“Because for the first time commerce and communication are converging, we can really track performance along the entire journey. Leveraging new digital technologies, we are delivering solutions in a new space which we call real-time marketing,” Bonori says.

One of the industry’s earliest media agencies, Zenith rebranded itself in 2002 to assume an ROI positioning. About a year ago, it re-launched its network brand identity, proposition and platforms with the term ROI+, Bonori explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.

In simple terms, ROI+ rests on three pillars, the first of which is the designing of a “digital transformation journey and agenda for the clients, helping them fix specific business challenges,” says Bonori. “It’s all about understanding what is the value.”

The second is a planning base where, among other insights that are surfaced, “we detect an expectation gap. Because Amazon is the new norm, the expectation level is very high. Unfortunately, brands are struggling. They really need to improve the way they are designing experiences.”

Third is one-to-one optimization using machine learning algorithms, something Zenith began to harness several years ago. “We are now scaling this solution and we have a very powerful platform for that, and it’s really helping clients to automate partially or completely the end-to-end customer journey.”

As media agencies have continued to evolve their offerings, they want to be seen less as vendors and more like partners, according to Bonori. “T he degree of cooperation has expanded a lot, clients are building more capabilities inside, which is good because we have more stakeholders challenging us, raising the bar, making sure we can really elevate the conversation. You need to partner in a different way.”

Agency clients still may foster barriers that can complicate the partnership, for example at companies where teams remain disconnected. “It’s a disaster because there’s no one single truth in terms of culture within the organization.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“We’ve said for three years ago that Criteo will be one of the last stalwarts to stand strong and independent as this frankly brilliant arbitrager who has been selling on CPC buying on CPM because of tech, targets and talent.”

Those three T’s help advertisers and agencies make sense out of what still can be separate brand awareness and performance operations that should be melded. Prohaska alludes to a former client 2.5 years ago that had separate budgets, separate people and separate KPI’s for their brand awareness and performance activities.

“Just insane that they were totally siloed off,” says Prohaska. “Never shared data. It was almost a little too oil and water instead of chocolate and peanut butter like we always say in terms of those things mixing better.”

In terms of tech leadership, he says Criteo early on had its own dynamic creative optimizer. “The fact that there are major agencies who still do not have either their own, that they bought or built or even licensed at this point is crazy.”

He recalls that while working at BBDO in the mid 1990’s, creative and media staffers were separated by just one floor. “It was nice when you had media and creative together. Criteo has had media and creative together. That’s why their click-through rates were always one-plus and why conversion rates were always higher, because actually there are a lot of advertisers where that math still matters quite a bit.”

According to a recent release, Criteo is ranked #1 by IDC with a worldwide adtech market share of 7.4%. It was the first time IDC quantified the advertising software market at $12.7 billion, growing 38% year on year.

Speculating on Criteo’s future direction, Prohaska believes the more it can share its expertise “either with self-service tools or kind of empowering, maybe in a way that Xaxis became part of [m]PLATFORM. The more times that they do that and partner more with buyers and sellers, it might be less margin but of a much bigger pie and they’ll keep growing. It’s just symbolic of them doing very, very well, redefining performance marketing nailing it in this space and then expanding when it comes to video, mobile, in-app, ultimately television.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

He’s not alone, according to IAB Europe research about attitudes to programmatic advertising, Halstead explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference. The survey shows that 90% of advertisers, agencies and publishers across Europe are talking about investing more money in the coming months, says Halstead, who is Chair of the IAB Europe Programmatic Trading Committee.

“The optimism is there. There obviously have been some headwinds, particularly in the last eighteen months to two years around trust and transparency, and we are seeing some evolution in hybrid models,” says Halstead.

From the buy-side, he’s seeing “more engagement from advertisers and agencies in the decisions they make. Some more direct contracting. But this to me feels part of maturity of an industry reaching a grown up state.”

Part of that maturation is growing adoption of ads.text for brand safety, abiding by the new GDPR rules to protect consumers and “really try to shorten the supply chain or be clear about who has the right to sell this inventory and who has opportunity to position it.”

Under Oath Ad Platforms, the new stack includes a unified demand-side platform, a native and search marketplace and programmatic access to Oath inventory through its own supply-side platform and some 40 ad exchanges, as Martech Today reports.

In addition, the Oath Publishers Suite enables publishers to monetize their video “but also has additional tools like video syndication, so they can actually pass their content on to other partners and they can grow their pool of content and compete.”

