In this video interview, the president of the Wavemaker/Wunderman alliance urges advertisers and agencies to change their approach to meeting consumers’ expectation for a great experience.

“Every brand really needs to find out what’s the right experience for them and their customers and their consumers,” Fremont says. “So taking chances, taking risks today is what we need to do in digital video. We need to keep pressing the envelope on what it is.

“It would be a shame … if we took 30 seconds (ads) and just cut them down, and didn’t create the right brand, consumer experience.

“We need to think about them consecutively, so in a consecutive manner. And tie that into data and into insights, because that should be a continuous loop.”

Wavemaker was formed last year when WPP’s Maxus and MEC were tied in a new entity, a global media, content and technology agency with 8,500 people in 139 offices spanning 90 countries and handling $38 billion in client billings.

Wavemaker’s client list includes Colgate-Palmolive, L’Oreal and Paramount.

Fremont also works with the IAB to tackle the issues he is talking about. “We’re bringing up the right issues, but there’s more work to be done,” he says,

The interview was conducted at the IAB’s Video Symposium in New York this month.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Video Symposium 2018 presented by Tremor Video DSP.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

“If somebody really doesn’t have a strong bias towards a brand and you decide to serve them what we would call active phase content, utility content, ultimately that’s wasted because they’re not predisposed to picking you anyway,” Acampora adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s a lot about customizing content to the platform and then starting to personalize the right kind of content to the individual or the segment.”

The Wavemaker agency takes its lead on clients’ creative needs by considering their existing partnerships and what’s best for them. “There are definitely instances where we’re creating new custom content, everything from what we call hero content to utility content.”

Wavemaker works with vendors like VidMob, a technology platform that connects marketers with a global network of expert editors, animators and motion graphics designers.

The agency’s Momentum consumer insights database is the largest of its kind, with some 400,000 “individual journeys” across a host of categories and countries. “That data is the starting point to help us segment and sub-segment audiences,” says Acampora.

He relates how Wavemaker worked with Ikea to promote its living room offerings. “For one segment, it might be way more about quality and design, so those are the things we drummed up about their living room message. Another might be way more about price and ease of putting it together, more utility content.”

MEC, which along with Maxus constituted the basis for the combined entity called Wavemaker, had handled Ikea’s media planning and buying for more than a decade. Last month, Wavemaker successfully defended the U.S. business, as ADWEEK reports.

To help clients navigate the maze of segments and creative iterations, “We try to make that as turnkey and bite-sized for them as possible. You want to limit it to a certain number of meaningful segments that will actually help to unlock growth for the brand,” says Acampora.

The proof point or benchmark Wavemaker has used “is roughly a one and a half times increase in ROI. Whether through attribution modeling or longer-term market mix modeling results, we see a significant increase in the overall ROI. That or if we go more toward a performance level we’ve seen roughly a two times decrease in the cost per acquisition when we start to customize and personalize messaging.”

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.

“The idea that you go somewhere, you decide you want something, you make that purchase and then you’re done is incorrect. Inherently it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t really exist in real life,” says Whitney Fishman Zember, Managing Partner, Innovation & Consumer Technology, Wavemaker US.

Wavemaker, the self-described media, content and technology agency is quite literally obsessed with deciphering the consumer purchase journey.

“You’re never not considering or thinking about something you may need or want to do, whether it’s a week from now a day from now a month from now. There’s always something top of mind and percolating,” Zember explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Wavemaker’s approach is to “flip the quote unquote funnel upside down” and look at things through the purchase journey, according to Zember.

“There’s active and there’s passive stages, but the reality is that consumers are always in some state of the purchase journey.”

Whether it’s understanding, exploration, fact finding, making a purchase, reviewing a purchase, sharing a purchase, engaging in a purchase, “There’s something that’s always going on with a consumer with regards to brands.”

The agency also takes a different view of technological solutions in a sort of cart-after-the-horse scenario.

“I always say it has nothing to do with the technology,” Zember says. “If you start with the technology, you tend to look for reasons to apply it and it’s not always genuine use cases or genuine opportunities to impact the consumer positively.”

