I hope you’ve had good,  relaxing summer.

Here in the Beet patch  we are ramping up with a number of projects including our weekly podcast.  We are very pleased to be back for a new season – and a huge thanks to Transunion for sponsoring.

We are kicking off the the new season with my chat with Wenda Harris Millard, one of the most innovative, inspiring leaders we know.

Wenda has a stellar record of achievements from her work  at  DoubleClick, Ziff Davis, Yahoo and Martha Stewart Omnimedia where was co-CEO.  She joined  Michael Kassan twelve years ago as Vice Chairman and COO to build the powerhouse consultancy MediaLink.

Not slowing down, she is hard at work at at MediaLink at a number of other projects.  I am happy we could catch up.

In our chat, she covers the accelerated transformation of digital media, the emergence of identity-based solutions  and their impact on outcomes.

She shares her thoughts and experiences as woman mentor, advising many women on how to navigate the extraordinary pressures of family and career during Covid.

A great conversation.

Thank you Wenda for all you do and for you support of my work.  You mean a lot to many people

Thanks again to our season sponsor Transuion.

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

The BeetCast is a weekly podcast produced by Beet.TV.  The Fall 2021 series is presented by Transunion.   Please find your favorite podcast platform right here.

But this year’s offering will be much more robust, explains Philip Thomas, CEO of Cannes Lions and head of the events business at Ascential.

The biggest change is that the Lions, the awards themselves, will be back after a two year hiatus.

This year’s digital offering will include the awards along with its judges and winners, a deep dive into the creative “work.”  It’s all part of a yearlong digital pass for the Festival and other content for a $250 subscription.  Thomas says the deep content offering makes the essence of the Festival much more widely accessible.

Of course, the networking at events can’t be fully replicated on line, but Thomas hopes some of the networking and casual meetings will take place in a virtual world enabled by software from Spatial Web.   The plan allows all registered guests to assume an identity or avatar.

The Spatial Web software was used for a virtual party for 700 at  CES ’21 hosted by MediaLink, a division of Ascential.

Speaking of MediaLink, Thomas said that it is working on a plan to mark the festival in New York during the week of June 21, but noted that plans have not been finalized.

Thomas also spoke about the company’s investment in Hudson MX, an enterprise solution for advertising agencies and others to manage inventory and operations.   Ascential is the largest shareholder of Hudson MX.

But, to do that to best effect, they are going to need to start acting before the campaign has ended.

That is the view of Wenda Harris Millard, the industry veteran who is now vice chairman at strategic advisory MediaLink.

Toward certainty

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Millard says the move toward outcomes as a focus is understandable.

“Given a lot of the uncertainties in our world now – socially and politically, business-wise – really focusing marketing dollars on business outcomes I think is more important than ever before,” she says.

“I think brands are still looking for the classics – driving awareness, consideration, intent to purchase – all those classic metrics.

“But now they’re really looking to see and measure engagement, online action, conversion to online and offline sales.”

Outcomes throughout the funnel

Millard – previously co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Chief Sales Officer at Yahoo! – says it is now just about moving from the top to the bottom of the marketing funnel – not just about foregoing brand building in pursuit of measured sales.

Rather, she thinks brands need to have the capability to bring certainty to the top and middle of the funnel, too.

“One of the challenges that marketers have had is they’re still getting post-campaign reports,” she says.

“What a company like LoopMe does is right while that campaign is happening, leverage the data insights that they have through their partnerships, add the AI, and they can adjust that campaign in real time and bring in better targets and net new customers. It’s really literally closing the loop.”

Rebuilding relationships

Millard is referring to LoopMe, an outcomes-based advertising platform of which she is an advisor and that this year unveiled tools to optimize mid-flight campaigns in pursuit of attributed goals.

Going forward, she expects to see brands have a new focus on relationship-building.

The deprecation of third-party cookies and withering of mobile identifiers driving a new focus on gaining consented audience buy-in.

But Millard also says the times we live in are calling for a “respectful” tone that calls for emotion.

“That to me is the most exciting thing that I see on the horizon,” she says.

Millard recently joined LoopMe as member of the  company’s data advisory board

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

A growing number of media leaders thinks so.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, cross-disciplinary media consultancy MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan says a content crunch is coming.

“In the real, real world, people are going to have to make some binary choices,” Kassan says. “Not everybody can add 10 subscription services to their monthly expense. They’re going to go where the content is going to be the most compelling.”

In other words, when the rubber hits the road, some consumers are going to take a hard left.

But the nature of what represents valuable content could change when there is a lot more time available to watch that content, Kassan believes. He thinks driverless cars could create more time for consumers to be in front of screens.

“Just think of the fact that the commute that most consumers have in their day jobs, you know, today,” he says. “All of a sudden you’re going to be handed back an hour, 45 minutes, two hours a day of commute time that normally they had their hands on the wheel. There’s going to be an increase in content consumption.”

To many, the idea that removing drivers’ autonomy in order to sit them, immobile, in front of more marketing messages may seem like a dystopian commercial fantasy.

But you only have had to ride in the back of a New York taxi to be a passenger exposed to TV news and local advertising on screens in the back of the cab.