Digital advertisers continue to move away from traditional last-click attribution models while seeking categories of buyers and their behaviors, according to Halstead.

“What a buyer is looking for is efficient pricing decisions, really well-driven machine learning and optimization and understanding, and the ability to build data segments to help address their audience. And I feel we’ve made really significant progress in that space.”

On the mobile side, Oath now has a combined supply-side platform for display and mobile inventory, mobile video and in-app, and a separate video platform “which can also take account of some of the needs of video syndication in the more complex video environments.”

This video is part of a series titled: “Finding Success in a Time of Transformation.” It is presented by PubMatic. For segments from the series, please visit this page.

Adjust’s SDK resides within its customers’ apps and “we transfer the data to our platform and then help our customers to understand what kind of campaigns they are running, what kind of value they can get out of it,” Henschel says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.

The data Henschel refers to is some 500 billion data points that it manages each month. “We basically created a fluid data system that hasn’t been there before.”

That data informs comparisons of campaigns and creative elements across various channels. “Plus we have all the data coming afterwards such as events, so we’re basically making sure that our customers have a complete transparency about the customer journey from acquisition down to churn,” Henschel says.

Adjust first partnered with retargeting provider Criteo about four years ago and has been expanding that partnership around the globe, according to Henschel.

“For Criteo specifically, mobile has become a significant part of their business and I think with our technology we’re helping them a lot to get more traction there and also to run better results for their customers.”

In terms of the evolution of digital advertising, Henschel notes the huge difference between the desktop world and mobile considering cookies versus device ID’s. “But what we see as the biggest change over the last couple of years that people are really focusing on other KPI’s than they did before.”

Five years ago, the whole industry “was basically focusing on CPC, getting the most effective CPC, the cheapest” before shifting to CPI and now to return on ad spend.

“This is when the retargeting companies came into the space, including Criteo, and now it’s really about incrementality,” Henschel says.

Henschel is a longtime attendee of DMEXCO, having represented “many companies over many years.” Given his German heritage, he’s pleased at the way DMEXCO has grown, citing a panel this year about German adtech companies that had managed to achieve global scale.

“Compared to the early days, we also have now German, relevant international companies and somehow that’s also reflected in the panels, in all the companies out there exhibiting and that’s something I’m actually really proud of.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“Given this challenge there’s a real need to go beyond the install and go beyond the user acquisition and focus on engagement,” Jeger adds.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference, Jeger talks about the ways of measuring the value of app marketing campaigns and the role that companies like Criteo are playing in that effort.

AppsFlyer helps its app marketing customers collect and surface data “to understand, for example, the impressions and clicks and installs and then further down the funnel within the app all the events that happened and attribute these to a specific source.”

A typical example could be an advertiser running multiple campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and some Tencent social apps in China, according to Jeger. It would want to try to make sense of the performance and how much each of the campaigns cost versus the revenue generated.

“We enable them to do that by having partnerships with all of these companies and being official measurement partners for those companies and putting revenue against cost,” says Jeger.

One of AppsFlyer’s more than 4,000 partners is retargeting specialist Criteo, which “focuses on one of the huge pain points of app marketers. Getting users into the app and then retaining them and keeping them engaged. There’s a huge retention issue when it comes to apps and Criteo is fighting that head on by providing campaigns to get users back into the app.”

Moving beyond user acquisition to focus on engagement, using very personalized and non-intrusive messaging, “is the holy grail of where we need to go as an industry,” Jeger says.

But there’s a learning curve that could be steepened if more people knew the kinds of data that are available and the most sophisticated ways of employing that data. “I think we should be seeing more and more apps in the next year being at the place where they can get to that kind of level of communication.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

Driving scale for video is best done via programmatic ad sales, Newman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference in which she also discusses the hurdles that are curtailing the growth of in-app advertising.

Because a majority of video content doesn’t represent significant scale, it’s typically sold directly by in-house sales staff. The challenge to achieving scalability for programmatic is having enough content and inventory, which entails choices.

“Do I put my video content not just on the home page but also in article pages for example? Or do I do some kind of content distribution deal where there’s a potential revenue share, so a publisher who has a similar audience to mine can license my video content, or maybe take my video content” and share the ad revenue it generates.

Quipping that it’s been “the year of mobile forever,” Newman believes apps are the growth area, but with limitations. PubMatic’s new Quarterly Mobile Index, based on clients’ traffic and spend, shows “year over year that app is the growth area both in inventory but also in spend. But I still think there’s a way to go for the spend to catch up to where the eyeballs are.”

