He says this sort of  permission marketing is essential for success. And there are lessons for publishers and writers like himself who have found greater traction in the process subscription. For his weekly substack newsletter, he notes that the sign-up process has yielded far greater impact for his newsletter versus publishing on social networks where attention is largely built around various algorithms.

In this episode of Beet.TV’s podcast “The BeetCast” he talks about his book Restoring the Soul of Business and how it has proven prescient for the era of the COVID 19 pandemic, including the longterm implications of work from home. He predicts that a full 50 percent of white collar jobs will be done at home. But he warns that work from home has several key limitations.

He shares his advice for the future of advertising which needs to be staffed by a new wave of creative talent, he urges.

This episode of the BeetCast was originally published in November.   We are republishing it over the holiday break as one of our essential podcast sessions.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service.

The #BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.

It will also be a time when companies must embrace a more of people-focused ethos with a commitment to training.

These are some thoughts of Rishad Tobaccowala, author of the book Restoring the Soul of Business, Staying Human in the Age of Data, and senior advisor to Publicis Groupe.

Many of these trends were predicted in his book, which was published in January. The post-COVID-19 world is the focus of his new newsletter. For more, on where things are heading from his perspective, read Rishad’s recent piece.

Separately, we spoke with him about ommnichannel advertising and the need for unified systems for planning transacting media across platforms. This second video will be published later this month as part of a new Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean.

But that’s what is happening.

The senior advisor of media agency holding group Publicis, an ad industry veteran, has complained that too many businesses have followed the path of math.

In Restoring The Soul Of Business, which was published by HarperCollins in January 2020, he calls on businesses to address the “heart” of consumers.

In this recorded interview with Beet.TV, Tobaccowala talks about the three profound effects coronavirus will have, predicting “a time of amazing anxiety”:

1. “(It is as) if 9/11 met the 2008-2009 crisis and they had a child. It’s much more than a one-time systematic shock. It’s much more than financial. It’s a broader and deeper thing than anything that has gone before.”
2. “It is like an asteroid has hit the Earth and the Earth went on after the asteroids hit – but one of the things the asteroids did take out were dinosaurs. There’ll be certain business models, certain businesses, certain organisations that will never come back.”
3. “When you basically close down the global world economy in stages … you don’t restart it without people having different mindsets. It’s like someone has th
4. wacked you in the head.”

In the new world, he says, businesspeople are going to have to “lead with soul”, a topic his book breaks down in to five traits:

1. “Capability. Show that you are capable even if you are working at home with limited stuff to actually do your job.”
2. “Integrity. Like never before, people have to trust you, trust your word because often you’re going to basically tell people in uncertain times.”
3. “Empathy. Not only understanding your ultimate client, but understanding your employees and anybody you’re working with.”
4. “Vulnerability. It’s very, very important to recognize and know that you yourself are concerned about the future and what will happen to not only the world, but your business and your firm.”
5. “Inspiration. This, too, will end. All of us have been given 12 weeks to reconsider life, to reconsider ourselves, to reconsider our families; that’s really positive.”

Tobaccowala was interviewed remotely at home by BeetCam.

But is this now an industry that is led too much by the numbers? Or, put another way, is it time the “Mad Men” took over from the “Maths Men”?

Rishad Tobaccowala wants a better balance, and the chief growth officer of media agency holding group Publicis has written a new book all about that balance.

“People choose brands with hearts and not with numbers,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The more your business is only based on machines and spreadsheets, you will also be out of a job.

“You need both the spreadsheet and the story. What do people feel? What are their emotions? Without the humanity looking at the data, you end up in a different place.

“The entire business … is besotted with what I call plumbing… how you reach the right person at the right time. But no one is thinking about the right context and what you (should) actually say. (There is) too much plumbing, too little poetry.”

He says he is becoming fond of technology companies that use machine learning to predict an audience’s emotional response to a video before it is published.

Tobaccowala has written a book on “digilog” companies, ones where digital tools and analog people are integrated expertly.

Restoring The Soul Of Business by Tobaccowala is available for pre-order on Amazon, published by HarperCollins in January 2020.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, 2019.   The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  

Tobaccowala, who is CGO of Publicis Groupe, describes the first connected era as “built around the Web, and it was basically you link to information, you link to transactions. Google did the best on information and Amazon on transactions.” There followed the second era, circa 2007, when “we were connected all the time and to everybody” while social networks and mobile phones took off, lifting the Apples and Facebooks.

“Another company eventually recovered and became very powerful, which is Microsoft and had actually left the ad-tech space with the exception of Bing,” he adds.

“And now we’re entering a third connected age, which is machine learning. Which is data connecting to data, Internet of things, VR” as well as “much faster connections because of 5G.”

Along the way, online advertising exceeded $100 billion, fueling digital giants who are privy to lots of consumer data.

“It’s funding good things, like it enables the technologies of Google and Facebook. On the other hand, it also funds the troubles that YouTube and Facebook bring to the world,” says Tobaccowala. “People are beginning to realize that these things are not necessarily ad-tech, they’re society tech. What started off as advertising technology is actually becoming technology that effects and impacts society.”