Kassan says: “It’s a perfect storm that we as consumers I think can just revel in. I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for my next binge. I’m always looking for that next new bit of content that can capture my attention.”

This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr.   Please visit this page to find more videos from the series. 

While Spiegel isn’t ready to declare the death of cookies for tracking consumers, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference that they’re increasingly less relevant.

“One of the things we’re spending a lot of time on is where is new consumption happening and what’s the identity signals in that new world,” says Spiegel, who joined TransUnion last August from MediaLink. “And a lot of that has to do with certainly not only devices but IP-based content.”

TruSignal uses its custom audience-building platform to deliver predictive scoring powered by artificial intelligence, making data available and actionable in almost real time for one-to-one addressable marketing. The combination of its technologies and information will allow TransUnion’s inherent accuracy to operate at scale, according to a news release.

Spiegel sees TransUnion, the consumer credit reporting agency whose data holdings include 200 million files profiling nearly every credit-active consumer in the United States, as an enabler capable of straddling both privacy and technology.

“We are fortunate to be able to actually leverage and utilize PII in a safe, secure manner,” he says, because TransUnion is used to government regulations “and leaning into the new privacy regulations that will come. A lot of the players in the ecosystem are uncomfortable leveraging PII. They don’t have the infrastructure to do that.”

As opposed to distributing information, TransUnion helps to be a “validation source to turn a lot of unknown information into known information. Get beyond devices, get beyond a thin slice of information about consumers into a full picture.”

While the company has invested in Tru Optik and is helping it “continue to power their solutions,” TransUnion sees its data science and technology capabilities as helping marketers understand “what to show to consumers and what next best action to highlight, what offer to show, what’s the contextual as well as personal experience, how do you make that more relevant.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.

With just a few weeks to go before the annual ad industry shindig kicks off in June, it looks like Kassan has landed his catch.

“The original partners that we’ve announced already are Activision, NBC, Microsoft, Adobe, Tik Tok and a couple of more that are just about ready to be announced in these last few days as we’re leading up or last few weeks,” Kassan tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

In February 2017, Cannes Lions’ organizer, London-based Ascential, a B2B media company, announced it would acquire MediaLink, which has more than 120 people in multiple US offices, with each company remaining independent.

The new CLX strand is one of the first visible fruits of the tie-up. It aims to help get brands up close and personal with leading entertainment companies.

According to the festival’s announcement: “CLX participants can partake in a selection of curated roundtables that will provide compelling insightful learnings and ideas for the creation of successful content.”

Those roundtables, specifically, hosted by senior execs:

• The Art and Science of Building Beloved Stories – Activision Blizzard
• The Power of Creative Storytelling. The Power of Comedy in Storytelling. Tell Me a Story: How to Break through the Noise and Form a Real Connection – NBCUniversal
• Authenticity wins: TikTok’s Formula for Success. Everyone is a Creator: Unlocking the Power of UGC – TikTok

“And we’ve got Jeffery (Katzenberg) and Meg (Whitman) in tow to talk about Quibi and their launch of their mobile platform,” Kassan adds.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

At the NewFronts, strategic advisory firm MediaLink teamed with YouTube for a kickoff breakfast and discussion that included Tara Walpert Levy, VP of agency and brand solutions at Google and YouTube.

Referring to the ever-rising competition among streaming TV providers, Kassan observes, “there are peoples’ careers who depend on it and there are companies that are looking at it as their future, and there’s a lot of barbarians at the gates right now.”

He notes that after Disney announced Disney+, Wall Street’s reaction was to push the stock of the Walt Disney Co. “to an all-time high.” Similarly, WarnerMedia has “an amazing existing franchise with HBO and extending that and bringing Bob Greenblatt to the party I think is going to make a big statement,” Kassan adds in a reference to the recently appointed Chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment.

He says Comcast and its NBCUniversal juggernaut “are certainly not to be counted out but very much in the middle of it. Not to underestimate YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix “and you just go on and on. You’ve got billions and billions of dollars being spent against the backdrop of creating content, and the consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for that content.”

As for the prospects for advertising spending on television amid all the groundbreaking change, some question whether marketers that can’t spend money the way they traditionally have done “are just going to put that to their bottom line. We know that’s not the case because you still need to market your goods and services. I think it has to be reimagined. It’s not going to be the way it was, that’s for sure, but it will still exist and it will still thrive.”

Noting margin inadequacies at agencies and profit-and-loss challenges at marketers, it’s logical to take a close look at what can be done in-house, Kassan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“Those are competing dynamics and I think it’s a chaotic moment and I think there is more that clients, marketers can do themselves. That doesn’t negate the need for an agency because the agency is that outside-in perspective that you can’t always get looking inside out,” says Kassan.

“You run the risk if you create an in-house agency at brand X, that your team is only focused on brand X and they don’t get the horizontal visibility and influence that you get if you’re working across many brands.”

Taking more functions in-house also impacts the recruitment of talent when creative or media practitioners decide whether they want to work on just one client or vertical category, according to Kassan. “Or do they want the variety is the spice of life approach where they get to work across a portfolio of clients?’

