“Clients will have to be more diverse with the growth of the Hispanic population,” says Daisy Expósito-Ulla, CEO of d expósito & Partners, in an interview with Beet.TV.

Expósito-Ulla helped put Hispanic advertising on the map as CEO of Y&R’s The Bravo Group, which she left in 2004 after 23 years. (She joined as a creative director.)

“[It] gave me the platform to really evolve how Hispanic advertising was being practiced,” she says, noting that The Bravo Group worked with huge brands like AT&T, Kraft and Pfizer. “I was able to evangelize and prove that we could take this division just from adapting stuff from English to Spanish to really developing strategic work.”

In the course of her tenure, she says there was a shift on both the client side and internally at Y&R to recognize that the Hispanic market represented a big growth opportunity, and now multi-cultural advertising is “mandatory,” she says.

She started her own agency after leaving Y&R and observes that she faced personal challenges at the time, like her father’s Alzheimers diagnosis. She was able to channel her feelings into work when she pitched the AARP business.

“Part of what got me the business is that I really understood the people I was engaging with,” she says. “In doing so I was also able to pioneer this 50+ segment in the Hispanic market.”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Expósito–Ulla was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

“I began to wonder why I felt a certain way and I was sure the media of that era — the way we were depicted, stereotypically, in negative terms — shaped [people’s] attitudes,” says Lewis, who founded UniWorld Group, an African-American and multi-cultural agency, in 1969, in an interview with Beet.TV.

The company was foundering seven or eight years after its inception when Lewis had the inspiration to develop a radio soap opera about black life and experience, which aired for 39 weeks and was sponsored by Quaker Oats. That marked a turning point for the agency.

WPP bought a 49% stake in UniWorld Group in 2000. Lewis stepped down as its CEO in 2012.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Lewis was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

The future founder of USA Network had a serendipitous moment as a college student while backpacking in Europe over the summer when she went to hear a lecture by Arthur C. Clarke, the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and other sci-fi works. He was talking about geosynchronous orbit satellites. The power of the instruments struck her, and she was already working as a TV producer in college.

She had accepted a ride from someone she knew from college to New York City, and that woman mentioned she was going to an advertising conference and asked Lazarus if she wanted to come. She went on a lark, though she had never thought about advertising as a potential career.

The conference lasted for five hours, but “I could have sat there for another three days,” says Lazarus, now Ogilvy & Mather’s chairman emeritus, in an interview with Beet.TV. “I was completely mesmerized by it.”

Lazarus went on to lead a storied career. She was Ogilvy’s CEO and chairman from 1996 to 2008.

Asked about her greatest setback, she observes that losing a piece of business always felt personal. However, nothing was more satisfying “than when the phone rings and it’s your old client saying, ‘Can we come back now?'”

Then asked how the ad business is likely to change in the next five or 10 years, Lazarus observes marketers will continue to grapple with how to reach consumers in new content environments.

“Just taking a small space print ad and putting it on a screen is not necessarily the most compelling way to get a message across,” she says, observing that there’s still much to learn about how to seize opportunities afforded by new platforms to communicate with consumers on a one-to-one basis.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Lazarus was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

“I was vice-chairman of AOL in its heyday when it owned the internet – I watched the transformation of that,” he tells Beet.TV. “We are in another transformation all over again. Over-the-top video and the way that millennials consume content, it’s all up for grabs.”

Joining Time Inc 1985 as an assistant comptroller, he eventually became SVP, CFO treasurer of the company in 1993 and, a few years later, served a AOL vice-chairman until 2004.

After leaving the stable for senior roles in pharmaceutical, marketing services and several high-profile boards, Ripp returned to the new-look Time Inc, the magazine group, in 2013 as chief executive.

And now Ripp reckons things are about to be ripped up again. “It couldn’t be a more exciting time in the industry right now,” he says. “When you look forward, it’s still going to be about great content. But it’s going to be about distributing that content and creativity in different ways.”

