He has variously been president of network outfit Akami, managing partner of ad group VivaKi and co-founder of the digital ad company Digitas, acquired by Publicis.
Now heading one of the world’s largest sources of data, Kenny’s company is pioneering use of super-local, metereological data to target ads. But there is also a higher calling than marketing.
“Climate change is controversial in some parts of the world,” Kenny tells Beet.TV. “We just did a piece with military leaders and CEOs, who are more conservative, who can really speak about this without making it a bipartisan (sic) issue.”
That project, Climate 25, comprises interviews with 25 scientists, businesspeople and citizens about the weather effects of climate change. In the US, where many still debate the reality of climate change, that is a bold stance for Weather to take. The New York Times calls it “consciously designed to reach people who may be doubters about the causes of global warming”. And Kenny sees the potential.
“I’m happy to begin to move the population,” he says. “We reach 200 million people a day. Helping those people relate to climate change, I think, will make a difference in their actions.”
Kenny credits mentors from his three distinct segment backgrounds with having enabled him to take The Weather Channel to new heights – Bain & Company chairman Orit Gadiesh, Publicis CEO Maurice Lévy and Akamai CEO Tom Leighton.
He concedes he has sometimes slipped up at promoting people: “There are at least three occasions where I promoted someone too quickly, out of loyalty because they had done a great job in the past role. I’ve done better as I’ve gotten older, to be slower on promotion and make sure people are really ready for the management role before you give it to them.”
But Kenny is insisted that the collision of media and technology is a great place for graduates to be. “It’s a great chance to leave a mark on the world,” he says.
Kenny was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. Taping took place in Cannes in June, 2015. This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL Please find the series videos here.
]]>It didn’t work out so well. In fact, the newspaper he launched with a friend, “Beginnings of Boston,” targeted at 20-year-olds in Boston, hit the rocks. Armstrong tells Beet.TV that remains his biggest career setback – but one he learned the best business lessons from.
“At one point, since we really didn’t know what we were doing, and we were starting from scratch, I was 23 years old hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,” Armstrong tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I financed it all myself. I sold my car, my mountain bike, my surfboard, and used all my credit cards, and taught myself how to program.
“The business almost went out of business. What seemed like a crushing amount of debt and failure made me make a decision about whether or not you give up or keep going.”
In the crucible of that crisis, Armstrong realized the enduring value of hard work.
“I remember reading the Boston Globe one morning at the depth of the lowest point,” he adds. There was an article about how handicapped people overcome adversity. There was a quote I used to carry around in my wallet for years that said, basically, the world doesn’t owe you anything, you have to get up every single day and continue and prove yourself and grow.
“It just hit me right between the eyes. I got up that morning and said, ‘Regardless of what happens, I’m always going to keep pushing forward’. It was a great lesson for me.”
Amid the turmoil of his early newspaper foray, Armstrong met with the developers of one of the first web browsers and quickly put all his efforts in to digital media.
Armstrong has spent six years at the helm of an AOL that has been spun out of Time Warner and, after flirting with Yahoo, has been sold to Verizon. That followed positions for Armstrong including running Google’s Americas business, directing sales at ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures and advising Greycroft Partners.
Throughout that time at the company, he has continued applying and spreading the lesson learned from that Globe article. “It’s been a real amazing thing to watch thousands of people at this company get up every morning and improve a little bit every day,” Armstrong says.
Now AOL has itself acquired mobile ad network Millennial Media, the latest in a series of deals designed to place it at the forefront of the fast-changing online advertising industry.
Armstrong’s motivation remains clear, however. “I’ve had one simple philosophy,” he tells Beet.TV. “I want to be really honest with myself about mistakes I’ve made.
“I have a personal mission statement I use in my life, which is about making as many people as I possibly can successful. That drives me.”
This interview is 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 AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP. Please find more clips from the series here.
Armstrong was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place at the AOL headquarters in New York.
]]>“The reality is, I wanted to be a surgeon,” he confesses to Beet.TV in this video interview. “I just cannot stand blood, so I had to change. I went to learn something else. I became an engineer.”
Lévy joined Publicis as IT director in 1971 – after which, one of his most important feats is said to be putting in place a data security policy that involved backing up all of the company’s data on magnetic tape. According to Wikipedia: “A fire in the company’s office (on the Champs-Elysées) proved the success of his backup and restoration strategy, as the company was back on its feet one week later.”
It sounds as if Lévy could have run that IT department with one hand tied behind his back – pretty soon, his horizons were growing.
“After three months, I was doing all my job in half the day -I have learned to do almost everything in the business,” he says. “All the afternoon, I was with the creative department – thinking about how we can find new ways of creating new solutions etc.”
