We spoke with Kirk McDonald, CEO of GroupM NA about the event and his hope that the dialogue coming out it will lead to a more fair, sustainable media landscape.
Earlier, GroupM announced that some 20 leading brands are making substantial commitments to investment in Black-owned media companies. Speaking to Variety about the initiative, McDonald stated:
GroupM’s programs “are not just about what we need to do to support today’s owners, but how do we make sure that diverse ownership grows in the future? We are talking about both of those legs.”
The Global Forum will be streamed on the GroupM LinkedIn feed from 1 to 4 pm EDT on 6/23. The program is made possible with the support of IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and PubMatic. To stay informed of the Forum details and agenda use the hashtag #ResponsibleMedia. Please find more information and register here.
]]>She was appointed to the head the agency one year ago, coming from GroupM’s Essence where she was Head of Media Activation for North America.
In 2013, Gila joined the growing Google account at Essence and built a team to run Google’s SEM and biddable media efforts. Gila also helped Google codify its global Adwords and DoubleClick best practices.
She grew Essence’s social practice by 50x between 2013 and 2016.
In this interview, she talks about her path to leadership and the efforts to bring diversity, equality and inclusion to Xaxis. She speaks about the focus of outcomes at Xaxis as a core value of the programmatic unit of GroupM. She covers AI and the future of of a more efficient programmatic ecosystem.
This year marks the agency’s 10th year anniversary.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.
]]>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.
]]>Whilst software has reigned in a predictable pattern over the last few years, engineers are now on the cusp of applying several breakthroughs that are all about physical innovation.
Irwin Gotlieb knows it. The WPP advisor, INVIDI board member and former GroupM CEO is a veteran Consumer Electronics Show (CES) attendee, and he says January’s 2020 show will be slightly different.
“We always talk at CES about what is possible, as well as what is practical,” Gotlieb tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “What’s possible always changes at a very, very rapid rate. What’s practical, historically, hasn’t changed as rapidly as what was possible.
“The incredible thing … is that nanotechnology, computing, chip design (and) communications are impacting the rate at which what’s possible is becoming what’s practical. And that may be the single most important thing about CES this year.”
So, what’s on Gotlieb’s horizon for the tech ahead?
This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January. The series is presented by Samsung Ads. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>“It’s not in-housing, it’s part of a much broader trend,” the former CEO of WPP says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Sorrell is now Executive Chairman of S4 Capital, which is described as building “a new era, digital platform for global, multi-national, regional, local and millennially-driven clients.” When he looks at the six biggest agency holding companies he sees an “adapt or die” scenario.
“They have no choice. The six of them are like sort of super tankers. They’re not agile enough, they’re not fast enough, they’re not flexible enough,” Sorrell says.
He traces client retrenchment to the days when Lehman Brothers was failing and the world financial system was on a precipice. One recent example Sorrell cites is the acquisition by McDonald’s of Dynamic Yield Ltd., which specializes in in personalization and decision logic technology, as a means of “trying to take back control.”
Other advertiser concerns include platforms controlling data, “proving to be a block to the direct consumer relationship.” Agencies, meanwhile, “are worried about incumbency instead of being totally transparent and willing to experiment.”
The net result among marketers is “the propensity to experiment has risen to a level that I’ve not seen in fifty or the so years that I’ve been in the industry,” says Sorrell. “In-housing is one of the means of experimenting. We’re not just seeing it on programmatic, we’re seeing it on content creation too.”
When agencies negotiate fee structures, “The level of directs for a new company with a clean sheet of paper is totally different than an established company, a legacy company. With indirects it’s light years difference. You don’t have indirects in a startup.
“They are strapped. It’s like a straight jacket. So when the procurement people from the agency go to negotiate with the procurement people at the client, they’re locked into a structure that the client’s not willing to accept. So that’s the fundamental problem. You have to have a totally new structure.”
