Rob Norman

The growing audience for connected TV (CTV) programming is creating more opportunities for advertisers to reach consumers, especially younger people who have been early adopters of the latest video technologies. However, advertisers also face challenges in viewing activity. CTV Has Room For Improvement in Ad Pods Mike Baker, investor and strategic advisor Differences in the […]

Cookies may be going away, mobile identifiers may have new controls – but one ad industry veteran says alternative targeting signals are available in the emerging TV and video world. With digital advertising’s traditional signals being reduced in usefulness, many in the industry have looked toward contextual targeting as an alternative. But, in this video […]

WEST CORNWALL, CT – For advertisers, it offers the best of both – the impact of television and a smidgen of the targetability of digital. But how is connected TV shaping up, and what will it look like in the next few years? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Norman, a veteran GroupM executive […]

VIA BEETCAM — People can learn a lot from a crisis. And we can also learn a lot about businesses. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Norman, senior advisor to GroupM, the world’s largest media agency, says the coronavirus pandemic will allow us to assess brands against their stated goals. “We’ve had any number […]

According to GroupM’s Rob Norman, the more that data is at the center of advertisers’ strategies, “the more value you’ll find in addressability and other forms of targeted TV, because what you put in is a significant determinant of what you get out… It’s about creating really high-quality seed data.” Norman, senior advisor at GroupM, […]

The year is 2019 and disinformation is everywhere. Every day, it seems, every fact has now become contestable, as many citizens, media and politicians choose to engage in building a community rather than building awareness. A board member from one of the world’s leading news organizations thinks such organizations need to do better at cutting […]

SANTA BARBARA — There is now a plethora of ad-tech solutions available to ad buyers, a smorgasbord of options for applying data to ad buying. And yet, this emerging world of opportunity also carries with it degrees of fragmentation and limitation. So, should ad buyers look to build their own, perfect solution? No, says a […]

In 2019, barely a week goes by without another big scandal or controversy concerning a big technology company, the rules around its platform access or the use of its audience data. And all that comes on the heels of the prior two years of ad-tech outcry, when advertisers lamented the opaque and often fraudulent digital […]

Why is $300 million the new black? Because that is the amount that both Google and Facebook have each pledged to spend on initiatives for news publishers, both over three years. For one ad agency veteran who is now a board member at one of the world’s largest news organizations, that may not be enough. […]

Is bad news bad news for brands? A sometimes-toxic political climate has prompted some advertisers to shun news publishers. Some ad buyers buyers have even blacklisted news sites. Now publishers are fighting back. Vice has accused brand safety platforms of censorship and others like BBC News, News Corp, The Economist and CNN are protesting that bad news can be good news […]

Put Rob Norman, Doug Ray and Lyle Schwartz on the same stage and you’re going to get some entertaining and sobering dialogue about the future of television in all of its varied permutations. So it was at the recent Beet Retreat in the City as the veteran trio talked about the promise of addressable TV […]

Rob Norman wants to help advertisers buy advertising with outcomes, not proxies, in mind – but that doesn’t mean brands should be fixated on end goals. Around the industry, new attribution and tracking technology is drawing executives to seek pricing ad pricing models that involve paying only when outcomes like product purchases are recorded. That […]

It is barely a year since a hard-hitting ANA report blew the lid off practices in which US advertising agencies were accused of keeping up to 20% of clients’ media budgets for themselves after engaging in “pervasive” kick-backs and rebates. But that was just one of the controversies that has come to live under the […]

Could blockchain technology, with its security and transparency, cure the ills of an often-murky digital media ecosystem? GroupM’s Rob Norman believes the attributes of blockchain will be a focus of the upcoming DMEXCO advertising and media trade show because of “an inevitable demand” from advertisers and agencies for some type of open ledger system for […]

One expects to see faster chipsets from the NVIDIAs and Qualcomms of the world at CES 2017, plus more dazzling television screens. But for TV programmers, a lot of the action will focus on skinny bundles and trying to figure out how consumers will figure out their individual relationships with entertainment content. This is the […]

While digital ad viewability probably won’t be the “topic de jure” at CES 2017, GroupM is taking into account modifiers for U.S. feed-based video advertising as it takes its own viewability standards global, according to Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman. “It’s pretty well known that the GroupM viewability standards aren’t met by feed-based environments,” Norman […]

Using a metaphor of the discovery of the the so-called “God particle” by physicists at the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, GroupM‘s chief global digital officer Rob Norman tells Beet.TV  that Google and Facebook have arrived at a place he calls the “God particle of marketing” which is perfect attribution. He explains the power of Google and […]

Insights gleaned from the acres of show floor space at CES will not about the latest curved TV screens, it will be the “bits in the middle” — meaning innovations taking place between the two “poles” at the show:  one being “immersive” experiences like VR and passive, and the other sensor-based technologies like smart appliances […]

GroupM, the giant media agency unit of WPP, has named Brian Lesser as CEO of North America, succeeding Kelly Clark, the company announced on Thursday.   Lesser presently serves as CEO of Xaxis, the data and and digital media buying unit of WPP. Succeeding Lesser at Xaxis as CEO will be Brian Gleason , CEO of Xaxis […]

It’s an oft-cited trope in adland that media fragmentation is still on the rise, but GroupM’s Rob Norman believes there’s an end in sight because of the rise of apps.  This is the crux of his DMEXCO keynote address he will present this week in Cologne. Norman points out that more than 80 percent of […]