Transparency is a key reason why brands haven’t fully embraced in-app ads even though they know that’s where their target audiences are. Newman calls the ads.text initiative “fabulous by the way, we totally support it” but it’s only applicable now to desktop and the mobile web.

“We’ve educated buyers to buy ads.txt so they’re very comfortable with that, but then you say ‘could you buy this in-app traffic as well’ and they’re like, ‘where’s the ads.txt file?’ There isn’t one yet.”

She believes the industry is catching up in the form of the IAB’s SDK. Then there is ads.cert, but it requires open RTB 3.0 integration “so that’s going to take some time to move. So I would say that comfortably in-app is definitely making some changes but there’s a lot of work around education.”

Further complicating in-app progress is the need for a consent management platform per the new GDPR regulations in the European Union, according to Newman.

As for publishers and their “frenemies” status with platforms like Facebook and Google, Newman points to joint ventures by publishers to take back control, among them The Ozone Project in the UK. Launched three months ago, it facilitates ad buying from The Guardian, News UK and Telegraph from one site, as The Guardian reports.

Publishers’ goal is to compete with the scale that advertisers enjoy with social media platforms “in a brand-safe, high-quality environment which also benefits us as publishers because we’re investing a lot of resource into developing this great content that brands actually want to be seen alongside,” Newman says.

This video is part of a series produced at DMEXCO 2018 in Cologne titled: “Finding Success in a Time of Transformation.” It is presented by PubMatic. For segments from the series, please visit this page.

“One of the biggest issues right now is trust and transparency across the ecosystem,” says Goel. “We’ve all seen over the last couple of years all sorts of horrible headlines about fraud, about bots, about fees, about auction dynamics. All of these different things that have led marketers to distrust the programmatic ecosystem.”

But he believes the ecosystem has worked hard over the past 18 months “to improve that on a dramatic scale,” Goel explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.

As a result, publishers have enjoyed increases in revenue and CPM’s for their inventory. As header bidding has “exploded onto the scene,” more of that inventory is monetized programmatically.

“One of the key things that we are focused on is open source capabilities like our OpenWrap technology, which just won an award from Digiday, which is a very open and transparent header bidding solution for publishers,” Goel adds.

Even though PubMatic is on the sell-side, it knows that advertisers and buyers more and more want to know where is their ad spend is going and what they are getting in return.

“So we’re actually spending more time than ever with the agencies and with the advertisers alongside our publisher clients to help connect the two directly,” with PubMatic as the enabler “to execute their business strategy on top of our technology platform.”

Going forward, the company is putting considerable resources into growing its mobile app and video business. “These are now significant portions of our business and we see them becoming even bigger in 2019 and 2020. So we’re really excited about our omni-channel monetization capabilities,” Goel says.

As SSP take rates decline across the industry “we see that as a huge opportunity to make our own business more profitable but also to lower costs for publishers and marketers by continuously lowering the cost of our platform and the cost of delivering technology.”

This video is part of a series produced at DMEXCO 2018 in Cologne titled: “Finding Success in a Time of Transformation.” It is presented by PubMatic. For segments from the series, please visit this page.

So says Craig Ellis, Global COO of the IPG agency Reprise Digital, in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference in which he discusses pricing dynamics and measuring true ROI.

Not that long ago, the search discipline seemed to be structured around achieving the lowest cost per click, according to Ellis. “Now with understanding your audience and the targeting, it’s making sure you’re buying the right audience and therefore how does the cost work in not only the initial purchase but then also lifetime cycle, lifetime value.”

With innovations like voice search and the integration of image-based search, “All of this is becoming quite fundamental because it is demonstrating consumer intent,” Ellis adds. “There’s a lot of value in that intent. Tapping into that consumer and behavioral opportunity is really important for clients.”

Depending on the category, paid search can be prohibitively expenses for some marketers. Nonetheless, Ellis counsels going beyond the initial purchase “and start looking at lifetime value. I think that’s really important to start fundamentally getting the true ROI.”

Asked about performance benchmarks, he says some clients approach the process like a full acquisition budget. “I sell a computer, I’m prepared to pay seven percent of the sale. Go and sell me as many computers as you can for seven percent.”

