We are taking a break from the BeetCast. We are finishing up the season with this episode and will be back on September 13.

And what a way to end this series with our season finale with Lou Paskalis.

Lou, as many of you know, is a visionary marketer.  A longtime executive in financial services with senior media investment posts at American Express and at Bank of America, he has not only led his companies in innovation but has been a guide to the entire industry though its participation in industry groups including MMA,  speaking at industry conferences and via his popular, must-follow Twitter feed @LouPas.

Lou left Bank of America recently. He’s taking a much need break, and I am sure he will be doing something major soon. Can’t wait to hear.

I am grateful that Lou took the time to speak with me for this no holds barred conversation on the state of digital media, the future of the media agency, what he sees as  the lack of responsibility at Facebook around disinformation – and the imperative for brands to support journalism.

A great conversation, surely a high point in the BeetCast and a great way to end the season.  Thanks Lou for this and for all you do to lead our industry. And thanks for being a supporter of my work for so many years. It means a lot.

A huge thanks to our series sponsor Mediaocean. Really appreciate your partnership.

And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode.

That is the view of one man making media buying decisions at one of the world’s leading financial services institutions.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lou Paskalis, Bank Of America’s Senior Vice President, Customer Engagement and Media Investment, discusses the relationship between price and volume.

He talks about the recent trend with which some TV networks are now reducing the number of ads they show viewers – a response to growing complaints of excess.

“I’m actually happy to see the industry is maturing with regard to ad load,” Paskalis says. “The solution isn’t carving out more time for ads. It’s actually being able to deliver less ads that are more valuable to an individual which will have a higher take rate and will allow marketers to pay fair value for that.

“We give away advertising in this country today in some channels, and it really vexes me that I can buy a news audience for the same price that I can buy a primetime audience, when, in fact, we know that news audiences are six times more likely to recall your ad and five times more likely to engage with your ad. And yet they’re not sold at any kind of a price premium.

“I think that, when we get smarter about the relative value of audiences, those pieces of inventory will come at a significant premium, which will ultimately reduce ad load and improve the consumer experience.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January.  The series is presented by Samsung Ads.  For more videos please visit this page.

The new opportunities presented by a plethora of different marketing channels mean brands need to generate more messaging in more formats and more combinations than ever before.

That is according to the man who spends advertising money for Bank Of America.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lou Paskalis, Bank Of America’s Senior Vice President, Customer Engagement and Media Investment, says: “Creative has never been more important than it is today. We need a lot of what I would call ‘core stock’ of really good creative experiences – not just ads, but also content and, frankly, even utilities; things that help people … calculate or to understand what their options are.

“I think the net production of creative over the next several years from agencies and also from in-house as well, is going to increase dramatically. I think the average asset will get exposed to less people because there’ll be more total assets out there.”

Paskalis also speaks about dynamic creative optimization (DCO), the technology which allows advertisers to take raw ingredients of advertisements and mix them in to different versions for different platforms and different audiences.

He suggests Bank of America is keen on harnessing the DCO opportunity, and is making steady progress on exploiting.

“We’re hoping to give folks an experience that makes them say, ‘Wow, the bank really understands me’,” Paskalis says. “It’s a real gas/oil mix of data science and intuition, but we’re learning our way forward and we’re really excited about the progress we’ve made.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January.  The series is presented by Samsung Ads.  For more videos please visit this page.

For starters, agencies need to perform a basic assessment for their clients and not avoid tough challenges, Paskalis, who is SVP, Consumer Engagement & Media Investment, explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Data Summit, where he was one of the featured speakers. That assessment should include asking:

• Does the client actually have a really strong customer lifetime value model?

• Is the marketing organization mapped to that?

• Does the client actually have a Customer Data platform and is the marketing and media function represented in those discussions along with analytics and technology?

• What is the client’s attribution solution? Does it truly have multi-touch in place that’s taking into account first and third party?

“If the answer to any of those questions is less than 100 percent, that’s where the agency needs to focus and they need to bring the clients along the journey,” Paskalis says. The way to make marketing more relevant to business outcomes is to “ensure that marketing has the right seat at the right table and is able to advocate for what we really think from a holistic customer perspective,” he adds.

Identity solutions remain a huge hurdle, according to Paskalis, who believes “the reality is we need to innovate around identity.” Being able to determine whether ad messaging is reaching the same people on different platforms facilitates the delivery of episodic creative. “If we don’t do that, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant. As the social media algorithms get more and more precise around putting things in front of you that are exactly relevant to you, marketers need to build muscle memory in that same area.”

