One of them is Iain Jacob, the Chief Executive Officer, EMEA for Publicis Media
.”A lot of ad-tech to date has been about optimization, improving efficiencies and automation,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“That’s great, but there’s a bigger future there. It’s going to be discussed this week. This is around storytelling for brands … how they’re getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time.
“Effective storytelling has to be about connecting content around consumers’ desires. The big push for data is connected data, looking at people as individuals.”
Publicis recently went through a reorganization that Jacob says was about creating simplicity and integration for clients in an increasingly complex world.
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Still, one ad group man says the prospects for that tipping point are now looking a lot healthier, five years after it began.
“We seem to be turning a corner regarding broadcasts and their engagement in the programmatic space,” SMG’s performance marketing CEO Marco Bertozzi tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We are seeing broadcasters have realised they need to find a way to understand their own audience better, and help advertisers deliver more specifically.”
Recently, UK satellite operate Sky invested in the brand data and analytics platform DataXu, while Videology has also struck a number of broadcaster partnerships.
“All of of the mainstream broadcasters are doing something now in this space,” Bertozzi says. “After quite a few years of resistance, it’s a positive shift, and a demonstration of the last hurdle toward programmatic being part of every channel that we operate in.”
But, so far, broadcasters’ programmatic foray has been limited to their digitally-delivered video-on-demand inventory. The next five years will see the shift of linear TV, too, Bertozzi reckons.
]]>But the tide may be turning, as some of those agencies decide it’s safer to stick than to twist, says one senior agency exec.
“The concept of taking it in-house has been popular discussion point, but really hasn’t come to fruition,” says Marco Bertozzi, the VivaKi veteran who was recently named new performance marketing Global CEO of ad agency SMG.
“It requires a lot of resource to do that. Advertisers are realizing, the best way of delivering this is a combination of the power the agency has … with ownership of their own data.
“I’m seeing examples where advertisers have rushed forward to try and do something themselves and have started to come back now and say, ‘We have learned a lot but we now see that the combination of all our skills is probably stronger than us trying to do it ourselves’.”
This video is part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.
]]>“The modernization of performance marketing has still got a long way to go,” according to Marco Bertozzi, the new performance marketing head of ad agency SMG.
“Because we haven’t necessarily had all the relevant tools and data, performance has gone down this road of straightforward, lowest cost-per-click (pricing), based on last-click models.
“We should be taking in to account the availability of attribution modelling… as part of performance. Otherwise, our KPIs are getting lower and lower an we’re going to run out of road.”
Bertozzi, too, is changing. As a long-serving executive at SMG parent Publicis’ VivaKi digital unit, he oversaw the rise of programmatic technology, including through VivaKi’s Audience On Demand unit.
Arguably, Bertozzi’s new role, which comes as Publicis organizes in to four agency divisions, suggests yet another maturation of programmatic ad-tech. He is tasked with unifying SMG’s performance activities in one practice.
“People are very focused on ‘programmatic’ as the label,” Bertozzi adds. “But, actually… the journey toward a single view of customer… understanding cross-channel, cross-device… all of these metrics that we’re talking about daily in programmatic are actually the fundamentals to performance (marketing).”
This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.
]]>SMG’s use of addressable TV is taking off in the States. But that’s not the same in every market.
“The UK market is … off to a very slow start,” Glucklich tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“The future of of marketing is in real-time addressable content and I think TV has an enormous role to play in that. But, from a UK perspective, really only Sky AdSmart is the one that’s offering that at the moment. I think 2016 will really see some big advancements and we’ve already heard that in the UK from the likes of ITV and Sky in particular.”
Glucklich wants this advancement because the pace of the world of content is quickening up immensely.
“Real-time is a huge challenge to marketers in particular … real, cultural, and pivotal moments are gone in a matter of minutes or hours,” she says. “For us, having a kind of fully data-enabled programmatic solution is absolutely critical to be able to make that work effectively, and television is only really starting to get there. ”
Separately, Thaer Namruti, the European strategy director at Acxiom, has been appointed to the new role of senior vice president for precision marketing strategy at SMG, rejoining the company after leaving in 2014.
