Vice Media arrived at the Cannes Lions advertising gathering in June with HBO having cancelled Vice News Tonight and Disney having written off its investment in the company.

But, speaking with Beet.TV, the outfit’s international and global chief revenue officer was full of optimism about the road ahead.

“We will announce soon the new home for that Vice News content,” Delport said. “I mean, (it is) multimedia-awarded (by) Peabody, and (is) the biggest newscast for the young audiences in the US.

“We want also Vice News to become more international because we don’t need less Vice News, but more Vice News – in the world of fakery, to have trusted sources, the highest journalistic standards, and (to) deliver, every, day 30 minutes of premium news, it’s something that we need.

“And, with elections coming all over the world, not just in the US, you need more and more that kind of immersive reporters from a great newsroom.”

Vice News Tonight’s incredible 2017 film on white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, received a 2018 Peabody Award, after also receiving Emmy, Polk, Scripps Howard, Gracie and Sidney Hillman awards.

One thing seems sure – Vice Media is diversified enough at this point that it can react to a changing and challenging media environment.

Delport says the company produces 1,5000 pieces of content every day in 25 languages, has clocked 1,000 hours of original Viceland originals – 900 hours of which has been licensed by the UK’s Channel 4 – and productions for Sky, Amazon, Netflix and more soon.

For him, it is all about tapping the spirit of a can-do generation to fix what may be broken.

“The world is young,” Delport says. “Don’t feel that the world is broken and that disruption is the end of the end. No, no. It’s the beginning of the beginning.

“Take that optimistic lens and look at the world as an array of limitless possibilities.

“The new generation that is coming is just crying for that. They want to fix the system. They want to have that positive impact.”

You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.

Some media agency executives told Digiday they had blocked hundreds of news sites. We have also seen publishers like BBC News, News Corp, The Economist and now Vice Media protest that there is nothing bad about being placed next to bad news.

Now one media buyer turned sell-side executive is speaking out against platforms that, in a bid to make “brand-safe” environments in which to buy ads, are actually employing policies that may be tantamount to homophobia, racism and censorship.

“A complete misunderstanding by the tech world is the fact that they will take decisions through algorithm and these keyword blacklists without literally being transparent about it,” says Vice Media international and global chief revenue officer Dominique Delport, the former global MD of Havas, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“I feel Vice has been the first to say, “Guys, enough is enough.” We’re talking about literally censorship. We took 18 months of research to look at all the blacklists that have been used for words that was supposedly brand unsafe. (They included) ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘black’, came before ‘guns’, ‘shooting’, ‘war’ and ‘killing’. It’s insane.”

Delport made a similar disclosure back in September. Vice, of course, is an edgy publisher whose journalism often takes readers on a roller-coaster through the under-bell of culture.

After a couple of years of outcry over the accidental programmatic placement of brands’ ads against less-than-salubrious stories, ad-tech platforms introduced brand safety tools, often working by running keyword checkers on article content.

But that may be a blunt instrument, and Delport thinks things have gone too far, possibly leading to denying younger audiences, especially, the kinds of news they want to read.

“The pendulum became literally too far on that kind of fake safety,” he says. “We’re having that current discussion with other great publishers for trusted news, to really put that at the top of the agenda of the tech platform and the tech community.

“This is really serious, and we need to fix that to avoid that kind of technologic filtering behind the back of our young audience.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

Now the publisher wants to help brands reach a young audience that it knows is increasingly skeptical of being marketed to.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Vice Media international and global chief revenue officer Dominique Delport lays out the scale now on offer to Vice ad buyers.

“Every day we produce 1,500 video, pieces of content in 25 languages,” he says. “We have 900 content producer in 35 countries, 500 editing suites, it’s a huge content machine.

“This generation are the bullshit flamethrower. We have 36 million of them on Snap. Every brand wanted to go deep in that kind of gen-Z insight and I think that we have probably the biggest library of survey and 35,000 people we interview every day.”

