined make the end result much more compelling and engaging.

“I’m really looking forward to how can we think much more about the technology or the data or the capabilities to allow us to create more personalized, connected storytelling that then puts the relationship that consumers have with brands much more on their terms,” he says.

Ray will be a featured speaker on June 6 at Beet Retreat in the City. Titled Television Advances as Consumers Choose: The Beet.TV Town Hall, the event will bring together leaders in the advertising and media industry for a full day of conversation and interaction.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“We do talk as an industry a lot about what it means to have diverse kinds of thinking in our organizations. But the actual action of bringing people with diverse thought to the table is really what I’m hoping comes to light,” Rossi says in this interview with Beet.TV.

On Thursday June 21, Rossi will take to the Palais 1 dais along with two beneficiaries of Creative Spirit so they can explain how they were recruited and hired into positions that leverage their oft-hidden talents, and how they approach briefs and challenges in a different way. The session is titled How Different Can Change The World.

“There are about 10 million people in the States alone who have an intellectual and developmental disability who are in the hiring age frame. And those people by and large are not employed,” says Rossi, placing the jobless rate at 85%. “We know that neuro-diverse thinkers have the opportunity to help companies grow their return three and four fold.”

Even though progress has been made in diversifying the makeup of the advertising and marketing world, the major exception has been people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, according to Rossi.

“So it’s been a passion point for me to reality think about neuro diversity, not just diversity as a topic, because we’re in the thinking business. When I look at folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities, they really do bring a different strain of creativity to our business.”

On the heels of a pilot program in Australia, Creative Spirit was unveiled in the U.S. at Advertising Week 2017. On stage were young adults in a number of disciplines—from coders to art directors, writers to receptionists—who had not had the opportunity interview for advertising or marketing jobs.

“From that moment, we received a groundswell from both clients and agencies around how I can bring that creative thinking to my organization,” Rossi says. “I set out with some partners on a mission to really bring that kind of neuro diversity to the marketing and advertising business, which is now expanding beyond to technology and other organizations.”

She’s hoping the conversation in Cannes is eclipsed by action.

“We see more sponsors and more organizations signing on and I also hope that our candidates have an opportunity to have the main stage for once.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“We absolutely are hearing audiences come up in the Upfront. From our perspective, it’s really been ten years or so since there’s been a significant change in the way that linear inventory is sold,” Smith says in this interview with Beet.TV.

His interpretation of the discourse about audience targeting “is that we’re at a point where there’s significant momentum for the next evolution of that. Most publishers are offering an audience component of that this year. When we go out with our linear sales organization and talk to marketers, that’s what they’re looking for us to do as well.”

With its deep technology relationships with premium video publishers, FreeWheel provides incremental reach for advertisers and monetization opportunities that avoid sales channel conflict with publishers’ direct sales teams.

“We really look at ourselves as a monetization service that the most premium linear and digital publishers can tap into to help complement what their sales organizations are doing in the market,” Smith explains.

As a part of the extended Comcast family, FreeWheel is unique in its involvement with both digital and linear video. It works with all manner of advertisers on the buy-side.

“Being part of Comcast, at one end of the spectrum we’ve got the Comcast Spotlight local sales organization plugged into our market. So they’re working with advertisers as small as local pizza shops or local car dealerships to be able to access premium inventory through our market.”

Then there is the FreeWheel national sales team. While it’s typically worked with advertisers seeking more efficient reach, “more and more we’ve been working with the major agencies and major advertisers to take advantage of some of our unique capabilities, including what we can do with audience leveraging some of the Comcast data,” Smith says.

Asked to survey the landscape going forward and what changes he envisions, Smith cites uniform measurement and better calculation of ROI.

“There’s still challenges in getting measurement in a unified way across all screens where someone would watch premium video. There’s still specific screens like OTT, connected TV where there are no industry standard measurement solutions.”

ROI starts with understanding who an advertiser is trying to reach and whether they are the appropriate target. “And then we can continue down funnel and look at how we can connect TV back to attribution” in line with KPI’s.

