That is according to the North America boss of the world’s largest media-buying agency, GroupM.
Tim Castree, GroupM North America CEO, in this video with Beet.TV, says traditional TV, therefore, remains robust with plenty of remaining upside to sell data-optimized traditional TV ad campaigns.
He is calling for “open” standards to change the game.
Castree spoke with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp, in this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” in August.
Castree is calling for three things to accelerate adoption:
Swartz described Castree’s vision for a common standard as “ensuring that they have a UID that allows them to identify unduplicated reach across multiple supply sources.”
He added: “Within that (standard), we’re (need) to understand, who have we reached perhaps, and at what level of certainty, and who have we reached for certain.
“We want to bring other data into systems where we care about people as the central kind of units that we measure things around. I think we can do a lot more with television than we are today.”
Castree accused certain vendors of acting in their own best interests.
“We’ve had a lot of systems … a lot of companies trying to bundle data, technology, and inventory, and not bring it back to us,” he said. “(But,) we (at agencies) want to buy that in a disaggregated way.
“Bring the data back to us, so we can de-duplicate it and look across that”
Some of these challenges may seem big. But Castree is confident. “I think we can get all those three things done in the next year,” he said.
That is because it isn’t the technology holding back adoption, it is protectionism.
“When we don’t operate this way, we give a massive advantage to the walled gardens (Google, Facebook and Amazon).”
And GroupM seems intent on the industry building common standards in an open way.
“Our goal at GroupM is to have an approach … which is not some locked-in GroupM standard.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That was the subject of a conversation between Tim Castree, GroupM north America CEO, and Howard Shimmel, president of his own Janus Strategy & Insights at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.
Asked by Shimmel about measuring how many viewers saw a TV ad, Castree replied: “I do think it’s just a simple agreement about math.
“Let’s just say (it’s) 60% likely that … the person we wanted to reach in that household saw that impression, even though we don’t know precisely.
“Let’s just agree some of those things – and I don’t think it’s complicated. It doesn’t require a lot of technology. It’s a simple agreement about a math-based kind of framework for translating things back to a common impression standard.”
Castree had another framework to offer, too – a three-pronged approach to being able to transact ad impressions across platforms:
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Over the last two years, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.
For one of the leading media agencies’ north America bosses, the change is becoming pronounced.
“The world is starting to bifurcate,” says Tim Castree, GroupM north America CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. He sees two emerging classes of video or TV delivery, each with very different experiences:
What does that mean for marketers? First, for broadcasters, Castree sees change coming.
“The direction of travel (is) away from 16, 18 minutes of ads an hour piled in with massive repetitiveness and frequency into much more controlled and targeted OTT environments where the experience is much, much better for the consumer and I think the performance is better for the marketer,” he says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.
]]>As in, make things as simple as possible for the biggest of clients and the teams within GroupM while putting forth a value proposition to attract mid-level or insurgent brands, according to GroupM North America CEO Tim Castree. “We are looking to radically simplify our business,” he says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Two areas of particular focus for Castree are increasing the company’s specialist capabilities while strengthening the core fundamentals of successful cross channel planning and activation. “Obviously, the business has been changing a lot for us.”
Formerly the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, Castree assumed his new position in December of 2018, as Campaign reports.
Business at GroupM has been growing in areas like content, ecommerce, precision and performance marketing, analytics and data sciences. “These are the things that are becoming increasingly part of the integrated media offering, so that’s what we’re in business to deliver,” Castree explains.
Asked about the growth and influence of GroupM’s [m]PLATFORM, he describes it as “a kind of liberation if you will” of technology assets that had existed inside of Xaxis. MPlatform is now a key element of WPP’s overall tech strategy.
While advanced capabilities are important, clients are looking for “foundational” work on holistic cross-channel and cross-platform activation, some that’s been hindered by walled gardens, different ad environments and the fragmentation of ad formats. “But it’s still really in many ways what clients are looking for.”
Recruiting the appropriate mix of talent is constrained by the combined pressures of client procurement and market competition.
“So a lot of the strategic things that we’re trying to get done are happening in an environment where the core business has been getting squeezed, and it’s been difficult to make a lot of the investment choices that we need to make to grow our business into the future,” Castree says.
Noting that media agencies generally attract “graduates in fairly monolithic ways,” GroupM is seeking to refine its recruitment efforts by working with technical schools and training specialists “to bring more qualified people into the organization and then do that across a number of various work streams.”
