Publicis Groupe’s Epsilon is integrating its CORE ID, a audience identity system for Publicis’ clients, with The Trade Desk-based Unified ID 2.0, a post-cookie solution for making identity buyable.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, The TradeDesk’s Davi Danziger says the integration is a win-win.
“Publicis and its customers make use of Epsilon data, Epsilon analytics, and Epsilon person-based identity in the form of CORE ID,” Danziger says.
“(It’s about) making sure that those customers can use that same intelligence to activate and buy media online and make sure they’re reaching the consumers that they intend to reach, that they can measure it. They can reach the customers that they want to reach online using CORE ID.
“And for the Trade Desk, the interoperability with Unified ID 2.0 gives even greater strength to the sort of building of Unified ID 2.0 from the buy side as more and more clients start to adopt it and use it in conjunction with CORE ID too.”
Unified 2.0 entered beta in March. According to AdExchanger:
“Unified ID 2.0, originally spearheaded by The Trade Desk, aims to replace the third-party cookie with an alternative identifier tied to hashed and encrypted email addresses.”
Originally kickstarted by the IAB’s Tech Lab, Unified ID has been taken forward somewhat by The Trade Desk, and Danziger has big ambitions.
“We wanted to push forward with Unified ID 2.0 in a way that would continue that exchange between where users had a say in whether their IDs were used for relevant advertising in exchange for the free content that works in the internet,” he says.
“Eventually the whole premise is that it’s open source. It’s non-proprietary. It’s not a Trade Desk product even, per se.
“It’s going to be something that’s owned by the whole industry and in a way where we all have a stake in, it’s not something where somebody gets financial gain resulting from it.”
The timeline for the CORE ID/Unified ID 2.0 is:
According to the announcement:
]]>“On the one hand, Publicis Groupe clients will be able to activate the CORE ID on The Trade Desk’s industry-leading demand-side platform (DSP) to reach people with personalized messages across display, video, social, connected TV, native and audio.
“On the other, The Trade Desk will become the exclusive DSP partner for Epsilon’s comprehensive CORE ID offerings, in addition to Epsilon-owned platforms. The CORE ID’s intelligence will be available to enrich campaigns run through The Trade Desk, for all advertisers to increase audience segmentation and deliver better results.”
But those brands will need to do more than that to avoid marketing to off-limits audience members.
That is according to healthcare media planning and buying agency Publicis Health Media.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, PHM’s VP, Media Technology Chatigny Imburgia explains how the world is changing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Imburgia says connected TV viewing is exploding, especially as many consumers have been kept at home by quarantine and social distancing.
“You have those who may be in an older age bracket who prefer watching live, but then you also have a younger age group … they’d prefer to see content that’s custom-created for them,” she explains.
“With healthcare, what that changes for us is, we have an opportunity to reach more people and help them, whether they’re the caregiver or the actual patient.
“It’s really important for us to allocate dollars in our spend to get into CTV so that we can ensure that we’re not missing a portion of the population.”
It’s been a crazy year. So crazy that Andrea Palmer wanted to (virtually) sit down with podcast vet @ebmoss for an in-depth conversation looking at some of the ways healthcare has pivoted. Check out the latest @InsiderIntervws episode here: https://t.co/IP0gmLGCBv
— Publicis Health Media (@tweetPHM) September 28, 2020
But Imburgia says connected TV’s handy age segmentation isn’t enough – ad buyers must use tools at their disposal to make more fine-grained buying decisions, especially in pharmaceutical, where brands are often barred from reaching out to minors.
“We have to be very careful on where we’re actually putting our messages out,” she say.
“If we can’t advertise to kids under a certain age, we have to be very cognisant of some of the new platforms that exist, more in the social media or short-form video streaming services.”
So Imburgia says she relies on partners like DoubleVerify for software that can verify the viewability, reach and audience exposed to particular ad inventory.
PHM clients include some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical brands.
COVID-19 and the Changing Nature of Patient-Physician Relationships
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, many media buyers shied away from content about or adjacent to coronavirus, fearing negative connotation would put off audiences.
Plenty of research has since disproved that theory, and media organizations’ efforts to convince buyers of their value – both to audiences and to brands at this time – have borne some fruit.