Amid that culture mix, he claims to have written “the very first algorithm in France for media optimisation”.
Publicis, of course, has changed considerably since Lévy’s early days. Now, the company numbers 75,000 staff around the world, and Lévy reckons: “We are the most advanced in digital and probably the one who will win the future.”
That’s a bold bet- hubristic, even. But Lévy acknowledges he has made mistakes along the way – it’s just that he turns the losses in to wins.
“I have lost clients … I had some difficulties with some acquisitions,” he concedes. “Setbacks are what back you stronger. At each of the hurdles that I had to jump … I get out of this stronger. If I am strong today, it is because I had many.”
One recent slip-up, of course, came when the merger of Publicis with Omnicom, which Lévy architected, collapsed in 2014. He reportedly has hinted that, when he leaves the company, it is a team and not an individual that will replace him.
But the man knows that it is the dark days which can turn the light back on: “When you are riding horses – as soon as you fall down, you have to jump over again and again until you win.”
Lévy was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. Taping took place in Cannes in June, 2015. This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL Please find the series videos here.
]]>
“I’m seeing people beginning to pick up formats that were considered dead and reimagine them,” says Susan Lyne, the veteran media executive who previously ran AOL’s brand group and now runs its BBG venture wing.
“Five years ago, people were talking about magazines being dead. What I’ms seeing a lot of … are these gorgeous new magazines that have a very specific point of view, that are very thoughtfully received … and they’re charging $20 for them and they’re selling out. You’re going to see more of that.”
Lyne has been through a media evolution herself. Having once been managing editor of The Village Voice in the late 70s, Lyne created Premiere magazine for News Corp, co-headed ABC Entertainment, ran Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and then built Gilt Groupe in to a digital retail powerhouse.
In between, it was the loss of one of those high-profile jobs which shaped Lynes attitude to the rough and tumble of life in the industry she loves.
“My biggest setback was very public,” she confesses to Beet.TV in this video interview. “I was fired from a job running ABC Entertainment, which means running primetime, just a few weeks before we were announcing a schedule that included Desperate Housewives and Lost and Grey’s Anatonmy. I was excited about them … and I lost my job. I was furious, heartbroken, embarrassed.
“But I learned a few things from that experience. One was resilience – I could have sat there and wallowed in that for many, many months – my husband called me that nigh and said, ‘You have 24 hours to weep over this and then you’re going to get over it and think about all the things that you can do now that you couldn’t have considered 24 hours ago’. It was great advice – it did change my thinking about what had happened.”
These days, Lyne is busy righting a wrong – helping back women-led startups in a world where, she says, 93% of investment goes to the other gender. That comes in the shape of Built By Girls (BBG) Ventures, the seed investment unit she runs at AOL and which is billed as “the evolution of a media company as a platform for change”.
Change is the biggest disruptive factor shaping the entire media industry, Lyne reckons. “When you see new technologies emerging, that gives a whole new group of people to build businesses,” she says.
Just as she thanks her mentors for giving her the push she needed through her early career, Lyne thinks graduates today should seek a rewarding career in media.
“If you want to be part of the conversation … If you want to shape how people think about the world … go in to media; it’s a fabulous world,” she says.
Lyne was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL Please find the series videos here.
]]>Many a business guru is fond of the ironic value of failure. That’s a notion that the boss of one of the biggest ad groups subscribes to, too.
“I’ve always learned more from failure than success,” Starcom MediaVest Group CEO Laura Desmond tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “At times, when people are on the top of the wave, riding it and feeling like nothing can touch them – those are the points in time when you really have to remember, ‘what was it like to be off that wave?’
“Those times make you humble, keep you hungry and keep you focus on the good and the necessary learning and challenges that go in to staying strong in this industry.”
There’s another kind of wave Desmond is riding, and that is the constantly-changing businesses of advertising and technology. The fusion of the two is up-ending the traditional marketing business, and turning geeks in to kingmakers amongst the creative community.
“This industry ain’t for the faint of heart. It’s a tough business today, (with) lots of different pressures,” Desmond reckons.
“Our work inherently is for people who are young or young at heart. You have to have a constant curiosity about what’s going on in the world. You have to be very comfortable with this notion of … moving at an increasingly faster rate of velocity as we see technology empowerment disrupt business models.”
Back when Desmond got started in the industry, her entrance was a sure thing. It started by being an outlier – the only one in her class to back advertising as a positive force for change.
“It’s a story that starts in my freshman year in college,” Desmond recalls. “One of the assignments was to find a popular brand advertising campaign and argue, ‘Was it good for society or not?’
“Out of 20 people in the class, I was the only person to argue that the campaign for Crest toothpaste was actually good for society because the sales funded the investment and research in to fluoride and better products.”
