Browser cookie deprecation, plus limits on mobile identifiers imposed by Apple amongst others, are limiting traditional  targeting methods used by advertisers.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, one ad agency executive says technology can come riding in to help.

Loss of signal

“Many marketers already made the choice to work with specific partners, lean on specific technologies, says Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at GropM’s Wavemaker.

“The burning questions we get today from marketers is more about the changes they have to make because of privacy.

“They see a massive pressure coming from all these changes related to privacy.”

“We’re going to lose lots of (audience) signals.”

After the identifier

The loss of those signals has emerged as the key advertiser challenge in 2020 and 2021.

One of the solutions mooted is a leaning toward first-party data, that which can be gathered from consumers with permission.

But, with some expecting the vast majority of iOS users, for example, not to opt in to tracking like location and app usage, finding users in the noise is getting more difficult.

Machines offer help

Hernoux sees a solution in artificial intelligence.

“The power of machine learning is really to build this layer of intelligence on top of a more limited amount of signals and translate that into something which is quite meaningful,” she says.

What kind of intelligence? That depends on the use case.

“It may be insight, it can be intelligence that is going to optimise media planning, but it can also be the predictive piece,” Hernoux claims.

“Everybody’s looking to really know where you need to put your media dollars to maximise the return on investment and contribute more to your bottom line.”

But, increasingly, artificial intelligence algorithms are proving they can restore the primacy of ad creative.

That is what a host of industry executives discussed when they gathered on June 23 for the Global Forum on Responsible Media,

This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the creativity/technology  advertising track presented by IBM Watson Advertising.

1. Dynamic creative rising

The New Majority: MediaCom’s Prabhu Aims To Make Advertising Addressable

Dynamic creative versioning is allowing advertisers to deliver a diverse range of re-mixed ad creatives for consumers. But Anush Prabhu – US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, for MediaCom – says companies need to lean on software for something that is becoming too complex for humans, in two areas:

• Production: Prabhu’s MediaCom is tapping tools like WPP Open and Flashtalking to produce creative in many versions connected to foundational insights.
• Optimization: Then he wants to understand which versions are working. “There are so many variations within those messages, whether it’s the right colour, do we have people in it?,” he asks. “How much of the product should be seen? All those aspects get even more complex when you add the different audience variations.”

2. Machines help scale creative palette

AI Helps Brands Re-Focus On Creative: IBM’s Redmond

Robert Redmond thinks he has the answer – if producing a plethora of different ad creatives for a burgeoning range of audience types if complex for humans, call on the machines to help.

Specifically, machine learning like that offered by Redmon’s IBM is increasingly being called on to anticipate and remix the optimum ad creatives for different viewers.

“We teach an algorithm how to predict which individual assets to combine at real time to be most relevant for that consumer,” says Redmond, whose IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions.

“We’re going to see more and more uses of technology and creativity together in very powerful ways to do this type of work.”

3. Context is back, with a fresh new look

‘Data Artistry’ Unlocks Context & Cohorts: Mindshare’s Clayton’s Post-Cookie Dreams

Creative-focused technology is important because there is a growing sentiment that ad creative, in the programmatic era, has been overlooked in favor of super-targeting alone.

But it also comes as ad buyers look for solutions in the era after third-party cookies and digital identifiers. And that is seeing the re-emergence of contextual targeting.

“Context has always been considered this old-school thing of the past,” says  Sean Clayton, executive director, solutions officer at WPP’s Mindshare. “But, really, as you start understanding that people move in waves, they move in larger cohorts, the ability to start executing against those cohorts is actually pretty exciting, especially when you can look within the programmatic ecosystem.”

4. Restoring signal in an age of noise

Machine learning can help advertisers in the new world, despite declining usefulness of traditional identifiers, says Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at GropM’s Wavemaker.

“The power of machine learning is really to build this layer of intelligence on top of a more limited amount of signals and translate that into something which is quite meaningful,” she says.

“It may be insight, it can be intelligence that is going to optimise media planning, but it can also be the predictive piece. Everybody’s looking to really know where you need to put your media dollars to maximise the return on investment and contribute more to your bottom line.”

5. Piloting data signals

Xiao Lin of Xaxis wants to make sure clients have really bespoke creative that speaks to consumers. But he, too, wants to lean on technology to get there.