But PHM’s Imburgia says many brands should still be wary of media missteps.
“We have some clients that really just don’t want to run against as much COVID content,” she says.
Congratulations to PHM’s Andrea Palmer for being recognized at the 2020 #MMMHallofFemme today! Several incredible women were honored for their contributions and positive impact in the health and marketing fields. pic.twitter.com/5OVfeoQHyo
— Publicis Health Media (@tweetPHM) September 22, 2020
A chief reason for standing on the sidelines is not raising consumers’ COVID-19 hopes unnecessarily, Imburgia says.
“Here we are, still working from home, waiting on a vaccine or a cure, whichever comes first,” she says.
“You don’t want to give false hope because we’re six months, seven months in and not much has changed, so you have to really be careful.
“Our guidance is … it’s somewhat of a value statement of where you fall but it’s very much, ‘Are you confident in your product coming to market?’
“If you’re not … you have to be very careful about where your brand stands from a values standpoint.”
This video is part of CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective, a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Seven, nine years ago in digital, it was a wild wild west,” says Whitesel. “Everyone was running all these ad networks and DSPs and some people had DMP, some didn’t. The advertisers that were willing to take risks and understand that, yes, I may not understand what I’m buying right now but I need to jump in early and build learning and understanding … those are the advertisers that we’re seeing in TV that are also applying that same risk perspective.”
Whitesel notes that there is some discomfort in putting money, time and resources into methods that aren’t necessarily tried and true, but this is the thought leadership that can give companies the edge on competitors vying for the same viewers, content or ratings.
“I think you see some of our clients really setting themselves up within this Upfront to make those changes,” says Whitesel. “But it’s a three or four-year vision, and they know that it’s tiny twists of the knob each year as they can go and more forcibly ask for the things they want versus ‘I think I might want this, but I don’t know’.”
Looking ahead, Whitesel also mentioned the importance of networks viewing their specific services or focus within the greater media ecosystem, particularly as it pertains to the evolving world of advanced TV.
“What are the ways [companies] can control their content across an ecosystem to really deliver more for the advertisers as well as managing what they can control?” Whitesel says. “Even though they may not control every platform that it’s viewed on, they still have ownership over the content, which is a big piece of the pie.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But that is a challenge agencies are now trying to respond to.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Helen Lin, Publicis chief digital officer, says hers is relishing the opportunity to go deeper with clients, by leveraging years of experience working on the same kind of technology with which brands are looking to go in-house.
“(For them), working with an agency who obviously has been doing this for hundreds of clients over the last two decades, it allows us to help advise them in doing it, in the best way possible, giving them that reassurance,” she says.
“What’s super exciting about what’s happening with the industry is, as our clients are taking on more and understanding more in terms of data and technology, it actually allows us to spend a lot less time with 101s and start thinking about things like Marketing Cloud and what can that enable, and personalization at scale.
“And it’s allowing us to get deeper in with the client, within their organizations, to do things that are more transformative.”
The number of US brands which have launched in-house agencies has reached 78% – up from 58% in 2013, according to the ANA’s In-House Agency Report.
But many figures vary, and chatter often suggests that implementation isn’t as easy as going all-in on in-house.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>By itself, “First-party data, although powerful, it limits scale, and if you can’t scale in this environment, scale with the pace of a consumer, it becomes very limiting,” says Musi.
One of five global Publicis brands, Blue 449 calls itself “the open source media agency.” Its goal is to “move the equation to create a tighter connection between marketing and business,” Musi explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference.
“I think what’s happened in this day and age with the abundance of information is that the first-party data has become so expansive, it’s lost in its core focus of what we ultimately need it for.”
The key to leveraging first-party data is how to structure the information so that “it’s most meaningful for me as a business so that I can work with my agencies in order to connect the right data sources, second party, third party.”
Musi believes that just because micro-targeting, particularly with digital media and increasingly via television, exists doesn’t mean it’s applicable in every instance for every brand. “So I have a philosophy that’s saying you don’t really want to be too precise,” he says. “Pizza, everybody loves pizza, everybody loves hot dogs. Why do we need to be one-to-one at that level?”