The ANA surveyed 412 of its members in August 2018, 52% of whom were at the director level or above. According to the survey, 78% of ANA members have some type of in-house operation compared to 42% 10 years ago.

Kassan believes that advances in technology and automation will continue to be driving force for marketers deciding to do more themselves. “Will that trend continue? Yes.”

He perceives more transparency in what people are talking about at the ANA conference, and not just pertaining to media buying and placement “but also transparency about the actual conversation. Marketers and agencies actually talking about what are the benefits and liabilities of going in house. I think it’s a good conversation and we’ll see a lot of movement in that regard.”

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

If the agenda for next year’s upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is anything to go by, it certainly is.

In a new addition to the advertising festival’s agenda, CLX (“Connect. Learn. Explore”), a new mini-event within the overall programme, will add a series of curated discussion sessions, helping brands to think like entertainment companies.

And co-organizer MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan is looking for entertainment companies to come in and help.

“We’re looking for an interesting group of foundational partners, somewhere in the range of eight or ten foundational partners, which will come from all sides of the industry, says Kassan in this video interview with Beet.TV.

In February 2017, Cannes Lions’ organizer, London-based Ascential, a B2B media company, announced it would acquire MediaLink, which has more than 120 people in multiple US offices, with each company remaining independent.

The new CLX strand is one of the first visible fruits of the tie-up. Invite-only for two out of four days, it seeks to help brands “get up close and personal with some of the world’s most inspiring and sought after entertainment experts” and “learn how the world’s most popular content gets made”.

Cannes Lions takes place in June 2019.

This interview was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando.

“We are in an absolute state of transformation. I’ll be kind, I used to say chaos. It’s controlled chaos,” Kassan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference, where MediaLink is a longtime attendee.

A year and a half after its acquisition by Assential plc, “it’s been a wonderful experience so far,” says Kassan. MediaLink opened a London office last year and “we’re very serious about our foray into Asia Pacific and China. They’re great partners and they’ve been a tremendous boost to MediaLink in terms of our ability to really create that global scale.”

Kassan considers DMEXCO to be “one of the best places to bring the adtech and martech communities together,” although not necessarily a venue where one can interact with lots of brand advertisers.

“One of the challenges of DMEXCO has always been there’s not a lot of brands here,” he explains. “There’s a lot of sellers. If you look around the show flow you see all the bold faced names that matter in martech and adtech.”

He harkens back to his opening day at law school and the prevailing expression, “Look to your left, look to your right one of those people won’t be here when you graduate.” Fortunately, whoever was sitting on his right or left “looked at me and I still made it, but there was truth in what they said.

“I think if you look to your left and look to your right, in 2019 there’ll be a few different players here. They may be merged or they may be purged. One of the two.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

Not only will AT&T unveil the name and road map for its advanced advertising goals at the event in Santa Barbara, Kassan will get to explore how one of the newest video content startups intends to become relevant.

Kassan will moderate a discussion at Relevance between Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is Managing Partner of WndrCo and Chairman & Founder of mobile media startup NewTV, and Meg Whitman, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and CEO of NewTV.

“What Jeffrey and Meg have cooked up, having just raised a billion dollars from all the key entertainment companies to launch NewTV, I think should be very exciting,” the CEO of MediaLink says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.

In the walkup to Relevance, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has been emphasizing how the company’s traditional and newly acquired assets—including AppNexus and Time Warner—gives it lots of potential leverage in the advanced advertising space.

“The AppNexus acquisition certainly underscores how serious he was. While at the same time disclosing an 83 billion-dollar purchase of Warner Media there was still room and some cash left on the table to do a one point six billion acquisition of AppNexus.

“I think it validates everything Randall said publicly and as well, candidly, in the trial that happened around the Department of Justice challenging the deal,” Kassan adds.

That’s a reference to AT&T’s public position that scale was its ultimate goal in its acquisition pursuits “and they certainly have put their money where their mouth is.”

Other highlights of the conference for Kassan will include hearing from Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner, whose latest effort is a series titled The Romanoffs, and former Huffington Post chief Ariana Huffington regarding her venture called Thrive Global.

This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

Now, it seems, they want to kick it up in to the next gear.

Last year, Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.

In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes the next phase.

‘Not waiting’

“We’ve been in market seven, eight months with a platform that essentially does very little … but that is not where it’s ending,” he says.

“What more can we do around planning? What more can we do around, ‘Well, I have an advanced audience; what if I want to plan against that, what if I want to buy against that?’ It’s really about ‘What do we do next?’, not ‘Where do we stop?’

“This is why we have developers. We were waiting and we were waiting for companies or ad tech to try and solve this for us, and I think what happened is when we got together and we looked at the problem, we said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna go develop a bespoke solution that is going to solve some of the foundational elements.'”

Brands ‘thirsty’ for more

That was something welcomed by a brand marketer on the panel. L’Oreal SVP Nadine McHugh said “working together is a step in the right direction”.

“We need scale,” McHugh said. “I don’t think TV any time soon is ever going to go away. We need you guys to evolve into the future in a meaningful way. We definitely want more targetability.”

Like Gordon, McHugh said L’Oreal hadn’t been sitting on its hands, waiting for technology to be invented to serve its goals.