The GroupM division uses a tool called Copilot that uses signals like browser, location, time of day and the weather “to create thousands of creative variations on the fly”, Lin says: “It introduces thousands more different data inputs to which then our AI Copilot could actually optimise towards the output or the client’s outcome.”

She is a pioneer in the programmatic space, starting her career on the sell side with stints at AOL, CNET and at Sky where she headed the satellite company’s trading desk.

She joined the buy side in the early days of Dentsu’s Amnet and remained with the company at its Amplifi and Carat units. The British born executive moved from London  to New York five years ago.

Last just July, she was tapped to head the Americas region for GroupM’s Wavemaker.

In our conversation, she speaks about her career and her perspective racial bias  in the United States as a British Asian. Speaks of her hopes that her work will lead society to a better place.

And she speaks about the evolving role of the media agency and the direction of Wavemaker with a range of brands including several, new disrupter companies.

Great conversation.  Thanks Louisa.

Thanks to the BeetCast sponsor Mediaocean.

And thank you for listening.  I hope you enjoy the episode.

That is the view of an experienced advertising exec who has skated on both sides of the ice.

In this video interview by Beet.TV guest host Tim Spengler of Amobee, Vinny Rinaldi, head of activation and audience at GroupM’s Wavemaker, says the new approach is to separate linear from over-the-top TV’s offer, whilst nevertheless treating the two holistically.

OTT + TV

“The way that we’re thinking about this ecosystem more than ever before is separating out,” Rinaldi says. “The reality is that screen, that television ecosystem has … been consumed more than ever before.

“The marketplace has diminishing returns in supply across linear capabilities, (but) we’re still looking at ‘What is the whole screen with these broadcast partner going to give us?’.

“Their capabilities have only grown. There’s a ‘plus’ on the backend of every single broadcast partner right now that allows you to have content at your fingertips. And there is nothing more powerful than that because it’s on the big screen still and those eyeballs are still there.”

Upfronts’ big year

Major broadcast owners’ upfronts presentations kicked off in April, with digital NewFronts continuing into June.

Last year’s TV upfronts were affected by pandemic ad spending constraint and turmoil. Many brands called for a delay to the season.

Many brands have tried to move toward more agile ad-buying approaches, which connected and addressable TV is seen as catering to.

But the move to this kind of buying was underway before the pandemic. Many think the 2021 upfronts is when pandemic agility, declining linear viewership and the emerging comfort with targeted TV buying is when the advanced TV technique will take off.

Holistic approach

“We’re working on (it) really holistically,” Rinaldi adds. “Not only do we have to think about it from a linear perspective, those eyeballs that are leaving.

“What content are they still consuming within those broadcast partners and how do we leverage these new areas like a Peacock, like a Paramount to get integrated for holistic buying ecosystems versus just separating out linear and digital?

“How do we integrate brands’ presence across everything within those environments?

“That’s why the upfronts are still important. I think the discussions in the upfronts are just changing a bit into a much more data-driven conversation.”

Still got it?

Rinaldi’s comments will be welcomed by TV networks as evidence their evolving offering still resonates with the biggest media buyers around.

But Rinaldi says the extent to which Wavemaker buys TV, and different kinds of TV, will vary from brand to brand. Software, he says, is key to making that happen.

“I think we’ve got to hone in and really create a structure with technology as that layer that informs our media ecosystem,” he adds. “And I think from what we’ve seen (in the) early stages as we go to the upfronts, there’s a few platforms who are separating themselves from the pack very quickly and we’re really excited to work with in this data-driven linear ecosystem.”

You are watching “Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. For more videos, please visit this page.

Case in point – GroupM agency Wavemaker is having to negotiate the ongoing deprecation of audience identifiers like cookies.

But, even as it does so, the agency is embracing advanced new tools, says US executive director for data and product, Stuart Pennant.

Geo data boosts campaigns

Pennant says Wavemaker used geographic tools to improve its campaign for last year’s US 2020 Census.

“So we were tying our media data and our media, both delivery and audience data, to the geographic units, which are census tracts and block groups,” he says.

“I think pulling in that geographic layer and doing geospatial analysis on that data allowed us to optimise the media plans for the Census to actually get – even during these times of COVID where people didn’t want to answer the door – the type of response rates that we got in 2010.”