Contemplating the “past, present and future of our business,” Musi thinks the fundamental things have not changed. “We’re still trying to connect a consumer to a brand. What’s changed is everything in the middle. I don’t know why we think performance or accountability is a new thing. It’s always been around.”
What is different is marketers’ expectations of the pace of ROI for their media investments. “What I think the expectation is today, which is maybe sacrificing the long-term health of a brand, is the short-termism of the ROI that is expected today,” says Musi.
So it pays to think both short- and long-term. “For every dollar we’re going to invest, we expect the return to be X, that X will be delivered today, because we’re meeting the demand that people are presenting today. The Y will be delivered as we meet the demands in the future.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Former Starcom MediaVest Group advanced television specialist Tracey Scheppach has a foot in both of those spheres as CEO & Co-Founder of her agency, Matter More Media. Scheppach helps new advanced-TV technology providers while doing direct brand activation based on CRM and other data.
In this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018 conference, Scheppach refers to research presented by Forrester analyst Jim Nail showing that 15% of brand-side executives have executed addressable TV campaigns. “If you look at the law of adoption, we’re at the tipping point,” Scheppach says, echoing Nail’s conclusion.
However, the addressable TV work that’s been done so far has been derived from household address files. “Being at a digital conference with LiveRamp, the question is how can you bring digital data to household level addressable television. Which is hard because so far it’s built off a street address file versus an IP or cookie file or a device ID,” she says.
Scheppach points to emerging IP-based technology, noting that companies like Sinclair and Sorenson are pursuing dynamic ad insertion to smart TV sets. Then there is the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard for over-the-air broadcast TV.
With ATSC 3.0, transmission will be “IP-based, completely mobile, always on, census-level data, full addressability, which is going to open up more and more inventory to be addressable,” Scheppach says.
Since starting Matter More Media and being on the “front lines” with clients, Scheppach has a closer view of the impact of agency holding companies having separated their creative assets from their media operations. This can be a stumbling block to perfecting, executing and tracking the four elements of successful addressable TV campaigns: the idea, its production values, media channel selection and analytics, according to Scheppach.
“All four pieces work together, all four pieces should be at the table together, not in separate siloes not ever to meet. You just can’t throw the creative over the wall to the media people and just have them execute,” she says.
In its sell-side consulting work, the agency helps people “trying to bring product to market, like a Sinclair, like programmers. They have to figure out how to structure the technology and pitch it to clients.”
In the agency’s direct activation for clients, Scheppach is pursuing “anyone that has a CRM file. I think catalogers are just a natural fit.”
She thinks addressable can help marketers for whom the expense of traditional TV has been a barrier. Some brands with catalogs or direct-mail campaigns are trying to figure out “how do I make it more accountable? How do I make it more storytelling? How do I build my brand out of it? And sight sound and motion is going to do that better than paper.”
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.
]]>Thus says Tracey Scheppach, the former Publicis executive who spent upward of 15 years charting the future of more one-to-one targeted TV before forming Matter More Media. “At this event, what I have heard over the last three days is lots of talk about collaboration. And that is really encouraging because the infrastructure is getting there,” Scheppach says during a break at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have the tools to make media more efficient, more precise and now it takes the ecosystem to work together.”
One of her business goals is to bring more money to the TV space. She suggests catalogers take a page from marketers that have long known the power of the medium.
“They’re taking a list, they’re sending an asset which happens to be paper and putting it in a mailbox. Here we’re taking a list, we’re taking an asset that happens to be video and putting it into a set-top box or over the top in some IP-delivered way,” Scheppach says.
The 2018 TV Upfront “is going to be I think a watershed moment because the data is available and the programmers are starting to cooperate,” she adds. “We all know that TV works but they’re going to be able to prove it in a way that the Facebooks and Googles have been able to prove it to clients. Now TV is at that place.”
Looking back at the naming of her company just over a year ago, Scheppach recalls a meeting with Maurice Levy and other Publicis executives in which she presented “the future of addressable and data-driven television and what creatively Publicis needed to do.” When she made “waste less” one of her talking points, Levy chided her by advising “don’t ever say waste. That makes our clients feel like we were wasting their investment before.”