He references his trip last year to the Burning Man festival, which is held in the desert in Nevada, as an allegory for what agencies are facing. “It’s creative reconstruction or destruction. Every year eighty thousand people build the burning man, they build the temple and they burn it down at the end of the week and they start again.”
You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page
]]>The squabbling is prominent in the addressable television advertising space, Gotlieb noted in his keynote speech at this week’s Advanced Advertising Forum in Manhattan. In this interview with Beet.TV, the advertising veteran says that while there have been some breakthroughs, there have been more frustrations.
“And the frustrations come from the fact that we operate in a context where the constraints are no longer technology based” given that the enabling technology for addressable TV has existed for nearly a dozen years.
What have gotten in the way are the various components of the industry, according to Gotlieb. “The MVPD’s have to execute the addressable ads. The content owners have to agree with it. The net problem here is that each have their own interests.”
One longstanding reality is that for decades, the relationship between TV distribution and content ownership has been, and continues to be, fundamentally adversarial. To prove his point, Gotlieb alludes to current headlines about carriage-renewal conflict between DirecTV and Viacom. “Those relationships are so adversarial that there isn’t the trust required to move things forward.”
Even with vertical integration, as evidenced by Comcast and AT&T, the ownership is the same “but the business interests remain somewhat siloed in that they operate their own independent P&L’s and are rewarded based on the performance of their P&L’s. And so these things get in the way,” says Gotlieb.
As a consequence, it is still “remarkably difficult to plan, to execute and to steward addressability or advanced advertising, far more so than it should be.”
Then there is the limitation on addressable advertising inventory, which predominantly consists of the two minutes per hour that the MVPD’s control. “And even there has been some internal squabbling between those people who feel that addressability is replacing geo targeting, and geo targeting usually accrues to the benefit of businesses like Spotlight, and everybody protects their turf,” Gotlieb says.
Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.
]]>Fifty-nine percent of homes which get TV over antennae now also subscribe to subscription video-on-demand, according to Nielsen.
US households are nearing three SVOD subscriptions per household, according to Ampere Analysis.
Whichever numbers you look at, subscription TV over internet is eating in to the traditional pay-TV and telco bundle – and more services are still yet to come.
In to that melee, Apple in March previewed its own TV ambitions, in an underwhelming presentation that left many onlookers confused.
But one thing is for sure – the SVOD arms race may not have infinite capacity to scale.
“I think there will be so much happening that the consumer will be overwhelmed,” says Irwin Gotlieb, WPP senior advisor, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“By the time you replace your triple play package with an internet package and a cell phone and a few content packages, you’re paying what you used to pay for the triple pay, if not more.
“There will be several that survive, but there will be substantial fallout over time. I think trying to market all these services at the same time is going to be really, really challenging because the consumer’s not going to understand or differentiate between them.”
To Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and many others, add Disney+, a new AT&T service and more yet to be unveiled to a growing list of subscription video operators.
They may be competing with traditional cable, but Gotlieb sees a historical pattern repeating itself – if SVOD services drive up their prices, as HBO did, they may stay with low subscriber numbers.
Breaking News Update: On March 31, Comscore announced that Gotlieb will join the board as part of a major management shake-up.
Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.
]]>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.”
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, the WPP agency’s Director, Addressable Lead talks about the complexity of executing addressable TV campaigns for GroupM agencies across various MVPD’s from clients, ranging from adult diapers to luxury cars.
“They’re not necessarily one provider,” Cestaro says. “When you think of adding the satellite guys and the cable guys together, that’s all incremental reach. But where Sorenson is unique is they sit on top of that. So they can extend reach and they have access to different inventory that we haven’t really tapped into yet.”
MODI has seen good results for clients using addressable but it’s a fluid playing field. “There’s a lot of learning curves, there’s a lot of new growth in the space and with that comes new clients and new opportunities,” he says.
