LAS VEGAS — It’s nearly a year since Tim Jones, then regional CEO of Zenith Optimedia, stepped up to lead Publicis Media’s Americas division after the ad agency group’s latest reorg.
But that was the past. What is on Jones’ mind when it comes to the future of media?
To find out, Beet.TV caught up with Jones at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Jones said the industry is undergoing a revolution he calls “the road to personalization”.
“We are able to talk to consumers on a one-to-one basis through programmatic and, increasingly, through traditional areas of media,” he said. “We are within sight of the era of personalization where we will be able to serve an individualised message to a consumer or customer.”
The reorganisation saw Publicis Groupe organize around four groups and programmatic capabilities be threaded in to normal agency activities, rather than kept the specialist preserve of VivaKi. It’s an approach Jones calls “the power of one” for the conglomerate, though there may be four times that number of groups under the hood:
- Publicis Media
- Publicis Communications
- Publicis.Sapient
- Publicis Healthcare
“We wanted to be much more accessible and open-source for our clients,” Jones adds, saying the programmatic move has led to much greater client adoption of the tactic.
In an online media world dominated increasingly by just Google and Facebook, ad agencies are looking for other publishers to step up and provide the scale they need to place money elsewhere.
“We embrace competition, we need choice … in the partners we can work with,” Jones urges. The consumer wants choice as well.”
But he sees positive changes are coming. “We’re seeing the next generation of social media platforms coming through,” he says.”
This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