Since FreeWheel is “relatively new to the buy-side conversation,” at Cannes Smith is looking forward to meeting with “the world’s major marketers and be able to tell our story,” in addition to forming additional partnerships to “help solve some of these major industry challenges, like measurement and attribution in television.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

This year at Cannes, the Palais is exactly where Warren will be. “Like, I literally willed it into existence. It is not a beachside conversation. It needs to be the big stage,” Omnicom’s SVP, Chief Diversity Officer says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I’m super excited.”

Warren will join Edward Enninful, Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue, HP Chief Marketing Officer Antonio Lucio and British actress Thandie Newton in a 45-minute session titled Diversity—a Values Issue and Business Imperative—Requires Bold Action, hosted by Omnicom and HP.

A description of the session reads: “In order for the creative industry to remain shapers of culture and society, it’s critical that we move beyond theory and talk by taking bold action. Research proves diversity initiatives are more effective if they have support at the top. It also requires measurement to hold ourselves accountable.”

Beyond the metrics and statistics to be featured at Cannes, Warren has a fairly simple rationale for determining the value of hiring diversity. “What I say is, ‘What’s the value of sameness?’ That’s how I respond back. Because no one can answer that. No one wants to and has an answer for what sameness has done for your business.”

In a “constricting industry” such as advertising, “there’s other companies that are providing more creative solutions because they’re infusing equity and diversity in the hiring process and bringing in great minds and doing it in a way that’s equitable. That’s how you answer that.”

She has company in her viewpoint in the person of Merck CEO Ken Frazier, who is often asked about the business case for diversity. “His response is, make the business case of sameness for me. It always gets people because you really find it hard and you struggle to think of the things that come out of being the same.

“If you have the same ideas, the same people, the same thought process, your company can do well but it won’t evolve,” Warren says.

While mentoring has always been important to Warren, she considers herself a coach. And she expects those who she is coaching to be coaching her. “So I stay on top of things because I’m not just providing responsibilities and answers to things that I’ve overcome so they can jump over the land mines that maybe I stepped on in my career.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“Today we are on most of the connected TV platforms and in the next month or two we will be pretty much virtually everywhere,” Midha adds in this interview with Beet.TV, dubbing the connected living room “a super rich environment.”

Prior to taking over daily operations and long-term strategy at true[X], Midha spent five years at Disney ABC Television Group, where she rose to SVP, Digital Ad Sales & Operations, as ADWEEK reports. She also spent a decade at various Viacom properties.

Midha will be a keynote speaker at Beet Retreat in the City, scheduled for June 6 in Manhattan.

The company’s core product, its engagement ad format, is now used “across pretty much every broadcast and major cable network.” In addition, “We also work with some of the MVPD’s on their digital inventory and we work with some select gaming partners,” says Midha.

Since its founding in 2007, light years before anyone thought of living rooms as being “connected,” true[X] had a simple proposition: give consumers some say in which television ads they’d prefer to endure and, potentially, interact with. In its most basic form, the true[X] offering in full-episode video content gives viewers a “choice card” with the options of interacting with a 30-second ad or just viewing a “regular” ad experience

“And what we see time and time again is that most people would choose to interact than have the regular ad experience,” says Pooja. “What’s interesting is that the first time they take it, they adopt it, the rate is nearly sixty percent. The second time they see it, it goes up and it keeps going up.”

Full-screen interactivity provides for a broad pallet of advertiser and publisher storytelling and e-commerce. “There’s a lot of potential to really drive very different advertiser KPI’s.”

Advertisers are not charged if viewers leave the interactive format before its full 30-second run and default to the regular ad experience. “The idea is that at any time, we are guaranteeing that you will have someone’s full attention for thirty seconds, that they will interact at least once, and that you will be in a high-quality, full-screen environment,” says Pooja.

While the true[X] studio team last year eclipsed the 10,000 interactive ad mark, the company typically works with advertisers’ existing creative assets. Pooja says there’s lots of potential beyond simple engagement—particularly in the living room.

