“They are looking to us as change agents, as transformation stewards, to help them do that because they realize that it’s very difficult changing their own organization sometimes,” Ankeney says in this interview at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“And sometimes it’s actually easier to do it through the partnership with and the lens of an outside media agency partner. No place like Cannes to inspire that sort of thinking and conversations.”

Being accountable to clients’ business outcomes is “a huge challenge,” but having made transparency and data two priorities has paid admirable dividends to Havas as measured by account wins, according to Ankeney.

“For us, we focus on the meaningful data and the meaningful data is what we hold ourselves accountable to. It’s what supports the business challenges and business objectives of every client and that enables us focus on being accountable to our clients.”

Sometimes it’s a matter of leading clients to transformation. “They know they want it, they know they need it, they know that there’s concern there. Sometimes they need us to help them understand it.”

Others are “very advanced and very knowledgeable and they are pushing us, demanding from us that same thing. Luckily we’re of like minds when we get there so it’s a very easy conversation for us to have.”

With a background at such agencies as J. Walter Thompson, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Carmichael Lynch, Doner and Initiative, Ankeney has roots on the creative side but is more than happy to be engrossed in media.

“I love more focus on media because it means our role is becoming more meaningful with our clients and we can have more meaningful partnerships and relationships with our clients,” he says. “Whether it’s accountability or transformation or you name it, the more focus on media the better as far as I’m concerned.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

“I think we’re moving into a stage where brand safety will become a commodity. Within a year or two years time, marketers simply won’t buy from publishers who don’t guarantee them brand safe inventory,” says John Montgomery, Global EVP, Brand Safety, GroupM. “And that’s going to be table stakes for vendors.”

This year and next, GroupM will be focusing on compliance, Montgomery explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“But also we’ve tried to take the brand safety conversation from limiting risk onto another level now. What we’ve found is because of the way we buy, from mainly premium publishers and in a brand-safe environment, not only are we limiting clients’ risk but the ads are working better.”

So Montgomery is trying to convince GroupM clients and the advertising community as a whole that by buying better quality, “maybe the CPM’s will not be that low or they’ll be slighter higher than they are at the moment, but it will be worth it.”

GroupM has done studies in various countries “proving that brand safety not only limits risk but it works better. Buying quality actually sells. This is where we think we should take the conversation to after brand safety becomes kind of table stakes.”

With the European Union having a month ago instituted the General Data Protection Regulation for consumers, Montgomery says it’s had a heavy impact not just in Europe but around the world.

“Particularly Google and Facebook’s decision to limit access to measurability and, in some cases, access to brand safety tags. We’re still assessing the impact of that, but certainly we have more limited programmatic now.”

Although the scandal in which Facebook user data was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica has made the marketing community “sit up and be concerned about consumer reputation and respect for consumer data,” it doesn’t seem to have negatively impact use of Facebook, according to Montgomery.

“I don’t think consumers are as concerned as we may think in the marketing community, which is good news because it gives us time to act and respect consumer data.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

So the Festival is still a “very important watering hole,” says Millard. In this interview with Beet.TV, Millard says data, diversity and consultants encroaching on the agency space were three main topics of discussion.

Millard is perhaps closer to the year-to-year center of gravity of Cannes than most people because Ascential plc, which owns the Festival, acquired MediaLink just over a year ago. MediaLink and its executives have long been fixtures at Cannes.

“I think what is absolutely palpable is the number of agency execs who are not here this year,” she says. “The conversations this year are more on the gravitas side. In years past, we focused on a lot of what isn’t working at all. This year, I find the conversations about we can do for the industry, for society at large.”

She feels that the Festival listened to the feedback it received from attendees leading up to last year’s event and that its subsequent modifications have been positive.

“It feels a little bit different and I do think that part of that is Cannes Lions’ response to a number of different constituents who said, ‘hey we’re looking for a little bit different experience here at Cannes.’ I think cutting it down by a day was a very, very smart, important response to it.”

Contributing to the “different feel” this year are “perhaps a little less frivolity and subjects with a little bit more gravitas.”

On the much-discussed subject of the utility of data, Millard cites the recognition by brands that “their data needs to be owned by them and better understood perhaps than in the past.”

There was more of a focus on equality and diversity this year, “not just in our business, but in our world. That will continue. That’s very much here to say.”