Glucklich and co-CEO Steve Parker gave this guided tour of SMG’s new London office to Campaign magazine…
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>We spoke with Schappach at CES last week. This video is part of our coverage of CES sponsored by Adobe.
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“When you look at innovation, you always swing the pendulum way too far, and then it comes back,” says SMG precision video EVP Tracey Scheppach.
“Right now, we’re buying audience all the way; (the perception is there is) no value to context. (Truth is,) we don’t have enough data to value the context. So we’ve swung all the way to audience. I think that’s going to come back. Only the data will set us free.”
The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.
]]>“This has been an amazing year for addressable television,” according to SMG precision video SVP Tracey Scheppach. “We’ve tripled our business. We’ve had 50 advertisers, hundreds of campaigns, billions of impressions. We have a real business on our hands now so I feel like a lot of the fundamentals have been worked out.”
Much of that work has been done by using available data sets and technology. So what’s next in 2016?
“We’re going to apply the principles of audience-based buying and using better data to apply that to linear – something that I would call addressable light,” Scheppach says. “I think there’s so much value that is created by ushering in a better data set, getting us off of Nielsen, and onto more granular data.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
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“That data’s not free,” according to Modi Media president Mike Bologna.
“Of the 50-plus household campaigns we’ve run so far this year, we’ve used pretty much a different source or a different piece of a single data source of reach and every different campaign. It is expensive.”
So far, ad tech vendors tend to boast to clients that they can unite a varied array of data sources to bring about super-targeting. The combined price of so much data is not a challenge often discussed. Time to go back to basics?
“We always recommend that an advertiser use their own data,” says Steve Murtos SMG SVP. “That’s the most accurate data. We’ve sent the best results (from that).”
Murtos predicts a “shake-out” of ad data providers. “The ones that are the best will rise to the top and be the standard,” he is betting.
Programming Note: Murtos will be a speaker at the Beet TV executive retreat in For Lauderdale this month.
They were interviewed last month by LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja, at an event about the future of addressable TV presented by AT&T AdWorks in association with Beet.TV Please find more videos here
]]>“I’m putting about three times as much money in the marketplace as I was a year ago,” Starcom MediaVest Group’s precision video EVP Tracey Scheppach tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty way to go for “addressable” to reach its full potential.
So what’s next? Scale and breadth, Scheppach hopes. She wants to see addressability applied to linear TV ads and to have more inventory opened up to the process. Particularly, she would like brands unaccustomed to TV advertising to be enticed to begin.
“I had hopes early on that we’d start to bring in new advertisers,” Scheppach says. “But what we’re seeing is the deepness of television players use television more efficiently and effectively.
“The big opportunity is to pivot to bring in new advertising forms – political is one, direct mail is another huge category… whoever they were going to send the catalogue to, I can send a 30-second spot to.”
Programming note: Scheppach will be a featured speaker at the upcoming Beet.TV executive retreat in Fort Lauderdale in November.
This video is part of the series Programmatic Video at a Turning Point, presented by SpotX. You can find additional videos from the series here.
]]>But what humps are still in the road to an addressable future? In a panel on the topic, these executives discussed the topic…
Modi Media president Mike Bologna
“Almost 50%, 47 million households, of the United States now has the ability to insert an ad at the household level.
“Demand is where it gets a little bit tricky. To truly benefit … the advertiser needs to know who they really want to reach… a really granular segment. This requires advertisers to think about, ‘Do I want to reach drivers of a specific vehicle?’ That requires pooling together different data sources.”
Starcom MediaVest SVP Steve Murtos
“As we start to scale, we need more automation. Agencies need to help advertisers understand how to think about this, what the right sequencing of messaging is.”
AT&T AdWorks Rick Welday
“It’s such a different mindset from an agency perspective. This is very different (from traditional ad-buying). There’s an evolution that still has to occur within the agency space to help customers understand that we’re no longer purchasing premium content – we’re pursuing the audience; the audience becomes addressable.”
