But what is the state of “identity graphs” and “people-based marketing“, really?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Chad Engelgau, Global Chief Data Strategist and Head of Client Management at IPG Mediabrands, explains.

Identity graphs: “Identity graphs really help you anchor all of your insights into a normalised set of individuals or households or even businesses if you’re a B2B marketer, and then activate those consistently.”

People-based marketing: “People-based marketing is a fantastic term that’s sometimes conflated with somebody’s true capabilities. The most intelligent and some of the largest marketers in the world, who have been performance based for years – those who have grew up in direct marketing (with) heavy reliance on direct mail, reliance on email – they’ve always looked at people, individuals, households, all the attributes around those… they’ve always closed-loop their campaigns to the conversion data that they hold themselves.”

Engelgau arrived at IPG after 12 years with Acxiom, the data warehouse firm that sells consumer profiles and identity services to the world’s largest companies, when IPG acquired the majority of Acxiom except its LiveRamp unit a year ago.

The deal left the ongoing Acxiom focusing on LiveRamp, which is more fixed on letting brands use their own customer data in ad targeting than just buying in consumer data sets.

This video is from a Beet.TV series “Unlocking People-Based Marketing on the Open Web presented by OpenX.”   Please find more videos from the series on this page.   

Fast forward to the present and Cohen, like other advertising and media professionals, is glad to see a slimmer, more focused Festival, the President of North America for Magna Global explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“As we all know, Cannes has morphed quite a bit over the past 12 or 15 years. It’s become much more about technology and data and the creativity using that. I’m excited this year that Cannes has kind of contracted a little bit.”

Likewise, Cohen and his industry peers “are getting much more concentrated with the number of people that we’re bringing to Cannes” along with “lots of our clients.”

He expects to see a refocus what Cannes is all about, “which is the most creative work in the business across media, data and tech and messaging and storytelling.”

With a shorter schedule of activities this year, Cannes should be more suited to substantive conversations. “Everyone is in the same place for a limited period of time, so we get a lot accomplished both with clients and with partners,” Cohen says.

Asked about the progress of creative versioning of advertising messaging, Cohen notes that IPG Mediabrands has “an entire practice” focused on dynamic creative in the form of its Addressable Content Engine (ACE).

“We’ve spent a lot of time focused on the media side of the equation and not a ton historically on the messaging or the creative side of the equation.”

ACE is designed to match message relevancy with media reach. Plans and content are tailored to the right person, in the right place, the right moment and in the right voice.

“We now have the tools and the technology to actually think about templative creative, to think about versioning in a much more efficient and effective way,” Cohen says. “That is an area of innovation that we’re excited about over the next couple of years.”

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.

Announced today at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, the APB “came up as a very natural discussion around something that we call the code of decency,” Louis Jones, EVP, Media & Data at the 4A’s, says in this interview with Beet.TV. “There ought to be a base level for brand safety.”

Founding members of the APB include executives from Dentsu Aegis Network, GroupM, Havas Media, Horizon Media, IPG Mediabrands, MDC Partners, Omnicom Media Group and Publicis Media. Each holding company—as well as Horizon Media—has committed to dedicating a Brand Safety Leader within its network to serve on the bureau.

“We are creating a database where everybody can report in and say, ‘Hey, I’m the person from Dentsu Aegis and I just saw some of your Publicis brands in places where you don’t want them,” Jones says. “And then that information gets shared so that everyone can collectively act and keep every brand potentially, every major brand in the marketplace, safe.”

The formation of the APB is the first step in a list of actions that nearly 100 4A’s members and industry leaders “outlined and rallied around” at the Advertising Assurance Forum, a closed-door event hosted by the 4A’s on March 19, according to a 4A’s release.

Additional next steps outlined under the Advertising Assurance initiative include:

• Develop a risk management module. The APB will work with advertisers to 
develop categorizations of risk across a spectrum from most safe to least safe.

• Create a code of decency. Working with the Media Rating Council, Inc., APB agencies will help establish a set of ground rules that align baseline expectations for safety through a new set of standards within the MRC’s Brand Safety Guidelines, currently in initial draft. “Down the road, media agencies will also work with the MRC to identify efforts and methodologies to mitigate fake news,” states the 4A’s release.

