“The juggling act between scale and targetability is the fulcrum that we have to juggle,” says MasterCard’s media SVP Ben Jankowski, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We’re working on various ways to do that.”

Like other brands, Jankowski’s MasterCard, which has used its “Priceless” marketing campaign for many years now, deploys a wide range of strategies, and a complex array of partners for the jobs.

“Back in the day  … you had a very small group of partners that did everything. I had one agency that did all the media,” he adds.

“Now we have a programmatic partner, a couple of social partners, a DMP partner, we’re working through some different dynamic creative partners, people like that make it more complex but we feel like we get a wider range of contemporary expertise.”

Many brands hope that this chain gets shorter as consolidation happens in the ad-tech space, as testified by Adobe’s latest acquisition of TubeMogul.

Despite the current confusion, however, the possibilities are clear.

“It’s an exciting time,” Jankowski says. “It’s no longer science fiction, it’s real, it’s there – no-one’s figured it out yet, it’s a journey.”

This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV.

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.

“It’s about understanding the customer journey pre-, during- and post-funnel, from call center, to commerce, to app development and user experience. Not only do marketers need a broader toolkit, but brands need partners who can help them in an expanded agreement not just in communications but a great digital customer experience.”

Schulman says his goal is to arm the CMO with the type of scorecards and metrics that translate into tangible business results in today’s “always-on” world, rather than just practicing an old school “what commercial do you run in Super Bowl” type of marketing. “What are the best organizational models to be an always-on creator? We have to think of less channel-based storytelling and more holistically as something that will be everywhere and will take different lengths from short to long to medium . . . and what is the content strategy and how much is video? As we think about addressable and using real-time data to power it, that’s where the future is going to be.”

We interviewed Schulman at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Built in to the company’s marketing platform, the new offering is priced on a self-service model and allows users to control automated ad buying for search, display and social media across ad exchanges and media networks from partners like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Rubicon Project and Index Exchange.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Adobe Marketing Cloud’s product marketing and strategy VP for core audience Suresh Vittal says “programmatic”, the buzzword of ad tech for the last couple of years, means three things:

1. Identifying your audience: “Recognising behavioural digital signals, cross-referencing those insights across different platforms, using customer behaviour data to drive audience selection.”
2. Automation and transparency: “Brands want transparency in to how well their budgets are performing and the returns on investments they are getting.”
3. Real-time creative: “The ability to programmatically optimise creative – not just media buying decisions but also the creating, being able to test and learn all the time.”

Vittal says: “Adobe is unique in that it brings marketing technology and ad tech much closer together.

“Ad tech is the science of going after the unknown in paid media, marketing tech is the science of driving conversion and loyalty and purchase behaviour. We are the one company that’s able to bring these two technologies together in a very realistic manner.

This video is part of a series from DMEXCO presented by FreeWheel.  For videos from the series, please visit this page.

Announced last month, the deal sees GroupM and WPP constituents gain a “creative residency” amongst BuzzFeed content producers and a creative group at BuzzFeed’s video studio, meaning the two sides will jointly work on viral content for advertisers. But it also includes preferential ad rates and access to BuzzFeed’s POUND, a data technology platform showing the Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion – in other words, how content flows across multiple online platforms.

“We’ve been reticent historically about announcing partnerships with media vendors,” GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman concedes, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The BuzzFeed one is different. The future of our business lies at the intersection of creativity, media and technology. BuzzFeed has exploited this as well as any other.

“Unlike Facebook, BuzzFeed is a creator of content… distributes that content across many platforms other than its own and, unlike any other media vendor, they gave a very complete, thoughtful and sincere approach to off-platform distribution.”

The deal involves “no binding guarantees of money”, Norman says, although The Guardian reckons it to be worth “tens of millions” of dollars. Norman likes that, with POUND, “you can observe, if something starts on Snapchat, what happens when it gets pushed to Twitter”.

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.

