Robert Andrews

CANNES — Late 2015 and early 2016 already look like shaping up to be the time when the biggest online media brands try breaking in to the old medium of TV. AOL already hopes to gain distribution for its new HuffPo Show weekly satirical show, and BuzzFeed is known to be considering its options. Now it looks like […]

CANNES — How should a financial giant market to young adults in the digital age? By giving it to them straight. That’s according to Vice Media CEO Shane Smith, whose publishing company us helping Bank Of America do just that. At Cannes Lions, the bank announced the launch of The Business Of Life, a video […]

CANNES — It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world if you’re an ad agency exec right now. On the one hand, you have a palette of unlimited possibility at your fingertips – on the other hand, so does everybody else. Renowned media and technology M&A advisor and banker Terence Kawaja of Luma Partners is releasing […]

CANNES — These days in ad land, it seems like the only topic in town is data. The transformative potential of data-driven tools has spawned a plethora of advertising technology platforms, allowing buyers to sellers to better mediate the trading and targeting of messages. For an industry that has always prided itself on creative messaging, […]

CANNES — Over the last year, Beet.TV has been reporting on BBC Worldwide’s growing branded content initiative. Now the organization is formalising its offering in a new unit. Announced at Cannes Lions, BBC StoryWorks is the name of the content marketing that will have offices in Singapore, Sydney, New York and London and will be headed by […]

CANNES — Today, ads on TV, internet video and mobile video, by and large, have to be bought separately. But that fact is changing, with many vendors wanting to help advertisers make one buy across multiple channels. TubeMogul is amongst those vendors. “Right now, we do a really job at automating the buying a desktop pre-roll buy or […]

CANNES — Over the last couple of years, ad buyers have fought hard against the perceived threat from fraudsters cheating them out of ad impressions. Now some feel Apple is about to exactly the same. Under iOS 9, the Safari web browser will support extensions that enable “a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, […]

CANNES — US retailers’ spend through “programmatic” ad-trading platforms will bust through 20% of their total digital ad dollars this year, according to eMarketer. But we should look on that as just the start, according to one leading marketer. “Why are we focusing it on such a small percentage of overall available inventory?,” B. Bonin Bough, SVP, Chief Media and […]

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, many wondered what influence the technology executive would have on the historic newspaper. One answer is now evident – data. The lid was recently lifted on Clavis, a software project at the Post in which algorithms analyze, understand and categorize the content of news articles. That […]

Facebook is now serving “billions” of native ads on mobile apps and websites other than its own, according to the company’s ad tech head. The Facebook Audience Network was launched in beta in 2014, allowing publishers to put native ads in their apps and services, just like those on Facebook’s own. “We’ve actually figured out […]

Does the future of advertising lay in curing the common cold? That may be so for Johnson & Johnson and its agency, J. Walter Thompson. Together, the pair have just bowed HealthyDay, an iOS app that shows US users local colds, flus and allergy symptoms as though they were checking the weather.  The project was implemented […]

The marketing industry may be going crazy for consumer data, but data is nothing without insight. Marketing company Y&R’s global CEO David Sable says the “digi-babble” and “BS” about data is missing something. “Data’s not new,” Sable tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Thirty years ago, we all grew up using data. Today, we have way more sales […]

CHICAGO — What are the biggest and most exciting trends affecting advertising and communication today? Mobile, quicker time to sale, and the fusion of creative advertising by customer data, according to the boss of one of the world’s biggest ad agencies. Speaking with Beet.TV in this interview ahead of her visit to the upcoming Cannes Lions […]

Publicis’ VivaKi unit recently reorganized to thread programmatic trading throughout its sibling departments in a bid to take data-based planning to new heights and new media, according to a stablemate exec. “We are thinking not just data-centric but data-centric as it involves your entire media investment,” ZenithOptimedia activation standards, insights and technology EVP Julian Zilberbrand tells Beet.TV in […]

CHICAGO — The amount of money SMG advertisers are spending on so-called “addressable TV”, which helps buyers target unique consumers via cable and satellite boxes, with Internet precision, is on course to double this year. “We sized the addressable market for 2014 at about $300 million,” says Tracey Scheppach, EVP of Precision Video at Starcom MediaVest Group, in this […]

Facebook is this summer giving advertisers better ad targeting data so they can find better-quality ad inventory, according to the social network’s ad chief. “Adding people-based marketing, we’re taking the level of quality that markets can count on… understanding that they can deliver to real people,”  Facebook ad tech head David Jakubowski tells Beet.TV in this […]

Big media companies don’t usually buy vendors that want to rip up their historic main funding mechanism. But true[X] wants to reboot the way advertising is delivered by 21st Century Fox, which acquired it for $200 million in December. What is true[X]’s big idea? Rewarding viewers for interacting with good ads by showing them fewer ads overall, says […]

Last fall, following its acquisition of Atlas from Microsoft, Facebook announced its reboot of Atlas as a cross-device ad targeting solution. Today, the social network is switching many of its advertisings over to that system. “We’ve signed deals with five of the six holding companies. We are actively onboarding clients with all of them,” Facebook ad tech head […]

Today, Tim Armstrong is credited with having turned around one media company, as the resurrection and recent sale of AOL suggests. But, in 1993, when a 23-year-old Armstrong was embarking on his first foray in to the media business, things weren’t quite so rosy. Fresh out of a six-month stint in investment banking, after realizing the […]

Last week’s acquisition of SeriousEats and RoadFood by newcomer publishing house Fexy Media was just the start. Formed by husband-and-wide team Cliff and Lisa Sharples following Lisa’s steering, as CEO, of AllRecipes to a $175 million acquisition by Meredith, Seattle-based Fexy plans more acquisitions of its own. “We continue to build out the category in and around the kitchen table,” […]