Accordant Squeezes Between Agencies & SaaS Vendors: CEO Muldoon

CANNES — In the last few years, we have seen a rush of companies scramble to offer services for the programmatic trading of online advertising. Traditional ad agencies have added programmatic services to their offering, even as programmatic ad tech vendors rise up and promise to to disintermediate those agencies. One company now claims to be toeing […]

 
 

Havas Invests To Simplify Programmatic, Houssaini Says

CANNES — Programmatic has come a long way, and confused a lot of people along the journey. Now it’s time to simplify a technology that is the overriding priority for many a media agency. “Everybody needs to understand it and they need to understand the simplicity of it,” according to Houssein Houssaini, global head of programmatic solutions for […]

 
 

Digital Ads Beginning To Resemble Direct Mail: Merkle’s Delaney

CANNES — In June at Cannes Lions, Merkle, the independent data-driven ad-tech company, announced the launch of its Programmatic Addressable Marketplace, the latest ad targeting product to hit the market. As the company put it at the time, “PAM represents the industry’s first premium programmatic advertising solution that enables deterministic, people-based targeting and measurement across premium […]

 
 

Connected TV Will Bestow Internet Powers: Mediavest | Spark’s Korenfeld

CANNES — Once, it was a one-to-many medium. But TV is being rebooted. As consumers connect a new wave TV boxes to the internet, the screen in the living room begins benefitting from all the things internet-connected devices have been able to do for the last 20 years. And marketers are getting excited, because targeted advertising […]

 
 

Programmatic’s Dead, All Hail Advertising Automation, Rubicon Project’s Jay Sears

CANNES — It has spent the last couple of years up-ending, shaking up and revolutionizing the buying and selling of advertising – all without, it sometimes seems, the industry ever agreeing what it really means. But could “programmatic” advertising now be waning? After a year in which executives have begun to apologetically refer to “the […]

 
 

Pivotal’s Wieser Expects More Dialogue And Scrutiny Regarding Agency ‘Kickbacks’

CANNES – Wall Street analyst and former media agency executive Brian Wieser has lots of observations about the controversy over the allegedly non-transparent ways some agencies make money. But his main takeaway seems to boil down to this: marketers need to read their contracts. It sounds so simple considering all of the time, money and […]

 
 

Advertisers Want Google, Facebook Alternative: Rubicon’s Patz

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 […]

 
 

What’s The Importance Of Transparency? Rubicon’s Rooftop Panel Discusses

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 […]

 
 

Are Ad Blocking And Viewability Over-Hyped? Rubicon’s Rooftop Panel Debates

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 […]

 
 

Are Marketers Ready To Bring Tech In-House? The Rubicon Rooftop Debate

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 […]

 
 

4A’s Hill, Pivotal’s Wieser Spar Over ANA Report Critical Of Agency Practices

CANNES – The advertising industry’s reaction to a report critical of advertising and media agencies that the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) believes pad their compensation via non-transparent tactics continued with a testy waterfront exchange here. It’s a subject that won’t be going away soon. Beet.TV was present for the contentious discussion sponsored by Rubicon […]