But this year’s offering will be much more robust, explains Philip Thomas, CEO of Cannes Lions and head of the events business at Ascential.

The biggest change is that the Lions, the awards themselves, will be back after a two year hiatus.

This year’s digital offering will include the awards along with its judges and winners, a deep dive into the creative “work.”  It’s all part of a yearlong digital pass for the Festival and other content for a $250 subscription.  Thomas says the deep content offering makes the essence of the Festival much more widely accessible.

Of course, the networking at events can’t be fully replicated on line, but Thomas hopes some of the networking and casual meetings will take place in a virtual world enabled by software from Spatial Web.   The plan allows all registered guests to assume an identity or avatar.

The Spatial Web software was used for a virtual party for 700 at  CES ’21 hosted by MediaLink, a division of Ascential.

Speaking of MediaLink, Thomas said that it is working on a plan to mark the festival in New York during the week of June 21, but noted that plans have not been finalized.

Thomas also spoke about the company’s investment in Hudson MX, an enterprise solution for advertising agencies and others to manage inventory and operations.   Ascential is the largest shareholder of Hudson MX.

But, this Saturday, Cannes Lions chairman Phillip Thomas will be roughing it – sleeping out on the cold concrete of New York, like thousands of truly homeless people.

Thomas will be joined by ad industry peers like those from WPP and MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan for World’s Big Sleep Out, a fundraiser that will see businesspeople around the world curl up on sidewalks to raise money and attention for the growing global homelessness problem.

He has already raised more than $4,000 through his JustGiving page, which has made Thomas the number-two individual giver to the cause. Beet.TV readers can help Thomas raise even more money by donating there now.

Money raised by those participating in the US will go to UNICEF USA. Thomas and his peers will join those sleeping at Times Square.

“It was started by a guy in Scotland who decided to do something about homelessness and encouraged people to sleep out for just one night to raise money for homelessness,” Thomas told Beet.TV in this interview recorded at the Beet.TV OpenAP holiday party on Monday night at the iconic Manhattan media watering hole Michael’s.

“He did it for a few years in Scotland and this year he’s doing it in 50 different cities all over the world, including London and here in New York.”

According to a 2005 UN report, 100 million people around the world were homeless. According to the Coalition For The Homeless, 62,391 people in New York were homeless in September 2019, driven primarily by the lack of affordable housing, with the numbers reaching the highest level since the Great Depression o the 1930s.

Focus on sustainability

The sleep-out isn’t the only positive initiative Thomas will engage in over the next year. Also president of events at London-based Ascential, after the media group, formerly known as Emap, he says the forthcoming 2020 Cannes Lions festival will devote a whole day to debating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“We want to focus that attention by having lots of content about the SDGs, have the United Nations speak at the SDG Lions on that Wednesday and we’re partnering with Global Citizen as well to have a big event at the end of the day as well,” he says.

“There are many different conversations throughout the week about things like the SDGs and what our industry can do to help the world. But also there needs to be a lot of other conversations, you know, commercial conversations.

“So we want to try and focus those conversations on one day to get the maximum bang for our buck for it, allowing people to have bigger conversations around other things for the rest of the week.”

Themes fit for a Lion

Thomas’ Lions has revealed the eight themes on which next June’s festival will focus:

1. “Creativity is the business growth engine.”
2. “Creative disruption in commerce”.
3. “Post-purpose: brand accountability and activism.”
4. “Your brand is my experience.”
5. “Looking to 2030: Making your business future-fit.”
6. “Applied creativity: When data, tech and ideas collide.”
7. “Storytelling at scale.”
8. “Let’s go back to brand.”

“It does tie itself to emotional, meant to be viewed live events that create water cooler talk or social moments where people are interacting on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,” adds Callahan, the VP of Audience & Automated Sales. “We feel like the new company is designed for that live happens now, it’s in the moment and it only happens once.”

Whether it’s live linear or live connected-TV, “we feel like that’s the most valuable viewing destination for our team to monetize.”

Fox News is the fuel for the new corporation, driving an estimated 70% of profit, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Heading into another contentious U.S. election cycle should help drive ads and viewing at the network.

