Cotton Delo

As the media landscape continues to shift, clients’ expectations of their media agencies are also changing — and becoming more demanding in a sense. “I think it’s becoming the norm now for clients, quite rightly, to expect flawless execution and great value for money and brilliant client service, and I think now that we’re seeing […]

Facebook’s VP-Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson went to college thinking she would become a broadcast journalist. But a subsequent stint in consulting that led her to a job at Disney ignited her love of media and technology for good. “That was the beginning of me seeing what it would be like to work for a […]

Now the chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, Inc., Bob Pittman got his start in the media business as a 15-year-old disc jockey in Mississippi, where he grew up. Motivated to earn money so he could take airplane flying lessons, he first applied to the local men’s clothing store and then tried to get a job […]

Interpublic Group’s chairman emeritus David Bell grew up expecting to become a litigator, but when he decided at the last minute not to go to law school and turned his sights to advertising, he got lucky with admission to Leo Burnett’s training program. “I was the only one of 19 that didn’t have an MBA, […]

In Irwin Gotlieb’s view, what should make the ad industry exciting to young people is the variety of skills they’ll get to learn and clients they’ll get to serve. “If someone were to watch me in any given day, I still read scripts for television shows, I still make calls on development, and yet in […]

Some creatives have continued to view data as an intrusion that undermines their work by valuing algorithms over instincts, but that may be starting to change. One development that creatives are excited about is the availability of programmatic technology that allows them to show hundreds of different iterations of creative to different customers, according to Erin Matts, […]

The scope and scale of the addressable TV market is bound to grow over the coming years, but that’s not all. Addressable screens are also likely to come onto the scene as TV operators stitch more devices into their content ecosystems, according to Henry Tajer, who became CEO of IPG Mediabrands in May. “That rigor […]

While it seems inevitable that targeting TV audiences at a set-top box level will become a widespread practice, the targeting of individual households at massive scale seems like a less assured eventuality. “This is really about human behavior; it’s not really about what technology will allow,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which […]

For marketers who still have the instinct to use repurposed TV spots for their digital video ads, mobile video remains challenging. It represents a form factor many haven’t figured out. “You have to rethink how you’re telegraphing [your] message and how you’re telling a story in as little as six seconds” or keeping it interesting […]

As the ad dollars spent on data strategy and infrastructure have exploded in recent years, so has investment in attribution in an effort to understand how marketing across channels works together and, ultimately, how to assign credit for driving purchases. “It’s almost rare these days to find brands who are not doing some kind of […]

Carat’s global president and U.S. CEO Doug Ray recalls a recent conversation with a client, who admitted to thinking of media five years ago as a commodity product. Fast forward to now, and the differences between media agencies and even holding companies look stark. In Ray’s view, that’s because of factors like the growth of data […]

DDB Worldwide’s chairman emeritus Keith Reinhard considers his role as a co-founder of Omnicom in 1986 to be his greatest career accomplishment, but bringing disparate agency cultures together wasn’t easy. Concurrent with the three-way union that formed Omnicom was the merger of Doyle Dane Bernbach, a New York agency, and Needham Harper Worldwide, which had […]

Despite the rapid pace of media and technology innovation, Procter & Gamble’s former top marketer Jim Stengel observes that the fundamentals of brand building haven’t changed. “A lot of companies lose sight of that,” says Stengel, who left P&G in 2008, in an interview with Beet.TV. “They get consumed by the activity that is possible now, […]

Going back a decade, when Millward Brown’s annual BrandZ study tracking the 100 most valuable global brands was first released, only one Chinese company made the list. Now there are 14, including the tech giants Tencent and Alibaba. “Most of them are big brands, but they’re not truly globalized brands yet,” says Doreen Wang, Global […]

CANNES — One consequence of the rise of data-driven marketing is brands creating tens of even hundreds of ads for various audience segments for a single campaign, not just two or three like in the old days. It’s “great from a sales perspective and not so great from a marketing cost perspective,” says Richard Guest, […]

When J. Walter Thompson’s Non-Executive Chairman Bob Jeffrey got his start in advertising, it was normal for agencies to present a single TV spot to prospective clients in order to prove their credentials. For example, at Chiat/Day, where he worked early in his career, they showed the “1984” Apple spot. However, today’s top creative directors […]

When considering setbacks over the course of his career, J. Walter Thompson’s Non-Executive Chairman Bob Jeffrey thinks of losing accounts, which he always took “very personally and emotionally.” In particular, he remembers when the agency lost most of its Microsoft business. “That was very painful because I thought we had done great work, and there […]

CANNES — When considering the future of media over the next decade, the Daily Mail’s North America CEO Jon Steinberg thinks we have to be open to what may have seemed impossible even two years ago. “When I look at my 6-year-old daughter, I’m pretty sure she’s not going to drive a car,” he says […]

CANNES — In one form or another, David Kenny’s career has been all about data, from the advertiser, agency and publisher perspective. Now The Weather Company’s CEO and chairman, Kenny was previously a president at Akamai, a managing partner of VivaKi, and a founder of Digitas. In his first job at Bain, he learned from […]

CANNES — Addressable TV has been in development for the last decade, but only now is it beginning to reach scale. That means that gross ratings points, or GRPs, may be starting to become obsolete. “You know what’s really silly?” says Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media, in a panel discussion at Cannes recorded by […]