Hope you are well and enjoying the summer.
For this week’s episode, I am happy to chat with Matt Seiler. Many of you know Matt as the longtime CEO of IPG Mediabrands and later at Dentsu where he was President of Brand Solutions.
An innovator who saw the transformation of the media business to programmatic, Matt has taught and inspired many of us in the industry.
Now Matt is guiding individual careers as a headhunter with the global executive recruiting firm Raines International.
In our chat, he talks about the value of human capital in the advertising industry and the challenges that remain in hiring and recruiting talent.
He also addresses the challenges of a post-Covid workplace and his suggestions on what companies need to do to retain and nurture staff.
Great conversation, as always with Matt. Thank you, Matt.
Thanks to our podcast sponsor Mediaocean, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the Festival, Seiler talks about the speed needed to deliver creative in real time and the utility of such technologies as artificial intelligence, artificial reality, virtual reality and blockchain.
On the issue of speed, there’s some catch-up needed between desire and reality, according to Seiler.
“Once you’re at the right person, what do you want to say to them and how much can you change that up to ensure that you’re getting the right message to the right person in…real time. And I pause on real time, because I think we as an industry talk about real time as if it were now and it’s way too big a lag,” says Seiler, who is President of Brand Solutions. “So I suspect that the accountability will get to individual behaviors and as close to the time that you wanted to solicit that behavior as possible.”
He believes that artificial intelligence has “been around kind of forever, but calling it AI has changed our perception of it. I think there’s an insecurity around machine learning that makes us think that people are going to become obsolete, and that obviously isn’t the case.”
To Seiler, machines should do things “that people are wasting an awful lot of time doing themselves” so that they are freed up to be much more creative. “It should be much more around the story rather than the technology that’s required in order to develop and or distribute that story,” Seiler says. “AI I think is going to be really helpful and really disruptive at the same time, because there are going to be jobs that are displaced by it, as there should be.”
Virtual reality is being used “all over the place,” but he thinks the application to media hasn’t really been determined. While it’s probably appropriate for gaming, beyond that “I don’t imagine anytime soon until the technology advances and you don’t have to have those really clumsy things on your face.”
Artificial reality “is going to get a lot farther a lot faster.”
Seiler considers blockchain technology as a potential remedy for providing needed trust, accountability, speed and measurement, but he’s not about to jump aboard the blockchain train.
“I don’t think we have a clue how to go from where we are today and how we are used to paying for things and tracking them, etcetera, to where we will go.”
At Cannes, it’s all about the creative for Seiler. “I love judging here because it means you’re actually guaranteed seeing the work. I wish always that we were spending more time around the work, which is what the point of this whole thing is.”
Nonetheless, he cites a palpable sense of insecurity given the struggles of some advertising-based holding companies and competition from, among others, management consulting groups.
“The collective understanding that things are changing but not a clear understanding to what. So there’s that uncomfortable thing of, ‘like I know it isn’t this but I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ I say opportunity.”
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In recent months, many agency holding groups have reported revenue trending down and share prices have fallen, after challenges including the rise of brands buying direct from online platforms.
But Matt Seiler would chalk another reason up – greed.
“I think that holding companies in general and media agency groups have kind of gotten what they deserve,” says the president of Dentsu Aegis Networks brand solutions in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“If you consider what the model has been predicated upon, it is convincing clients to spend as much money as possible. And that’s kept television alive as a much more robust medium for advertising than it probably had any reason to be.
“Convincing clients to spend as much money as possible is good maybe for those that are reaping the commissions or keeping the numbers of people employed to spend all that money, but not so good for the client. If you’re an agency, you’re going, ‘Oh, this is a big problem. Oh, we’re screwed’.”
Of course, Seiler, an agency veteran who took his latest role earlier this year, doesn’t put Dentsu in the same bracket.
He says his group was “built the right way”, taking pains to tell clients where they should and should not be spending.
Now the role of agencies must evolve to become a trusted companion that advises against a spray-and-pray approach, he says.
“There’s a role for mass communications in terms of brand awareness and so on, but that’s not where you should be spending the preponderance of your dollars, probably,” he adds.
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.
]]>“I think what’s most exciting, and this might sound odd from an agency person’s perspective, is Netflix,” Seiler adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
Why is that?
“Because subscription has led to way better content. And like all things free capital market, that’s led to more choice means got to be better. Content’s better everywhere you look.”
He calls pay-TV content “extraordinary.” That, in turn, has made free TV content “have to be that much better.”
But there’s a need for aggregation of all that content because we can’t all possibly keep track of where it is, according to Seiler.
“And I think that the notion of that really good content being interrupted by nasty ads is wildly anachronistic. I love the platforms that are pushing for fewer interruptions that are being smarter about how brands are integrated.”
Integrating brands into “the really valuable stories that are being told and ensuring that they’re there in a way that’s reasonable” is paramount. Brands should not engage in integrations just because they’re just looking to insert themselves. “They’re there because they’re making the content better.”
He thinks this year’s Upfront rituals will produce “a lot better partnerships with the content creators and the brands and the agencies that work with them to ensure that when a brand’s showing up that’s a good thing.”
Along with proliferation of choice comes the need for aggregation and therefore a few trusted partners. “They’re probably not going to be the few trusted partners that you and I had growing up of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, et cetera. Those channels are going to look more like Prime and Netflix and YouTube as well as NBC, as well as some of those other channels,” says Seiler.
Nonetheless, he believes it’s a great time to be a brand and a marketer. “It’s confusing, but the choices are so much better and the idea of integration in the truest sense of the word is I think here.”
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>“Whatever your KPIs are, those should be our KPIs,” he says in this video interview. A KPI-based payment also affords more flexibility. In the past, if an agency noticed something happening with product pricing that was out of synch with how it’s paid, the agency had little motivation to suggest changes. A pay-for-performance helps the agency look out for the client more.
In addition, Mediabrands is shifting to use more real-time campaigns. “We have committed in North America to delivering 50% automation across our buys in three years.”
We spoke with him on Monday at YuMe Video event hosted by IPG at the agency’s villa in the hills above Cannes.
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