The ads in question would come from the two minutes per hour of local commercial time in programming DISH enjoys, and would playback in both live and DVR-recorded TV.
Most people would call that “programmatic TV”. But not the executive who runs the scheme.
“There’s no such thing as ‘programmatic TV’,” Dish Network media sales VP Adam Gaynor tells Beet.TV in this recorded interview. “I believe TV can be bought programmatically – there’s a layer of automation, of data and of buying impressions.”
But Gaynor believes “programmatic” – still the buzzword occupying hearts and minds in media land – will settle down to be just a mere technique.
“Programmatic is not a product, it’s a process,” he says, sharply. “If we can help brands and agencies reach audiences easily through data, that’s what our platform is all about.”
How about a progress update for DISH’s “programmatic” foray? Gaynor adds: “We’re going to come out of our pilot phase and more in to production. We’re going to be able to add many more DSPs now, to work with many more brands through many more platforms.”
Case in point – today DISH announced a summer-time integration with BidSwitch’s real-time partner ecosystem, itself a gateway to numerous supply and demand sources.
The increasing automation and efficiency of TV buying will be explored on July 24 at a Beet.TV leadership summit on advanced TV and data sponsored by Dish Media Sales and Experian Marketing Services.
This interview with Gaynor was originally published in June.
The Beet.TV leadership summit will feature the following speakers and moderators:
Mike Bologna, President, Modi Media (GroupM) Amy DeHaen, VP of Advanced TV, Cadreon (IPG)
Adam Gaynor, VP, Media Sales & Analytics, DISH Media Sales
Kevin Heindl, Director of Partner and Advertiser Solutions, Experian Marketing Services
Prasad Joglekar, General Manager, Viewer Measurement, DISH Media Sales
Chris Harter, SVP, TV Partnerships, Cardlytics
Joanna O’Connell, Chief Marketing Officer, MediaMath (Moderator)
Tracy Scheppach, EVP, Publicis Media Exchange
Matt Spiegel, SVP, MediaLink (Moderator)
Jay Stocki, VP of Product Management, Experian Marketing Services
Andre Swanston, CEO Tru Optik
]]>In an interview with Beet.TV, Mat Baxter, the network’s Global Chief Strategy & Creative Officer, says that one of the most efficient things from which clients can realize value is their own “asset base.” He likens it to the difference between owning and renting an apartment: you can rent it only as long as you pay the rent.
“Clients are starting to realize that if they can build their own assets with their own audiences and leverage those on an ongoing basis, the efficacy and the cost of managing those assets over time is less,” Baxter says. “We’re starting to look at how do we connect paid media, which continues to be really important, into a bigger ecosystem of channels that are more sustaining than just paid media on their own.”
Citing the traditional “set-and-forget” media duties—plan a campaign, buy a campaign, wait until it’s done to judge success—Baxter says being a more dynamic media agency means, “Actually starting to understand how media is performing in real time. Not just across paid media but across every touch point a client might have.”
He believes the distinction between what’s deemed creativity versus media is a moot point.
“The channel and the message are fused in such a seamless way that it’s really difficult to make that separation anymore.”
A first-time judge at the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Baxter says that the proliferation of consumer data is enriching the creative process. But it takes a different mindset to embrace all of that information.
“A lot of people used to think that data and rigor were like enemies of creativity, that creativity was limited sometimes by structure and process,” Baxter says. “Actually, it’s quite empowering. You can improve the creative product.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>The head of the strategic advisory and business development firm is “excited and honored” to be conducting an interview with Leslie Moonves, Board Chairman, President and CEO of CBS Corp., to begin this year’s Festival on June 23 in France.
The concept of the Cannes Lions Entertainment track “is something I discussed with senior Cannes executives several years ago. I feel like a part of it,” says Kassan.We’ve got such a force of entertainment and content creation at Cannes this year and it truly has reached the tipping point, in a very good way, of the intersection of marketing media, advertising, entertainment and technology.”