Founded 24 years ago, Vice has long since expanded from being a magazine and website. Now it offers its Viceland TV channel; operates Munchies.tv, Motherboard.tv, Noisey.com, Thu.mp, and Broadly, and it just set up a live experience division.

The outfit just signed a distribution deal bringing much of its video content to Hulu’s platform in Japan.

After video-on-demand, though, Vice is turning page a page to linear.

“Live on TV is back,” Delport adds, hinting at upcoming plans for a live TV show from Vice.

“Everything started with the insight from that generation. They want and expect it. They want to be surprised. If you want them to watch something for two hours, it needs to be very different and not pre-tape or pre-produced, because they can watch that any time.

“And so February 25th, we will have the first show at 9:00PM, 11:00PM, and huge possibility for brand integration.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

But how can a company that wants to be ad-funded keep ad-buying brands happy amid all the controversy and harshness of real life?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, VICE Media international and global chief revenue officer Dominique Delport suggests VICE gets an unfair rap from ad-tech buying platforms.

“I’m shocked, when I look at how programmatic trade news articles and news video, there is a kind of new moral norm no one is aware of where DSPs [demand-side platforms] are choosing the keywords that they’re considering as brand unsafe,” says Delport.

He’s referring to new brand safety software that runs on DSPs, categorizing publishers and their ad inventory based on the kinds of topics they cover.

That practice cropped up at this year’s NewFronts, where digital media publishers presented their upcoming content rosters to ad buyers, attempting to break down a mounting feeling that – amid 2018’s heady political climate – news was a bad place to find context.

Says Delport: “When I looked at the [keyword] list the other day, ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’, any video talking about ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ are de facto skipped by algorithms because [they are] considered as brand-unsafe.

“This is wrong. This is crazy. This is not the world we live in, and brands should be bold enough and just relevant enough to consider that this is not the world our audience lives in. And we know that. The Gen Z [crowd] are even more purpose-driven than the millennials.”

Over the last year, several news or so-called news sites have found their way on to the blacklists which some ad buyers and platforms use. Some media agency executives told Digiday they had blocked hundreds of news sites.

This year, we have seen publishers like BBC News, News Corp and The Economist protest that there is nothing bad about being placed next to bad news.

What can be done about it?

“I will keep being vocal with my programmatic partners and platforms to say, ‘Guys, look at that. This is not good’,” Delport 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 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. 

To provide more clarity and faith in the programmatic transaction process, Havas started with “a very simple statement” about demand-side platforms. “A DSP is not neutral,” Delport explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and trade show.

“If you put an amount of money with some KPI’s, whatever the DSP you will have very different results. You need to manage and optimize money to different DSP’s in parallel with your campaign if you want have the best result for your clients.”

Havas had 30 developers writing in excess of 100,000 lines of code to build a trading solution for its clients. The result is the global communications group’s Client Trading Solution (CTS), a fully transparent control tower displaying all programmatic trading that allows clients to track and monitor their programmatic buying in one place.

“We saw that there was only one way to restore trust, with an open platform. A platform that everyone can connect with,” Delport says.

Along with its ability to improve programmatic transaction transparency, CTS is touted as a better alternative to some brand marketers taking their programmatic efforts in-house.

“But you don’t have to manage people, you don’t have to manage the ever-changing tech, you don’t have to manage research and development,” says Delport. “You pay just a premium to see everything. And to have the total transparency and tranquility of knowing where the money goes.”

He still believes more needs to be done, because people who commit fraudulent digital media practices are usually one step ahead of the industry’s “detectives.”

Havas is applying CTS to brand safety as well, “to ensure that every inventory is absolutely clean. I think that we can say that we have under three percent of fraudulent inventory in our engine. It’s too much, but it’s much lower than the industry standard.” Another industry standard, this one impacting Europe, is looming over the advertising industry. Between now and May 28, 2018 there is be “a new frontier” in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union’s biggest change in privacy regulation in 20 years.