]]>While a lot of progress has been made in the last several years, “there’s still too many people that want to own their own solutions, own their own data,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to CES 2019. “So we’re seeing a lot of advanced television silos pop up, which makes it more challenging and less simple to aggregate that back up for marketers.”
Formerly the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, Castree took on his new role earlier this month, as AdExchanger reports. The CEO position had been held by Brian Lesser, who joined AT&T in 2017 to build an advertising and analytics platform for the data and content assets the company would acquire from Time Warner.
Castree sees too many publishers that want to create their own end-to-end solution comprising data, inventory and technology “and sell it bundled in a package.” Hence GroupM’s focus on collaboration, consortiums and a “disaggregation of technology, inventory and data so we can re-aggregate more bespoke solutions for individual advertisers.”
Judging by market mix modeling and performance attribution, “video is still the top of the performance stack” but it’s a fragmented world of premium video distribution.
Stressing the importance of scale, particularly for mass-marketed products, advertisers can’t always target their way to growth, according to Castree. Within that scale lies the ability to add targeting layers and dynamic creative optimization to find “more interesting, nuanced and targeted ways to reach certain segments of those audiences.”
Asked about marketers’ understanding the value proposition behind addressable and other forms of audience targeting, given the incremental cost of creative, data and technology, Castree adds, “I think some advertisers understand it very well and others don’t. Everybody understands it conceptually.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, global CEO Tim Castree offers three pillars…
Marriage of media content and technology: “Media is not just about the distribution of paid messages anymore. It’s also about how dynamic content, and one-to-one content, and technology, data and platforms, and the new forms of distribution, are really coming together to create a different experience for consumers and different outcomes for advertisers.”
Simplify the noise: “There’s a lot of noise in the world of media at the moment, and we were really looking for ways to simplify. How can we take something which just feels endlessly filled with buzzwords, baloney and BS, and just start to really simplify what media is for our clients, and how we help them to create a change in their business?”
An obsession with purchase journeys: Castree’s team focused on consumers’ purchase journey to clients’ products. By understanding that journey holistically, he says, agencies can help brands make the right interventions.
Last year, Wavemaker parent GroupM launched [m]Platform, a “suite” that comprises data analytics, audience insights, data scientists, technologists from across other GroupM divisions, and in to it wrapped Xaxis, its programmatic and data-driven ad unit.
Castree says [m]Platform is a “big bet on audience-based targeting”, with data for 1.4 billion people.
But, by year’s end, he says, Wavemaker will have added a million purchase journeys to the system, via sibling Kantar’s Lightspeed product.
Castree is also jury president of the Media Lions for the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>So says Tim Castree, global CEO of the Wavemaker agency formed from the merger of Group M’s MEC and Maxus.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Castree says traditional TV viewing is declining – but, by means of consolation, many viewers are migrating to TV and video platforms with addressable advertising capabilities.
There, an old style of targeting meets a new one. Probabilistic targeting, in which a plan places an ad somewhere a planner believes a viewer is more likely to be in the intended group, is meeting deterministic marketing, in which the identity and intentions of a viewer can – thanks to data points – actually be known.
“We’ve been buying audiences since the 1980s,” he says. “We’ve been optimising demos into audiences. That’s what all of our optimization systems have been built on for 20 or 30 years. So in many ways, it’s not at all new.”
“What we’re doing now is really marrying that with more deterministic or addressable channels so we can know you’re absolutely in the market for a Mercedes versus probably in the market for a Mercedes.
“So it’s really the marriage of deterministic targeting with more probabilistic optimization, bringing that together in video, which is really what’s happening of the landscape of video at the moment.”
Castree says the ability to use both types of approach on the same screen will lead to new creative opportunities.
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.
]]>His first-time judging gig comes after the Cannes Lions reached a tipping point in 2017 as some agencies pushed back on the cost and scale of the venerable event. “It’s going to be a little bit more subdued this year,” Castree, the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Nonetheless, he’s “excited to dig into the work.” With pre-judging efforts already under way, “I’m up to my eyeballs in looking at work at the moment.”
Castree believes that there’s a “simple mission” to Cannes: celebrating the context of creativity from both a macro—the “zeitgeist” of what’s happening around the world—and micro scale. About the former, he points to all the “excitement and change going on in the world,” along with disruption and cause-related movements.
“There’s a lot of places and spaces for brands to get involved in the conversation in the larger context of all the excitement and change going on in the world,” Castree says. “Great brands love to be part of bigger conversations.”
