Steve Ellwanger

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Two major ways that political advertising campaigns differ from those of brand marketers are the “Super Bowl” effect of intense competition and the detailed CRM databases the campaigns have at their disposal. But true programmatic TV buying won’t be available until the 2020 presidential election, not owing to a of lack of technology but […]

COLOGNE-As more brands strive to harness technology to create end-to-end solutions for reaching their prospects, the issue of trust looms large. Digital ecosystem realities like ad blocking are “absolutely a wakeup call that you need to be responding to as a client,” said the CEO of the EMEA region for Publicis Media. As he attended […]

COLOGNE-It’s a fantastic time to be a media agency, according to Zenith Global Brand President Vittorio Bonori. The flip side is that clients’ business models are “under attack,” a situation that the right uses of technology can help to overcome. “Sometimes when we refer to technology it can really seem as something really cold and […]

COLOGNE-A year ago, headlines abounded in advertising and media circles about the impending death of television and a skepticism about brand marketers’ need for premium video. “Fast forward 12 months to today and the headlines are literally the exact opposite,” says James Rooke, Chief Revenue Officer at FreeWheel. Rooke cites two main reasons for the […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Challenged by reach, scale and bidding against brand advertisers for impressions, political campaigns are hamstrung in their desire to do audience-guaranteed buys. But that is bound to change by the next presidential election cycle, according to Jason Tollestrup, Director of Programmatic Advertising & Business Intelligence at The Washington Post. “I think that in 2020 […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Too much TV pretty much sums up this election cycle with regard to political advertising for Susan Parker at Hearst. In the next cycle, publishers will make data for targeting voters easier to manage than it is today and cross-screen reach will be much more important. “I think one of the takeaways for me, […]

COLOGNE-While it’s great to be able to track consumers as they move across digital devices, marketers should place more emphasis on peoples’ need states than on making sure they are targeting the same individual, according to Blake Cuthbert. “All of the need states that we can identify allows us to be really super targeted but […]

COLOGNE-Irish public broadcaster RTÉ took the plunge into native branded content several months ago to provide a more immersive experience for advertisers like the Irish Tourism Board. But as the broadcaster continues to expand its reach across devices, it faces the same gremlin as its competitors: accurate audience measurement. “We’re primarily a broadcaster and we’ve […]

COLOGNE-While few marriages are actually made in heaven, the union of FreeWheel and StickyADS.tv comes pretty close. On the eve of FreeWheel’s European summit, Co-Founder and Co-CEO Doug Knopper prefers to call his company’s acquisition of StickyADS.tv a “partnership” that melds the best of direct and programmatic premium video sales and provides a much broader […]

COLOGNE-With video advertising now generating about 30% of overall revenue, Spotify is beta testing original video series so that brands can reach both paid and free users “in an immersive experience,” according to the digital music provider’s Global Head of Sales. A couple of years ago, Spotify had “only a couple of ad units to […]

COLOGNE-When its deal with Yahoo closes, AOL will gain “unprecedented scale” with which to become the king of content, while Facebook and Google rule social and search. This is the worldview of Jimmy Maymann, President of Content & Consumer Brands at AOL, whose keynote address at the DMEXCO confab was appropriately titled Publishing is the […]

COLOGNE-Having opened its Audience Network to video ads earlier this year, Facebook hopes to offer its more than 3 million advertisers the same user experience it has achieved with native content. “Video is key to our ecosystem,” says Yoav Arnstein, Head of Audience Network Sales for the AMEA region. Some 80% of ad impressions delivered […]

COLOGNE-The Internet Advertising Bureau Tech Lab is participating in two new coalitions, whose mandates are to improve the digital advertising experience for consumers and establish standards for video ads in conjunction with the television industry. Announced at the DMEXCO conference and exposition, the Coalition for Better Ads is in large part a response to the […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-From Alaska to Obama, since 2004 Mark Jablonowski has witnessed the explosive rise of political campaign technology, a business where “everything is an emergency.” Now the Chief Technology Officer of DSPolitical, a digital advertising network for Democrats, has a hand in fueling that growth overseas. Jablonowski described DSPolitical as “Somewhere in between a trade […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-With programmatic display advertising for political campaigns “fading, or at least plateauing,” video, mobile, social media and in-banner formats have become much more popular. “It’s not functioning, it’s not getting the same engagement rates that we’ve seen,” is how Jordan Lieberman describes programmatic display. The Politics & Public Affairs Lead for Audience Partners predicts […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Political campaign veteran Zac Moffatt believes a big key to success for future election cycles is more optimized television spending to heighten targeting and reduce waste. “Being able to optimize your linear TV is going to be the single most important thing a campaign can do,” The Co-Founder of Targeted Victory said earlier this […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Matt Prohaska disagrees with the stereotype of political campaign teams being behind the curve of cutting-edge audience targeting strategies and tactics. “That is far from reality,” the CEO and Principal of Prohaska Consulting said earlier this month in an interview at the Beet.TV summit on politics and advertising. One reason campaigns need to be […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-After the 2012 election cycle, POLITICO decided to move beyond its D.C.-centric publishing model and expand nationally. Now with seven state-specific newsletters and three state-specific websites, it’s knee deep in the audience targeting game and working with directly with the Clinton and Trump campaigns, as well as numerous PAC’s and Super PAC’s. “Historically, POLITICO’s […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-The 2016 presidential election cycle is the first one in which campaigns have been able to target voters with addressable television advertising. “So we’ve been awfully busy,” said Mark Failla, Director of Political Ad Sales at D2 Media Sales. D2 is a limited partnership between DIRECTV and DISH that was created just in time […]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-The most exciting aspect of the 2016 political cycle for Matthew Dybwad isn’t candidates’ foreign trade policies or medical histories. It’s programmatic television, which in his view is complicated to execute now but by 2018 will be considerably more friction-free. Dybwad, the Head of Politics & Public Affairs at global advertising software platform TubeMogul, […]