Fox’s apps “continue to be extremely strong,” says Callahan. “People are finding Fox Sports Go through baseball season. Football season last year was gangbusters for us.”

Discussing distribution partners, he notes that programmers have typically retained 87% of advertising inventory while MVPD’s and other distribution endpoints get 13%. In its relationship with Hulu, “Fox has owned the ad insertion on ninety percent of the ad inventory within the Hulu footprint.” Even though Fox is no longer a co-owner of Hulu, the streaming service “still represents a great digital footprint for us with their growing number of subscribers.”

Asked about the local TV landscape, Callahan says companies like TEGNA Premion “are growing competitors. There’s a number of different local market makers that are growing into what is really a national footprint at this point. TEGNA Premion, any of those guys are a must watch, a must coordinate with, partner with where appropriate.”

Meanwhile, Sinclair Broadcasting’s purchase of Fox’s 21 regional sports networks from Disney “shows how serious they’re taking regional businesses and building a national footprint on it.”

With regard to the UpFronts this month and the Cannes Lions event in June, Callahan says to expect from Fox “A nimble willingness to partner with brands and agencies in ways that we had not before. It’s a much leaner organization where we can quickly get things up to the top, approved.”

This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion.

At a gathering in Orlando, Cannes Lions and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) convened more than 200 chief marketing officers to inform how a new CMO Growth Council will debate key issues at next year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The Growth Council was formed earlier this year, chaired by P&G’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard, to share best practice. Now things are ramping up again.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Cannes Lions VP of creative excellence, Simon Cook explains how Orlando and the south of France are converging.

“The council was established in June this year, the very first time it took place,” he says. “And that was 25 global CMOs giving up their time to attend a meeting, a very important meeting in Cannes, where they would discuss the future growth of marketing.

“Through a shortlist of priorities, (they) picked five things that they’re going to focus on for the year that are really going to … drive growth in our industry.

“The next tent pole event was here at the ANA. And again, the 25 CMO’s have come together in partnership with Cannes Lions and the ANA, but this time drawing in a wider community of over 200 CMOs, to discuss and to debate, and to contribute their expertise to the cause.

“I think an amazing amount of progress has been achieved in just two days. And I think it’s very rare these people get to meet on a peer to peer basis to discuss some of their challenges, learn from each other, but ultimately come up with a set of actions which are going to push things forward.”

Outcomes will be discussed at next year’s Cannes Lions, which has also tabled another new strand called CLX, in partnership with MediaLink.

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

In a new addition to the advertising festival’s agenda, CLX (“Connect. Learn. Explore”), a new mini-event within the overall programme, will add a series of curated discussion sessions.

CLX is a partnership with media consulting firm, MediaLink, which has been a stablemate of Cannes Lions since its acquisition by Ascential in 2017.

Cannes Lions executive director Louise Benson explains the rationale in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We’re going to be bringing together around 500 of the senior marketers, agency executive, brands, entertainment companies, media companies and technology companies to get together in curated discussion sessions, talking about the future of creativity,” Benson says.

“We’re going to be working with up to eight sponsor partners, who will be coming from the worlds of media, entertainment, and sport. And they’ll be bringing some of the world’s finest content creators to spearhead discussions on how to build experiences, and create the content that consumers really want to spend time with.”

The reasoning is even more interesting. Benson says Cannes Lions “feels that the era of buying eyeballs is coming to an end” and that brands “need to think like entertainment companies in order to really drive the engagement that they’re looking for”.

On two days, CLX will be invite-only, for VIPs only. But from Tuesday to Friday, CLX will be open to all Lions delegates.

Cannes Lions takes place in June 2019. The 2018 trimmed some elements from the programming and made tickets more cost-effective, after feedback from delegates.

This interview was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando.

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

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

Shorter festival

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

Fewer Lions

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

Consultancies pitch up

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

Entries are up

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

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

The festival has long been a Mecca for advertising types – and, increasingly, those from other industries, too.

But, last year, the Wall Street Journal reported ad agencies were cutting costs amid a downturn that was just beginning. At the time, it said WPP wanted to spend 25% less on Cannes attendance, Interpublic planned to shave 10% off its Cannes budget, while Dentsu Aegis was curtailing hiring and pay, citing “market weakness” and “clear signs of a slowdown.”