As a judge of award entries, he’s interested in the contextual aspects of media and “how brands take advantage of what is going on in our times and to be part of those conversations in ways that are interesting and engaging.”
On the micro side of things, Castree talks about addressability, data and targeting and “the context of one to one.” Combining the macro with the micro provides “great opportunities for brands to show how they marry creativity and context” to drive business outcomes.
He brings a particular view to his judging duties when it comes to entries that might stretch the strict definition of a Cannes media entry, noting that “media entries come from everywhere.”
So he will be on the lookout for entries that “get stacked with a lot of things that aren’t always about media. I’ve seen a little bit of that already, to be honest. Ideas matter, but there’s a lot of other places at Cannes for ideas to get recognized and rewarded.”
He feels that this year’s event will be more subdued than last year because “agencies have pulled back a little bit. Without Publicis there it’s going to make a difference,” he says in reference to the holding company’s voluntary absence from Cannes 2018.
In any case, he thinks it’s “appropriate to reset a little bit and refocus on the central themes of the power of creativity to move business and to move people.” Distractions at previous Cannes festivals have included celebrities, luxury and scenery, “which are fun and wonderful but that really can distract from the central focus and message of what Cannes is all about.”
For Wavemaker, Cannes is about the “density of intellect, the density of talent, the density of great thought leaders, thinkers. For us that’s about media, content and technology and how the marriage of those three things are really creating the future of media.”
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview series of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by FreeWheel, a Comcast company. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Wavemaker uses a two-step process that begins with identifying “the gaps, barriers, challenges, opportunities” associated with the purchase journey, the agency’s Global CEO says in this interview with Beet.TV. “The second question within that is what are the audiences that we can most tap to unlock growth in the context of that purchase journey opportunity.”
“The connection between our macro purchase journey research and insight tools and our programmatic audience platforms is really how we connect the world of purchasing journey planning into the audience-driven activation models that exist for us today.”
The “connective tissue” is largely [m]Platform, Group M’s means of unifying WPP Group agencies’ access to data and technology. “We do all of our purchase journey research on top of mPlatform, connected through a Kantar product called LIVE Panel. That enables us to seamless connect what we see in the macro trends around purchase journeys to the audiences that we want to trade on programmatically once we understand them in that purchase journey context.”
When it was introduced two years ago, LIVE Panel provided access to a global panel of more than 5.5 million consumers in 30 markets. Components included such Kantar offerings as Lightspeed, Kantar Worldpanel, Kantar Shopcom, Millward Brown BrandZ, TGI and TNS Connected Life.
Even with the advances of programmatic technology, advertising media will continue to be a mixed trading model for a long time to come, according to Castree.
“There’s a lot of people in the industry who think that this whole thing is on an inexorable march to everything being bidded and I couldn’t disagree with that context more.”
Premium video, for example, will always represent “a relatively scarce environment. More places are going to want to continue to transact on an upfront basis and lock pricing in and manage that holistically,” Castree says.
“I think we’re going to be operating in a world of mixed trading types, upfront traded, futures traded and real-time trading well into the foreseeable future.”
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>This is why Wavemaker’s “principal and defining obsession” is with the purchase journey, says Global CEO Tim Castree.
It’s not simply that chief marketing officers care about the purchase journey, Castree explains in this interview with Beet.TV. Research from IBM indicates that 83% of “progressive, transformational CEO’s organize themselves and their own thinking around consumers and how they make their way to products and brands on the path to purchase,” he says.
“It’s a very well understood context.”
The main reason why media, content and technology agency Wavemaker is “principally obsessed” with the purchase journey is that it lets the agency simplify “in a very complex world how we talk about our products, services and solutions. And how they work to benefit our customers and prospects.”
Asked about the biggest challenges facing CMO’s these days, Castree points to the broad area of fragmentation—less from an audience standpoint than a maze of choices in the digital era—and how best to calculate ROI. He believes there has been an excessive obsessiveness with ROI.
“People are over obsessed with ROI past the point of diminishing returns. So we’re optimizing increasingly to the lowest cost things, but we’re not looking at the full picture of marketing returns over time.”
While market mix modeling has long been a staple of CMO activity, modern times have brought a lot of focus on multi-touch attribution. But according to Castree, “A lot of those attribution models don’t take full account of the effects of marketing over time and the way they build performance over time.”