But Ripp can’t help but sound a word of caution about the exciting changes ahead, which will be ad disruptive as they may be liberating – that’s the business model, of course. Some pretty fundamental questions are posed by the demographic shift of media audiences.

“If people are not watching networks and they’re just buying video on-demand, what’s happening to advertising, how are we going reach those audiences?, Ripp asks. “Who’s going to pay for television, if it’s not supported by advertising, if its subscription-based?”

Ripp was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  The taping took place during the Cannes Lions Festival in 2015.  This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries.  The series is sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. 

“That was very painful,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I take everything pretty personally and emotionally. I thought we had done great work. This was a case where I thought it was completely unfair.

Luckily, I’m an optimist by nature – my attitude has always been to never focus on the past, to look forward. My attitude was to just replace the business and move on. What else can you do?”

During his 16-year tenure, including 11 years as Worldwide CEO, Jeffrey shepherded relationships with blue-chip global clients including Bayer, Ford, HSBC, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Kimberly–Clark, Macy’s, Nestlé, Nokia, Rolex, Royal Caribbean, Schick, Shell, Unilever, Vodafone and many others.

Once, that future looked tough – when he became CEO of JWT in 2003. “I was faced with a brand that was really viewed as a dinosaur,” he says. “My number-one mission was to keep it alive and contemporary. Getting JWT to its 150th anniversary, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment.”

Today, Jeffrey is still looking forward. At the end of last year, he stepped down as JWT’s worldwide CEO after 11 years in the job. Although he has now stepped back to be non-executive chairman, Jeffrey reckons youngsters entering the industry will get to experience an unparalleled mix of business and creativity that is ripe for even more disruption.

“Today, we say, ‘Look at what Apple did to the music industry’, ‘Look at what Airbnb is doing to the hotel industry’,” he remarks. “In five years – I don’t know who or what it will be – that conversation will happen as it relates to advertising and communications.

“But I see that as a positive thing – creative destruction has to happen with capitalism.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Jeffrey was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

The store didn’t have room to post the promotional materials from the likes of Kraft, General Mills and Mars, so he took them home to study them, intrigued by the logos and type.

“I think Betty Crocker was probably my first pin-up girl,” says Reinhard, a co-founder of Omnicom who’s now chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, in an interview with Beet.TV.

Looking back on an impressive career, Reinhard recalls being fired by McDonald’s while serving as president of Needham, Harper & Steers in 1981 as his biggest professional setback. Luckily, the agency won a big assignment from Anheuser-Busch shortly afterward and avoided layoffs.

Reflecting on how the ad business will change in the coming years, Reinhard notes that it’s perhaps more important to focus on the things that are unchanging.

“Chief among the things that won’t change ever are basic human drives,” he says. “Our job is to find ways that our clients’ brands can connect with those drives.”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Reinhard was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

What’s unique about the ad business?

“It has the best highs I’ve ever experienced in my business career and the worst lows,” Roth says in an interview with Beet.TV. “This industry brings out the best and the worst in relationships.”

Prior to coming to IPG, he was running Mutual of New York, an insurance company.

In the decade he’s been in the business, Roth observes that he’s seen it change dramatically with the continued rise of digital and more recently mobile. But more is bound to unfold in the next five years, and it’s going to become very competitive for ad agencies.

“Traditional advertising agencies have to change,” he says. “They have to embrace digital, they have to embrace technology, but yet they have to keep their creativity, because without creativity, this business isn’t as successful.”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Roth was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

“I was an avid reader of TV Guide as a kid – stacked ‘em up on my bedside table,” Rogers tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The page I read the most was about FCC regulations that nobody else … cared about. It got me hooked on how this industry and government interface.”

Rogers became a lawyer, later becoming senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance Subcommittee, where he drafted telecoms law including the 1984 Cable Franchise Policy and Communications Act.

That period presented him with his most challenging career setback, trying to steer through some significant new cable TV legislation.

“Two days before Congress was adjourning, it looked like it had stalled in its tracks, it was over, the National Cable Television Association basically threw in the towel,” he says. “I spent an entire night … with the chief counsel for ht eRepublican judiciary committee, trying to come up with a compromise.

