“To think that somehow everyone is okay with personalization, or to think that everyone hates personalization, is wrong,” O’Connell said at the outset of a fireside chat with GroupM’s  Phil Cowdell at Beet Retreat 2018. “None of us feels the same as any other person.”

As an example, she cited two hypothetical 25-year-olds that might have totally opposing attitudes toward the use of their data to better target them with ads.

“So that really is the crux of this, is that we need to appreciate that humans are individuals and we’re not doing that very well right now,” said O’Connell.

“We have all this data and technology available to us. It’s how we sort of tune the machines. The industry is kind of in the crapper. Consumers feel about different ad channels and formats, it’s not an awesome story,” particularly in the digital space, O’Connell added.

Addressing frequency capping of ads, Cowdell, most recently of GroupM, asked “How do we do it? Is it real or is it BS?”

From an omni-channel perspective, “There’s a lot of stuff out there where we are serving ads and we are just not cognizant enough of how all of those ads are interacting,” O’Connell responded. “We’re doing a good job in little fiefdoms of making things better, and that’s great.”

She talked about working with clients in the retail sector, one of which asked her “what should we centralize versus allow the brands to own?” Her response was to inquire whether the marketer understood the overlap in its user base, which it did not. “That might be a good place to start. Maybe the first thing to start thinking about is unifying your data. You can start thinking about execution a little bit later.”

Cowdell then asked about the potential for marketers embracing a service offering as opposed to individual brand managers selling individual products. “For sure. It’s starting to happen in little levels inside of these giant multi-brand organizations,” said O’Connell.

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

According to Ramos, tutors are a critical component of helping kids through the school process so they gain future potential.

“We want to make sure that they’re able to insert in the work force. Once they’re done with high school, we want to get them to college. We want those that are not wanting to go to college to have a job as well. The tutors have been that companionship for our kids. That mentor.”

Tutoring goes well beyond assisting young people with homework, Ramos explains. “Many of our kids do not have that father figure. At times they don’t even have the mother figure. Some of our kids are growing with their grandparents. So our tutors have become that person that guides them through the educational path.”

BGCPR’s previous after-school efforts had been more general in nature. “We did assistance with homework. We were more focused in Spanish,” Ramos says. “We have worked to elevate our offer in order to make sure that they’re more prepared to be successful in school. In Puerto Rico, most of our schools are not up to par with what kids need.”

A PLEA FROM ANDY PLESER:   Please donate to the Boys & Girls Club via this donation page.  Contributions are tax deductible.   You can use this page for your tax deductible contribution.

This video was produced in San Juan in November.

With a successful 13-year career at Walmart and having spent eight years on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, Ramos had decided it was time for a change.

“What I did was great in the business sector, but then I think that as a Puerto Rican myself I have to make sure that I leave a legacy and that I work to make a difference,” says Ramos, who was a featured guest at the recent Beet Retreat in the City. In this interview with Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services at GroupM, Ramos explains how the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico—which is affiliated with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and has just celebrated its 50th year—had decided to shift its focus in the face of an economic crisis that has lasted for more than a decade.

Several years before Hurricane Maria, “We decided that we needed to do things differently. In order to prepare our kids and youth to be prepared for what the future has in store for them.”

At one of its 13 club houses, the organization set about trying to change “the systemic conditions in which our kids live” by concentrating on training them to benefit from tourism. From ages six to 12, youths began to learn about the tourism culture. “When they’re teens, we work with them on entreprenuership. We start putting that seed in their minds that there are things you can think through, there are things that you can come up with. You can have your own business or you can work through another business,” says Ramos.

Part of the effort involved training parents and guardians as well. “It’s about home stability and changing the conditions for the kids. The kids do not choose to live poor or to be born poor,” she adds.

This is different than in the U.S., where the focus is mainly in children, notes Cowdell, who along with many other GroupM representatives became active in Puerto Rico relief efforts immediately after Hurricane Maria struck. However, in Puerto Rico, “You can’t just help the child, you have to help the parent as well,” he says.

Among the success stories at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, one in particular stands out to Cowdell and Ramos, who had mentored a young girl in her high school years and was determined to help her succeed through college and beyond. “We had to involve her mother because it was a single mother trying to let her only girl go out and study,” Ramos recalls. The girl had posted grades of 4.0 in both high school and college, where she studied chemical engineering and won summer internships to Harvard, Georgetown and Ohio State University.