“The providers don’t necessarily work together. Everybody has their own data, their own buys, there’s no magic solution that goes across everyone so it’s a manual process.”
Cestaro likens Sorenson’s positioning in the market to that of Apple Pay.
“Meaning they’re not Visa, they’re not Mastercard they’re not Discover. Those companies kind of sit there. But they’re kind of sitting on top of that and they’re helping direct or being the pipes behind a more aggregated approach and a more wide-scale approach,” he says of Sorenson.
From an inventory standpoint, Cestaro doesn’t think there’s limited supply of addressable TV inventory. “Can there always be more? Absolutely. The demand is high.”
With about two-thirds of U.S. households able to be targeted with addressable ads, some marketers are testing addressable while others keep returning to it, having navigated the learning curve.
“You’re going from GRP’s to impressions,” says Cestaro. “The way we buy it is different. The way we target is very different. Even the back end piece is all different.”
As addressable continues to scale, “What Sorenson is doing is taking what was there and really just doing it a different way that hasn’t quite been done yet and it’s really allowing for more of a top level approach.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“What everyone’s anxious to understand is a bit more of the how. With a massive footprint, with all the opportunity across data and content, how are they bringing that together seamlessly from an agency perspective and to marketers?” says Amanda Richman, U.S. CEO of the Wavemaker agency.
“How are they distinguishing themselves and how might they set some new industry standards as well?” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to the AT&T confab.
When the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics takes on a new moniker that will be announced early on at the event, one of its big competitive advantages will be its understanding of audience behavior across various platforms. Given its progress into digital television “and with the content layer on top of that now with all the Warner Media assets, it seems to be an opportunity for a seamless end to end solution.”
She notes that the term “relevance” is very often tied to targeting and precision marketing, which encompasses eliminating waste, “But I think there’s a white space around that emotional connection that brands need to make and how brands can actually connect on the heart as well as the mind across devices,” says Richman.
A WPP Group-owned media, content and tech agency, Wavemaker was created in 2017 via the merger of agencies Maxus and MEC. Contemplating what the future entails “starts with the people themselves and a physical space. Thankfully, now we’re at 3 World Trade Center. We have that new space and new energy that comes with a great environment.”
What follows includes trying to develop more seamless processes “with better navigation of all of our assets so we can customize what the solution is for each client instead of just one single approach.
“And then make sure that we’re measurable and held accountable even in our own compensation for delivering growth to our clients. We think that’s the best future.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In June at Cannes Lions, we sat down with Read to talk about the agency business, the needs of brands and the value of data We have republished that video with today’s news.
]]>“If we have a better festival, it will prosper. In the same way our industry, and I include WPP, we need to make changes as well,” says Read, who is COO of WPP and Global CEO of its Wunderman digital agency. “We need to become simpler to navigate.”
When Read joined Wunderman several years ago, he recalls some people disparaging the venerable direct marketing agency for being in the direct-response space. “But actually, today all marketing is direct marketing, so we can do everything.”
Some industry change is imposed by outsiders, for example regulators. Read notes that the recent implementation of the European Union’s GDPR privacy strictures “has had a big impact in Europe.”
He contrasts the situation with the United States, where there is a different approach to privacy. “The EU approaches privacy as a sort of human right, something that consumers come to expect,” Read says. “I think the U.S. view is companies can do what they want to do so long as they’re clear about they want to do. As long as they do what they say, they’re fine.
“In the main, GDPR has been a challenge for companies, but I think it’s been a good thing as well.”
Asked about the ongoing efforts to bring more transparency to the digital media supply chain, Read says WPP’s GroupM media unit “has talked a lot to our clients about what they need to do to make sure that their marketing messages appear next to content that they’d like it to appear next to.”
Other improvements to the supply chain will require more cooperation for mutual benefit. “No one part of the industry can solve the problems on its own. It requires cooperation between various players.”
In a nod to the dominance of Facebook and Google, Read says there is a need for a market where people can afford to create quality content, particularly news.