“We’ve been trying to push ourselves forward while we waited for the industry,” she said, telling Gordon: “So, you should get some of us involved to … during the plumbing stage, so that we can move faster when you’re ready to launch some of these new things because we’ve been thirsty, and we’ll drink faster if we’re in it with you.”

Tech ‘not ready’

Another TV company, NBCUniversal, said the technology “is not there yet” and would take a couple more years.

NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said: “We have the ability now to create incredible segments in OpenAP. It’s come a long way but it’s not quite there yet.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Witherspoon was one of four panelists who discussed new video ad formats and how creative and media agency professionals are working more closely together to build stories relevant to specific audiences. It was one of several discussions at Cannes under the auspices of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.

Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink kicked things off by asking “How much more will you pay for a non-standard ad?”

Responded true[X] President Pooja Midha, “It’s how much more will you pay for impact. Non-standard, who cares?”

That’s where things got complicated, as Witherspoon explained. “It’s difficult, because sometimes you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. Within this campaign or within each kind of percentage of always on, what amount of that is going to be something that you’re going to be testing.”

Which is where Nissan’s “pilots” come in and how testing is needed to help change the thinking within procurement. “Once you take the results from that, how do you actually start to scale that? I think that’s when you can start to advance the financial discussion, once you’re able to show that impact across, in the case of Nissan, all of our models, across all of our markets, that’s a very powerful discussion to have,” said Witherspoon.

Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman said the test-and-learn approach also needs an activation plan. “So as you’re presenting a learning road map, you actually can say, ‘if this works we’re going to scale immediately.’ We’re not going to wait and have another committee meeting, it’s not going to be three months. Turn on a dime and then roll on to the next test.”

Along the way, people on both the creative and media side need to come together more than ever, said John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA, because media plans traditionally have been built in a process wherein storytelling has been relegated to creative agencies.

“There’s a gap in between, which is story building, and I think it’s amazing what happens when you get tight teams sitting together, working together from the onset, as opposed to the traditional iterative process where sometimes media comes in late in the game,” Osborn said.

He described the process with Nissan, TBWA and OMD “literally welded together at the hip, working on which types of data will better inform the right kinds of storytelling.”

true[X] does real-time creative optimization for Nissan as it simultaneously measures real-time brand lift. “We launch with one version of an engagement, and as we see the data coming back we’re able to actually build with Nissan and its agency a more elaborate version, or a version that lets you go deeper or let’s us hone in on what we see really lifting,” said Midha.

Spiegel wanted to know whether creative personalization is right for all brands, particularly the biggest ones with the widest target audiences.

“One of the things we’ve seen across the tens of thousands of engagements we’ve built is that strong, persistent branding, even for very, very well advertised brands, is really important in actually driving results for them,” Midha said.

Richman related that one of Wavemaker’s clients describes its target audience as “anyone with a mouth.” Still, such a brand might need to achieve relevance with a new generation of consumers or could be missing opportunities for frequency or selling across its whole portfolio.

“A level of personalization may not be one hundred segments, but looking it from the lens of two or three it will drive the business forward,” Richman said.

The panelists agreed that campaign measurement will continue to be one of the biggest challenges, given cross-platform content consumption. The fact that advertisers and publishers alike recognize this and want to change old habits, there are fundamental barriers that will take time to overcome.

“Right now, to launch anything, for example inside of CTV, which is such an important environment, it’s not one platform. It’s a bunch of different devices that are all built on different code bases. It’s not simple,” said Midha.

As the discussion shifted to things like total ratings points and sound media strategies, Osborn summed things up by observing “Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in the media jargon there’s a great brilliance in just thinking as a human would think.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

Several initiatives and companies are now trying to tackle that problem. But what will it really take for TV to become a “platform”?

In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes his vision.

“If you think traditionally of Facebook, Google, even Amazon as the three large advertising platforms, advertising ecosystems, then what is it about television, this thing that’s been around for 50-plus years?,” he asks, before laying out the template: “I think it really comes down to three things…

1. Unification: “Premium television content now can touch consumers across many different points within a consumption journey, whether that is a traditional piece of glass on a wall, whether that’s a mobile phone, whether that’s a tablet. The ability to unify that around content, around this premium experience of television content, that’s sort of critical piece number one.”
2. Cooperation: “OpenAP is sort of an incredible effort that has been bearing a ton of fruit over the past 12, 18 months. And over the next 12, 18 months I think it’s going to absolutely accelerate the ability for marketers to come in and buy television in a more comprehensive and cohesive way.”
3. Bridging the activation gap: “I can go to Facebook, I can go to Google, I can go to Amazon, I can bring data, I can bring advanced targeting. We’ve been limited to Nielsen demography for the past 50 years in the TV ecosystem. But with OpenAP and with other efforts that are happening across the market, we are seeing that fundamentally change.”

Other executives on the panel responses to the idea.

Consumers See TV and Digital as Joined 

NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said right now we can’t really start thinking about it as ‘TV is a separate entity from digital from addressable’, because the consumer doesn’t care.”

She said consumers don’t see TV as a single environment, because these days they consume TV content anywhere, seamlessly.