Citi senior media manager Kim O’ Connor
“On our end, people are way more excited about the idea of being targeted and addressable than the idea that you’re going to run spots in Big Bang Theory
“The challenge is, the space is a little bit fractured. Five different providers, you have to go to each provider to get individual cost, there are five different research studies.”
Programming Note: Murtos will be speaking at the Beet Retreat next month in Floridaabout this and related topics.
He was interviewed last month by LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja, at an event about the future of addressable TV presented by AT&T AdWorks in association with Beet.TV Please find more videos here
]]>We spoke with him about the growth of addressable which will expand beyond the cable box to IP content via various audience optimization approaches, he predicts.
We interviewed him last month at an event about the future of addressable TV presented by AT&T AdWorks in association with Beet.TV Please find more videos here
]]>“I’m lucky enough to work in an organisation where I don’t really see that challenge quite so much – a lot of my global leadership are female,” says SMG global network clients president Jodie Stranger, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“What is most concerning to me is how we are preparing our industry for the future.
“This industry is evolving at the speed of light. It is fascinating and frightening and exciting all at the same time. What will this industry look like for the (future) generation look like? Who knows? We need to use that as leverage to bring diverse talent in to the industry.”
Stranger’s SMG colleague, Pippa Glucklich, has previously spoken with Beet.TV on advertising-industry gender diversity, too.
This video is part of a series from DMEXCO, presented by Mediaocean. Please visit this page for our other videos.
]]>“Fundamentally the agency model is changing, and if you’re not disrupting yourself, somebody else is going to disrupt you,” says Jacob in an interview with Beet.TV recorded earlier this month at the DMEXCO conference.
Jacob also observes that agencies need to be in the technology business. For that reason, Publicis Groupe acquired RUN, a mobile-focused DMP and DSP business, and why SMG partners with data and technology companies like Acxiom. Additionally, SMG works with startups in Berlin and London to actually co-develop technology that’s being put to use for the business.
But while technology and data have both come a long way, “it’s actually the convergence where technology meets creativity that has still to be cracked, because that’s how brands will be able to make storytelling real,” he says.
This video is part of a series from DMEXCO, presented by Mediaocean. Please visit this page for our other videos.
]]>“It feels like the business, certainly our business, and probably the whole industry, is obviously a year older but definitely a year wiser – and I think maybe a year braver,” he says.
At DMEXCO, SMG will be discussing the marriage of technology and content as well as how to bridge the gap between technology and brands – topics that reflect the business’s direction, particularly around precision marketing.
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.
]]>“The starting point is the client and the client brief, and we just want to meet as many startups as possible who can answer them,” he says.
Currently, there are about 100 startups on the NTN directory.
“We’ve got our own media village here, and DMEXCO will be an opportunity to actually get to know some new startups, to get to bring them into our camp,” Kite says.
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.
]]>Many a business guru is fond of the ironic value of failure. That’s a notion that the boss of one of the biggest ad groups subscribes to, too.
“I’ve always learned more from failure than success,” Starcom MediaVest Group CEO Laura Desmond tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “At times, when people are on the top of the wave, riding it and feeling like nothing can touch them – those are the points in time when you really have to remember, ‘what was it like to be off that wave?’
“Those times make you humble, keep you hungry and keep you focus on the good and the necessary learning and challenges that go in to staying strong in this industry.”
There’s another kind of wave Desmond is riding, and that is the constantly-changing businesses of advertising and technology. The fusion of the two is up-ending the traditional marketing business, and turning geeks in to kingmakers amongst the creative community.
“This industry ain’t for the faint of heart. It’s a tough business today, (with) lots of different pressures,” Desmond reckons.
“Our work inherently is for people who are young or young at heart. You have to have a constant curiosity about what’s going on in the world. You have to be very comfortable with this notion of … moving at an increasingly faster rate of velocity as we see technology empowerment disrupt business models.”
Back when Desmond got started in the industry, her entrance was a sure thing. It started by being an outlier – the only one in her class to back advertising as a positive force for change.