“In that 48 hours, I went from feeling total dejection, the worst setback I could have imagined of two years of work’ evaporation, to believing we could get it done. With a few hours left, we rushed it through both houses… to president Reagan for signature.”

Rogers jumped the fence from regulation in to the TV business proper when he became an NBC executive, founding CNBC and the MSNBC joint venture, as well as helping to form National Geographic Channel and Court TV. He credits former GE CEO Jack Welch, whose company owned NBC, with having given him his key business lessons.

“Being in a company where you’re able to see how a leader like that was able to drive businesses, allow new businesses to be created like CNBC and watch how he motivated an enormous organisation, running a company which needed to be reinvented,” Rogers remembers.

Now Rogers sees the future of media not in hundreds of channels but in one – the personal channel.

The piece of that I think’s going to become a much bigger factor … is the personalization through filtering of relevance from all kinds of data inputs,” he says. “That’s an exciting thing for young people to get involved with.”

Just as a young Rogers enthused about the media business, so, too, he says the industry is exciting for the next generation.

Everybody thinks we’ve hit the new frontier and that it’s going to stabilise. It’s never going to stabilise,” Rogers says. “It’s constantly going to be in motion. New innovators will constantly change the approach to how this is done.”

This is segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL.

Rogers was interviewed  for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

He has variously been president of network outfit Akami, managing partner of ad group VivaKi and co-founder of the digital ad company Digitas, acquired by Publicis.

Now heading one of the world’s largest sources of data, Kenny’s company is pioneering use of super-local, metereological data to target ads. But there is also a higher calling than marketing.

“Climate change is controversial in some parts of the world,” Kenny tells Beet.TV. “We just did a piece with military leaders and CEOs, who are more conservative, who can really speak about this without making it a bipartisan (sic) issue.”

That project, Climate 25, comprises interviews with 25 scientists, businesspeople and citizens about the weather effects of climate change. In the US, where many still debate the reality of climate change, that is a bold stance for Weather to take. The New York Times calls it “consciously designed to reach people who may be doubters about the causes of global warming”. And Kenny sees the potential.

“I’m happy to begin to move the population,” he says. “We reach 200 million people a day. Helping those people relate to climate change, I think, will make a difference in their actions.”

Kenny credits mentors from his three distinct segment backgrounds with having enabled him to take The Weather Channel to new heights – Bain & Company chairman Orit Gadiesh, Publicis CEO Maurice Lévy and Akamai CEO Tom Leighton.

He concedes he has sometimes slipped up at promoting people: “There are at least three occasions where I promoted someone too quickly, out of loyalty because they had done a great job in the past role. I’ve done better as I’ve gotten older, to be slower on promotion and make sure people are really ready for the management role before you give it to them.”

But Kenny is insisted that the collision of media and technology is a great place for graduates to be. “It’s a great chance to leave a mark on the world,” he says.

Kenny was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  Taping took place in Cannes in June, 2015.  This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL   Please find the series videos here.

It didn’t work out so well. In fact, the newspaper he launched with a friend, “Beginnings of Boston,” targeted at 20-year-olds in Boston, hit the rocks. Armstrong tells Beet.TV that remains his biggest career setback – but one he learned the best business lessons from.

“At one point, since we really didn’t know what we were doing, and we were starting from scratch, I was 23 years old hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,” Armstrong tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I financed it all myself. I sold my car, my mountain bike, my surfboard, and used all my credit cards, and taught myself how to program.

“The business almost went out of business. What seemed like a crushing amount of debt and failure made me make a decision about whether or not you give up or keep going.”

In the crucible of that crisis, Armstrong realized the enduring value of hard work.

“I remember reading the Boston Globe one morning at the depth of the lowest point,” he adds. There was an article about how handicapped people overcome adversity. There was a quote I used to carry around in my wallet for years that said, basically, the world doesn’t owe you anything, you have to get up every single day and continue and prove yourself and grow.