“We’re actually trying to see what else we can do in that environment and we’re standing up an entire CT innovation lab around that concept,” she says.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“I think we’re going to ultimately end up negotiating live TV, because those are the moments that have the greatest attention. They’re wrapped around cultural moments that we want to associate brands with,” Ray explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

He bases his “hypothesis” on the nature of non-live programming “Most of that content is very low rated, it’s time shifted in terms of how people are viewing it, and therefore our ability to manage reach, frequency, audience delivery in a programmatic or audience targeted way is absolutely the future.”

Ray will be a featured speaker on June 6 at Beet Retreat in the City. Titled Television Advances as Consumers Choose: The Beet.TV Town Hall, the event will bring together leaders in the advertising and media industry for a full day of conversation and interaction.

Another trend he sees continuing unabated is the desire for marketers to “own the ID” of their customers using personally identifiable information, not data proxies. He cites Amazon as an example, noting that every single user has a registered ID, “you have your address that you’ve given, there’s a credit card number, there’s no way that you can transact without them having some level of personally identifiable information.

“And so I think every single client is trying to move towards owning and identifying to the best that they can their customers.”

Dentsu is one of the youngest of the major agency networks and its initial holding, media agency Carat, was known for its strength in consumer-related analytics when it came to the U.S. from Europe in the late 1990’s and began to acquire media-buying services. Dentsu’s 2016 acquisition of a majority stake in marketing agency Merkle had the effect of “transforming the organization around people,” says Ray. “What Merkle brings is 30 years of dealing with consumer and understanding consumers through that data.”

Combined with Dentsu’s existing data and analytics assets, Merkle has helped to create “an incredibly robust data cloud that allows us to truly understand people. And critically, doing that based on PII data, name address email address. Not a projection of someone or a proxy of someone based on a cookie ID or device ID or panel ID but actually an authenticated deterministic ID.”

A couple of years ago, Dentsu agencies recommended to clients that a small percentage of cable upfront dollars should be put aside for programmatic linear television. “For those clients that did that, they actually learned about what networks were working or weren’t working, and that was leveraged for the next TV Upfronts,” Ray recalls.

“For other clients, they saw such success with that they doubled their investment. Maybe ten percent to twenty percent programmatic. And this year, we’ve got a handful of clients that have almost a third of their cable dollars that are being spent in some form of addressable or audience targeted television. I think that’s going to continue.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Balis talks about why targeting is more of an immediate concern than achieving true one-to-one TV addressability at scale, and how EY counsels its publisher clients on the various ways they can better control and monetize their businesses.

“Television still very much matters,” is how Balis prefaces her comments about advanced targeting, before questioning its oft-malleable definition. “If we’re talking about truly addressable, having a full, two-way footprint, we’re a ways off from that being at scale. So I tend not to think as much about advanced advertising,” Balis says.

She’d rather concentrate on the confluence of digital advertising media and the growing number of TV delivery options, whether it’s video on demand or over-the-top streams. “There’s no question that we’re moving to more advanced television advertising. But the crux of what’s happening right now is much more about targeting,” particularly audience segmentation.

“And right now, what you see is essentially every network or network group has their own approach to how they bring more optimization into the mix.”

Today’s world is one in which an industry that for years was based on programs and ratings is colliding with one centered on viewable impressions “in a very different kind of content.” However, “there’s no comparability of the currency.”

This why media buyers and sellers, people “who would traditionally look at each other as competitors,” should come together around new standards and ways to transact. “Because but for an industry solution, it’s very hard to see how we will really get to scale.”

The beneficiaries will be marketers that want to be able to use the same audience segment “across different places, compete viably in the marketplace and really understand the value that they’re getting out of advertising. That’s the pressure around where television advertising is going today.”

For publishers working to monetize their content, Balis believes the biggest pressure is “first and foremost to market themselves differently” while taking control of how they acquire customers and achieve distribution.

Adopting a more direct-to-consumer approach is in contrast to publishers’ “dependencies on many of the largest players in that landscape.”

Balis describes digital display ads as being at “a very mature, plateauing perhaps declining, side of the marketplace” given alternative formats—video being at the top of the list.