Accept inconsistency

But the panel’s brand marketer, L’Oreal’s Nadine McHugh, was skeptical. Responding to Gordon’s wish that the TV makes it easy for brands to buy in a “consistent way”, she said: “When I hear ‘consistency’, I think it’s going to take 10 years to get it to where we need to go.

“It’s about where consumers want to consume video content. And they don’t care. We have to maybe be comfortable with being inconsistent within a consistency.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.,This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018.  For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.

MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel prefaced the conversation by calling into question the age-old format of 40 minutes of TV content leavened with 20 minutes of commercials. Encountering no disagreement, Spiegel elicited the following condensed thoughts from the varied panelists.

Amanda Richman, CEO, Wavemaker US: “This battle for attention is really sparking different ways of working. And we’re excited about now it’s becoming less of a focus just on the precision and data and targeting and keeping that within the realms of digital media only. And maybe back to the creative agencies and a different level of collaboration to recognize that we need to actually help develop the stories and messages that are bespoke to these new ad formats and platforms and broader distribution.”

John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA: “I think media more and more is just as innovative and in some ways just as creative as the creative storytellers in a creative agency. No one’s ever gone wrong by considering the consumer first and foremost. You’re seeing I think some real evolution in terms of innovation in different formats if you think of what Fox is doing with JAZ pods or NBC with Prime Pods and you’re seeing a variety of different formats coming to life. But I think a lot of the conversation is around formats. I think more and more we have to change and tilt the conversation more to experiences.”

Allyson Witherspoon, GM, Global Brand Engagement, Nissan: “Relevancy becomes what the experience is because we know so much more about who our consumers are and what their interests are that we need to be serving up content and experiences to them that’s relevant. In the case of automotive, we know when they’re going to be in market, we even know what type of vehicle that they’re in market for. So we should not be advertising a van to them if they’re interested in a sedan and we know that type of information. And then it’s to the point of how you can combine media and creative to actually deliver that message, which I think is still not something that we’re able to do at scale but it’s definitely something that we’re trying to build towards.”

Pooja Midha, President, true[X]: I’m heartened and I love the discussion that’s happening these days around bringing the consumer back to the center. While I’ve not been with the company terribly long, true[X] has been around for years and really from the beginning said we need to think about the consumer. We need to respect the consumer. We have got to think about messaging and context, advertising and an experience that is worthy of that consumer’s attention. If we’re not delivering that, then we really have no right to be there and to be expecting something back. It’s nice to be in Cannes because everyone we work with is represented. The creative side of the business, the media side of the business, the agency side, client marketers even the technology companies and measurement companies we partner with to deliver.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

So the Festival is still a “very important watering hole,” says Millard. In this interview with Beet.TV, Millard says data, diversity and consultants encroaching on the agency space were three main topics of discussion.

Millard is perhaps closer to the year-to-year center of gravity of Cannes than most people because Ascential plc, which owns the Festival, acquired MediaLink just over a year ago. MediaLink and its executives have long been fixtures at Cannes.

“I think what is absolutely palpable is the number of agency execs who are not here this year,” she says. “The conversations this year are more on the gravitas side. In years past, we focused on a lot of what isn’t working at all. This year, I find the conversations about we can do for the industry, for society at large.”

She feels that the Festival listened to the feedback it received from attendees leading up to last year’s event and that its subsequent modifications have been positive.

“It feels a little bit different and I do think that part of that is Cannes Lions’ response to a number of different constituents who said, ‘hey we’re looking for a little bit different experience here at Cannes.’ I think cutting it down by a day was a very, very smart, important response to it.”

Contributing to the “different feel” this year are “perhaps a little less frivolity and subjects with a little bit more gravitas.”

On the much-discussed subject of the utility of data, Millard cites the recognition by brands that “their data needs to be owned by them and better understood perhaps than in the past.”

There was more of a focus on equality and diversity this year, “not just in our business, but in our world. That will continue. That’s very much here to say.”

The third major conversation revolved around “the classic consultants encroaching on the previously owned relationships that agencies have with the brand marketers,” says Millard.

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

“So now we’re talking about what’s the right messaging format, how do you tell interesting stories,” Spiegel adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recently concluded Cannes Lions 2018.

Such discourse generates lots of discussion about, among other things, interesting new ad formats, the role of engagement ads in television, more precise micro segmentation and ad sequencing.

There’s another side to the coin that is a rapidly changing television landscape, according to Spiegel. “The business of television is certainly dealing with figuring out how to equal itself as a platform at scale, much like you’d see from Google and Facebook. In many ways, television today already drives more scale, but for marketers they want to figure out how can I buy against many audiences in one simple way.”

A lot of what was talked about at Cannes is how the business of television is “evolving to do that, and how are the various traditional competitors playing enough together to enable that. I think that’s a good hot topic as well,” says Spiegel.

On the subject of ad loads, keep all eyes on consumers, because “millions and millions” have voted that they prefer an ad-free experience.

“The dichotomy from ad-free on hand to the traditional broadcast model on the other, which is as much as twenty percent out of an hour of content is commercials, is the other extreme. I think that choice for consumers is pretty easy.”

