After two decades with the world’s largest ad media company by billings, the man they call “the king of advertising” is still hungry, still changing. Good job – advertising is about to change, a lot.
“If someone were to watch me in any given day, I still read scripts from television shows, I still make calls on development – in the next minute, I may be dealing with a computer or trading issue,” says Irwin Gotlieb.
Currently chairman of GroupM, Gotlieb previously led MediaVest Worldwide, led Mindshare Worldwide and was CEO of GroupM before moving to chair in 2012.
Renowned for his sharp ability to spot future trends, Gotlieb, who grew up in Japan and taught himself to code on some of the earliest computers, leverages decades of experience to spot the next wave. So what’s next for advertising?
“It will be much more performance-based than it is today,” he tells Beet.TV. “I think we’ll be dealing with outcomes (for marketers) as opposed to media (content) delivery. I believe that it will be enabled by granularity of data.
“Instead of product development cycles based on a typical person, everything will be based on collaborative filtering, understanding things at a census level. The closest thing we’ll be doing to modelling down the road, is creating buckets of individuals who have similar behaviour patterns.”
After so many years in the business, Gotlieb clearly still has a real zeal for changing, adapting and creating the future of media – an industry he says is a perfect choice for young new starters.
“I can’t think of any other business where you get to play with technology, where you get to play with content, where you get deal-making, where you get strategic insight, input and analytics,” he says. “We cover the whole gamut of things.”
So, what would be the “king of advertising’s” advice to the pretenders to the throne?
“Come at it from a perspective that says, ‘there are no rules, disruption is okay’,” he says. “Just cause someone hasn’t done it before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Just get on with it.”
This is segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.
Gotlieb was interviewed in his New York office for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
