While a lot of progress has been made in the last several years, “there’s still too many people that want to own their own solutions, own their own data,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to CES 2019. “So we’re seeing a lot of advanced television silos pop up, which makes it more challenging and less simple to aggregate that back up for marketers.”
Formerly the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, Castree took on his new role earlier this month, as AdExchanger reports. The CEO position had been held by Brian Lesser, who joined AT&T in 2017 to build an advertising and analytics platform for the data and content assets the company would acquire from Time Warner.
Castree sees too many publishers that want to create their own end-to-end solution comprising data, inventory and technology “and sell it bundled in a package.” Hence GroupM’s focus on collaboration, consortiums and a “disaggregation of technology, inventory and data so we can re-aggregate more bespoke solutions for individual advertisers.”
Judging by market mix modeling and performance attribution, “video is still the top of the performance stack” but it’s a fragmented world of premium video distribution.
Stressing the importance of scale, particularly for mass-marketed products, advertisers can’t always target their way to growth, according to Castree. Within that scale lies the ability to add targeting layers and dynamic creative optimization to find “more interesting, nuanced and targeted ways to reach certain segments of those audiences.”
Asked about marketers’ understanding the value proposition behind addressable and other forms of audience targeting, given the incremental cost of creative, data and technology, Castree adds, “I think some advertisers understand it very well and others don’t. Everybody understands it conceptually.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“They’re trying to pull off something really unique, but I can tell you that the 200 or so people who are at this conference really are leaning in and really want it to happen,” Criteo’s COO says.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the conference, Spilman talks about the positive effect that speakers like Ariana Huffington and others have had on both minds and bodies.
“To get up this morning and hear [CEO] Brian Lesser unveiling Xandr, what they’re looking to accomplish, is really inspiring and compelling.”
While most people think of AT&T as a legacy telephone company, its ambition to become “a modern media company” represents “just such the right time with the right message,” says Spilman, who has been in advertising and media for nearly 30 years.
Contemplating the attention spectrum, she references the term “CPA” for continuous partial attention. “It really goes to show how important relevance in advertising is. Because in this world of fragmentation and fragmented attention, how do you market your products and services to this audience who has partial attention at any given time across devices?
“We’ve talked for years about addressable TV and measurability and how all these things are going to converge,” Spilman says. “And now with this combination of content, distribution, technology and marketing coming together, we have a shot. And that’s just really, really exciting and inspiring to me for somebody who’s been in this industry for a very, very long time.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“There has been a lot of talk over the past few years and many companies, partners and vendors have done a lot of great strides. But there hasn’t yet been a consolidating at a realistic level,” says a4 President Paul Haddad.
“There’s a lot of theory in there, putting the pieces together and making a national addressable TV solution scalable enough for advertisers. AT&T has taken a step with tangible footprints that are really addressable today and brought the best of the best, put them together,” Haddad adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Xandr Relevance Conference.
Launched in the spring of 2018, a4 was the culmination of Altice’s acquisitions of Cablevision, Audience Partners and Placemedia, as AdExchanger reports.
“AT&T has a very similar yet much grander vision and it’s very well aligned with ours. So we are helping AT&T on the national TV addressability aspect and in return they’re helping us on the national addressability from a digital perspective,” says Haddad.
A4 is Xandr’s addressable TV partner in the New York market. Xandr also announced a deal this week to aggregate and sell the national addressable TV advertising inventory of Frontier Communications.
“We are bringing our local addressable TV inventory to the party and AT&T is putting all these pieces together of their footprint and our footprint and creating a scaled national TV solution for their clients.”
Haddad says that when he sat down with Xandr CEO Brian Lesser to figure out “how can we bring these pieces together,” it was easier than expected.
“It didn’t take long for us to figure out that this is real, this is something that we could have up and running in the next couple of months,” Haddad says. “We decided that this is the right thing for Altice, this is the right thing for AT&T, this is the right thing for the industry. And we’re hoping that the results will show themselves in the next quarter or two quarters.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“There’s no question that lots of folks in the marketing and media world would like more alternatives to Google and Facebook, and AT&T by bringing a lot of extraordinary assets is the latest to present a credible assembly of important capabilities,” Rothenberg says.