As a result, data privacy is a hot topic. Tobaccowala believes the ad-tech industry “was not regulated that well, with regard to data, to one that right now is being overly regulated. And people are trying to figure out what the rules are.”

To boil things down, he lists for marketers and the technology industry three “tenets” that should become reality: “Do you actually have to collect the data, and when you do the person who you’re collecting, they need to know why you’re collecting it. They should have the opportunity to basically correct it. They should be able to share in the monetization of it.”

Asked about identity graphs, he says everybody’s building one and there will be many of them going forward. “And right now the most powerful identity graphs are closed identity graphs.” Amazon has verified names and credit card numbers while Google “has multiple touches on you. And in the case of Facebook, they know who your friends are, your name and a whole bunch of other things.”

Tobaccowala’s book, which will be published January 28, 2020 is titled Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in an Age of Data.

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.

That’s because agencies are best equipped to “understand people, what they do, how they buy, what they’re motivated by and brands. And how to connect media and brands in the right media environment together,” says Desmond.

In this interview at RampUp 2018, the annual LiveRamp conference, Laura Desmond, the former CEO of Starcom and now Founder & CEO of the new consultancy Eagle Vista Partners, talks about the tools and skillsets agencies will need to best leverage omnichannel marketing.

Referring to Tobaccowala as “my very smart old colleague,” Desmond says of his prediction, “I think broadly that’s right.”

In the days of the 15% media commission for agencies, the impact of such a spending decline would have had a different effect. Now it means that agencies must invest more not only in creativity but also in data and science.

“And agencies are without question in that space the undisputed leaders of putting that alchemy together on behalf of a client, on behalf of their brands. I don’t think that’s going to change,” Desmond says.

Agencies need data platforms and streams that encompass not only brand, media and buying but all kinds of data. This can range from weather to purchasing information “to how people use screens when they are in store, out of store, mobile, location,” she adds.

“All those data pieces and streams have to come together and agencies are going to need to use technology and software to better capture intelligence in an instant of time. Because people and human hands just can’t do all of that data crunching themselves.”

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.

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.

“For most countries, the number one thing that clients are looking for is how do they grow again. So there’s a growth issue,” Tobaccowala says in this interview with Beet.TV during the 2017 Digital Content NewFronts. “The second one in the world of marketing is how do they engage with people in a world where a lot of interruptive ways of engaging are becoming less and less relevant.”

Third: “Do they have the right organizational design?”

Asked for his takeaways from the NewFronts presentations, the Strategy & Growth Officer at Publicis Group opines that “creativity continues to matter,” there’s a “whole bunch of new companies” that attendees need to pay attention to and what is supposed to be “dinosaur companies are not dinosaur companies. They’re coming alive again.”

While speaking of dinosaurs, Tobaccowala offers his take on the video created by NewFronts founder Digitas in which the pairing of a cave man and an astronaut symbolizes the need for both instinct and science in today’s marketing world.

“A lot of people say only the story matters, but so does who sees the story, when they see it and why they see it and that’s where the data comes in,” he says.

It’s all about yin and yang, which makes Tobaccowala “a big believer that it’s actually art plus science plus I think underlying technology that will be necessary to enable both.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

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.

He talks about the changing demands of clients and the evolution of the role of the agency.

We spoke with him earlier this week at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB meeting was sponsored by SpotXchange.

“We may be losing the plot – too much math, too little meaning,” says DigitasLBi and Razorfish chair Rishad Tobaccowala.

“We’ve forgotten that the data is there to support the art of the instinct, rather than be the art of the instinct.”

Modern digital advertising software platforms give advertisers and agencies super-control in to where and how they buy online ads, including fine control over how they target campaigns to reach consumers across ad networks. It’s becoming a frenzy.

“We’ve become too data-infested and not intelligent enough,” Tobaccowala tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Things will keep changing so fast that the machines won’t keep up with the rate of change – machines are very good at repeating what has been done before – not at doing new things.”

Tobaccowala published a blog post on the topic this week.

This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO.  Please find all of our coverage of the show right here.  Beet.TV’s coverage of DMEXCO is sponsored by Videology.

Rishad Tobaccowala told Beet.TV in this video interview advertising that is increasingly video-led will, first, become more targetable and, second, include built-in transactional capability. But Tobaccowala’s exciting vision extends beyond current technology.

Third, he said: “It will basically go across glass. The word ‘screen’ is very backwards. Some of the most interesting uses of video will not only be things like Google Glass but the next iteration of Nike Fuel band…

“What Apple and others come out with will be wearable glass… There will be glass in your kitchen and on all kinds of stuff. We can see a world that is IP-delivered across glass with APIs that allow transactions.”

Already in today’s world the funnel between marketing and consumer purchase has collapsed such that ecommerce transactions need to exist inside advertising messaging, Tobaccowala said. Imagine a future in which marketing-led ecommerce is viable on a plethora of surfaces and gadgets.

We interviewed him last week at the Cannes Lions.