Previously COO and Vice Chairman of Initiative Media Worldwide, Kassan had an “epiphany” recently while talking to his team at MediaLink: “Over five days and four square blocks on a lovely stretch of the Mediterranean 100% of our industry is present,” he recalls. He adds with a chuckle, “And in our case, probably 100% of our revenue is present.”
For the fourth year, MediaLink will be curating conversations at Cannes at its Daily Dose sessions to produce “what we hope to be interesting conversations around the things that are shaping and forming our industry,” Kassan says.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>When the agency first began doing programmatic, it used its agency trading desk and third-party managed services, according to Helen Lin, President of Digital Investments & Partnerships. “While somebody was conducting the buys for us we were basically outsourcing some of the learning that could be gleaned from these data-driven buys,” Lin says in an interview with Beet.TV. “That was a problem for us.”
Another thing she noticed by virtue of her proximity to the company’s VivaKi trading desk was that audience insights were being gleaned not only during campaigns but in the planning and audience sizing stages.
“We realized it needed to be with our client teams. So we went all in and brought those teams in, embedding them into our actual client teams,” Lin says.
Like many agencies, Publicis initially used programmatic digital ads for efficiency. “What’s different in premium video is it’s still very scarce, so really the benefit there is the application of data across video. But it’s not necessarily about efficiencies, it’s about effectiveness,” says Lin.
Acknowledging “some naysayers” about bringing programmatic in-house, Lin concludes that “We probably did that just in time. With addressable TV now possible but not without a premium, it was vitally important for us to know what data segments really worked for audiences. We were able to test that out in digital with very little risk and low cost.”
Looking ahead to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Lin hopes to see evidence not only of the intersection of data, technology and creativity but also great strategy.
“We know what our brands stand for, but what we haven’t done a great job of in the past is delivering the right messages that are super relevant and tailored but also very exciting to a particular audience,” Lin says. “What I’m hoping to see is amazing brands that have been able to do this at scale using technology.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Turner’s solution – fewer, longer, better ads. That’s why, in October, it said it will halve the number of prime-time ads on its truTV real-life crime channel, a reduction of up to nine minutes each hour. But now the same idea is also being applied to original series on the TNT channel, which will also halve ad load.
“Our vision starts with having the consumer at the center,” Turner ad sales president Donna Speciale explains in this video interview with Beet.TV. That’s why we started thinking about the ad loads.
“The experience right now on television is not ideal. With all the choices that a consumer with Hulu or Netflix or Amazon or cable or TV or mobile, the experience is now crucial.
We needed to take a step.”
Although these steps have so far been taken in earnest on two of Turner’s channels, don’t bet against seeing ads reduced across the board. Adult Swim on TBS already comes with fewer ads in tow.
Fewer ads in a slot gives Turner the opportunity to sell longer ads to brands at a higher premium, in what is a less cluttered airing, and lends itself better to the kind of extended videos brands are now making as native marketing content. The only question is finding the right balance. That’s why Speciale is running tests.
“We’ve been doing a lot of research on the backend and testing what breaks we should be doing – three breaks with more ads in those breaks, or should we keep it at five breaks with less commercial loads in those,” she says.
“We’re testing on three to five. Our gut is saying five breaks are probably the best, with a two-minute to two-and-a-half-minute load between them.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Sure, radio has existed for years. But Serial has ignited new interest for sponsoring podcasts, while new technology is promising programmatic-style ad-buying and targeting in streaming music and radio.
While consumption is growing healthily for those outlets, building a bigger audience for buyers, for some, one of the biggest benefits is that audio is relatively untainted by the fraud, viewability and other ills that have plagued pictorial digital display.
“There isn’t as much challenge as it related to digital audio,” Horizon Media chief digital officer Donnie Williams says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Things like ad blocking, fraud, viewability – they don’t have as much of an impact there. It’s a pretty clean transmission as much as communicating a brand message, and it’s pretty powerful.”
Horizon is the US’ largest independent ad agency. So, what can it do with streaming music, radio and podcasts?
Podcasts are becoming attractive for commercial sponsorships, though that sector is small-scale due to lack of available analytics. But online radio and music services are seeing burgeoning consumption.