“But then I think it’s incumbent on news organizations to evolve and innovate the way they create news, the way they work,” he says. “Each player in that ecosystem, agency, client, media owner, technology company, has a role to play and actually it’s the sort of cooperation around them and the coalescence of interests that will help us.”
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.
]]>The European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation updates prior consumer data protection rules in a significant way. Now any global company which handles EU citizens’ data must comply with a new and more stringent set of demands, including:
That seems to pose a challenge to the new world of advertising that is hyper-charged by the new oil of consumer data. The boss of the world’s largest ad agency holding group certainly thinks so – but Sir Martin Sorrell understands why.
“It does make things much more intricate and much more complicated, but understandably so … with the sort of things that have been going on in relation to consumer brand safety or what I call ‘political brand safety’,” the WPP CEO says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
By ‘political brand safety’, Sorrell is referring to alleged interference in elections by foreign state actors. This was far from the reason the European Commission proposed the GDPR several years ago, but the point, he argues, is that the world is waking up to sophisticated uses of audience data.
“The problem is the regulators never keep up with technological development,” Sorrell adds. “And we’ve got three decisions in Europe in relation to Google, one of which has been given by the director general in the EU, and there are two more decisions to be made.
“So (there are) lots of regulatory things to happen. And I think all of the big seven as I call them, the seven sisters (tech companies) all understand that, with their size and with their power and with their success … comes a responsibility, too.”
This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world. The series is presented by Criteo. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That’s why WPP saw the need to tool-up Facebook savvy amongst the people actually tasked with creating ads for that inventory.
Together with Facebook, the group created a Creative Ambassador Program, designed at injecting best practice in the creation of modern mobile and video ads for Facebook in to the agencies that actually make them.
“We already had a really deep, broad relationship with Facebook,” says WPP’s chief digital officer Scott Spirit in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But it was primarily based in our media agencies (GroupM)
“We felt that there was a lot of innovation in media, but the creative and digital agencies had been a little bit left behind. We were slightly concerned that our creative agencies weren’t really aware of the full capabilities that Facebook had. So we put together this program to really address that.
“We decided we were going to really fully commit to this and get all our agencies involved. I think it’s the first time that Facebook’s worked at a holding group level to really roll something out on a global basis”
The ambassadors program has already touched down in APAC, with WPP sending creative directors, planning directors, copywriters and client leaders from WPP agencies across Asia for a two-day education session.
They heard how Facebook’s Carousel, Slideshow, Canvas, 360 and Live products can be used to create mobile-first ad experiences. And they worked to develop example campaigns using the skills they learned.
Making ads that fit the new medium is important because, for a long time, many marketers have simply squeezed assets from a legacy medium in to the new box. “Shovelware” has always carried negative connotations amongst practitioners – but, to consumers, it means the difference between watching a quick ad built for fleeting mobile moments and sitting through a frustrating 30-second ad that originated on their TV screen.
“In terms of mobile video and mobile creative, that the initial wave of campaigns has really been just adapting assets that were created maybe for other means,” WPP’s Spirit admits.
“What we’re hoping to get out of this program is rather than adaptation, you have creation for the medium.
“It’s really helped our creative agencies think about what changes they need to make to their processes to be truly mobile first when it comes to creative work.
This Beet.TV series, presented by Facebook and WPP, is titled Creativity in a Mobile First World. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“One of the refreshing parts of the conference today is seeing the marketing community galvanize as trying to be a single voice and just renewing the importance of the investment and what marketing can do.”
In this interview with Beet.TV, Zambianchi reflects on the importance of measuring campaign results and how quickly the digital media ecosystem has advanced when compared to the traditional television business.
“Measurement is everything,” says Zambianchi. “I don’t think anyone’s comfortable anymore with just having communications out there but really tying it back to how we can affect the business.”