So she tried to make a positive out of it with Matter More. “We’re moving to a more precise one-to-one conversation that’s a progression. That’s the more part. You can’t just matter now. The world didn’t just change over night. It’s a progression to be able to matter more,” says Scheppach.
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.
]]>At Cannes Lions, AI – perhaps surprisingly – emerged as one of the key trends and opportunities facing modern marketers.
Publicis Groupe chief growth officer Rishad Tobaccowala, in this video interview with Beet.TV, says the opportunities are big.
He says AI is marked out by three characteristics – large datasets, a large amount of computing power and a natural, childlike learning ability.
“Put those together and you can predict and make decisions better than ever before,” he says.
“Human plus AI helper can do amazing things.”
In fact, Tobaccowala likens it to Her, the sci-fi movie in which a man who interacts daily with his AI powered operating system assistant and, ultimately, falls in love with it.
“For a marketer, how do you ensure that when someone calls your name or asks for help, your brand can ask for help?,” he says.
And Tobaccowala has more grand thinking.
“We are at the beginning of the third connected age,” he says.
“The first connected age was around mid-90s with the Netscape browser… In 2007 was the second connected age – the rise of social networks and the rise of smartphones… 2017, we’re now in the third connected age – data connecting to data, things connecting to things, and people connecting in new ways including voice.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Data is paramount to every strategy we put together with our clients, with our partners. It’s sort of the universal language that we have not just to transact on necessarily but to plan against,” says Adam Shlachter, President of Global Innovation at Publicis Media.
This language translates into understanding people as people, not just as broad-based segments to be traded on or targeted against. Tapping into mindsets and behaviors while grasping the effect of ad environments can unleash many useful changes.
“We can create better ads, we can certainly create better experiences and over time we can probably eliminate a lot of the waste that exists today,” Shlachter says in this interview at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat.
That wastes derives from a lack of transparency, lack of connectivity and “quite frankly an overly complex media ecosystem that is not as connected as we’d like it to be.”
It’s been just over a year since Publicis Groupe began to transform its media operations, eliminating some divisions while merging agencies, as The Wall Street Journal reports. From a central perspective, the realignment facilitates greater intelligence sharing while providing better access to talent, resources and technology, according to Shlachter.
“I do believe that these transformations take more time,” he says. “You have to make sure you have all the right pieces in place. Nothing’s going to happen overnight.”
Nonetheless, he’s excited about the momentum Publicis has exhibited in recent months. And he marvels at the pace of the long-discussed convergence of data, technology and platforms, plus the growth of industry partnerships.
“We’ve been waiting for it for a long time. The next three to five years are going to be super interesting,” Shlachter says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Scheppach is particularly excited about new addressable TV operators and the potential groundswell of interest she’s noting among national TV programmers to participate in the addressable marketplace. While the inventory for addressable TV is still small, the base is growing with companies like Comcast and Verizon having stepped in.
“But what’s really interesting is quietly I’m starting to hear national programmers starting to be interested in how do I actually bring addressable opportunities to market,” Scheppach says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
So while just one to two percent of TV inventory is addressable via a TV set, “there are a lot of things that are kind of behind the scenes that I can feel happening that are going to explode that marketplace,” she adds.
Having worked with Murtos at Publicis for 10 years, the duo represents almost 50 years of experience in TV buying and advanced TV.
Among other things, Matter More’s engagement with Tapad includes the use of Tapad’s Device Graph to measure the actual performance of media across channels. In a release announcing the partnership, Scheppach said that achieving “unduplicated reach and frequency across all channels with true addressability, and the ability to measure outcomes, is marketing nirvana.”
Asked about creative versioning of TV ads, she says she’s “yet to really crack the code” but is impressed by companies doing 5,000 or more versions of an ad for online video. “When television becomes more real time and sophisticated, I think we’re going to see more of that coming. It hasn’t happened yet and I think that’s a big opportunity,” Scheppach says.
Her company is focusing much of its efforts on bringing to TV direct mail marketers and mid-market brands—described as having smaller budgets and including “savvy digital marketers”—that have never before embraced the medium.
