Robert Andrews

CANNES — The rise of automated, super-targeted advertising known as “programmatic” has been complex and fast. Sometimes, ad tech players have not helped themselves by obfuscating their offering in obtuse language. But one of the key execs in the space says he observers advertisers increasingly wrapping their head around the prospect and its potential. “We’ve […]

CANNES — After a couple of years of estimates that upwards of 30% to 50% of online ad impressions may have been fraudulently served by nefarious bots, it has begun to seem like platforms have gotten across the problem. Try telling that to Lou Paskalis, who holds the marketing purse strings as Bank of America’s global media […]

CANNES — For businesses that have often preached the dangers of operating in “silos”, it’s ironic how siloed ad agencies’ programmatic ad tech operations have been within their own companies. But that is now changing, with a couple of big agency initiatives to reboot how their dedicated programmatic divisions operate in their wider groups. Publicis’ VivaKi unit […]

CANNES — The ongoing digital explosion is shaking up operations for publishers and broadcasters around the world, and that means recalibrating the skills you need in your team. What does that mean for one of the world’s biggest business information media companies? Asked by Mindshare NA Chief Stategy Officer Jordan Bitterman for Beet.TV, Bloomberg Media global chief revenue […]

The whole of the communications business is being shaken up – and yet, one thing will remain exactly the same. “In 10 years time, as today, ideas will be king,” according to ad agency holding group Publicis’ CEO Maurice Lévy. Speaking with Beet.TV, he envisages a future industry in which digital technology will play a bigger […]

CANNES — If you thought it was just media companies that were selling automatic online advertising, think again. Retailers are also becoming media companies, and they are using programmatic to do it. Programmatic ad tech vendor Rubicon Project’s international GM Jay Stevens tells Beet.TV he anticipates the “confluence” of database marketing with display advertising. “Some of […]

CANNES — Vox Media‘s portfolio of eight sites may be pretty popular on their own. Together, the publisher claims around 170 million monthly uniques for the collection, to which it recently added Re/code. But CEO Jim Bankoff is thinking bigger. He wants to spread that content off from just owned and operated sites, on to […]

CANNES — Brands buying ads that drive traffic to wholesale retailers will push ecommerce to new heights, according to the marketing chief of Oreo and Toblerone company Mondelēz International. Bonin Bough reckons a coming fusion of media buying and ecommerce opportunities will fuel massive business expansion. “We saw a unique opportunity in the marketplace right now to build […]

CANNES — Almost exactly a year after the president and chief operating officer of BuzzFeed was named to lead MailOnline’s US expansion as the online paper’s north America CEO, now Jon Steinberg is already enjoying getting a toehold in to the TV business. At Cannes Lions, DailyMail.com (as the site is called in the States) and Dr […]

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 […]