COLOGNE -- Sixty percent of Starcom MediaVest’s business in the EMEA region now comes from digital content and data analytics, which is a fundamental shift from even five years ago, according to Iain Jacob, SMG’s EMEA president. “Fundamentally the agency model is changing, and if you’re not disrupting yourself, somebody else is going to disrupt you,” says Jacob in an [...]

COLOGNE -- Native ads have been called many things -- “custom advertising” and “custom content” among them -- but their value proposition boils down to one thing. “What we’re really talking about is developing great content or great stories,” says Paul Caine, Bloomberg’s global chief revenue and client partnerships officer, in an interview with Beet.TV recorded at the DMEXCO conference [...]

COLOGNE -- If UK government papers photographed by the press this month are to be believed, Channel 4 - the publicly-owned, advertising-funded broadcaster with a remit to be daring and creative - could be sold off, in the latest dimunition of state-linked organisations. Until and regardless of whether that happens, the company is shooting toward a future in which more of the ads it sells [...]

COLOGNE -- Over the last couple of years, many broadcasters and advertisers have been getting excited about so-called "addressable" TV - the ability to target advertising at individual households, in which consumers have distinct characteristics. But "addressable" may not take off everywhere. "Each market is a little bit different," says Conor Mullen commercial director of RTÉ, the Republic of Ireland's national radio and TV broadcaster. "If you want [...]

COLOGNE -- Mobile advertising is exploding, demanding focused investment and new strategic approaches from those who deliver it. "I only think mobile - I honestly think that’s the only thing we should be concerned with; we hear that from publishers. " says LiveRail’s EMEA head Yoav Armstein, whose ad tech company was acquired by Facebook. "Mobile is challenging. The tagline should be ‘less is [...]

COLOGNE -- They are the twin trends reshaping media and, with them, advertising. The surge of mobile and video consumption is the biggest opportunity in front of marketers, says one of Facebook's advertising chiefs. "Where it took TV and radio years and years and years to reach 50 million users, it took just seven years to reach over a billion people,"Facebook advertising [...]

COLOGNE -- Despite all the changes and uncertainty in the ad industry in the last decade, Havas CEO Yannick Bolloré observes that his company is seeing a great deal of momentum. “I think we have the combination of a good strategy … and the right people in the right place,” he says. Bolloré was interviewed by Beet.TV earlier this month [...]

COLOGNE -- Ooyala, the big video services company that bought European video adtech firm Videoplaza a year ago, is finding success with its anti-ad blocking software, says Rags Gupta, GM of Ooyala, EMEA, in this interview with Beet.TV He says the European roots of Videoplaza, having addressed this issue when it first arose in Germany, has given the company an early [...]

COLOGNE - Collective, one of earliest buy-side programmatic companies, has introduced a cross-platform media buying platform called Visto.   We spoke with founder and CEO Joe Apprendi about the new product, developments at Collective and his views on trends including ad blocking and the perils for publishers and marketers in over riding ad blocking software. We spoke with him earlier this month [...]

COLOGNE -- A couple of months back, we reported how AppNexus, the programmatic ad tech firm, told us it would reboot its video advertising offering after a troublesome start. And now it's claiming initial results as promising. According to the company: "Based on conversations with clients who tested our product over the past few months, we’ve consistently heard our video buying solution achieves [...]

COLOGNE -  Based on its most current studies, some 200 million people worldwide are using ad blocking software which is leading to loss in unrealized revenue of $22 billion in revenue for publishers, according Johnny Ryan, Innovation Leader at Pagefair, a company that provides ad blocking solutions.  The study was done jointly with Adobe. Factors leading to the growth of ad [...]

COLOGNE -  With its recently forged alliance with the Rubicon Project, video adtech company Virool is expanding its publisher relationships around the use of it's "in-text" video unit, says Brian Danzis, Chief Revenue Officer of Virool, in this interview with Beet.TV Virool,  and the emergence of "in-text" or "out-stream" videos were covered recently in the Wall Street Journal. We spoke with him [...]

COLOGNE - Banner ads on mobile just "doesn't exist in my mind" and the future is native advertising, delivered in innovative ways, says Chris Wallace, Mindshare's managing director for digital in EMEA, in this interview with Beet.TV He speaks about new emerging units, including the ones from Teads which deliver advertising messages in the mobile content stream. He also talks about the [...]

COLOGNE -- Time was, Bloomberg was just a business terminal. But now the financial news behemoth's empire stretches across print, web, TV, video, radio and whatever-next. Paul Caine acknowledges the strength in traditional media - but wants to monetize all the new opportunities, too. "Over the next 12 months at Bloomberg, we’re all about disruption," the company's chief revenue and partnerships officer tells Beet.TV [...]

COLOGNE -- So far, "programmatic" technology for planning, targeting and trading adverts have revolutionised online display advertising, and has extended far in to digital video. The opportunity in the multi-billion-dollar TV market is even larger - but don't expect that to happen easily any time soon, according even to an exec from a programmatic ad tech company. "There’s still a lot of question [...]

COLOGNE -- Some folks in communications are starting to get excited about greater prospects for connecting up advertising and marketing. VivaKi, the advertising group Publicis' digital unit, is now celebrating the "first birthday" of a partnership with Adobe to do just that. The so-called "Always-On Platform" gives all Publicis agencies access to Adobe's Marketing Cloud suite, to plan, create and track marketing campaigns. Speaking [...]

COLOGNE -- Many top-tier publishers used to be skeptical about the so-called "programmatic" advertising trading technology. Time was, "programmatic" meant selling off unsold inventory for pocket change in real-time. But things are changing, according to one boss of a programmatic ad tech platform. "We’ve seen premium publishers start to launch private marketplaces" says SpotX CEO Mike Shehan. "We’ve seen some of these [...]

COLOGNE -- Time and time again, the advertising executives we speak to rate one TV platform above others for having brought the prospect for targeted linear TV advertising in to reality. UK satellite TV platform Sky's AdSmart technology leverages household data the provider already holds about subscribers, and uses its broadband lines to send customised ads to customers' TV set-top boxes. "We are further had [...]

COLOGNE -- BuzzFeed's recently-inked $50 million advertising deal with WPP was a validation for its branded video efforts led out of Hollywood. Now those efforts are due to expand overseas. Online video production veteran Ze Frank leads BuzzFeed's video content efforts in Hollywood, but they are set to get an expansion. "Branded video will be coming to my region very soon," Kate Burns, [...]

Facebook is tweaking the way businesses can present themselves using Pages, and one of the execs in charge says it's about getting better representation and better outcomes on mobile devices. The tweaks, which Facebook detailed here and which First Post covered, include better calls-to-action, more pages, better layouts "If you’re a restaurant here in New York City, you can have your menu page there, you [...]