CANNES – There was no shortage of talk about data at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. But beyond the purpose of targeting people who are actually relevant to particular brands, “when you get to the right people, what happens?” asks Dentsu Aegis Network’s Matt Seiler.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Festival, Seiler talks about the speed needed to deliver creative in real time and the utility of such technologies as artificial intelligence, artificial reality, virtual reality and blockchain.
On the issue of speed, there’s some catch-up needed between desire and reality, according to Seiler.
“Once you’re at the right person, what do you want to say to them and how much can you change that up to ensure that you’re getting the right message to the right person in…real time. And I pause on real time, because I think we as an industry talk about real time as if it were now and it’s way too big a lag,” says Seiler, who is President of Brand Solutions. “So I suspect that the accountability will get to individual behaviors and as close to the time that you wanted to solicit that behavior as possible.”
He believes that artificial intelligence has “been around kind of forever, but calling it AI has changed our perception of it. I think there’s an insecurity around machine learning that makes us think that people are going to become obsolete, and that obviously isn’t the case.”
To Seiler, machines should do things “that people are wasting an awful lot of time doing themselves” so that they are freed up to be much more creative. “It should be much more around the story rather than the technology that’s required in order to develop and or distribute that story,” Seiler says. “AI I think is going to be really helpful and really disruptive at the same time, because there are going to be jobs that are displaced by it, as there should be.”
Virtual reality is being used “all over the place,” but he thinks the application to media hasn’t really been determined. While it’s probably appropriate for gaming, beyond that “I don’t imagine anytime soon until the technology advances and you don’t have to have those really clumsy things on your face.”
Artificial reality “is going to get a lot farther a lot faster.”
Seiler considers blockchain technology as a potential remedy for providing needed trust, accountability, speed and measurement, but he’s not about to jump aboard the blockchain train.
“I don’t think we have a clue how to go from where we are today and how we are used to paying for things and tracking them, etcetera, to where we will go.”
At Cannes, it’s all about the creative for Seiler. “I love judging here because it means you’re actually guaranteed seeing the work. I wish always that we were spending more time around the work, which is what the point of this whole thing is.”
Nonetheless, he cites a palpable sense of insecurity given the struggles of some advertising-based holding companies and competition from, among others, management consulting groups.
“The collective understanding that things are changing but not a clear understanding to what. So there’s that uncomfortable thing of, ‘like I know it isn’t this but I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ I say opportunity.”
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