And Williams imagines more. “Translation technologies take the written word and turn them in to audio,” he says. “That’s pretty interesting – it’s hard to read if I’m trying to multi-task. If I can convert text copy in to audio, that’s a meaningful user experience.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But one ad woman says that isn’t happening – now, according to the Maxus Global agency’s CEO Lindsay Pattison, it is time to finally unite the two hemispheres.
“Programmatic should be seen as an opportunity for creativity,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Data and creativity coming together has been talked about for a number of years, I don’t think we’ve really seen it.
“When we look at the winners at Cannes (Lions), we sometimes see examples of data being used to prove that creative work was effective, I don’t think we’ve seen brilliant work that has data at the heart of it. I hope we see more of it this year.”
What could data plus creativity equal? Take Pattison. She says programmatic algorithms should already be showing her ads for pink and red businesswear ahead of her company’s upcoming sojourn at Cannes. With the June festival just around the corner, many suitcases are about to be packed.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Well, now advertising and entertainment are blurring in to branded content – so Cannes’ Lions organisers have met demand for a specific new break-out event.
“There was a conversation about creativity that wasn’t properly served through the Cannes Lions content,” concedes Lions’ corporate development director Rob Dembitz, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We decided to create a new two-day festival called Lions Entertainment that will really explore and help understand how you create those moments of unskippable creativity.”
Lions Entertainment will feature talks with representatives of Machinima, Sony Music, Hulu, CBS and more.
The question Dembitz wants to answer for them? “How do you work together across so many different channels and partnerships to create moments that grab attention?”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“The standards [for targeted ads] that we are developing are around IAB’s ‘rising stars’ ads. We’re thinking about the ads not being in a box, but in terms of components — components of creativity, of delivery and maybe of a ratio. It’s about each individual asset within an ad as standing alone, and being able optimize when an asset goes to a consumer and if it resonated. We haven’t had any standards around this yet,” Tilds says to Beet.TV.
Standards in this area will better set up the digital media future for things like artificial intelligence and making ad creativity a bit more programmatic in some ways, she says.
Other opportunities on the interactive ad front lie in shoppable and buyable ads. “We have talked about video as a way in which we can interact and you don’t have to leave the environment of an ad to try a different color or price, and evolving that too in the near future so you can buy within the ad.” But to reach that future in ads requires shifts in industry standards, ad serving, and media and planning for such experiences, she says.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“There are traditional companies that are thinking about their offering in new ways,” Cohen, who is president of North America for the media unit of IPG, says in an interview with Beet.TV. “Whether it’s traditional broadcasters or out of home companies who are thinking about technology and data and going to the market differently.”
Then there are the new kids on the block, emerging platforms seeking to compete with their predecessors. “They are trying to take some of the learnings that we have from 60 years of traditional media and bring that to the market,” Cohen says. “It’s a mix of old and young. It’s a great juxtaposition for the first time I think in quite some time.”
One thing that Cohen won’t be doing at Cannes is meeting with people that he could meet with any time in New York. He plans on spending lots of time walking the Palais des Festivals. “The tendency is for us to just have meetings, from morning noon and night it’s meetings, meetings, meetings,” Cohen says. “We’re trying not to do that. This is a festival of creativity. We want to see the best work in the world so we’re going to make our way to the Palais more so this hopefully than in years past.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>To Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of the Web media analytics company best known for tracking viewability of digital ads, “human” and “viewable” are mere table stakes.
“From our perspective, we need to go way beyond that. Human and viewable doesn’t mean that it worked,” Goodhart says in an interview with Beet.TV at last month’s LUMA Partners DMS event. “It doesn’t mean it was effective and that a consumer ultimately is paying attention and that they’re ultimately going to be influenced by a marketer’s message.”
Moat’s aspirations put it up against some of the industry’s most formidable players, including Google and other metrics providers, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Goodhart refers to the current Internet Advertising Bureau digital ad viewability standards as “minimum thresholds,” adding, “The standards were not meant to be the maximum goal, effectiveness or anything of that nature.”
