In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, D’Angelo says he’s had “quite a number of interesting conversations about this and in preceding months where people will want to segment with a very hard line between performance marketing and brand marketing.

“And I think there’s a bit of an analogy also between digital marketing and analog marketing,” D’Angelo adds. “Those two things don’t exist in two kind of separate universes.”

In “very traditional advertising and marketing,” it was always about performance. “We were always trying to elicit a response from consumers.”

What’s different from half a century ago is that “the response was somewhat delayed and you didn’t have the immediate return path and ability for interactivity with consumers.”

D’Angelo believes that if marketers can maintain “that kind of holistic vision that there are points on the scale, I think that’s incredibly healthy.”

When it comes to campaign KPI’s, he notes that the vast proportion of P&G’s consumer packaged-goods sales still occur in brick-and-mortar stores.

“I think the key for us is to find ever concrete KPI’s that we can begin to measure consumer response. Whether that’s quality visits to our websites, appointments with beauty advisors in department stores or clicking to download a coupon. If we can continue to move along that spectrum I think we’re going to be in a good place.”

In a similar vein, D’Angelo talks about the “big bifurcation” between Game Of Thrones-like, extended long-form content “that plays out over a number of years” and very short video content on the other end of the scale.

“I think as advertisers, we should be inspired by that because the traditional workhorse of the thirty-second or the fifteen-second commercial I think is coming under scrutiny. I think we have to respond to that as advertisers and take note of the fact that consumers will want to be much more flexible in terms of how they’re consuming their video content and that we need to respond to that in kind.”

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tariq Mahmoud, Roku head of international sales and strategy, describes a disconnect he expects will be closed in the next few years.

‘There’s this delta right now between OTT viewing and OTT ad spend,” Mahmoud says. “That will get closer and closer over time. Just like we saw in digital over the last five years, I think we’ll see that in TV as well. Ad spend on OTT … will catch up to viewership on OTT.”

His comments come as just-published analysis by Strategy Analytics shows how Roku’s lead for connected TV device adoption is accelerating. More than 30% of the connected TV devices sold in the US in Q1 2019 were Roku devices, it says…

And the observation is interesting. eMarketer forecasts OTT viewing reaching another 1.7% of the US population by 2021…

But Winterberry Group sees US OTT advertising spend slowing, from 42% in 2018 to 20% in 2019…

That illustrates the need for OTT ad spending to catch up to OTT viewing.

Roku is well positioned. An attractive pricepoint, a simple proposition and integration in some TV sets is seeing Roku pull away from the rest of the pack, according to Strategy Analytics.

There are now more than 41 million Roku-based devices in use, including Roku media streamers and Roku-based smart TVs, accounting for 15.2% of all media streaming devices.

Roku now has a 36% lead over the next major platform, Sony PlayStation, in terms of devices in use. The report predicts that this lead will stretch to 70% by the end of the year, largely as a result of the success of Roku’s smart TV partner strategy.

Mahmoud says: “In Q1 of this year alone, we reached 29 million active accounts, which was 2 million more than the quarter before that, 9 billion hours of total hours streaming, relative to about 25 billion last year in total, 9 billion just of Q1, so our growth is tremendous.”

So, what is Roku doing to win advertising?

The outfit holds first-party data on its users in unique identifiers it calls RIDAs, helping facilitate targeted advertising. Earlier this year, Adobe Ad Cloud began matching marketers’ own audience segments to RIDAs, meaning buyers who use Adobe as a demand-side platform (DSP) can now end up buying Roku ads more easily.

Roku also offers 15- and 30-second video commercials but also background wallpaper sponsorships, sponsored content hubs or advertiser-funded free movie nights.

Twelve months ago, Roku launched a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page

But Jakob Nielsen is having the time of his life.

In 2017, WPP’s GroupM launched Finecast, aiming to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”, beginning in the UK and since launching in Australia.

Now Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen says the outfit will launch in another country this coming September.

Having launched in the UK, the unit is up to 51 people and has also set up in Australia.

“We are starting to really scale,” says Nielsen – of both Finecast and the addressable ecosystem in general. “Now it feels like there’s a shift this year.”

Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data.

It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.

What are the right ingredients for the addressable TV facilities recipe? “You need to have a lot of data people, a lot of technology people, lots of TV people,” Nielsen says, speaking with MTM co-founder Jon Watts for this interview.

“They find better solutions for our clients and that’s what we think our job is.”

Not just people, but also technology. Finecast has built some of its own, but is happy to use software from the likes of FreeWheel, AT&T, Amobee and others, what Nielsen calls the “plumbing” for TV 2.0.

But getting there isn’t easy. Though advanced TV advertising may be hitting a kind of scale, it is relative to the dominance of the overall linear market – and it is a slog.

“(It is) enormously complicated, very fragmented, no measurements, many, many systems to connect to,” Nielsen acknowledges. “And that will slow down the adoption of addressable TV. That’s why we are where we are now and we won’t grow as much as most people want to grow because it’s complex. It’s difficult to understand.”

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Donohue explains how data “opens up everything in the creative process, from start to finish. It’s all about personalized experiences for the consumer.”