• Educate the ecosystem. The APB will develop an industry playbook that will include new standards, metrics, methodologies and tools to combat unsafe environments for both brands and consumers.

Working with the MRC will help agencies understand “what are all the things we can do as an industry, from a perspective of how can technology be better, how can it be more specific, what is the role that human intervention plays in terms of understanding levels of risk and inappropriateness,” Jones says.

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Amongst other stipulations, the European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) measures include:

• tighter consent conditions for the collection of citizens’ data.
• consumers can instruct companies to stop processing their data.
• automated decision-making and profiling decisions must be made clear.
• consumers can request decisioning by automated processes be stopped and handled by a human instead.
• they have the right to request an explanation of automated decision-making.
• they can request free access, rectification and deletion of data.

The measures apply to any global company processing EU citizens’ data, with penalties of up to 4% of global turnover. Steps data handling and data processing companies should take include conducting risk assessments, appointing data protection officers and overhauling policies and systems.

So, with less than a year ticking on the compliance clock, how are advertisers and their agencies responding to the new regimen?

At a panel debate convened with Beet.TV, four agency data executives said GDPR compliance was a big deal, but they framed privacy regulation in the context of consumer aversion to “creepy” ad tactics generally…

IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:

“There are a couple of things (clients) probably miss on… an understanding that there is a true impact of what many of these regulations are, and how the EU and the US are not necessarily going to be in sync.

“(Clients) are not at the point where they’re willing to have a conversation around, ‘If someone’s giving me data, what am I giving in exchange?’ It’s going to get harder to justify bombarding consumers with impressions that they don’t need, just because you know who they are. Less is more. That is a far more fundamental shift that has the come – privacy is one part of it.”

GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser

“We have more conversations about how advertising can be relevant engaging without being creepy… there very rarely is (a breach of privacy). Part of our job as agencies is to ensure clients don’t find themselves getting sued for breaching privacy laws.

“Privacy is not an issue for our clients so much as following the law; that’s never been an issue – it’s more about … using data for good to make the consumer experience better.”

Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray

“If we use some insight about an audience to personalise a communication … the trust is there because you’re using the data in a way that there’s a value exchange.

“As we start to use data across more parts of the agency and client, there’s an education that has to happen, so that people that haven’t necessarily been handling data previously and are now having data conversations know the implications and are trained on how to handle that data or send an email without being in breach.”

Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:

“I think clients should own all their own ad-tech contracts, agencies should operate them, and they should be fully transparent.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

For many, that has meant a promotion for the executives who once ran outlier data divisions within an agency but who now are calling the shots.

What changes when that happens, and what have those people learned along the way? In this recorded panel discussion at Cannes Lions, four agency executives opened up. Here is what they said…

Brian Lesser, CEO, GroupM North America (previous: CEO, GroupM’s Xaxis):

“It’s a sign of the times that people with data, analytics, platforms backgrounds are now being put in a position to manage media agencies.

“For me, it’s a matter of making sure our agencies have appropriate platforms… make sure we are data-informed at every step along the way … activation across all channels.”

Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer, IPG Mediabrands (previous: president, IPG’s Cadreon):

“In this role, I’ve started to see the reality of the imbalance between planning and buying. Planning tools are activated by data sets which are still not quite where they should be.

“There are silos being created which are legacies from the past, you need to clean them to make some of the tech and systems work. That’s all I’ve been focused on for the last there of four months since starting the role.”

Doug Ray, product and innovation president, Dentsu Aegis Network (previous: CEO, Carat):

“I’ve always been on the planning, strategy and management side, not so much on the buying side. What has made great plans and strategies … is human insight, to have a deep understanding of customers. Clients are looking for the human truth, the insight to help them with better outcomes on their media.”

Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Hearts & Science (previous: CEO, Omnicom’s Annelect):

“We under-leveraged the audience creation and syndication side of it. The buying side of programmatic is actually the least important side of programmatic. The three most important sides… are the audience creation, syndication and also using some of the new ad-serving capabilities like an Innovid … to do the orchestration of the creative assets in the product.”