Agencies can be “very powerful” by collaborating and setting up frameworks to measure their efforts to determine “what we’re doing is moving product off shelf, is bringing foot traffic into stores.”
Asked about the growing potential of reaching consumers with premium video, Zambianchi references the evolution of TV “let’s say from how prevalent it was in the 1950’s, when it was in fact in every household.”
It took roughly 30 to 40 years to get beyond three TV networks, and 40 to 50 to get into cable and satellite offerings. Comparatively, digital consumption and the accompanying ecosystem has changed dramatically in just 20 years and shows no signs of slowing down.
“It’s so difficult to even project where it’s going to go, it’s moving so rapidly,” says Zambianchi.
He believes advertisers and agencies have just started to tap what premium video can do.
“Consumers have proven that they’re willing to trade their time to spend with brands with interesting content.”
MediaCom counsels its clients to “be true to their own brand values, bring interesting, engaging stories, be more creative. Media can be a force for that. It’s just beginning to blossom.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell says that ecommerce, with which brands now have the ability to sell directly to customers and not just through wholesalers, sees two factions vie for control.
“It tends to be a sales function rather than a marketing function,” he says, speaking at the DMEXCO advertising industry gathering in Germany.
“So we are seeing quite a battle, with CMOs trying to take control or exert control of the ecommerce function.
“That probably has to happen, or they have to come together in a more coherent way. We’ll see some changes in that.”
Mondelēz’s chief marketer has previously told Beet.TV “one of our fastest-growing P&Ls … will be ecommerce”, but the company needs to “build a bridge” between ecommerce and media sales.
“Welcome to the Vibrant Future,” a video series of thought leadership from DMEXCO 2017 presented by Criteo. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Well, at this week’s 2017 occurrence of the digital ad gathering in Germany, the pair graced the stage together, and Sorrell joined the social network live in front of an audience.
But that doesn’t mean the chief of the world’s largest ad agency holding group is a total convert.
Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview after his appearance, Sorrell had some robust views about what advertisers need from tech companies like Twitter.
“We had a very strong year with (Twitter) last year,” he said. “We went up in spending with our clients from about 240 million to 300 million. (But) I think they’ve got to be a little bit less clunky on the technology front.
“It’s true of all the big tech companies – a lot of times the clients and the agencies say, ‘Look, can’t we have this?’, to which the answer is often a ‘No’.
Twitter may need to relent. Its Q2 2017 advertising revenue fell 8% year-on-year, while daily-active-user growth declined from the previous quarter.
The network, once pitched as a “microblog” for text updates, is now pinning its ad growth on live video streaming.
But Sorrell is hoping Twitter – or perhaps Snapchat or another – can drive competition amongst a “Fearsome Five” of big tech firms and especially against the troublesome two of Facebook and Google.
“Frankly, a lot of our clients, a lot of traditional media owners, agencies, want a third force,” he tells Beet.TV. “Twitter has an opportunity, Amazon clearly has an opportunity to become that third … Oath has an opportunity, AppNexus has their opportunity, so we’ll see how it all pans out”
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s unfortunate what has happened. What happened with the ANA last year, for reasons that I don’t really understand to this day…reports issued, full of innuendo but no fact,” Sorrell says in this interview with Beet.TV at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade show.
“What it’s done is create a different atmosphere which I don’t think has been helpful.”
Just over a year ag,o the Association of National Advertisers issued a report that roiled the waters of the advertising and media agency world. It concluded that some agencies had routinely padded their profits by using such non-transparent practices as taking rebates from media sellers.
To Sorrell, those accusations consisted of “aspersions which I think are totally unjustified, or certainly from what we’ve seen.”
He doesn’t cite specifics about the Middle East except to say that people are “examining the entrails.” For Japan he seems to be referencing the overcharging scandal that engulfed a major ad agency in September of 2016 after one of its biggest clients suspected something was amiss in its digital media buys.