One of the many invitation-only attendees of the Xandr Relevance Conference, The IAB chief was scheduled to moderate a panel discussion titled Consumers’ Choice: The DTC Revolution. It was based in part on the IAB’s “Rise Of The 21st Century Brand Economy” study.
“I think the elite attendance here at The Relevance Conference is an example of the interest, the hunger for an entity that can do what AT&T is promising to do,” Rothenberg says.
That’s based on what he considers to be AT&T’s “world class” assets encompassing entertainment, news, distribution, data, privacy and a “great embedded understanding of data security.”
Add them all together and “you’ve got a company that puts together a lot of remarkable capabilities that can be brought to bear on behalf of both consumers and businesses at the same time.”
Rothenberg has words of praise for AT&T management in the walkup to the Xandr unveil this week. “I think the fact that they’ve spent a good solid year planning and building before coming out with public announcements was incredibly smart.”
He expresses a special affinity for Xandr CEO Brian Lesser and CMO Kirk McDonald, both “colleagues” and in McDonald’s case a former IAB board member.
“I think everybody here wishes them well and expects that they will do extraordinarily well to help build not just a new media entity, but a new media communications and advertising industry in the United States and elsewhere,” Rothenberg says.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“I’m thrilled to be attending the conference in the next week or two,” she says. “I want to hear Brian’s vision from him and his team,” she adds in a reference to Brian Lesser, who is CEO of the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics unit. “I think it’s going to be so exciting.”
Speciale, who is President of Advertising Sales at Turner, is already in sync with Lesser and his people, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.
“We’ve been working together for the past few weeks collaborating with both our teams,” she says. “And what’s so exciting is that both his side and our side, our visions have been so much aligned. So I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say and what our clients have to say.”
Like many others, Speciale is keen on knowing how AT&T plans to use customer data for better targeting of ads across media. “At Turner, we’ve always put the consumer at the center. We have been doing that for years.”
She talks about the company’s efforts to reduce commercial load “because the experience is so important to us of how our viewer really feels, making content more relevant, targeting obviously is definitely something that we have been focusing on over these years.”
With advanced targeting data, “I think addressability is what’s really going to be popping. That’s really where our vision has been for the past few years.
“It has to start with audience, that’s what we’ve been focusing on, now getting the data from AT&T is going to make that even more rich and viable and the next portion of that is going to be addressability.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Amongst other stipulations, the European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) measures include:
The measures apply to any global company processing EU citizens’ data, with penalties of up to 4% of global turnover. Steps data handling and data processing companies should take include conducting risk assessments, appointing data protection officers and overhauling policies and systems.
So, with less than a year ticking on the compliance clock, how are advertisers and their agencies responding to the new regimen?
At a panel debate convened with Beet.TV, four agency data executives said GDPR compliance was a big deal, but they framed privacy regulation in the context of consumer aversion to “creepy” ad tactics generally…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“There are a couple of things (clients) probably miss on… an understanding that there is a true impact of what many of these regulations are, and how the EU and the US are not necessarily going to be in sync.
“(Clients) are not at the point where they’re willing to have a conversation around, ‘If someone’s giving me data, what am I giving in exchange?’ It’s going to get harder to justify bombarding consumers with impressions that they don’t need, just because you know who they are. Less is more. That is a far more fundamental shift that has the come – privacy is one part of it.”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser
“We have more conversations about how advertising can be relevant engaging without being creepy… there very rarely is (a breach of privacy). Part of our job as agencies is to ensure clients don’t find themselves getting sued for breaching privacy laws.
“Privacy is not an issue for our clients so much as following the law; that’s never been an issue – it’s more about … using data for good to make the consumer experience better.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray
“If we use some insight about an audience to personalise a communication … the trust is there because you’re using the data in a way that there’s a value exchange.
“As we start to use data across more parts of the agency and client, there’s an education that has to happen, so that people that haven’t necessarily been handling data previously and are now having data conversations know the implications and are trained on how to handle that data or send an email without being in breach.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“I think clients should own all their own ad-tech contracts, agencies should operate them, and they should be fully transparent.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For many, that has meant a promotion for the executives who once ran outlier data divisions within an agency but who now are calling the shots.