Moat wants to enable both marketers and publishers to measure the signals that make sense to them. This, Goodhart believes, will “move the industry forward.”
Asked about his expectations for the upcoming Cannes international advertising festival, Goodhart thinks the industry needs to get to a place where audience, creative and user experience become part of the conversation again.
“I think for a long time we’ve been stuck, and part of the reason that we’re stuck is because we’re still transacting in old ways of doing things,” Goodhart says of impression-based measurement. “Our hope is that by cleaning up the industry to a degree, by removing the incentive for non-human, non-viewable activity, we’ll begin to have a better conversation about creativity.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>
Mark Zagorski is about to find out just how magical data-driven creative can be, as he’s been selected to be a Creative Data Lions judge at the 2016 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month in France.
“What I think is really amazing about the concept is the fact that there’s always been a lot of talk about data and creative has almost been left out of the equation,” Zagorski says in an interview with Beet.TV. “But all of that without awesome creative with it is a waste. Bringing the two together is really magic.”
Zagorski launched the U.S. operations of data-management platform eXelate in 2008 and led the sale of the company to Nielsen Company last year. eXelate is now a key component of the Nielsen Marketing Cloud, along with the Nielsen Media Impact tool (in partnership with Pointlogic) and buyer insights from, among others, Nielsen Catalina and J.D. Power and Associates.
Driving efficiency for marketing campaigns has never been more important, according to Zagorski.
“Not only is the data there now, but spend is so fragmented that understanding what is working and where I spend my money is crucial to any marketer,” he says. “Whether you’re pushing top or bottom of the funnel, there always needs to be an ROI on that.”
For the balance of 2016, Nielsen will be rolling out its Marketing Cloud in markets like France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Western Europe. It wants the industry to know that while more Nielsen solutions will be populating its cloud-based services, the company also will be pulling in third-party features.
“Just like your iPhone has owned apps and third-party apps, we’re doing the same thing,” Zagorski says.
As for his stint as a Cannes judge, Zagorski quips “I never thought I’d get to be a judge without going to law school.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Drawing from a range of data sources, it claimed 22% of smartphone users globally are blocking mobile web ads, the vast majority using mobile browsers that block by default.
Whilst the overwhelming balance of that activity takes place in China, where the pro-blocking UC browser is popular, and on Android, which offers more third-party browsers like UC, that doesn’t mean the problem won’t grow.
“Ad blocking on mobile is just two, three percent,” according to Ben Barokas, CEO of Sourcepoint, a company trying to tackle the problem, referring to the reported percentage of US iOS users actively using content blocking plugins to block mobile web ads.
“While there are a large number of downloads, the path to downloading and installing an ad blocker is a little bit too complex for the average user to implement today. Over time, it will be much easier.”
Ad blocking is turning out to be a huge fear for publishers. Sourcepoint aims to solve matters by powering publishers to present readers running blockers with several options, ranging from “pay up”, to a gentle cajoling and more.
Such alternative methods of what Barokas calls “compensation” may be important – because ad blocking may not be going anywhere any time soon.
“We may be entering an era where every browser, mobile or not, will have an ad blocker natively installed,” he adds, recalling how desktop browsers have all but banished pop-up ads using in-built pop-up blockers.
“You’re seeing it today in Mozilla, Brave, Maxthon. This trend is not going to go away. We’re going to see ad blocking proliferate across browsers.”
We spoke with him last month at the LUMA Partner’s DMS conference.
]]>
“I think restraint is a good business model when it comes to advertising load,” says Peter Naylor, the company’s SVP of Advertising Sales.
Noting the trend toward selling ads horizontally—by target audiences—as opposed to vertically—by shows or networks—Naylor says Hulu “almost backed into” the horizontal model. “When we license the content from third parties they say, ‘Look, you can have the content but you can’t conspire against my sales force so you have to sell on a horizontal or blind basis,’” Naylor says during an interview last month at the LUMA Partners DMS conference.
This where data comes in. “We’re happy to sell age, gender, geography or, more interesting, tailor the ads to data sets and behaviors,” says Naylor.