Out of college, Desmond joined advertising company Leo Burnett, which she recalls as “where it was at”: “Creative (messaging) wasn’t the … only thing … (the strategy of) reaching people at the right time and the right place became as important and – arguably, today, 20 years later, more important than the message itself.”
So what are Desmond’s lessons to tomorrow’s generation of ad industry joiners? “Be humble and listen,” she adds. “That’s mostly what I’ve tried to do.”
Desmond was interviewed in Chicago for Beet.TV by Andy Plesser, executive producer of Beet.TV for the Media Revolutionaries series presented by AOL and Xaxis. You can find more videos from the series here.
]]>“When I was a kid, my father ran advertising agencies … I always liked the commercials better than the programming on television,” Lesser tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“When my father had ‘Take your kid to work’ day, I would go in and meet his colleagues at the advertising agencies. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘This is the coolest job in the world’. Advertising agencies then were the hottest business, in the 80s. His colleagues were the smartest, wittiest, funniest people I knew. I grew up thinking, ‘I want to be in advertising just like my dad’.”
In a sense, that’s just what Lesser has done. Launched by WPP and GroupM in 11 countries across North America, Europe and Australia in June 2011, Xaxis is a global digital media platform that connects advertisers and publishers to audiences across all addressable channels.
In short, Xaxis is driving forward “programmatic” advertising, that thorny collection of technology platforms that help better target, plan and trade online advertising.
Xaxis is not Lesser’s first advertising foray, of course. In 2008, he created Media Innovation Group, an integrated data management, targeting and ad delivery platform for media agencies.
But things weren’t always so upbeat. “In 2001, all of that came crashing down and I lost my job,” Lesser says. That job was as consultant to ill-fated digital ad group iXL, which bit the dust in the dot.com bust but which ended up part of Razorfish.
“It felt like all the momentum we built up came crashing down,” Lesser remembers. “But I turned that in to an opportunity – I decided it was a good time to go back to business school. By the time I good out, things had partially recovered.”
Now Lesser believes today’s college-leavers should look to the ad industry for a great career journey.
“In the early 90s, everyone wanted to be an investment banker – that’s not the case anymore,” he tells Beet.TV. “People in school are looking for jobs where they feel they can do the job, make lots of money and be around smart people.
“There’s no better industry than the programmatic industry to do that. These are some of the smartest people in the world, it’s a very fast-changing environment, we’re literally reinventing the advertising business.”
Lesser was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL Please find the series videos here.
]]>
Swartz began his career in 1984 as a reporter with The Wall Street Journal after graduating from Harvard. Then he served as an editor on the Journal’s Page One staff from 1989 to 1991.
“Like a lot of folks of my generation, I went in through journalism,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I was influenced by my fascination with the Watergate case. It led me to think that being a journalist is something that has great social responsibility.”
But Swartz’ executive career got started when, in 1995, he was named president and CEO of SmartMoney, a magazine venture Hearst and the Journal launched four years earlier with Swartz as founding editor.
He went on to be EVP and then president of Hearst Newspapers, before being named president and CEO of Hearst in its entirety in June 2013. That puts Swartz in charge of a multi-media empire. But his position is one he credits with following his early passion.
“Doing things you’re passionate about really works,” he says. “I got my start as a newspaper reporter – it’s because that’s what I was most interested in. That led to so many other things.
“How does one lead to another? When I was getting out of college, being a reporter was what I was most excited about. I did it, I loved it and it’s worked out.”
For a time, it didn’t look like it would. Swartz ran Hearst Newspapers during the economic turmoil of 2008 to 2010, when papers suffered a battering as advertisers pulled back on funding. In 2009, Hearst turned its Seattle Post-Intelligencer web-only.
But Swartz says it was a challenge the company rode out.
“We did a lot of intelligent cost-cutting that did not involve taking journalists off or cutting the quality of the newsprint,” he recalls. “We focused on our culture and people, making sure we supported each other through difficult times.”
Now those changes have been made, the overall industry has stabilized to flat fortunes or more muted declines, with Swartz says Hearst’s papers have shown profit for four straight years.
As the media landscape swirls around us, Hearst is making bets on a digital future not just by reinventing its own properties but also by investing in targets like Vice Media, BuzzFeed and AwesomenessTV. Latest rumors are that the company is working on a special ecommerce project with Snapchat.
Swartz was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, chairman of Xaxis and president of WPP Digital. The taping took place in New York. This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries. The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft.
]]>Carolyn Everson remembers the site with horror, too – but, for different reasons. Everson says the idea for a pet retail site was hers. Whilst in her second year at Harvard, she combined forces with the owner of the domain name and took $5mn in funding from a VC firm that brought in a CEO – who promptly fired Everson three weeks later.