“Every company needs to rethink the way they’re collecting first party data, to rethink the way they are collecting user ID’s on their social networks or their different online interfaces,” says Delport.

This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

It may seem incongruous, but, as executives in industries the world over scramble to assess the benefits promised by AI, advertising decision-makers are amongst those getting excited.

“At the agency level, we have a unique opportunity,” says Havas’ global managing director Dominique Delport. “The way we are going to reach new heights .. is the moment we can bring more and more automation.

And Delport draws a parallel with what happened on the New York Stock Exchange more than a decade ago, when new automated trading software was introduced, meaning many trades are now performed by algorithms, not traders on the floor.

“(It is) exactly what happened in the financial markets and the trading floor, where (the) computer sits next to traders,” Delport adds. “Traders and quant analysts and computer help to make the engine work better.”

At Cannes, discussion of AI’s application in advertising has ranged from interactive 3D faces to personalization. Delport says Havas has already begun to plug AI in to its software stack.

“We start(ed) implementing AI components in our latest version of the meta-DSP, and our new programmatic platform, CTS … to have smarter decision-making by providing the top 30 trading strategies,” he adds.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress 2017, Delport opines that while this year is one of transition and incremental innovation, there’s no ignoring the strides being made by telcos. “They are organizing our digital life. They just want to be back in the race,” he says.

Artificial intelligence is one means of gaining the upper hand with mobile users. Delport cites Telefónica’s announcement at MWC heralding its new AURA platform, which the company describes as “the basis for a new relationship model with customers.” AURA will make “cognitive sense” out of the flow of user data while giving users the means to control which data are used, the company says.

Augmented knowledge about mobile device users, including sharing of devices, will help telcos understand “all these weak signals that will be activated for advertising purposes,” Delport says.

Surveying the landscape of major U.S. players like AT&T and Verizon upping the ante on content creation, he says it’s a clear sign that “convergence is back.” It’s a major reason why telcos induce users to sign up for bigger data packages so that they spend more time consuming content.

Responding to the desire for premium content, Vivendi Content in Latin America and Europe recently launched Studio+, which the company describes as “the first global premium short series offer for mobiles.” Delport, who is also Chairman of Vivendi Content, describes the offering as 10-minute episodes in a series of 10.

The backdrop to the telcos’ advertising and content plays is the increasing integration on the part of  Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. “They are fascinating but also a bit scary for the other players,” he says.

Delport refers to a prediction that in the next three years, 80% of mobile bandwidth will be consumed by mobile video. “It’s just beginning,” he says.

This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.

Marketing agency Havas Media Group is amongst those wary of the new reality.

“Advertising is less and less acceptable for many consumers,” Havas Media Group global MD Dominique Delport concedes in the video interview with Beet.TV. “There is less and less acceptance of interruption, especially on mobile.

“When you have more than 250m people getting so upset that they put an ad blocker in their system, download it in their browser and kick any kind of ad coming, I think it’s a wake-up call – something is wrong.

“There is a necessity … to really try to clean the slate … go back to the consumer with trust, and say, ‘we want that moment of time to be the most entertaining possible’.

That’s why Havas is looking to route around the traditional advertising model, by turning to in-video, post-production product placement.

Its creative agency subsidiary Arena just signed a deal to put product placements in programming on Vice Media’s Viceland TV channel.

The placements are powered by Mirriad, the London-based technology that can super-impose brands’ products in to TV and video programming. Mirriad has been going a few years now, but the technology has been evolving and, in light of the ad blocking growth, the necessity may be greater than ever.

The software blends images in to even old, archive programming, meaning producers don’t need to make a conscious plan for product placement at shoot, and meaning long-tail shows can have a commercial life, long after first broadcast.

Havas reckons its clients will spend $25m through this channel in the next 12 months. That is a significant indicator as to the scale of the model, as well as a market of the expected size of Viceland itself.

In these days of cashflow uncertainty, however, many bands and singers are only too happy to work with brands – and marketers are falling over themselves to buy in some music cool.