The bottom line is over optimizing “to the point of diminishing returns” to the bottom of the purchase funnel.
“I think there’s a lot of more fragmented decision making happening in the boardrooms as we think about things like programmatic or working with Google or on and on and on,” Castree says.
Wavemaker sees opportunity in bringing all the essentials together in a much more holistic and fully attributed approach to media and marketing, which leads full circle to understanding the consumer purchase journey not just as a concept.
“Understanding it econometrically is really the key for us to be able to give our clients the best advice about how to really reintegrate all of those pieces to drive a better outcome,” says Castree.
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>“Amanda is a fantastic choice to be our US leader,” Castree said in a news release. “She is universally liked and respected by her people, her clients and her partners in the marketplace and I’m delighted that she’s joining our global team.”
In the same release, Richman said the MEC offer “was just too good of an opportunity to pass up. With leading talent and tech in place, we have an opportunity to drive the new agency model forward faster, in partnership with our clients and the marketplace.”
As President of Investment at Starcom USA, Richman architected and led the agency’s cross-channel investment practice across clients including Airbnb, Bank of America, Kraft Heinz and Samsung. Previously, she served as President of Digital for Mediavest, building its digital team and capability. Prior to joining SMG, Richman held digital leadership roles at The Interpublic Group as Managing Director of their first digital agency, and at Time Warner leading client services for the company’s interactive television division.
The merger of MEC and Maxus takes effect in January 2018.
Beet.TV interviewed Richman earlier this year in Los Angeles at the 4A’s conference. We are republishing the interview with today’s news.
Despite great advances in digital and television audience targeting, platform-specific creative is a milestone the industry has yet to achieve. Until a silver bullet arrives, there’s some “simple stuff” that agencies and brands can do, according to Amanda Richman.
“One of them being, let’s bring together all the right parties that all have the same interest in success in the briefing process,” says the President of Investment & Activation at Starcom USA.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Richman discusses the need for creative—not just media—to drive effectiveness and the eternal value of human input in a technology laden industry.
Richman believes that digital audience targeting has been perfected and new network television audience optimization products are showing lots of promise toward the same end. Programmatic “is certainly elevating our game” with respect to brand safety, when it comes to controls and processes.
“But we still have not put sufficient time, resources and attention really to the space around creative messaging that is more bespoke to the audience,” she says.
The goal is to make a more meaningful impact with consumers and engaging with them not only in a campaign “but maybe across a longer period of time.”
As for the “simple stuff that we still need to crack,” it starts with having the right people at the table during the briefing process and then sticking to the brief. “Let’s map out what it is that we’re trying to achieve and understand where we actually can make that happens,” says Richman.
The process includes tapping the best practices of publishers that can help agencies understand, say, how to make the best six-second commercial format or the best experience on Snapchat. The end goal is to “really sequence and synchronize campaigns in a way that can make an impact over time,” Richman says.
“Humans and their ideas and their creativity lead the best work,” she adds. It’s something “you can’t replace with technology.”
]]>This was the view shared by representatives of MEC and Videology at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and moderated by Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink.
When MEC’s Global CEO, Tim Castree, considers TV and video convergence he’s less concerned with where it’s at than he is in the context for doing it, because context “is where the motivation comes from” for the industry to move faster.
“We are in a really consequential time for our industry. For agencies, it’s a jump ball whether we’re going to more relevant or less relevant five years from now,” said Castree.
The best hedge against a lack of relevance “is solving technologically the cross-screen convergence opportunity. I actually see it as a competitive imperative that we continue to solve this challenge.”
Asked by Spiegel why agencies should fixate on that particular challenge, Castree pointed to the sheer ad dollars brands invest in television and premium video inventory and the manner in which they do so. He says this inventory will always be traded principally in an upfront, futures manner, which lends itself to media agencies’ “trading scale and the role we play in the market as the market makers.”
Adding technology to achieve more advanced optimization would seal the deal, according to Castree.
“Obviously, Google, Facebook, Accenture are never going to be traders of the upfront commodity of television and premium video. So bringing those two things together gives us a unique hedge against what others are trying to do to us,” he said.
Videology’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said that Castree “nailed it in terms of his answer” and went on to list companies that are gradually invading the space that has long been the territory of agencies.
“The number of times we’re hearing names like Oracle and Accenture and PWC in conversations these days which we didn’t hear a year ago is incredible,” Jamboretz observed.
