Robert Andrews

CANNES — For the last couple of months, a big number has been rattling around the media industry – “85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook”, a Morgan Stanley analyst observed in The New York Times. The two big platforms are super-dominant when it comes to ad […]

CANNES — If consumers are revolting against advertising because ad-tech has been too aggressive, why would anyone trust ad-tech to clean up the mess? That seems to be the rationale at AOL, whose content division is now taking a stronger role in making ad formats that don’t piss off its readers and viewers. “People are pushing back […]

First, it was a letterbox. Then, it was vertical. But is the future of video actually… square? Zohar Dayan thinks so. He’s the CEO of Wibbitz, a company helping publishers make videos out of text articles. And, when it comes to distributing those videos through social media, one format wins “Eighty-five percent of the most shared videos on […]

CANNES — John Marchese has seen the future. It’s a world where consumers really like ads, and want to get more of them, because they enjoy interacting with commercial messages. That’s a world away from where we are today, says Fox Networks Group’s advanced advertising president. Because the truth is, consumers don’t really like ads at all. “We […]

CANNES — USA Today’s weekly virtual reality news show “VRtually There” may not even have launched yet – but that isn’t stopping the news publisher from touting the product to advertisers, all the same. Publisher Gannett announced in March that VRtually There would launch in the spring, bringing scheduled weekly news to consumers in virtual space. Speaking at […]

LONDON — Advertising creatives schooled for a world of TV spots are going to have to think very differently in the age of newsfeed messaging. That’s according to one such exec who offers this fantastic observation to Beet.TV. “The social news feed is your personal curation of what’s going on – you just jump in, ‘what’s […]

Back in the eighties, Eamonn Store piloted Royal Navy ships around the Caribbean. Now the former advertising executive is the latest chief at the helm of The Guardian’s New York-based US division. In choppy waters filled with threats and opportunities ahead, Store is plotting a course for a publisher that will swerve around advertising revenue chances if they don’t fit […]

CANNES – It is just two months now since Comcast-owned video ad-tech enabler FreeWheel acquired France-based TV ad-tech platform StickyADS, as it looked to extend its US digital ad expertise in to European TV. We have heard lots about the complementarity of the two companies. But what does the deal mean for existing and new customers of the […]

CANNES –  With numbers this big, it’s no wonder ad-tech vendors re vying to turn even the traditional media space programmatic. “Worldwide, (advertising) is $170bn, in the US it’s $77bn,” according to Herve Brunet, CEO and co-founder of StickyADS, one TV ad-tech vendor recently acquired by another. “The linear side of TV is eventually going to […]

CANNES — The advertising technology industry is now replete with metrics and currencies. What if there was another one added to the mix? The chief of a programmatic firm acquired by Group M’s Xaxis division is advocating a switch of focus. “We (as an industry) have been talking a lot about performance metrics and if people […]

CANNES — Twelve months after it launched an ability for advertisers to introduce custom logic to ad buying, AppNexus claims 25 clients are using the tool. Last year, the ad-tech platform bowed AppNexus Programmable Bidder (APB), a way for buyers to connect with AppNexus via API. One part of that was Bonsai –  a way to let  advertisers “decide […]

CANNES — One of the hottest topics in advertising right now is dynamic creative – the ability to tailor not just the buying of inventory in real-time, but the message served in the ad, too. Numerous software vendors are now offering ad buyers variants of this customization, and Group M’s Xaxis says it can be pretty […]

CANNES — Across the industry, ad execs are coming to realize that integrating brand messages in to content could lead to better impacts, could even save an ad industry that is fast becoming concerned about a consumer revolt. Native advertising is becoming big business, and product placement is growing bigger than ever. The only problem? Developing an industry-wide […]

CANNES — Two watchwords were on the lips of most advertising execs who gathered at the Cannes Lions festival this year. One was “authenticity“. The other, “transparency”. Across the industry, advertisers – alarmed by the revelation that many ad views are invoked without a real human audience – are aiming for full visibility of audience […]

CANNES — The tech industry sure does like to trump up certain software as the next big thing. All the while, the advertising industry, too, has been worrying that certain technological developments could cause it the mother of all headaches. So, what’s the truth – and which of the recent trends are overblown? On a panel of […]

Advertising is changing faster, perhaps, than it ever has. Today, new platforms offer a new creative palette for agencies to make messages – and new challenges present limitations on their scope. Underneath all that change, however, lays the kernel of the same, enduring construct – storytelling. That’s according to an agency creative who has devised campaigns for […]

As they approach Facebook for clients, it would be easy for a lazy agency to simply re-trot the creative assets they had already produced for legacy media or other digital outlets. But that would be missing the point – new channels demand new approaches, and new approaches reward creatives, according to one advertising leader. “Every time they […]

CANNES — One screen good, two screens better… but, in households with multiple people and multiple devices, how are advertisers and content owners supposed to understand consumption anymore? That’s where media measurement agencies come in – and that’s why digital measurer comScore agreed to merge with TV mesaurement firm Rentrak last year. The outcome – a combined […]

CANNES — A couple of years back, video ad-tech outfit Ooyala acquired peer Videoplaza to combine geographic footprints and technological capabilities in a single company. Now the joined-up outfit is going to market. “We have invested in the ad-tech business since acquiring Videoplaza a couple of years ago,” Ooyala programmatic GM Scott Braley tells Beet.TV on the company’s first […]

CANNES — If you Google “ad agency disintermediation“, you won’t fail to see the debate. With countless advertising and marketing technology platforms now on offer to help brands plan, buy and understand their communications, people are starting to wonder – is the ad agency over? In other words, will clients begin to run more of their own […]