She eventually made her way to NASA with assistance from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.

“Everyone has human potential,” says Cowdell. Then he asks Ramos about the future.

“I think there’s hope,” she says. “Puerto Ricans are resilient.”

At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised more than $20,000.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

There will be more storms and “people are still living under roofs with plastic tarpaulins…there are still people who don’t have power. So what we have to do is help to sustain relief to make sure that people live their own lives and be independent.”

At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, Cowdell provided an update on those relief efforts.  He presented an overview of what he and his colleagues from GroupM undertook in tthe weeks after the storm.via slides and video. In this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, Cowdell explains how a GroupM team including people from agencies like MediaCom, Media Edge and Wavemaker responded after Maria struck on Sept. 16, 2017.

“What happened immediately after the storm is I reached out and said, ‘how is everybody’? It took a couple of days to find out at least they’re all okay and they’re alive,” says Cowdell, who is Global President, Client Services. “And then when you get a message from a colleague who says ‘but I have no drinking water for my 13-month old baby,’ what do you do? You have a choice.”

While some people donated money or made pledges to do so, Cowdell chose to “get on a plane and you can take water purification. I managed to get on a phone, collected water purification, filters, solar lamps, medications, etcetera.”

Cowdell expresses frustration when he recalls seeing events on the ground versus what the news media was reporting during the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. He says the national narrative the weekend after the storm was characterized by people tweeting “about the NFL and taking a knee. They weren’t about thousands of Puerto Ricans at risk and potentially thousands dead.”

Some news reports conveyed the impression that there were lots of relief efforts going on by individuals and the military.

“What was being told didn’t reflect reality on the ground. I know we’re in a world of fake news now, but for me personally it was my first real experience of seeing the reality of a situation on the ground and what’s being communicated through the storytelling of the media,” Cowdell says.

His focus going forward is to continue to help marshal continued assistance to Puerto Ricans in the face of inexorable threatening weather conditions.

“The real issue is, the storm when it first hit was a weather disaster. What happened after it became an economic disaster. People who are very rich paid $25,000 they flew out and moved to their houses in Miami. Then it got to the next class and the next class.”

Meanwhile, in places like the hills of Campos, “They are still in desperate need. There was no real tolerance for a storm like this. Those are the people who need help.”

At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised some $20,000.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We as an industry, in trying to learn each thing, create isolation, create separation and create a break in the consumer experience,” says Phil Cowdell, President of Platform Services for global media investment group GroupM.

Part of GroupM’s response is [m]PLATFORM, which allows all GroupM agencies to present clients with a more fully unified suite of ad planning, tracking and targeting tools, as ADWEEK reports.

Cowdell describes [m]PLATFORM as an amalgam of technology, data, people and expertise coming together “into one seamless, horizontal utility to client and agency teams.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Cowdell shares his vision of a world in which advertisers earn the right to consumer data by creating meaningful ad experiences for them. And he posits that data sharing among non-competing marketers can create a powerful alternative to first-party and third-party data, something he calls “closed-second” data.

Tackling semantics first, he says the terms first- and third-party data are off the mark because it’s the consumer’s data. “It’s consumer first.”

He offers an anecdote involving two men discussing who’s going to “chat up the girl” they encounter in a bar. “The reality is, the lady in the bar can decide who she’s like to spend her time with, and it’s not the choice of these two people.”

What really matters is how agencies and brands actually deploy all of that information. “If we don’t respect their data, if we don’t add value through their data, their own experience, we’re not going to get it,” Cowdell says.

He fully expects to see more data sharing in which brands in non-competing categories share useful consumer information to the benefit of all. “If we make it too isolated within our own narrow set, we can’t activate it,” he explains. “So the thing we’ll start to see in data is this emergence of closed-second.”

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

Already, real-time bidding is on track to account for nearly 25% of online video dollars this year, the IAB said. That’s why agencies need to pivot and integrate automation into their planning, but also weave it into the big episodic events that drive brand awareness too. “We need strategy and we need execution with high levels of automation,” he says.

Brands are becoming less differentiated, he adds, citing that even though 80% of CEOs believe their brands will stand out, only 8% of consumers do, he says. The net result is agencies must reinvent themselves quickly in order to serve these two changing faces of ads, he says.