“It just hit me right between the eyes. I got up that morning and said, ‘Regardless of what happens, I’m always going to keep pushing forward’. It was a great lesson for me.”

Amid the turmoil of his early newspaper foray, Armstrong met with the developers of one of the first web browsers and quickly put all his efforts in to digital media.

Armstrong has spent six years at the helm of an AOL that has been spun out of Time Warner and, after flirting with Yahoo, has been sold to Verizon. That followed positions for Armstrong including running Google’s Americas business, directing sales at ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures and advising Greycroft Partners.

Throughout that time at the company, he has continued applying and spreading the lesson learned from that Globe article. “It’s been a real amazing thing to watch thousands of people at this company get up every morning and improve a little bit every day,” Armstrong says.

Now AOL has itself acquired mobile ad network Millennial Media, the latest in a series of deals designed to place it at the forefront of the fast-changing online advertising industry.

Armstrong’s motivation remains clear, however. “I’ve had one simple philosophy,” he tells Beet.TV. “I want to be really honest with myself about mistakes I’ve made.

“I have a personal mission statement I use in my life, which is about making as many people as I possibly can successful. That drives me.”

This interview is from Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries”, a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries,sponsored by Xaxis and AOL.  Xaxis is a unit of WPP. Please find more clips from the series here.

Armstrong was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  The interview took place at the AOL headquarters in New York. 

“The reality is, I wanted to be a surgeon,” he confesses to Beet.TV in this video interview. “I just cannot stand blood, so I had to change. I went to learn something else. I became an engineer.”

Lévy joined Publicis as IT director in 1971 – after which, one of his most important feats is said to be putting in place a data security policy that involved backing up all of the company’s data on magnetic tape. According to Wikipedia: “A fire in the company’s office (on the Champs-Elysées) proved the success of his backup and restoration strategy, as the company was back on its feet one week later.”

It sounds as if Lévy could have run that IT department with one hand tied behind his back – pretty soon, his horizons were growing.

“After three months, I was doing all my job in half the day -I have learned to do almost everything in the business,” he says. “All the afternoon, I was with the creative department – thinking about how we can find new ways of creating new solutions etc.”

Amid that culture mix, he claims to have written “the very first algorithm in France for media optimisation”.

Publicis, of course, has changed considerably since Lévy’s early days. Now, the company numbers 75,000 staff around the world, and Lévy reckons: “We are the most advanced in digital and probably the one who will win the future.”

That’s a bold bet- hubristic, even. But Lévy acknowledges he has made mistakes along the way – it’s just that he turns the losses in to wins.

“I have lost clients … I had some difficulties with some acquisitions,” he concedes. “Setbacks are what back you stronger. At each of the hurdles that I had to jump … I get out of this stronger. If I am strong today, it is because I had many.”

One recent slip-up, of course, came when the merger of Publicis with Omnicom, which Lévy architected, collapsed in 2014. He reportedly has hinted that, when he leaves the company, it is a team and not an individual that will replace him.

But the man knows that it is the dark days which can turn the light back on: “When you are riding horses – as soon as you fall down, you have to jump over again and again until you win.”

Lévy was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  Taping took place in Cannes in June, 2015.  This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL   Please find the series videos here.

“That was the beginning of me seeing what it would be like to work for a consumer-focused company that has a fantastic brand [and] that is very-mission based,” says Everson in an interview with Beet.TV. “And really that alerted me to how much I actually liked [the] business.”

After Disney, Everson attended Harvard Business School, where she ultimately faced a setback. In her second year, she drew up a business plan for an online forum and shop for pet owners and wound up joining forces with the owner of the pets.com domain to raise $5 million to fund the company. However, she didn’t end up seeing eye to eye with the professional CEO who was brought in and was fired via fax. It was May, and she was due to graduate.

Everson was rattled by the incident, but she says it’s helped her recognize the importance of believing in yourself.

“I think about it often when I’m in a moment of feeling like I need to get my confidence back,” she says.

Reflecting on ways in which the industry will be transformed in the coming years, she says she expects to see more entrepreneurship coming out of the developing world as more and more people are coming online for the first time.