What changes when that happens, and what have those people learned along the way? In this recorded panel discussion at Cannes Lions, four agency executives opened up. Here is what they said…
Brian Lesser, CEO, GroupM North America (previous: CEO, GroupM’s Xaxis):
“It’s a sign of the times that people with data, analytics, platforms backgrounds are now being put in a position to manage media agencies.
“For me, it’s a matter of making sure our agencies have appropriate platforms… make sure we are data-informed at every step along the way … activation across all channels.”
Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer, IPG Mediabrands (previous: president, IPG’s Cadreon):
“In this role, I’ve started to see the reality of the imbalance between planning and buying. Planning tools are activated by data sets which are still not quite where they should be.
“There are silos being created which are legacies from the past, you need to clean them to make some of the tech and systems work. That’s all I’ve been focused on for the last there of four months since starting the role.”
Doug Ray, product and innovation president, Dentsu Aegis Network (previous: CEO, Carat):
“I’ve always been on the planning, strategy and management side, not so much on the buying side. What has made great plans and strategies … is human insight, to have a deep understanding of customers. Clients are looking for the human truth, the insight to help them with better outcomes on their media.”
Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Hearts & Science (previous: CEO, Omnicom’s Annelect):
“We under-leveraged the audience creation and syndication side of it. The buying side of programmatic is actually the least important side of programmatic. The three most important sides… are the audience creation, syndication and also using some of the new ad-serving capabilities like an Innovid … to do the orchestration of the creative assets in the product.”
Those were some of the conclusions of a panel of ad agency technology executives, who debated the topics in a session recorded by Beet.TV.
In the panel, the quartet spoke about the problem of inconsistent data taxonomies and how advertisers can make hay where consumers are already buying.
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“When I say an audience segment is ‘somebody who is interested in fashion’, am I defining it the same way across these different datasets, are the taxonomies similar? If they are not, then, even if it’s deterministic, it fails, because I’m actually not reaching the audience I think I am.
“How quickly do you refresh this data? If my data is a year old, should I really be using that or not?”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“We’ll never get to a category standard because the industry thrives on information asymmetry – everybody wants to know more than their competitor.
“We have to tell (clients) things they don’t already know about their own consumer but also model out their potential consumer. You’re seeing a cottage industry crop up to answer these questions.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“The mobile device is the gateway to people’s passions. We can instantaneously learn about a product, the price and buy that product at that moment in time. If there’s one thing that will continue to transform the way our clients market, it will be mobile.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Often, the question is framed as an “either-or” in which Netflix would have to choose between continuing its current premium SVOD model or ripping it up in favour of ad funding.
Previously, Ampere Analysis’ Richard Broughton has told Beet.TV Netflix could make up to $8bn a year from advertising if it switched over entirely, but would have to accept churn would knock off some of the gain, as angry consumers quit.
But one ad agency executive doesn’t think the choice has to be so dichotomous. Speaking in this panel debate recorded by Beet.TV, GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser said an ad model for Netflix could be a lot more intrinsic and less disruptive.
“The question is not necessarily, ‘Is Netflix thinking about how to infuse advertising in to its model?’,” Lesser said.
“Netflix is, I would bet, having conversations about how big-brand advertisers can get involved in content creation so that they can have a more effective engagement with their consumers.
“I think, over time, all over-the-top content, with Netflix being the gold standard, will have to be financed in some way by what we, traditionally, know now as the advertising business.”
Also in the panel, ad agency tech and data executives discussed whether the modern-day precision capability to target only customers known to be in-market for a particular brand or product will mean an exclusive focus on performance advertising, at the expense of traditional top-of-funnel or brand-based advertising of the like commonly seen on TV.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That was the main question on the lips of moderator Jay Sears, the SVP of MasterCard’s advertising intelligence, when he chaired a panel discussion on the topic on the shores of the Cannes Lions festival of creativity.
In The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel, Sears questioned a line-up of agency leaders:
In this enlightening, 46-minute recording of the panel, they touch on a variety of topics, including:
Enjoy the full, insight-packed video, or look out for our individual segments.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Now, slowly, as new attribution technology hots up, brands are being promised the ability the ability to close the loop.
