In this video interview with Beet.TV, the MD for solutions at WPP-owned Xaxis says the two different sides of the ad industry need to re-unite.
He says the key is finding ways to put creativity back at the centrality of ad ops, and scaling personal creative to programmatic scale.
“Creative in the programmatic space has always been underutilised, always been a little bit underappreciated,” Lin says.
He blames the separation on creative’s origins in linear media like TV and magazines, which led “creative agencies tend to be separate entities and separate disciplines from the media buying or the media planning entities”.
“In the programmatic industry, that creative activation is an afterthought because most of that creative again comes from the client’s creative agency,” Lin says. “So we’re essentially a lot of times taking or re-purposing what was already created by some agency who really have no connection to the media.”
Lin wants to change that, so that clients to utilise and recognise the power of creative in the programmatic ecosystem.
But that’s going to involve combining distinct requirements from each side.
“What we really want to do as a company is make sure clients have really bespoke creative that speaks to the consumers in this environment, and also connect that to the data and to the media that they’re running with us,” Lin says.
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) can help the journey – the practice through which individual items within the creative can be customized for different recipients, leading to thousands of different variations.
That is a big increase from what Lin says is currently only “about three to about four creatives per campaign with clients”.
So technology is nevertheless going to be required to mix personal creative at scale.
For Lin, it all adds up to the quest for “responsible media”, which he defines as: “Taking the trends that we have right now, but evolving them to the trends of the future, which means cookieless, which means more cohort-based optimizations and a huge emphasis on creative variations and creative optimization.”
Xaxis is using two tools to make that mix:
Using signals like browser, location, time of day and the weather, “it enables us to create thousands of creative variations on the fly, it introduces thousands more different data inputs to which then our AI Copilot could actually optimise towards the output or the client’s outcome”.
“(It) takes cookieless cohorts of the best performing segments of inventory … like browser, creative, time of day, geo – and essentially optimises towards the best cohorts. So creative will only allow our AI and also other AIs to introduce a tonne of measurable aspects of the creative, like the click, how long someone hover on the ad, if they interacted with a video, how long they played a video.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page.
]]>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.
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:
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.”
‘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.”
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.”
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 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.
]]>But humans, too, have to learn how to make the right calls when it comes to training those algorithms.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, GiLa Wilensky, president of US at Xaxis, says “ethical AI” is essential.
Xaxis is the WPP agency focused on driving business outcomes using programmatic ad-trading. It has operated its own AI offering under the name Copilot for five years now
Introducing Copilot, Xaxis' proprietary AI-powered technology that optimizes campaigns using machine learning models.#OutcomeMedia #artificialintelligence #machinelearning pic.twitter.com/lAVva9uBmy
— Xaxis (@XaxisTweets) September 28, 2018
Wilensky says AI use cases in programmatic advertising include streamlining bidding and investment decisioning towards client goals, through customizable and machine learning models.”
“The true promise of programmatic and AI is to automate as much as possible and streamline so we can free up human resource and human time to do other things,” she says. “And so I think AI is great for automating decisions that a human can make quickly.”
But she is also cautious that, without the right guidance, the algorithms could lead to poor outcomes.
“If you put garbage (data) in, you get garbage out,” Wilensky, who joined Xaxis earlier in 2020 from Essence, adds.
“If you’re feeding the algorithms unethical or unsafe data or poor inventory to run against with programmatic, you’re going to see that output.
“The humans are ultimately responsible for the AI and the decisioning. We need to be very aware of the human biases that we’re coding in, our methodologies for sourcing data, the inventory quality, so that we can be as brand safe and ethical as possible in the outputs of what the algorithms are working towards.”
Some time ago, in association with IAB Europe, @XaxisTweets conducted a pan-European survey to understand the current and future impact of Artificial Intelligence (#AI).
Survey results are here: https://t.co/QN25wAZf6N pic.twitter.com/KlTxgFbvrO
— IAB Europe (@IABEurope) December 16, 2020
So Xaxis’ Wilensky has a solution – humans to watch over the machines.