Starting with understanding who consumers are and where they are within the purchase journey should take precedence.

“What is their everyday experience and those opportunities to alleviate everyday frictions that people don’t even think can be alleviated that they don’t even realize are a problem?”

Choosing the right tools, technology and platforms comes after “you recognize inherently what those needs are and how you can provide for the consumer.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

“We’re moving away, I would argue, from media planning and saying ‘well, we actually need a content strategy,’” Gaines says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Media creativity involves how to represent the story of a brand in a way that’s appropriate, including during the priming stage, “when I am trying to create a position for my brand of favor, so that when somebody gets to the trigger point…there is a better predisposition for my brand relative to the things I need to say once they’re in that purchase journey cycle.”

The plethora of options for media consumption have pushed creativity in a way “that we’ve not really been able to think of it definitely a decade or so ago,” Gaines adds.

The concept of having “one big idea” and exposing it to lots of people is no longer operable, according to Gaines. “That only really works if you have brand new news,” he says. “Or you’ve got a new launch. Ninety-nine percent of the products we work with are trying to create greater share, growth in some shape or form. Revenue, share of market, consumption.”

Thus media creativity now involves generating a conversation that keeps people engaged all the way around their purchase journey. “So that what I do from a broadcast perspective and awareness perspective has an amplified effect on converting people to buy my product or buy my service,” says Gaines.

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

This is why Wavemaker’s “principal and defining obsession” is with the purchase journey, says Global CEO Tim Castree.

It’s not simply that chief marketing officers care about the purchase journey, Castree explains in this interview with Beet.TV. Research from IBM indicates that 83% of “progressive, transformational CEO’s organize themselves and their own thinking around consumers and how they make their way to products and brands on the path to purchase,” he says.

“It’s a very well understood context.”

The main reason why media, content and technology agency Wavemaker is “principally obsessed” with the purchase journey is that it lets the agency simplify “in a very complex world how we talk about our products, services and solutions. And how they work to benefit our customers and prospects.”

Asked about the biggest challenges facing CMO’s these days, Castree points to the broad area of fragmentation—less from an audience standpoint than a maze of choices in the digital era—and how best to calculate ROI. He believes there has been an excessive obsessiveness with ROI.

“People are over obsessed with ROI past the point of diminishing returns. So we’re optimizing increasingly to the lowest cost things, but we’re not looking at the full picture of marketing returns over time.”

While market mix modeling has long been a staple of CMO activity, modern times have brought a lot of focus on multi-touch attribution. But according to Castree, “A lot of those attribution models don’t take full account of the effects of marketing over time and the way they build performance over time.”

The bottom line is over optimizing “to the point of diminishing returns” to the bottom of the purchase funnel.

“I think there’s a lot of more fragmented decision making happening in the boardrooms as we think about things like programmatic or working with Google or on and on and on,” Castree says.

Wavemaker sees opportunity in bringing all the essentials together in a much more holistic and fully attributed approach to media and marketing, which leads full circle to understanding the consumer purchase journey not just as a concept.

“Understanding it econometrically is really the key for us to be able to give our clients the best advice about how to really reintegrate all of those pieces to drive a better outcome,” says Castree.

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

The new GroupM agency that launched in the U.S. last November debuted in Canada in January 2018, led by CEO Ann Stewart, formerly CEO of Maxus Canada. In this interview with Beet.TV, Bhopalsingh explains what clients are looking for in a modern agency and why being slightly behind the consumer trends curve has its advantages in the Great White North.

One of the key things in the creation of Wavemaker was to be able to identify and prioritize client needs. “Trading on media inventory is table stakes,” says Bhopalsingh, whose background includes stints at Aegis, OMD and MEC. “It’s expected of us but as consumers have evolved, as technology has evolved, clients’ needs of media agencies have evolved as well.”

Helping marketers navigate “the new consumer journey” and how it evolves requires covering many bases.