But, whilst, to many, this evolution appears to be driven by brands, agency tech chiefs, in this Beet.TV recorded panel discussion, say some clients have a long way to go. Here is a flavour of what they said…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“Depending on who in the client organisation you talk to, you tend to get get a couple of different definition of ‘What is an outcome?’
“There is a disconnect in the conversations you have in procurement (and the brand). There is a desire in one part of the organisation to drive toward the outcome – and the other part doesn’t necessarily believe that that is measurable or comparable across a wider set of the ecosystem. There needs to be an alignment.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“You get what you measure. If you’ve got a procurement department, they’re looking at ‘How do we extract cost and drive down that cost? … If I can buy what I bought before more cheaply, the thesis is the return on investment will be improved’.
“There is a race to the bottom. It can only be bought so cheaply before you’re starting to fundamentally disrupt the quality of that inventory.
“We’d like to change the conversation and look at the value-in versus cost-out. It may cost you a higher CPM – but, if the response from the consumer is greater, then the overall value of that media buy is going to be better for that client.”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“The technology would be easy to solve. The most powerful media companies right now have a better understanding of consumers than many advertisers do – they want to hold on to that leverage, they want to define their own metrics, they want to grade their own homework. We’re left with Nielsen, which is imperfect at best.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“A lot of clients believe there’s one true god and that god is Nielsen – and that is wrong.
“If you’re an application … you have to install the Nielsen app in to your SDK, and there’s not a lot of room for that. We think 40% of all video or content that could be measured is not. That’s a big problem.
“The great thing about programmatic … and fusing different panels … in to a DMP is, you can actually start to look at the causality of marketing.”
In this discussion panel recorded by Beet.TV, ad agency tech executives say many clients are capable of moving forward – but they are caught between two worlds…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“The newer companies look at performance (marketing) very differently and they’re far more open to restructuring and not having silos. They’re very good at lower-funnel, they’re structured internally to do that.
“Where they struggle is, in many cases, they see that as a battle for market share, as opposed to figuring out, ‘How am I going to get to the top of the funnel?’”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“Market-mix modelling has been the holy grail of channel allocation fora very long time. When you come from the new school, you say, ‘Market-mix modelling is looking through the rear-view mirror, that can’t possibly be right.’
“You get part of your media plan using real-time media to buy and optimise, and part of your plan that’s looking backwards. The answer is not either-or, frankly – tis’ about updating that model more often.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“The big problem with the market-mix models right now is the competitive data set which powers most of those are powered by Nielsen, and 75% of Nielsen’s money comes from the TV networks – so the mixed models themselves are totally based on TV and don’t take in to account what’s really happening in digital.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“We’re working with a lot of our clients on, ‘How do you bring those two worlds (clients’ media team and and customer data team) together? How do you apply the precision and audience understanding that those groups had, how do you leverage the understanding that those CRM or ecommerce teams and leverage similar types of data in a mass-media ecosystem?’ That’s evolving, we’re able to apply some of those principles in the mass-media space.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM north America CEO Brian Lesser explains the group is responding a world in which the agency business model is fast-changing, now that brands can increasingly see consumers’ purchase events and link them to ad exposure.
“We’ve been able to measure the effects of online advertising directly to sales for a very long time – it’s just been expensive in the past,” Lesser says. “Ten years ago, we could take one digital impression and match it to a product bought in-store. The data has become ubiquitous. Today, we’re closer to being able to do that at massive scale.”
Agencies were already coming under pressure from clients to introduce a more transparent charging structure.
The emergence of this attribution technology is another reason why agencies are coming under pressure to change.
“We in the marketing services business can start to change our business model,”Lesser says. “We can move more closely to a performance-based model… generating actual sales or test drives based on awareness we drive online and in linear advertising.
“We’re aggressively changing our organisation structure, how we service clients,”
“We are replatforming our agencies so that all them are planning and activating based on real-time audience data that we have in [m]Platform. We’re combining MEC and Maxus in to one global network… that makes us more efficient … it broadens our network and makes that individual company have the scale.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. Where Lesser was a panelist. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“That doesn’t necessarily mean the programmatic that we know and understand today,” Lesser says during a break at the Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “It doesn’t have to be traded in an open marketplace with something like real-time bidding, but I do think eventually all media will be digital and it will be transacted by machines.”