The third major conversation revolved around “the classic consultants encroaching on the previously owned relationships that agencies have with the brand marketers,” says Millard.

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

“It’s going to rise all tides,” says Wise.

However, some of the boats navigating those tides might be looking at rough waters ahead. “If your business is reliant on margins that are above market value or if there’s fraud being laced within your ad exchange or SSP, then obviously it will hurt your business,” he adds.

It’s okay for the margins of adtech companies to decline in a more efficient and transparent market if the end return outweighs that decline, according to Wise.

“So if your margin goes down ten or twenty or thirty percent but the business opportunity is ten to twenty X, that’s a tradeoff I think everyone would make and I think that’s the opportunity here.”

He cites three main goals of the blockchain consortium: more transparency, interoperability with other blockchain solutions and faster invoice reconciliation.

“A lot of marketers didn’t know how much adtech tax, if you will, they were spending and how much was going to working media. And when they saw that in digital programmatic it can be as high as sixty to sixty five cents on the dollar, they were blown away. So the first thing we’re going to do is make all of that transparent, make the supply chain more transparent,” says Wise.

Interoperability with other blockchain solutions will yield improvements in supply chain management issues, plus problems like fraud and privacy.

As for reconciliation, “We’re going to be able to reconcile much quicker, which means the pipes are greased. We can pay quicker, we can invoice quicker.”

Wise calls the blockchain consortium the “natural evolution of Mediaocean,” whose systems handle some $140 billion in annual global ad spend. “It’s not about Mediaocean, it’s not about what happens to our business, it’s what happens to the industry,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.

“We’re living in a day and age when there’s no shortage of innovation,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “Certainly innovation has come in the form of different ad formats. If you look at what Fox has done with JAZ pods and NBC with Prime Pods, you’re really seeing a different way of delivering messaging in a variety of different formats.”

As for experiences instead of formats, he believes complexity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “It think that provides an opportunity for us as sort of Sherpas, if you will, working with the clients to figure out exactly what the right formats are and what the right choices are for clients to make. To distill it down to brilliantly simple solutions that ultimately are an economic multiplier for the clients we serve.”

But old habits can and will endure. Osborn invokes the “our own worst enemy” adage when discussing change in advertising.

“Our immediate impulse is to take something that’s innovative, that’s been proven out in a test and win format and to productize it. And then we set a pricing structure to it. And there are no real benchmarks for that so it leads to a lot of questions.”

A better approach is to “just constantly strive for the right kinds of innovation, figure out the right measurement formats, and then collectively what does it all mean for the marketers we work for,” Osborn says.

At Cannes, OMD has altered its approach to an industry fixture that is also undergoing considerable change. Whereas the company used to craft its own experience and then welcome clients to that experience, “This year, we’re working with the clients to give them more curated experiences that are more customizable to their specific needs.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 on the future of television.   You can find more videos from this series here. 

“We absolutely are hearing audiences come up in the Upfront. From our perspective, it’s really been ten years or so since there’s been a significant change in the way that linear inventory is sold,” Smith says in this interview with Beet.TV.

His interpretation of the discourse about audience targeting “is that we’re at a point where there’s significant momentum for the next evolution of that. Most publishers are offering an audience component of that this year. When we go out with our linear sales organization and talk to marketers, that’s what they’re looking for us to do as well.”

With its deep technology relationships with premium video publishers, FreeWheel provides incremental reach for advertisers and monetization opportunities that avoid sales channel conflict with publishers’ direct sales teams.

“We really look at ourselves as a monetization service that the most premium linear and digital publishers can tap into to help complement what their sales organizations are doing in the market,” Smith explains.

As a part of the extended Comcast family, FreeWheel is unique in its involvement with both digital and linear video. It works with all manner of advertisers on the buy-side.

“Being part of Comcast, at one end of the spectrum we’ve got the Comcast Spotlight local sales organization plugged into our market. So they’re working with advertisers as small as local pizza shops or local car dealerships to be able to access premium inventory through our market.”

Then there is the FreeWheel national sales team. While it’s typically worked with advertisers seeking more efficient reach, “more and more we’ve been working with the major agencies and major advertisers to take advantage of some of our unique capabilities, including what we can do with audience leveraging some of the Comcast data,” Smith says.