“It’s a story that starts in my freshman year in college,” Desmond recalls. “One of the assignments was to find a popular brand advertising campaign and argue, ‘Was it good for society or not?’
“Out of 20 people in the class, I was the only person to argue that the campaign for Crest toothpaste was actually good for society because the sales funded the investment and research in to fluoride and better products.”
Out of college, Desmond joined advertising company Leo Burnett, which she recalls as “where it was at”: “Creative (messaging) wasn’t the … only thing … (the strategy of) reaching people at the right time and the right place became as important and – arguably, today, 20 years later, more important than the message itself.”
So what are Desmond’s lessons to tomorrow’s generation of ad industry joiners? “Be humble and listen,” she adds. “That’s mostly what I’ve tried to do.”
Desmond was interviewed in Chicago for Beet.TV by Andy Plesser, executive producer of Beet.TV for the Media Revolutionaries series presented by AOL and Xaxis. You can find more videos from the series here.
]]>Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media division, which is working on just that proposition, says 2015 is the year it has begun to happen – but he cautions that advertising may need to adjust to the new realities of the possibilities.
“If we still live in a world where we spend a million dollars to create a spot, that’s not economically feasible for this data- and tech-driven world,” he told a Cannes Lions panel discussion, recorded by Beet.TV.
“We need to figure out a way to take these big, beautiful million-dollar spots and cut them three, four, five, 20 different ways so that the right message goes to the right consumer at the right time at the right frequency.”
Fellow panelists agreed that the prospects are vast:
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions aboard the AT&T AdWorks yacht, sponsored by AT&T. For more clips from the session, please visit this page.
]]>“You know what’s really silly?” says Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media, in a panel discussion at Cannes recorded by Beet.TV. “Asking 20,000 people what they watch on television and assuming the other 114 million watch the same.”
Bologna says over 100 GroupM advertisers are running 350 campaigns on addressable TV right now, and the agency is willing to pay CPMs as high as $400 for premium inventory. And SMG’s Tracey Scheppach, EVP-Precision Video Director, says over 45 agency clients have done roughly 100 campaigns.
However, both acknowledge this is just a drop in the bucket when you consider the $70-billion TV ad market.
“I agree that distributors have been slow to embrace this technology and slow to roll it out at scale, but I think we’re starting to see that happen,” adds Mike Welch, president of AT&T AdWorks.
Scheppach says that TV networks are starting to feel an impetus to embrace new technology.
“The whole CPG category is up in review, and when you have that moment when upfront dollars are moving, it puts a lot of pressure on inventory owners, the traditional ones, to pull something off to save the account,” she says.
The session was moderated by Terence Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners.
Scheppach, Bologna and Welch were part of a Cannes panel discussion on targeted TV advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>“You’re seeing 50, 60, 70% increase in sales lift,” says Tracey Scheppach, SMG’s EVP-Precision Video Director, in a panel discussion at Cannes that was recorded by Beet.TV. “We’ve even seen it higher than that.”
The lift for CPG and automotive brands is easily measurable because of the availability of sales data through the likes of Dunnhumby and Kantar Shopcom. So there’s a means of looking at the households that viewed a given commercial, running that data through a company like Acxiom, and then matching it to shopping data to see how many households exposed to the ad wound up making a purchase.
“That’s really cool stuff, and that’s never happened in TV before,” says Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media.
Meanwhile, AT&T AdWorks’s president Mike Welch observes how his business provides a different layer of data via insights into people’s web browsing activity (which it obtains from an opt-in from customers using its fiber-optic service GigaPower.)
“We’re using that data behind the scenes to understand how exposure to a TV ad, for instance, drives particular web browsing patterns, and I think that helps fill in the in-between part of this exposure-to-purchase part of the funnel,” he says.
The session was moderated by Terence Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners, a boutique media investment bank.
This panel discussion on the brand lift of targeted TV advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>The mindset of big brands accustomed to the notion that they can buy a massive audience of adults from 18 to 49 is a large factor, according to Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media.