“If you create the right boundaries and guardrails for AI, when you’re writing that code, then you’re able to have the outputs live within those boundaries,” she says.
“Some of the fear of lack of ethics in AI is really when it sort of goes wild and you don’t have the right guardrails in place.”
“Ethical AI” is a big trend in the sphere, concerning how to fairly program machine learning algorithms without human biases.
There is even an institute dedicated to the practice, while Google’s internal AI ethics unit this month hit the press amid in-house diversity concerns.
A side issue is the idea of transparency. If ad-tech were not already mired enough in concerns about lack of visibility in to supply chain patterns, then some fear decisions made by AI will be even more opaque. That is why a movement is growing to encourage AI to show their workings.
Ultimately, though, Xaxis’ Wilensky imagines AI helping play a part in keeping brands afloat after a difficult year.
“There’s no better medium than programmatic media to do so because it’s extremely flexible and we can help our clients roll with the punches as we continue into 2021 and the pandemic,” she says.
You are watching “Media In Transition: How AI is Powering Change,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Preparedness and resilience for large-scale resets are emerging onto the agendas of businesses around the world, and marketing is no exception.
In the last couple of months, many brands have had to quickly adjust their advertising strategy for different business circumstances and their creative to be more suitable for pandemic-era consumers.
Greg Anderson thinks this agility in pursuit of brand suitability can be expressed through dynamic creative optimization (DCO), the advertising technology that can allow ad buyers to quickly reassembly the creative in their ad slots.
“One area where I think we will see some adjustments is in the approach around planning and how advertisers want to adjust for any type of changes that may occur in their approach, in the economy or marketplace itself,” says the MD of Xaxis Media Group, the GroupM unit.
“With the adjustments to the economy and the consumer, we’ve seen a lot of brands leaning into dynamic messaging and changing that strategy altogether.”
DCO was already rising in prominence in the couple of years prior to the pandemic, as some ad buyers sought to assemble optimal ads for the right audience using raw components of underlying creative.
Now ad-tech vendors are also suggesting DCO could be one way they can practice the kind of agility necessary to respond to profound and sudden change.
“We’re templatizing that approach for the brands and allowing different types of messages to be fed-in based on the consumers they’re reaching and how they’re trying to drive different types of performance metrics for their campaigns,” Anderson adds.
“Within pharma and health, we’ve seen them changing their approach around messaging and how they align with the consumer. In some cases with retailers, we’re seeing a shift from driving people in-store to picking up kerbside or to their e-comm sites.”
Although TV ad rates are commonly known to have crashed, Anderson says, in a DCO world, that isn’t always the case.
“It’s not as simple as that,” he says. “We’re seeing that some brands are actually leaning into it in a very big way, wanting to align with COVID messaging and new sites, others want to steer clear of it.
“And so, depending on that strategy, we’re actually seeing, in some cases, prices increase.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But knowing which channel to use and when is a thorny problem that must be solved before a marketer can really perform omni-channel effectively.
According to Greg Anderson, MD of WPP-owned outcome-based media tech company Xaxis, that means two software processes must improve.
“I would say the two are probably most around measurement and planning,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“I think, in order for people to really adopt omnichannel solutions, they need to understand that there’s a metric they can gauge it against (to answer) ‘is this really working?, ‘why am I investing into these channels or this type of approach?’
“For any type of new or emerging channel to be adopted, measurement is at the foundation of that. I think then that ties right back into planning, and how can we take that common metric, how can we take that measurement and use it as a way to start planning and buying across new types of opportunities that they’re looking to go to market with?”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But, somewhere along the line, digital advertising became about the steps along the journey, rather than the destination itself.
That is why Xaxis, WPP’s programmatic-focused division, is now predicating its offerings on the outcomes marketers want to achieve.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nicolas Bidon, Xaxis global CEO, says that, often, what clients think they want is not necessarily the best thing that leads to outcomes.
“The evolution to outcome media really came from the poor job we’ve done as an industry to really show the accountability from programmatic,” he says.