Havas Media Group and Universal Music Group consummated their affection 12 months ago, when they formed the Global Music Data Alliance, an initiative to “create powerful marketing and advertising opportunities for brands”. One year on, how does the program sound?

“All these examples have now been scaled in more than 30 countries, with dozens of implementations,” says Hamas Media Group global MD Dominique Delport, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“It has been incredible – the pace, enthusiasm and motivation of everyone, even the artists.”

Delport says a banner example was this campaign for UK clothing etailer Very, which paid London duo Rizzle Kicks to re-record DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s “Summertime“.

“The 50 guys on the screen during the barbecue party, all the clothes were shoppable – one click and you buy it,” Delport says.

“The ROI has been 6-to-1 … for less than a half-a-million investment. All that has been possible because the data, brands and bands have worked together.”

Expect to see even closer working between bands and brands in 2016.

Our coverage of CES 2016 is presented by Adobe.

Speaking from there, Havas Media Group global MD Dominique Delport concludes: “Every marketer should become a user experience designer. We are now living with apps. The way we interact with apps and technology will also define the way we brands and appreciate these brands.”

Havas seems to have been doing pretty well amid digital change. Delport says the agency has been winning “new brands, new partners, global accounts in more than 15, 20 countries every two months and a half”.

Despite industry debate over what agencies’ role is in an era when clients can perform some of their traditional functions using technology platforms, Delport asserts: “Brands need change agents”.

Now, new change is around the corner, built on recent developments in marketing automation. “Programmatic is providing a great help to target better, understand better,” Delport adds. “What can be automated will be automated – not only in advertising, in every compartment of our lives.

“Every product will contain some sensor that capture information to make our life easier, not more scary or more complicated. Simplicity needs to become that pillar of the way we think.”

Our coverage of CES is presented by Adobe.

Consumers are engaging with video on nearly every platform and service across most digital devices, he says. From Vine to Instagram to YouTube to Facebook, they are participating and engaging in video in new ways.

As this video landscape changes, brands need to stay abreast of new technologies. “Brands need to try and to test. It can’t just be putting their copy on TV, but shorter online. They need to be their own publishers,” he said. Content production is important especially as consumption barrels in new directions. As an example, Delport points to South Korea, which isn’t a “mobile first” culture now, but more of a “mobile-only” one with 85% smartphone penetration. Also, in China recently, a documentary about smog pollution was seen millions of times via an app, he says. These underscore the worldwide shifts.

Marketers need to be aware of how quickly habits are changing and how new technologies in mobile and video are driving disruption, he adds.

This video is part of our series about the future of video advertising, produced at Cannes and presented by Teads. The video was recorded on the Teads yacht. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

That can present a possible opportunity for Havas, which has been quickly growing its business and positioning itself as a “challenger” agency. Delport said Havas has added one big global client every two months for the last two years. Part of this shift is the increasing importance of digital, and the opportunity for marketers to more closely evaluate and automate buying, with options such as programmatic. “What can be automated will be automated. Thinking of that evolution is [leading advertisers to ask] if they are with the right partner,” he says.

Data is the currency for the present and the future for brands, and they need to be able to control the use of it. That’s why marketers are asking if they are paired up with the right partners, and who they even need to work with in a media world that’s more dependent on technology and automation, he adds.

This video is part of our series about the future of video advertising, produced at Cannes and presented by Teads.  The video was recorded on the Teads yacht. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

The use of algorithms allows for programmatic marketing. The rapid rise of Google, Facebook and Twitter has been made possible by algorithms such as PageRank (Google), EdgeRank (Facebook) and SpreadRank (Twitter), Delport says.

Mixing audience data with these mathematical mechanisms allows marketers to target the right person with the right message at the right time – which is critical in a time when many are resistant to advertisements and spam, Delport says.

Beet.TV spoke with Delport at the Cannes Lions festival earlier this month after he participated in a panel around programmatic buying organized by the Rubcon Project.  We interviewed him French and have create the translation in captions.