“With that being the case, we really have to look at subscriptions, the value exchange that we have with consumers, how we look at compensating transparently for the use of data and what that value exchange that enables consumers to want to provide their data.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

So what’s on the “other” side?

“Does it work? Is it valuable? What are the ramifications for it in a rapidly changing legal environment?” Hanlon adds in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he also talks about the limits of automating creativity and observes how competitive walls are rising in digital but falling in television.

[m]PLATFORM is GroupM’s means of spreading a wealth of data and technology prowess—and how to most effectively harness the two—across the multitude of WPP entities, many of them advertising or media agencies.

Hanlon says reverberations from the EU’s recently activated GDPR, which represents a tightening of data privacy restrictions, are “starting to find its way into the United States as well and forcing clients, particularly large global clients that we work with, to sort of really rethink how they think about their consumers and what is valuable to them from a data and technology perspective.”

The reasons are clear: it can cost more to properly manage and safeguard customers’ data under GDPR, which while quite voluminous in verbiage isn’t crystal clear to marketers at this point with regard to what definitively constitutes non-compliance and the specific financial consequences.

Nonetheless, when having a serious conversation about the realistic value of customer data, “I think what’s interesting is that the answer has been no as much as it’s been yes,” says Hanlon. He stresses that “no” isn’t inherently bad because getting a “concrete answer” carries its own value.

“But what it means is that the opportunity for evolution, for change, is a lot more prominent than I think we would have necessarily anticipated from the conversations that we were having with clients a year or even two years ago.”

When Hanlon addresses the convergence of traditional TV and digital video, he characterizes the conversation around platforms like Google and Facebook as “one that’s slightly negative or closing. All you hear about is the sort of closing down of access and the application of data at an individual level that can happen as policies start to change, as the walls start to get higher.”

By way of contrast, “On the TV side of the world it’s the opposite. We’re seeing an acceleration into a world of addressability and an ability to think about things from a cross-channel perspective.”

As for limits on hyper personalization of ad messaging, Hanlon questions the idea that “we can fully automate creativity and that we can create an individual experience for every single person that we ultimately see within the ecosystem.”

Such an approach ignores “very key reasons how we build brands and how we build resonance and salience. It may make a lot of sense within a retargeting context, but when it comes to these larger TV and video-based executions, we’re never going to be able to get to a space, I think, nor do we want to, where we personalize it for every single person.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“What’s very clear to me is there is an alignment across the globe in terms of how broadcasters and operators see the world,” says James Rooke, GM, FreeWheel Publishers. “They all understand that there’s an incredible threat to their business coming from those looking to take TV dollars.”

From a software standpoint, broadcasters and operators understand that they need to “accelerate against the ability to offer the brand marketer the ability to buy quality inventory regardless of what screen it is, against any audience or dataset that they choose, and make that as simple as possible,” Rooke adds in this interview with Beet.TV. 

“And then be able to prove attribution against that.”

Rooke works with sell-side clients and, regardless of language or nationality, there’s a common refrain.

“Whether we’re talking to a client in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy or the U.S., if you put them all in the room, there’s a very aligned point of view about what needs to happen for the premium end of the ecosystem to be able to thrive.”

While a core theme during the TV Upfront negotiating season continues to swing toward premium video and advanced audience targeting, underpinning that theme is an industry pulling together out of necessity to work more as a platform, according to Rooke.

“Television, if it can work in a more interoperable way, has an incredible opportunity to continue to shift dollars back into the ecosystem.”

 Rooke considers the audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom—and most recently NBCUniversal and Univision—to be “a good example of large media companies looking at how they can create scale for brand marketers to buy against in more simple, more automated ways against audiences. I think that’s just the start.”

 FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, sees its role as facilitating interoperability to help make “TV As A Platform” a reality. “Which is a bold and hard thing to achieve, but ultimately I think it’s a shared vision,” Rooke says.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview series of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The creative agencies are fantastic at telling stories. But stories just being told isn’t enough anymore,” Rozen adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “We see our job as story builders as much as the story telling still needs to happen.”

