ORLANDO -- If only there were an instruction manual for everything. Like many marketers, Rahul Malhotra wishes there were one for brands. He is the head of brand strategy and stewardship at Shell, one of the largest oil companies - in fact, one of the largest companies of any sort - in the world. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Malhotra says he is searching [...]

ORLANDO—Trying to guess what Progressive’s chameleon-like character Flo might morph into next is harder than winning the Power Ball lottery. It’s all about taking marketing risks because Progressive is “not like your father’s insurance company,” says CMO Jeff Charney. Suitably, Charney’s presentation at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference was titled The Most Feared Four-Letter Word In [...]

ORLANDO - After a few years in which the advertising business seemed to get consumed by numbers and efficiency, is creativity returning the fold? If the agenda for next year's upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is anything to go by, it certainly is. In a new addition to the advertising festival's agenda, CLX ("Connect. Learn. Explore"), a new mini-event within the overall [...]

ORLANDO -- If you thought the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was down-sizing, think again. In a new addition to the advertising festival's agenda, CLX ("Connect. Learn. Explore"), a new mini-event within the overall programme, will add a series of curated discussion sessions. CLX is a partnership with media consulting firm, MediaLink, which has been a stablemate of Cannes Lions since [...]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Before Hurricane Maria made land in the fall of 2017, Procter & Gamble had been in the process of upping its involvement in digital media. What followed the devastation was an immediate reliance by P&G on traditional media and, a year later, a “quantum leap” in how Puerto Ricans consume media, with online shopping soaring, says the [...]

ORLANDO—Lack of scale has been a common excuse to avoid trying to reach TV viewers using dynamic devices to view content on the big screen in their living room. But with set-top box VOD and OTT viewing soaring, it’s time for advertisers to “catch up to that viewership,” says FreeWheel’s James Rothwell. “I think we’re at an inflection point,” Rothwell says [...]

ORLANDO -- Once upon a time, a marketer spending millions on a TV campaign had to wait until its conclusion before digesting the results and tweaking the mix on the next buy. But A+E Networks is now letting ad buyers recalibrate the mix mid-campaign. The TV channel operator earlier this year began offering performance-based guarantees for some of its ad spots - [...]

ORLANDO -- After a spate of controversies in the last couple of years, ad agencies are enduring choppy waters, as many brand clients look use software, for themselves, to execute some of the traditional functions of their agencies. A recent Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey showed 35% of marketers expanded their in-house media buying capabilities in 2017 But, speaking at a new [...]

ORLANDO -- If there is one kind of publisher that knows a lot about people, it must be a genealogy site. Ancestry lists more than 20 million members, all desperate to build connections with relatives - living, deceased or as-yet unknown. It's all about reducing the boundaries between people. But there is another kind of boundary Ancestry is keen to smash down [...]

ORLANDO—For brands trying to engage with consumers, “making less matter more” is a much better business strategy than simply creating tons of content and not being channel-specific in the process, says IBM Chief Content Officer George Hammer. “I don’t think we should try to mimic business models that aren’t necessarily thriving,” Hammer adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent [...]

ORLANDO—Marketers need to find the nexus of performance marketing—“a bunch of clicks and data and sets”—and the big, thematic and typically slow-moving ideas that have long characterized brand marketing, according to the CMO of Clorox. “I’m going to suggest that we have to figure out how to pull them both together around one consumer in order to really drive the growth [...]

Is live or on-demand TV a bigger opportunity for advanced ad targeting technology? A growing number of companies is choosing both, rather than either. Case in point - Simulmedia, which had, until now, majored on lighting up advertiser access to linear TV spots using data techniques, is now adding over-the-top TV ad inventory to its offering. Through an integration with SpotX, Simulmedia says it can [...]

ORLANDO—FreeWheel’s DRIVE is a new suite of advanced advertising solutions designed to provide the “missing link” to reaching OTT and VOD viewers: holistic measurement. By partnering with Nielsen and its Digital Ad Ratings (DAR), buyers can apply age and gender targeting and/or measurement and guarantees to advanced TV campaigns. “We’re trying to put this all together, create scale and apply data [...]

PepsiCo is using the #SeeHer Gender Equality Measure as both a qualitative and quantitative tool to more accurately portray girls and women and help validate some of its budget and media decisions. “We’ve been using it much, much more the last two years across our organization and across a wide variety of brands,” says Global VP Ciara Dilley. “Because we do [...]

ORLANDO -- If any industry should know how to shake off an image problem, it should be the marketing industry. After all, isn't that its core competency? But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Deloitte Digital's chief marketing officer Alicia Hatch says marketers are suffering at the hands of technology, and need to reboot their perception. "Marketing was this force, for decades, as [...]

ORLANDO—In its ongoing efforts to transform marketing by taking back control and leading disruption, the Association of National Advertisers has committed to forming “what’s essentially an ANA marketing university,” says P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard. “The CMO Growth Council was formed to focus on marketing taking back control and leading disruption because marketing is being disrupted completely but taking control [...]

2018 was the year Amazon became the number-three digital ad platform in the US, according to eMarketer's analysis. But that is a fraction of the platform's overall revenue, led by retail sales. At the nexus of those two channels, Criteo, an advertising technology platform best known for offering retargeting capabilities, is trying to help smaller retailers compete with Goliath. Following a series of [...]

ORLANDO -- For corporate America, "diversity and inclusion" rose up the imperative ranks in 2018 like probably no year previously. But those qualities are not just nice-to-haves or boxes to tick - they also lead to natural uplift in business effectiveness. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mastercard chief marketing and communications officer Raja Rajamannar shows how adequately balancing the gender of [...]

ORLANDO--The Association of National Advertisers will expand its #SeeHer initiative globally in 2019 as it seeks to make the Gender Equality Measurement “the gold standard” for the depiction of girls and women across all types of media. What began in 2016 as an effort to more accurately portray females in advertising and content now encompasses 75 advertisers managing more than [...]

ORLANDO—Packaging for paper products like Sparkle and Brawny have benefitted from the #SeeHer Gender Equality Measure for more than a year. But one thing that Georgia-Pacific didn’t expect when it committed to #SeeHer was the positive impact it’s had on female talent recruitment. In addition to #SeeHer, Georgia-Pacific has its own program to promote gender equality in advertising and media called [...]