So there’s little doubt that the “ecosystem of media companies” understand that they need to shorten formats, create new ad experiences and rethink how they make the exchange between content and advertising. What will the impact be on media company revenue?

“I don’t think that’s fully solved. I don’t think anyone would tell you on the sales side that they have that question fully answered. But I think they realize they’re going to have to experiment,” Spiegel says.

“And maybe there might be some short-term up and down pain, but I think there’s also the reality that marketers are willing to potentially pay more for things when they have less clutter and they’re more engaging.”

Proving paying more is worth it falls to measurement, particularly when it comes to marketers’ procurement teams.

“You’ve got to bring procurement departments along to make sure it’s not only about cheaper, it is actually about more effective,” Spiegel says. “These things are alright and I think we’re going to get there, but I think as you point out we’re in for probably some years of some bumpiness as those revenue shifts kind of shake out.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

Auletta interviewed 450 people, some of whom became key narrative characters in his book because of their vast influence and positions of power. They include former WPP Group CEO Sir Martin Sorrell, MediaLink Chairman and CEO Michael Kassan and Carolyn Everson, VP of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook. Auletta’s goal was to determine whether advertising is going through the same disruption that has impacted music, newspapers, magazines and television, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMS conference presented by LUMA Partners.

“And they are, I found. It’s a vital industry and yet it’s one under assault with grave consequences for the media,” Auletta says.

Under Auletta’s scrutiny, no entity that is dependent on advertising revenue is immune to seismic disruption.

“The reason I came to the title Frenamies is that if you’re an agency, you are suddenly faced by people who used to be your partners or customers who are suddenly your competitors,” he says.

He also cites marketers taking functions in-house that were formerly the province of agencies, “PR agencies increasingly becoming ad agencies,” consultancies shifting their focus to advertising, “Facebook and Google who were your customers are now dis-intermediating you and going directly to your clients” and media companies “increasingly are becoming ad agencies selling ads and dis-intermediating you as well.”

Some people have become power brokers across the entire advertising ecosystem, one example being Kassan, according to Auletta, whom he describes as being “everywhere I went.”

MediaLink’s clients range from major publishers to Facebook, Google and Microsoft, to brand marketers and agencies. “If you’re writing about politics, you’re interested in following the power brokers. Michael Kassan in the ad world is a power broker. I call him the connector.”

He describes CBS CEO Les Moonves as “probably the most successful modern television executive in modern history” who became a vehicle to help Auletta determine “can old media become new?”

Then there is the public, which represents a “threat to this whole industry” because of their ability and desire to avoid ads. Throw in data privacy concerns and Auletta’s book depicts a future rife with challenge.

“You’re in a seesaw here,” he explains. “The more the seesaw goes up in terms of data that we can target at you, the more privacy goes down. And if privacy goes up, then your ability to use data goes down. And that’s a conundrum that the advertising world faces and government faces.”

While neither anxiety nor frenemies are on the formal agenda at the upcoming Cannes International Festival of Creativity, they will be in abundance, according to Auletta.

“Everyone knows they’re being disrupted, they know that there are problems ahead. These are all anxieties that everyone shares, be they a client, a platform, a publisher or an agency. So I think in that sense it brings them together, and yet they’re all frenemies. So they can’t get too close.”

In recent months, many agency holding groups have reported revenue trending down and share prices have fallen, after challenges including the rise of brands buying direct from online platforms.

And the CEO of the world’s largest holding group resigned amid claims regarding use of company money, triggering a further stock slide.

Suddenly, everyone is asking whether the traditional ad agency holding group model – amassing many agencies in to a network to benefit from economies of scale – really works in an age when buyers can buy direct.

“It’s an important moment,” says MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan. “I don’t know that it’s truly a tipping point. But I think everybody’s re-imagining how the large holding companies are able to continue to thrive. They’ll survive, but (it’s about) how they’re able to continue to thrive.

“2018 is very much like 1859. In 1859, Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities – clearly, for some, the best of times; for others, the worst of times.

U.S. agency revenue grew a sluggish 1.8 percent in 2017, according to Ad Age Datacenter – the slowest growth since the ad market emerged from recession in 2010.

And Kassan says the model is at a point of change – it just remains to be seen whether it is a moment of evolution.

“Interestingly enough, in 1859 another Charles, Charles Darwin, wrote On The Origin Of Species, which talked very clearly about the adaptability and the need to adapt to survive, and the survival of the fittest.

“I think that’s where we are today. I think if the agency holding companies can identify where the market is going and adapt to that, and loosen the yolk of infrastructure that’s around their neck, I think they will thrive. If they don’t, I think they’ll survive – but it could end up being a long drawn out, sort of melting ice cube if they don’t adapt.”

We spoke with him Monday at the MediaLink NewFronts breakfast hosted by YouTube.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018.  The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB.   Please see additional videos from the series on this page.   

“I think we have to back up from that. What we’re really doing is talking about the integration of mass reach with sophistication of measurement, targeting and ultimately relevance,” says the Managing Director of strategic advisory firm MediaLink.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the RampUp 2018 conference, Spiegel talks about the “next wave” in identity resolution and why marketers should recognize the value of a blend of more granular targeting and pure scale.