“We think we can show them the way using these sophisticated tools, whether it be Device Graphs or Identity Graphs or addressable television,” Scheppach says.
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.
]]>These were among a variety of possible scenarios explored at the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat during a one-on-one keynote session with Adam Shlachter of Publicis and Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. Among the agreed-upon certainties five years from now: 15- and 3-second ads will not be the predominant video ad units and gross rating points will be a currency, not the currency.
When YouTube launched its paid channels about four years ago, Shlachter, who was at Digitas at the time, viewed the company as a modern day MSO. “A vessel for programming, distribution, monetization and ultimately for audience,” is how he recalls it. While many people weren’t surprised that YouTube launched a premium subscription service, “That it exists now built into television sets or any device and any screen and it’s with you everywhere is something that I don’t think people were thinking about initially,” he said.
While both Facebook and YouTube have such massive audiences they cannot be ignored, “We’re also still trying to figure out the right way to engage with them,” particularly since their respective viewing experiences are so different, according to Shlachter.
Asked by Spiegel whether 15- and 30-second ads will dominate five years hence, Shlachter responded, “I hope not.” But he was skeptical about a headlong rush to reduced commercial loads wherein many units are transformed into content that could be more valuable to sellers.
“They have to figure out economically how to make that work,” Shlachter said, referring to companies like Fox. “We have to make the experience a little bit cleaner and we have to make it smarter.”
So why on earth would Netflix get into the advertising game? “Right now if you ask anyone they will tell you absolutely not because there’s no need,” he said. However, if net neutrality laws go in a certain direction and Netflix is taxed for its bandwidth consumption on different operators’ systems “maybe they have to look at alternative ways,” Shlachter added.
As for five minutes of commercials in one hour of content, he agreed it’s possible. In addition to ads taking different shapes in the next several years, cross-channel planning will see great advances along with closed-loop measurement models, according to Shlachter.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But that was the past. What is on Jones’ mind when it comes to the future of media?
To find out, Beet.TV caught up with Jones at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Jones said the industry is undergoing a revolution he calls “the road to personalization”.
“We are able to talk to consumers on a one-to-one basis through programmatic and, increasingly, through traditional areas of media,” he said. “We are within sight of the era of personalization where we will be able to serve an individualised message to a consumer or customer.”
The reorganisation saw Publicis Groupe organize around four groups and programmatic capabilities be threaded in to normal agency activities, rather than kept the specialist preserve of VivaKi. It’s an approach Jones calls “the power of one” for the conglomerate, though there may be four times that number of groups under the hood:
“We wanted to be much more accessible and open-source for our clients,” Jones adds, saying the programmatic move has led to much greater client adoption of the tactic.
In an online media world dominated increasingly by just Google and Facebook, ad agencies are looking for other publishers to step up and provide the scale they need to place money elsewhere.
“We embrace competition, we need choice … in the partners we can work with,” Jones urges. The consumer wants choice as well.”
But he sees positive changes are coming. “We’re seeing the next generation of social media platforms coming through,” he says.”
This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In addition to new tech and new devices, Richman will have an eye on the continuing evolution of measurement as consumer behavior shifts from linear to online video, to mobile, to over the top, as well as the different ad formats for those mediums. “As we have more platforms, we get more signals frrm consumers about how they’re watching, and when,” she says, and that input can help optimize ad offerings and measurement.
Richman also touched on addressable TV, emphasizing that the term itself is becoming more broadly defined. “Today as we talk about addressable, it can be how do we find new narrow segments online, what can we learn about them, what new targets can we discover about them that we can bring to TV. Much of that is available programmatically so we can get more precise with these audiences…and use that to understand what segments to invest in.”
Looking ahead, Richman expects this type of data-driven planning will play an even bigger role in the upfront. The availability of more data affords flexibility to move ad dollars across mediums to drive performance, she says.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>That’s why Dan Bruinsma is looking forward to the kind of consolidation heralded by the latest big ad-tech M&A deal.
Adobe is set to buy video ad platform TubeMogul in a deal valuing the latter at $540m, plugging it in to its burgeoning suite of marketing tools.