Creative versioning has long been based on campaign performance, as in “We’re seeing the red ad perform better than the blue ad. But what we’re also able now to overlay is audience understanding.”

The combination of data and technology facilitates amending creative “to be more bespoke to the situation that the consumer is in,” says Rozen. “Not just is red better than blue, but this call to action is going to resonate better because we believe that we’ve seen certain actions or indicators prior that allows us to optimize.”

Asked whether creative versioning is more suited to niche or broad targeting, Rozen says, “It can scale fantastically because a lot of what we’re talking about is technology driving this.”

With the role of creative agencies being to create assets, as those assets are developed technology “allows us to deliver this type of thinking at scale. More and more of our clients are looking for this type of advantageous way of connecting with consumers.”

Rozen doesn’t believe in a world of end-to-end, one-to-one personalized ad messaging. To him, it’s less about the medium and more about the format and using tools and technologies to drive more personalized stories.

“We don’t have to just serve one ad to all people. We can now get more granular. I don’t think all brands at all times need to be one to one. I think that has its place and it’s not for everyone.”

Alternatives include “one to many or one to fewer or one to some. It doesn’t always have to be one to one, but it also doesn’t have to be one to all, either.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“We do believe that the horse has left the stable in terms of us looking at audience buying on linear.”

While it’s been doing linear optimization for ad targeting, Disney has begun to see “what addressable looks and feels like for our audiences,” says Somaya. This year and next,  the company will work with addressable partners to target ads at the household level.

ESPN offers a product that “essentially takes what we’re doing on OTT, which is completely measurable from a digital perspective, and then retargets those messages across our digital footprint,” Somaya explains. An ESPN viewer who is known to have seen a 30-second spot on OTT can be sequentially targeted with digital ads across the ESPN digital portfolio.

“As part of our integration more broadly with the Walt Disney Company we’re now looking to see how we do that broadly across all of the Walt Disney Company properties,” he says.

With the retargeting offering, ESPN can take a 30-second brand spot and “connect it to a series of digital notions that can actually do something as complex as sequential advertising to a single viewer. We can take a thirty-second spot and do a series of sixes against that same audience member across our digital networks.”

Based on ESPN’s own research and that of partners it’s worked with, the retargeting “has a really positive impact.”

Another ESPN offering, called “reactive TV,” enables advertisers to build campaigns around major sports milestones that are known in advance—for example, a player’s home run tally.

Having recently reorganized its sales, technology, direct-to-consumer and international businesses under Kevin Mayer, who had been Chief Strategy Officer at Disney, “we are now open for business as a one-stop shop,” says Somaya in reference to the upcoming Cannes event. “A lot of the conversations we will be having in Cannes will be around that notion.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

So says Tim Castree, global CEO of the Wavemaker agency formed from the merger of Group M’s MEC and Maxus.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Castree says traditional TV viewing is declining – but, by means of consolation, many viewers are migrating to TV and video platforms with addressable advertising capabilities.

There, an old style of targeting meets a new one. Probabilistic targeting, in which a plan places an ad somewhere a planner believes a viewer is more likely to be in the intended group, is meeting deterministic marketing, in which the identity and intentions of a viewer can – thanks to data points – actually be known.

“We’ve been buying audiences since the 1980s,” he says. “We’ve been optimising demos into audiences. That’s what all of our optimization systems have been built on for 20 or 30 years. So in many ways, it’s not at all new.”

“What we’re doing now is really marrying that with more deterministic or addressable channels so we can know you’re absolutely in the market for a Mercedes versus probably in the market for a Mercedes.

“So it’s really the marriage of deterministic targeting with more probabilistic optimization, bringing that together in video, which is really what’s happening of the landscape of video at the moment.”