Spiegel opined that it’s not as if the more established media players like NBCUniversal, Viacom and Turner under AT&T are going away anytime soon.
“They are essential, they probably aren’t going anywhere, but they’re in the same fight we’re in,” said Castree.
For both the buy-side and sell-side, the rate of change needs to increase dramatically, regardless of what has already taken place, he added.
“We’ve had a massive rate of change in our business in the last five years. But if the rate of change in our business for the next five years looks like the last five, we will have fallen behind,” Castree said.
Meanwhile, on the the sell side, “The more complex and advanced guys are saying, ‘How do I use this to stitch together all my distribution points into a converged offer,’” said Jamboretz.
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“That’s really more what we’re focused on versus worrying too much about getting to a fixed definition of what’s premium and what’s not,” said Tim Castree, Global CEO of MEC, during a panel discussion at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
Castree was responding to a question by moderator Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink, who offered that premium content “is one of those words that doesn’t really have a definition.”
From premium content the discussion turned to the consumer video ad experience, the preponderance of tech solutions and the challenges to content sellers and buyers posed by the mixed trading model most publishers are having to deal with.
Asked by Spiegel whether Videology is seeing video stream providers paying more attention to the quality of the consumer experience then just doling out lots of ad impressions, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said things have definitely improved.
Five or six years ago, Jamboretz noted, when broadcasters “put their over-the-top television out they were over-monetizing, I would argue. They were putting way too many ads in the streams at the beginning.”
He acknowledged “some really great work being done by people like Fox around what is the appropriate ad load” while stating that “I don’t think we’re there yet.”
Spiegel asked whether there are too many technology stacks and not enough standards and commonality.
“It’s highly ambitious if a bit naïve to think that any one company is going to be the full stack,” said Jamboretz. “For us it’s all about interoperability.”
He cited as one company that is “doing it right” Sky in Europe, which is a sell-side client of Videology. “We’re their monetization solution on the supply side but we also work for Tim’s company and many others in that market as a demand-side platform,” said Jamboretz. “So we play both of those functions. And that works better than having to be the top-to-bottom stack for every cable company in Europe or in the U.S.”
According to Castree, one advancement that would greatly benefit the industry is better publisher yield management. Publishers are “dealing with a very complicated environment,” given their remnant interaction with supply side platforms, premium deals in the UpFronts, direct programmatic transactions—some of it on demographics, others on audiences.
He said this mixed trading model is one reason “we’re struggling technologically with all these home-grown solutions.”
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>This is the viewpoint that Tim Castree brought to global advertising and media planning agency MEC upon his arrival as CEO from Videology, following stints at MediaVest and Leo Burnett. Having been tapped to lead the merger of GroupM’s MEC and Maxus earlier this month, Castree sees a need for more standardization for targeting and measurement and fewer “home-grown” solutions.
Many people look at advanced TV and premium video “and say it’s obvious, we get better targeting, we get better performance, etcetera,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV. “But there’s a larger context that I’m not sure people are talking about in the industry that’s really essential.”
While companies like Google and Facebook are “fantastic, important partners” they represent “disintermediation against the agency model at the moment,” according to Castree.
Meanwhile, he alludes to consultancies that are attempting to lower the rank of agencies on the value chain.
“They want to give all the smart advice and try to relegate us to execution,” Castree says.
So the opportunity for better optimization of advanced TV and premium video isn’t just about better performance. “It’s our bulwark. It’s our big hedge against the competitive threats and disintermediation.”
The route to erecting these ramparts is by bringing more data, targeting and addressability “but more importantly more standardization to the approach behind which we transact in premium video.”
In other words, a common way to apply different types of data to targeting and measurement.
“The challenge we’re having at the moment is everybody is building a home- grown solution,” Castree observes. “There’s just a multitude of home-grown solutions so it’s getting more fragmented, more difficult to navigate and the power is in some form of consolidation around that.”
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Now we may see an accelerating flurry of mergers and acquisitions, as larger players gobble up vendors to streamline the ecosystem again, a panel convened by Beet.TV discussed…
MediaMath’s O’Connell lamented that, too often, ad buying involves planning across multiple separate “fiefdoms” of publishers. “That creates disjointed user experience,” she said, adding that, in this day and age: “What really makes it magical is when you have a unified view of each user as a human, not as a cookie or a device.”
O’Connell said the industry is beginning to get a holistic view of consumers, even if it means piecing together different parts of an increasingly voluminous technology “stack”.
