Steve Ellwanger

Few people have experienced the transition from “analog transactional media buyer” to the “almost full-service provider” that is today’s media agency than Steve King. The CEO of Publicis Media had a bird’s eye view of the birth of Zenith Media in 1995, back when the notion of unbundling the media department from the full-service agency […]

While media planning and buying giant Carat USA would like to replace the industry’s current viewability standards for digital ads with a time-based currency, it thinks there isn’t enough quality content to trade on such a metric. The agency’s preferred metric would focus on things like time, cost per view or cost per completion, USA […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-The Washington Post has gone to great lengths to create a unified auction for its ad inventory that is sold programmatically as it tries to make it easier for buyers to understand and manage private marketplace deals. “If you don’t have a direct relationship with the buyer, you’re just line on the spreadsheet,” said […]

The Internet Advertising Bureau wants to make digital ads more responsive to the screens they’re served on and easier for agencies to create, so it’s unveiled a complete overhaul of the IAB Standard Ad Unit Portfolio. Now the advertising industry gets to respond to the new global guidance. “The beloved ad units of yore are […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-If there’s a misconception that political content is not the best platform in which to advertise political campaigns, “We completely disagree with that,” is the response from Politico’s Randon White. Just about a month ago, qualitative research showed that 60% of the Politico audience was undecided on specific policy issues and that 30% were […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Sometimes success has less to do with how you do something than with letting people know you can actually do it. So it is with publishing giant Hearst—whose local newspaper reach extends from California to Connecticut—and political advertisers. Hearst has been “very aggressive with adopting technology and very flexible with executions. There’s nothing we […]

COLOGNE-Traditional “last touch attribution” for measuring advertising is out of touch with today’s analytics and could help to explain some of the headlines about how television just isn’t working as it used to, according to Jean-Philippe Durrios. “The industry has known this for a awhile. But more and more it’s becoming more democratized, that you […]

COLOGNE-Matt Gee has his own take on the nature of the transformation sweeping the advertising industry. He envisions advertising as evolving into a kind of “service design” provider, which helps to put technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality in an interesting perspective. Gee, who was recruited to Aegis Dentsu’s Isobar UK as Head of […]

COLOGNE-To the world at large, the fate of Yahoo had been a long-running saga that seemed like it would never end. But to AOL CMO Allie Kline, the deal joining AOL and Yahoo is a big momentum boost for the “flywheel” of data-driven advertising and content under the Verizon umbrella. With Verizon already having scooped […]

COLOGNE-While dynamic ad insertion is hardly a nascent concept, there is a debate over the merits of executing it solely with server-side technology. Adobe, whose Primetime technology NBC used for the Summer Olympics in Rio, believes it’s not simply an issue of client or server side. “There are major benefits and tradeoffs with server-side ad […]

COLOGNE-As it gains traction around the globe following its acquisition by FreeWheel, StickyADS.tv is preparing to release a solution to facilitate the competitive separation of ads. Meanwhile, its CEO & Co-Founder sees technology that makes video ad blocking more difficult as providing a stepping stone to linear programmatic television. In an interview with Beet.TV at […]

When she was the Global CMO of IPG Mediabrands, if Liz Ross had suggested creating a client advertising campaign that quickly disappears, she might have been shown the door. But as the President and CEO of Periscope, that concept has been a smash success in the independent agency’s work for Trolli gummy candies. Periscope’s groundbreaking […]

COLOGNE-WPP Group hasn’t wasted any time incubating GroupM Connect, its digital agency platform specializing in real-time and biddable media. In two years it’s grown to more than 2,000 people and made a number of acquisitions because “We firmly believe that anything that can be bought programmatically going forward will be,” said Ruud Wanck, Worldwide CEO […]

During its first dozen years or so of existence, the Internet Advertising Bureau helped create digital advertising standards. But more recently, digital players have pursued extreme differentiation in their offerings, unleashing “chaos” that helped spawn problems like ad-blocking technology, says IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg. “It was industry standards, including things like the IAB standard ad […]

COLOGNE-As a former tech staffer at ITV in London, Jon Block knows the many challenges facing linear television broadcasters as they plunge into the addressable space. So it is with a fair amount of confidence that the VP of Product & Platform, EMEA, at converged TV and video advertising software provider Videology declares an industry […]

COLOGNE-The biggest obstacle to the availability of addressability in programmatic linear commercial television spots is the convergence of data, not technology, says Videology’s John Tigg. As a result, so-called zero-rated TV spots represent lost revenue and profit opportunity for broadcasters. Zero-rated spots are a byproduct of traditional panel-based television audience measurement wherein there isn’t perceived […]

COLOGNE-If anyone doubted that DMEXCO has become a huge, must-attend event, that was dispelled by the presence of the “big dogs.” Companies like Accenture, IBM, Oracle and SAP had a major presence here this year, “Which I think speaks volumes,” says Ashley J. Swartz. In addition to being the Co-Founder & CEO of Furious Corp., […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-When you are a publisher serving more than 50 political buyers across some 200 different political campaigns and receiving one trillion bid requests monthly, ad tech only goes so far. “We have to be able to understand what’s happening,” according to Erik Requidan, VP of Programmatic at Intermarkets. “Let’s say a bidder is bidding […]

COLOGNE-Most newspaper publishers might be satisfied with regularly selling out their digital video inventory via good old-fashioned direct sales, particularly if they’ve managed to survive for well over 100 years. Nonetheless, Italy’s RCS MediaGroup sees the importance of programmatic sales to help monetize video content in a rapidly changing media landscape, said Simone Branca, Head […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Quality and scale of audience are key to most political advertising campaigns, according to the VP of Business Development at OpenX. “The quality component is really key for buyers because we’re no longer in a world where we’re just trying to buy the audience across any type of content. Ad effectiveness on quality content […]