“To create disruption, you have to start by being a curious person,” Speros, EVP of Corporate Communications at Fidelity, says in an interview with Beet.TV.

Beyond simple curiosity, he believes there are three pillars to creativity, which Speros defines as “drawing upon your eclectic thinking and experiences and putting it together in a surprising way.”

To be intellectually curious, “You have to look at music, art, science, technology, fashion, trends, news events and study other categories in other companies,” Speros says. “You have to put something in that repository before you can draw from it.”

Second on the list is having varied personal relationships. “If all you do is hang out with people that are exactly like you, all you’re going to be doing is reinforcing the same things that you already know,” Speros says. “I like to put it as inhaling your own fumes.”

Lastly, he thinks more people should learn how to “adopt more of a risk-taking attitude, because out of great risk taking comes great creativity.”

While at AT&T, Speros was credited with placing the first Internet banner ad in 1994—when Mark Zuckerberg was in grade school and social media consisted of bulletin board systems. Now he is all too aware of the impact of platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

“A bad string of social media commentary can absolutely destroy a brand very quickly,” Speros notes. “Were in control of the experience that we serve up, but the interpretation of that experience is defined by the consumer.”

He takes a dim view of the term “mass media” but thinks it can be achieved through a different approach than that traditionally taken.

“There is some element of reaching people in mass, but the way you get to mass might be through a series of highly personalized interactions enabled by addressable television, mobile technology and so on,” Speros says.

We interviewed him last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.

The company uses machine learning and predictive analytics to help app publishers better understand their users via its software development kit, which collects data to create segments and audiences for driving desired behaviors.

“For example, if someone has abandoned a shopping cart and you want to try to give them an offer incentive, you can do that almost instantaneously,” Aggarwal says.

Localytics recently reported that while more people are using smartphones worldwide and downloading apps, 23% of users abandon an app after opening it only once. Knowing who those people are in advance is a key to success.

“We can automatically identify your users who are very likely to churn, so that you can start taking amore active, proactive aggressive approach at trying to maintain them,” Aggarwal, who is CEO of Localytics, says in an interview with Beet.TV. “We’ll give you the data to show what’s working and what’s not.”

Companies like ESPN, HBO, Nordstrom, CVS and Priceline know they need to be “best in breed” with their apps because it’s a competitive differentiator, according to Aggarwal, citing several Localytics clients.

“While people felt like a few years ago they were just experimenting with mobile, today their most valuable users and, in many cases, the majority of their digital users are engaging them through mobile devices and they can’t get it wrong,” Aggarwal says.

As the mobile space has developed, the most successful players in mobile usually win through apps and Aggarwal believes that will continue. But the challenges remain.

“It works differently than anything you’ve don in the past,” Aggarwal says of apps. “It’s fundamentally different from the web and people have to relearn how to acquire users, how to engage those users and monetize that user base.”

We interviewed him last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.

Speaking with Beet.TV for this video interview, Eric Litman, who became GroupM’s worldwide mobile SVP last June after the group’s acquisition of Medialets, the mobile ad tech company he ran, says VR could be disruptive.

“It’s a coming wave of entirely new devices and interaction modalities that are different from anything we do on our mobile devices,” Litman says. “You could conceivably browse an advertisers’ entire catalog, become deeply immersed in products, content backgrounds and stories and a lot of the emotion that brands want to bring to life.”

But he acknowledges it’s “really early” to go making grand bets for advertiser success. Gartner’s Hype Cycle on the topic doesn’t expect mainstream VR adoption for another five to 10 years.

“There are a couple of smaller ad-tech companies that have already figured out what the early ad units in VR might be,” Litman observes.

“We’ve yet to see any scalable consumer adoption of VR devices – that has to be there to get advertisers interested in a big way.”

We spoke with Litman after the Mobile World Congress.  He shares his views on this year’s show and notable trends.  Video is part of a series about MWC sponsored by Light Reaction.   You can find additional clips from MWC here. 

The tweaks, which Facebook detailed here and which First Post covered, include better calls-to-action, more pages, better layouts

“If you’re a restaurant here in New York City, you can have your menu page there, you can make a reservation, you can click to call that restaurant,”says Facebook global agency development director Patrick Harris, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We want to make that navigation experience, and the ability to find the most relevant information to you, as easy as possible for all businesses.

“We want to provide the right type of canvas in a mobile-based environment… “Without having to send you to another landing page … we’re trying to make it as frictionless as possible for the consumer. We can help connect people to commerce.

“The world between performance and brand advertising is starting to collide,” says Facebook global agency development director Patrick Harris, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Advertisers that were focused on brand metrics are now much more interested in sales volume, new markets, how their advertisements have impact.

