MIAMI -- In changing times, when advertisers are being invited to buy media directly with platforms, rather than continuing to go through their traditional agencies, is the writing on the wall for the incumbent intermediaries? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Havas Media Group North America president Shane Ankeney acknowledges "everyone is a little intimidated" by the disintermediation chatter. But he says agencies still [...]

MIAMI-When Cambell Soup Company put its huge creative and media account into review last year, it didn’t seek the usual “spec creative” from contenders. Unlike when the company hired BBDO back in 1954, Campbell was looking for a partner to help it navigate “the pace and complexity of change.” Last month, Publicis Groupe was awarded Campbell’s U.S. retail work, Canadian and [...]

MIAMI -- Kathleen Brookbanks knows the future is mobile - she just has to hire for it. The chief operating officer of Omnicom's two-year-old agency Hearts & Science says the future of advertising depends on finding the right people. "Being that we're in a world where we have to figure out mobile, I think I would go as far as saying, advertising is [...]

MIAMI -- Advertisers now have an arsenal of tools with which to make and buy ads, and a plethora of platforms with which to measure them. But one outcome that is sorely lacking, according to the man who speaks for big-brand marketers? Advanced ad tools are not driving actual business growth. In this video interview with Beet.TV, ANA CEO Bob Liodice says innovation [...]

After a year in which it acquired Teads (video ads), miLibris (digital publishing), Audience Partners (ad-tech), Placemedia (advanced TV ads) and more, multi-national cable company Altice is making a step change to unify its ad offerings. In April, the Netherlands company's USA division, which bought Cablevision in 2015, launched a4, a business allowing advertisers to build audience segments, plan campaigns and activate [...]

MIAMI-Having been in advertising since the 1970’s, David Sable knows all about the value exchange between consumers and advertisers. So when he views the controversy about Facebook and its users’ data, he sees “an awakening of the notion of data” and suggests another value exchange might be in order. “Let’s be very clear. This is not like everybody woke up this [...]

MIAMI-There’s lots of talk about the challenges facing advertising and media agencies, among them a very competitive recruitment market, diversity and inclusion. And then there is the actual value that agencies bring to the table. “There’s a lot of negative narrative out there about what’s going wrong for agencies,” says Marla Kaplowitz, President and CEO of the 4A’s, long known as [...]

MIAMI-Since Bill Koenigsberg founded Horizon Media nearly 30 years ago, he has opted for integrated services and independence over holding companies and their assorted offerings. And while he sees his media agency as a speedboat amid aircraft carriers, all vessels are fighting an uphill battle with the likes of Facebook and Google to attract and retain talent. “Talent today in my [...]

Many U.S. marketers recognize the importance of Hispanic consumers but lack the research and content-creation resources needed to reach them most effectively. NBCU has just delivered those resources in the form of a new $250 million, state-of-the-art facility in Miami. The 500,000-square-foot Telemundo Center houses “eight studios the size of eight football fields and newsrooms to create all of our original [...]

MIAMI -- As the name of an organization, it may evoke memories of 1950s cop TV series - but, whilst the Advertiser Protection Bureau (APB) fights misdemeanors, it isn't a crime-busting agency and its members don't carry badges. Launched at the 4A's Accelerate conference, APB is a new body through which ad agency groups will notify each other when they see [...]

MIAMI -- Bitcoin isn't the only beneficiary from blockchain, the underlying technology that powers decentralized cryptocurrencies and, potentially, a whole lot more. That same kind of infrastructure is getting people in several industries excited. In particular, blockchains' ability to store an immutable, public ledger of every system activity. In the advertising world, that capability has some people wondering if such a ledger [...]

MIAMI-Even as digital-based audience targeting techniques grow in the television medium, there still needs to be a balance between one-to-one marketing and broader advertising efforts. “I think the two have to work together and you need to be careful that you don’t optimize toward specific audiences and optimize yourself out of business,” says Jason Harrison, President & Client Partner at GroupM’s [...]

On the spectrum of ad-tech bold moves, it has to rank high. Last week, NBCUniversal announced it would create nothing less than "the industry’s first unified advertising metric". So-called CFlight is a new measurement metric that aims to give advertisers a total sense of campaign viewership across screens, creating a new currency and offering guarantees of campaign performance in the company’s [...]

MIAMI-Veteran advertising and media author Ken Auletta predicts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is “going to get beat up” when he appears before Congress beginning today. But he doesn’t see any easy answers to reining in big digital companies. “He’s just a prop,” Auletta says of Zuckerberg. “They’re the actors and they’re going to perform on stage, making like they’ve been dealing [...]

MIAMI-A group of 4A’s member agencies is banding together under the aegis of the organization’s new Advertiser Protection Bureau (APB) to collectively monitor the environments in which their clients’ advertisements appear. The APB establishes a process in which risky environments are flagged and then investigated by agency-client teams. Announced today at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, the APB “came up as a [...]

Ad-tech provider Mediaocean will soon begin deploying the technology that underpins decentralised cryptocurrencies as a solution in the fight for ad transparency. In this video interview with Beet.TV, company CEO Bill Wise says Mediaocean will be making a blockchain announcement in the next few months, though initial activity in entered on discussions with potential partners. Whilst blockchain is best known as the [...]

MIAMI - The Association of National Advertisers is calling for “a new contract” that Facebook, Google and other digital companies should employ to regularly tell consumers what happens to the data they share online. “How many times are we going to go through surprise after surprise after surprise,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s [...]

Three years ago, GroupM Global Chairman Irwin Gotlieb foresaw a future that would be “much more performance-based” and focused on outcomes as opposed to media delivery. “I believe that it will be enabled by granularity of data, census-level data. Instead of broad-scale attribution modeling it will be census-level attribution calculations,” Gotlieb said at the time. Now, with his predictions having become [...]

Consumers may be driving the expansion of television viewing options, but publishers still face a balancing act between reducing ad loads and meeting financial goals. Ad buyers, meanwhile, are going to want to see demonstrable results for their investments in return for increased prices due to inventory reductions. “I think it’s a really complicated challenge that the industry is in right [...]

What do “digital pure-play” disruptors turn to when they need to ramp up customer and revenue scale? Television advertising, according to the Video Advertising Bureau. When studying big-spending, Silicon Valley brands the organization found some striking similarities, according to VAB CEO & President Sean Cunningham. “We found it interesting that the biggest bet that the disrupters were making was, if you will, [...]