And Bruinsma, chief investment officer of GroupeConnect, the Publicis unit dedicated to the agency’s Bank Of America account, thinks that’s a good thing.
“It’s encouraging,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The ad-tech space is pretty complicated, there’s a lot of players. It’s very difficult to find differentiation and to be able to understand what’s working and what’s not in a partnership.
“It’s a great opportunity for us specifically as we work on Bank Of America. (It) also aligns with partners we’re already working with – That particular alignment is great for us because TubeMogul is one of the DSP patterns that we work with and Adobe is a DMP partner that Bank is building right now.”
Ad-tech M&A advisor Terence Kawaja reckons “winter is coming” for an ad-tech vendor cluster that had previously enjoyed high volumes of investment but which on which Wall Street is becoming bearish.
“We have to have solutions that are more nimble and don’t create six-month ramp-up periods just getting used to working with a partner,” GroupeConnect’s Bruinsma adds. “That’s what I’m hoping comes out of that consolidation of DSPs and DMPs.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>As CNN recently reported, ahead of the recent Super Tuesday, Republican groups supporting rivals spent heavily on TV attack ads to stop Trump’s runaway train, spending an estimated $5.9m in airplay for just a single day.
But that is a waste, according to one advertising expert.
“He built his brand using television,” says Publicis’ chief strategist Rishad Tobaccowala, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Now he uses free media, controversy and Twitter to spread his brand. Television advertising against him doesn’t work – he can overwhelm it.
“Most importantly, the messages don’t work. In Florida, I believe The Republican anti-Trump advertising helped them because it verified that ‘these people want to stop me’ but ‘they cannot control me’.”
Trump only bought his first TV ad in January, six months in to his campaign, having up-ended the usual campaign tactic, in which attention is bought via television, in favor of causing uproar using speeches that reverberate around television newscasts and social media, for free.
About his strategic addition, Trump had said: “Honestly, I feel guilty. All these people are spending all this money on ads. We have spent the least amount of money. I am very proud of this ad. I don’t know if I need it, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
So, does Trump’s success suggest TV ads are useless? Not quite. Trump may be benefitting from reams of coverage earned for free but Tobaccowala says any campaign – for brands or politicians – benefits from using both free and paid media.
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
]]>“The reality is, I wanted to be a surgeon,” he confesses to Beet.TV in this video interview. “I just cannot stand blood, so I had to change. I went to learn something else. I became an engineer.”
Lévy joined Publicis as IT director in 1971 – after which, one of his most important feats is said to be putting in place a data security policy that involved backing up all of the company’s data on magnetic tape. According to Wikipedia: “A fire in the company’s office (on the Champs-Elysées) proved the success of his backup and restoration strategy, as the company was back on its feet one week later.”
It sounds as if Lévy could have run that IT department with one hand tied behind his back – pretty soon, his horizons were growing.
“After three months, I was doing all my job in half the day -I have learned to do almost everything in the business,” he says. “All the afternoon, I was with the creative department – thinking about how we can find new ways of creating new solutions etc.”
Amid that culture mix, he claims to have written “the very first algorithm in France for media optimisation”.
Publicis, of course, has changed considerably since Lévy’s early days. Now, the company numbers 75,000 staff around the world, and Lévy reckons: “We are the most advanced in digital and probably the one who will win the future.”
That’s a bold bet- hubristic, even. But Lévy acknowledges he has made mistakes along the way – it’s just that he turns the losses in to wins.
“I have lost clients … I had some difficulties with some acquisitions,” he concedes. “Setbacks are what back you stronger. At each of the hurdles that I had to jump … I get out of this stronger. If I am strong today, it is because I had many.”
One recent slip-up, of course, came when the merger of Publicis with Omnicom, which Lévy architected, collapsed in 2014. He reportedly has hinted that, when he leaves the company, it is a team and not an individual that will replace him.
But the man knows that it is the dark days which can turn the light back on: “When you are riding horses – as soon as you fall down, you have to jump over again and again until you win.”
Lévy was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. Taping took place in Cannes in June, 2015. This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL Please find the series videos here.
]]>
But one of the key execs in the space says he observers advertisers increasingly wrapping their head around the prospect and its potential.