Arguably, agencies’ position has got worse since then. WPP’s share price has fallen hard in recent weeks.

So Papa is at pains to demonstrate the enduring value of attending Cannes Lions.

“For so long, there is a misconceived view that Cannes Lions is this lavish exercise for an industry that has for many years coped with excesses,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We’re far from it. It’s truly one of the most powerful and prominent investments that anyone in the communications industry makes. The exercise of going to Cannes is transformative.”

Adweek previously reported changes made by Cannes Lions to make the festival smaller and more affordable, including:

• The festival will run for only five days (Monday to Friday, June 18-22) instead of the usual eight days.
• The cost of a Complete delegate pass is being cut by €900.
• The festival will introduce nine content “tracks” that will guide all festival programming as well as the the Lions themselves, which will be grouped under the tracks.
• Three Lions are being retired (Cyber, Integrated and Promo & Activation), while five new Lions are being added.
• More than 120 award subcategories are being removed.

Papa tells Beet.TV: “We stand for four principles around networking, inspiration, learning and celebration. And we cater different opportunities and experiences for each one of those needs.”

He says last year’s experiment, in which attendees needed buy passes to gain access to the hotels and the yacht jettee, will not be repeated.

“Last year, yes, the hotel pass and the harbor pass they were important exercises for us even to understand who is coming and who are the people who are not engaging straight with Cannes Lions,” he said. “This year, we needed the data this year. We won’t do it again.”

Execs from the company will take to the stage at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this coming June, despite typically not attending.

“We’ve got Angela Ahrendts and Tor Myhren,” says festival content director Charlotte Williams in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Angela looks after all the retail stores for Apple and of course Tor is vice president of brand.

“They’ll be on stage to talk about how they’re reinventing retail and we’re really excited about that because it’s the first time they’ve come to Cannes to talk specifically about Apple and the work they do. We’ve had Apple there before Jony Ive a few years ago, but this is much more of a business conversation they’ll be bringing.”

For Williams, Apple’s appearance is just one of the ways she is rebooting Cannes Lions this year.

Williams and her colleagues have split the festival up in to four “tracks” – reach, impact, experience, innovation. She explains the aim is to help attendees “decipher” the Lions:  “It means there’s a bit more rigor involved,” she says.”

That rigor extends to a more foot-forward approach to sourcing speakers and their presentations.

Whilst the festival still takes speaker submissions, Williams says: “This year we’ve been more proactive  in looking out for and reaching out to speakers who we want. We’re curating some of our own content this year.”

Fresh topics are likely to include the role of brands in creativity in an increasingly politicized and polarized world, plus new technology like blockchain.

“We’ve reached a level where we always wanted to be from the beginning on,” says Christian Muche, Co-Founder of the global digital marketing exposition. “I think the level of quality, which is the key word for us, is exceptional.”

The challenge is in the form of having to decide how to allocate two days across a spectrum of topics and personalities.

“That makes it I think very efficient for everybody, but also very difficult over two days you have to choose what you listen for and where you can enter sessions and listen to people,” says Muche. “But the variety of offers to our industry I think is exceptional.”

The success of another DMEXCO can’t be understated in a year when events like the Cannes Lions festival seemed to have reached a tipping point of sorts.

“We never said we need to reach, let’s say, 100,000 visitors in so many years. We’ve never said we reach a couple million square feet of floor space. It’s just happened naturally in terms of how the business is growing, how our industry is growing.”

Some of the growth has come as the result of DEMXCO adapting each year to “new market players who jump into our business more and more from outside of our ecosystem,” Muche adds, citing companies in the Internet of Things space as one example.

He shares credit for the success of the event with its many and varied participants, which have made it a priority to trek to Cologne each year amid a slew of digital marketing events from which to choose.

“This is impressive but it all depends on the involvement of our partners. So it depends on that they engage their leadership to come to Cologne and to go on stage and share their visions.”

This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview as Cannes Lions kicked off, event CEO Phillip Thomas said the biggest recent expansion had come with the addition of Lions Entertainment, meaning a host of new delegates from music, TV and film this year – but other segments may yet be to come.