Bonin Bough reckons a coming fusion of media buying and ecommerce opportunities will fuel massive business expansion.

“We saw a unique opportunity in the marketplace right now to build a bridge between the media practice and what we think will be one of our fastest-growing P&Ls, which will be ecommerce,” Bough told a Beet.TV discussion panel with TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson. That fusion is what gave Bough his own new title recently, of ‎SVP, Chief Media and eCommerce Officer.

“Everybody’s talking about ‘unicorns‘, growing a billion-dollar business really quick… we believe this notion of digitising traditional businesses will actually grow bigger, better, faster unicorns than even the tech business can build.

“Ecommerce will be 50% of the growth of most CPGs over the next five years.”

Mondelēz does not sell its own goods direct to customers but instead through retailers. In an ecommerce world, Bough says he wants to be “driving more traffic to our retailers, ultimately driving what we think will be the fastest-rowing ecommerce business out there”.

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

When Sir Martin Sorrell took a controlling stake in what was then a shopping basket maker, Wire & Plastic Products, in 1985, little did most peers suspect the former Saatchi & Saatchi finance chief would go on to make WPP as influential as it is today.

WPP’s scale has grown steadily through a seemingly-neverending series of acquisitions and investments. These days, it is almost rarer for a week to go by when WPP hasn’t been involved in such a deal, as the company builds up an arsenal of marketing data, analytics, content production and other units.

So what is in Sorrell’s crystal ball for the years ahead? “I think we’ll see more consolidation. There will also be a blurring of the lines,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview for Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries” series.

That blurring is occurring partly as marketing technology vendors, who already help clients understand customer data, buy in to data-driven ad-tech platforms, and vice versa. WPP’s CEO sees an emerging middle ground on which multiple large players will all offer all manner of services their founders could not have dreamed of. But, these days, marketing firms are also editorial content makers and content platforms are also analytics providers.

“When people talk about who our competitors are, we think about Omnicom or we think about Publicis, IPG, Havas or Dentsu or Ipsos, GfK or Nielsen,” Sorrell says. “But we also think about Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, we also think about Deloitte Consulting and Accenture.

“Those lines are going to get more and more blurred. You see what Salesforce is trying to do, what Adobe is trying to do, what Oracle with (its acquisition of) Datalogix is trying to do. This is all a blurring of the lines.”

It is no wonder lines are blurring. WPP itself has lately been buying in to an array of mead segments. Recent deals include pieces of Spanish football rightsholder Imagina, House Of Cards studio MRC and YouTube multi-channel network Fullscreen, long-form digital video producer Indigenous Media, FullScreen and Vice Media. The company has even invested in the formation of a new sports marketing firm Bruin Sports Capital, to double down on popular live sports, and Sorrell calls WPP “a content company” as well as everything else. But it is recent stakes in measurement firms comScore andRentrak and stake in ad tech company AppNexus that underscore WPP’s interest in numbers.

“All these are good examples of us putting a stake in the ground in tech, data, sports and entertainment,” Sorrell adds. “From a functional point of view, it’s going to become more and more competitive.”

Next, WPP is rumoured to be preparing a bid to buy Dunnhumby, the data marketing specialist that has been the catalyst behind much of UK supermarket giant Tesco’s growth, according to WSJ.

So, nevermind “Wired & Plastic Products”; WPP could soon stand for “Wide Product Portfolio”.

This is the first from Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries”, a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft.  Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Sorrell was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  The interview took place in January at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show.

The Drum reports on the changes here.

“The largest group within AOD – the client services group … those individuals are a 60-person group, being folded in to individual SMG agencies,” VivaKi programmatic SVP Mac Delaney tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“When Audience On Demand was created, it follows the same story of digital – when there’s a new innovation, things happen at the center first until the dust settles.

“The same is happening now – we’re moving proactively to do so ahead of the marketplace, to push that know-how, skillset and ability out in to the hands of the individuals managing the client relationships.”

Delaney was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.