One way to get unification is through consolidation. “The notion of a single platform, it’s not going to happen,” said Videology’s Castree. “We’re going to see consolidation in three waves” – buy-ups of “point solutions” (single-task tech vendors), aggregation of decisioning technologies and further interoperability.
Who’ll buy? As the so-called “mar-tech” wave grows, Castree said: “I think you’ll see the Oracles, IBMs and Salesforces start to really look at advertising technology.”
Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, the founder of Furious Corp, asked if acquirers would be the usual big beasts like Google and Facebook.
Google’s own VanDerzee said: “It makes good theater to make it a zero-sum game, a battle of the titans. But the reality is, it’s not a zero-sum game. There are so many opportunities for companies to provide tremendous value. We’re going to see a lot of different entrants to the marketplace.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was moderated by Furious Corp founder Ashley J. Swartz.
]]>But, as the technology has matured, it has also begun to allow for old-fashioned-style upfront buys – with all the added efficiency of programmatic. A panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the topic:
“You can merge programmatic and guaranteed,” MediaMath’s Cox said. “Programmatic is neither real-time nor bidded. You can make a forward commitment on a guarantee on a specific volume, specific value and flight date and hit it.”
Videology’s Castree agreed, saying: “In the US last year, 99% of video sold last year was on a guaranteed, futures basis. Fifty-eight percent of inventory through our platform last year was clients bringing their own upfront deals.”
But the arrival of upfront ad deals also makes some wonder if they are losing the unique advantage programmatic brings.
What was a great decision 24 hours ago might be a poor decision now,” said Target’s Reiter, calling for flexibility. “When I hear ‘guaranteed’, somewhere in there must be some loss of agility.” GroupM’s Kowan said: Maintaining that agility is absolutely critical.”
MediaMath’s Cox said his company strikes the balance by having embraced header tags, allowing real-time data to support guaranteed transactions by having eliminated exchanges.
Separately, GroupM’s Kowan said programmatic is merely a toolset, not a strategy, and does little to change the role that agencies play for brands overall.
And the panel discussed how, with the basics of programmatic now in place, advertisers will soon get to benefit from more – developments Kowan said include “attribution based on in-store sales, and exposure time and session depth, personalisation”.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was chaired by MediaLink data and technology SVP Matt Spiegel.
]]>Moderating this session is Christina Beaumier, SVP at Xaxis.
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.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
]]>
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.
]]>Each promises to serve customers with a specific part of the value chain – but one vendor says this just confuses customers.
“There is a massive amount of programmatic point solutions popping up which make it more complicated to realize the efficiency and value of programmatic,” according to Videology North America MD Tim Castree. “No agency can deal with 65 programmatic point solutions.”
Although Castree criticised these vendors who do one thing, he also criticized those who try to offer too many services: “There’s a wall garden thing going on where you get tied in to a technology ecosystem. We’re not trying to own en ‘end-to-end’ technology stack”
He was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat by Furious Corp founder and CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
]]>“At end of 2015, we’ll be lucky if 3% of the total video universe is transacted programmatically,” ad tech firm Videology Group‘s north America MD Tim Castree tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“There will be a day in the future when every television in this country is addressable (individually targetable). What do we do in the meantime?
“There’s no point sitting around waiting for the perfect world to emerge. How do we create more value in the imperfect world today? The addressable audience is growing – there’s 42m homes in the (US) addressable footprint, 110m connected screens. ”
Castree also talks with Beet.TV about Videology’s recent partnership with Mediaocean.
He was interviewed at Beet.TV’s Beet Retreat annual get-together in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
]]>So is the very existence of the media agency under threat? Not according to one agency exec who has just crossed to the other side.
“More clients want to get involved in the decisions about what platforms they work with – it’s only natural,” according to Tim Castree, MediaVest’s USA COO, who recently joined video ad platform Videology to run North America operations.
“A lot of people see that as the canary in the coal mine for the disintermediation of media agencies in the future. That is not a world view that I subscribe to. Much like incredible trading technologies didn’t spell the end of financial services companies, I don’t see the incredible platforms coming to bear on the business of media ultimately spelling the end of the media business.”
Castree tells Beet.TV agencies will survive if they quickly iterate to clients’ needs.
Castree and Videology at the Beet Retreat
Castree will be a speaker at next month’s Beet Retreat in Fort Lauderdale, which is being co-sponsored by AOL and Videology. Participants in the forthcoming event are listed below:
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