“Profound change,” according to GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, McDonald interviews MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki on how the entire advertising industry can reboot itself for a new era.

From ‘hack’ to patchwork

Both McDonald and Zawadzki agreed cookies, the third-party usage of which is being deprecated, are a “20-year-old hack” on top of rudimentary browser technology, and are ill-suited to modern demands.

“If you thought that either last click or post-click post view was the right basis by which to manage a $500 billion industry on our way to a trillion dollars… is it going to work by asking people to touch their TV?,” Zawadzki said. “Highly unlikely.”

"The advertising ecosystem is begging for a redesign and it’s our job to give it one." Read more from our CPO, Anudit Vikram, on the urgent need for programmatic redesign, live now on @TheDrum: https://t.co/1g4eO3nZfO

— MediaMath (@mediamath) June 29, 2021

“We’re in a situation where we want to recreate addressability as defined by the humans behind the screens and speakers, which is good. But the way that we’re going to have to do it – we’ll have to become enterprise-open. It’ll have to be a portfolio of solutions.

“Those things will need to be selected, stitched in scale – it’s going to be deterministic solutions, probabilistic solutions, open solutions, proprietary solutions. You’re going to have to put these things together in a way that allows for orchestration across set screens and speakers.”

‘Go far, together’

Zawadzki said the new-look industry organization demands a more consensual, all-hands approach to redefinition. Previously, he suggested, self-interest ruled.

“People (have been) operating in silos in isolation… optimising for publisher yields, optimising for advertiser performance, optimising for intermediary profit growth,” he said.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

“You can’t solve the industry challenges in a silo.”

‘Look in the mirror’

Global Forum on Responsible Media – Watch the Program on Demand

Ultimately, the significant disruption happening in the ad industry can be beneficial, the MediaMath CEO said.

“It is a requirement that the industry reorganise itself around a new set of principles and work backwards from what it should look like and what it needs to look like.”

And GroupM CEO McDonald agreed. “Profound times require profound change,” he said.

“Profound change does have us have to sort of look in the mirror.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.

Companies are compelled to take a positive stance on a range of outward issues – but often find that benefits nevertheless flow back in.

As part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, advertising agency executives discussed what they are doing on that front:

• GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald
• 4As president and CEO Marla Kaplowitz
• Mindshare global CEO Adam Gerhart

From singular safety to multi-responsibility

“When we used to think about things like responsible media, we used to go straight to brand safety,” said Mindshare global CEO Adam Gerhart.

“But, more and more, the definition and the view of responsible media and the obligation that we have to consumers in the world is becoming much more progressive and much more encompassing.”

He said he is most excited about the “depth” represented by a responsible stance. Gerhart cites data ethics and privacy, media plan practices, carbon neutrality, journalism and minority communities.

“(We can make) carbon-neutral media plans that encourage media partners and owners to offset their own activities,” Gerhart said. “We are now creating things like a series of inclusion PMPs (private marketplaces) which is directly aimed at putting money back into the hands of underrepresented voices. It started with LGBTQ community, has moved into black communities, and now we’re doing the same from a responsible journalism perspective.”

Having a point of view

For 4As president and CEO Marla Kaplowitz, responsible media is “not something anyone should take lightly”.

“We actually launched media responsibility principles last September, building on the work of our advertiser protection bureau focused on brand safety and brand suitability,” she said. “It was about taking action to really put a point of view out there and say what does this mean in terms of promoting respect, making sure that we’re addressing hate speech?” The principles cover 10 areas.

“Words only go so far. Actions go the distance,” Kaplowitz adds. “We’ve seen some brands, some agencies, do that, but now I’m really seeing a collective focus on this. We still have a lot of work to do with misinformation and disinformation.”

Lead by following

GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald says brands and agencies should respond to what consumers are saying. His responsibility commitment covers five areas.

The first is authenticity, something McDonald says the pandemic has shown the importance of. “Your brand had better be authentic and it better be able to live in the moment and react and move in the moment,” he said.

Other commitments for GroupM include a “data ethics complex“, sustainability, brand safety and diversity and inclusion.

“In dynamic, profound, changing times, the partners that truly are living evolve or die realise that if you don’t dynamically change, you won’t keep up,” McDonald added. “The bold are going to actually have this proportionate outsized wins as a result of actually living their promises to their clients, their guests, their consumers.”