“What we wanted to do is to the change the dialogue with our clients, refocused on measuring what matters to them. Not necessarily delivering standard metrics like CPM, and CPC, which are fairly crude, but rather agree with them what is the closest proxy to the real business results they want to deliver, and, based on that, optimize the media plan storage delivering those outcomes.
“We find brands sometimes at a loss to really understand what drives value and what doesn’t. We really leverage the technology we have on hand, specifically our machine learning platform, which is called Copilot, to try to customize algorithms that are going find the nuggets you have in the media landscape that are most likely to deliver the outcomes our client want.”
]]>“The reality is even in 2019, we still have big-brand marketers and people spending lots and lots of money measuring click-through rates or landing page visits. That kind of stuff,” Sweeney says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
About four years ago, Xaxis invested in its own artificial intelligence platform called Copilot. Even though demand-side platforms typically offer great data and technology, “to provide advantages for our clients we had to go even further.”
Copilot was designed to augment DSP’s so that marketers and agencies can “find the metrics that matter most to their business,” Sweeney says.
“What we’re looking at is huge data sets that you can lift from a DSP, log-level files where with machine learning you can look at all this data and look for those multiple touch points. The multiple variables that lead to a better engagement for a client.”
Thus informed, buyers can be smarter about “how do you bid in a very, very competitive marketplace and find more people like those people that engaged with a customer and led to a successful engagement.”
Across all verticals, Xaxis uses what it calls “a custom outcome indictor” to find the best proxies for digital media success. “Stop looking at things like click-through rates and landing pages and start looking at things that drive to a better business outcome,” says Sweeney.
While Xaxis services mostly GroupM clients working with MediaCom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, it also has a direct team whose clients include so-called direct-to-consumer brands. Those tend to seek to combine brand marketing and performance.
“That’s what’s most exciting is very often you have sort of a brand KPI or performance KPI. But a lot of these DTC guys, they want both. We’re learning a lot and we’re driving great results for our partners in that space,” Sweeney says.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>As in, make things as simple as possible for the biggest of clients and the teams within GroupM while putting forth a value proposition to attract mid-level or insurgent brands, according to GroupM North America CEO Tim Castree. “We are looking to radically simplify our business,” he says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Two areas of particular focus for Castree are increasing the company’s specialist capabilities while strengthening the core fundamentals of successful cross channel planning and activation. “Obviously, the business has been changing a lot for us.”
Formerly the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, Castree assumed his new position in December of 2018, as Campaign reports.
Business at GroupM has been growing in areas like content, ecommerce, precision and performance marketing, analytics and data sciences. “These are the things that are becoming increasingly part of the integrated media offering, so that’s what we’re in business to deliver,” Castree explains.
Asked about the growth and influence of GroupM’s [m]PLATFORM, he describes it as “a kind of liberation if you will” of technology assets that had existed inside of Xaxis. MPlatform is now a key element of WPP’s overall tech strategy.
While advanced capabilities are important, clients are looking for “foundational” work on holistic cross-channel and cross-platform activation, some that’s been hindered by walled gardens, different ad environments and the fragmentation of ad formats. “But it’s still really in many ways what clients are looking for.”
Recruiting the appropriate mix of talent is constrained by the combined pressures of client procurement and market competition.
“So a lot of the strategic things that we’re trying to get done are happening in an environment where the core business has been getting squeezed, and it’s been difficult to make a lot of the investment choices that we need to make to grow our business into the future,” Castree says.
Noting that media agencies generally attract “graduates in fairly monolithic ways,” GroupM is seeking to refine its recruitment efforts by working with technical schools and training specialists “to bring more qualified people into the organization and then do that across a number of various work streams.”
]]>“We’ve said for three years ago that Criteo will be one of the last stalwarts to stand strong and independent as this frankly brilliant arbitrager who has been selling on CPC buying on CPM because of tech, targets and talent.”
Those three T’s help advertisers and agencies make sense out of what still can be separate brand awareness and performance operations that should be melded. Prohaska alludes to a former client 2.5 years ago that had separate budgets, separate people and separate KPI’s for their brand awareness and performance activities.