“That can extend from anything from paid media though to omni-channel experiences to how they collect and analyze data to impact their business,” Bhopalsingh adds.

What others call a purchase funnel Wavemaker sees as “momentum.” The rationale is that consumers will always be impacted by messages they see in-market, even if they’re not at the stage of actual purchase consideration of, say, an automobile.

“Even though I may not be in the market for a vehicle, I’m constantly seeing messages and making subconscious decisions about the brands that I like and align with.”

Eventually, that leads to a “trigger phase,” which could be having a child, starting a new job or something along those lines, according to Bhopalsingh. “You then move into different phases where you are evaluating and through to purchase.”

Canada is unique in the sense that a lot of the technologies on display at events like CES 2018 will take about a year and sometimes two or three to reach the market. “Things tend to roll out in Europe, Asia Pacific and the U.S. rather quickly. It gives us a bit of leeway and a runway to help prepare our clients.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

“It has to be more than a merger. If all we did was take two great brands and cultures and teams and mesh them together, we have failed,” says Amanda Richman, U.S. CEO of Wavemaker, the global media, content and technology agency unveiled one year ago.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Richman explains the impetus behind creating Wavemaker was “Let’s really reboot and redesign what a modern marketing agency is. With a single focus on the consumer journey and with that understanding how we can grow our clients’ revenues and opportunities in the marketplace.”

If Wavemaker sounds more like a consultancy with traditional and contemporary media chops, it’s not far off the mark. “The future of the agency business has definitely shifted to not just buying on impressions and cheapest CPM and fill out the pricing template,” Richman says, noting that there’s still a component of investment management that’s about driving efficiency.

“But as you think about our role today in the middle of the ecosystem, in having to not only understand and embrace and evolve our clients’ approach to data but also to their broader business issues.”

Richman, who was appointed U.S. CEO last August, sees an opportunity to “get a greater share” of clients’ problems along with providing a greater share of solutions to solve the challenges they face. This entails having a “laser focus on consumer understanding,” not only from a purchase journey lens but how are they adopting and adapting to the breadth of content and distribution opportunities.

“Our role is really sifting through all of that to find out what’s most meaningful and relevant to their consumers and what’s the brand relationship that can be established with those insights,” Richman says.

This involves not just another innovation play or understanding what the next platform is, the next channel, the next partner. “It’s all of that and so much more that really leads to a deeper understanding of their audience and how to move them to that next step forward.”

She’s looking forward to being able to “really hit reset in this robust environment, listen more to our clients and understand what are their needs when it comes to an agency today and build around that.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

A year ago, Marriott itself comprised 19 different brands. Then came its acquisition of Starwood Hotels and the combined brand tally now exceeds 30.

“Bringing those brand perception levels higher to actually drive the right consumers into the purchase journey is key,” Desai says in this interview with Beet.TV. “So we’re helping them sort of reinvent that purchase journey to make sure it’s connected from the top to the bottom.”

Among other results for these efforts, Marriott and MEC picked up Gold and Silver Creative Data Lions at this year’s Cannes International Festival of Creativity. The awards, given to M Live—Marriott International’s global marketing real-time center—were in the categories of Social Data and Use of Real-time Data.

M Live is the touch point across all 30 Marriott brands used to identify pop culture trends and create real-time content directly with on-property guests on social channels based on geo-fencing technology.

One benefit of working in the hotel category is that unlike insurance or packaged goods, which are often pitched as necessities, “it’s something you want to do. It’s aspirational. You want to go on vacation,” says Desai. “We have that to our advantage.”

As a part of GroupM, MEC shares its digital brand safety standards and works with Marriott and other clients to build brand safety guidelines for global implementation “to make sure that our ads aren’t being seen where they shouldn’t be seen.”

While he acknowledges that working with walled gardens like Facebook and Google “is tough because they see a lot of our media spend,” Desai says maintaining close partnerships with digital and traditional media providers produces learnings that can be applied “across the board.”

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.

“Amanda is a fantastic choice to be our US leader,” Castree said in a news release. “She is universally liked and respected by her people, her clients and her partners in the marketplace and I’m delighted that she’s joining our global team.”