We spoke with Kirk McDonald, CEO of GroupM NA about the event and his hope that the dialogue coming out it will lead to a more fair, sustainable media landscape.

Earlier, GroupM announced that some 20 leading brands are making substantial commitments to investment in Black-owned media companies. Speaking to Variety about the initiative, McDonald stated:

GroupM’s programs “are not just about what we need to do to support today’s owners, but how do we make sure that diverse ownership grows in the future? We are talking about both of those legs.”

The Global Forum will be streamed on the GroupM LinkedIn feed from 1 to 4 pm EDT on 6/23.  The program is made possible with the support of IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and PubMatic.  To stay informed of the Forum details and agenda use the hashtag #ResponsibleMedia.  Please find more information and register here.

But Choreograph is a little different. Launched at a time when brands around the world are trying to activate their own first-party data as a response to challenges facing digital ad identifiers, the new unit will focus on this new and emerging need.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kirk McDonald, North America CEO of GroupM, which will house Choreograph, explains the rationale.

Dancing with three legs

McDonald says Choreograph has “three legs”:

1. “We help our clients earn and manage the data that they have, and the access to that. We then help them turn that into ID, into a clear resolved identity.”
2. “We enrich it and expand it for them. Layers of intelligence and insights are included in that.”
3. “We actually help them activate that, where they want to activate it against media, through our operating systems and platforms.”

The company has more than 700 staff available to it, including data scientists, technologists, product developers and customer success representatives.

Our products enable marketers to create better experiences, stronger brands and trusted customer relationships. pic.twitter.com/gxcaKRIeJC

— Choreograph (@ChoreographData) May 13, 2021

First-party journey

Choreograph, which was announced in late April, will combine resources from GroupM and Wunderman Thompson, said by WPP CEO Mark Read to be “another important step in our simplification strategy”.

McDonald will oversee Choreograph.

He explains: “All our clients are on different parts of that journey of figuring out how to harness their first-party data, and activate it and turn that data into a resolved identity in a way that they can use it.

(Choreograph) really captures some of the history and the heritage of our Wunderman Thompson data business, 40+ years of experience in that team of data scientists, engineers, and experts around data management, robust data management suites, particularly around identity resolution and enrichment.”

Choreograph will use data and technology platform WPP Open.

But the conversation around the pace of creativity and innovation and change remains constant, if not accelerated.

Marking the two years since Cannes, we are doing a very exciting program with GroupM and the 4A’s.  We are convening a global forum on Responsible Media on June 23.

The virtual event will explore the future of media as being responsible and sustainable with some 30 speakers from the WPP/GroupM agencies, media, brands and technology companies.

The program takes its lead from the Responsible Media investment initiative from GroupM.   The initiative was announced last month by Kirk McDonald, CEO of GroupM NA.

Kirk is today’s guest on the BeetCast.  He explains the imperative for the responsible media program and other projects aimed to boost under represented voices.

We also go deep on WPP’s new agency called Choreograph and plans to drive unified user identity across its global network.

In our chat, he shares his hopes for the conversations during  the June 23 Responsible Media Forum.

The Global Forum is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen, PubMatic,

The event will be streamed live on LinkedIn Live, Twitter and YouTube.  It will be free and will not require a registration.   You can find more details in the days ahead on Beet.TV and via the hash tag #ResponsibleMedia or sign up for event updates here.

Thanks Kirk for joining us today and for all your years of  leadership and for your support and friendship.  Very much appreciated.

Thanks to the podcast sponsor, Mediaocean.

And thank you for joining us.  I hope you enjoy this episode.

Fully qualified, he often saw himself as an “imposter” at these gatherings.

I interviewed him this week to get his feelings and outlook during the nation’s upheaval over race.

He spoke with the formation of the I.D.E.A. Initiative as  a”safe space” for people of color to gather – and more recently, to advocate for change in the C-suite and boards of media, tech and marketing companies.

Emotionally exhausted by the present turmoil, he is optimistic about change, although not sure how it will look.   At  AT&T, he is finding an “awakening across leadership.”

*Note:  This recording was made in June.  We have republished today as one of the most important segments from 2020.   Kirk is not longer at Xandr having been named. CEO of GroupM NA  in August.

This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here. 

