COLOGNE — If the fabled “year of mobile” has finally arrived, what about “the year of video”?
Harry Kargman thinks that will be 2018, when deals the mobile ad company he founded has with two big partners kick in to high gear.
Kargo, of which Kargman is CEO, earlier this year announced a deal with NBC to create “the world’s largest premium ecosystem for mobile advertising”, offering sale of ads on 300 premium sites from 70 media companies.
“Kargo’s going to become a very big part of what they’re doing in terms of transforming how and where video can run,” Kargman tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We think next year will be the year of mobile video. We’re going to take standard television assets and make them in to mobile-first video assets.”
Next year, NBC hopes for a big pay day as it broadcasts Superbowl, World Cup and Olympic Games for which it holds rights.
Kargo has curated an “invitation-only” list of publishers on which it sells ads it often tweaks and manipulates in creative, mobile-centric ways.
The company also has a deal with Unilever. “We’ll create these formats with Unilever, part of their creative services,” Kargman adds. “They’ll use assets they built from TV, print or outdoor – we’ll take those assets, reformat them in to mobile-first assets, we’ll even get them to create mobile-first formats with us … in the contextually-right places.”
But Kargman is calling on the entire industry to “bring art back to advertising”. “‘ART’ is in AdveRTising but nobody talks about creativity and ad technology. I don’t understand why.”
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.