In the meantime, Lesser is tasked with taking the notion of GroupM as a holding company and transforming and modernizing it to be more of a platform company to support media agencies like Mindshare, MEC, MediaCom and Maxus. In other words, it’s no longer good enough just to be the world’s largest buyer of media, as scale itself is not the ultimate solution.
“The notion of scale has changed over time. The intelligent application of scale has meant that we use technology to deliver performance to our clients in terms of the media marketplace,” Lesser observes. “But as the marketplace has gotten more complicated and complex, the intelligent application of scale has to evolve. Now how much you know about a consumer is as important as how much media you buy in the marketplace.”
Promoted last November from his role as CEO of GroupM’s Xaxis division, Lesser is focused on making the right investments and partnerships to guide the continued evolution of GroupM in a complex world of media channels and devices. He points to the creation of Modi Media in the programmatic television space as one example of adapting to where the industry is headed.
“We have a different philosophy within WPP and GroupM than some of our traditional competitors in that we’ve always invested quiet significantly in data and technology,” Lesser says. “My role, knowing platforms and programmatic as I do, is to continue that evolution and continue to invest in our technologies to support our clients’ performance.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>Succeeding Lesser at Xaxis as CEO will be Brian Gleason , CEO of Xaxis Americas.
Rob Norman, the global Chief Digital Officer of GroupM Worldwide, will have the added post of Chairman of GroupM North America.
Clark announced he would stepping down earlier this week.
More on the announcement can be found in this report on Advertising Age.
Earlier this year, we sat down with Lesser for our series, the Media Revolutionaries. In this segment about his career journey, he is interviewed by Dave Moore, his long time colleague at 24/7 then Xaxis where Moore serves as Chairman. This video is part of series sponsored by Xaxis.
]]>“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.
]]>
The new unit is an amalgam of two acquisitions of ActionX and QuismaX along with existing Xaxis technology. Light Reaction is launching in 20 countries with 300 clients. The new company sells media on a per outcome basis, vs. a more conventional CPM, Lesser explains.
Light Reaction is being headed by Xaxis veteran Paul Dolan.
In other developments, Lesser says that Xaxis is growing its direct business with marketers who work directly with Xaxis. He says the direct business in the U.S. accounts for $75 million in annual revenue.
]]>His comments echoed the sentiments of WPP CEO Martin Sorrell with whom we spoke recently.
Lesser also speaks about the double digit growth of Xaxis this year, the launch and impact of its DMP product and the rise of video which now comprises a majority of the media in the agency’s operations. He also talks about the future of programmatic TV.
]]>“It’s our ambition to not buy any media in an open marketplace,” says Xaxis global CEO Brian Lesser.
“Our clients expects us to give them competitive advantage in the marketplace. By the end of the year, we will be completely off of exchange-traded media – which is the right goal for our clients.”
Lesser spoke with Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more coverage of the festival here.
]]>We interviewed him at the IAB annual leadership meeting.
]]>
Xaxis will package the inventory and sell it based on GRPs, demographics and psychographics rather than online metrics such as clicks or views, said Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser in the Adweek article. Xaxis will rely on data from Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, comScore, and Kantar, and will lean on tech partners Videology and TubeMogul.
Beet.TV spoke to Lesser in June at the Cannes Lions event and he addressed the increasing industry shift to programmatic buying. For more insight into the benefits of programmatic buying, check out this video interview.
]]>“Over the next three to five years, you will see that the majority of digital advertising is being traded through programmatic systems,” Lesser told Beet.TV in this interview during Cannes Lions.
Xaxis, which now manages $400 million in annual spending, exists to target consumers whether they be offline or on one of a plethora of devices. But Lesser acknowledged challenges:
“On some mobile devices, it’s difficult for us to identify audiences in an anonymous way, because we can’t sync up our cookie database. But there are strides being made to develop technologies that sit alongside the cookie or even replace the cookie that will help us identify users across devices in an anonymous and privacy-friendly way.”
Lesser was a participant in a rooftop round-table event at Cannes Lions organized by The Rubicon Project that involved the heads of the major holding company trading desks top executives. Here is a report on session in the AdExchanger.
]]>