Asked to survey the landscape going forward and what changes he envisions, Smith cites uniform measurement and better calculation of ROI.

“There’s still challenges in getting measurement in a unified way across all screens where someone would watch premium video. There’s still specific screens like OTT, connected TV where there are no industry standard measurement solutions.”

ROI starts with understanding who an advertiser is trying to reach and whether they are the appropriate target. “And then we can continue down funnel and look at how we can connect TV back to attribution” in line with KPI’s.

Since FreeWheel is “relatively new to the buy-side conversation,” at Cannes Smith is looking forward to meeting with “the world’s major marketers and be able to tell our story,” in addition to forming additional partnerships to “help solve some of these major industry challenges, like measurement and attribution in television.”

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.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Balis talks about why targeting is more of an immediate concern than achieving true one-to-one TV addressability at scale, and how EY counsels its publisher clients on the various ways they can better control and monetize their businesses.

“Television still very much matters,” is how Balis prefaces her comments about advanced targeting, before questioning its oft-malleable definition. “If we’re talking about truly addressable, having a full, two-way footprint, we’re a ways off from that being at scale. So I tend not to think as much about advanced advertising,” Balis says.

She’d rather concentrate on the confluence of digital advertising media and the growing number of TV delivery options, whether it’s video on demand or over-the-top streams. “There’s no question that we’re moving to more advanced television advertising. But the crux of what’s happening right now is much more about targeting,” particularly audience segmentation.

“And right now, what you see is essentially every network or network group has their own approach to how they bring more optimization into the mix.”

Today’s world is one in which an industry that for years was based on programs and ratings is colliding with one centered on viewable impressions “in a very different kind of content.” However, “there’s no comparability of the currency.”

This why media buyers and sellers, people “who would traditionally look at each other as competitors,” should come together around new standards and ways to transact. “Because but for an industry solution, it’s very hard to see how we will really get to scale.”

The beneficiaries will be marketers that want to be able to use the same audience segment “across different places, compete viably in the marketplace and really understand the value that they’re getting out of advertising. That’s the pressure around where television advertising is going today.”

For publishers working to monetize their content, Balis believes the biggest pressure is “first and foremost to market themselves differently” while taking control of how they acquire customers and achieve distribution.

Adopting a more direct-to-consumer approach is in contrast to publishers’ “dependencies on many of the largest players in that landscape.”

Balis describes digital display ads as being at “a very mature, plateauing perhaps declining, side of the marketplace” given alternative formats—video being at the top of the list.

“With that being the case, we really have to look at subscriptions, the value exchange that we have with consumers, how we look at compensating transparently for the use of data and what that value exchange that enables consumers to want to provide their data.”

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.

So what’s on the “other” side?

“Does it work? Is it valuable? What are the ramifications for it in a rapidly changing legal environment?” Hanlon adds in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he also talks about the limits of automating creativity and observes how competitive walls are rising in digital but falling in television.

[m]PLATFORM is GroupM’s means of spreading a wealth of data and technology prowess—and how to most effectively harness the two—across the multitude of WPP entities, many of them advertising or media agencies.

Hanlon says reverberations from the EU’s recently activated GDPR, which represents a tightening of data privacy restrictions, are “starting to find its way into the United States as well and forcing clients, particularly large global clients that we work with, to sort of really rethink how they think about their consumers and what is valuable to them from a data and technology perspective.”

The reasons are clear: it can cost more to properly manage and safeguard customers’ data under GDPR, which while quite voluminous in verbiage isn’t crystal clear to marketers at this point with regard to what definitively constitutes non-compliance and the specific financial consequences.

Nonetheless, when having a serious conversation about the realistic value of customer data, “I think what’s interesting is that the answer has been no as much as it’s been yes,” says Hanlon. He stresses that “no” isn’t inherently bad because getting a “concrete answer” carries its own value.

“But what it means is that the opportunity for evolution, for change, is a lot more prominent than I think we would have necessarily anticipated from the conversations that we were having with clients a year or even two years ago.”

When Hanlon addresses the convergence of traditional TV and digital video, he characterizes the conversation around platforms like Google and Facebook as “one that’s slightly negative or closing. All you hear about is the sort of closing down of access and the application of data at an individual level that can happen as policies start to change, as the walls start to get higher.”