“In order to shift from an analog model to this model we’re talking about today, not only do we need to better refine our segments so we can reduce our waste, we need to help convince the media owners that if they go from a broad scope to a narrow scope, it will improve their yield and everyone will make money,” says Bologna, in a panel discussion recorded at Cannes by Beet.TV.
“Free the Data”
Another argument is that demand from large advertisers matters far less than the sheer availability of consumer data, which is still mostly locked up behind the cable operators.
“The thing that’s really holding us back is access to the data to really transform the business model,” says Tracey Scheppach, SMG’s EVP-Precision Video Director. “We’ve shown that we’re going to pay a higher CPM [for addressable TV]. We get more, we pay more.”
AT&T Adworks President Mike Welch notes that his unit is focused on observing consumer behavior across media.
“How do we follow that television subscriber when he or she consumes content on mobile devices and other screens?” he says. “That’s something we’re as focused on as anything right now.”
Scheppach, Bologna and Welch were part of a Cannes panel discussion on targeted TV advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>“MediaVest has completely rethought staffing on our business. For the most part, it’s been very positive and our campaigns have benefitted from it,” according to Heineken USA senior media director Ron Amram.
Speaking alongside Amram on a Cannes Lions panel, MediaVest digital data and technology president Carrie Seifer said the idea was to free people to be more creative.
“If we use programmatic correctly, it should give creatives the data they need so they can go and be creative – look at the data, then create something great,” Seifer said
Digital people thrive when they’re allowed to master digital. It’s risky to decentralize digital sometimes. But we’ve found, by decentralising AOD, it became … AOD at the table way upstream, thinking about how programmatic could affect the strategy. All of a sudden, the RFP is informed with programmatic built at the centre.”
Update: After Cannes, Heineken announced the selection of Publicis for the global creative.
This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event. Please find additional videos from the series here.
]]>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.
]]>Designed to help SMG clients with their content marketing efforts, Content@Scale gives quick access to licensed content produced by more than 36 publishers and 135 content contributors, including CBSi, Kiplinger, Mode, Popsugar and AOL, as well as owned content from brand websites, YouTube videos, tweets and Facebook posts.
“It gives brands the ability to associate with quality content … that’s relevant to what [they] care about and to what consumers are talking about and publish that content into paid ads,” says Lisa Weinstein, SMG’s president of global digital, data and analytics. “That really is the value proposition of Content@Scale.”
The program first launched at CES in 2014. Now there are more than 350,000 searchable articles, images and videos in the database, which brands can incorporate into ad units and other types of communications.
At launch, the focus was on display as a distribution channel for content, via a partnership with Flite. Now, working through SMG’s partner Innovid, brands can transform their pre-roll video into interactive and personalized experiences by tapping into the Content@Scale database. And via Nativo, they can insert their content into native formats in publisher streams.
We interviewed Weinstein earlier this month at SMG’s headquarters in Chicago.
]]>For that reason, VivaKi’s AOD trading desk has been moving programmatic specialists over to client teams at Publicis Groupe’s media agencies.
“It makes sense that we would have that programmatic buying capability within our agencies rather than having it be siloed,” says David Gould, SMG’s EVP-global digital managing director, in an interview with Beet.TV. He also notes that integrated teams will make it more viable to deliver insights to advertisers about their digital audiences that can be leveraged across all their executions.
While Gould doesn’t think that SMG needs to become a technology company, he says there’s a focus on “technology-enabled services.” That’s made possible through partnerships with tech platforms and, in one recent notable case, the purchase of one. Last fall, Publicis bought an ad-tech firm called Run to help its agencies target and track digital ads — especially on mobile — more effectively.
Gould says that Run helps make the programmatic world more transparent to clients, who worry about where their money is going and who takes a piece of it along the way.
“[It] gives us insight into how the black box works so that we can best allocate our clients’ money across the right DSPs and make sure we’re playing correctly in the marketplace,” he says.
We interviewed Gould at the SMG offices in Chicago earlier this month.
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