Sorrell says a WPP client in China asked it to audit several state-owned enterprises (SOE’s) “on the media front because we didn’t use brokers in China, where there was let’s say a fog around the operations. We were asked to look at one of the areas of potential corruption advertising billings. In China there’s opacity in relation to the supply chain.”
Sorrell believes the transparency issue is of relatively minor importance in the U.S. market “where there are no rebates and relatively more important in markets like Japan, where I think it’s true to say there’s still total opacity on what the price of a TV spot is. It’s totally unknown as to what many of our clients are paying for their spots.”
Addressing the transformation that has swept the advertising and media industries—totally reshaping how clients and agencies interact—Sorrell lists three areas that stand out.
Media and data: GroupM and Kantar each represent 25% of WPP’s business.
The growing importance of digital agencies of record: “Digital agencies going into clients through the digital door and then expanding above the line.”
The “veritable explosion” of production platforms: Among them WPP’s Hogarth Worldwide that enable marketers to “pull down their marketing assets effectively without reproducing them and reinventing the wheel in every market.”
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In the aftermath of the television UpFront season, Sorrell thinks traditional networks have done pretty well price-wise. ““I think they’re quite bullish about the UpFronts in the U.S. They’re seeing reasonably significant prices increases in the mid single-digit area at a time when we’re seeing deflation elsewhere,” says Sorrell, who is Founder & CEO of WPP. “So I think owners of the inventory feel pretty good about it.”
He then cites “obviously broader and much more significant opportunities” for advertisers in the programmatic space. It’s an area where WPP has made significant investments in its Xaxis unit and [m]PLATFORM technology.
“We’re offering something a little bit more than programmatic as it overlays brings in data and technology inputs, which make it far more sophisticated in terms of targeting,” Sorrell says.
Clients that had been concerned about some aspects of programmatic buying are thinking differently, he adds.
“We are seeing I think the start of a groundswell of change in attitude toward programmatic,” Sorrell says, citing marketers’ in-house operations “perhaps becoming less attractive” for reasons that include the need to keep updating the technology.
Turning his attention to newer content providers like Amazon he notes, “The amount of money that these companies are willing to invest in content is quite considerable.”
He says it’s not uncommon for Amazon to spend $10 million on one, hour-long episode, “Netflix maybe $7 million and the more traditional producers spending about three.”
As for whether Netflix, which according to Sorrell loses money on a cash flow basis, can ever turn that around, the answer will lie in its subscription and advertising policies. “In a way Netflix is already advertising, it has product placement warnings in front of some of its series already. So we are starting to see advertising in one form or other start to invade the Netflix platform.”
Companies like WPP, which traditionally had concentrated their investments outside of the content creation sector, have changed their thinking and are ramping up on the sell-side. Sorrell points to investments in Vice Media, Refinery29, 88rising and Mic as examples of his company’s need to experiment “to see how we can learn more and how are clients can be involved in it.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Among other things, the company knew “there would come a time in an industry that got hyper focused on audience and eyeballs and finding the right human that context would matter again someday,” says JoAnna Foyle, COO of the company now known as OpenSlate.
Given the recent and widespread advertiser backlash against their ads appearing alongside objectionable video content on places like YouTube, context has indeed arrived front and center.
“Our whole mission in life became how do we create an analytics system leveraging all of the ingested meta data from every scrap of videos that have ad opportunities on them,” Foyle recalls in this interview with Beet.TV.
This no small task considering there are 300 million videos on YouTube with ad opportunities. OpenSlate’s platform analyzes and scores YouTube content on quality, brand safety, subject matter expertise and audience.
In essence, OpenSlate helps brands create “a safe version of YouTube,” one that is tailored to their audience targets and objectives, according to Foyle.
The company scored a major coup in March of this year as brands began to flee some video platforms by partnering with WPP’s media investment management unit GroupM. As the companies announced at the time, their effort was aimed at providing GroupM clients “additional controls and content safeguards” to support their YouTube buys.