Today, Everson, now Facebook’s global marketing solutions VP, is sanguine.
“I think about it often,” she tells Beet.TV. “Unfortunately, we didn’t see eye-to-eye on how to take the business forward. She sent me a note via fax at the time. That was devastating. It has taken me many many years to get over that.
“When that happens, you learn a lot from that. You realise that you have to believe in yourself. Executives don’t see eye to eye, you have to learn to navigate that and adjust strategies.”
Everson has certainly ridden it out. Since then, she has held senior roles in Zagat, Primedia, Viacom and Microsoft, before being hired to the world’s biggest social network in 2011.
At Facebook, Everson says she is driven by a deep mission. “Every day, you walk in with a mission to try to connect the world” she says. “We have billions of people that are still not connected to the internet. Knowing that we are doing is making a difference is very rewarding.”
Facebook has a big strategy to wire up Africa through its Internet.org arm. That will be a huge undertaking. But it’s by no means the biggest challenge Everson has faced.
What was that? “Being the mother to Taylor and Kennedy,” Everson replies. “They got a really rough start to life – they were born at 27 weeks and had a 30% chance of survival.
“When I was in and out of the hospital in the weeks leading up to their arrival, my biggest mission was to get them to a point where they could be born and have a chance at life.
“When I compared that to any challenge I’ve had in business – to achieve a revenue number, or to start a new company or overcome a huge obstacle – nothing has ever come close to those seven weeks.”
Everson was interviewed for Beet.TV. The taping took place in New York. This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries. The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft.
]]>After leaving the stable for senior roles in pharmaceutical, marketing services and several high-profile boards, Ripp returned to the new-look Time Inc, the magazine group, in 2013 as chief executive.
He’s spent 30 years in this most multi-media of companies. So what does Joe Ripp think the next few years have in store?
“I was vice-chairman of AOL in its heyday when it owned the internet – I watched the transformation of that,” he tells Beet.TV. “We are in another transformation all over again. Over-the-top video and the way that millennials consume content, it’s all up for grabs.”
We know that, these days, Time Inc. no longer considers its magazines “magazines”, but as brands – 90 of them – and has big plans for producing video content. Just in the last couple of months, Rip”s Time Inc. has announced plans to move 300 staff over to Brooklyn, where a big new premises will include a studio and facilities for a new brand aimed at young car owners.
And the company is building on existing strengths in interesting new directions. Recently, it acquired four sports information companies, to create its own new division, branded Sports Illustrated Play, that will sell services to youth sports leagues.
Despite having already spent a few decades in the media business, Ripp seems excited about what’s around the corner.
“It couldn’t be a more exciting time in the industry right now,” he says. “When you look forward, it’s still going to be about great content. But it’s going to be about distributing that content and creativity in different ways.”
But Ripp can’t help but sound a word of caution about the exciting changes ahead, which will be ad disruptive as they may be liberating – that’s the business model, of course. Some pretty fundamental questions are posed by the demographic shift of media audiences.
“If people are not watching networks and they’re just buying video on-demand, what’s happening to advertising, how are we going reach those audiences?, Ripp asks. “Who’s going to pay for television, if it’s not supported by advertising, if its subscription-based?”
Ripp was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The taping took place during the Cannes Lions Festival in 2015. This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries. The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft.
]]>But Bob Pittman doesn’t see it that way. Pittman, who oversaw the creation of MTV, led AOL Networks and now is CEO of online radio service iHeartRadio, thinks agencies are on top of their challenges, and set for bright days ahead.
“I think it’s going to be a great time for ad agencies,” Pittman tells Beet.TV. “When we just have formulas of ‘you go buy spots on radio or TV or some page sin a magazine or the newspaper’, the client began going ‘how hard is that?’ and ‘why am I paying you so much money?’
“Now you’re talking about something that’s very complicated. So I don’t think the pressure is going to be on the fees to the agency, I think the pressure is going to be on the performance. The agencies are building that skillset better than anyone’s built it. They’re becoming experts on data, on how to connect these relationships with consumers to products.
“Ad agencies are in for a real renaissance, and I can’t think of a more exciting time to be in the ad business.”
Pittman has seen media evolution over decades. Back in the day, he became a radio announcer at the age of 15 to earn money for flying lessons, going on to programme, produce and co-host radio and TV shows about music.
Pittman later blazed a trail by founding and taking MTV public but he went on to form Quantum Media, becoming advisor to and, eventually, CEO of Time Warner Enterprises after Warner’s buy-out of Quantum. Pittman was one of the first presidents of AOL, since 1996, helping it grow its subscriber base through its dial-up boom years.