Castree says the ability to use both types of approach on the same screen will lead to new creative opportunities.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

According to Midha, upon its founding in 2007 true[X] “never meant to build a measurement system” as it sought to give TV viewers a choice of commercial options with interactive ads priced on cost per engagement. Rather, it was built out of necessity, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“What I think is important is that this was something that when you explained it to an advertiser or an agency and you said this is what you can accomplish in this environment, people lean in they think this is great,” says Midha. “And then you get down to talking about pricing, because again you have to make sure you account for what you’re missing, and it becomes a bit harder.”

The company considered simple commercial delivery—measured with the help of entities like White Ops and Moat—to be “our baseline metric.” The answer was to be able to prove impact. “There was no solution that existed in the marketplace that could measure impact of the ad,” Midha adds.

That’s why true[X] developed Uplift to measure brand benefits at scale, across platforms, in real time and in a consistent manner. “Today we run Uplift across every single true[X] campaign on every platform that we exist on and we’re measuring brand lift, which we think is such a fundamentally human metric and actually the metric that matters most.”

At the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Pooja will explain how true[X] plans to bring engagement ads into live digital streams and how the company plans to expand measurement options.

Beet Retreat in the City will be held a the Luce Auditorium at Meredith Corporation, 225 Liberty Street.  Participants include:

Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services, GroupM

Laura Desmond, CEO, Eagle Vista Partners

Kristin Dolan, CEO, 605

Christopher Geraci, President, National Video Investment at Omnicom Media Group

Walt Horstman, SVP Advanced TV, TiVo

David Kline, President, Spectrum Reach, Executive Vice President, Charter

Allison Metcalfe, GM LiveTV, LiveRamp

Rob Norman, Advisor

Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing iX at IBM

Nancy Reyes, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY

Lyle Schwartz, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY

Doug Ray, Chairman, Dentsu Aegis Media

Mike Rosen, EVP, Advanced Advertising and Platform Sales at NBCUniversal

Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp.

Vikram Somaya, SVP, Global Data Officer & Ad Platforms, ESPN

Ben Tatta, President, 605

Jamie West, Deputy MD, Sky Media UK & Group Director of Advanced Advertising Sky PLC

Ben Winkler, Chief Investment Officer, OMD

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

For Ari Weiss, CCO, North America, DDB, the difference is all in the brain. Specifically, the Cortex. That’s the name for the collaborative unit inside DDB’s We Are Unlimited, the agency dedicated to serving McDonald’s.

Cortex, which launched two years ago, has been described as “a data-informed view of customers by gathering insights in real-time from experts across digital, social, retail, behavior”.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Weiss, from Omnicom’s DDB, says the unit has its origins a couple of decades ago.

“When I first started, we had what we called cultural anthropologists going out into the marketplace,” he says. “They would spend anywhere from three months to a year in a specific market, researching a specific business and how the world reacted to that business. Then they would come back and present really, really compelling information and you’d be able to create fantastic campaigns.”

Similarly, Weiss calls the Cortex “our data hub for pulling all of the social listening and various consumer inputs”, interpreted by “wizards” who are now crucial to sifting, analyzing and deriving meaning from the massive amounts of data available.

How does it work? By means of example, Weiss explains how, last year, the agency tapped the resource to advise McDonald’s to market its sodas on quality rather than on price.

“We went into social listening mode,” he explains. “We pulled out this insight that there was kind of a hidden conversation on the internet about the urban legend of how much better the Coke at McDonald’s tasted versus their competitors. We said, ‘Okay, well this is a different type of value proposition’.

“When we shared these findings with McDonald’s they were like, ‘Absolutely, we have to go for this.’ Then they had the bravery and the insight and the fortitude to do a completely unbranded campaign.”

Weiss says the campaign further spurred consumer activity toward higher Google page rankings for blog posts containing theories about the reasons for the taste difference.

“That’s a campaign we could have never landed on without those insights,” he adds. “Those insights had to be interpreted properly and they were. That converted me to believe data can very much be our friend.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“Frankly, the reason why I think consulting is becoming so relevant at this particular moment is this is an industry undergoing tremendous change,” says Janet Balis, who is Global Advisory Lead, Media & Entertainment, at EY. “The consumers are leading and the business model is in catch-up mode in so many cases,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

EY is a case in point in the diversification of professional services firms. Until its official rebranding in 2013, it was known as Ernst & Young, with a pedigree that dates to the 1800’s. Now it competes with the likes of Accenture and a host of other big-name entities that have expanded their consulting offerings in step with the increasing complexity of the advertising and media world.