Those were some of the conclusions of a panel of ad agency technology executives, who debated the topics in a session recorded by Beet.TV.

In the panel, the quartet spoke about the problem of inconsistent data taxonomies and how advertisers can make hay where consumers are already buying.

IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:

“When I say an audience segment is ‘somebody who is interested in fashion’, am I defining it the same way across these different datasets, are the taxonomies similar? If they are not, then, even if it’s deterministic, it fails, because I’m actually not reaching the audience I think I am.

“How quickly do you refresh this data? If my data is a year old, should I really be using that or not?”

GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:

“We’ll never get to a category standard because the industry thrives on information asymmetry – everybody wants to know more than their competitor.

“We have to tell (clients) things they don’t already know about their own consumer but also model out their potential consumer.  You’re seeing a cottage industry crop up to answer these questions.”

Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:

“The mobile device is the gateway to people’s passions. We can instantaneously learn about a product, the price and buy that product at that moment in time. If there’s one thing that will continue to transform the way our clients market, it will be mobile.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Often, the question is framed as an “either-or” in which Netflix would have to choose between continuing its current premium SVOD model or ripping it up in favour of ad funding.

Previously, Ampere Analysis’ Richard Broughton has told Beet.TV Netflix could make up to $8bn a year from advertising if it switched over entirely, but would have to accept churn would knock off some of the gain, as angry consumers quit.

But one ad agency executive doesn’t think the choice has to be so dichotomous. Speaking in this panel debate recorded by Beet.TV, GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser said an ad model for Netflix could be a lot more intrinsic and less disruptive.

“The question is not necessarily, ‘Is Netflix thinking about how to infuse advertising in to its model?’,” Lesser said.

“Netflix is, I would bet, having conversations about how big-brand advertisers can get involved in content creation so that they can have a more effective engagement with their consumers.

“I think, over time, all over-the-top content, with Netflix being the gold standard, will have to be financed in some way by what we, traditionally, know now as the advertising business.”

Also in the panel, ad agency tech and data executives discussed whether the modern-day precision capability to target only customers known to be in-market for a particular brand or product will mean an exclusive focus on performance advertising, at the expense of traditional top-of-funnel or brand-based advertising of the like commonly seen on TV.

• Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn: “If (a consumer) can’t afford a Mercedes Benz, why not save the money and not advertise to them?”
• IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar: “We need to focus more on things like the customer joinery – in what stages of life are those customers… ? Figuring out… so that you can get the best outcome.”
• Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray: “Consumers may not be int he market today, but maybe in the market down the road. There’s a role for building the purpose of the brand, amplifying that through lots of exciting creative type of engagement.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

That was the main question on the lips of moderator Jay Sears, the SVP of MasterCard’s advertising intelligence, when he chaired a panel discussion on the topic on the shores of the Cannes Lions festival of creativity.

In The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel, Sears questioned a line-up of agency leaders:

• IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar
• Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray
• Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn
• GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser

In this enlightening, 46-minute recording of the panel, they touch on a variety of topics, including:

• What they have learned from the promotion of data-savvy leadership through agency ranks.
• How brands should pivot to target marketing outcomes, not proxies for those outcomes.
• Why advertisers should downgrade marketing-mix modelling and embrace customer data for better results.
• How inconsistent audience data segments pose a challenge to targeting.
• The changing place of brand advertising in a performance-driven world.

Enjoy the full, insight-packed video, or look out for our individual segments.

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Now, slowly, as new attribution technology hots up, brands are being promised the ability the ability to close the loop.

But, whilst, to many, this evolution appears to be driven by brands, agency tech chiefs, in this Beet.TV recorded panel discussion, say some clients have a long way to go. Here is a flavour of what they said…

IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:

“Depending on who in the client organisation you talk to, you tend to get get a couple of different definition of ‘What is an outcome?’

“There is a disconnect in the conversations you have in procurement (and the brand). There is a desire in one part of the organisation to drive toward the outcome – and the other part doesn’t necessarily believe that that is measurable or comparable across a wider set of the ecosystem. There needs to be an alignment.”

Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:

“You get what you measure. If you’ve got a procurement department, they’re looking at ‘How do we extract cost and drive down that cost? … If I can buy what I bought before more cheaply, the thesis is the return on investment will be improved’.

“There is a race to the bottom. It can only be bought so cheaply before you’re starting to fundamentally disrupt the quality of that inventory.

“We’d like to change the conversation and look at the value-in versus cost-out. It may cost you a higher CPM – but, if the response from the consumer is greater, then the overall value of that media buy is going to be better for that client.”

GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:

“The technology would be easy to solve. The most powerful media companies right now have a better understanding of consumers than many advertisers do – they want to hold on to that leverage, they want to define their own metrics, they want to grade their own homework. We’re left with Nielsen, which is imperfect at best.”

Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:

“A lot of clients believe there’s one true god and that god is Nielsen – and that is wrong.

“If you’re an application … you have to install the Nielsen app in to your SDK, and there’s not a lot of room for that. We think 40% of all video or content that could be measured is not. That’s a big problem.

“The great thing about programmatic … and fusing different panels … in to a DMP is, you can actually start to look at the causality of marketing.”

In this discussion panel recorded by Beet.TV, ad agency tech executives say many clients are capable of moving forward – but they are caught between two worlds…

IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:

“The newer companies look at performance (marketing) very differently and they’re far more open to restructuring and not having silos. They’re very good at lower-funnel, they’re structured internally to do that.

“Where they struggle is, in many cases, they see that as a battle for market share, as opposed to figuring out, ‘How am I going to get to the top of the funnel?’”

GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:

“Market-mix modelling has been the holy grail of channel allocation fora  very long time. When you come from the new school, you say, ‘Market-mix modelling is looking through the rear-view mirror, that can’t possibly be right.’

“You get part of your media plan using real-time media to buy and optimise, and part of your plan that’s looking backwards. The answer is not either-or, frankly – tis’ about updating that model more often.”

Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:

“The big problem with the market-mix models right now is the competitive data set which powers most of those are powered by Nielsen, and 75% of Nielsen’s money comes from the TV networks – so the mixed models themselves are totally based on TV and don’t take in to account what’s really happening in digital.”

Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:

“We’re working with a lot of our clients on, ‘How do you bring those two worlds (clients’ media team and and customer data team) together? How do you apply the precision and audience understanding that those groups had, how do you leverage the understanding that those CRM or ecommerce teams and leverage similar types of data in a mass-media ecosystem?’ That’s evolving, we’re able to apply some of those principles in the mass-media space.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

That is according to the tech chief of one leading ad agency.

Compared with analog, digital advertising may be sophisticated but, without having full sight of outcomes like actual sales, for years the industry has relied on currencies that measure things like clicks.

But that is changing, says IPG Mediabrands chief data and technology officer Arun Kumar.

“We do have an addiction to measuring proxies,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“For too long in the industry, we’ve talked about proxies (as metrics), because of our inability to measure the outcome.”

“Advertising has had a problem that broadband has had (in emerging markets) for a long time – the problem of ‘the last mile’. You bring the wire all the way up to the house and then it’s not in the apartment.”

In Kumar’s world, the advertising industry would close that last mile, helping advertisers to understand true business outcomes by abandoning proxy metrics like clicks, and instead by embracing true outcomes data that can, nowadays, be linked to online instigators.

Increasingly, new measuring techniques can capture a moment of sale and cross-reference data trails to match the purchase to the user who saw ads that motivated the decision.

“There are a fair amount of clients making the move,” says Kumar, “saying, ’It’s important for us to go beyond proxies’.

“We desire to drive outcomes. The outcomes are always business-related. It’s a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page. Kumar was a panelist at this event. 

To Larene Mantel, it’s been “a challenge and refreshing at the same time” to explain advanced TV to the uninitiated. The Director of Advanced TV at IPG Mediabrands’ Cadreon has deep roots in the traditional TV space from stints at ZenithMedia and PHD and so is well suited to the task.

“There are a lot of clients who are digital in background and are willing to do new things in the space and test and learn,” Mantel says in an interview with Beet.TV. “But there are clients that are traditional and very rooted in their traditional TV and their GRP’s. They know that this has worked in the past and if it’s not broken why fix it. It’s very interesting to have those conversations.”