That seems to be a knack he has carried over. “iHeartRadio is the fastest service in the history of the internet to reach 20 million registered users,” he says, proudly “It’s now at 70 million.”
But it is data which Pittman says will have the biggest disruptive effect on the media business in the years ahead.
“The way in which we buy and sell media is closer to electric typewriters and white-out than the modern day – we’ve got to move the business there,” he says.
“When we look at the business in five or six years, it’s going to look very data-driven, very consumer-centric, a wonderful mix of the math and the magic, the creativity we can bring.”
Pittman was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The taping took place during the Cannes Lions Festival in 2015. This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries. The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft.
]]>Fresh out of a six-month stint in investment banking, after realizing the finance world was not for him, Armstrong talked a high school friend in to starting Beginnings Of Boston, an alternative newspaper targeting 20-something Bostonians.
“At one point, since we really didn’t know what we were doing, I was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,” Armstrong tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I financed it all myself. I sold my car, my mountain bike, my surfboard, and used all my credit cards. The business almost went out of business.”
The episode felt like “a crushing amount of debt and failure”. But one event turned things around, and made Armstrong the media leader he is today. What was it?
“I remember reading the Boston Globe one morning at the lowest point,” he says. “There was an article about how handicapped people overcome adversity. There was a quote I used to carry around in my wallet for years that said, basically, the world doesn’t owe you anything, you have to get up every single day and continue and prove yourself and grow.
“It hit me right between the eyes. I got up that morning and said, ‘Regardless of what happens, I’m always going to keep pushing forward’. It was a great lesson for me.”
In that moment two worlds, two very distinct possible outcomes, collided in Armstrong’s mind. What could have been a crushing humiliation that put him off media entrepreneurship for life instead become a learning experience that spurred him forward. “Success and failure are two sides of the same coin,” he now says, succinctly.
Armstrong, in fact, left his fledgling newspaper business headed to Seattle to join Paul Allen’s Starwave, an early internet content pioneer that built out ESPN.com and other properties.
But readers will score few points for recognizing, in Armstrong’s aphorism, some clear parallels with the venture for which he is now better known. Picked by Jeff Bewkes in 2009 to helm an AOL that was struggling to capitalize on its waning dial-up access heritage, Armstrong’s task, this time, was to stick around and reverse the company’s fortunes – this time, using his new-found resolve.
“AOL is a company that wasn’t doing well, it was at a low point,” he says. “Although a lot of people had given up on it, I looked at AOL as the largest brand in the world. Failure only takes you down when you give up. When you don’t give up, it’s a really powerful thing to learn in your life.”
Armstrong threw AOL a lifeline by choosing to downplay old-line business activities in favor of content, advertising and video opportunities. His mantra was “buy low, sell high”. If Verizon’s $4.4 billion offer for the company is anything to go by, that has been borne out.
So what’s next for Tim Armstrong after a sale to Verizon? He tells Beet.TV he takes most personal satisfaction from staying true to himself, and he advises companies that are doing well today not to decline the opportunity to shoot for a bigger prize tomorrow, in a still-growing market.
“As businesses get older, you tend to take less risks. I hope we take ever more risks in the future,” he says.
“There’s going to be billions more people connected to the internet. It’s hard to imagine things 100 times bigger, but I think we have to live in that world. Success is going to come from taking really substantial risks. Buy low, sell high.”
This post is part of 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.
Armstrong was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The taping took place at AOL headquarters in New York.
]]>What most people probably don’t know, however, is that, along the way, Sorrell nearly made a very costly mistake.
Asked by Beet.TV in this video interview to regale his biggest career setback, Sorrell says: “It was the near-death experience… in ’91/’92, when I over-leveraged the company after the acquisition of Ogilvy. We thought the world’s economy was going to be stronger in ’91 and ’92 and that we would ride through it.
“The actual technical mistake I made was that we had a convertible preferred stock, which converted in to equity if the share price rose. Of course, in a recession, share prices fall. It was very expensive debt – 11% gross – which was phenomenally expensive.”
Sorrell understands why some people may think his eyes were bigger than his belly in attempting the deal in 1989. At the time, Ogilvy was many times larger than his own WPP. But the $864m deal was one of two pivotal buys, together with WPP’s acquisition of J. Walter Thompson two years earlier, that would kickstart WPP on a trajectory to real industry heft.
It is telling that Sorrell pulled off the Ogilvy acquisition shortly after the loss of his father, who had been a compass to Martin, both personally and professionally.
“My dad would be my mentor,” Sorrell tells Beet.TV. “He died in 1989, just after we did the Ogilvy acquisition. He saw the two biggest things we’ve done – JWT and Ogilvy.