I am grateful to Kirk McDonald and my other dear friends, along with so many new acquaintances, for having spoken so candidly and personally about what is like to be Black in our industry and for sharing their anguish and hopes in this time of racial injustice and social unrest.

Simply put, we’re having conversations we’ve never had before.

Several of the executives in the series speak of needing a “safe space,” a place where fellow people of color can freely share about who they are and to discuss  difficult issues in their work experience.

Well, Beet.TV is now that “safe space.”

I hope that the series will help to foster understanding and progress.  The series is far from over.  We will produce more videos in the months ahead.

As a publisher, we are determined to bring more people of color to regular Beet.TV industry coverage.  And we have made progress.  Much more to come.

I am very moved by Kirk McDonald’s words about my work.  I have published this short video on this page. Thank you Kirk, my friend, for opening the conversation.  We all need to take a few steps forward.

Update: Since we published this video, Kirk has been appointed CEO of GroupM North America.   Congrats Kirk.

Here is our series to date: 

• Black Women: We Can Be Our Worst Enemy, Innovid’s Stephanie Geno
• Channeling Frederick Douglass: He Would Want Us All to Vote w/ Maria Weaver, CMO, Comcast Advertising
• Being Black in AdTech: “You Lose Bits of Yourself” w/Kerel Cooper, SVP Global Marketing at LiveInten
• People See Color in the Workplace — And that’s OK, NBCU’s Brian Norris
• Let’s Recognize and Celebrate Our Differences, Dish’s Sean Robertson
• “The Mask Doesn’t Work: Be Your Beautiful, Authentic Self,” Monique Nelson
• “We All Have to Develop Empathy” Now, IBM’s Kareem Yusuf
• Racial Diversity Programs Must Address Systemic Racism, Comscore’s Tershone Phillips
• “Our Voices and Ideas Are Suppressed in the Workplacew” w/ Kelle Coleman, SVP Brand Partnerships, Nielsen
• “We’re Not Allowed to Fail, We Have to be Perfect w/Cavel Khan, Chief Revenue Officer of Tumblr
• “Diversity Needs to Woven into the Fabric of Everyday Decisions,” Facebook’s Alvin Bowles
• Being a Black Woman in Silicon Valley: The Stereotyping is Exhausting w/ Kenya Hayes, Head of Comms, NA, Appsflyer
• “We All Play the Game.” We’ve Learned to “Code Switch” at Work, Christian Borges
• Kirk McDonald: Exhausted by the Turmoil, Positive about Changes Ahead’
• Andre Swanston Shares His Experiences, Lessons and Hopes for Society in this Beet Series Debut

This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here. 

For AT&T’s Xandr, however, it is more than that. This September 16 to 18 in Santa Barbara, the company hosts its second Relevance Conference.

In its first year, 2018, the conference effectively announced the creation of Xandr, the advanced advertising and media division which AT&T created after a series of acquisitions.

This year, the conference’s main aim is to explore how consumers are spending their media time, Xandr’s chief marketing officer, Kirk McDonald, explains in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“There are still only 24 hours in the day,” McDonald says. “So, with finite time and near infinite content, how are consumers really making decisions about what they spend their time with?

“For the media producers, the programmers, those that are creating the content, they have become shareholders of attention.”

The conference agenda will hear from executives like…

• Megan Pagliuca, Chief Data Officer, Hearts & Science
• Conan O’Brien, TV host and producer
• Evan Hanlon, Chief Strategy Officer, GroupM
• Kevin Reilly, President of TBS/TNT/HBO Max
• Rob Norman Senior Advisor, GroupM

But that’s not all. “AT&T, under Brian (Lesser)’s leadership as our CEO, has given us permission to have a conference that is not [just] a selly conference,” McDonald says. “We’re not [just] bringing customers [and] clients together to try to hock or push a particular product.” The event is also about thought leadership, and getting a new, consumer-focused dialogue started, McDonald said.

Social change: “We’ve already announced two of our Women’s World Cup soccer stars. We’ve got Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe who are joining us. It really is their time … it’s about time that we make some of the changes, we react to the way consumers are behaving.”

Research: “We’re going to do another big bit of industry research. This year we wanted to look at ‘Do consumers begin to understand how advertising is underwriting their access to content and information?'”

