People who are closest to the day-to-day nexus of data and technology are usually the first to discern meaningful turning points. For Evan Hanlon, that insight emerges as he considers years of industry talk, hopes and dreams. \u201cI feel like we\u2019re turning the corner beyond the sort of aspirational and the dream and all the good stuff and we\u2019re starting to think a lot more about the other side of it,\u201d says the President of GroupM\u2019s [m]PLATFORM, US.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s on the \u201cother\u201d side?<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes it work? Is it valuable? What are the ramifications for it in a rapidly changing legal environment?\u201d Hanlon adds in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he also talks about the limits of automating creativity and observes how competitive walls are rising in digital but falling in television.<\/p>\n

[m]PLATFORM<\/a> is GroupM\u2019s means of spreading a wealth of data and technology prowess\u2014and how to most effectively harness the two\u2014across the multitude of WPP entities, many of them advertising or media agencies.<\/p>\n

Hanlon<\/a> says reverberations from the EU\u2019s recently activated GDPR, which represents a tightening of data privacy restrictions, are \u201cstarting to find its way into the United States as well and forcing clients, particularly large global clients that we work with, to sort of really rethink how they think about their consumers and what is valuable to them from a data and technology perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reasons are clear: it can cost more to properly manage and safeguard customers\u2019 data under GDPR, which while quite voluminous in verbiage isn\u2019t crystal clear to marketers at this point with regard to what definitively constitutes non-compliance and the specific financial consequences.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, when having a serious conversation about the realistic value of customer data, \u201cI think what\u2019s interesting is that the answer has been no as much as it\u2019s been yes,\u201d says Hanlon. He stresses that \u201cno\u201d isn\u2019t inherently bad because getting a \u201cconcrete answer\u201d carries its own value.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut what it means is that the opportunity for evolution, for change, is a lot more prominent than I think we would have necessarily anticipated from the conversations that we were having with clients a year or even two years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Hanlon addresses the convergence of traditional TV and digital video, he characterizes the conversation around platforms like Google and Facebook as \u201cone that\u2019s slightly negative or closing. All you hear about is the sort of closing down of access and the application of data at an individual level that can happen as policies start to change, as the walls start to get higher.\u201d<\/p>\n

By way of contrast, \u201cOn the TV side of the world it\u2019s the opposite. We\u2019re seeing an acceleration into a world of addressability and an ability to think about things from a cross-channel perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for limits on hyper personalization of ad messaging, Hanlon questions the idea that \u201cwe can fully automate creativity and that we can create an individual experience for every single person that we ultimately see within the ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such an approach ignores \u201cvery key reasons how we build brands and how we build resonance and salience. It may make a lot of sense within a retargeting context, but when it comes to these larger TV and video-based executions, we\u2019re never going to be able to get to a space, I think, nor do we want to, where we personalize it for every single person.\u201d<\/p>\n

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented\u00a0by the\u00a0FreeWheel Council for Premium Video<\/a><\/em>. For more videos from the series,\u00a0please visit this page<\/a>.\u00a0 FreeWheel is a Comcast company.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People who are closest to the day-to-day nexus of data and technology are usually the first to discern meaningful turning points. For Evan Hanlon, that insight emerges as he considers years of industry talk, hopes and dreams. \u201cI feel like we\u2019re turning the corner beyond the sort of aspirational and the dream and all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":52537,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[]},"categories":[7262],"tags":[5279,5287,5267,3803,3977,6597,7259],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}