“They’re going to serve our society in ways that we probably can’t even imagine,” she says.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

“I’m seeing people beginning to pick up formats that were considered dead and reimagine them,” says Susan Lyne, the veteran media executive who previously ran AOL’s brand group and now runs its BBG venture wing.

“Five years ago, people were talking about magazines being dead. What I’ms seeing a lot of … are these gorgeous new magazines that have a very specific point of view, that are very thoughtfully received … and they’re charging $20 for them and they’re selling out. You’re going to see more of that.”

Lyne has been through a media evolution herself. Having once been managing editor of The Village Voice in the late 70s, Lyne created Premiere magazine for News Corp, co-headed ABC Entertainment, ran Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and then built Gilt Groupe in to a digital retail powerhouse.

In between, it was the loss of one of those high-profile jobs which shaped Lynes attitude to the rough and tumble of life in the industry she loves.

“My biggest setback was very public,” she confesses to Beet.TV in this video interview. “I was fired from a job running ABC Entertainment, which means running primetime, just a few weeks before we were announcing a schedule that included Desperate Housewives and Lost and Grey’s Anatonmy. I was excited about them … and I lost my job. I was furious, heartbroken, embarrassed.

“But I learned a few things from that experience. One was resilience – I could have sat there and wallowed in that for many, many months – my husband called me that nigh and said, ‘You have 24 hours to weep over this and then you’re going to get over it and think about all the things that you can do now that you couldn’t have considered 24 hours ago’. It was great advice – it did change my thinking about what had happened.”

These days, Lyne is busy righting a wrong – helping back women-led startups in a world where, she says, 93% of investment goes to the other gender. That comes in the shape of Built By Girls (BBG) Ventures,  the seed investment unit she runs at AOL and which is billed as “the evolution of a media company as a platform for change”.

Change is the biggest disruptive factor shaping the entire media industry, Lyne reckons. “When you see new technologies emerging, that gives a whole new group of people to build businesses,” she says.

Just as she thanks her mentors for giving her the push she needed through her early career, Lyne thinks graduates today should seek a rewarding career in media.

“If you want to be part of the conversation … If you want to shape how people think about the world … go in to media; it’s a fabulous world,” she says.

Lyne was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL   Please find the series videos here.

Many a business guru is fond of the ironic value of failure. That’s a notion that the boss of one of the biggest ad groups subscribes to, too.

“I’ve always learned more from failure than success,” Starcom MediaVest Group CEO Laura Desmond tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “At times, when people are on the top of the wave, riding it and feeling like nothing can touch them – those are the points in time when you really have to remember, ‘what was it like to be off that wave?’

“Those times make you humble, keep you hungry and keep you focus on the good and the necessary learning and challenges that go in to staying strong in this industry.”

There’s another kind of wave Desmond is riding, and that is the constantly-changing businesses of advertising and technology. The fusion of the two is up-ending the traditional marketing business, and turning geeks in to kingmakers amongst the creative community.

“This industry ain’t for the faint of heart. It’s a tough business today, (with) lots of different pressures,” Desmond reckons.

“Our work inherently is for people who are young or young at heart. You have to have a constant curiosity about what’s going on in the world. You have to be very comfortable with this notion of … moving at an increasingly faster rate of velocity as we see technology empowerment disrupt business models.”

Back when Desmond got started in the industry, her entrance was a sure thing. It started by being an outlier – the only one in her class to back advertising as a positive force for change.

“It’s a story that starts in my freshman year in college,” Desmond recalls. “One of the assignments was to find a popular brand advertising campaign and argue, ‘Was it good for society or not?’

“Out of 20 people in the class, I was the only person to argue that the campaign for Crest toothpaste was actually good for society because the sales funded the investment and research in to fluoride and better products.”

Out of college, Desmond joined advertising company Leo Burnett, which she recalls as “where it was at”: “Creative (messaging) wasn’t the … only thing … (the strategy of) reaching people at the right time and the right place became as important and – arguably, today, 20 years later, more important than the message itself.”

