Robert Andrews

It was a WPP agency that devised The Financial Times’ once-famous marketing slogan, “No FT, no comment.” So, what does WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell think of Pearson’s sale of its newspaper to Japan’s Nikkei for £844m ($1.3bn) this week? Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, Sorrell urges Nikkei to thaw an approach to advertisers he […]

CANNES — The $72 billion US TV advertising industry is premised on making 30-second spots that target consumers. Imagine what happens when TV sets give advertisers the cues they need to target customers individually. Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media division, which is working on just that proposition, says 2015 is the year it […]

These days, Pets.com is part of internet folklore – an early dot.com juggernaut that, in its mission to sell pet supplies direct to consumers, burned bright, launching in August 1998 and going from an IPO to liquidation in 268 days. Carolyn Everson remembers the site with horror, too – but, for different reasons. Everson says the idea for a pet retail […]

CANNES — After “programmatic” methods of refining and automating the planning and buying of digital display ads took off, many are wondering when the same technology will get traction in the TV world. But that’s the wrong question to ask, according to GroupM global chairman Irwin Gotlieb. He says the same approaches have been used since TV […]

CANNES – Joe Ripp has seen about as many incarnations of Time Inc. as there have been in the digital era. Joining in 1985 as an assistant comptroller, he eventually became SVP, CFO treasurer of the company in 1993 and, a few years later, served a AOL vice-chairman until 2004. After leaving the stable for senior […]

CANNES  — Over the last year, with more brands embracing ad tech platforms to undertake advertising activity themselves, and as more top-tier brands put their agency accounts back out to review, many have begun to wonder – is the ad agency over? But Bob Pittman doesn’t see it that way. Pittman, who oversaw the creation of MTV, led […]

CANNES — The fact that many the world’s biggest brands recently started to review their long-held agency relations, putting them out to tender once again, is making agencies nervous but will refocus their minds on results, according to one agency boss. Adweek reports, in the last six months, as advertising technology opportunities swirl around them, 20 big brands […]

CANNES — BBC News has managed to mix online video and text since the late 1990s. But why keep the two separate? Now the organization is ensuring both are on-screen at the same time, launching a product called “stick video”. “The idea is that the video player moves with you on the screen,”BBC Global News sales […]

CANNES — The CEO of video ad planning, buying and execution tech platform Videology acknowledges, right now: “The vast majority of television-based media is not fully addressable.” So he imagines a world where, today, technology supports TV ad buying that is merely “data-informed”, evolving later “all the way up to fully addressable”. With New York-based Videology, […]

CANNES — When the Media Ratings Council specced out what truly constitutes a “viewable” ad impression, in a world increasingly falling victim to fraudulent ads, ad buyers rejoiced. And then the whole system began fragmenting. Now, it seems, some customers are getting confused about which viewability trackers are right. “As viewability becomes more and more a transitionary […]

CANNES — During a panel discussion at Cannes Lions, disagreement broke out over how much ad buyers should know about the so-called “transparency” in ad network and programmatic practices. “If the agency and the client can have a very clean discussion about what is the value of the offer and what is the fee they charge, […]

CANNES — Many brands are now beginning to take the opportunity to buy ads through programmatic platforms purely under their own steam, rather than enlisting ad-buying agencies. But what is the experience like? Whilst such a feat is eminently possible, Michael Brunick, partner in programmatic ad advisory service Unbound, says: “Several brands we’ve been working with have been doing programmatic […]

CANNES — Heineken may not be able to take advantage of everything programmatic ad buying techniques offer – but that doesn’t mean it can’t use programmatic technology to better understand its customers. USA region senior media director Ron Amram tells a Cannes Lions panel discussion: “We are not big users of data, we don’t have a lot of […]

CANNES — In the ad tech arms race, a plethora of platforms claims to be “full-service”, “end-to-end”, or “full-stack”. But their dream of providing the entire solution to agencies and buyers may be wide of the mark – more likely, customers like to mix and match the tools they use. “There’s no one-size-fits-all,” Carat Global executive […]

CANNES — We have heard a lot this year about how SMG’s VivaKi has moved much of the functionality of its distinct Audience On Demand programmatic division out in to sibling agencies. That has been the internal reorganization story. But what do clients think? “MediaVest has completely rethought staffing on our business. For the most part, it’s been […]

CANNES — What is the sound of $25 billion changing hands? It’s enough to prompt a sharp in-take of breath from ad agency execs. That is the amount at stake after many of the world’s biggest brands recently began reviewing their long-held agency relations. Why are the brands putting agencies on notice? Because times are a-changin’, say industry […]

CANNES — After Philips bought out its part-owned UK video watermarking company Teletrax in 2008, it rolled it up in to a new unit called Civolution, which also offered TV event audience measurement and second screen functionality. Now Civolution has sold off the latter pieces to Kantar, it is returning to the original brand, Teletrax, which will focus on TV […]

CANNES — Social platforms have made some big announcements in recent weeks, with both Twitter’s Project Lightning and Snapchat’s 3v Advertising due to usher in auto-playing, full-screen videos. You might expect that vertically-oriented video would present a challenge to advertisers, who, traditionally, have redeployed ad creative first designed for TV’s landscape screen. But GroupM chief digital officer […]

CANNES — A common theme out of the recent Cannes Lions advertising festival is advertisers’ quest to turn messages in to actual ecommerce sales. That’s what agency Omnicom’s digital CEO Jonathan Nelson is shooting for, too, with big partners. “We’re huge partners with DoubleClick, we’re big Atlas partners,” he tells The Weather Company CEO David Kenny in […]

CANNES — TV ads aren’t as effective as they could be online because viewers instinctively want to be able to exert choices over otherwise passive content. That’s according to an ad exec whose company enables that functionality. “We have incredible budgets for television commercials. What we haven’t really seen is incredible production budgets for digital […]