The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.

“In order to really apply sophistication on the creative side… you need multiple permutations of a given spot,” he says.

“We’re seeing more and more brands understanding… they have multiple channels … so we’re seeing an influx of more content being produced and … (they) understand what is means to create multiple variations of your spot to deliver different msgs.”

Chalozin’s New York-based Innovid is an advertising technology company that helps agencies deliver video ads that are not just digital but interactive. Innovid ads encourage pointing, clicking and mouse roll-overs by viewers, with the idea being to expand engagement rates.

He was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.

The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.

Taboola is announcing a $117mn Series E round, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company along with previous backers Marker LLC and Steadfast Capital. But notable new investors are Condé Nast parent Advance Publications, Comcast Ventures, the chairman of Italian news publisher L’Espresso, Yahoo! Japan and Groupe Arnault, the majority shareholder of LVMH.

The new names suggest some backing from important publishing houses. Taboola already had a partnership with Yahoo! Japan. The amount dwarfs the total $50m Taboola had raised over five previous rounds since 2007.

Taboola is serving 6bn recommendations daily, is second to Google for audience reach according to comScore and is now seeing 50% of revenue from desktop clicks, CEO and founder Adam Singolda tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“For the first time, we’re seeing (some individual) advertisers spending more than $10mn a year with us. Native advertising reaches the entire (purchase) funnel.

“The thing that differentiates successful from non-successful brands is, those that … attach some sort of KPI success rate … are able to spend tens of millions of dollars. Those that are not are still stuck at marketing budgets … they’re testing.”

In this new article, Bloomberg examines the content marketing distribution space.

Singolda was interviewed by Furious Corp founder and CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.

The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.

The campaign has generated some hefty social media views. So what was the secret?

“It has a real brand product benefit from an emotional perspective, so, tonally, we felt that Upworthy was a great fit for us,” DigitasLbi’s social content VP Mark Book tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We worked with them to understand what they audiences want. What does the audience wants from a utility perspective or a value perspective?

“We are all a little bit scared when it comes to going past 30 to 60 seconds. Will it perform well? The pieces of content range from two and a half minutes to three minutes and, from a completion rate perspective, performed exponentially well because we knew that’s what the audience was consuming.

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“We’ve been the definition of  a mass marketer,” the group’s digital brand engagement global director Sosti Ropaitis says in this video interview with Global Online Video Association executive director Paul Kontonis for Beet.TV. “But it’s a very interesting time for us – we’re shifting to continue doing (mass marketing) but also expanding in to digital

“We’re hoping that video is the next wave for us – it’s a natural evolution. We’re really looking to upscale our digital efforts.

He was interviewed by Beet.TV at the Beet.TV leadership summit on the transformation of television, presented by AOL. Please find more videos from the event here.

• Havas Media Worldwide social marketing director Len Kendall: “Media agencies really need to extend in to influencer marketing and consider influencers as another marketing channel – almost as if they were to liken themselves to PR shops.”
• IPG’s BPN chief strategy officer Chris Hiland: “We are not agents anymore – we are participants, assemblers, processors and synthethizers for our clients. If we don’t embrace those challenges and opportunities, we run the risk of becoming our client’s competitor and vice versa.”
• Mindshare digital innovation and strategy MD Jim Cridlin: “A lot of these services… that were traditionally only done by the agency that the client is now able to do him or herself… there’s less need for the agency to be doing it.”
• Maxus Chicago MD Spencer Bahler: “The exposure that a media co has to consumer insight as well as to how the consumption of media is changing is great. It’s going to only amplify from here.”

They were interviewed by comScore co-counder and executive chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni, at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group.  You can find more videos from the summit here.

“You have to think about the first few seconds. We have to think about modularity of creative … whether these 30(-second videos) are small films anymore,” says BPN chief strategy officer Chris Hiland:

“The reality is … I might be paying per the second of the ad viewed… I have to be able and willing to swap out the next form of creative.