“Identity is going to power the ad business and marketing, however you want to define it,” says Spiegel. “Identity is the underpinning of future success without any question.”

He observes that the gap between companies like Facebook and Google and big media companies in being able to more precisely target audiences is shrinking as the latter expand their digital footprints and seek better linear TV options. “You now have this whole more sophisticated level of targeting and measurement that the industry on the more traditional media side couldn’t have before.”

All the distribution points of content “built into that ecosystem is the power of identity, the potential of identity anyway, if they stitch it together the right data,” says Spiegel. That connected to “this massive world of linear television, which by the way is still really big and still a lot of money and still has a lot of value, those two things combined I think are huge.”

The trick, he adds, is understanding identity with sophistication. On-boarding data and employing device graphs is all well and good, but the hardest part is matching individuals to their households.

“We’ll keep talking about matching and on-boarding, and there’s value. But what we’ll really start to talk about is the applications built on top of a sophisticated identity resolution system. That’s what I think’s much more interesting.”

This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation means new measures that must be followed by any global company processing EU citizens’ data, with penalties of up to 4% of global turnover.

But, whilst companies may be aware of the impending legislation, they are not necessarily prepared, says MediaLink vice chairman Wenda Harris Millard, the former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia co-CEO who now works with the consulting firm helping media companies transform themselves.

“There’s a big difference between awareness and preparedness,” she says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Being prepared means:

1. “Hiring privacy and data experts.
2. “Making sure that everyone in the organization is involved in this discussion and in the preparedness and in the action.”

GDPR is a big deal. Amongst other stipulations, measures include:

• tighter consent conditions for the collection of citizens’ data.
• consumers can instruct companies to stop processing their data.
• automated decision-making and profiling decisions must be made clear.
• consumers can request decisioning by automated processes be stopped and handled by a human instead.
• they have the right to request an explanation of automated decision-making.
• they can request free access, rectification and deletion of data.

For a marketing industry now ostensibly driven by collecting, crunching and targeting consumer data points, the challenge is clear. Steps data handling and data processing companies should take include conducting risk assessments, appointing data protection officers and overhauling policies and systems.

But Millard says: “It’s not just the purview of the marketer. It is every business function in a company.”

Running MediaLink’s operations from London since MediaLink’s acquisition by Cannes Lions organiser Ascential last year, Millard may have a better view of the new legislation than many of the US ad execs she serves.

Right now, switched-on companies are racing to hit compliance. But glass-half-full companies don’t just have to use GDPR as an event to resent or be scared of – even re-obtaining explicit consent is an opportunity for another consumer interaction. What’s more, the net effect for marketers may be, to obtain future consumer opt-in, you are going to need to create even more valuable interactions.

“Those who understand how to provide more value will do well but I think those who aren’t paying attention to the importance of that value exchange there will be a challenge there,” Millard adds.

This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world.  The series is presented by Criteo.  Please visit this page for additional segments. 

These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.

Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:

“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”

Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:

“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”

Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:

“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”

Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.

To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”

Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Such observations arise when people in key positions peer beyond what’s currently happening in the TV space, as was the case during a panel at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel. Joining Spiegel were Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid; Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising at TiVo; and James Shears, VP, Advertising at Sorenson Media.

“There will be a big emphasis on how do you actually tell a better story,” said Chalozin. “How do you respect user attention. This value exchange of allowing users to choose what experience they’re interested in.”

These elements won’t be optional. “All of those things will become table stakes and will be standard for every marketer on every platform,” Chalozin added.

Asked by Spiegel to outline the potential parameters of one-to-one interaction between viewers and what they are watching, Chalozin steered away from what a decade or so ago was standard thinking about so-called interactive TV.

“It won’t always be this I click on a sweater in order to buy that,” said Chalozin. “I don’t believe that people will actually transact on a television. You would save things for later. You would have some type of universal shopping cart and you can save it for later and it will be aggregated on your phone so you can check out.”

TiVo is headed down the road of advanced personalization to assist content discovery. In October of 2017, the company announced the availability of its VOX products, which facilitate entertainment-centric voice control and hyper-personalized viewing recommendations, Horstman explained.

“It’s all about natural language understanding,” he said. “Pick up the remote and say ‘what’s on TV tonight?’ And then based on your historic viewing and based on what we think you’re interested in based on a whole series of machine learning algorithms, we’ll make recommendations of what you should be watching.”

This gives rise to new ad products, including what Horstman termed “sponsored recommendations.” In addition, TiVo will offer sponsored videos. “You’ll be pulled into it as a consumer because we know enough about you through all of the analytics and all of the data that we’ve got. We’re not going to be doing interrupt-driven advertising. We’re going to pull them into an experience that they will get value out of.”

Meanwhile, Sorenson Media is out to create an entirely new ecosystem that does not rely on current infrastructure to provide live, addressable linear beginning in 2018. Its partnerships with TV manufacturers gives its automatic content recognition chip a front row seat to everything that happens behind the glass.

