CANNES – Solving the challenges of optimizing advanced television and premium video surely will provide better audience targeting and advertising performance. But just as important, it’s also a “bulwark” for agencies to defend their turf against consultants and other forms of disintermediation.
This is the viewpoint that Tim Castree brought to global advertising and media planning agency MEC upon his arrival as CEO from Videology, following stints at MediaVest and Leo Burnett. Having been tapped to lead the merger of GroupM’s MEC and Maxus earlier this month, Castree sees a need for more standardization for targeting and measurement and fewer “home-grown” solutions.
Many people look at advanced TV and premium video “and say it’s obvious, we get better targeting, we get better performance, etcetera,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV. “But there’s a larger context that I’m not sure people are talking about in the industry that’s really essential.”
While companies like Google and Facebook are “fantastic, important partners” they represent “disintermediation against the agency model at the moment,” according to Castree.
Meanwhile, he alludes to consultancies that are attempting to lower the rank of agencies on the value chain.
“They want to give all the smart advice and try to relegate us to execution,” Castree says.
So the opportunity for better optimization of advanced TV and premium video isn’t just about better performance. “It’s our bulwark. It’s our big hedge against the competitive threats and disintermediation.”
The route to erecting these ramparts is by bringing more data, targeting and addressability “but more importantly more standardization to the approach behind which we transact in premium video.”
In other words, a common way to apply different types of data to targeting and measurement.
“The challenge we’re having at the moment is everybody is building a home- grown solution,” Castree observes. “There’s just a multitude of home-grown solutions so it’s getting more fragmented, more difficult to navigate and the power is in some form of consolidation around that.”
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