While the census may have been a unique example, given the kinds of geo data census organizers themselves had access to, Pennant is sold on geo: “I think the geospatial analysis that we’re currently now employing has an application across not just government clients, but also other clients, retail or any clients that have brick and mortar places across the nation.”

Replacing cookies

That kind of capability is useful, because Pennant’s Wavemaker, like all on in the ad industry, are currently being challenged by the deprecation of third-party cookies and new limits on mobile device identifiers.

Pennant knows he has to balance the consumer interests in which those moves are rooted with a need to continue locating audiences on behalf of brands.

“In the past, we were able to identify users across sites and across properties so we could actually understand full user journey pathways,” he says.

“That ability is now being questioned and it’s being deprecated. We need to find far more interesting ways and far more effective ways that are privacy safe in order to understand that type of incrementality that we need.”

Predicting the future with ML

One answer could lie in artificial intelligence – or, more specifically, machine learning.

Pennant is nervous about “AI” pronouncements, lest the technology stray too closely to connoting Terminator 2’s plotline. Indeed, many AI deployments are actually quite rudimentary.

But Wavemaker’s Pennant says his agency’s use of “ML” technologies is “very rich”.

“One of the things that we’re leveraging at Wavemaker and at GroupM is predictive analytics, time series, predictive analytics,” he says.

“Understanding how much money or how much funds should be going into certain channels, let’s say search, and predicting what your response would be based on other media that’s running, based off of budgets, based off of past performance, and predicting in the near future of what sort of responses that you can get back.

“This is very valuable to our clients because one of the things about, let’s just take search for instance … If you over budget for it, you end up not spending your budget. If you under budget, you leave money or you leave conversions on the table. Getting that number right is important.”

You are watching “Break the Cycle,” a leadership series brought to you by IBM Watson Advertising and Beet.TV. For more videos, please visit this page.

The industry is now entering a second phase of the COVID pandemic where companies are thinking more long term about the opportunities available given the evolved consumer behaviors.

“[We are now figuring out what it means] to think about media overall and how we can better connect media itself and messaging using all that we have at our hands when it comes to data and technology,” Richman says.

The goals of this next stage include making the tonality of the messaging more relevant and being more service-focused in that messaging. It also means thinking creatively about how companies invest differently.

“Now it’s more towards that creativity and how do we really unleash the power of technology and data to make that happen and make it real,” Richman says.

Richman also touched on the popular questions that are specific to brand marketers at the moment.

“There’s always this aspect of inspiration and what does the future look like and am I moving fast enough to get there,” Richman says. “But there’s also the underlying principle of what is measurable and how will this drive my business.”

Right now there is more emphasis than ever on what incremental dollars can be added where against what audiences, programs, and platforms in order to see what equates to meaningful sales. It has created a dynamic where the more innovative forecasting techniques must also be balanced with a more conservative approach.

“You’ve got that dichotomy of the creativity and the innovation and the no boundaries with also the realities of demonstrating how we can learn, understand, and iterate to get to their sales goals,” Richman says.

This video is a preview in a series leading up to the 2020 IAB NewFronts.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the Road to the NewFronts 2020.  This Beet.TV series is presented by the IAB.  To request a free invitation to the 5-day virtual event, visit this page:

The GroupM agency recently landed the Novo Nordisk Danish pharmaceutical giant with a reported annual media spend of $400 million.

Richman talks about managing the agency virtually and how this has lead to increased productivity.   “Remote work is bringing us closer,” she says.

How marketers engage with agencies:

“The needs of how clients engage with media agencies has started to really shift from the sense of how do we buy media more efficiently and how do we connect with the consumers but how do we act as their guide to finding the next opportunity for growth.”

From impressions to outcomes:

“Just measuring the fact that the impression was delivered is where we used to work in the space. Today it’s all focused on outcomes. So yes, there’s an expectation of how we report on delivery of media, but then how are we delivering the experience, how is that driving through to sales, how are all the channels working collectively together, what are the forms of content people are engaged with, how can we serve up more of that with sequential messaging so that we’re bringing them through the entire purchase journey and not just building brand bias but building it all the way into sales and loyalty.”

Why values matter to brands:

“Brands are shifting really from the sense of a campaign around change into how do we think about our values as an organization, how do we think about representing those values in the culture of our organization, do our partners reflect that and how collectively can we actually bring that into culture and better reflect the diverse culture in particular.”

