NEW YORK – At the IAB NewFronts, Liane Nadeau, chief investment and media officer at Publicis Groupe’s Digitas North America, made a quiet but notable admission: the old rivalry between direct buys and programmatic is over, and frankly, it was getting awkward anyway.
“Historically, those two things would’ve been antithetical,” Nadeau said, referring to direct publisher deals and programmatic buying. “You would’ve thought you’re either going to buy direct or programmatically.”
Now, she explained, the two are increasingly working together, even if programmatic still feels like the plus-one that arrived late.
“There is some benefit to still running some of those programmatically,” she said in this interview with Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV. Nadeau pointed to advantages like frequency control and unified measurement.
Measurement still keeps everyone humble
If there is one thing that continues to humble even the most sophisticated marketers, it is measurement. Nadeau acknowledged that what counts as success depends heavily on the client, the category and how advanced their analytics setup is.
“It depends on the client because admittedly, measurement is a bit different for different categories,” she said.
Still, she made it clear that publisher partnerships do not get a free pass.
“We’re holding publisher partnerships just as accountable as we are our social, our programmatic, even our search,” she said, adding that if they do not drive business outcomes, they likely will not make the next plan.
In other words, even the fanciest custom content program has to prove it can pay rent.
Context becomes the industry’s favorite buzzword, again
For Nadeau, the most important driver of outcomes can be summed up in one word that marketers have rediscovered with great enthusiasm: context.
“The thing that I would say matters the most is context,” she said, before breaking it into its essential parts.
That includes reaching the right audience, placing ads alongside quality content and showing up at the right moment. She also offered a gentle critique of the industry’s programmatic era.
“As we start to buy more biddable and focus on audiences, we lost a little bit of the content along the way,” she said.
Now, content is back in fashion, which is convenient since it never actually left.
Publisher direct relationships make a comeback tour
Nadeau described publisher direct deals as something of a lost art, now enjoying a revival. The appeal is not just access to inventory but access to trust.
“One of the things that you can only get from a publisher direct relationship is typically the borrowed equity of that brand,” she said.
Aligning with premium publishers allows brands to benefit from the credibility those environments have already built with audiences. It is the marketing equivalent of being introduced at a party by someone everyone already likes.
Brands now advertise to humans and machines
If that were not enough complexity, marketers now have a second audience to consider: algorithms.
“We’re not just speaking to people anymore, we’re also speaking to LLMs,” Nadeau said, noting that publisher partnerships can boost visibility in AI-driven discovery.
This means content must resonate not only with consumers but also with the systems that decide what those consumers see. Subtle, nuanced storytelling is now competing with whatever an AI model finds easiest to summarize.
Success is measured in real time and in hindsight
When it comes to proving effectiveness, Nadeau outlined a two-part approach. First, there are immediate signals like engagement and view-through rates. Then there is the harder part: tying those signals to actual business outcomes.
“What are the optimization metrics that we can see in real time?” she said, before adding that those cannot be the only measures that matter.
Ultimately, she emphasized the importance of connecting upper funnel activity to real results, often through marketing mix modeling. “Tying that upper funnel, mid-funnel down to brand outcomes in the end is what’s pivotal,” she said.
Which is a polite way of saying that impressions are nice, but revenue is nicer.
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