“Just insane that they were totally siloed off,” says Prohaska. “Never shared data. It was almost a little too oil and water instead of chocolate and peanut butter like we always say in terms of those things mixing better.”
In terms of tech leadership, he says Criteo early on had its own dynamic creative optimizer. “The fact that there are major agencies who still do not have either their own, that they bought or built or even licensed at this point is crazy.”
He recalls that while working at BBDO in the mid 1990’s, creative and media staffers were separated by just one floor. “It was nice when you had media and creative together. Criteo has had media and creative together. That’s why their click-through rates were always one-plus and why conversion rates were always higher, because actually there are a lot of advertisers where that math still matters quite a bit.”
According to a recent release, Criteo is ranked #1 by IDC with a worldwide adtech market share of 7.4%. It was the first time IDC quantified the advertising software market at $12.7 billion, growing 38% year on year.
Speculating on Criteo’s future direction, Prohaska believes the more it can share its expertise “either with self-service tools or kind of empowering, maybe in a way that Xaxis became part of [m]PLATFORM. The more times that they do that and partner more with buyers and sellers, it might be less margin but of a much bigger pie and they’ll keep growing. It’s just symbolic of them doing very, very well, redefining performance marketing nailing it in this space and then expanding when it comes to video, mobile, in-app, ultimately television.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>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.
]]>In the past 12 months alone, GroupM launched its global [m]PLATFORM and then bolstered its Xaxis programmatic digital media platform with the machine learning initiative called Co-Pilot and finally the acquisition of Triad Retail Media.
[m]PLATFORM is aimed at “streamlining and simplifying” so that GroupM’s clients can “see their consumers and prospective in the same way across the globe,” Nicolle Pangis, the Global COO of [m]PLATFORM, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
From an organizational standpoint, [m]PLATFORM has brought together teams that used to plan, activate, execute and optimized clients’ investments across channels. This process had historically been done “in different pockets in the agency,” Pangis says. “Now we’re at the point of maturation of our industry that it makes sense to bring those all back together and create a single view.”
The biggest single acquisition by Xaxis was that of Triad, which helps retailers sell ads on their websites, for a sum in the neighborhood of $300 million, as The Wall Street Journal reports. Scaling through Xaxis’s many international offices affords Triad the opportunity to help retailers that don’t already sell ads on their websites.
Co-Pilot represents the entry point to machine learning, which is one aspect of AI. In the simplest terms, Co-Pilot’s contribution to brands engaging effectively with consumers is its ability to predict what may happen when ads are served “or what has the highest probability of happening” based on what it’s seen in the past.
“The great thing about technologies like this is that it can take both data that is specifically advertiser driven or just macro economic driven,” says Pangis.
Like other AI-inspired technology, Co-Pilot “learns as it goes.”
Among its abilities are predicting whether a particular ad impression might be viewable based on history and whether a specific consumer has engaged with ads before.
“As a technology it’s not one that is stagnant,” Pangis says. “It’s not like you put a model in and you leave it forever. You’re constantly putting in models and they’re constantly learning.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That’s the view according to veteran ad man David J. Moore, the chairman of WPP’s Xaxis programmatic outfit.
Speaking at a Beet.TV leadership summit, Moore discussed the rise of what is variously called “dynamic creative optimisation” or “dynamic creative” – “the ability to design an ad on the fly for a particular user or user group”.
Unlike conventional ad production, which tends to be for a single unit, ad production for dynamic optimisation often involves creating raw materials for a multitude of different scenes and permutations. In short, the ad may be different every time, depending on the viewer.
Moore says agencies would rather hold on to the traditional way they bill for their work.
“The legacy agency business still tends tone a time-and-materials business,” he says.
“If one of these (dynamic ad-tech) companies helps them save time and money, (they) actually lose money. We have to deal with that economic dilemma.”
A new wave of company – with one foot in technology and the other in creative – is emerging to help brands and their agencies produce ads that are the creative equivalent of a choose-your-own-adventure book, in which the story is dictated by targeting algorithms.
“My belief is the creative agencies will develop what I would call ‘creative DMPs’ and use their own DMP (data management platform) to not only direct the production of future digital but also be able to work with clients and data in a way that preserves the amount of time they’re spending on the account and perhaps even increases it.”