“I had a number of conversations already this week, one with a big music company who have brought people down for the first time in big numbers,” Thomas said. “There are so many music people here, it is absolutely incredible.”

Today, licensing music to brand campaigns is a growing business for labels, whilst ad buyers increasingly can target listeners through on-demand music services and apps.

But Thomas says Cannes Lions still under-delivers on several other media segments.

“There are quite big areas that we’re not exploring – for instance, sport,” he said. “We don’t really cover that very much. Gaming is another area that we’re not particularly deep in to. People are saying to us, ‘That needs to be part of what you do’.

“We normally finish the festival, take a breath and then pull the learnings from the festival to try to start to build next year.”

The Lions’ 15,000 attendance swells the Cote D’Azur town’s 73,600 population every year, and is only getting larger, as the festival draws in professionals from segments outside its traditional creative agency delegate profile.

“Every year, there’s a huge amount of rumor,” Cannes Lions CEO Philip Thomas revealed to Beet.TV in this video interview. “It starts with the taxi drivers in Cannes saying, ‘You’re going to leave, aren’t you, to go to Barcelona or whatever?’

“But a few days ago I actually signed a deal with the mayor of Cannes to agree to stay for another 10 years.”

A rumored move to Barcelona would have seen Cannes Lions follow GSM World Congress, the original mobile industry conference, which spent several years in Cannes before reconstituting in Barcelona as Mobile World Congress, as the mobile industry took off.

But Lions isn’t there yet, Thomas said: “Although people say, ‘Aren’t you getting too big for Cannes?’, the fact is the film festival has more than twice as many people as we have. The region can actually deal with a lot of people. There are bigger shows than Cannes Lions.”

This year, advertising technology is set to play a bigger part than ever in Cannes Lions. But Thomas says “inspiration” is the watchword for an event he wants to remain about creativity.

About submissions have blossomed in entertainment, health, outdoor and product design categories, he said.

“Today I come here, and it’s so inspiring because you literally can do anything,” says Doria, who has been coming to the festival for 12 years.

“Possibilities now are incredible because you can really live what’s going on in film through your life at home,” Doria said while speaking about a friend’s mobile application that allows users to purchase items in movies and TV shows, while the user is watching them in real time. “That’s a fantastic thing to be able to play with.”

We interviewed Doria at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.

Earlier this year, as part of these efforts, J. Walter Thompson Company introduced Mirum, a global technology and innovation company, as a “complement to J. Walter Thompson Worldwide.”

“What Mirum is bringing to the table is a deeper technology expertise, in terms of platforms and helping clients navigate what technology means for their business.”

We interviewed Tick at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.

Tilds’ four tips for keeping up are to be a student of technology; to maintain a consistent framework for learning about new technologies; to understand what you already have so you know what you need; and to create space.

A good example of this, Tilds says, is Snapchat’s billboard over the Palais, which could hardly be missed by this year’s festival-goers.

Last year, Snapchat had one business development person at Cannes, Tilds says.

“Being in the right place, making space, having conversations, being open to conversations, knowing what you have and know what you’re looking for helps you[…] Knowing how to find the right clients who are ready in your organization to take advantage of those things gets you to the place where it’s not a surprise [Snapchat] is on the billboard of the Palais because you were there at the first moment.”

We interviewed Tilds at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by Teads. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.

So he imagines a world where, today, technology supports TV ad buying that is merely “data-informed”, evolving later “all the way up to fully addressable”.

With New York-based Videology, Ferber says: “Agency holding companies and media companies have a common set of data they can use to evaluate opportunities on both sides. The supply side understands what the demand sides wants to do.”

Writing on The Guardian last week, Ferber said: “According to a 2013 study by Nielsen and the ANA, only 48% of marketers said cross-screen campaigns were ‘very important’ – but when looking ahead to 2016, that percentage increased to 88%.”

Ferber was part of a Cannes panel discussion on targeted TV advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.

Now, it seems, some customers are getting confused about which viewability trackers are right.

“As viewability becomes more and more a transitionary element of how people are buying media, one of the most important things is going to be a unified measurement structure,” according to auto-playing video ad tech company Teads’ USA president Jim Daily, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“You have some fantastic companies out there, that we work with quite a bit, that are tracking viewability. Sometimes, we’ll see that, for the same impression on the same publisher, these three companies have very different results.