“We’ve had a few years where advertisers have had a little bit of confusion about who to trust,” VivaKi global clients president Marco Bertozzi tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But I feel like we’ve passed a lot of those – advertisers are now asking all the right questions. We are really moving to a positive space at the moment,
“I’m seeing a lot from the big global advertisers that they are restructuring to cope with this programmatic ecosystem. We’re starting to see heads of programmatic, heads of data technology, these roles being put in to place, which is a great step. It means they start to evaluate the landscape, understand what all the agencies do, educate themselves well.”
Bertozzi’s VivaKi itself is currently engaged in a restructure which sees its own programmatic staff being spread throughout its holding company’s individual agencies – another sign that programmatic is being normalized in ad land.
Bertozzi reckons that task will be completed by the end of Q3.
We interviewed Bertozzi at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>But that is now changing, with a couple of big agency initiatives to reboot how their dedicated programmatic divisions operate in their wider groups.
Publicis’ VivaKi unit is moving its programmatic staff out in to operating agency stablemates, while IPG Mediabrands’ digital and ad tech group Cadreon is retooling itself to be more of an “incubator” for group technology, executives tell an industry panel.
“Everything about automation, programmatic, data needs to reside in the agencies,” says VivaKi global CEO Stephan Beringer. “It is the paradigm the new business model needs to be built on. If we want to scale this intelligence and integrate it in to the service, we need to push capabilities in to the agencies.”
Cadreon global president Arun Kumar says clients are asking for greater visibility in to programmatic strategies – something that is prompting changes.
“We’ve looked at how we can transform ourselves from being a trading desk in to being an incubator for ad tech and develop platforms that allow our agency partners to access that intelligence,” he adds.
“(We are seeking) greater synchronization between planning and buying. When you democratize that , the media agencies can play a more strategic role.”
We interviewed them at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>“In 10 years time, as today, ideas will be king,” according to ad agency holding group Publicis’ CEO Maurice Lévy.
Speaking with Beet.TV, he envisages a future industry in which digital technology will play a bigger and bigger role – and that will force agencies to adapt.
“Our role will evolve,” he says. “We will have to work more closely with the client. We will have to develop a whole spectrum of services, from brand-building to sales – omni-channel. This will take a lot of transformation. It’s a business that has to be reinvented.”
Lévy has already spent the last few decades reinventing Publicis. What better emblem for an industry witnessing the collision of creativity and technology than the tech guy who ended up running his company, 16 years after joining its IT department?
Lévy joined Publicis as IT director in 1971 – after which, one of his most important feats is said to be putting in place a data security policy that involved backing up all of the company’s data on magnetic tape.
According to Wikipedia: “A fire in the company’s office (on the Champs-Elysées) proved the success of his backup and restoration strategy, as the company was back on its feet one week later.”
Four decades later, and data could barely be a hotter topic in the advertising agency world. So how does Lévy, now 73, advise the next generation of job entrants to this fast-moving industry?
“If they want to live, with passion, the unexpected; if they want to be part of the people who will be modelling the future; if they want to be at the intersection of digital technology, emotions, creativity… if they have the passion for that, there is only one place,” he says. “It is the advertising world.”
It is a marker of how highly Publicis regards its CEO that it extended his tenure despite the collapse of the Omnicom merger he architected. He reportedly has hinted that, when he leaves the company, it is a team and not an individual that will replace him.
Lévy has three sons and several grandchildren who regularly seek his career wisdom. So, what does he say?
“Be who you are,” Lévy tells Beet.TV. “If you are not happy, leave. Have fun. We spend most of our waking time working, at our desk, computers, with teams, clients, etc. We must have fun. Don’t listen to anyone, be who you are.”
Levy was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The taping took place during the Cannes Lions Festival in 2015. This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries. The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft.
]]>Renowned media and technology M&A advisor and banker Terence Kawaja of Luma Partners is releasing a report, “Back To Mad Men”, that paints a stark picture of the challenge. He says agencies have been “caught flat-footed” by recent technology developments.