“Don’t wait for half way through the 30 to show the brand logo – hit them up front. People are becoming more impatient.”

He was interviewed by comScore co-counder and executive chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni, at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group.  You can find more videos from the summit here.

“Five or six years ago, we were talking about the CIO, CMO and CTO groups merging together and becoming a blurred conversation across each of those disciplines within clients,” Matt Adams tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“A lot of clients have restructured themselves around having more of joined-up approach. Fifty percent of our time around data is dealing with technology officers, information officers, IT teams – the non-traditional marketers who now hold the keys to pulling in first-party data.”

This video is part of a series titled The State Of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series.  This session was recorded in London.

Universal McCann global chief strategy officer Hamish Kinniburgh tells Beet.TV in this video interview how his agency did so for Coca Cola during the recent soccer World Cup.

“We were able to respond with client content in online video but also television in quite a short turnaround time,” he says. “The effects on the overall campaign were pretty dramatic.

“Digital video is at a point of maturation. We’re getting very comfortable with that now. The TV industry is doing a really good job of reinventing itself for this new environment.”

This video is part of a series titled The State Of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series.  This session was recorded in London.

Now Mondelēz’s global media and consumer engagement VP B. Bonin Bough reveals progress in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We’ve been able to deliver over 100 million unique impressions via the studio at 50% of what our average online video CPM is,” Bough says.

“The challenge that brands have is, we want to create content in real-time that’s relevant to what’s being discussed right now. Guess what news organisations do on a continual basis? That’s exactly what they do. Blink Studios is really about operationalising real-time content creation from a video perspective.”

Last week, Mondelēz inked a deal with Google which will see the confectioner up its ad spend across YouTube and Google+ in return for analytics and production support on its branded video content.

Bough says YouTube is already making it possible for brands to respond to breaking news events with conversational video, but he is eyeing a future in which that transfers to bigger screens: “At some point, I’m going to be able to create a TV commercial in real time based on what’s being talked about in culture. We’re preparing for that.”

Beet.TV interviewed him Bough Manhattan during Advertising Week at the offices of digital consultancy RebelMouse.

At the DMEXCO conference, Vittal’s company announced a deal in which all of Publicis’ agencies will have access to a new suite, Always-On platform, that is powered by Adobe Marketing Cloud and offers content creation, audience segmentation, campaign tracking, measurement and more.

“The marketing transformation that’s happening in the industry because of digital, the disruption of multi-channel and audience fragmentation is going to require a technology and an analytical-driven process,” Vittal told Beet.TV in this panel interview with Ashley J. Swartz, Founder and CEO of Furious Minds at DMEXCO.

“Marketers have varying levels of confidence when it comes to the technology options.” Vittal said Adobe and Publicis were “coming together to solve marketers problems”.

This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO.  Please find all of our coverage of the show right here.

“All of a sudden, certain media slots on linear (will) become way more valuable,” snack food brand Mondelez International’s global media and consumer engagement VP B. Bonin Bough said during a Beet.TV session produced at DMEXCO, moderated by Terence Kawaja. CEO and Founder of LUMA Partners.

“The moment I know I can buy a piece of ‘remnant’ media that is a specific audience, that media becomes more valuable (to me). It’s going to increase their business.”

Bough criticized the industry for focusing too much on the 20% of media spend that is in digital, saying the ditigitzation of linear TV will be exciting.

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

“Real-time has been about owned and earned,” Jordan Bitterman tells Beet.TV. “Tent-pole events like the Superbowl – ‘how do we get someone to retweet our creative tweet?’ That’s all very well and good. But this is the year where the plumbing has finally been laid for paid media to enter real-time.

The idea” we can optimize based on data about weather patterns, what people are searching for, transaction history – all of that stuff is now infusing what we do from a paid media perspective.”

We spoke with him at the Mindshare party at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“There’s been a sea-change in the attitudes but, more importantly, the confidence of the broadcast and major cable network groups,” according to Nielsen global product leadership president Steve Hasker.

