Cotton Delo

Byron Lewis formed UniWorld Group, an African-American and multi-cultural agency, in 1969. But seven or eight years later, his venture capital was running out, and the agency was failing to make enough money to keep the lights on. One big problem the agency had been up against was that there were almost no media outlets […]

As cord-cutting continues to gain momentum and video-streaming options abound, Cablevision’s chief operating officer Kristin Dolan is trying to transform her company into a service-oriented business like American Express or Zappos. “To me, we’re at a critical inflection point where the world is changing and we’re no longer a monopoly, and we’re a company that […]

CANNES — Addressable TV promises to be a powerful tool for reaching consumers at scale with creative that’s carefully targeted to them, but how much lift are marketers who are investing in it actually seeing? “You’re seeing 50, 60, 70% increase in sales lift,” says Tracey Scheppach, SMG’s EVP-Precision Video Director, in a panel discussion […]

CANNES — Since the value that addressable TV delivers is widely understood, what’s hampering its adoption?  Investment banker and CEO of LUMA Partners Terence Kawaja asks these panelists in a session taped aboard the AT&T AdWorks yacht. The mindset of big brands accustomed to the notion that they can buy a massive audience of adults […]

CANNES — The large number of media accounts currently up for review comes down largely to issues of pricing, trust and transparency, according to Lou Paskalis, Bank of America’s SVP-Global Media Investment. “We are in an upheaval we’ve never seen before in this business, and marketers realize they need a new pathway to market, and they’re […]

CANNES — In an effort to reach millennials, Bank of America turned to a platform and a publisher that people don’t closely associate with financial services: Pinterest and Vice. The conversation with Vice CEO Shane Smith began in Cannes a year earlier and led to a video series the bank is sponsoring entitled “The Business […]

CANNES — Yahoo arrived at Cannes last month ready to talk about video and programmatic. Lisa Utzschneider, the company’s SVP-Sales, Americas, observed that Yahoo’s video offerings now run the gamut from long-form original content (such as a custom opportunity for Honda in “Community”) to short videos in digital magazines to Sponsored Posts on Tumblr that […]

CANNES — Programmatic buying is still almost entirely associated with digital media, but the time might not be far off when creative is routinely served in real time on outdoor advertising displays. That’s what Danny Hopwood, VivaKi’s VP-solutions and platform operations for EMEA, envisions. He observes that traditional outdoor advertising companies like Clear Channel, Posterscope […]

CHICAGO — SMG is expanding the content platform it launched early last year to encompass video and native distribution channels. Designed to help SMG clients with their content marketing efforts, Content@Scale gives quick access to licensed content produced by more than 36 publishers and 135 content contributors, including CBSi, Kiplinger, Mode, Popsugar and AOL, as well […]

CANNES — Addressable TV and the notion of targeting TV ads individually has been a hot topic in the ad industry for years, and it may very soon be scaleable. “We’ll be able to make it so that it feels like it was just made for you,” says Jeff Goodby, co-chairman at Goodby, Silverstein & […]

CANNES — According to GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb, many media reviews are happening at least in part because of a bad habit agencies have developed of promising too much. “Everything comes home to roost eventually,” says Gotlieb in an interview with BeetTV at Cannes this week. “Those who over-promise massively and fail to deliver have […]

Though people often say “it’s not personal, it’s business,” it was always personal for Shelly Lazarus when Ogilvy & Mather lost an account. “What I learned was you had to have the resilience to bounce back and to say we are really good at what we do, we add value, we make a difference, and […]

CHICAGO — Roughly 45% of display ads in the U.S. are now bought programmatically, and that’s much too big for programmatic buying to be considered a specialization anymore. For that reason, VivaKi’s AOD trading desk has been moving programmatic specialists over to client teams at Publicis Groupe’s media agencies. “It makes sense that we would […]

CHICAGO — As subscription-based streaming platforms like Netflix and HBO Go gain a larger and larger share of people’s TV-viewing time, brands are losing valuable opportunities to get in front of consumers. But developing their own content — which is sometimes viewed as a way around the problem — and making it good enough to […]

The intersection of data and creativity stands to be one of the hottest topics of discussion at Cannes once again this year. And as a result, more ad-tech executives and data scientists are receiving accolades for their work than ever before. “It’s exciting to have clients and to have people in our own organizations who […]

When Brian O’Kelley was fired from Right Media after its sale to Yahoo because of a major disagreement about the direction the company had been being taken in, he considered whether he should retire or maybe become a venture capitalist. Instead, later in 2007, he decided to start something new. “It took me about six […]

More than most people, Keith Reinhard knows that persistence pays off. In an interview with Beet.TV, DDB Worldwide’s chairman emeritus describes the shock of being fired by McDonald’s and his 16-year campaign to win them back. Reinhard recalls receiving notice from McDonald’s in 1981, when he was president of Needham, Harper & Steers, as the […]

Interpublic Group CEO Michael I. Roth took an unusual path to the top of the ad industry. He was a tax attorney and then an insurance executive and was running Mutual of New York before he came to IPG in 2005. While he finds there’s some similarity between being a tax attorney and an ad […]

LONDON — Back when SMG’s Pippa Glucklich was a university student writing her dissertation about women in advertising, just 14% of senior executives in the ad industry in the UK were women. Now, two decades later, the percentage has increased, but only to 25%. “Our industry in the UK is absolutely split 50/50 at entry […]