Tweaking the percentage to 8% might yield extra volume, and it might not. “The challenge is going to trying to keep that margin. Search specifically is going up year on year. There’s more ways to spend your dollars,” Ellis says.

“There’s really challenging dynamics, which I think’s putting a lot of emphasis on the consumer journey. What happens after the click.”

Search also comes into play in digital re-targeting, with understanding consumer intent again being a major component and proper message sequencing key as well to the overall experience.

“What quality experience is a brand providing to ensure that consumers are feeling you understand me, that you’re listening to me, I’m valued and you’re taking note of what I’m saying and you’re giving me a sequential story that maybe helps me to action? I think that’s pretty important.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“A lot of folks refer to us as the trade desk for walled gardens,” says Pixability CEO David George. “The next evolution for us is into OTT or CTV.”

Pixability’s clients include the “big six agencies” plus smaller independents and some brands as well, George explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.

The big six “tend to look at YouTube and Facebook in different groups where the independents and brands they really get value around our ability to do cross platform. We provide a lot of efficiencies and scale in that environment because we can move ads and budgets around to different platforms.”

Earlier this month, Pixability released a tool for automating analyses of what specific video iterations are working or not. The system uses machine learning to evaluate the different versions of the uploaded ads while measuring their performance, context and audience against the client’s KPIs, as MediaPost reports.

Part of the reason for Pixability’s presence at DMEXCO is its expansion to international markets. In addition to Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, the company has an office in London.

While video consumption and advertising “is growing exponentially,” says George, what’s really exciting is what’s going on in OTT. I myself recently cut the cord. It’s a liberating experience.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“We are in an absolute state of transformation. I’ll be kind, I used to say chaos. It’s controlled chaos,” Kassan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference, where MediaLink is a longtime attendee.

A year and a half after its acquisition by Assential plc, “it’s been a wonderful experience so far,” says Kassan. MediaLink opened a London office last year and “we’re very serious about our foray into Asia Pacific and China. They’re great partners and they’ve been a tremendous boost to MediaLink in terms of our ability to really create that global scale.”

Kassan considers DMEXCO to be “one of the best places to bring the adtech and martech communities together,” although not necessarily a venue where one can interact with lots of brand advertisers.

“One of the challenges of DMEXCO has always been there’s not a lot of brands here,” he explains. “There’s a lot of sellers. If you look around the show flow you see all the bold faced names that matter in martech and adtech.”

He harkens back to his opening day at law school and the prevailing expression, “Look to your left, look to your right one of those people won’t be here when you graduate.” Fortunately, whoever was sitting on his right or left “looked at me and I still made it, but there was truth in what they said.

“I think if you look to your left and look to your right, in 2019 there’ll be a few different players here. They may be merged or they may be purged. One of the two.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“Transparency still is a huge, huge issue,” OMD Global CEO Florian Adamski says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.

“Whereas I believe that a lot of things happened and a lot of it improved, and a lot of new adtech providers helped to clean up the supply chain, clients still have an eerie feeling that they don’t have total control over it,” he says.

This leads to a second trend: clients taking control. “Basically they want to own their own data, they want to own their own contracts, they want to own their own adtech.”

Which leads to a third trend, the problem of talent. “Clients can recruit and hire, buy the adtech and the licensing. The problem is how long can they retain and nurture talent to, in the long run, do what in the past agencies used to do,” says Adamski. “Do I believe there is a place in the supply chain in the industry for media agencies still today? Absolutely, because we will be all about recruiting, identifying, nurturing, training those talents that actually need inspiration working across different client industries.”

About a year into his global role, Adamski finds it fascinating to track distinct differences between different marketplaces. He notes that many people might assume that everything in adtech and publishing is fully globalized.

“My verdict is it is absolutely not. And I don’t even have to start talking about China and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) over there or a totally different landscape in Japan or South Korea.”

But more frustrating is working with clients to take the best possible approach to measuring the performance of the money they spend on advertising.

“I still believe in the value of building and creating and fostering a brand that at some point then will deliver sales, downloads, interactions, whatever you define as the key KPI,” says Adamski. “To understand the relationship between this rent-building effort and how it pays off in performance. Only if we tie that together we can see that full picture.”

He adds that it’s “daunting” to encounter marketers that have walled off brand and performance issues. “I think that’s a big problem. It needs to stop. It needs to be reintegrated.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“Short term, it’s always going to be Whac-A-Mole. The criminals are smart, they’re well funded. The industry needs to up its game,” Zaneis explains says in this interview with Beet.TV during TAG’s first visit to the annual DMEXCO conference.

