In Irwin Gotlieb’s view, what should make the ad industry exciting to young people is the variety of skills they’ll get to learn and clients they’ll get to serve.
“If someone were to watch me in any given day, I still read scripts for television shows, I still make calls on development, and yet in the next minute I may be dealing with a computer issue or a technology issue or a trading issue,” says Gotlieb, GroupM’s chairman and a legend in the media business, in an interview with Beet.TV. “And you don’t get to do that in most businesses.”
Reflecting on his career, Gotlieb, who founded MediaVest in 1993, says he’s fortunate not to have had any horrific business setbacks. However, earlier in his career he focused on business at the expense of his personal life, though he’s had ample time to make up for it with his wife and daughter.
“With parents it doesn’t work that way because once they’re gone you don’t get a do-over,” he says. “So that’s the one thing that I’ve probably failed at.”
Looking to the future, Gotlieb says the ad business will be much more performance-based than it is today, focused on outcomes instead of media delivery. Instead of broad-scale attribution modeling, census-level attribution calculations will be the norm.
This 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 AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.
Gotlieb was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
Gotlieb will be the keynote speaker at Beet.TV’s November summit on addressable TV advertising.