Products: “We’ve introduced a bunch of new ad formats on the TV side and we’ll showcase some of those at the conference. This year we’re really proud of having brought a new strategic buying platform to the marketplace… Xandr Invest. We also announced the Community.”

Note:  Beet.TV will cover the conference as part of a sponsorship arrangement with Xandr. 

What followed was Xandr’s first-ever The Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara, which brought together “the shareholders of attention,” AT&T sharing data with WarnerMedia within six months of its acquisition and the recent launches of Xandr’s Community audience marketplace and the Xandr Invest demand-side platform.

Now Xandr is once again “on the road to Relevance,” which will be repeated in Santa Barbara on Sept. 16, McDonald says in this interview with Beet.TV.

He describes the purpose behind the Community marketplace as “a premium audience marketplace that would not just be our owned and operated inventory but would be this community of like-minded publishers and content producers.” WarnerMedia (including Otter Media), Vice, Hearst Magazine, Newsy, Philo, Tubi, and XUMO are inaugural Community partners, according to a Xandr news release.

Xandr Invest is a re-launch of a demand side platform “really as an audience-buying platform,” says McDonald. It takes into account “the things that really needed to be improved as the industry’s evolved dramatically on the programmatic side around now buying against return on investment, not just a system to manipulate the quick fluctuations of rapid trading.”

Audience buying, while advanced in digital platforms, “really is still nascent in TV. As the leaders in addressable TV we think we understand what are the challenges all the way at the edge and we’re solving those to a large degree for a lot of partners,” he adds.

Last year’s The Relevance Conference “far exceeded our expectations,” McDonald says. It also marked the debut of the Xandr Relevancy Report, whose research “revealed a lot of things that we kind of knew intuitively, but it was great to put hard facts behind the sense that consumers care about advertising, understand its role. They know that it’s part of the content consumption process and part of the package.”

Xander has the launched a second wave of Xandr Relevancy Report research and will share the findings in September in Santa Barbara.

You are watching Beet.TV coverage of Cannes Lions 2019.   For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page.  Thank you to our 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.    

“There’s no question that lots of folks in the marketing and media world would like more alternatives to Google and Facebook, and AT&T by bringing a lot of extraordinary assets is the latest to present a credible assembly of important capabilities,” Rothenberg says.

One of the many invitation-only attendees of the Xandr Relevance Conference, The IAB chief was scheduled to moderate a panel discussion titled Consumers’ Choice: The DTC Revolution. It was based in part on the IAB’s “Rise Of The 21st Century Brand Economy” study.

“I think the elite attendance here at The Relevance Conference is an example of the interest, the hunger for an entity that can do what AT&T is promising to do,” Rothenberg says.

That’s based on what he considers to be AT&T’s “world class” assets encompassing entertainment, news, distribution, data, privacy and a “great embedded understanding of data security.”

Add them all together and “you’ve got a company that puts together a lot of remarkable capabilities that can be brought to bear on behalf of both consumers and businesses at the same time.”

Rothenberg has words of praise for AT&T management in the walkup to the Xandr unveil this week. “I think the fact that they’ve spent a good solid year planning and building before coming out with public announcements was incredibly smart.”

He expresses a special affinity for Xandr CEO Brian Lesser and CMO Kirk McDonald, both “colleagues” and in McDonald’s case a former IAB board member.

“I think everybody here wishes them well and expects that they will do extraordinarily well to help build not just a new media entity, but a new media communications and advertising industry in the United States and elsewhere,” Rothenberg says.

This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.

“There is almost infinite information fighting and competing for finite human attention,” Kirk McDonald, CMO,  says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’ve embraced this moment in time when we believe advertising needs to be reimagined. It needs to change.”

To help foster that change, AT&T will host The Relevance Conference on Sept. 24-26 in Santa Barbara, CA. McDonald describes the event as an aggregation of thought leaders across entertainment, media, marketing and content production, “to get together to talk about what are the best practices that they have put together around understanding how to engage with today’s consumer and creating moments of relevance for them.”

The invitation-only event will be limited to 300 attendees.

AT&T will share new research at The Relevance Conference about the attention economy. In addition to examining where consumers are spending their time and why and what’s relevant to them, attendees will contemplate how the industry is shaped “both in terms of its organizational structure” and its practices around speaking to people in more relevant ways.