Smaller, digital-based clients approach advanced TV strategies and tactics with a different comfort level, according to Mantel. “They’re not having to spend as much money to reach their target audience and that opens up the door for them to get into TV,” she says in response to a question from interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group.

Some traditional TV advertisers are more sheepish. “Sometimes they have sponsorships and that’s working for them. That’s where they’re having mass awareness,” Mantel says. “Some clients are not focused on a niche audience. They want to reach everyone.”

As addressable TV becomes pervasive, some clients are willing to test and learn, according to Mantel. Hurdles to experimentation include clients that are rooted in their networks and dayparts and knowing exactly where their ads are going to run, which runs counter to how addressable works.

“Changing that mindset and helping them feel comfortable and focusing on the target audience and making sure that you’re reaching the right people is a conversation,” Mantel says.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

That’s bringing in new, smaller advertisers for which TV may previously have been too costly. But one surprising new group of buyers is those from overseas.

At Cadreon, IPG Mediabrands’ ad-tech unit, advanced TV VP Amy DeHaen describes the main three kinds of addressable ad buyers currently in-market:

1. “You have one bucket of clients that is it a complement to their overall schedule and they’re looking at it from a test-and-learn perspective.”
2. “Then you have another bunch of clients that are looking at it from a new way to get involved in TV, (for whom) TV might have been too massive or expensive.”
3. “We’ve also had clients come from an international perspective, utilizing it from the entree in to the United States, which is a new perspective.”

That last group is interesting, because, unlike the previous two, it is little talked about as a constituency benefitting from addressability.

So why are foreign brands flocking to US addressable? DeHaen adds: “Because the US market is so dramatically different from a lot of the other markets, this allows them to come in and take the targeting and the demo they believe they have in their home market and test it in the US market … before they spend a lot of money … before they release their branding in the US, to see if it’s precisely working.”

In this example, the brand in question even ended up having to change its entire US branding after realizing, thanks to addressable, that its creative wasn’t resonating in the US, DeHaen says.

Despite the market movement, DeHaen wants to see greater scale through more addressable households and to see a common reporting mechanism.

This video is part of a series presented by DISH Media Sales. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

To learn more about addressable advertising and its benefits, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report:

Semantics aside, Kumar is focused on answering a particular question from marketer clients. “Have I made a smart decision on my media investment, and why is it smart?” he says in an interview with Beet.TV.

Key to such smart decisions is making sure that creative and planning agencies are working with the same target audiences and that buyers are executing against the same segment.

“What it means for us is this is the way we expect all media to be bought in the future,” Kumar says. “It’s less about whether it’s biddable, whether it’s going through an exchange, whether it’s private inventory. The most important point is are we planning and buying on audiences or are we still stuck with space.”

He notes that advertisers are increasingly willing to pay a premium for media “but we need to know exactly what are we paying a premium for and how is it driving the business.”

Kumar is encouraged by the increasing scale of U.S. households that can be reached with addressable TV advertising. “From our perspective, addressable has been a significant growth area. I think as the number of households scale, that’s where a lot of clients are going to be focused,” says Kumar. “We’ve gone past the tipping point on that.”

The bigger challenge lies in being able to target specific individuals within households as they consume content on a variety of devices through a variety of delivery mechanisms.

“The blockage in the system is how do you measure cross-screen and how are you going to figure out frequency capping across those multiple devices,” says Kumar.

In addressable TV he sees a similar pattern in location-based targeting of digital ads populated by dynamically inserted creative messaging. “I think a lot of that is also driving the growth of household addressable,” he says.

This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.

Matt Greenberg describes Rubicon’s expanded involvement with Cadreon as the latest step in a relationship spanning about three years. Cadreon has been using Rubicon’s non-guaranteed orders marketplace along with its open auction exchange.

Now Cadreon will be accessing “the entire spectrum of the programmatic waterfall, from the unreserved open market to the reserved automated guaranteed space” via Rubicon, according to Greenberg.