An outspoken critic about brand safety on digital platforms, Paskalis sees much more work that needs to be done, particularly within the walled gardens of digital publishers who do a good job of protecting their own data but are lacking when it comes to rooting out fraud.

“I’m tremendously concerned about the hygiene in the digital space,” he says. “Programmatic has been the single worst thing that’s happened to the advertising industry and it’s the only salvation of marketers going forward.”

There need to be more conversations around the issue, but with some preconditions.

“The walled gardens need to become transparent. They can no longer say ‘we’ve got this’ when in fact they can’t do long division and addition, they can’t provide a brand-safe environment, they can ‘t ensure that the people you’re talking to are actually people with both pulse and respiration.”

He’s excited about the work by companies like TrustX, which bills itself as the cooperative, private marketplace for the world’s must trusted brand marketers and premium publishers.

“We need more of that and we need that to be working in behind the walled gardens as well.”

This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, BoA SVP for customer engagement and investment officer Lou Paskalis explains the change the company has made.

“We have taken a hard look at how our investment lays out,” Paskalis says. “We have engineered a return to a little bit more reliance on traditional.

We are in a lifelong relationship with our customers, and we have many more touchpoints in the digital world than we do in other forms of media, so we are never going to move away from it.

“But, as walled gardens become more and more central in people’s lives, we are going to have make choices between going where the audience is, and doing things that are really accountable toward our investment, and for our shareholders.”

In the last year, advertisers and publishers alike have grown concerned about the dominance of two internet’s two biggest platforms, and the way that some ad-tech vendors withhold vital data for campaign assessment.

At the ANA Masters Of Marketing event, P&G chief marketer Marc Pritchard, who arguably kick-started advertisers’ fight-back in a seminal speech in January, spoke about providing consumers with more useful, valuable ad messages.

And Paskalis explained the rationale behind Bank Of America’s strategy shift.

“As a lifelong media person, we have principles that we actually live by -,” he said

1. “Go where your audience is.”
2. “Don’t expect what you don’t inspect”

“If I lived by just those two principles, I would be in massive conflict right now, because the audience is clearly on these walled garden platforms like Facebook and Google, but I’m not in a clean, well-lit (advertising) environment.

“I am not able to really see if the media is performing the way that I need to understand it. I am not able to understand those data signals that are coming off, so that I can curate more relevant experiences, not just within the confines of Facebook and Google, but across the digital world.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

The as-yet unnamed channel won’t rebroadcast footage from Bloomberg’s existing television operation but will be composed of live news reporting from the news outlet’s bureaus around the world. In addition, it will feature a curated and verified mix of video posted on Twitter by the social-media platform’s users, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Paskalis cites the real-time nature of Twitter combined with “the analytics and the deep insights” that Bloomberg brings to the table as major attributes of the new streaming news service.

“Whether it’s connecting to the culture at the speed or now, whether it’s reaching influencers on topics that matter to them right now, whether it’s an audience that I know is influential within their overall spheres of interest, I can’t think of a better partnership from a marketing standpoint for Bank of America,” he says.

The deal represents a realization that Twitter recognizes the power of news and connecting brands to what’s happening in both the news and in culture, according to Paskalis.

“It’s an opportunity for marketers to find relevancy in an era where it’s harder and harder to compete for attention. So I welcome these kinds of partnerships,” he says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the the #NewFronts, please visit this page. 

THE DIGITAL CONTENT NEWFRONTS 2017, PRESENTED BY THE IAB

At Mobile World Congress, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told Beet.TV mobile technology still wasn’t attractive enough to make it a truly engaging ad medium, while P&G marketing VP Sophie Blum said the small screen was a challenge.

Now another global chief marketer is raising the issues around mobile advertising.

“We’ve taken a lot of advertising logic in to what is ostensibly a one-to-one marketing medium – (but) advertising is a one-to-many experience,” according to Bank Of America enterprise media planning, investment and measurement SVP Lou Paskalis.

But Paskalis may have an answer for the industry. Speaking at the congress, he gave Beet.TV a menu of three considerations mobile marketers need to address:

1. “What is the use case where marketers can win? In an era where the feed is highly personalised, we need to have something contextually relevant that has stopping power.”
2. “Attribution – are we getting the right signal from the mobile environment so that we can make the right investment in those platforms?”
3. “A fundamental shift in the campaign mindset, to an always-on environment – we need to be in story-telling mode all the time.”

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.