Right now, the majority of people who sign up at Hulu choose the advertising- supported plan. “It shows that advertising isn’t universally disliked. It means when you put a value proposition in front of consumers they will make a choice for them and this is a choice for time and money,” Naylor says.
Looking ahead to the Cannes advertising festival, Naylor expects to hear a lot of discussion about branded content. A lot of publishers have started up creative services that compete with the creative agencies,” Naylor observes. “It will be interesting to see who will wade into those waters.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“We call them engagement ads because we know people are engaged with them, which I believe is the goal of all advertising,” says Joe Marchese, President of Advanced Advertising Products at Fox Networks Group.
Fox took the plunge into immersive ads with its acquisition of Marchese’s company TrueX and will be promoting the concept of fewer but more effective TV ads at the upcoming Cannes festival. In an interview with Beet.TV, Marchese says Fox can set a new industry standard if the creative community does its part to help brand marketers place more value viewers’ attention.
“The thing for Cannes for us is if we’re going to set a new standard, if we’re going to start respecting consumers’ time, we need to do more with less,” Marchese says. “We can’t say ‘Okay, we’ll make an ad and then shove it in front of them as many times as we can.”’
A recent example of letting consumers choose was Fox’s deal with Hulu, in which viewers could watch an interactive 30-second ad instead of roughly two minutes and 30 seconds interspersed within a normal episode of a Fox show on Hulu, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“If you think about it, it’s the difference between watching a commercial and being first person in the commercial,” Marchese says. “It can be as simple as interacting and designing your own car or checking out the features of something. The idea is that it delivers the message more clearly so that you don’t need a frequency of five or seven or ten.”
This is how Fox hopes to “fix the social contract with the consumer,” according to Marchese. He believes that the industry has gone too far down the road of interruption via ads that “consumers have started to get the raw end of the deal.”
Fox’s message to the creativity community can be summed up thusly: “We’ll give you a consumer’s undivided attention once. Do the work there,” says Marchese. This, he adds, means “drawing on a new canvas” combining sight, sound and interaction.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“Over the last couple of years it’s really become much more than that,” observes Doug Ray, CEO of media agency Carat N.A., citing the increased attendance of ad tech partners, digital providers and data miners.
Ray uses the word “exciting” to describe both the state of digital media and television and the myriad content choices for consumers, although as platforms proliferate measuring effectiveness across them for clients is still a work in progress. As was the case last year, he believes some brands will continue to shift dollars from linear TV to digital.
“But as you shift money to follow that consumer into the digital video, you’re fundamentally talking now about mobile video,” Ray says in an interview with Beet.TV. “You start getting into different formats and sizes, vertical versus horizontal, and that brings a whole series of challenges that I don’t think clients have been looking at solving in the past.”
Ray isn’t the first media veteran to apply a legacy media concept to the issue of digital ad viewability. “To me it’s table stakes,” he says of the industry V-word. “When you ran an ad in a magazine you expected it to be printed correctly, to be right-side up and be in the magazine. Viewability should just insure that the ad runs as we think it should.”
This isn’t to say viewability in and of itself is a performance metric. According to Ray, “Performance is going to be measured by the appropriate KPI’s against the business outcomes that we’re looking to set.” Asked whether he supports the Internet Advertising Bureau’s viewability guidelines, Ray says, “Personally, I think we could go further on those. It depends upon the campaign. But overall I would like to see a little bit stronger viewability standards in place.”
As he reflects on the changing role of media agencies, beset as they are with competition from consulting and technology companies, he says they must excel at having the best data, technology and talent. “There is so much going on, we fundamentally believe we have to move from being a media agency, which is about channels and media types, to being an audience agency and thinking about people first,” Ray says.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“Maybe everyone should be given a cell phone and made to consume all of the entries on a cell phone, because allegedly that’s how everyone’s consuming their video these days,” Norman muses in an interview with Beet.TV. “It seems so vaguely incongruous that you’re winning prizes for work that’s going to be seen on cellphones and it’s being displayed on the biggest screen anyone can find.”