So what are Desmond’s lessons to tomorrow’s generation of ad industry joiners? “Be humble and listen,” she adds. “That’s mostly what I’ve tried to do.”

Desmond  was interviewed in Chicago for Beet.TV by Andy Plesser, executive producer of Beet.TV for the Media Revolutionaries series presented by AOL and Xaxis.  You can find more videos from the series here. 

“When I was a kid, my father ran advertising agencies … I always liked the commercials better than the programming on television,” Lesser tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“When my father had ‘Take your kid to work’ day, I would go in and meet his colleagues at the advertising agencies. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘This is the coolest job in the world’. Advertising agencies then were the hottest business, in the 80s. His colleagues were the smartest, wittiest, funniest people I knew. I grew up thinking, ‘I want to be in advertising just like my dad’.”

In a sense, that’s just what Lesser has done. Launched by WPP and GroupM in 11 countries across North America, Europe and Australia in June 2011, Xaxis is a global digital media platform that connects advertisers and publishers to audiences across all addressable channels.

In short, Xaxis is driving forward “programmatic” advertising, that thorny collection of technology platforms that help better target, plan and trade online advertising.

Xaxis is not Lesser’s first advertising foray, of course. In 2008, he created Media Innovation Group, an integrated data management, targeting and ad delivery platform for media agencies.

But things weren’t always so upbeat. “In 2001, all of that came crashing down and I lost my job,” Lesser says. That job was as consultant to ill-fated digital ad group iXL, which bit the dust in the dot.com bust but which ended up part of Razorfish.

“It felt like all the momentum we built up came crashing down,” Lesser remembers. “But I turned that in to an opportunity – I decided it was a good time to go back to business school. By the time I good out, things had partially recovered.”

Now Lesser believes today’s college-leavers should look to the ad industry for a great career journey.

“In the early 90s, everyone wanted to be an investment banker – that’s not the case anymore,” he tells Beet.TV. “People in school are looking for jobs where they feel they can do the job, make lots of money and be around smart people.

“There’s no better industry than the programmatic industry to do that. These are some of the smartest people in the world, it’s a very fast-changing environment, we’re literally reinventing the advertising business.”

Lesser was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL   Please find the series videos here.

]]> https://dev.beet.tv/2015/08/pittman-iheartmedia.html Thu, 27 Aug 2015 15:49:20 +0000 http://www.beet.tv/?p=35052 Now the chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, Inc., Bob Pittman got his start in the media business as a 15-year-old disc jockey in Mississippi, where he grew up.

Motivated to earn money so he could take airplane flying lessons, he first applied to the local men’s clothing store and then tried to get a job bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. When that failed, he walked into the local radio station, where the owner asked him to read some wire copy into a tape recorder.

“He goes, ‘That’s good enough, go to New Orleans and get your third class radio telephone operator’s license, and you’re hired.’ And that began my career,” says Pittman in an interview with Beet.TV. He’s held a variety of jobs in the media industry, from co-founding MTV to being COO of America Online, Inc. (later AOL Time Warner).

After his first break, Pittman worked as a disc jockey in Milwaukee and Detroit before getting an opportunity to program a radio station in Pittsburgh at age 19. Then he was hired by NBC in Chicago, and, at 23, he was transferred to WNBC, the flagship station, in New York.

Asked about his greatest career setback, he says he believes there’s no such thing, and you only learn and grow by doing.

“In our place we preach, at iHeart, that mistakes are the byproduct of innovation. If you’re going to try something new, there’s no way you’re going to think it through on paper,” he says.

Considering the future of the business five or six years down the road, Pittman thinks it’s going to continue to be transformed by data.

“It’s going to look very data-driven, it’s going to look very consumer-centric,” he says. “It’s going to be a wonderful mix of the math, which is the quantitative stuff, and the magic, which is the creativity.”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Pittman was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

“I was the only one of 19 that didn’t have an MBA, so I must have faked a passion for advertising pretty good, but it was a great lucky stroke,” says Bell in an interview with Beet.TV.