Longer term, “As we harden our economic model against criminal actions, what we hope is that it will be harder for them to profit and they’ll start to look away. These are the same networks that used to be involved in online identity theft. They used to attack online banking systems.”

Formation of the BSI was announced in July and it will be working with TAG, the Coalition for Better Ads, the IAB Tech Lab and other related groups and suppliers. Instead of focusing on corporations, as these groups do, BSI’s mission is to supply professional training and certification.

In this manner, “the individual at the company understands what brand safety means and they can get certified as a Brand Safety Officer,” Zaneis says.

It was a lack of semantical unity that led to the creation of the BSI. “What we found was there was really a vacuum around thought leadership on what brand safety meant in the industry. So as we were interviewing senior leaders across the supply chain, we found the need for development of a more common taxonomy.”

The BSI and TAG have jointly issued a white paper titled Defining Brand Safety. Among other things, ranks the words most commonly associated with the term “brand safety” and assigned them categorical buckets where appropriate. For example, Piracy, Fraud and Malware are examples of criminal activity.

Just under three years old, TAG has been helping to weed out criminal activity in the digital media supply chain—a subset of overall brand safety—and issuing certification. There are some 350 TAG members in 28 countries across six continents.

Earlier this year, TAG opened an office in Europe. “We’ll expand into other regions as they continue to grow and engage with us,” Zaneis says.

Providing more transparency into the supply chain deters traditional “criminal networks” from eastern Ukraine, Russia, Southeast Asia and elsewhere “that are trying to defraud the industry and they have done that successfully to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

“We’ve proven that you can get five hundred percent cleaner inventory than if you just work across the industry. You can reduce eighty three percent of all invalid, non human traffic,” says Zaneis.

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

It all stems from what Chris O’Hara, VP, Product Marketing, calls the “fourth industrial revolution” led by things like data, AI and the internet of things.

“It’s harder for marketers to deliver personalization at scale to consumers and that’s the goal. So everything we’re doing at Salesforce is really about integration,” O’Hara says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.

By way of examples, he cites the acquisition of ExactTarget about four years ago with the intention of making email “a very sustainable part of marketing, such that it’s not just batch and blast email marketing but it’s also your single source of segmentation for the known consumer.” The end result was the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud Salesforce Integration.

In late 2016, Salesforce bought a company called Krux and within six months had morphed it into Salesforce DMP. It was a way to assist marketers in making sense of households “comprised of hundreds of cookies and dozens of different devices” and aggregate them to a single person or households “so can get to the person who makes the decision about who buys a car or what family vacation to take,” O’Hara says.

Salesforce DMP benefits from machine-learned segmentation, now known as Einstein Segmentation, to make sense out of the thousands of attributes that can be associated with any given individual and determine what makes them valuable. Developing segments by machine replaces “you as a marketer using your gut instinct to try to figure out who’s the perfect car buyer. Einstein can actually tell you that.”

In March of 2018, MuleSoft, one of the world’s leading platforms for building application networks, joined the Salesforce stable to power the new Salesforce Integration Cloud. It enables companies with “tons of legacy data sitting in all kinds of databases” to develop a suite of API’s to let developers look into that data and “make it useful and aggregate it and unify it so it can become a really cool, consumer-facing application, as an example.”

Datorama now represents what O’Hara describes as a “single source of truth for marketing data, a set of API’s that look into campaign performance and tie them together with real marketing KPI’s and use artificial intelligence to suggest optimization.”

In addition to driving continual integration, Salesforce sees itself as “democratizing” artificial intelligence, according to O’Hara. “There’s just too much data for humans to be able to make sense of on their own. You don’t have to be a data statistician to be able to use a platform like ours to get better at marketing.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“The audiences are coming to us not just on the desktop home page, which is such a powerful force for us. Our mobile numbers are going through the roof and, frankly, OTT has begun to really, really take hold,” Berend explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.

“That for us is proof that the brand resonates as much as it ever has. It’s also an indicator of where a lot of consumption and behavior is headed.”

CNN sees news consumption as “less fragmented and more of a giant fire hose,” Berend adds.

The global news provider walks a daily tightrope that is the oft-vitriolic political discourse some advertisers don’t want to be associated with, according to Berend. Among advertisers, there’s a higher sensitivity right now to salaciousness and vitriol prevalent within the political realm in the United States.