“I used to speak to him three, four, five times a day, irrespective… about the business. That was the days before mobile phones. He only had my agenda at heart, not anybody else’s.”
Mentors are crucial to any entrepreneur, says Sorrell. But, whilst many a founder would cite a business contact as their mentor, Sorrell continues to credit his dad.
“It’s very important to have that, to be able to talk to somebody who is dispassionate about what you’re talking about,” he adds. “My father was not knowledgable about the business, so was even more neutral. My father was my closest friend ever.”
This article is 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.
]]>“When I was working in direct marketing we used to imagine what it was like if we could talk to an individual in real time and tell that person about our product and service, and everything we did was to simulate what that would feel like,” says Shelly Lazarus, Chairman Emeritus of Ogilvy & Mather in this interview with Beet.TV. “Now we can. We are just in the infancy in the industry of trying to figure out how to use the ability to talk one to one in the moment a consumers indicates he or she is interested in what we have to sell.”
Those changes in the technological capabilities of the digital world are making advertising a more fascinating playground for those entering the field today. “Over the next five to ten years, we are going to have more ways of consuming content than has ever been imagined, and as a starting point we are all going to have to be agnostic about how an individual wants to consume content. They are going to have so many choices and we have to accept it.”
Lazarus has a particular vantage point from having been with the storied shop since 1971, and having led the agency during the 1990s and into the 2000s. Advertising was a natural fit for Lazarus since she responded to the creativity as well as the particular type of people that the field attracts.
“If you want to wake up every morning and have the world be different in a way where you have to figure out what to do in it, this is a great industry. And it’s the people in it. Working all day with creative people is a treat,” she says in explaining her passion for the business. “I also find people in advertising very involved in culture and what is happening in the world, so you have these interesting, funny, outrageous people who you get to think with every day and come up with new solutions…it has never felt like work to me.”
Lazarus has talked openly about “personal branding” and what it means and shouldn’t mean in the context of a career in advertising. “Resilience —the ability to hang in there when things are difficult—is critical in a career, and if you’re spending every hour of the day pretending to be someone you’re not, you’ll be exhausted and won’t have the energy needed to face your real work,” she said in an interview with the Harvard Business Review on this topic.
Perhaps that’s why she’s such an outspoken advocate of working in a field one loves. “Find something you love to do. Find something about which you are passionate,” she tells Beet.TV. “If it’s not advertising, don’t stay here. If you don’t like what you’re doing, go find something you love. You’re never going to give enough of yourself to something unless you love it. And unless you give freely of yourself, you’re not going to be successful.”
This is segment is part of 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. Lazarus was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
]]>That’s the key advice to new entrants in the ad business from industry veteran Wendy Harris Millard, president and COO of media consultancy MediaLink. “Be ever the student. Don’t ever stop understanding the broader context you are working in. Keep studying the industry,” she says, sharing with Beet.TV her wisdom for newcomers. Millard is deeply involved in education in the industry, having served as Chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, as well as having held numerous leadership roles at industry associations.
A passionate advocate of the opportunities in advertising, she believes now is an ideal time to enter the business. “The exposure is incredible. We are living convergence. It is Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley and Hollywood and Wall Street,” she says. “The volume and velocity of the change is stunning. There are entrepreneurial opportunities in large and small companies. I can’t imagine a better industry.”
However, the industry needs to make improvements especially in better communication between men and women. “I was ten years after Mad Men, but it was very tough like that. It is tough today but in a different way. One of the biggest blockages for women to get through that ceiling is that the language of men and women is very different. By and large, it is men that are running businesses. And if we don’t get on the same page with communication it makes it that much more difficult…Is communication better? Yes. But did I think it would be better faster? I did.”
Millard brings a wealth of expertise to her current role at the strategic advisory firm, with a long and varied career in the ad business that has spanned stints as president of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. as well as chief sales officer at Yahoo. During her time at the tech giant, she led ad revenue growth in six years to $6 billion from $700 million.
More industry change will come in the next five years with the growth in native advertising and branded content, she predicts. Those transformations are helping advertising to evolve from a less interruptive model to a more conversational one. “We are starting to see that as brands begin to message but in a very different way from ads. Facebook and Twitter are the drivers of a different look of what advertising really means.”
This segment is part of 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.
Millard was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place in February in New York, in the MediaLink offices.
]]>“If someone were to watch me in any given day, I still read scripts from television shows, I still make calls on development – in the next minute, I may be dealing with a computer or trading issue,” says Irwin Gotlieb.
Currently chairman of GroupM, Gotlieb previously led MediaVest Worldwide, led Mindshare Worldwide and was CEO of GroupM before moving to chair in 2012.