“On the other side, you have people that were traditional performance marketers – be it the gaming companies or ecommerce companies or somebody new like Airbnb – whose pouring a ton of investment back in to their brand.”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.

“It’s sometimes an afterthought,” IPG Mediabrands global mobile head Travis Johnson agrees, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“We’ve got clients … seeing upwards of 50% of their site traffic come from mobile devices, and they’re dedicating 1% of their spend to driving people there. (Only) a few percent of global media spend is going to mobile. They’re not making the most of that.”

What accounts for this ongoing schism? And isn’t it a missed opportunity? Johnson says: “It’s a new space where … it take s a lot of infrastructure to get all your assets aligned. It’s taking a lot of clients quite some time.”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.

Amongst the latest is Taboola, which says it will power content recommendations inside Associated Press’ mobile apps and websites.

The deal is a two-year exclusive, meaning Taboola will serve links to related stories when a reader is reading an article in AP’s website or apps.

Taboola CEO Adam Singolda says AP is amongst hundreds of publishers whose mobile app content recommendations are powered by his company, which released an SDK and an API for mobile developers.

“It’s one of our largest apps. It has 13 million uniques, which is massive,” he says. “If you go in to the app and click a link from ‘around the web’, you will stay within the app… there’s a ‘back’ button where I can go back.”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

But addressable TV is not just about more refined TV targeting – the device in the living room is one platform that will feed in signals to an overall system which will produce unprecedented customer granularity – that’s multi-touch attribution, according to SMG precision video director Tracey Scheppach.

 “We can combine that with other digital signals … and connect them in a unique ID through companies like Liveramp,” she told a Cannes Lions panel recorded by Beet.TV. “Make those connections to say, ‘This is a handheld device that belongs to this home’. You’re able to say ‘What piece of the media pie drove the conversion?’ That is new.”

Scheppach credits location-based ad tech platforms like placeIQ with helping enabling the change, but says many others are also advancing the possibilities.

Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media division, which is working on addressable TV ads, said: “For the past 15 years, we’ve been putting ads on television, ads on the internet and, for two thirds of that, ads on mobile phones. We have very little of an idea what the unduplicated reach and frequency is between all those screens. To (show that), that’s a really really big deal and shouldn’t be taken lightly.”

Also commenting is Mike Welch, president of AT&T AdWorks.  The session was moderated by Terence Kawaja, CEO of boutique investment bank LUMA Partners.

This session was part of a Cannes panel discussion on targeted TV advertising co-presented  Beet.TV and AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.

“The idea is that the video player moves with you on the screen,”BBC Global News sales and marketing director Chris Davies tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Rather than the traditional way of watching a video and then waiting for it finish and read the article, the video will follow you down, and the advertising follows with the video.”

That fits a trend in which publishers are getting creative about the way they show video and moving images, with many having adopting parallax scrolling presentations or New York Times, Snowfall-style experiments. Separately, many publishers and social networks are moving to auto-play videos as users scrollg through.

“At the BBC, we have a massive amount of video content,” Davies adds. “It’s about getting that in to shape for the web.”

We interviewed Davies at Cannes.  This video is part of a series of Cannes interviews sponsored by true[X].  Please find additional videos from the series here.

Better ads are important because currently upwards of 70% of pre-roll ads are never seen since viewers tune them out, he tells us. To combat this issue, Teads has aimed to innovate with new video formats, including one it calls a “view to play” ad that’s inserted into editorial content with publishers and invites viewers to play the ad. “We all hate to watch ads that are not interesting for us and we are trained to avoid those ads,” he says. This new format is more of a “suggestion” to the viewer to watch the ad. “The business model is aligned with the user experience and we only charge brands and agencies for videos that are completely viewed,” Chappaz says.

Teads is also focused on mobile video ads and is offering new tools in this area. “This is an extremely promising area to increase the monetization of mobile,” he says.

We sat down with Chappaz at the Cannes Lions Festival aboard the Teads yacht.

Beet partnered with Teads for events on the yacht and sponsored this series of videos from the Festival.

The Facebook Audience Network was launched in beta in 2014, allowing publishers to put native ads in their apps and services, just like those on Facebook’s own.

“We’ve actually figured out a thing or two on how to monetize mobile apps. Here’s a suite of tools and best practices around native and app-based marketing that can generate much better results for advertisers,” Dave Jakubowski tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Those ads are performing 7x better than the banner counterparts. That is up at scale, literally running billions of ads as we speak.

“We’ve taken all of the capabilities of everything you buy when you buy directly through Facebook, and we’ve added the option for marketers to say, ‘I would like that same audience on other apps beyond the Facebook family’.”