What form a “creative DMP” may take is not yet clear. But its role is important because, as Moore puts it, the creative process, in the last couple of years, has lagged behind the new toolset that is now applied to ad targeting.
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>But, if you thought that was small, just look at the Asia-Pacific region, where things are still in their “infancy”, according to the Group M programmatic exec trying to boost the tech in the area.
“It’s very limited still,” says Michel de Rijk, Singapore-based CEO of Group M’s Xaxis division for the APAC region.
There’s some initiatives mainly in Australia, in China and a few small companies just launched to try to cover the South-East Asia region.
“The most developed market is Australia, the most proactive, but still there it’s in its infancy right now.”
Almost half of APAC marketers have bought programmatically, according to recent Forrester research for MediaMath. But that is much smaller when it comes to TV specifically.
While TiVo in the States expects the US industry to hit 5% to 10% programmatic TV spend in the next 12 months, AsiaMX, a Singapore-based premium cross-media monetisation service provider, only launched Asia’s first programmatic TV advertising sell-side exchange in March.
“When we launched Xaxis in Asia four years ago, we had to approach advertisers and agencies and explain what programmatic was,” says de Rijk. “Now the big markets have adopted programmatic at a pretty decent scale.
There’s a lot of work to do. Programmatic is seen as bringing more efficiency to the media buying process. But I think programmatic brings a lot more opportunities to the table – specific audience messaging, overlaying of data opportunities. A lot of Asian markets still need to adopt that in a more proactive way.”
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The company has grown from fewer than 100 to more than 1,500 employees, to more than 3,000 brand customers and more than $1bn in revenue, 15% of which comes from outside WPP and its Group M agency, according to Xaxis global CEO Brian Gleason.
Next up is considerable further investment in Xaxis’ underlying technology, with a big expansion of a campaign visualization tool.
“We’ll invest over $54m in our tech this year,” Gleason tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We have over 260 engineers and scaling very quickly.”
Xaxis’ technology platforms revolve around the following, Gleason says:
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Group M’s Xaxis data intelligence VP Kedar Patil tells Beet.TV, in this video interview, the top imperative is “how to capture them and tie it back to media exposure”.
Problem is, in a multi-device world, “each of those kinds of data exist in silos”. The compulsion, then, is to “put it in one unified format”, Patil says.
Collecting data is one thing. But mapping audience data to business outcomes is the next thing. “To figure out those links … helps tell that story better,” Patil adds.
Xaxis recently launched a programmatic ad sales solution for radio in the APAC region, and named Millennial Media’s Bob Hammond as its technology chief.
This interview was recorded at the I-com Global Forum for Marketing and Data Measurement in Seville, Spain, April 18 to 21. This video is part of a series from the Forum sponsored by Xaxis. Please visit this page for more videos from Seville.
]]>New eMarketer data this week puts a more modest assessment on current levels, pegging UK ad blocking at 14% of internet users in 2015. But its forecast rises to 27% in 2017, commenting: “Once seen as the preserve of the tech-savvy, early adopters and gamers, ad blocking has now moved into the mainstream.”
In response, publishers are scurrying, variously, to present better ads, add non-advertising revenue streams or simply to block the blockers. That’s a tactic a growing number of individual publishers are undertaking whilst, in France and Sweden, several publishers have teamed to jointly prohibit access to users detected to be running ad blockers.
It’s a move endorsed by WPP Digital president David J. Moore. In this interview with Beet.TV, he says: “Viewability continues to be an issue for most. The bigger sites are starting to recognise that (there is) a cost of revenue.
“If someone has an ad blocker, they can’t monetise them anyway so don’t let em in!
“The more websites that stop letting consumers visit with an ad blocker, the more that occurs, the less effective those types of companies will be.”
Moore is also chairman of Xaxis.
This interview was recorded at the I-com Global Forum for Marketing and Data Measurement in Seville, Spain, April 18 to 21. This video is part of a series from the Forum sponsored by Xaxis. Please visit this page for more videos from Seville.
