Even as more marketers come to understand the value proposition of advanced advertising targeting, more sell-side silos are being erected. This is why a big focus under new GroupM North America CEO Tim Castree is to encourage the disaggregation of data, inventory and technology.
While a lot of progress has been made in the last several years, “there’s still too many people that want to own their own solutions, own their own data,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to CES 2019. “So we’re seeing a lot of advanced television silos pop up, which makes it more challenging and less simple to aggregate that back up for marketers.”
Formerly the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, Castree took on his new role earlier this month, as AdExchanger reports. The CEO position had been held by Brian Lesser, who joined AT&T in 2017 to build an advertising and analytics platform for the data and content assets the company would acquire from Time Warner.
Castree sees too many publishers that want to create their own end-to-end solution comprising data, inventory and technology “and sell it bundled in a package.” Hence GroupM’s focus on collaboration, consortiums and a “disaggregation of technology, inventory and data so we can re-aggregate more bespoke solutions for individual advertisers.”
Judging by market mix modeling and performance attribution, “video is still the top of the performance stack” but it’s a fragmented world of premium video distribution.
Stressing the importance of scale, particularly for mass-marketed products, advertisers can’t always target their way to growth, according to Castree. Within that scale lies the ability to add targeting layers and dynamic creative optimization to find “more interesting, nuanced and targeted ways to reach certain segments of those audiences.”
Asked about marketers’ understanding the value proposition behind addressable and other forms of audience targeting, given the incremental cost of creative, data and technology, Castree adds, “I think some advertisers understand it very well and others don’t. Everybody understands it conceptually.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