On direct-to-consumer brands:

“They’re leaning into traditional media because they realize actually once they’ve gone through their own in-housing with search, with social, with display, with programmatic and have flooded enough of those channels and have enough performance driven from that they realize that next customer needs to come through other ways and other channels. And so they’re leaning in and helping to reinvent digital out of home, as they’re leaning into television and understanding how to bring data and actually make that more of a relevant experience as well. They’re leaning into print they’re leaning into all the channels that used to be seen as maybe not digital enough but through the last years as they have reinvented, as they have shown how they can drive outcomes, they’re driving some performance for DTC brands.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen.  For more segments from the series, please visit this page.  You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.

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.”

A recent Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey showed 35% of marketers expanded their in-house media buying capabilities in 2017

But, speaking at a new ANA event, one agency rebooted for the new world made a strong case for retaining an agency relationship.

“Now is the time, more than ever, to really look at partnerships differently and look at agencies, I believe, as your true partners in sifting and navigating through this and working with the media companies, agencies, clients, consumers, all at the table to try and sort our way through this,” said Wavemaker US CEO Amanda Richman in this video interview with Beet.TV

“I think it’s a world where there can be divides. We need to start to bring the organizations together, because everyone really want trust to be an imperative in the marketplace and we need trust with our consumers and we need to earn that back again.”

Wavemaker was formed in 2017 out of the merger of MEC and Maxus Global, with brand clients like Vodafone, L’Oréal, IKEA and Paramount Pictures.

Richman says there is an opportunity for agencies to help at both the big and the small levels – that is, helping brands hit marketing scale, but also helping them understand how to personalize individual content experiences for their audiences.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Witherspoon was one of four panelists who discussed new video ad formats and how creative and media agency professionals are working more closely together to build stories relevant to specific audiences. It was one of several discussions at Cannes under the auspices of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.

Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink kicked things off by asking “How much more will you pay for a non-standard ad?”

Responded true[X] President Pooja Midha, “It’s how much more will you pay for impact. Non-standard, who cares?”

That’s where things got complicated, as Witherspoon explained. “It’s difficult, because sometimes you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. Within this campaign or within each kind of percentage of always on, what amount of that is going to be something that you’re going to be testing.”

Which is where Nissan’s “pilots” come in and how testing is needed to help change the thinking within procurement. “Once you take the results from that, how do you actually start to scale that? I think that’s when you can start to advance the financial discussion, once you’re able to show that impact across, in the case of Nissan, all of our models, across all of our markets, that’s a very powerful discussion to have,” said Witherspoon.

Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman said the test-and-learn approach also needs an activation plan. “So as you’re presenting a learning road map, you actually can say, ‘if this works we’re going to scale immediately.’ We’re not going to wait and have another committee meeting, it’s not going to be three months. Turn on a dime and then roll on to the next test.”

Along the way, people on both the creative and media side need to come together more than ever, said John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA, because media plans traditionally have been built in a process wherein storytelling has been relegated to creative agencies.

“There’s a gap in between, which is story building, and I think it’s amazing what happens when you get tight teams sitting together, working together from the onset, as opposed to the traditional iterative process where sometimes media comes in late in the game,” Osborn said.

He described the process with Nissan, TBWA and OMD “literally welded together at the hip, working on which types of data will better inform the right kinds of storytelling.”

true[X] does real-time creative optimization for Nissan as it simultaneously measures real-time brand lift. “We launch with one version of an engagement, and as we see the data coming back we’re able to actually build with Nissan and its agency a more elaborate version, or a version that lets you go deeper or let’s us hone in on what we see really lifting,” said Midha.

Spiegel wanted to know whether creative personalization is right for all brands, particularly the biggest ones with the widest target audiences.

“One of the things we’ve seen across the tens of thousands of engagements we’ve built is that strong, persistent branding, even for very, very well advertised brands, is really important in actually driving results for them,” Midha said.

Richman related that one of Wavemaker’s clients describes its target audience as “anyone with a mouth.” Still, such a brand might need to achieve relevance with a new generation of consumers or could be missing opportunities for frequency or selling across its whole portfolio.

“A level of personalization may not be one hundred segments, but looking it from the lens of two or three it will drive the business forward,” Richman said.