In the same release, Richman said the MEC offer “was just too good of an opportunity to pass up. With leading talent and tech in place, we have an opportunity to drive the new agency model forward faster, in partnership with our clients and the marketplace.”

As President of Investment at Starcom USA, Richman architected and led the agency’s cross-channel investment practice across clients including Airbnb, Bank of America, Kraft Heinz and Samsung. Previously, she served as President of Digital for Mediavest, building its digital team and capability. Prior to joining SMG, Richman held digital leadership roles at The Interpublic Group as Managing Director of their first digital agency, and at Time Warner leading client services for the company’s interactive television division.

The merger of MEC and Maxus takes effect in January 2018.

Beet.TV interviewed Richman earlier this year in Los Angeles at the 4A’s conference. We are republishing the interview with today’s news.

Despite great advances in digital and television audience targeting, platform-specific creative is a milestone the industry has yet to achieve. Until a silver bullet arrives, there’s some “simple stuff” that agencies and brands can do, according to Amanda Richman.

“One of them being, let’s bring together all the right parties that all have the same interest in success in the briefing process,” says the President of Investment & Activation at Starcom USA.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Richman discusses the need for creative—not just media—to drive effectiveness and the eternal value of human input in a technology laden industry.

Richman believes that digital audience targeting has been perfected and new network television audience optimization products are showing lots of promise toward the same end. Programmatic “is certainly elevating our game” with respect to brand safety, when it comes to controls and processes.

“But we still have not put sufficient time, resources and attention really to the space around creative messaging that is more bespoke to the audience,” she says.

The goal is to make a more meaningful impact with consumers and engaging with them not only in a campaign “but maybe across a longer period of time.”

As for the “simple stuff that we still need to crack,” it starts with having the right people at the table during the briefing process and then sticking to the brief. “Let’s map out what it is that we’re trying to achieve and understand where we actually can make that happens,” says Richman.

The process includes tapping the best practices of publishers that can help agencies understand, say, how to make the best six-second commercial format or the best experience on Snapchat. The end goal is to “really sequence and synchronize campaigns in a way that can make an impact over time,” Richman says.

“Humans and their ideas and their creativity lead the best work,” she adds. It’s something “you can’t replace with technology.”

This was the view shared by representatives of MEC and Videology at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and moderated by Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink.

When MEC’s Global CEO, Tim Castree, considers TV and video convergence he’s less concerned with where it’s at than he is in the context for doing it, because context “is where the motivation comes from” for the industry to move faster.

“We are in a really consequential time for our industry. For agencies, it’s a jump ball whether we’re going to more relevant or less relevant five years from now,” said Castree.

The best hedge against a lack of relevance “is solving technologically the cross-screen convergence opportunity. I actually see it as a competitive imperative that we continue to solve this challenge.”

Asked by Spiegel why agencies should fixate on that particular challenge, Castree pointed to the sheer ad dollars brands invest in television and premium video inventory and the manner in which they do so. He says this inventory will always be traded principally in an upfront, futures manner, which lends itself to media agencies’ “trading scale and the role we play in the market as the market makers.”

Adding technology to achieve more advanced optimization would seal the deal, according to Castree.

“Obviously, Google, Facebook, Accenture are never going to be traders of the upfront commodity of television and premium video. So bringing those two things together gives us a unique hedge against what others are trying to do to us,” he said.

Videology’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said that Castree “nailed it in terms of his answer” and went on to list companies that are gradually invading the space that has long been the territory of agencies.

“The number of times we’re hearing names like Oracle and Accenture and PWC in conversations these days which we didn’t hear a year ago is incredible,” Jamboretz observed.

Spiegel opined that it’s not as if the more established media players like NBCUniversal, Viacom and Turner under AT&T are going away anytime soon.

“They are essential, they probably aren’t going anywhere, but they’re in the same fight we’re in,” said Castree.

For both the buy-side and sell-side, the rate of change needs to increase dramatically, regardless of what has already taken place, he added.