Alas, such an approach could inevitably lead to questions about viewability—an issue that Norman, GroupM’s Chief Digital Officer, knows all too well. He says “the grey area” is the length of time exposure to create a genuine opportunity to see.
“Either a standard will evolve in that area or, more practically, a price modifier will evolve and people will, from experience, understand that in faster scroll environments that opportunity to see is less robust than in other environments and they will pay accordingly,” Norman says.
On the other hand, he believes it could turn out that human processing power is so great now, “and I’m totally prepared to believe this, by the way,” that relatively fleeting exposures as something passes through a viewable window are enough to attract attention. In that case, “The problem is going to be solved by better and more arresting creative delivered more relevantly,” Norman says, adding, “Anything can happen. That’s a moving target.”
Given GroupM’s tough viewability standards, Norman observes that at the moment, Facebook “is actually not in the sweet spot of the GroupM viewability standard because Facebook, broadly speaking, is a sound-off environment and it’s a short-duration environment.” Nonetheless, GroupM is buying “a considerable if not massive amount” of advertising on Facebook and Twitter as it looks at high-level effectiveness measures around recall.
“We’re seeing different aspects of commercials that are encouraging people to view for longer durations,” Norman explains. “But we do think that if advertisers want to take advantage of feed-based video at scale, they need to think of either one or more often multiple creative executions that recognize the shorter attention span in an environment where viewing, as it were, isn’t forced.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>This is not to say that things like great creative, direction and cinematography have been pushed to the background, according to Dave Hohman, the company’s EVP for Agencies.
“It’s a much more scientifically driven activity than it used to be, but I think what’s interesting is that there are arts and sciences still in the creative development,” Hohman says in an interview with Beet.TV. “The science piece may have been amped up, but the art part is still there definitely.”
The Total Audience Measurement data weren’t widely available to be used in this year’s Upfront TV negotiating sessions. Right now that information is being disclosed on a proprietary basis, beginning with TV networks and then publishers, advertisers and agencies by the third quarter of 2016, according to Hohman.
In the meantime, ADWEEK reports that Nielsen would be sharing more information about consumer usage of connected TV devices like Roku and Apple TV.
Nielsen’s new methodology is designed to measure audiences beyond its usual seven-day period by capturing viewing beyond traditional broadcast, for example video on demand or digital-only viewing.
Noting the new requirement that Cannes entries include an advertising performance metric, “I think that’s going to be a topic of conversation that’s going to increase this year,” Hohman says. “Our clients are very interested in buying ads that work, not just buying ads that win awards.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>On the heels of the 2016 Upfront TV negotiating season, “I think this year feels like the return of TV,” Kinsella says in an interview with Beet.TV.
Among other evidence, he cites presentations from networks showing the power of TV in driving brand awareness and the willingness of some to reduce their advertising loads. As International Business Times reports, Fox, Viacom and Turner, among others, have announced plans to reduce the number of ad breaks during programming.
Kinsella goes a step farther in his TV renaissance scenario, saying the industry has learned a lot from the digital side and questioning the latter’s ability to do things that TV programming can.
“In some ways, it’s almost an indictment on the brand-building power of digital,” says Kinsella. Although he acknowledges the direct-response, lower-funnel attributes of digital advertising, “It’s the brand-building stuff I think gets a little more interesting and less clear on digital’s role there. I think some of that is coming out in a lot of the presentations that I have been seeing.”
He sees the upcoming Cannes advertising confab “as much a media event as it is a creative event. I think in many ways, people are really coming to grips with the fact that these two things need to be together again somehow, some way.”
In that vein, for Kinsella, moving to Havas represents a sort of full-circle moment in a career that began in the 1980’s at Foot, Cone & Belding, a time when creative and media still resided within the same agency walls. As some marketers began to shift their media assignments to what were then known as “buying services,” agencies followed suit by unbundling their media departments into “media agencies.”