The panelists agreed that campaign measurement will continue to be one of the biggest challenges, given cross-platform content consumption. The fact that advertisers and publishers alike recognize this and want to change old habits, there are fundamental barriers that will take time to overcome.

“Right now, to launch anything, for example inside of CTV, which is such an important environment, it’s not one platform. It’s a bunch of different devices that are all built on different code bases. It’s not simple,” said Midha.

As the discussion shifted to things like total ratings points and sound media strategies, Osborn summed things up by observing “Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in the media jargon there’s a great brilliance in just thinking as a human would think.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

But old needs a reboot.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wavemaker global chief client officer Aaron Smith redefines the “Ps” for a new era.

“The old ways of building relevance no longer work,” he says. “To really drive relevance in today’s world, brands need to think differently about what I would say what are historically the classic four P’s of marketing….”

1. Purpose: “For me, relevance today is about creating a really strong brand purpose. What do you stand for as a brand?”
2. Pride: “How you promote your message with integrity and honesty.”
3. Partners: “If you look at any of the successful brands today, they can’t do it alone … they need to bring in external thinking.”
4. Protection: “Increasing amounts of data … can be both a blessing and a curse. Brands need to make sure that they’re really using that data in the right way and protecting consumers’ best interests.”
5. Personalisation: “As we collect that data, we need to make sure that we’re using it in ways that are helping to drive more meaning and relevance to the consumers’ lives without crossing that line of being creepy or invasive.”

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wavemaker global head of strategy Stuart Sullivan-Martin says proving value is getting harder, not easier, as two imperatives of marketers come together in a clash.

“Accountability, understanding of what’s working, what’s not working … that sounds easy, right?,” he says. “But of course it’s not. It’s almost never been harder because there are so many layers of metrics and some of them don’t tell the truth, and you have to find the truth through the story in terms of what properly delivers to the brand in the short, medium and the long term.”

The time factor is a critical one, and now more than ever, because Sullivan-Martin says agencies are facing two competing demands.

“A lot of my clients at the moment are facing down short-term quarterly pressures in their business – and all businesses around the world, let’s face it – at the moment, to understand the true value of marketing,” he says.

The problem? That quest to understand value is a short-term one because those same pressures are short-term – but, Sullivan-Martin says, the value of marketing can often only be seen over the long term.

“There’s a tension point there which is something we’re having to work with our clients or trying to help resolve at the moment,” he adds.

When she eyes the video landscape, Richman sees it evolving toward the opportunity for more precision targeting without taking away from the scale “that all the big players and certainly the television networks bring to the party.

“So it’s starting to shift from the conversations that used to happen that really separated the two worlds of digital and linear,” the U.S. CEO of the agency Wavemaker adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Guided by data and a better understanding of where audiences are and how they’re consuming video, Wavemaker’s focus on the purchase journey and where people are consuming video within the journey “creates just much more fluidity in how we can think about budgets, how we think about planning and connecting at the right time.”

These insights also fuel conversations with creative agencies “to make sure it’s not just about where we’re connecting with the consumer, but what’s the right messaging that’s really going to draw them in.”

Looking at learnings from, say, feed consumption of video or OTT viewing can be scaled across other platforms and “it gets much more interesting from a sense of how do you plan for that engagement and plan the right message,” Richman says.

Asked about Wavemaker’s interactions with creative agencies, she says the main goal is to get insights faster and integrate them into story and message development. “That is fueled by often the media agency’s data inputs and for Wavemaker, it’s thinking through momentum and our purchase journey understanding and the database of data points that we have that can then fuel more insights into how to connect and what message to deliver.”

Providing its data assets to a creative agency “gives them a deeper understanding of the consumer than they might have typically gotten on a brief from a client and that’s where the magic starts to happen.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

There will be more storms and “people are still living under roofs with plastic tarpaulins…there are still people who don’t have power. So what we have to do is help to sustain relief to make sure that people live their own lives and be independent.”

At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, Cowdell provided an update on those relief efforts.  He presented an overview of what he and his colleagues from GroupM undertook in tthe weeks after the storm.via slides and video. In this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, Cowdell explains how a GroupM team including people from agencies like MediaCom, Media Edge and Wavemaker responded after Maria struck on Sept. 16, 2017.

“What happened immediately after the storm is I reached out and said, ‘how is everybody’? It took a couple of days to find out at least they’re all okay and they’re alive,” says Cowdell, who is Global President, Client Services. “And then when you get a message from a colleague who says ‘but I have no drinking water for my 13-month old baby,’ what do you do? You have a choice.”