From 2003 to 2005, Bell was CEO of IPG, which had acquired True North, where he had the top job, and he’s seen adland undergo a great deal of consolidation and other transformations during a career that spans five decades.

Bell started his career on the media side, and that involved “spreadsheets, cranking numbers and super menial tasks like hand collation of presentation decks,” he says. But a few short years later, at 27, he wound up an agency CEO after his boss died.

He considers his greatest career accomplishment the shift “from thinking of myself as an individual performer with talent to an igniter of people’s talents.”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Bell was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

“If someone were to watch me in any given day, I still read scripts for television shows, I still make calls on development, and yet in the next minute I may be dealing with a computer issue or a technology issue or a trading issue,” says Gotlieb, GroupM’s chairman and a legend in the media business, in an interview with Beet.TV. “And you don’t get to do that in most businesses.”

Reflecting on his career, Gotlieb, who founded MediaVest in 1993, says he’s fortunate not to have had any horrific business setbacks. However, earlier in his career he focused on business at the expense of his personal life, though he’s had ample time to make up for it with his wife and daughter.

“With parents it doesn’t work that way because once they’re gone you don’t get a do-over,” he says. “So that’s the one thing that I’ve probably failed at.”

Looking to the future, Gotlieb says the ad business will be much more performance-based than it is today, focused on outcomes instead of media delivery. Instead of broad-scale attribution modeling, census-level attribution calculations will be the norm.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Gotlieb was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

Gotlieb will be the keynote speaker at Beet.TV’s November summit on addressable TV advertising. 

“You all were well-mannered and good friends enough to not say it too loudly to me, but I did feel it,” Perlis tells Beet.TV in this video interview. Five years on, Perlis reckons things are going pretty well.

Perlis had already enjoyed senior-level positions in some of the top media houses in the US before he decided to become a venture capitalist. In the 80s and 90s, he had been GQ publisher, Playboy president, TVSM president, Runner’s World and Men’s Health publisher. Then, as the media bubble burst, in 2001, he joined SoftBank Capital as a general partner. However, the challenges of rebooting a media brand called him back after nine years in finance to run the venerable business publisher Forbes.

When Perlis came aboard, the wind in media land was blowing back to charging for digital properties. But, as Perlis told me at the time, despite Forbes’ high-level audience, the forbes.com site was to remain free to achieve scale. The success of the site’s contributor model since seems to attest to the digital rejuvenation of the business under Perlis.

“Our digital business is much, much bigger than our traditional business,” he tells Beet.TV. “We are one of the few traditional iconic print brands to travel over the land to digital.”

“(I aimed) to show an outsider with an empathy and affinity for the mission, for the product and history and Forbes could run the company…. and transform it in to a digital business and make it a global company with tech at its centre.”

Beside carrying Forbes’ own staff editorial, forbes.com’s BrandVoice makes money by running sponsored posts and the site takes contributions from independent field experts.

That story attracted interest from a new Hong Kong investment group that last year purchased a majority stake in Forbes Media. “My team is in tact, the mission is in place and is now really well funded,” says, gleefully.

So what does the publishing landscape look like today, and how will it change in the next decade?

“The current maelstrom around the mix of passion and science is going to sort itself out,” Perlis says.

“It feels so much today like you either need to get on the technology path or down the creativity and content path. I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive, they’re mutually inclusive.”

It seems like at the confluence of creativity and technology is where Forbes has managed to find the ingredients to pursue its digital business growth.

Not that the media business looks like slowing down any. According to Perlis: “Every day, it feels like there’s a freight train coming at you.” It’s a journey he looks like jumping aboard for.

Perlis was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, chairman of Xaxis and president of WPP Digital.  The taping took place in Cannes.  This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries.  The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. 

Concurrent with the three-way union that formed Omnicom was the merger of Doyle Dane Bernbach, a New York agency, and Needham Harper Worldwide, which had its roots in Chicago and was fundamentally a Midwestern business.