Balis has a deep background in media, having been Publisher at The Huffington Post, head of sales and marketing at AOL and EVP, Media Sales and Marketing at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She also held positions at Time Inc. and Newsweek.

When she surveys the present terrain, Balis doesn’t focus on the friction that can exist between consultancies and advertising/media agencies, preferring instead to posit that everyone should be working together.

“I certainly recognize that some companies in the professional services space are absolutely and increasingly playing roles that we would consider to be the roles of agencies,” says Balis. “We have taken a distinct position, which is that we want the full ecosystem to thrive.”

Thus EY works with agencies “that we’re privileged to serve and that we believe in. We think that the right answer is not that this is a moment to compete, but this is a moment to collaborate.”

More specifically, the name of the game is to help marketers connect the dots. “The fact is that there are so many places that the dots don’t connect. There are silos in the organization, people working at odds with KPI’s, data sitting in particular silos. In order to connect the dots, that’s the perfect role for a consultant.”

Looking ahead to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Balis discusses EY’s sponsorship of a concept known as “better questions,” which rests on this philosophy: The better the question, the better the answer, the better the world.

“Because this is a moment frankly for intellectual humility. No one has all the answers.”

Given the dynamics of lower linear television viewing amid a sea of video alternatives, giving rise to a lessening of ad loads, “It places more pressure on the business model. It also places more pressure on the creative. It’s really about the stories we tell,” Balis adds. “So Cannes is the perfect place for us to have that dialogue.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview series of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions.   The series is presented by FreeWheel, a Comcast company.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  

His first-time judging gig comes after the Cannes Lions reached a tipping point in 2017 as some agencies pushed back on the cost and scale of the venerable event. “It’s going to be a little bit more subdued this year,” Castree, the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Nonetheless, he’s “excited to dig into the work.” With pre-judging efforts already under way, “I’m up to my eyeballs in looking at work at the moment.”

Castree believes that there’s a “simple mission” to Cannes: celebrating the context of creativity from both a macro—the “zeitgeist” of what’s happening around the world—and micro scale. About the former, he points to all the “excitement and change going on in the world,” along with disruption and cause-related movements.

“There’s a lot of places and spaces for brands to get involved in the conversation in the larger context of all the excitement and change going on in the world,” Castree says. “Great brands love to be part of bigger conversations.”

As a judge of award entries, he’s interested in the contextual aspects of media and “how brands take advantage of what is going on in our times and to be part of those conversations in ways that are interesting and engaging.”

On the micro side of things, Castree talks about addressability, data and targeting and “the context of one to one.” Combining the macro with the micro provides “great opportunities for brands to show how they marry creativity and context” to drive business outcomes.

He brings a particular view to his judging duties when it comes to entries that might stretch the strict definition of a Cannes media entry, noting that “media entries come from everywhere.”

So he will be on the lookout for entries that “get stacked with a lot of things that aren’t always about media. I’ve seen a little bit of that already, to be honest. Ideas matter, but there’s a lot of other places at Cannes for ideas to get recognized and rewarded.”

He feels that this year’s event will be more subdued than last year because “agencies have pulled back a little bit. Without Publicis there it’s going to make a difference,” he says in reference to the holding company’s voluntary absence from Cannes 2018.

In any case, he thinks it’s “appropriate to reset a little bit and refocus on the central themes of the power of creativity to move business and to move people.” Distractions at previous Cannes festivals have included celebrities, luxury and scenery, “which are fun and wonderful but that really can distract from the central focus and message of what Cannes is all about.”

For Wavemaker, Cannes is about the “density of intellect, the density of talent, the density of great thought leaders, thinkers. For us that’s about media, content and technology and how the marriage of those three things are really creating the future of media.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview series of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions.   The series is presented by FreeWheel, a Comcast company.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.