“We have GRP’s, we have declining linear audiences around 18-34 and we have the unreachables that are on non- ad-supported platforms or non-measured platforms,” says Fiona Carter, Chief Brand Officer, AT&T Communications. “So what are we going to do about that? How are we going to move to an all-screen measurement that works across all of the networks, all of the digital players?”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Carter applauds the coalescence of competitors joining forces to facilitate not only reach and engagement with audiences but also the ability to measure the ROI of those engagements.

“In the end, although we’re very keen on brand building and we’re very keen on measuring how well our brand engages with our audience, we’re also here to sell at the end of the day,” Carter says. “And so trying to get the ROI out of everything we do so that we can prove we’re an investment and not a cost I think is an ultimate goal for a CMO.”

Among the offerings at Cannes, she identifies artificial intelligence from IBM, Quantcast and others as “one of the most fascinating conversations here at Cannes.” She echoes the desire to harness AI to improve marketing while wondering about its impact on advertising creativity. “Can they coexist? Can machine learning actually inspire greater creativity or will it be the end of creativity as we know it.?”

Asked for her thoughts on blockchain technology, Carter says AT&T is “doing a lot on blockchain” while noting that “everyone understands the murkiness of the digital advertising ecosystem. As a marketer, I feel many of us have been asleep at the wheel in understanding when our budget goes in through our agencies how much comes out to meet the publishers and eventually the consumers.”

She praises “these companies that are trying to help us work out the tradeoff of all of these service taxes and tolls and what the value is ultimately and frankly what the real price of operating in the programmatic supply chain should be.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

“We’re actually introducing something that we think is really informative and revealing things about the new brand identity that’s going to be associated with this advertising company,” McDonald adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

Earlier this month, AT&T prevailed over the Justice Department in its bid to acquire Time Warner’s assets, foremost among them HBO, Turner and Warner Bros.

“We are very excited about the outcome of the trial,” says McDonald. “For sure, this actually allows our business to actually go forward and execute against the strategy that we believe is really going to be very, very valuable to consumers, to the marketers and publishers we work with as well as to the AT&T business for all.”

The branding effort at Cannes introduces “a new business that reflects a welcoming of the creative canvas, tied together with informed by technology and data in a way that truly advertising companies haven’t existed before.”

There are no words in AT&T’s branding unveiled at the Carlton, just colors, starting with “trusted blue on one end” signifying the company’s 140-year roots and the brand’s “credibility and high integrity,” says McDonald.

“And that transitions across the face of the Carlton to produce a new color, bright coral, which has all of what that color embodies. Energy, passion, innovation. And that is the brand color of the new name for this advertising business and we can’t wait to talk more about what we’re going to be doing inside that business later this year.”

“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.”

Fast-forward and you had deals like NBC and Comcast and now the pending acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, flanked by the emergence of Amazon, Facebook and Google as video disruptors.

“All of a sudden, the U.S. really woke up as it became apparent that audiences were fragmenting and ratings were declining, especially among some key audiences,” recalls Ryan Jamboretz, CRO of TV and video software provider Videology.

This awakening has forced traditional cable companies and MVPD’s to face the reality of “competition from old foes, people in their own competitive set, and these kind of new barbarians at the gate,” Jamboretz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions gathering, where he was a panelist on the Advanced TV Summit.

Previously, companies needed only be proficient at distributing other peoples’ content or creating it. “Now they’re having to become both. If not become experts at monetization within that as well,” Jamboretz says.

As a “pretty global company,” Videology had a ringside seat to “bleeding-edge stuff on TV and video combining” as the result of its work with pioneers like Sky TV.

In the U.S., it’s companies like AT&T that “are really the ones we’re seeing with most of the innovation,” says Jamboretz.

Videology never sought to be a “jack-of-all-trades” in the digital arena. “For us it’s been a wonderful kind of awakening of the industry over the last two or three years as this challenge of how do we tackle TV turning digital has now kind of hit on all fronts,” he says.

One of the company’s keys to success is that it’s still privately held. “We have the luxury of not having to kind of expose all our state secrets, and I think we have every intent to keep doing 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.

“You’ll see something from over the next four to six weeks – a video-only offering in mobile,” company video SVP J.R. McCabe told Beet.TV’s cross-platform monetization summit, hosted by Starcom MediaVest and sponsored by Dailymotion.

“Mobile video had been a nascent offering in Time Inc until, 10 months ago, we started a very, very steep and strong development curve on that.”

It’s a marker of how far mobile has come as a content consumption platform in its own right that we are now seeing context-, device-specific channels launch, sweeping aside media companies’ historic strategy of taking core content on to multiple screens.

At Beet.TV’s summit, McCabe also hinted that Dailymotion would soon be added to its recently-launched video partner network, extending Time Inc’s increasing video production capability across the French-owned video service.

Watch the full interview for how the publisher is trying to extend its multi-platform credentials whilst also being spun out from its owner.

Media luminaries to speak include Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner; WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell; Thomas Rabe, CEO of Bertelsmann and several top media industry innovators.

For an overview on the conference, we spoke with FT’s Media Editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson who will be one of the event’s moderators.

Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.