“Every advertiser is different and within categories, you have a lot of different concerns and sensitivities,” he says. “But we’ve also been very smart and we understand what they’re concerned about and so we put, whether it’s technical things or thematic things or editorial pieces in place, to make sure that they do have a safe environment to get their message across.”

Meanwhile, CNN has been growing a lower-profile asset in Great Big Story, launched nearly three years ago. Great Big Story is an independent media company owned by CNN that’s executed more than 50 brand partnerships this year while opening new doors for the news network.

Great Big Story monetizes its content through sponsorships and advertising. “We don’t run pre-rolls. This is not a video-start farm,” says Berend, who co-founded the operation.

While Great Big Story represents a different style and approach to the traditional digital business within CNN, it “starts a conversation with new advertisers that we may not be getting through our doors at CNN proper and it also starts a conversation with new audiences.”

The average age of user of Great Big Story is roughly 27 to 28, quite a bit younger than traditional CNN viewer.

“For us, it’s hitting all the right notes and the business is growing exponentially, and at this point we’re just trying to keep up,” Berend says.

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

The Founder & CEO of LUMA Partners will be one of some 250 industry leaders attending The Relevance Conference hosted by AT&T in Santa Barbara on Sept. 24-26. On the opening day he will join Otter Media’s Tony Goncalvez and others on a panel titled Putting A Price On Content that will explore the “happy medium” between paid subscription models and ad-supported media.

While AT&T has planted a very large flag in acquiring some of the biggest content and adtech assets, it all comes down to brands changing the ad experience for consumers who have lots of choices, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.

“It will be very exciting to see a company with deep pockets, very, very capable, pursue the dream that is convergent television,” he says of AT&T in the wake of its bringing Warner Media and AppNexus under its communications, content and advertising umbrella. “It’s great for ad tech but forget that, it is great for media and marketing writ large. This is a company that demonstrates that it’s not afraid to put its money where its mouth is and get the very, very best.”

At base level, relevance can have meaning with respect to targeting, personalization and other tactics, but with today’s consumers there is a much higher level at which the term needs to be considered, according to Kawaja.

“Netflix has trained them that they can get premium content without interruption,” he says, and “with the training that these paid models have got us all used to, now it’s hard to go back, either once you have the skip button on an ad or just don’t see any ads at all. The ads have to have a different nature.”

Noting that the advertising industry is one “built on the premise of interruption,” he adds, “I think we have to get away from that.”

He cites as an admittedly “extreme” example paid search, where unlike other advertising, consumer intent means everyone involved can win.

“If I’m looking for a Thai restaurant in St. Louis and I enter that search result, I’m going to get back a bunch of media with ads in it. Turns out the ads are facilitative of my original intent of pursuing that media.”

More in the mainstream realm, he mentions ads in The Weather Channel app that don’t block the experience because they’re in the background, juxtaposed with current weather conditions. “The ad is, in fact, additive to the content. At the core we need less advertising, certainly less interruptive advertising and the notion of relevance I think gets to that acknowledgement that we need a better consumer experience.”

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. 

One of the big reveals at the conference will be the new name for AT&T Advertising & Analytics. “Relevance is going to be a great conference,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.

Among the featured speakers will be AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson. “He’s been very articulate about his hopes and expectations for how we put these pieces together and I think it’s going to be a great conversation,” O’Kelley adds.

“If you look at the assets that AT&T has assembled, they have this incredible connection to consumers, especially in the U.S. and Latin America,” says O’Kelley. “Now with Time Warner they have some of the best TV assets on the planet and I’m incredibly excited about the idea of taking all of our technology and plugging it in with the media and data and leadership that they have.

“I think we can do something that really no one’s ever done before, which is create a new kind of television advertising that should be transformative.”

According to O’Kelley, relevance is the confluence of creative, an emotional connection and the right medium to deliver messaging. He doesn’t think that’s particularly been the case with banner ads and “a lot of the mobile advertising we’ve seen can’t convey that emotional impact.”

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. 

From his position as GM, EVP, Advanced Advertising, FreeWheel, Comcast Clark sees broad recognition that “there’s an opportunity to coalesce a platform, bring audiences together, share data and offer marketers a more unified look into inventory, unified planning,” he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference. “Make it all easier. That’s a huge sea change.”

FreeWheel has been preparing for this change for about a decade, something that now fills the time of some 1,500 people. “We’re all focused on one thing: solving the very complex software and data issues around television, making it interoperable and driving economics for the programmers and for marketers.”