“We’ve had a massive rate of change in our business in the last five years. But if the rate of change in our business for the next five years looks like the last five, we will have fallen behind,” Castree said.

Meanwhile, on the the sell side, “The more complex and advanced guys are saying, ‘How do I use this to stitch together all my distribution points into a converged offer,’” said Jamboretz.

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“Everybody’s trying to reinvent themselves in one way or another,” says Renato de Paula, CEO of MEC Latin America. “We are experiencing video on demand, we have OTT all over the region as well. There’s a lot of growth.”

There are parallels for brands as well, as TV “continues to be massively important, particularly when it comes to categories like fast-moving consumer goods,” de Paula says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

As in the States, LATAM channels have been improving the quality of their programming along with their audience targets, with more “content-related programs that actually speak with niches,” he adds.

This is due in large part to shifting consumer viewing habits that impact traditional broadcast ratings. “Every year there is a small decline. It varies by country and network, because of digital and because of everything that’s going on.”

Mexico has had a unique TV marketplace because two dominant players, Televisa and TV Azteca, “have been there forever,” says de Paula. “They are incredibly strong.”

In the past two years, two new networks—Grupo Radio Centro and Cadena Tres—have added to the competition, as Variety reports.

“They are fighting for space knowing that the market is tough, knowing that clients are looking for accountability, looking for ROI.”

Mexico and Brazil are probably the most advanced TV markets in LATAM, according to de Paula.

Asked for his reflections on the Cannes Lions, he says he’s impressed by “the brain level of the youngsters nowadays.” He recalls hearing presentations by two CEO’s, one 22 the other 24, and was impressed by their “level of eloquency.”

What also caught his attention is “the conversation about women leadership, which is a very important, serious topic that we should all pay very close attention.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

And it’s probably not going to get much easier going forward, Reed explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“I think we’re going to learn some things over the course of the next year that are really surprising,” says Reed. “We know that consumer attention us dropping every time we turn around. We have less attention span than a goldfish. We’re not getting any better.”

The implications are profound because “as we start to look at ad formats, we’re going to have the expectation that those ad formats need to be shorter and faster to grab attention.”

The need for speed will ultimately rest on the shoulders of creative because they won’t be thinking of “that anthem 30- or 60-second unit that they used to build but how do I build something that’s fast, gets to the point and engages instantly.”

On the subject of data and walled gardens, Reed is asked whether her agency gets everything it needs from Facebook. “Does anyone get the information they need from all of the walled garden partners?” she says with a laugh. “No. Certainly not.”

On a positive note, she believes the caretakers of the gardens “have actively taken an approach to say that they are willing to try to find a solution with all of our clients. It’s going to take time.”

Nonetheless, the clock is ticking. Reed thinks that in the next year or so Facebook and its ilk might have to get more magnanimous and “figure out how to give data back to the advertisers in order to be able to truly address ROI, or it will significantly affect their investment levels.”

In the meantime, new players are emerging all the time that could become the next Amazon, Facebook or Snapchat. “Let’s not forget that AOL was the behemoth many years ago, and now they’re starting that resurgence again with Oath,” Reed observes.

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

The result, as moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink termed it during an MEC-sponsored panel discussion at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, could well be dubbed “myth busting.”

The A+E project involved some 350 million ad-exposure records for 40 million addressable-TV-enabled households over a few months matched with transactional data to produce indices, according to panelist Ben Tatta, Co-Founder & President of 605.

While it’s true that a network like Lifetime is a great venue for reaching buyers of health care, beauty and packaged-goods products, digging deeper unearthed some interesting insights, said panelist Mel Berning, A+E’s President and Chief Revenue Officer.

“What we’re also finding out is that it’s a wonderful environment for reaching women who are the principle decision makers for buying cars. Or investments,” Berning explained.

“One of the things that was really interesting was that across the board for all of the A+E Networks, responsiveness to TV way over-indexed versus the average television viewer,” said Tatta.