“The media player in the TV does actually take precedent over anything that’s happening, whether it’s through the MVPD or something else,” Shears said. “The bet really is about an ecosystem opportunity. It’s less about media sales and transactions. It’s actually about bringing people to the table to create an ecosystem that allows for a little more robust opportunity in addressable.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

For companies more used to selling the context of their content to advertisers, the hot new possibility – in the over-the-top TV era – is to instead sell individual viewers, thanks to the myriad data points on offer.

But which are the most viable revenue opportunities, and which choices should distributors leave on the table?

In this panel debate convened at the Beet Retreat, executives from several publishers and distributors weighted up how they tackle the wealth of new options available.

NBCUniversal sales and strategy EVP Mike Rosen:

“I like the word ‘balance’. The culture of our company should be about content-plus-audience. We’re not abandoning content. We don’t want to go to our agencies, our advertisers, and make them choose between the two.

“We sort of see that balance, where, yes, you’re going to sponsor some shows, because your brand belongs there. But, at the same token, there may be other strategies that involve looking across our entire portfolio, and finding the audiences. The two, I think will coexist for a really long time.”

Fox Networks Group Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions Noah Levine:

“A year ago, I was very digitally focused. I’m very convergence focused right now. My team is probably spending about 70% of its time focused on linear. My team focuses on audience, and programmatic solutions across linear, addressable, set top box VOD, and digital.

“A lot of my time, and my leadership’s time, is spent socializing these concepts internally, getting buy-in, developing excitement around these initiatives, because part of our job is to be disruptors, to say, ‘Hey, we’ve been using age, gender as a way to guarantee for very long time’.”

Acxiom VP, Television Partner Development, Craig Berkley:

“I think most of the organizations in traditional TV are aware that this needs to happen, that we need to move towards addressable, and audience based buying, and incorporate all of these into our platforms. Different organizations are in different stages in accomplishing that internally.”

Oath Business Lead, Advanced TV, Brett Hurwitz:

“I kind of go through work each day, wondering ‘What are the obstacles’? There’s obstacles, I think, on the supply side. I think there’s obstacles on the demand side. I think we have to, as an industry, as leaders in the industry, really start breaking down those issues, and tackling them one by one, because I think the evolution is happening remarkably slowly.

“I think traditional linear television delivery has a certain amount of life ahead of it. It doesn’t make sense to me that money is still being spent the old way.”

A+E ad sales president Mel Berning:

“We have all sorts of balls up in the air right now. We would all prefer to get to a world where we’re talking about (advertising) outcomes.

“Until clients, agencies, and all of us are able to get into a real dialogue about what is the right metric to gage the effectiveness of the medium, I think we’re in a difficult spot.”

The panel was moderated by MediaLink A+E managing director Matt Spiegel.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

In advertising, buyers are getting excited about a world in which planning moves beyond the broad demographic audience targeting of yore, to a world of advanced TV, where granular characteristics and data can help target specific audiences viewing specific content.

But this emerging world is, itself, more granular than simply “advanced TV”. So, how do companies at the vanguard of the revolution make sense of the wealth of different tactics coming in to view?

A panel convened at Beet Retreat debated that question. Here is a flavor of what they said…

Simulmedia VP, Partner Relations, Marc Goldstein:

“There’s just so much out there, and there’s so much happening. What we’re able to do in the national TV space, to be able to find a custom audience to be able to guarantee that audience to be able to guarantee on a conversion to be able guarantee on ROAS (return on ad spend). These are things that we’ve been talking about for a long time and marketers have been talking about but we’re actually seeing them in action.

“The power of the traditional GRP still exists as the power of your television. I think in most cases we’re seeing marketers though realize that we can take portions of their budgets and put it towards these new opportunities.”

IAB mobile and video SVP and GM Anna Bager:

“(Advertisers) need proof points.”

“Where we as the IAB really are going to double down and do research and try and understand better… there’s a lot of questions around six second ads… ‘What does that mean for ad load, and what and in the long run does that mean for us and our profitability, and how are we going to make money here?’

DISH Advanced TV & Digital director Adam Lowy:

“The digital tech stack is opening up a whole new ballgame. You’re just finding an audience and I don’t care if it’s on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Roku… you know, the DISH set top box doesn’t matter anymore.

“We’re going cross platform pretty soon… (There are) tremendous opportunities within live TV back to the big screen. We see a lot of sessions on mobile devices and we’re seeing a lot of people watching content like this.

“Six-second ads, we will see that. Will we see a collapse of ads and, you know, shorter pods? Yes, I think that works. In live TV, we probably won’t see that.”

Videology GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development Tony Yi

“There’s certainly service providers that have capabilities technologically to do some of it right now. I think from a mass national level, though, you really need to have respondent level matching with your dataset to truly understand who you’re reaching if you can get device level even better.”

Google Strategic Partner Lead Peter Dolchin:

“Publishers just want optionality at this point. There’s still a very distinct way and legacy way of selling this inventory through upfront and so forth. But there are specific advertisers who are looking for new experiences.

“If you analyzed all your first party data in one place, and Google Cloud can help you do that, it starts to take down all of these silos that exist that have been really difficult for the entire industry. Once you have the ability to have all of your data in one place, you’re able to analyze it in a much faster way.”

The panel was moderated by MediaLink managing director Matt Spiegel.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.