She sees an industry facing “a ton of transformation, and to a certain degree there’s pressure on that transformation.”

But on the other side “there’s just so much enthusiasm for that change. What’s possible is amazing. And what we can do to build consumer experiences is very powerful and so you see a lot of optimism from people.”

Asked by interviewer Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, about the challenges agencies face in mastering data and technology, she admits those haven’t traditionally been core competencies. “Agencies are historically a service-based business. However, there are lots of industries that have had to change and pivot from what their core business is.”

Spine was created by Publicis in the fall of 2017 as a team of 3,500 engineers, data scientists, analysts and tech leaders to serve as a platform that helps brands to target specific individuals, as Advertising Age reports.

“At the core of it what we’re really trying to do is foster both the marketing transformation and the business transformation side of it. In the center of that is the consumer,” Donohue says.

“Clients are very rich with data. It’s usually not that they don’t have data, it’s that their data is housed in silos and it’s not connected. So we help them very much with that.”

If agencies understand their clients’ growth objectives they can determine which consumers they need to talk to. “And that helps us ideate. Even at the ideation stage data can be very informative. Then as you go into personalization, data can help us create versions, data can help us create sequential messaging and better storytelling and “even start to get the toe in the water of dynamic creative,” Donohue says.

Will there be thousands of creative within the same campaign? “There can be. If we better understand where a specific consumer is in the journey, then we know what message they need to hear at that point in the journey and to move them along to the next phase.”

Donohue isn’t suggesting that such personalization is just around the corner.

“We have all talked about it at length and we all know that it’s going to make sense and it’s going to help both consumers and brands. But there is a lot of work to implementing it, especially when you think about implementing it for global brands.

“Implementing a strategy like that in Russia is very different than the US and it’s very different than Brazil. So I think it’s really going to be focused on how do we take the promise of personalized experiences and be able to implement it sustainably,” Donohue says.

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page.

With the group for 16 years, Mendonça had been president of OMD Worldwide’s EMEA region, responsible for 6,500 marketers running brands like McDonald’s and PepsiCo.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mendonça, now president of Accenture Interactive Operations, says the pace of change is still accelerating.

“The ability to sort of integrate the big desire brand building and the personalization … I think a lot of advertisers are asking us that they want to do both,” she observes.

“As more and more (media) touch points (become) shoppable, it’s incredibly important that I take some of their expertise and being able to almost truncate that purchase funnel so that you’ve literally got desire building, demand generation, and conversion happening in a matter of minutes – for example, on the Instagram platform. There’s a lot of interest around that.”

Mendonça is talking about the emergence of features inside many media channels that don’t just support the delivery of messaging that could spark purchase consideration later down the line, they also enable that purchase to be completed there and then.

That is increasingly the case with some interactive TV ads, and it is the case inside Instagram photos as of 2019.

And, by the sounds of it, this isn’t just a theory. Speaking with MTM’s Jon Watts at Cannes, Mendonça says brands are all over the opportunity.

“A plethora of advertisers are all searching for a new model,” she adds. “I didn’t think that the sort of groundswell of interest would be that intense.

“The moment we went out to market, the moment we said that we were in the business of activation and experience activation, then a lot of clients started calling. So now I’m really trying to build a global offering to keep up with that demand.”

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page

“It’s not in-housing, it’s part of a much broader trend,” the former CEO of WPP says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Sorrell is now Executive Chairman of S4 Capital, which is described as building “a new era, digital platform for global, multi-national, regional, local and millennially-driven clients.” When he looks at the six biggest agency holding companies he sees an “adapt or die” scenario.

“They have no choice. The six of them are like sort of super tankers. They’re not agile enough, they’re not fast enough, they’re not flexible enough,” Sorrell says.

He traces client retrenchment to the days when Lehman Brothers was failing and the world financial system was on a precipice. One recent example Sorrell cites is the acquisition by McDonald’s of Dynamic Yield Ltd., which specializes in in personalization and decision logic technology, as a means of “trying to take back control.”

Other advertiser concerns include platforms controlling data, “proving to be a block to the direct consumer relationship.” Agencies, meanwhile, “are worried about incumbency instead of being totally transparent and willing to experiment.”

The net result among marketers is “the propensity to experiment has risen to a level that I’ve not seen in fifty or the so years that I’ve been in the industry,” says Sorrell. “In-housing is one of the means of experimenting. We’re not just seeing it on programmatic, we’re seeing it on content creation too.”

When agencies negotiate fee structures, “The level of directs for a new company with a clean sheet of paper is totally different than an established company, a legacy company. With indirects it’s light years difference. You don’t have indirects in a startup.

“They are strapped. It’s like a straight jacket. So when the procurement people from the agency go to negotiate with the procurement people at the client, they’re locked into a structure that the client’s not willing to accept. So that’s the fundamental problem. You have to have a totally new structure.”

He references his trip last year to the Burning Man festival, which is held in the desert in Nevada, as an allegory for what agencies are facing. “It’s creative reconstruction or destruction. Every year eighty thousand people build the burning man, they build the temple and they burn it down at the end of the week and they start again.”

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page