“The faster we can get to a point that everybody can have the exact same standards, the standard we can get to truncating on viewable impressions.”

Daily is echoing the views even of IAB US CEO Randall Rothenberg, who told Beet.TV in April: “There are 17 accredited viewability vendors in the field and at least a dozen more in the pipeline to be accredited by the MRC. This proliferation of vendors has been an utter obstacle, they’ve just confused everybody.”

Beet.TV partnered with Teads for events on the yacht and sponsored this series of videos.

Whilst such a feat is eminently possible, Michael Brunick, partner in programmatic ad advisory service Unbound, says: “Several brands we’ve been working with have been doing programmatic for a while, but they’ve no idea who they’ve been working with, no idea what segments they’ve been using, what the source of the data is, how it’s been working.

“The trading desks did themselves a disservice and ultimately to their clients by, many times, it’s reporting as a single line item on a report that a media planner will send over to a client once a week. That’s it. They don’t really give visibility in to what’s happening.”

That doesn’t mean brands can’t win from the mechanism, however. Brunick says: “Even if you want to build an in-house team eventually, you need to start off by taking more control over what you do now. … Take a more active role in the strategy development.”

Brunick is the former IPG programmatic head who left for Unbound a year ago.

This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event.  Please find additional videos from the series here.

“MediaVest has completely rethought staffing on our business. For the most part, it’s been very positive and our campaigns have benefitted from it,” according to Heineken USA senior media director Ron Amram.

Speaking alongside Amram on a Cannes Lions panel, MediaVest digital data and technology president Carrie Seifer said the idea was to free people to be more creative.

“If we use programmatic correctly, it should give creatives the data they need so they can go and be creative – look at the data, then create something great,” Seifer said

Digital people thrive when they’re allowed to master digital. It’s risky to decentralize digital sometimes. But we’ve found, by decentralising AOD, it became … AOD at the table way upstream, thinking about how programmatic could affect the strategy. All of a sudden, the RFP is informed with programmatic built at the centre.”

Update:  After Cannes, Heineken announced the selection of Publicis for the global creative.

This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event.  Please find additional videos from the series here.

Now Civolution has sold off the latter pieces to Kantar, it is returning to the original brand, Teletrax, which will focus on TV monitoring and TV-synced online advertising.

“We have an infrastructure that monitors thousands of TV channels across the world,” according to Civolution CEO Alex Terpstra.  “We identify, in real-time, which ads are airing on TV. We can can synchronize digital campaigns instantly to those moments and drive increased performance.

“It started with sync to TV ads – but is now evolving in to a whole series of sync products … new products coming over the summer.”

Also at Cannes, we interviewed Xaxis EMEA CEO Caspar Schlickum about the implementation of the company’s “Sync” offering which was created in collaboration with Civolution.

We interviewed Terpstra  at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on programmatic advertising presented by Rubicon Project.  Please visit this page for more videos from the series. 

But CEO Jim Bankoff is thinking bigger. He wants to spread that content off from just owned and operated sites, on to social networks around the web.

“Increasingly, our audience is everywhere,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re not just using it as distribution We’re figuring out how to tell stories natively, how to measure the impact of those stories. We’re taking our marketing partners along for the ride, too.”

Vox’s The Verge has some of the most impressive video productions you will see on a tech site.

What all these platforms have in common is mobile, so we’re optimising our video for mobile.

We interviewed Bankoff at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by Teads.  Please visit this page for more videos from the series. 

At Cannes Lions, the bank announced the launch of The Business Of Life, a video series made by Vice using data provided by Pinterest, which will also promote the content, as AdWeek reports.

“Young people are growing up and need financial advice,” Smith tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Banks don’t have the best reputation. They said, ‘What would you do?’ I said, ‘It’s very simple’ – just give them factual (information); ’here’s what a mortgage is’, ‘here’s how you lease a car’, ‘here’s renting versus buying’.”

Those are the topics The Business Of Life video discussions touch on over the series.