Together, the pair have just bowed HealthyDay, an iOS app that shows US users local colds, flus and allergy symptoms as though they were checking the weather.  The project was implemented sister agency Mirum.

For JWT NY executive creative director Eric Weisberg, the project exemplifies how “data and technology … are both changing everything that we do here”, Weisberg tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

HealthyDay uses health information from healthcare professionals, hospitals and the Center for Disease Control, plus adds in user-contributed symptom reports.

“It literally helps you outsmart cold, flu and allergies with the same speed and accuracy that you’re outsmarting weather and traffic in things like (traffic app) Waze,” Weisberg adds. The bonus for Johnson & Johnson? HealthyDay recommends product solutions to sick patients.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this interview ahead of her visit to the upcoming Cannes Lions festival, SMG CEO Laura Desmond says:

1. “It’s a mobile-first world – it’s undeniable. Anyone who thinks that today’s youth are not mobile-first is wrong.”
2. “We’re starting to see the journeys of media to content to commerce collapse. Companies need to think about … the exposure, the engagement and acquisition all at the same time.”
3. “Using technology and data to fuel creativity and data all at the same time as media. There’s been a lot of hype around how data, data, data, data, data is driving the new media propositions of the future. But data, data, data doesn’t mean we pursue data and not people.”

We interviewed her as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

PureWow recently raised $2.5 million in seed funding from a group of prestige investors that includes venture firms Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group, Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerRSE, Great Oaks Venture Capital as well as Whoopi Goldberg. “They took notice that we were on the forefront of this intersection between branded content and native ads,” Harwood tells us. The funding will help to scale PureWow across video, mobile, social, email, and will also be used to expand into new verticals and to invest in product and marketing.  Using more data is also critical. “We are hiring data scientists so we can make swift decisions,” he says.

Video advertisers have included Cartier, Silk Milk and L’Oreal.

For more insight into the mission and focus of the company, as well as the raison d’être for starting up, check out this video interview.

Harwood and the PureWow team will host a reception for Beet.TV’s Media Revolutionaries series at Cannes Lions along with Microsoft and Xaxis.

We interviewed Harwood as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Ad tech supplier Kargo is betting on giving advertisers and publishers something different, eschewing performance-driven banner sales for high-touch brand campaign placements.

Founder and CEO Harry Kargman tells Beet.TV his technology “allows us to take over the page and create a custom site skin”, “woven in to the editorial page”.

“Mobile is really challenging. The screen sizes are small,” he says. “Getting a consumer to consider buying that product is a really hard thing to do. That requires something more than a banner – we don’t think that a 320×50 banner is long-term sustainable in mobile. It’s not going to get the consumer to make the purchase.”

Clients include McDonald’s and Target. Kargo aims to grow its staff headcount from 130 to 200 by year’s end, partly by opening up a London office meet growth.

Kargman was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“Apple just rolled out the Beacon API last year,” MEC Global’s north America lead for mobile and emerging technologies, Rachel Pasqua, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Because you haven’t seen a lot of stats come out, you think it’s not happening. But it’s happening everywhere. Every big box store, supermarket, stadium, concert venue, every public space from train stations to airports to government buildings are putting beacons in to their infrastructure to enable all sorts of interactions.”

Bluetooth beacons, which Apple is calling iBeacons, have existed in one form of another for several years. Unlike GPS, they enable precise targeting within buildings by detecting proximity to a user’s smartphone.

Some retailers are getting excited about pinging messages to customers as they walk by product shelves.

Pasqua imagines “everything from quietly measuring foot traffic … to seamless delivery of useful information… about a public monument or something as useful as a coupon delivered at point of sale”.

Pasqua was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“The phone is your primary device,” says business development mobile ad tech provider AdColony‘s VP Matt Barash.

“Maybe gaming is the new cinema. It’s where people spend a lot of time.

“Recently, we had the Super Bowl – we saw a number of different app developers spending between $4m and $9m (on advertising) – that’s validation.”

AdColony makes HD-quality video play more efficiently on mobile phones, including for in-app ads.

Barash was interviewed by Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Beet.TV coverage of the IAB meeting was sponsored by SpotXchange. Please find Beet.TV’s coverage of the event here.

“Eighty-seven percent of mobile traffic happens in an app,” says ad tech company Jun Group‘s CEO Mitchell Reichgut. “The web is suddenly (like) AM radio.

“It’s important, it’s not dead… it’s going to remain viable. However, ‘primetime’ is happening in an app on a mobile device. Cookies don’t work there – it’s much more difficult to have a relationship with an app developer.”