While some people donated money or made pledges to do so, Cowdell chose to “get on a plane and you can take water purification. I managed to get on a phone, collected water purification, filters, solar lamps, medications, etcetera.”

Cowdell expresses frustration when he recalls seeing events on the ground versus what the news media was reporting during the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. He says the national narrative the weekend after the storm was characterized by people tweeting “about the NFL and taking a knee. They weren’t about thousands of Puerto Ricans at risk and potentially thousands dead.”

Some news reports conveyed the impression that there were lots of relief efforts going on by individuals and the military.

“What was being told didn’t reflect reality on the ground. I know we’re in a world of fake news now, but for me personally it was my first real experience of seeing the reality of a situation on the ground and what’s being communicated through the storytelling of the media,” Cowdell says.

His focus going forward is to continue to help marshal continued assistance to Puerto Ricans in the face of inexorable threatening weather conditions.

“The real issue is, the storm when it first hit was a weather disaster. What happened after it became an economic disaster. People who are very rich paid $25,000 they flew out and moved to their houses in Miami. Then it got to the next class and the next class.”

Meanwhile, in places like the hills of Campos, “They are still in desperate need. There was no real tolerance for a storm like this. Those are the people who need help.”

At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised some $20,000.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But Wavemaker, which started up in September, is responding to the talk of agency disintermediation with a clear plan.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, its global chief client officer Aaron Smith says he sees his organisation’s role as “future-maker”, and sets out what different qualities agencies like his must bring to the table in 2018 and beyond:

• Proactivity
• Orchestrating talent
• Great storytelling

“We have to evolve to be much more proactive consultants to our clients,” Smith says. “Rather than responding to briefs and reacting to questions that our clients have, we have to go to clients with strong recommendations and points of view around how they can build the strategy for the future and what’s that roadmap look like, as opposed to waiting for them to ask us questions.

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.

How did we become #FutureMakers? Our CMO, Nathalie Haxby [@NatHaxby] speaks to @Communicatemag about the ins and outs of merging two 'entrepreneurial' companies and the lessons along the way! https://t.co/rgS2vezZ9W pic.twitter.com/PFDtnE6PnS

— Wavemaker Global (@WavemakerGlobal) May 15, 2018

That’s one part of a strategy Smith says is all about enabling brands to build the future.

But what does it mean to be a “future-maker”?

“It’s about bringing bold transformative ideas to clients, that can help their brands break through the clutter,” Smith adds.

“It entails really coming up with creative, innovative, transformative ideas and packaging those ideas up into compelling stories that our clients can buy into. Ultimately, we then translate into different consumer communications and experiences.”

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.

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.

In ad-tech, many software vendors are risking ending up in the last category, as a dizzying array of function-specific tools risks confusing buyers.

That is according to one agency boss communicating how technological complexity is actually working against buyers and their vendors.

Oleg Korenfeld, chief platforms officer at Wavemaker, was speaking in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Often enough this technology actually is serving the opposite of what it was supposed to be,” he says.

“Where it’s supposed to deliver in this kind of efficient way to activate the audience to cut media waste, we’re getting this fragmentation and fragmentation is doing the complete opposite of that.”

Korenfeld’s Wavemaker was formed from the merger of Group M’s MEC and Maxus.

In 2018, the ad industry is looking back on at least 10 years of explosive growth, during which new tools and data sets aligned to give marketers unprecedented new targeting capabilities.

But, in that explosion, the industry is now wrestling with complexity. The VC rush to ad-tech propelled a thousand flowers to bloom. Now buyers are grappling with which way to turn.

The display LUMAscape explained by @AdOpsInsider http://t.co/MtEzCcOmCV #digitalmarketing #adtech pic.twitter.com/3aoAOERKZS

— Remi Boudard (@rboudard) June 19, 2015

It is an irony, perhaps, that – as the industry continues suffering from fraud, transparency and brand safety problems – yet more new tech platforms are launching, playing whack-a-mole.

Korenfeld hopes for a contraction.

“As an industry, we’re over-engineered,” he says. “I think a lot of technology companies been developed to address very specific niche issues.”

“In order to simplify the stack, in order to understand what are the critical components of that stack, you need this kind of platform’s approach of very specific skillset.”