]]>But what’s left on the table? Mobile, measurement and that little matter of creativity, says one exec working at the numbers end of an ad data company.
“There’s a surge in people moving on to mobile devices. From a measurement perspective, we’re still paying catch-up,” Xaxis EMEA analytics VP Paul Martin says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Twenty years ago, there was one radio and one TV in the household. (With) a couple of panels, you could get all the insight you wanted. Now there’s so many devices. There’s still more work to be done.”
Xaxis, the data-driven ad targeting division of WPP’s GroupM, just replaced Nicolas Bidon with Harry Harcus as UK MD, and debuted a programmatic platform for buying native ads together with Plista – something considered a key move for an ad format many have worried is not scaleable
Martin says programmatic – which, if you like, is the science of ad processing – needs to get more creative.
“People feel there’s still a gap in the creative space, trying to join up the creative with the media world, that’s untapped,” he says, adding Xaxis intends “working more closely with the creative guys of the world”.
This interview was recorded at the I-com Global Forum for Marketing and Data Measurement in Seville, Spain, April 18 to 21. This video is part of a series from the Forum sponsored by Xaxis. Please visit this page for more videos from Seville.
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“The new inventory source is native,” Xaxis business development SVP Larry Allen tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We see that effectively replacing display in the coming years.”
Native has garnered attention in recent years, as display performance has deteriorated further and ad blocking threatens traditional ads, despite the rise of programmatic technologies allowing for more efficient buying.
But few have bet on a wholesale replacement of the display category, which eMarketer says will grow to overtake search spending this year. Indeed, most definitions of “display” have that category including native.
Allen says: “”We’re betting on that early and evaluating all the players in the space, whether that’s individual platforms that are catering specifically to native formats, integrating with publishers, or going directly to publishers that have their own native and content marketing capabilities.”
Allen also says he is seeing a resurgence in affection for legacy media brands in the advertiser mix, despite the rise of pure-play publishers like Vox and The Verge.
This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.
]]>Also a big area of growth has been “direct” media sales, meaning transactions that have come outside of the WPP network of media agencies under the GroupM umbrella. This non-WPP business is now 25 percent of the unit’s revenue, he says.
Gleason was recently named global CEO of Xaxis.
We interviewed Gleason for the “The Road to CES” — our lead up series sponsored by YuMe.
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We spoke with him about the year ahead and the plans at Xaxis for CES which includes hosting a high-level industry event featuring Sir Martin Sorrell and others.
This video is part of our series the Road to CES, which can be found here. The series is presented by YuMe.
]]>But that doesn’t have to mean mere product manufacturers – which, traditionally, rely on someone else to sell their stuff – have to be left out, says Candice Odhams, EMEA engagement director of WPP’s Xaxis programmatic advertising unit.
“Traditionally, Xaxis would have worked with a lot of clients who hold a lot of data about their audiences,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“But, actually, won we’re starting to work with more clients in the CPG or FMCG sector, who might not have a digital sales point but who understand that’s where their audience exists. They’re starting to grapple with the fact that harnessing their own data … can really help them.”
Earlier this year, Mondelēz International marketing chief Bonin Bough told Beet.TV how brands buying ads that drive traffic to wholesale retailers will push ecommerce to new heights. By putting more money in to ecommerce, so that Mondelēz can drive actual custom for its own food stuffs, Bough can bridge the gap.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>One of those, viewability, is improving somewhat, as publishers pare back and focus on quality, says a top programmatic ad exec.
“Publishers are being more responsible about the types of inventory that they create,” Xaxis EMEA CEO Caspar Schlickum tells Beet.TV he has noticed. “They’re being more careful about how their websites are designed.
“Rather than it all being about quantity of ads, it’s about fewer, more relevant, more viewable ads – all of which contributes to a better experience for their user, it also creates a better experience for the advertiser.”
Why is this better
“I would much rather than one, viewable, high-profile, well-executed, well-targeted ad on a page than 10 poorly-executed, messy ads where you’ve got different advertisers all competing for attention,” Schilcikum adds.
The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.
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