Now for the myth busting. It turns out that Lifetime over-indexed both for viewers who are particularly weight conscious and those who are burger lovers. Men’s apparel was among the top-indexed categories for Lifetime viewers, while A+E overall “indexed high against younger families,” running counter to “today’s myth that younger audiences are migrating off the dial,” said Tatta.

As the discussion turned to how a company like A+E balances programming across platforms with the most appropriate ad formats, Berning separated out linear. For those nearly 100 million households, “The quality of the viewing experience is such a key factor to the environment on those networks,” he said. “We’re thinking about ad loads, we’re thinking about the ability to reduce clutter, to deliver a more engaged audience to the ad.”

With cross-platform, advertisers are at “different places in terms of the way they’re thinking about building their media plan across platforms,” Berning said. “It’s very easy to engage advertisers in terms of their requirements for linear. As you then engage them on what are your requirements on other platforms, there is a huge organizational effort to bring all of those pieces together.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“That’s really more what we’re focused on versus worrying too much about getting to a fixed definition of what’s premium and what’s not,” said Tim Castree, Global CEO of MEC, during a panel discussion at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Castree was responding to a question by moderator Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink, who offered that premium content “is one of those words that doesn’t really have a definition.”

From premium content the discussion turned to the consumer video ad experience, the preponderance of tech solutions and the challenges to content sellers and buyers posed by the mixed trading model most publishers are having to deal with.

Asked by Spiegel whether Videology is seeing video stream providers paying more attention to the quality of the consumer experience then just doling out lots of ad impressions, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said things have definitely improved.

Five or six years ago, Jamboretz noted, when broadcasters “put their over-the-top television out they were over-monetizing, I would argue. They were putting way too many ads in the streams at the beginning.”

He acknowledged “some really great work being done by people like Fox around what is the appropriate ad load” while stating that “I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Spiegel asked whether there are too many technology stacks and not enough standards and commonality.

“It’s highly ambitious if a bit naïve to think that any one company is going to be the full stack,” said Jamboretz. “For us it’s all about interoperability.”

He cited as one company that is “doing it right” Sky in Europe, which is a sell-side client of Videology. “We’re their monetization solution on the supply side but we also work for Tim’s company and many others in that market as a demand-side platform,” said Jamboretz. “So we play both of those functions. And that works better than having to be the top-to-bottom stack for every cable company in Europe or in the U.S.”

According to Castree, one advancement that would greatly benefit the industry is better publisher yield management. Publishers are “dealing with a very complicated environment,” given their remnant interaction with supply side platforms, premium deals in the UpFronts, direct programmatic transactions—some of it on demographics, others on audiences.

He said this mixed trading model is one reason “we’re struggling technologically with all these home-grown solutions.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“We’ve done an awful lot of work on unconscious bias. It’s a huge thing in our industry,” says Marie-Claire Barker, MEC’s Global Chief Talent Officer, who notes that agencies’ competitive set is “almost unrecognizable from five years ago.”

This led MEC during last year’s Advertising Week New York to launch an initiative titled Brave Your Bias. It’s based in part on research the company cites showing, among other things, that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have greater financial returns than the industry average.

While there are various varieties of unconscious bias, one that’s most prevalent in the ad industry is association bias, Barker explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“You associate and affiliate yourself with people who are like you,” says Barker. “They might have worked at the same place, they might gone to the same school, they could even have grown up in the same area as you.”

This creates a comfortable sense of community that keeps outsiders out. “What we’re trying to challenge people to do is step outside that comfort zone and start to work with people who are different.”

Barker evokes comments at Cannes by renowned photographer Mario Testino, who told an audience that he feared early on that his Peruvian heritage would put him at a disadvantage. “And that example shows that if people did have a bias against him because of that, look at the beautiful work we would have missed out on,” Barker says.

In the same vein, actor Sir Ian McKellen spoke to Cannes attendees about coming out as a gay man, while actress Helen Mirren reflected on how fantastic it is at her age to be associated with the beauty brand L’Oreal.