He credits a large degree of Havas’ wins of a global client account every three months for the past three years to the company’s efforts to reunite creative and media in such markets as Boston, Chicago and New York. “I think the answer is connecting the creative and the media together as two equals and going to the market in that way,” Kinsella says.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>In the walkup to the Cannes advertising awards celebration later this month, what excites Deirdre McGlashan, the company’s Global Chief Digital Officer, is what has been “progressively exciting” about Cannes: The intersection of technology and creativity. In an interview with Beet.TV, McGlashan discusses a gender-focused campaign for Ariel laundry detergent and one for Bose that garnered a Bronze Lion in the Media Lions awards category a year ago.
For Procter & Gamble’s Ariel, data from Nielsen indicated that 83% of women in India thought their partner could do more household work. “So that drove a creative execution around the idea of ‘sharing the load,’” Says McGlashan. The brand harnessed everything from laundry IQ quizzes for men to top designer Masaba Gupta explaining how garments can be washed by men or women.
MediaCom used data from Spotify to determine what type of music was popular in countries that were relatively unexpected—like dance hall in Japan, or Indie in Mexico. It teamed up with Vice and Facebook to publish authentic, documentary-style content aimed at Millennials. “The content was created solely through the intersection of data and it fit perfectly with the Bose brand because their brand is about better sound through research,” McGlashan says.
On the content delivery end, “the really exciting part about programmatic” is that it facilitates scalable, personalized story telling, according to McGlashan. By mining signals for audience attributes and behavior, augmented by such external data as weather or current events, brands can “better deliver a story either through dynamic creative or multiple variations of creative,” she says.
McGlashan assumes virtual reality will be a hot topic at Cannes “because it was super hot” at CES and Mobile World Congress. “Hopefully we are going to see some really great leading-edge work or potential for some new work when we look at what the vendors are bringing to bat,” she says.
This interview was taped in London as part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>So it’s a good job, for anyone vying for a piece of the TV ad industry pie, that times have changed. After all, that kind of ad buying system is anathema to television.
“TV is like a goldmine in terms of quality – that’s where you can find the best inventory,” says Gilles Chetelat, COO of StickyADS, the French ad-tech vendor that is helping unite premium video publishers and ad buyers. “That’s normal in an environment where upfront (sales) and reservation are key.”
As the possibility of “programmatic TV” rears its head, two camps of opinion seem to be emerging, in our experience:
Chetelat believes that upfront model remains key to the industry. But that doesn’t mean software doesn’t have a part to play.
“Any technology that can make that possible across platforms is going to make a difference,” he adds.
The company was acquired last month by Comcast’s FreeWheel unit.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“Viewability has become the conduit for identifying, at least, some really good quality traffic that does the work,” says comScore advertising SVP Duncan Trigg in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The next 12 to 18 months is going to be a very interesting time for the market as it learns to understand what value the quality end of the market is worth.”
As “views” plays a bigger role in the pricing of online ad spots, that will lead to some fundamental changes, Trigg reckons.
“The currency for buying been the gross impression, power by the ad server number,” he says. “The moment you start to walk away from that, start to look at quality and want to pay only for the traffic that’s being viewed, metrics have to change.
“From the sell side, they have to double their inventory costs if they’re only going to sell the stuff that’s viewable, in order to stand still. That battle, over the next 12 to 18 months, is going to shape the market.”
comScore is currently working with Kantar to deliver cross-screen media audience and campaign measurement capabilities. Its validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) is used to help advertisers measure truly viewable ad impressions.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Having sold off most of its financial services holdings, the GE brand is now about energy, health and transportation and becoming a “digital industrial company,” Boff says in an interview with Beet.TV. Its media choices range from live sports to late night entertainment, Internet venues like NowThisNews to Facebook Live.
“We are almost peripatetic in that we want our content to be places where people are going to discover it,” says Boff.
GE wants to come off as human and accessible, so it’s been running a campaign from agency BBDO in which the recurring character, Owen, tries to explain to family, friends and others why he took a job as a coder with GE. The company ran two 30-second ads during the Red Carpet pre-show at this year’s Oscars and one spot during the live broadcast of the 88th annual awards show, Advertising Age reports.
