Robert Andrews

A blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin – but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary. Over the last year, businesses of all kinds have explored the potential it offers to record every action and modification […]

CANNES — A lot of industry insiders are talking these days about how the traditional ad agency is dying. That may or may not be true, depending on your persuasion. But a 2018 intervention by new blockchain technology could at least improve the quality of agencies’ lives in the foreseeable future. That was the hope […]

CANNES — Several years after the term was first coined, “omni-channel marketing” – the process through which brands reach customers in a unified fashion despite that being through multiple devices or places – is still far from ubiquitous In this video interview with Beet.TV, Essence president Jason Harrison says the roll-out of the omni-channel approach is […]

CANNES — The construct of “The Four Ps of Marketing” has been in circulation for some decades now. But old needs a reboot. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wavemaker global chief client officer Aaron Smith redefines the “Ps” for a new era. “The old ways of building relevance no longer work,” he says. “To really […]

CANNES — Brands and agencies have more data thane ver before – so why is it getting more difficult to prove the real outcomes of marketing? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wavemaker global head of strategy Stuart Sullivan-Martin says proving value is getting harder, not easier, as two imperatives of marketers come together in […]

The technology used to process cryptocurrency doesn’t need to be particularly fast. At peak, there were barely 500,000 global Bitcoin transactions per day. When you think about using the same technology for digital ad management, however, it becomes clear that the infrastructure would need to cope with tens of millions of transactions per second. Many people […]

CANNES — Media measuring has come a long way since the days of audiences filling in a weekly diary of their TV consumption, or strapping a funny box to their media device. Now measuring media consumption is just as likely to be about taking actual raw data from publishers and networks. But that doesn’t mean […]

CANNES — Asia is big, but the scale of its digital transformation right now is bigger. In fact, businesses there are pushing to make their operations digital at such a clip that the process risks breaking down. That is according to one digital ad agency boss who says there is a need for marketers to […]

CANNES — Whoever ultimately ends up owning UK TV and telco operator Sky, following the current acquisition scrap, won’t just be getting the country’s leading pay-TV company – it will also be gaining one of the world’s earliest addressable TV pioneers. Sky launched AdSmart back in 2014, using its own customer data to analyze viewers on […]

CANNES — The gleaming, shimmering advertising future is one in which brands and buyers know which devices their target consumers are using and can plan to buy just the right amount of inventory across each to make a campaign tick. But, despite years of talk about “omni-channel” marketing, the truth is – for many – […]

CANNES — The addressable TV company GroupM established to tackle the challenge of cross-screen audience targeting and standardized measurement is still planning to expand beyond is initial UK launch market later in 2018. Last year, the agency launched Finecast, spanning multiple TV channels, pay-TV platforms, set-top boxes, video-on-demand services, over-the-top providers and game consoles. Finecast offers advertisers […]

CANNES — Worries from ad buyers and sellers over how portions of their money get siphoned off by ad-tech platforms have prompted an “inertia” in which players have become reticent to try new tools. But a panel of industry executives convened by Beet.TV debated how blockchain technology could usher in a new era of transparency […]

After transparency, back-handers and disintermediation by platforms, media agencies are also facing a competitive challenge from interest shown by big consulting firms. Is this the nail in the coffin for the traditional ad agency? Not necessarily, but their role may well evolve in the next few years. That is the view from one exec whose […]

Whether it is AT&T buying Time Warner, Comcast and Disney bidding for 21st Century Fox, or the earlier roll-up of Verizon, Yahoo and AOL, one thing is clear – US media and technology consolidation is in full-swing. One more thing that’s in full-swing? The arrival of consulting firms to the advertising and marketing party. For […]

The bears are circling traditional TV. With a continual digital migration, traditional TV ad spending entered last year entered what is forecast to be three years of downturn. By most definitions, that is a recession. But Mike Baker thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. The CEO of ad-tech firm dataxu thinks digital and linear […]

The worlds of crypto-currency and toilet paper may seem to have little in common – but the technology that underpins Bitcoin may soon help one of the world’s largest personal hygiene product makers clean up its media business. Kimberly-Clark, whose – brands include Andrex, Corronelle and Huggies – was one of the companies announced by […]

CANNES — It was the subject of a thousand interactive TV dreams in the nineties – the ability to buy products straight from ads seen on the TV screen. Now Hulu has enabled it, and its ad chief thinks the future has finally arrived. The new ad unit, called T-Commerce, was launched with interactive firm […]

When Twitter unveiled its mid-June feature update, focusing the company on a message of serving “What’s Happening“, it seemed strange. Twitter first embraced “What’s happening?“, the prompt to create new tweets, back in 2009. But, this time, the company was making some product changes, to better emphasise its role at the heart of global user […]

One month after Europe’s new privacy legislation came in to effect, the world did not cease to exist – but a good proportion of ad inventory did. Still, one ad-tech exec believes consumers have every right to expect a rebalancing of their relationship with publishers and advertisers, which the new GDPR law sought to usher […]

CANNES — If you believe the hype, podcasts right now are one of the fastest-growing media in the market. Edison Research’s The Podcast Consumer, the most oft-cited proofpoint, now suggests weekly podcast listening has grown to 17% of Americans aged 12 or over, with a balanced gender split. More and more publishers are falling over […]