Media buyers understand the power of platforms because of the billions of dollars they routinely allocate to the likes of Facebook and Google in return for reach, targeting, unified pools of inventory and ease of use, according to Clark. They’ve been asking television to do the same.

“I think when television gets all of this together, the buy-side is ready to go. It’s a very big shift. You’re seeing the buy-side also invest in technology, which we’re excited about as well and we’re providing a number of solutions there to connect up to the supply,” Clark says.

Noting that the consumer “is the one piece of the puzzle that we don’t control,” he cites the continuing shift toward on-demand TV environments and lower ad loads. On the latter subject, there are limitations.

“We’ve also seen examples where the right ad loads and the right sort of targeting offsetting subscription fees or even with subscription fees can be very appealing to consumers. So there’s a long march in that direction.”

To properly manage inventory yield and the viewer experience is a balancing act that will require more time to achieve because “you need tools that the industry doesn’t have scaled yet, like addressable technology, better yield management tools, those kinds of things. All of which is coming on line very quickly and we at FreeWheel are powering most of that.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“We believe we have an edge here because we have access to amazing shopper data. We cover more than 74 percent of shoppers worldwide,” Gazagne, who is EVP, Global Revenue & Operations, adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.

Three pillars support the new tech offering: helping clients acquire new website visitors, converting those people in clients and re-engaging with them “once they are part of your CRM.”

Gazagne potentially sees “every retailer” benefitting.

“We are first focusing on, of course, the biggest retailers with the manpower to operate these kind of platforms. But as we build it, it will be more scalable in time and so even small retailers will be able to use it.”

In creating the acquisition, conversion and re-engagement platform, Criteo is going “beyond the digital world because we have CRM data and being connected with the offline world through loyalty cards we are able to understand not only online behavior but offline behavior.”

Asked about the impact on the European Union’s new GDPR rules, Gazagne says “clearly, customers and users want to be in control of what they see, what they are being recommended. Clients also want to be more in control and have more transparency in what is being done, with their ads and where they are being played, so we are now proposing all this.”

For publishers, the whole idea has been having access to direct demand from retailers at scale. “Retail demand has always been something really quite tough to capture from normal publishers,” says Gazagne.

Currently operating in 30 countries, Criteo added another non-retargeting product with the recent acquisition of Storetail, a French ecommerce ad tech startup focused on bringing retail trade marketing dollars online. That helped to augment its creation of Criteo Customer Acquisition, Criteo Audience Match and Criteo Sponsored Products.

Asked about the DMEXCO confab, Gazagne says, “I love this show. I can meet all my German clients at once. As well as meeting with all the publishers worldwide. It’s the only show I never miss.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo.  Please find more videos from the series here. 

“The market is crying for more video. There is a huge shortage on that market,” says Dominique Delport, who is President, International & Global Chief Revenue Officer, at Vice Media.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference, Delport says two main features of VICE Media Everywhere are premium content in brand-safe environments and the ability to reach the 18-35 audience that isn’t being addressed by legacy media providers.

“The other issue is it’s super complex,” Delport explains. “We moved from medium is a message to medium is a mess. Today, to buy video with all the platforms, all the formats, is incredibly complicated.”

VICE Video Everywhere guarantees that brands’ advertising assets will only run on VICE owned and therefore produced content. Viewability is addressed through the offering of a vCPM pricing model for advertisers that prefer a 100% viewable approach. Measurement for buys is available through a number of market leading third parties.

To reach the 18-35 audience at the core of VICE’s offerings, “You have that ability, I would say in one click, to tap into Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Apple News, Roku, Viceland, YouTube, great video inventory vice premium content,” Delport adds.

He estimates that VICE produces some 1,500 pieces of content daily, in local languages, for audiences that include 55 million people on Snapchat. When the company started up in India a few months back, it decided to champion the cause of rights for women and LGBT people.

“After a few months of pushing the society forward, to see the Supreme Court decriminalizing LGBT behavior in India is a big achievement for the Indian society, and we’re very proud, even humbled, to have contributed to that change. We give a mic to a generation that is still very unheard by the legacy media.”

Having joined VICE four months ago from Vivendi Content and Havas, reporting to new CEO Nancy Dubuc, Delport describes himself as “still a rookie, still an intern, learning every day and impressed every day with what Vice has delivered so far.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo.  Please find more videos from the series here.