“Trying to put those two together to create what is now DDB Worldwide was a real task,” says Reinhard, who had been Needham’s CEO, in an interview with Beet.TV. “I had some good people helping me, but there were also some people who were against it.”

A popular line of thinking at the time was that Omnicom was formed out of greed, and it had nothing to do with client service. But Reinhard says he had seen the writing on the wall: that consolidation was already well underway. There would be room for boutique agencies but “not so much in the middle ground.”

“Clients were going to need service all over the world,” he says. And creating Omnicom ensured that it would be possible.

Reinhard is interviewed by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President or WPP Digital.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP. Please visit this page to see more segments. 

Swartz began his career in 1984 as a reporter with The Wall Street Journal after graduating from Harvard. Then he served as an editor on the Journal’s Page One staff from 1989 to 1991.

“Like a lot of folks of my generation, I went in through journalism,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I was influenced by my fascination with the Watergate case. It led me to think that being a journalist is something that has great social responsibility.”

But Swartz’ executive career got started when, in 1995, he was named president and CEO of SmartMoney, a magazine venture Hearst and the Journal launched four years earlier with Swartz as founding editor.

He went on to be EVP and then president of Hearst Newspapers, before being named president and CEO of Hearst in its entirety in June 2013. That puts Swartz in charge of a multi-media empire. But his position is one he credits with following his early passion.

“Doing things you’re passionate about really works,” he says. “I got my start as a newspaper reporter – it’s because that’s what I was most interested in. That led to so many other things.

“How does one lead to another? When I was getting out of college, being a reporter was what I was most excited about. I did it, I loved it and it’s worked out.”

For a time, it didn’t look like it would. Swartz ran Hearst Newspapers during the economic turmoil of 2008 to 2010, when papers suffered a battering as advertisers pulled back on funding.  In 2009, Hearst turned its Seattle Post-Intelligencer web-only.

But Swartz says it was a challenge the company rode out.

“We did a lot of intelligent cost-cutting that did not involve taking journalists off or cutting the quality of the newsprint,” he recalls. “We focused on our culture and people, making sure we supported each other through difficult times.”

Now those changes have been made, the overall industry has stabilized to flat fortunes or more muted declines, with Swartz says Hearst’s papers have shown profit for four straight years.

As the media landscape swirls around us, Hearst is making bets on a digital future not just by reinventing its own properties but also by investing in targets like Vice Media, BuzzFeed and AwesomenessTV. Latest rumors are that the company is working on a special ecommerce project with Snapchat.

Swartz was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, chairman of Xaxis and president of WPP Digital.  The taping took place in New York.  This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries.  The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. 

However, today’s top creative directors probably wouldn’t be showing off TV work.

“It would be a cool idea that somehow got communicated or executed in either an existing channel, a non-traditional channel, or actually a channel that we created,” says Jeffrey in an interview with Beet.TV. At the end of last year, he stepped down as JWT’s worldwide CEO after 11 years in the job.

And while data has upended the process of conceptualizing and executing campaigns in many respects, sometimes providing an overwhelming amount of research and insights to make sense of, Jeffrey sees it as an enabler of creativity.

“It actually gives creative people more to work with,” he says.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Jeffrey was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

Also in this segment about careers, Wenda Harris Millard, COO of powerhouse media consultancy MediaLink, shares her enthusiasm for the business which she sees at the crossroads of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.   She talks about entrepreneurial opportunities inside both large and small companies and touts the unique acceptance of failure in the business.

And finally in this segment is Shelly Lazarus, Chairman Emeritus of Ogilvy & Mather, talks about the unique personalities and excitement of the advertising industry.

These three executives are featured in the Media Revolutionaries,  a 50-part series with leaders in the adtech, media and advertising industries.  These are excerpts from the series. The interviews were conducted by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft.

Comcast has been expanding its addressable technology via acquisitions including the recent one of Visible World.

She lays out her vision in this segment taped last month at the Cannes Lions Festival.

The video is part of the Media Revolutionaries series presented by Xaxis and Microsoft.   Interviewing her is David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.