“They’ve realized consumers are consuming more video. Consumers prefer professionally-produced content. Professionally-produced content is hard to make. The TV networks are good at it. They’re in a good position if they play their cards right. The quality of television programming is unprecedented. That augurs well.”

• Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan said: “The television industry is a highly competitive oligopoly. They know they need to move. Most TV companies would like to hold on to things as it is and slowly add pieces.”
• Media agency Carat’s global president Doug Ray said his firm is exploring new ways to evaluate campaigns for clients: “We’re looking at things like agency-based model and attribution modelling to get to the sale-based understanding.”
• Campbell Soup Co. integrated marketing VP Yin Woon Rani said the distinction between generalists and specialists in this fast-moving industry can make life challenging: “If you look away for  second, you’ve missed something.”

They were speaking with Luma CEO Terence Kawaja in a panel during Beet.TV’ssummit on the future of television advertising at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.   Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.

“Delivering in to mobile is about 20 times harder than it is in desktop,” says Medialets COO Richy Glassberg. “In desktop, there’s 15 years of technology which allows anybody to build one ad in Flash, it works everywhere.

“In December, with the billions of ads we serve, we saw 30,000 different devices. You have to make an ad work in every type of environment. The scary thing for the agency is, ‘Did my ad work?’.”

“We’re seeing a rate of change we’ve never seen in the advertising world before. I don’t think anybody’s caught up.”

He was speaking to Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.   Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.

the Campbell Soup Company integrated marketing VP Yin Woon Rani tells Beet.TV: “We’ve put our content in to other digital video channels. But we do love TV. There is something about the sight-sound-motion piece of TV which is still very powerful. We see other formats as a ‘yes-and’, not necessarily an ‘instead-of’ TV.”

But Rani is amongst the ad buyers today whose interest is getting piqued by the prospect, presented by technology, of linking ad spend to actual sales outcomes – something that has long been impossible in marketing.

“It’s one of our current obsessions, getting away from proxies to the real business impact,” she says. “The only metric that matters in the end is sales. Now I can do it – it’s very exciting, but it’s early days.”

She was speaking with Luma CEO Terence Kawaja during Beet.TV’ssummit on the future of television advertising during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.   Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.

“We used to talk about how everything would converge on a single device,” says global president Doug Ray. “The reality is, people’s bevahiors have converged around different devices.”

It’s within that kind of ongoing disruption that Carat is amongst the agencies now being pushed by brands to measure marketing results not by exposures but by real, eventual sales.

“We are moving from media outputs to business outcomes,” Ray says, “making media much more accountable for the sales it’s driving”.

Ray was speaking with Luma CEO Terence Kawaja during Beet.TV’ssummit on the future of television advertising during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.   Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.

Disclaimer:  Beet’s coverage of Cannes is sponsored by Simulmedia.

“I don’t think anyone signs up for our industry to be staring at an Excel spreadsheet. moving click-through analysis rates from one cell to another,” MediaCom Worldwide CEO Stephen Allan tells Beet.TV. “They actually want to add something, bring creativity, bring innovation to a client’s business.

“The more we can redeploy people toward making a difference rather than just being spreadsheet analysts – that’s a win-win for everyone. If we can use technology to take out the drudge and the mundane, I’m all for using it.”

He spoke with Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more coverage of the festival here.

Producer’s Note: This video and several others were recorded at the MediaCom rooftop suite at the Martinez Hotel.   Thanks to the MediaCom crew for hosting us.

“Client transparency is certainly going to be a big hot topic,” according to Zenith US CEO Dave Penski. “Are they getting what they’ve been promised?

“Driving down costs is really important – but (advertisers will ask) ‘what are we actually getting?’ Before, they would test (campaign performance) assumed (any failure) was a creative issue. We’ll see a swing back toward transparency.”

We spoke with him as part of our series, “The Road to Cannes.”