“They don’t necessarily have the skillsets necessary to manage their complexity, nor the technical proficiency for that kind of world,” Kawaja tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Lately, we’ve seen a big squeeze on agencies, where all these marketing technology companies. The agency is under siege from all these sides.”
Kawaja credits WPP with having invested or acquired in data marketing capabilities and cites Publicis’ acquisition of Sapient as another example of how agencies are fighting back. But, he adds: “I’m not sure if it’ll be enough. There are competing interests for those kinds of capabilities from companies that are far more capable than ad agencies.”
More on the turmoil in agency reviews reported in the Wall Street Journal.
We interviewed him on at Cannes aboard yacht for a series on the future of TV presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please find more videos from the series here.
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“We are thinking not just data-centric but data-centric as it involves your entire media investment,” ZenithOptimedia activation standards, insights and technology EVP Julian Zilberbrand tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That means taking insights that you learn in one channel and applying them effectively in another.
“The more information you know about (consumers), the better you can communicate and give them messaging that is relevant for them. Data allows us to do that, but the opportunity to do that in a way that scales across multiple media types is an opportunity that’s still evolving.”
Zilberbrand is heading to Cannes Lions hoping the discussion about so-called “programmatic” ad buying, which he says has long happened in the US, is becoming more global.
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.
]]>“VivaKi still lives on,” says SMG programmatic SVP Mac Delaney in this video interview. “It operates the SkyScraper platform, the database for all of the group’s campaign reporting. You still have VivaKi employees dedicated to the AOD operating system. AOD is just one component of VivaKi.”
As reported earlier this year, VivaKi unit is rethinking the way it delivers programmatic services, moving from a centralized offering to threading the new discipline throughout sibling agency departments.
“They’re spending several days per week embedded within those teams,” Delaney says. “We’re bringing them further up the chain in strategy and planning.”
]]>The Drum reports on the changes here.
“The largest group within AOD – the client services group … those individuals are a 60-person group, being folded in to individual SMG agencies,” VivaKi programmatic SVP Mac Delaney tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“When Audience On Demand was created, it follows the same story of digital – when there’s a new innovation, things happen at the center first until the dust settles.
“The same is happening now – we’re moving proactively to do so ahead of the marketplace, to push that know-how, skillset and ability out in to the hands of the individuals managing the client relationships.”
Delaney 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.
]]>At the DMEXCO conference, Vittal’s company announced a deal in which all of Publicis’ agencies will have access to a new suite, Always-On platform, that is powered by Adobe Marketing Cloud and offers content creation, audience segmentation, campaign tracking, measurement and more.
“The marketing transformation that’s happening in the industry because of digital, the disruption of multi-channel and audience fragmentation is going to require a technology and an analytical-driven process,” Vittal told Beet.TV in this panel interview with Ashley J. Swartz, Founder and CEO of Furious Minds at DMEXCO.
“Marketers have varying levels of confidence when it comes to the technology options.” Vittal said Adobe and Publicis were “coming together to solve marketers problems”.
This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO. Please find all of our coverage of the show right here.
]]>“The Amazon announcement is the fruition of 18 months of working with them -it’s a case study for exactly what we’re trying to do with our big partners in the media space,” says Bertozzi, who was this spring promoted to president of the Audience On Demand sub-group for EMEA and North America.
In the first of three video interviews with Beet.TV, Bertozzi says six-year-old VivaKi’s unique selling point remains fixed, despite the emergence of powerful new ad tech vendor relationships and the collapse of Publicis’ proposed merger with Omnicom.
“There’s been a lot of swirl in the last few months about Omnicom and Xaxis and so on – but we’ve kept pretty consistent,” he says. “We want to align with agencies and their advertisers. The trouble with … some of the offerings that are out there is they have multiple business models in play, which means they can’t possibly align. That muddies the water.”
We spoke with Bertozzi for “The Road to DMEXCO,” a series of interviews with industry leaders produced in New York, London and San Francisco. It is sponsored by the automatic content recognition (ACR) technology provider Civolution.
Please find more videos from the series here. Beet.TV is a media sponsor of DMEXCO and will be covering the conference extensively.
Update: Please find this article in the Wall Street Journal about new advertising operations and services at Amazon.
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