“It’s self deprecating, it’s a little humble and fun,” Boff says of the campaign, which recently launched in France and is coming to China.
She believes the “single most powerful thing” is breakthrough creative. “Our industry is seeing terrific technology, the ability to buy media in a different way and use technology to monitor that media. All of that is great,” Boff says. “But that will ultimately become a commodity. What I don’t think ever becomes a commodity is how do you tell your story in a way that’s innovative.”
Looking ahead to the Cannes ad festival, Boff hopes for the kinds of conversations that are more typical of a South by Southwest gathering than an annual confab where the biggest executives mingle with one another. She’d prefer that some startups were in attendance.
“I think there’s room at Cannes for sort of a conversation where you have a variety of players around the table,” says Boff. “Great things can come from that serendipity.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“We have to a little bit careful we don’t think we will change the world in one day,” says Jakob Nielsen, UK Managing Director of GroupM Digital. “It will take time. But clients are looking for better value from what they have today. And addressable can give them that.”
In an interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen tallies the U.K. households that can be targeted for their particular characteristics via set-top devices: Sky Television with about 11 million, Virgin with some 4.5 million, plus Roku and other devices. This all adds up to market penetration of more than 50% of set-top devices in the UK.
“If you start by saying we want to move two, three, four or five percent of our TV budgets into this very exciting area for our clients, you are alive. You have a product there,” Nielsen says of addressable.
So far, the extra cost that can be associated with addressable ad inventory is borne out by results, according to Nielsen. As in the U.S., challenges include data availability, technology and “getting people to work together.”
Realist that he is, Nielsen doesn’t expect to hear much at the Cannes advertising festival about digital advertising issues that are near and dear to GroupM, for example fraud and viewability. “There is a very positive tone at Cannes,” he says. “You probably will not hear a lot about the big issues we have around fraud and the decisions we need to make about viewability. And yet is a big problem.”
Nielsen says he’s fascinated by the way technology will continue to change the process of creating content for consumers—along with who creates it. He notes that at ITV in the U.K., 50% of its profit and loss results stem from its studio operations, so content truly is a big deal for ITV.
Then there are athletes-cum-media companies like footballers Christiano Ronaldo (more than 150 million followers) and Lionel Messi (more than 90 million).
“They’re not football players anymore. They’re media companies,” Nielsen observes. “These people will start working more and more in this space. And we’ll see more and more professionally produced content that’s distributed in different ways and which will change the whole industry.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Andy Goldberg believes that when it comes to creating content, nothing is off the table these days. Citing new media versus the heretofore confines of traditional media like TV, print, out-of-home and radio, “I think the cover has been torn off,” he says in an interview with Beet.TV.
In its ongoing bid to brand itself given the nature of its revised corporate holdings, GE has been dipping its toes into various new content opportunities. Hence its co-producer status last year with National Geographic on the podcast called The Message, which Fast Company likened to a sci-fi version of the hit Serial.
“You have the ability to express brands in many different forms and create what I really call branded entertainment again more than just straight content,” Goldberg says. “It’s changed the way you go to market. It’s changed the way you think about creative. Everything’s open.”
Opinions can differ on the best metrics for consumer engagement of digital video, three seconds of viewability being one guide point. But great content has to stem from, well, great content. “You can’t go into a brief and say, ‘Hey, I want a viral hit.’ There’s a reason it’s called viral. It just has to happen,” Goldberg says.
In the end, it’s consumers who decide the meaning of “great.” To Goldberg, it hinges on completion and engagement of video. “It’s not an easy medium to make a hit,” he observes.
In Goldberg’s view, “The expectation truly is to engage and entertain more than anything else. I think brands are expected to entertain as much as Hollywood is expected to entertain.”
In the run-up to the Cannes advertising gathering in France this month, Goldberg says he hopes to see “how people are breaking the mold of what’s expected” from brand marketers.
“If you can really stretch the limit of creativity and shock people not for shock value but in amazement, that’s what captures the imagination,” he says. “More and more the advertising world and content development world should be capturing peoples’ amazement.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
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