Rubicon’s new partnership with Mediaocean aims to help scale automation efforts for the direct buying sector—the largest component of the digital advertising market—through the integration of Rubicon’s Guaranteed Orders product with Mediaocean’s Prisma platform.

“This allows us to access a lot more agencies that are looking for great supply, great partnerships, great publishers for every brand and agency that connects with the Mediaocean platform,” says Greenberg.

The new deals are a far cry from the early days of programmatic buying when it mainly involved remnant inventory.

“As the years have gone along we’ve found publishers and buyers are looking for places to buy premium inventory in well-lit environments,” says Greenberg.

“It’s sometimes an afterthought,” IPG Mediabrands global mobile head Travis Johnson agrees, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“We’ve got clients … seeing upwards of 50% of their site traffic come from mobile devices, and they’re dedicating 1% of their spend to driving people there. (Only) a few percent of global media spend is going to mobile. They’re not making the most of that.”

What accounts for this ongoing schism? And isn’t it a missed opportunity? Johnson says: “It’s a new space where … it take s a lot of infrastructure to get all your assets aligned. It’s taking a lot of clients quite some time.”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.

Addressable screens are also likely to come onto the scene as TV operators stitch more devices into their content ecosystems, according to Henry Tajer, who became CEO of IPG Mediabrands in May.

“That rigor and that granularity make for a much more effective and accountable television channel that we can put on recommendations for clients and can invest in around brands, and the ROI on that will be, I think, pretty tremendous,” says Tajer in an interview with Beet.TV.

Tajer also dismisses the notion that TV operators should be counted out. He expects more and more broadcasters to be embracing hybrid solutions that marry traditional linear TV with digital.

“For all the people throwing stones at the television industry, I would point to the simple fact that they are big businesses, they are robust businesses, and they are critical to consumer engagement,” he says.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.

He says that inevitable evolution of the new medium will bring new muscle to an already powerful TV.  He see the power of data targeting and television as challenger to even the biggest digital players.

Starting off the interview, Kumar explains the philosophy of the IPG group in advanced television media planning and buying. He says unlike some other companies which buy digital media upfront, IPG buys for specific campaigns, keeping the essential flexibility in the process.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

But that is now changing, with a couple of big agency initiatives to reboot how their dedicated programmatic divisions operate in their wider groups.

Publicis’ VivaKi unit is moving its programmatic staff out in to operating agency stablemates, while IPG Mediabrands’ digital and ad tech group Cadreon is retooling itself to be more of an “incubator” for group technology, executives tell an industry panel.

“Everything about automation, programmatic, data needs to reside in the agencies,” says VivaKi global CEO Stephan Beringer. “It is the paradigm the new business model needs to be built on. If we want to scale this intelligence and integrate it in to the service, we need to push capabilities in to the agencies.”

Cadreon global president Arun Kumar says clients are asking for greater visibility in to programmatic strategies – something that is prompting changes.

“We’ve looked at how we can transform ourselves from being a trading desk in to being an incubator for ad tech and develop platforms that allow our agency partners to access that intelligence,” he adds.

“(We are seeking) greater synchronization between planning and buying. When you democratize that , the media agencies can play a more strategic role.”

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

That is 52% more money going through programmatic than a year earlier, the report says. Indeed, programmatic is close to accounting for half of global online display ad sales, expected to be 42% this year and 48% in 2015.

But the US market has already reached the tipping point, with 62% of 2014 digital display sales carried out programmatically, says Magna Global. These new processes are expected to shift US 82% of digital display dollars by 2018. For now, the US market will have shifted $10.9 billion programmatically in 2014 – 53% of the worldwide total.

Magna Global says this year’s growth is happening because big consumer-goods, auto and pharmaceutical advertisers have adopted new tools that extend measurement of branding goals to programmatically-bought ads.

The new report on the topic covers 35 markets. Speaking to Beet.TV in this video interview in August, IPG Mediabrands global CEO Matt Seiler said transparency is a requirement in the programmatic space.  You can find more in this study published in the Wall Street Journal.

“It’s all about how to connect the data points,” he says. “How do you identify the critical components in the data that are valuable and connect them together to either speed up the process or enable targeting or enable the whole real-time concept. That’s where the marketing is going.” Data is making it possible to track individual touchpoints more, and connect them back to the media channel, he adds.

