ORLANDO—Few companies want their services to be invisible to users, but when the mission is to ensure video ads play perfectly on every screen or device, viewers of those ads shouldn’t pause to wonder what’s happening behind the scenes. That’s the goal at Extreme Reach, whose AdBridge platform is used to manage and deploy creative assets across the modern media landscape.
Extreme Reach doesn’t make creative or buy any media, CMO Melinda McLaughlin explains in this Beet.TV interview at the Association of National Advertisers’ first-ever conference devoted exclusively to in-house agencies.
“What we do is enable those stories, in whatever shape and size, to move seamlessly into whatever media placement needs that story to play,” says McLaughlin. “We have this wonderful chance at this conference, and in what we do every day, to sit at the center of connecting the creative with the media and making it invisible to the viewer.”
Amid much talk about workflow and operational efficiency, putting a story on a particular screen and have it play perfectly requires technology that “should recede away and just work. There should be no delays in campaign starting, there should be no ad that plays pixelated because it wasn’t formatted right.”
While many things are subjective, workflow is not, according to McLaughlin.
“Creating stories is an art. Media plans are an art and science. How you move something from one place to another through different paths and processes is not subjective.
“It’s a very repeatable, tactical, executional element,” McLaughlin adds. “What we do is bring technology to the table to make humans better and to do what humans can’t do as fast as they can when they’re at the controls of that technology.”
One of those things beyond the facility of humans is automated and programmatic media buying. “We need the creative assets to be able to marry into those moments as fast as can be. The millisecond is gone if an ad doesn’t play when the ad call comes in.”
When it’s done right, “it does become invisible,” she says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos, please visit this page.