“We’re talking to a number of the other holding companies,” says Foyle.
YouTube seems to be keeping a low profile with regard to the safe content theme, telling Digiday that it’s focused on reviewing its policies and giving brands more control over ads.
OpenSlate covers both reservation media, including Google Preferred, and auction-based inventory bought through AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager. Its compensation is in the form of a CPM upcharge or percentage of media spend.
The premise of OpenSlate is “making sure that the video you your brand is appearing against is one where your brand would choose to appear,” Foyle adds.
One example might be a cosmetics brand aligned with appropriate female content as opposed to “stuff that’s completely irrelevant, like Minecraft videos.”
We interviewed Foyle earlier this week at the VideoNuze advertising summit.
]]>To David Moore, President of WPP Digital & Chairman of its Xaxis unit, it comes down to being able to pull as many levers as possible for clients.
“With the advent of dynamic creative optimization, it’s another lever for us to pull,” Moore says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes and presented by Eyeview. “We have found that when you are tailoring ads on the fly for a particular user or group of users, that performance normally increases almost every single time.”
Asked what is holding back the advance of dynamic creative optimization—the ability to tailor ads on the fly to make them most relevant to particular audiences—Moore points to traditional business practices.
Companies like Eyeview benefit from media agencies adding an incremental CPM onto a media buy, harness dynamic creative optimization “and are getting a very fine return on investment,” according to Moore.
Contrarily, creative shops have tended to be time-and-materials focused. As a result, they don’t have budgets to fund such incremental media buys.
“I think they have to reexamine their business models and embrace the data that comes from utilizing dynamic creative optimization,” Moore explains.
So will the advertising industry ever re-bundle creative and media assets, which became separated in the 1990’s as a result of marketers awarding their creative assignments to one agency and media to another?
“It’s a good question and I think with the advent of digital, the whole value chain has become blurred,” says Moore. “You have a lot of people intruding on parts of the value chain that were historically parts of an advertising agency.”
Now, every big digital media company has a creative group not only for internal purposes but also for ideation of creative themes that are pitched directly to brands. As a result, agencies often buy what’s already been created.
In the addressable television space, Moore envisions creative and media shops working closely together: creative figuring out the “right” ad and media deciding who the “right person” is to target with it.
“In the future, it’s going to be video advertising coming together in real time and tailored to a particular user or group,” Moore concludes.
Interviewing David Moore for Beet.TV was Rebecca Lieb (Conglomotron).
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to the boss of the world’s largest ad agency holding group, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell.
Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview at Mobile World Congress, Sorrell says the famous mobile ad spending gap is still far from being closed.
“People are spending about a quarter of their time on mobile, and yet it only accounts for around 12% of spending,” he says. “That’s out of kilter and it has to change.”
So, why is spending still lagging behind usage? Sorrell blames the tech.
“Technology, bandwidth, the devices, the screens are not big enough, not good enough yet,” he says. “There’s a lot of technological development to come.”
Magna Global estimates global mobile ad spend grew by 48% in 2016 to hit $80 billion in 2016, representing 45% of total digital ad spend and 16% of total ad spend.But the group expects strong growth, rising to 72% of digital and 36% of the total by 2021.
That is the fastest growth of any ad medium, surely enough to delight Mobile World Congress veterans who long remember predictions of the arrival of “the year of advertising”.
Yet Magna Global also says a key growth drivers has simply been dollars moving from desktop, a channel now plagued by ad blocking on top of deteriorating effectiveness.
Sorrell is looking to technological evolution to make mobile advertising a more attractive proposition in its own right.
“5G will obviously be important,” he adds. “In India, we’ve seen the explosion of 5G, with Mukesh Ambani launching 5G having invested $16bn without receiving a dollar of revenue. Facebook and Google tell me (about) the utilisation rates, the graph looks (vertical) – they’ve never seen any country in the world with such penetration so quickly.”