“Pinterest is one of the biggest platforms in the world … especially that’s interactive,” Smith adds. “We didn’t really have a partnership with Pinterest, so we wanted to see how that would work, and it’s worked fantastically. Analytics doesn’t mean anything unless you can convert that in to something. Pinterest’s data actually works.”

We interviewed Smith as part of a series on video advertising at Cannes Lions, presented by true[X].  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Renowned media and technology M&A advisor and banker Terence Kawaja of Luma Partners is releasing a report, “Back To Mad Men”, that paints a stark picture of the challenge. He says agencies have been “caught flat-footed” by recent technology developments.

“They don’t necessarily have the skillsets necessary to manage their complexity, nor the technical proficiency for that kind of world,” Kawaja tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Lately, we’ve seen a big squeeze on agencies, where all these marketing technology companies. The agency is under siege from all these sides.”

Kawaja credits WPP with having invested or acquired in data marketing capabilities and cites Publicis’ acquisition of Sapient as another example of how agencies are fighting back. But, he adds: “I’m not sure if it’ll be enough. There are competing interests for those kinds of capabilities from companies that are far more capable than ad agencies.”

More on the turmoil in agency reviews reported in the Wall Street Journal.

We interviewed him on at Cannes aboard  yacht for a series on the future  of TV presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please find more videos from the series here. 

For an industry that has always prided itself on creative messaging, this is something of a change. But, just lately, even some of the ad execs who run tech initiatives have started advocating a return to advertising’s roots.

“For the last few years, it’s been very focused on data and technology, for the right reasons,” acknowledges Starcom innvestment and activation president Amanda Richman. “But we’ve lost some of the conversation around ideas and creativity. We need to bring that back in.”

She was speaking at Cannes Lions, the annual ad business get-together in the south of France that prides itself on being the “international festival of creativity”, not science. Richman hopes this week’s event will be a “pivot point” for the change.

“At Cannes, we have the perfect opportunity to align ad-tech and creative, and have a conversation about bringing that together again, to have technology and data actually fuel that creativity, instead of it being polarising it, which has been too much of the conversation over the last few years.”

This interview with Richman is part of a series on video advertising presented by Teads.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

Announced at Cannes Lions, BBC StoryWorks is the name of the content marketing that will have offices in Singapore, Sydney, New York and London and will be headed by Richard Pattinson, a former BBC News journalist who, at home in the UK, has edited the corporation’s This Week programme, reported for Newsnight and has been a commissioning editor for global news.

Speaking with Beet.TV, BBC Worldwide’s EVP of international advertising, Carolyn Gibson, says StoryWorks will offer:

1. sponsored content
2. branded content
3. partnered content

“It delivers newsroom values and the combination of creative studio to support our advertisers’ ambitions globally,” Gibson says.

“It’s using the skills and the heritage the BBC is so well known for – producing fantastic content, one of the world’s most trusted media organisations – but leveraging that skillet for our advertisers to tell their stories and engage with consumers.”

At home, the BBC is funded by license fee and is largely forbidden from running advertising on its owned and operated properties by royal charter, which is due for renewal amid speculation of reform. But the corporation is permitted – and, indeed,, encouraged – to make money from operations overseas and from select activities at home through its BBC Worldwide arm, of which BBC Advertising is part.

So far, BBC StoryWorks has worked on campaigns for tourism body Brand USA, in which it created a series of two-minute films that used Hollywood directors to talk about the American landscape and psyche.

We spoke with Gibson for a series from Cannes, presented by Teads.  To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Right now, we do a really job at automating the buying a desktop pre-roll buy or a mobile video buy or a linear television buy – but you still have to buy these individual silos,” CEO Brett Wilson tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“You’ll see us begin work on removing the silos of buying video. Over the course of the year, you’ll see us build products that make buying video across any screen a lot more seamless.”

That channel neutrality will give vendors like TubeMogul a leg-up from their digital heritage in to the much larger business of TV. But Wilson speaks out for platform independence, complaining that rival ad tech vendors owned by broadcast networks may not operate in clients’ best interests.

“Our largest competitors are also media owners – they also sell software. We think a lot of advertisers think it’s uncomfortable to use the software from a media owner,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event.  Please find additional videos from the series here.