Renowned for his sharp ability to spot future trends, Gotlieb, who grew up in Japan and taught himself to code on some of the earliest computers, leverages decades of experience to spot the next wave. So what’s next for advertising?
“It will be much more performance-based than it is today,” he tells Beet.TV. “I think we’ll be dealing with outcomes (for marketers) as opposed to media (content) delivery. I believe that it will be enabled by granularity of data.
“Instead of product development cycles based on a typical person, everything will be based on collaborative filtering, understanding things at a census level. The closest thing we’ll be doing to modelling down the road, is creating buckets of individuals who have similar behaviour patterns.”
After so many years in the business, Gotlieb clearly still has a real zeal for changing, adapting and creating the future of media – an industry he says is a perfect choice for young new starters.
“I can’t think of any other business where you get to play with technology, where you get to play with content, where you get deal-making, where you get strategic insight, input and analytics,” he says. “We cover the whole gamut of things.”
So, what would be the “king of advertising’s” advice to the pretenders to the throne?
“Come at it from a perspective that says, ‘there are no rules, disruption is okay’,” he says. “Just cause someone hasn’t done it before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Just get on with it.”
This is segment is part of 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.
Gotlieb was interviewed in his New York office for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
]]>That fusion eventually saw Fulgoni lead IRI, the first major supplier of point-of-sale scanner information to the consumer goods industry, in the 80s and 90s.
It was a period in which he collected awards at a rate of knots – Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Illinois Entrepreneur of the Year, Wall Street Transcript Award for outstanding contributions as CEO and an induction to the Chicago Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame.
But his crowning achievement is probably co-founding comScore – the media and marketing research company with a $1 billion capitalization and 1,200 staff. So what does Fulgoni know about building a business? Two things:
It’s apt that comScore runs a corporate responsibility programme called “Trees For Knowledge“. After all, Fulgoni gets a kick out of growing little acorns in to mighty oaks.
To youngsters thinking of planting themselves in a digital industry he calls “dynamic”, Fulgoni, 67, has some advice.
“Take an inventory of what you’re good at and figure out that in a competitive-strength perspective; that’s really important,” he says.
“If you’re creatively good, this is the place to be – there is a renaissance in creativity that’s needed. If you are technically very good, there’s a wealth of opportunities here in the industry.”
Having already helped reshape the industry in a mighty significant way, what still motivates the man?
“There’s almost never a total solution to the challenge of, ‘How do you get consumers to make a choice?’,” Fulgoni says.
“It’s a never-ending search for a solution. I find that to be particularly exciting – it drives me.”
This is segment is part of 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.
Fulgoni 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 W Fort Lauderdale.
]]>That view – you may see the explosion in ad tech vendors as indicative of a boom. In fact, it may only be hurting the business.
“There is too much money – especially venture capital – looking for a home,” Rothenberg tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It alights on too much minuscule segment innovation
“Rather than creating step-change advances in the way our industry moves forward … it tends to create more chaos.”
Case in point – the explosion in ad tech operators measuring the “viewability” of online ad inventory, following recently-agreed standards on that metric. You may think that is a good thing. But Rothenberg sees a down side.
“There are 17 accredited viewability vendors in the field and at least a dozen more in the pipeline to be accredited by the MRC,” he says. “This proliferation of vendors has been an utter obstacle, they’ve just confused everybody. It is frustrating that you have a vent cap industry that would finance so many companies of so little importance in the grand scheme of things”
Rothenberg should know. He spent 10 years reporting media and marketing for Advertising Age and six years as technology and Sunday magazine politics editor at The New York Times before becoming senior director of intellectual capital with the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton.
It was in 2007 he was tapped by the IAB to lead its operations, bringing his independent industry eye to the online ad sector’s trade body, which defines ad standards.
Data from CBI Insights reveals $518 million in venture capital was poured into ad networks and exchanges between 2013 and 2014.
But with his experience, Rotheberg thinks the many, many VC-fuelled ad tech firms vying for customers are merely “features, not companies”.
“What venture capital has done is essentially financed the outsourcing of the R&D function,” he argues. “This makes a lot of sense – why should a company take on all the costs on its own… ?
“The problem is … each one of these little features … has to turn itself in to a company. That’s a lot of redundant expenditure on unnecessary functions. It creates a lot of inefficiency.”
This is segment is part of 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.
Rothenberg was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place at the New York offices of the IAB.
]]>“Don’t worry about this job, or someone else’s. Keep your head down and success will be recognized,” he says. “Always associate yourself with good people. If you are in an organization that is doing something wrong or has a work ethic you aren’t comfortable with.”