“Let’s call it what it really is. Orchestration. I think it’s the Holy Grail for where we are in marketing are today,” Paskalis says of addressable advertising in an interview with Beet.TV.

As the financial giant’s head of Global Communications, Planning, Media Investment & Measurement, Paskalis recently oversaw the company’s first addressable advertising test for its Merrill Edge self-service trading platform product. The results will be revealed at Beet Retreat 2016 in Miami Beach.

“I can tell you we learned a lot,” Paskalis says of the test.

Paskalis has been an active participant in the ongoing shift from a probabilistic to deterministic marketing world. It’s not simply for the sake of efficiency, but because brands are competing for consumer attention in ways they never had to.

“We have to compete now because consumer expectations are higher than ever before about relevancy, and consumers are publishing greater and greater amounts of their own content which are highly relevant to their friends and family,” Paskalis says.

“So marketers need to play money ball. In order to do that, we need to be able to orchestrate experience across channels and platforms,” he adds.

Citing things like live Twitter streams of NFL games and presidential debates, Paskalis recognizes both the opportunities and costs involved in engaging with consumers in all of their varied moment-by-moment experiences.

“My challenge to my colleagues in the industry and to our agency teams is are we able to respond to those challenges? Are we able to respond to the variation we’re going to need in our thinking to make sure those experiences are elevatory for our brands, to compete for attention and having all these assets ready to go?” Paskalis says.

It will take a shift in mindset from the traditional media investment approach.

“It’s a longer tail model than a campaign, and we don’t really have a good infrastructure today to rationalize the return on investment for some of the assets we’re going to need to create that might not pay out for three, four, six, ten, twelve months,” Paskalis says.

This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising.   The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks.  Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.

Last month, Facebook conceded it had erred in the way it calculates average video view duration, leading advertisers to believe in numbers that were actually overstated.

“The error does not impact trading,” Bank Of America’s communications, planning, media and investment SVP Lou Paskalis tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It does impact our perception of experience quality. Facebook has always enjoyed what appeared to be a very high view rate in comparison to other platforms – that’s no longer true.

“They were using the wrong number. The net effect is actually a 200-300% overstatement of the view rate.”

Representing ad buyers, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) acknowledges the overstatement to have been a mistake but complains: “Facebook has not yet achieved the level of measurement transparency that marketers need and require.

“Facebook metrics are not accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC); accordingly an audit of Facebook metrics has not been completed. With more than $6 billion of marketers’ media being directed to Facebook, we believe that it is time for them – and other such major media players – to be audited and accredited.”

And that is a call Paskalis is backing. He says major “walled gardens” like Facebook are super-dominant, with Facebook and Google combined taking 64% of global digital ad money. So he wants them to be judged by a common standard, agreeing the MRC is a good place to start.

“We need to be more conscious of what those numbers are… full data transparency across all platforms,” Paskalis says.

“We need to make sure everyone’s providing the same data. These four walled gardens are not sharing that data.

“We need a common currency. Everyone needs to agree that the metrics we use for the count of video views are the same. We can’t have idiosyncrasies on different platforms, or marketers will lose relevance.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB MIXX Conference, 2016, presented by The TradeDesk.   Please find additional videos from the Conference here. 

Asked if the current wave of new advertising technology just amounted to introducing a set of new acronyms whilst not intrinsically changing the business, Bank Of America media SVP Lou Paskalis replied he “violently disagreed”.

“It is a massive paradigm shift … that allows us to use advertising inventory for a much larger sweep of use cases,” he says. “I’m going to take a CRM mindset and modality in to paid channels.”

Today, there are an estimated 43 million US homes that can receive such adverts, and the prospect got a short in the arm from last week’s partnership between GroupM addressable unit Modi Media and Cablevision. But Paskalis sounded a warning.

“The creative people are still marching to different music. They’re making 30-second stories, little ad-like objects – but they don’t understand what the targeting modalities allow us to do now. I don’t know how that works. We have to march them back in to this.”

Eyeview CEO Oren Harnevo agreed, saying: “The creative is completely separate. They made 30 seconds two months ago and that’s it.” That’s where Eyeview comes in. “We’ll make hundreds of thousands of different video ads, and then we’ll provide the different video ad for a person who likes this type of food,” Harnevo said.

In the panel, Modi Media targeted television director Joanna Thissen said most first-wave advertisers used the technology for “bottom-of-the-funnel” ads, those which can achieve sales return – but a coming second wave will be “moving up-funnel”.