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>“There are some things going on in the industry which are just unacceptable in my view, in terms of competitive behaviour,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell tells Beet.TV, in this video interview during Mobile World Congress.
“For example, we won one contract, a substantial contract – the defending agency offering signing-on inducements to the client to sign on again, giving unattainable cash guarantees on media pricing. It makes no sense, it’s suicidal.”
In the last couple of years, murmurs and grumblings have echoed around the ad industry at practices like the kind Sorrell is talking about – but few executives have gone on public record in opposition, for fear of biting the hands that feed them.
Then, last year, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) published a report lifting the lid on widespread rebates and other non-transparent dealings, finding “evidence of fundamental disconnect in the advertising industry regarding the basic nature of the advertiser-agency relationship”.
The report has caused shockwaves, pushing a new clamour for transparency that looks like being 2017’s watchword.
Sorrell appears deeply worried. “I would say, our industry has to watch itself,” he tells Beet.TV. “There are some really crazy things being done. That can’t do anybody any good in the end. It’s short-termism gone crazy.”
To him, it’s a kind of industrial self-destruct, precipitated by the irresponsibility of peers and rivals in the business.
“I remember speaking to Arun Sarin, who used to run Vodafone many years ago,” Sorrell recalls. “I said, ‘What’s the thing that most worries you?’ He said, ‘The acts of irrational competitors’. You’re only as strong as your weakest competitor.”
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>Moore is one of many industry leaders who will gather in New York on March 9 at the Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes: Connecting Video Ad Spend To Sales. The event is sponsored by outcome-based video marketing provider Eyeview.
In an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Moore notes that one neglected aspect of “the fantastic growth of digital over the last ten years” has been creative.
“And what we have now seen is a whole host of creative management platforms, as well as dynamic creative optimization companies that provide one more way for us to optimize a campaign,” Moore says.
Alas, most of this creative customization has been relegated to display ads. “Today video is not being put together on the fly in order to create an ad specific for a user. That will happen in the future,” Moore predicts.
“Right now, most of the video renditions tend to be downloaded overnight into a cable box or made available in some other fashion,” he adds. “However, over the next few years you will see video become an increasingly important part of the dynamic creative optimization marketplace.”
Among the speakers joining Moore on March 6 at the Andaz 5th Avenue for the Beet.TV Outcomes Leadership Summit are: Lisa Archambault, Senior Director, Global Advertising, Caesars Entertainment Corporation; Tal Chalozin, CTO and Co-Founder, Innovid; Brad Danaher, Television Partnership Director, Experian; Andrew Davis, Founder, Monumental Shift; Bob Estrada, EVP & Director of Strategic Partnerships, BBDO New York; Andrew Feigenson, Chief Revenue Officer, Nielsen Catalina Solutions; Oren Harnevo, CEO, Eyeview; Rebecca Lieb, Advisory Board Member, Netswitch Technology Management Inc. and OneSpot; Joanna O’Connell, Chief Marketing Officer, MediaMath; Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal, Prohaska Consulting; Tom Rogers, Executive Chairman, WinView Games, Chairman and CEO, TRget Media; and David Shim, Founder and CEO, Placed.
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
]]>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.
What’s the rationale? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Xaxis chairman David J. Moore explains it’s about “organizing around customer and client needs”.
“The Xaxis platform that has served us so effectively is going to become part of [m]Platform, a GroupM effort to spread it across the entire network of agencies which GroupM oversees,” he says.
“The platform will handle all forms of media, giving GroupM, WPP and Xaxis a competitive advantage that we don’t see any holding company coming close to matching.”
Moore, who is also president of WPP digital, says the new-look entity prefers private programmatic ad exchanges to real-time bidding auctions. Whilst, in the latter, GroupM could be bidding for ads against anyone, private marketplaces constrain the buyers and sellers in the exchange to a preferred pool.
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
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