“I just feel that the conversation about the value that people bring and not just how they look and who they know is really coming to the surface now,” says Barker.

Given how tech-centric advertising and media agencies have needed to become, attracting talent means not only embracing all types of people but particularly those who are interested in advances like artificial intelligence, according to Barker.

“Our industry isn’t full of those people. We need to go outside of our industry and try to attract different people.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

For their part, marketers need to be brave and experiment with AI while not thinking short term about it, Fremont says in this interview Beet.TV with The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“For me, artificial intelligence is about the iterative learning process,” says Fremont, who is Global Chief Digital officer of MEC.

From an advertising and media perspective, AI represents a transition from algorithms to “something that is learning on its own.”

He is particularly attracted to the notion that AI could help vehicle marketers configure a car “based not on what you told it but what’s learned about you, your lifestyle, if you have a family, how old your kids are, what you do. You go right to the showroom and your car’s there.”

Fremont dubs AI “beyond transformational” because it touches everything from product design to demonstration and purchase.

“It’s not device oriented, it’s not marketing oriented,” Fremont says. “What I love most about it is that it’s completely disruptive.”

Asked by Bitterman whether AI is just a lot of talk at this point, Fremont posits that marketers need to do a lot more experimentation. Beyond the vehicle design model, he talks about the potential for machine learning from consumer engagement with digital ads.

“It’s really taken the notion of one-to-one personalization to the ultimate.”

Recalling the early days of one-to-one marketing with the direct mail medium, Fremont marvels at the swiftness of the AI realm.

“Now the ability to move at lightening speed is what is so disruptive,” along with “the accuracy that it has.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.

This is the viewpoint that Tim Castree brought to global advertising and media planning agency MEC upon his arrival as CEO from Videology, following stints at MediaVest and Leo Burnett. Having been tapped to lead the merger of GroupM’s MEC and Maxus earlier this month, Castree sees a need for more standardization for targeting and measurement and fewer “home-grown” solutions.

Many people look at advanced TV and premium video “and say it’s obvious, we get better targeting, we get better performance, etcetera,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV. “But there’s a larger context that I’m not sure people are talking about in the industry that’s really essential.”

While companies like Google and Facebook are “fantastic, important partners” they represent “disintermediation against the agency model at the moment,” according to Castree.

Meanwhile, he alludes to consultancies that are attempting to lower the rank of agencies on the value chain.

“They want to give all the smart advice and try to relegate us to execution,” Castree says.

So the opportunity for better optimization of advanced TV and premium video isn’t just about better performance. “It’s our bulwark. It’s our big hedge against the competitive threats and disintermediation.”

The route to erecting these ramparts is by bringing more data, targeting and addressability “but more importantly more standardization to the approach behind which we transact in premium video.”

In other words, a common way to apply different types of data to targeting and measurement.

“The challenge we’re having at the moment is everybody is building a home- grown solution,” Castree observes. “There’s just a multitude of home-grown solutions so it’s getting more fragmented, more difficult to navigate and the power is in some form of consolidation around that.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“Guess what happened? Nobody was buying,” recalled Carl Fremont, Global Chief Digital Officer at media agency MEC.

That’s because there was no measurement around digital viewing and digital really couldn’t be compared to broadcast buys, Fremont said in a keynote interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

“It was a complete buyer’s market,” Fremont added, in response to a question from Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz. “It forced us to really look at the measurement pieces of it, both the planning side and the buying side.”

While some things have changed since those first NewFronts efforts, much remains the same in the absence of uniform digital video audience measurement. This is a source of much frustration given the universal appreciation for the sight, sound and motion characteristics of advertising messages delivered every second of the day to ubiquitous screens small and large.

“It’s so fragmented,” Fremont continued. “It’s still a confusing marketplace.”

Swartz sees it more an issue of EQ (emotional intelligence) as opposed to IQ, requiring buyers and sellers to come together and forge solutions. “It’s not about cherry picking problems. It’s about providing solutions,” she said.

Both agreed that removing complexity from the ecosystem would lower costs as more brand marketers embrace addressability and an audience-based world. “We do need one way of measurement. We need one way of planning,” said Fremont.