Jun Group’s technologies let advertisers place video or sponsored display segments on publisher sites.

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

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

“Native is the ad format for mobile … discoverable in-stream right alongside our own content,” says ad products SVP Michael Zimbalist. “We see a big opportunity for The New York Times and for premium publishers to create content for brands that’s native to the mobile experience.”

The scheme is part of the publisher’s Paid Posts sponsored content initiative. Zimbalist also says, in the mobile age, search’s importance as a source of traffic referral is diminished.

“Search is slowly being subordinated by social. It’s the smaller percentage of traffic but it’s the fastest growing. The way search works on mobile for consumers is different than the way it works on the web. (Mobile) will continue to evolve away from straight search.”

Here is a report in today’s Capital New York about hiring at the Times for its sponsored advertising unit.

He was interviewed for Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“We’ve seen usage of mobile grow 76% year over year,” CEO Simon Khalaf tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That’s insane growth – usually, you expect a market to start saturating.

“Last year, most of the growth was happening in emerging countries – this year, growth happened across the board, including mature markets like the US and South Korea.

“This is the first year that mobile eclipsed television in terms of time-spent. We have discovered the killer ad experience – video (and) native advertising.”

He was interviewed for Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

A Beet.TV panel discussion heard executives’ answers:

• Maxus strategic planning director Jill Langan: “There are opportunities to use mobile as a point-of-sale vehicle if we choose to… in-store, on the car lot… If we think about it differently, it can play different roles for us.”
• SMG publishing platforms and partnerships VP Lindsay Lichtenberg: “There is a creative challenge – where is the user consuming the content? There needs to be a creative consideration, more so.”
• DigitasLBi social content director Mark Book: “If you’re at home on your tablet, you can engage with more lengthy content. If you’re on the go … you’re probably in a more active state of mind and have less time to consume video.”
• Havas programmatic media director Stephanie Mustari: The biggest piece that I think is important with mobile is to approach it differently – it is a cookie-less environment … using universally-identified pieces of information to target users across device so we can take addressability and apply it to the mobile space.”

They were interviewed by Elaine Boxer, director of industry initiatives at the IAB, last month at the Beet.TV video summit about video advertising outside of the pre-roll. The event was presented by Teads.

“It’s a similar experience to what we see on TV,” North America MD Jim Daily of Teads tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“The limitations are that, when a brand is buying TV spots, they’re associated with a specific show – that content doesn’t exist nearly as much in the digital realm. Only 4% of video is ‘premium’ – nearly 100% of television content is premium.”

Teads tries to tackle this by allowing premium text publishers to sell auto-playing video ads between their editorial paragraphs, thereby growing the overall inventory base for advertisers who want to reach consumers pre-disposed to purchase.

Daily was interviewed by Elaine Boxer, director of industry initiatives at the IAB, earlier this month at the Beet.TV video summit about video advertising outside of the pre-roll.  The event was presented by Teads.

“It’s personal,” Young tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “They’re watching it not only out of home but in-home as well.

“I heard a term, “meerkatting” – they’re watching terrestrial television or cable television whilst on the phone consuming other video content.

“So I think there’s a real opportunity to synchronise with other messaging. The way the phones are being built is for video; the screens are getting bigger.”

The Weather Channel uses programmatic technology to sell ads inside its mobile app in real-time and depending on weather conditions in users’ locales, Young says.

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

“(Auto-play) smacks of things that less than ingenuous,” Reichgut tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “In an interstitial, an interruptive unit, in an app environment, you’re going from one page to another and there’s a commercial break.

“We’re considering that format. It will be much shorter – probably around a 10-second break. We have to test that. We want to make very, very sure we’re not offending the people who are using that app.”

Reichgut says mobile ads perform better than desktop ads for engagement, completion rates and post-view activities because mobiles command more singular consumer attention than desktop media.

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

In a related post, please find our interview with IAB Chair Vivek Shah on the evolving nature of auto-play in light of recent moves at Facebook to make the format more palatable.

“We’ve been preloaded on the Nokia Lumia for a while,” The Weather Channel global yield and programmatic director Daniel Young tells Beet.TV in this recorded video interview with Ashley J. Swartz, founder and CEO of Furious Minds, at DMEXCO. “And with iOS 8, we’re in there – there’s going to be a lot of web traffic coming in there and hopefully adoption and conversion across to the apps as well.

“We have over 37 language sites across Europe and Asia Pacific. The predominant way of monetising out there is a our programmatic stance with AdExchange. We have screeds of weather data going back 70 odd years. And that’s our real USP – we enrich an advertising offering with the data we have.”

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