Unless that happens, Korenfeld fears buyers will simply give up on the whole ad-tech stack.

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.

“We’re moving away, I would argue, from media planning and saying ‘well, we actually need a content strategy,’” Gaines says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Media creativity involves how to represent the story of a brand in a way that’s appropriate, including during the priming stage, “when I am trying to create a position for my brand of favor, so that when somebody gets to the trigger point…there is a better predisposition for my brand relative to the things I need to say once they’re in that purchase journey cycle.”

The plethora of options for media consumption have pushed creativity in a way “that we’ve not really been able to think of it definitely a decade or so ago,” Gaines adds.

The concept of having “one big idea” and exposing it to lots of people is no longer operable, according to Gaines. “That only really works if you have brand new news,” he says. “Or you’ve got a new launch. Ninety-nine percent of the products we work with are trying to create greater share, growth in some shape or form. Revenue, share of market, consumption.”

Thus media creativity now involves generating a conversation that keeps people engaged all the way around their purchase journey. “So that what I do from a broadcast perspective and awareness perspective has an amplified effect on converting people to buy my product or buy my service,” says Gaines.

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.

“We’re set up to be super flexible,” says Noah Mallin, Head of Experience, Content & Sponsorship, Wavemaker North America. “What that means is we’re not hung up on the idea that we always have to be the one creating every last piece of content.”

In this interview with Beet.TV, Mallin talks about client expectations and creating messaging that doesn’t look like messaging.

He starts with the reality that people are increasingly getting entertainment “and living their lives away from what we would consider ad-supported environments.” While this doesn’t mean they’re not exposed to any ads, “if we just think about that as the only way of reaching people, we’re not really going as far as we can and should be going.”

The job of Mallin’s team is to bring brand experiences to life in any and all venues and “not just showing them the same old thing they’re going to see from any other brand.”

Two big client expectations are an abundance of data to understand consumers in all contextual permutations and reach them in compelling ways they won’t choose to ignore.

“It doesn’t read to them like messaging,” Mallin says. “It reads to them as an experience they can actually take part in and they can have some impact on. Those are two big, tough things to do, especially doing them together.”

Wavemaker is open to working with clients’ own content, creative from partner agencies or third parties and helping to figure out how best to version it. Just because something works well on, say, YouTube doesn’t mean it will do so in display environments or “in the back of an airplane seat.”

There will be times when Wavemaker, a unit of GroupM, will produce content itself “because that’s just the right thing to do and we know we can do it more efficiently than a partner might do it.”

One thing the agency won’t do is try to recreate what a creative agency does “because that’s a very specific model that works well for those agencies.”

Rather, Mallin believes the better approach is to be “super flexible and based on trying to solve problems that exist and friction that exists in reaching the right audience with the right content at the right time.”

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.

“We’re seeing a lot of that now with the Entertainment Lions, the awards for content and creativity, the Creative Data awards as well,” Haxby, who is Global Marketing Director, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Making waves is the responsibility of MEC’s WAVEMAKER unit, which uses data and analytics showing how consumers behave and how they buy to inform content creation. The goal is to figure out which points in consumer’s journies are the most valuable to particular marketers.

With “tons and tons” of data available to her teams, “Our job is to try to make sense of that and really glean the insights that come out of that data,” Haxby says.

MEC brings to the table its own research study—called MEC Momentum and running for several years now. Its purpose is to close gaps in understanding what buyers do during the purchase journey, how their perceptions of brands influence their behavior and how they make their choices.

“We’ve surveyed more than 350,000 people in 30 countries, 60 categories to look at how they go around the purchase journey. We use that data and blend it with our clients’ data to create really targeted messages at certain points throughout the purchase journey,” Haxby explains.

Knowing that MEC itself has audiences that it needs to reach, the agency is constantly evaluating its own presence on platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. “It’s a learning curve for us all, but we would be remiss if we didn’t do what we said our clients should be doing,” says Haxby. “We have to do it for ourselves.”

She references an MEC session at Cannes in which iHeart CEO Bob Pittman talked about the power of radio, a medium sometimes overlooked.

“Ultimately, 250 million people listen to radio in the U.S. every day, so that’s something we have to tap into. We forget sometimes that it’s another platform. It’s called podcasting now, but it’s still radio.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.