Meanwhile, Comcast Media 360 VP Andrew Ward explained offering addressable TV ads gives Comcast access to customers that had never bought spot TV ads.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The panel was moderated by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

Bank Of America media SVP Lou Paskalis thinks brands need to take a leaf out of the books of publishers and broadcasters they historically have advertised against.

“I need to move into a world where I’m operating more like a publisher to have the level of content that I need to join these moments,” he said, in this fireside chat with Matt Spiegel  SVP of MediaLink at the Beet.TV executive retreat.

What Paskalis was channeling was a belief that only content, not ad messages, can really engage viewers.

“We’re now in the attention economy, he said. “We’re competing with every stimuli out there to try to get consumers’ attention long enough so that we can plant a message in their head.

“The issue is to do something that will resonate with people because let’s face it, they have 2.2 devices within reach while they’re watching television and they’re in control now with the swipe.

“They don’t want an ad, they want content, and they don’t want content, they want video content. So, if I can find those moments of indulgence and I can bring in something that resonates for them, I think I can win. It’s not about frequency; it’s about context and connection.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“I absolutely think that’s going to happen,” SVP of enterprise media at Bank of America,” in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We’re doing the first ever dynamic ad insertion in to live streaming video with NBC, in sports programming.”

But Paskalis cautions that assembling a single TV ad from dozens of pre-prepared components may introduce hundreds of alternate ads that brands will need to be careful to screen.

“(They will) need to see and approve every variant of a commercial spot with appropriate safeguards,” he says. “We’re going to have to put more safeguards there. There’s going to be a technological miracle that will allow this to happen. When it does, it’s going to become the norm, not the exception.”

The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of  TV Advertising Forum in London  You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.

That’s part of the “one-to-one marketing” that the brand focused on in 2015 with the establishment of a data management center, a content center of excellence and the current move to multi-touch attribution, Paskalis says. “All of those are manifestations of the single view of the customer that we can deliver in mobile and digital environments, and to some extent, TV. It’s moving from the paradigm of mass, reach and scale to the paradigm of customization and engagement,” he says.

In the year ahead, the financial company is bullish on VOD due to quality and pricing. In VOD, the ads aren’t skippable and the ads loads are lighter. “I know the audience is watching and they’ve gone to the trouble of finding the show,” Paskalis says.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.  You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“We’re at the end of the advertising era – it’s coming to an end,” Paskalis said in a recent industry panel discussion. “Thank God. Because now we can all be marketers, which is why we got in to this business, and get out of this ridiculous business of advertising, which is disruptive, not additive to the consumer experience, and which exactly no-one including your family wants.

“What they desperately want on their mobile device is content. Marketers can make great content. Content has nothing to do with ads. Ads are stories about my brand, content is stuff people want – we have to figure out how to win them over with content, earn their attention and make a connection.”

Vonage media VP Kathryn Szumowski agreed, adding content must engage users actively to be effective.

They were questioned by Tobi Elkin.

Programming Note:  Paskalis will be a speaker at the Beet TV executive retreat in For Lauderdale this month. 

This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV  Please find more event videos here.

But how are some of the biggest brands reading the apparent threat? With a mixture of trepidation and confidence, according to a recent panel discussion.

“There’s always a dire warning – the industry generally figures it out,” said Bank Of America enterprise media SVP Lou Paskalis. “The difference this time is that we to figure it out, we have to move away from the very construct of advertising.”

Paskalis is talking about an end to the old-style, repeated one-to-many push of salesy marketing messages, replaced by a more empathetic customer relationship.

“We have to get out of the advertising business, we have to get in to the people business, we have to get in to the content business, to get in to the engagement business,” he advocates. “When clients come after you about ROI, start talking about ROR, which is return on relationship – that is where the true value is in a longer term.”

But not all brands will be equally affected by ad blockers.

“It’s very segment-specific,” according to Vonage media VP Kathryn Szumowski. “The gal who’s buying home phone service from Vonage is a 55-year-old white gal who watches Judge Judy. Her ability to understand ad blocking and find it and turn it on is far less of a concern for us than when we talk about some of our small business efforts, where we’ve got a much more tech-savvy audience.

They were questioned by Tobi Elkin.

Programming Note:  Paskalis will be a speaker at the Beet TV executive retreat in Fort Lauderdale this month. 

This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV  Please find more event videos here.

But so much pushy-pushy has ended up being counterproductive, says one major-brand ad exec. Instances of ad blocking are, perhaps, testament to that.

“Advertising has to get better,” according to Bank Of America enterprise media SVP Lou Paskalis.