One of the challenges of planning video buys is there’s no line of sight to inventory, particularly premium video. A system that could look across different platforms like OTT and connected TV would be akin to utopia if buyers could gear the right content to the right consumer experience in the right channel.

To Fremont, programmatic is a key component but not just for the sake of technological convenience. There still must be human interaction among partners whose interests are common but whose approaches vary.

“It has to be done in a dialogue manner,” said Fremont. “The relationship that I think we need to have is less about the complexity of the buy side and more about how do we use data to find audiences at scale.”

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

At MEC, the process is called Momentum and it derives from surveys showing how brand perceptions influence behavior. Momentum provides “a deeper understanding of each brand’s purchase decision,” Fremont explains in an interview during the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat. “What’s going to make them make the decision about that brand based on different stages of where they are in that purchase decisioning.”

All forms of data “are critical to ensure we are reaching the audience most receptive to a brand’s message,” Fremont adds. “So when we go out to find those audiences that are most relevant, it’s with an understanding of what’s going to impact them.”

MEC wants to understand people behaviorally, emotionally, active and passively before marrying this intelligence with creative that will “drive their decisioning forward and make it all end to end.”

When it comes to measuring outcomes in terms of brand lift and ultimately brand sales, “That’s what I’m most excited about,” says Fremont.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That is according to one exec running mobile strategy within a media agency.

“There’s so much mobile consumption, the inventory is potentially infinite in supply,” MEC Interaction mobile head Jide Sobo tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We need to be careful not to overburden consumers with too much advertising.

“It’s great for publishers and Facebook to increase their yield by putting more adverts in there – but you need to be careful about the experience.”

Sobo is a long-time mobile marketer who focuses on spotting and integrating new technologies for MEC.

Whilst he calls the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat “siloed” “wall gardens”, they are crucial partners, he says.

“We’re seeing great traction but it’s an individual, siloed play, rather than being able to talk to people in their entirety across the mobile web,” Sobo tells us. “We need to keep an open perspective to be able to reach people all of the time.

“The problem is, on the mobile web, there is less data available. It’s a pay-off between data and larger reach.

“It’s super-important to create and develop different adverts for each platform. Between Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you need to have different creative.”

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.

We spoke with him for our series “The Road to CES” presented by YuMe.

“We think there’s tremendous opportunity for more creative, more targeted creative,” she says. “We can really get granular with all of the targeting.”

Digital and data, because they’ve become such powerful assets for understanding consumers, are now moving to the front of the conversation.

We interviewed Reed last week at the Teads Outstream conference in New York.

“Our job is to take creative and put it in the market. When we can be there from the very beginning of the process, the quality of the product we get is much better,” she says. Creative, however is expensive and the high cost opens opportunities for content partners to produce the creative and also for smaller creative agencies to land more work, Reed adds.

The business of a creative agency is shifting these days, given the focus on programmatic and targeted buying. Ideally, a creative partner should be able to work with the technology partner to weave together a variety of creative options that can be delivered to different audience segments, she said. “The creative agencies need to shift how they work. If your agency isn’t excited about getting those audience segments and using them to your benefit, I question whether the agency is there to drive your business or to put awards on their walls.

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

She also explains the value of the agency’s new association with Mashable and its propriety social media tracking engine called Velocity.

We spoke with her at the MEC event during the Consumer Electronics Show.

We are pleased the Reed will be a speaker at the Beet executive retreat in Fort Lauderdale next week.

Using Mashable’s real-time predictive tool, Velocity, MEC aimed to study trending topics and push that CES-related content out to interested consumers, she explains. “Velocity is a tool that Mashable created that we licensed and we use it for clients to determine what might trend,” she says in this interview. Velocity is designed to predict content that might go viral.

AT&T uses Velocity to track trending topics related to CES and then piggyback any related content on AT&T’s platform, she says.

Kaplowitz was interviewed for Beet.TV at Consumer Electronics Show. Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all the coverage here.