Roth comes to advertising from a non-traditional route. He’s the rare media agency CEO who didn’t cut his teeth on the copy desk or creative department. Instead, he moved into media management from the financial services side. He’s been guiding the shop for ten years now after having worked as a tax lawyer, an insurance executive and as an accountant back in his college days. He started at IPG on the board in 2002 and became CEO three years later.
Even in the short time he’s spent in the ad business, he’s witnessed tremendous change, wrought by the shift to digital, mobile and interactive consumer habits. As consumer attention becomes fractured across screens, the role of the agency morphs. “We are an advice model now. We have tech companies trying to gain market share but they are biased in favor of their platform and their tech. We are paid to advise clients on their best interests. We don’t have a vested interest in where we place media, or where we distirubte. That is the value we bring and the value of an integrated offering that is agnostic but has the expertise to understand the varied technologies.”
Data is fueling much of these changes. Roth has been an outspoken advocate of the need for sharing data freely across borders. As data becomes the “lifeblood” of the marketing economy, it’s vital for information to flow across the Internet, he has said. Earlier this quarter, he spoke about the overall growth of digital and how this sector is on track to exceed the TV ad spend in a few years. Acquisitions in digital and emerging markets are the foundation of IPG’s future growth, he has said.
More change is coming fast on the horizon. “The next five years will be exciting…but they will be very competitive. There are new players in our space and traditional advertising agencies have to change and embrace digital and keep their creativity.”
This is segment is part of 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. Roth 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 Wynnin Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show.
]]>“Corporations make a tremendous amount of profit from individual consumers giving their time, energy data and money,” Armstrong tells Beet.TV.
“The more that technology and the Internet Of Things comes in… you’re going to have the economics change a lot and the economy go in reverse… the individual consumer is going to get more benefit than corporations will get.”
Think of the classic Internet Of Things example – a fridge that knows what it needs to order. But extrapolate that idea to every conceivable consumer good.
“Instead of you going out to look for everything you need, those things will come to you – you’ll have a much better economic situation as a consumer,” Armstrong adds. “You’ll spend less time looking for things, you’ll get value from your own data. You’ll basically become more of your own profit center as a consumer. That’s a really big change. The economy’s going to come to the consumer.”
He postulates that this scenario will unfold in the next five or more years.
Armstrong is celebrating six years at the helm of AOL this month. That followed positions including running Google’s Americas business, directing sales at ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures and advising Greycroft Partners.
Armstrong has a knack for starting new ideas. The Connecticut College grad co-founded a newspaper in Boston and launched IDG’s first online magazine.
So how would he advise tomorrow’s generation to make its mark? Using three simple rules, he tells Beet.TV:
This interview is 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. Please find more clips from the series here.
Armstrong was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place at the AOL headquarters in New York.
]]>After all, six years after founding the online ad network Advertising.com with his brother in 1998, a 35-year-old Ferber sold the company to AOL for a hefty $495m.
Many a founder would have taken the opportunity to cash out after that kind of exit. But Baltimore-born, Stanford-educated engineer Ferber wanted to keep going – now he is taking as much pleasure from the bad times as the good.
“People on the outside would say it (Advertising.com) was my greatest accomplishment,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But the industry changes and the fact we’re addressing the television convergence (with Videology) – it’s such a big opportunity, and I feel like it’s still early. And it’s much harder!”
Ferber got the idea for Videology whilst working for AOL after the acquisition, searching for ways to create an internet video content platform. That didn’t work out quite as planned but setbacks, says Ferber, are the lessons that make you stronger.
“The setback I had at Videology was the same I had at Advertising.com, which was an economic crisis,” he says. “March of 2000 was arguably the beginning of the dot.com implosion. Eventually, we had 9/11 in 2001. That whole time period was incredibly difficult. We lost 60% of our revenues in five months. It was a travesty.
“What I learned from that is, the only constant in life is change. The most important thing is how good are we at reacting to changing conditions, which will always occur.”
That is a belief Ferber – who has won several awards including Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and Blue Chip Venture Company’s Chief Executive Officer of the Year – has carried over to Videology.
“The existing business model at the time – to aggregate content form the studios and put it out as a destination site for consumers – wasn’t going to work,” he says. “The economic crisis of 2008 wasn’t going to allow us to survive long enough to see that through. We pivoted. We changed course.”
Now the company is trying to help advertisers benefit from digital, targeted video advertising, and is moving to help TV ad buyers benefit from the convergence of TV and internet technologies. Ferber says the power of pivoting, and persistence, is clear.
“The most important thing is a positive attitude and determination. If I can persist and not get down on what’s happened … that was the single greatest reason for our success.”
This interview is 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. Please find more clips from the series here.
Ferber was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place at the Wynn Encore hotel in Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2015.
]]>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.
]]>