“’Make things people want’ is not a bad axiom. Let’s tell better stories, let’s be more respectful of what the audience mindset motivation is … and earn the ability to talk to folks.

“The greatest thing Facebook did was give us ‘Will they care and will they share?’ as an axiom for marketing in Facebook. I think that’s an axiom for marketing, moving forward.

“We’re going to have to work really hard to get people back to a place where they want marketing messages.”

We interviewed him at Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV  Please find more event videos here.

“If the agency and the client can have a very clean discussion about what is the value of the offer and what is the fee they charge, it is no one else’s business how it is set up,” said Dentsu Aegis Network’s AMNET global president Ashwini Karandikar.

“As programmatic evolves beyond display, the money that’s going to be at play is going to be 100 times what it is right now. So can we move beyond this silly question and talk about what is the value that you deliver? That discussion needs to be a one-on-one, not an article written in the press.”

But VivaKi global CEO Stephan Beringer and Bank of America’s global media investment SVP Lou Paskalis took issue.

“No,” Paskalis said. “The industry needs to have an understanding about the business model.

“Agencies, for the most part, are transparent about what they’re not transparent about. As a client, you have to understand that.  We have to be very clear what the rules of the road are.”

This segment from the Cannes Lions Festival was part of a series on programmatic advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series. 

“We are in an upheaval we’ve never seen before in this business, and marketers realize they need a new pathway to market, and they’re going to invest their dollars differently,” he says in an interview with Beet.TV recorded at Cannes.

In terms of what’s causing marketers to rethink their media agency relationships on the pricing front, Paskalis observes that brands are now having to invest in bespoke assets to create relevant ads for the likes of Snapchat, Pinterest and Vice News.

“That’s expensive when you think about a creative model,” he says.

In terms of video strategy, Paskalis observes that some marketers are relying less on pre-roll ads in favor of more attention-grabbing formats. There’s also a trend favoring more episodic ads that tell a story so that binge-watchers don’t see the same spot over and over.

“Smarter marketers are actually saying, ‘Can we use interstitial, can we use mid-roll or post-roll to introduce our brand after the story starts to unfold and the audience is engaged,’” he says. “That all of a sudden sounds like a model that we call television advertising, doesn’t it?”

Why are the brands putting agencies on notice? Because times are a-changin’, say industry execs speaking on a Cannes Lions panel.

Bank of America’s global media investment SVP Lou Paskalis:

“The biggest (driver) is pricing We’re seeing exponential growth in data crunching and the needs to support that, which are no longer 25-year-old planners who sleep six to an apartment and happy with entry-level income… You need to make bespoke content for that platform. You’ve got exponential increases in content costs. All of this is saying you’ve got to change the pricing model.”

VivaKi global CEO Stephan Beringer:

“The world, from a marketeer’s standpoint, has become extremely complex. I’ve experienced clients that, not in a mean way, have said to me, ‘We are investing gazillions in to this digital thing … the only ones making money with it are the agencies’. We need to think about how to organise ourselves … so that the extraction (for clients) remains high.

The panel was hosted by Rubicon Project marketplace development SVP Jay Sears.

This segment from the Cannes Lions Festival was part of a series on programmatic advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series. 

Try telling that to Lou Paskalis, who holds the marketing purse strings as Bank of America’s global media investment SVP.

“The groundwork we’re laying right now is in Pompeii, and Vesuvius is erupting and it’s fraud,” he says in this industry panel discussion. “It was a $8.3bn global problem in March. It’s a $9.2bn global problem as of last week (June 20), according to the ANA.”

“We have to build the wall high. Right now, (fraudsters) are coming over the wall and they’re taking our money. Nero fiddles, Rome burns.”

What’s ad fraud? Usually malware that infects consumer computers to algorithmically traverse publisher sites, generating ad views that humans never see, according to DoubleVerify CEO Wayne Gattinella, whose company helps advertisers and ad platforms weed out fraudulent ad views.

“I want to stop everything and fix that before we move on,” Paskalis says. “We cannot continue to be in denial about the 800 million pound gorilla in the room. Until we fix that, all of this is theoretical and it’s less interesting to me and my leadership by the hour.

“This is the biggest threat we’re facing. If we can’t fix fraud, all this other stuff doesn’t matter.If we’re not blacklisting every hour, we’ve got problems – we’ve got to get there. We’ve got to work as an industry to find and drive fraud out of our business.”

Separately, Unilever, the giant consumer package goods company claims some $10 billion in click fraud, MediaPost reports.

We interviewed Paskalis 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.