“The reality is today, as we engage with consumers, it is an engagement,” says McDonald. “We no longer tell them what to watch when to watch or where to watch. We actually now engage in a dialogue as that consumer participates in embellishing the content in their own unique ways and they actually filter for the things that are most relevant to them.”

At The Relevancy Conference, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson will participate in an opening fireside chat to share his thoughts on how “AT&T really evolves into a modern media company” combining its technological prowess, some 170 million consumer engagement touch points and the content heft of Warner Media.

“I think the most rewarding thing for everyone is to arrive and realize that they’re sitting across form the people that they work with all the time, or work against all the time, in sort of competing for consumer attention,” McDonald says. “This is a gathering of the shareholders of consumer attention. That’s who’s there.”

He calls data and technology the tools to relevance.

“Data to create an understanding and awareness of the interests or the intentions of a consumer and then technology to enable us to actually find them in the right moment and time,” McDonald adds.

“I think the pendulum is swinging in the direction where we’ll make data and technology enable better storytelling. Better storytelling is the requirement of relevance and this is the right time to happen. I’m very excited about it.

Following The Relevance Conference, during Advertising Week in New York, AT&T will roll-out the new advertising enterprise. “We wanted to not just actually announce the name just because we wanted to give a name to this already nearly $2 billion business. We wanted to actually enter the industry with some substance,” McDonald explains.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series about The Relevance Conference and emerging media trends. The project is sponsored by AT&T Advertising and Analytics.

“We’re actually introducing something that we think is really informative and revealing things about the new brand identity that’s going to be associated with this advertising company,” McDonald adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

Earlier this month, AT&T prevailed over the Justice Department in its bid to acquire Time Warner’s assets, foremost among them HBO, Turner and Warner Bros.

“We are very excited about the outcome of the trial,” says McDonald. “For sure, this actually allows our business to actually go forward and execute against the strategy that we believe is really going to be very, very valuable to consumers, to the marketers and publishers we work with as well as to the AT&T business for all.”

The branding effort at Cannes introduces “a new business that reflects a welcoming of the creative canvas, tied together with informed by technology and data in a way that truly advertising companies haven’t existed before.”

There are no words in AT&T’s branding unveiled at the Carlton, just colors, starting with “trusted blue on one end” signifying the company’s 140-year roots and the brand’s “credibility and high integrity,” says McDonald.

“And that transitions across the face of the Carlton to produce a new color, bright coral, which has all of what that color embodies. Energy, passion, innovation. And that is the brand color of the new name for this advertising business and we can’t wait to talk more about what we’re going to be doing inside that business later this year.”

The G+J deal means PubMatic will help enable programmatic mobile ads for brands including Spiegel and Vodafone live, after its mobile business grew by 200% early last year.

They sound like the kind of customers PubMatic is concentrating on, after seemingly axing others in 2015.

“Publisher networks have been a huge part of the business, but, in the last quarter or two, we’ve concentrated back and focused on our premium publisher business,” PubMatic president Kirk McDonald tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Intentionally, we moved away from some publishers who are just not, long-term, the right partners for us.

“We’ve concentrated toward premium publishers … In terms of a direct salesforce strategy, pricing and packaging is how they will differentiate their inventory sources from what is beginning to be a commoditized supply of inventory in the market.”

McDonald adds PubMatic continues to be publisher-centric, but has also launched features drawing buy-side customers.

We spoke with him at the MediaLink annual executive dinner at CES.

Our coverage of CES is sponsored by Adobe.

We spoke with him last week at the LUMA Partners CEO media and adtech conference in New York.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, the Redwood City- and New York-based company president Kirk McDonald tells Beet.TV Pubmatic will launch the offering this week.

“Up until now, publishers had to go to multiple vendors,” he says. “We have promised Pubmatic was going to be a one-platform solution, incorporating display, mobile and video all on one platform for publishers. This week, we kick that off.”

Pubmatic hired more than 100 people through 2013, taking it to nearly 400 staff, as demand for private ad exchanges and real-time management grew. After international expansion, McDonald says the outfit will set up office in Japan soon.

“Programmatic has entered a new year,” he says. (It’s) no longer a ‘Why?’ question. Now the conversation has gone to how to be vey successful.”

We interviewed McDonald at the MediaLink party at CES.