Looking ahead, he expects programmatic buying to become a bigger force in TV as addressable TV becomes more prevalent. “As consumers move over to devices that are less about broadcast and more about what they want at that moment in time, that’s how programmatic will move into that area,” he says.

This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO.  Please find all of our coverage of the show right here.  Beet.TV’s coverage of DMEXCO is sponsored by Videology.

IPG Mediabrands’ global CEO Matt Seiler tells Beet.TV in this video that more openness is needed from the “open” end of the industry.

“Pretty big advocates as we are about open, clients have some big concerns about what’s going on within trading desks and fear they don’t have control over what audiences are being aggregated through what means and through what margin is attached to that.

“Transparency is a requirement in this space. The more open we are in programmatic, the more likely that the whole automation delivery will happen.”

We spoke with Seiler  for “The Road to DMEXCO,” a series of interviews with industry leaders produced in New York, London and San Francisco.    It is sponsored by the automatic content recognition (ACR) technology provider Civolution.

Please find more videos from the series here.  Beet.TV is a media sponsor of DMEXCO and will be covering the conference extensively.

We spoke with him at the Beet.TV summit on programmatic television advertising yesterday.

“Today, (real-time bidding) is known as being motivated by trying to drive prices down as low as they can possibly go,” IPG Mediabrands’ Magna Global north America president Kristi Argyilan tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“While we like the idea of the real-time piece, the idea of an auction or a place where people feel like they lose control over pricing is the piece that keeps that from moving forward in a healthy≤ productive way for everybody.”

Argyilan is speaking about the consortium Magna Global recently formed with A+E Networks, AOL, Cablevision, Clear Channel Media and Entertainment and Tribune. Whilst the consortium’s aim is to move toward an “automated future” in which half of media buying is automated by 2016, it seems the partners also want an option in which inventory buying is carried out more slowly.

“So what we hope to figure out is, how do you take the driving pricing down off of the table by showing a new way of valuing things so that the right inventory demands the right kind of price?

“We do believe that near-time bidding is probably where we’re headed. in the near-time… For display, there’s a lot of inventory, inventory is not valued as highly as television inventory is. Us starting to separate those and understand we can do real-time bidding or near-time bidding across more channels is where we really want to go.”

Following up with Beet.TV, Argyilan adds: “We find we can legitimately optimize all media if we do it over longer optimization cycles. So, two- to four-week cycles for traditional is a responsible reaction to market response and gets a good result, hence the term ‘near-time’.”

“A lot of media companies have been good money with the old model,” IPG Mediabrands’ Magna Global north America president Kristi Argyilan tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Our hypothesis is that that model starts to fall apart in another two years.”

Argyilan was speaking to Beet.TV about the consortium Magna Global formed last month with A+E Networks, AOL, Cablevision, Clear Channel Media and Entertainment and Tribune to help it toward an “automated future” in which half of media buying is automated by 2016.

“Our consortium is meant to be a private room where we can start to play around with these new ways of doing business without introducing a lot of risk to any of us as we start to experiment with things,” she says.

“We’re taking all of the manual labor that should be automated out of the system by finding connective technologies to bring all these legacy systems together.

“The intent is for all of our partners to bring inventory to the consortium so that we can start to play around with different ways of pricing and tracking performance against specific target audiences that are client-based audiences.”

Working with Adap.tv

When IPG Mediabrands’ Magna Global media unit announced a partnership with Adapt.tv last month, it was seen as a win for AOL’s video ad tech firm.

Now Manga Global’s  Argyilan says the deal will let her clients target video ads far more specifically than previously.

“From the get-go, they identified themselves as a technology company,” she says in our video interview. “They brought development time to the relationship so that we were able to think about how we could use them as a platform on a broader basis than simply procuring video inventory.

“We’ve incorporated our discrete data stack in to their platform so that we can now star to look at different types of media inventory with our data applied so that we’re buying on a more sophisticated metric.”

We interviewed her in the Magna Global offices in San Francisco offices earlier this week.

In an unrelated development, the acquisition of Adap.tv by AOL was finalized today.