By way of contrast, “On the TV side of the world it’s the opposite. We’re seeing an acceleration into a world of addressability and an ability to think about things from a cross-channel perspective.”

As for limits on hyper personalization of ad messaging, Hanlon questions the idea that “we can fully automate creativity and that we can create an individual experience for every single person that we ultimately see within the ecosystem.”

Such an approach ignores “very key reasons how we build brands and how we build resonance and salience. It may make a lot of sense within a retargeting context, but when it comes to these larger TV and video-based executions, we’re never going to be able to get to a space, I think, nor do we want to, where we personalize it for every single person.”

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.

“What’s very clear to me is there is an alignment across the globe in terms of how broadcasters and operators see the world,” says James Rooke, GM, FreeWheel Publishers. “They all understand that there’s an incredible threat to their business coming from those looking to take TV dollars.”

From a software standpoint, broadcasters and operators understand that they need to “accelerate against the ability to offer the brand marketer the ability to buy quality inventory regardless of what screen it is, against any audience or dataset that they choose, and make that as simple as possible,” Rooke adds in this interview with Beet.TV. 

“And then be able to prove attribution against that.”

Rooke works with sell-side clients and, regardless of language or nationality, there’s a common refrain.

“Whether we’re talking to a client in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy or the U.S., if you put them all in the room, there’s a very aligned point of view about what needs to happen for the premium end of the ecosystem to be able to thrive.”

While a core theme during the TV Upfront negotiating season continues to swing toward premium video and advanced audience targeting, underpinning that theme is an industry pulling together out of necessity to work more as a platform, according to Rooke.

“Television, if it can work in a more interoperable way, has an incredible opportunity to continue to shift dollars back into the ecosystem.”

 Rooke considers the audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom—and most recently NBCUniversal and Univision—to be “a good example of large media companies looking at how they can create scale for brand marketers to buy against in more simple, more automated ways against audiences. I think that’s just the start.”

 FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, sees its role as facilitating interoperability to help make “TV As A Platform” a reality. “Which is a bold and hard thing to achieve, but ultimately I think it’s a shared vision,” Rooke says.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview series 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.

According to Midha, upon its founding in 2007 true[X] “never meant to build a measurement system” as it sought to give TV viewers a choice of commercial options with interactive ads priced on cost per engagement. Rather, it was built out of necessity, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“What I think is important is that this was something that when you explained it to an advertiser or an agency and you said this is what you can accomplish in this environment, people lean in they think this is great,” says Midha. “And then you get down to talking about pricing, because again you have to make sure you account for what you’re missing, and it becomes a bit harder.”

The company considered simple commercial delivery—measured with the help of entities like White Ops and Moat—to be “our baseline metric.” The answer was to be able to prove impact. “There was no solution that existed in the marketplace that could measure impact of the ad,” Midha adds.

That’s why true[X] developed Uplift to measure brand benefits at scale, across platforms, in real time and in a consistent manner. “Today we run Uplift across every single true[X] campaign on every platform that we exist on and we’re measuring brand lift, which we think is such a fundamentally human metric and actually the metric that matters most.”

At the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Pooja will explain how true[X] plans to bring engagement ads into live digital streams and how the company plans to expand measurement options.

Beet Retreat in the City will be held a the Luce Auditorium at Meredith Corporation, 225 Liberty Street.  Participants include:

Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services, GroupM

Laura Desmond, CEO, Eagle Vista Partners

Kristin Dolan, CEO, 605

Christopher Geraci, President, National Video Investment at Omnicom Media Group

Walt Horstman, SVP Advanced TV, TiVo

David Kline, President, Spectrum Reach, Executive Vice President, Charter

Allison Metcalfe, GM LiveTV, LiveRamp

Rob Norman, Advisor

Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing iX at IBM

Nancy Reyes, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY

Lyle Schwartz, Managing Director, TBWA/Chiat Day/NY

Doug Ray, Chairman, Dentsu Aegis Media

Mike Rosen, EVP, Advanced Advertising and Platform Sales at NBCUniversal

Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp.

Vikram Somaya, SVP, Global Data Officer & Ad Platforms, ESPN

Ben Tatta, President, 605

Jamie West, Deputy MD, Sky Media UK & Group Director of Advanced Advertising Sky PLC

Ben Winkler, Chief Investment Officer, OMD

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.

“Frankly, the reason why I think consulting is becoming so relevant at this particular moment is this is an industry undergoing tremendous change,” says Janet Balis, who is Global Advisory Lead, Media & Entertainment, at EY. “The consumers are leading and the business model is in catch-up mode in so many cases,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

EY is a case in point in the diversification of professional services firms. Until its official rebranding in 2013, it was known as Ernst & Young, with a pedigree that dates to the 1800’s. Now it competes with the likes of Accenture and a host of other big-name entities that have expanded their consulting offerings in step with the increasing complexity of the advertising and media world.

Balis has a deep background in media, having been Publisher at The Huffington Post, head of sales and marketing at AOL and EVP, Media Sales and Marketing at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She also held positions at Time Inc. and Newsweek.

When she surveys the present terrain, Balis doesn’t focus on the friction that can exist between consultancies and advertising/media agencies, preferring instead to posit that everyone should be working together.

“I certainly recognize that some companies in the professional services space are absolutely and increasingly playing roles that we would consider to be the roles of agencies,” says Balis. “We have taken a distinct position, which is that we want the full ecosystem to thrive.”

Thus EY works with agencies “that we’re privileged to serve and that we believe in. We think that the right answer is not that this is a moment to compete, but this is a moment to collaborate.”

More specifically, the name of the game is to help marketers connect the dots. “The fact is that there are so many places that the dots don’t connect. There are silos in the organization, people working at odds with KPI’s, data sitting in particular silos. In order to connect the dots, that’s the perfect role for a consultant.”

Looking ahead to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Balis discusses EY’s sponsorship of a concept known as “better questions,” which rests on this philosophy: The better the question, the better the answer, the better the world.

“Because this is a moment frankly for intellectual humility. No one has all the answers.”

Given the dynamics of lower linear television viewing amid a sea of video alternatives, giving rise to a lessening of ad loads, “It places more pressure on the business model. It also places more pressure on the creative. It’s really about the stories we tell,” Balis adds. “So Cannes is the perfect place for us to have that dialogue.”

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

His first-time judging gig comes after the Cannes Lions reached a tipping point in 2017 as some agencies pushed back on the cost and scale of the venerable event. “It’s going to be a little bit more subdued this year,” Castree, the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Nonetheless, he’s “excited to dig into the work.” With pre-judging efforts already under way, “I’m up to my eyeballs in looking at work at the moment.”

Castree believes that there’s a “simple mission” to Cannes: celebrating the context of creativity from both a macro—the “zeitgeist” of what’s happening around the world—and micro scale. About the former, he points to all the “excitement and change going on in the world,” along with disruption and cause-related movements.

“There’s a lot of places and spaces for brands to get involved in the conversation in the larger context of all the excitement and change going on in the world,” Castree says. “Great brands love to be part of bigger conversations.”

As a judge of award entries, he’s interested in the contextual aspects of media and “how brands take advantage of what is going on in our times and to be part of those conversations in ways that are interesting and engaging.”

On the micro side of things, Castree talks about addressability, data and targeting and “the context of one to one.” Combining the macro with the micro provides “great opportunities for brands to show how they marry creativity and context” to drive business outcomes.

He brings a particular view to his judging duties when it comes to entries that might stretch the strict definition of a Cannes media entry, noting that “media entries come from everywhere.”

So he will be on the lookout for entries that “get stacked with a lot of things that aren’t always about media. I’ve seen a little bit of that already, to be honest. Ideas matter, but there’s a lot of other places at Cannes for ideas to get recognized and rewarded.”

He feels that this year’s event will be more subdued than last year because “agencies have pulled back a little bit. Without Publicis there it’s going to make a difference,” he says in reference to the holding company’s voluntary absence from Cannes 2018.

In any case, he thinks it’s “appropriate to reset a little bit and refocus on the central themes of the power of creativity to move business and to move people.” Distractions at previous Cannes festivals have included celebrities, luxury and scenery, “which are fun and wonderful but that really can distract from the central focus and message of what Cannes is all about.”

For Wavemaker, Cannes is about the “density of intellect, the density of talent, the density of great thought leaders, thinkers. For us that’s about media, content and technology and how the marriage of those three things are really creating the future of media.”

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