Steve Ellwanger

CANNES – Purpose marketing that’s built into a brand’s DNA can mean survival or distinction, particularly when younger consumers are the targets. It’s one of the takeaways from all of the discussion at the Cannes advertising festival for OMD’s Nikki Mendonca. Credit it to the age of instant and viral digital communication. “Your brand is […]

LAS VEGAS – The words transparent and measureable don’t always apply to some digital advertising offerings. Retale, the location-based mobile advertising platform for retailers and brands, has found a way to incorporate both to stand out from the crowd. The shopping-based “app ecosystem,” which launched about two years ago in the United States, enables marketers […]

LAS VEGAS – Forget the unicorn startups. B. Bonin Bough wants to be among “the next wave of dragons” that create billion-dollar businesses on the backs of existing, scaled organizations based on sensing where consumers are headed. Bough, who is Chief Media & Commerce Officer of consumer-packaged-goods giant Mondelez, addressed futuristic e-commerce in a session […]

CANNES – As the North Star has been to navigation, television-targeting firm Simulmedia sees its partnership with Neustar as the most direct route to finding specific audiences on linear TV. Providing closed-loop activation and measurement of ad campaigns, the Neustar deal is designed to optimize brand marketers’ “most precious asset”—their first party data, according to […]

CANNES – Wall Street analyst and former media agency executive Brian Wieser has lots of observations about the controversy over the allegedly non-transparent ways some agencies make money. But his main takeaway seems to boil down to this: marketers need to read their contracts. It sounds so simple considering all of the time, money and […]

CANNES – The television industry needs to act less “precious” about its assets and be more aggressive in finding ways to expand measurement options. This was the view shared by NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino at a discussion sponsored by global media agency Carat. After laying out her company’s three priorities—content investment, data and analytics development and […]

LAS VEGAS – That people constantly multitask is yesterday’s news. How they allocate their time across devices within a given time period—and what that allocation will look like five years from now—is what’s important to Brian Hughes. As he attends the annual Nielsen Consumer 360 event, the SVP of Audience Analysis Practice Lead for Interpublic’s […]

LAS VEGAS –Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Research Officer has a message for cable television providers: unlock your viewership data and it will be mutually beneficial. “If I could wave a magic wand to have the right data set for TV targeting and attribution, right now what I’d love to see is all the MSO’s start […]

CANNES – Many people in the advertising industry are quick to bemoan high levels of turnover among younger employees. But not the president and CEO of TBWA\Worldwide. Given the rapid pace of consumer behavior and the ongoing melding of creativity and technology, Troy Ruhanen advises agencies to get used to filling open positions. “You have […]

LAS VEGAS – Despite tremendous growth in consumer use of connected-TV devices, traditional media have stabilized year over year and thus “the report of their demise appears to be premature,” says Glenn Enoch, SVP of Audience Insights at Nielsen. At the same time, DVR penetration and that of streaming video on demand (SVOD) have met […]

CANNES – When Canada’s Toronto Raptors basketball organization wanted to revamp the way it drafts players, it was elementary to turn to IBM. That’s because Watson helped the team analyze the social media engagement of potential draftees. Specifically, the Raptors chose IBM iX, a unit that stands for Interactive Experience, has grown from 10 to […]

LAS VEGAS – Nielsen veteran Karthik Rao senses a resurgence of engagement as a metric for marketers. If that’s so, then the sky is the limit because while advertising reach has its limits, engagement does not. As he attends Nielsen’s annual Consumer 360 gathering, the theme of engagement “seems to be what everybody’s building their mousetrap […]

LAS VEGAS – The term “total audience” doesn’t necessarily mean “total currency” to Turner Broadcasting’s Howard Shimmel. While he doesn’t think the advertising industry will ever adopt a single currency for trading traditional television and digital video, he’s happy that measurement giant Nielsen is moving ahead with its Total Audience offering. In an interview with […]

LAS VEGAS – The biggest takeaway to date from Nielsen’s work with Roku in examining the connected device landscape is that it’s a lot like linear television, given the amount of co-viewing that takes place. “If you looked at the connected device landscape and all you looked at is the server counts coming off of […]

CANNES – Even though the Havas trading desk has reduced bot and non-human traffic for its clients’ advertising campaigns to under 5%, it’s “a constant worry” to Dominique Delport. The Global Managing Director of Havas Media Group believes the online advertising paradigm has to be completely re-shifted. “I think enough is enough for consumers,” Delport […]

LAS VEGAS –The term “paid plus co-op sort of mentality” could well describe a mountain commune, but it’s an understated way of explaining the huge data nexus that Experian Marketing Services and Neustar hope to become under their new partnership. Among other things, advertisers will be able to pool their data for mutual benefit. In […]

LAS VEGAS  – Experian Marketing Services and Neustar have upped the ante in the ongoing arms race that is the onboarding and activation of offline, first-party data to more precisely plan and measure cross-platform advertising campaigns. Their partnership announced today also brings new potential for identifying and targeting viewers in addressable television households. The two […]

LAS VEGAS – ESPN’s Barbara Singer has been “fanning the flames” of cross-platform content viewing measurement for many years. Among other things, the media company has learned that its viewers and listeners only become “cross-platform” denizens over several weeks. “We thought that people were using multiple platforms every day, but it’s not true,” says Singer, […]

LAS VEGAS – Talking television ratings, Donna Speciale is ready for C Whatever, given the media company’s vast cross-platform presence, but for now she’s pleased that clients have warmed up to C7. She calls it “baby steps.” In an interview at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference, the President of Ad Sales at Turner Broadcasting System […]

LAS VEGAS – Pity the lowly digital video recorder. If media companies like Hulu had their druthers, it would go the way of the hula hoop (sorry Wham-O). It’s no surprise that people like Peter Naylor, Hulu’s SVP of Advertising Sales, have set their sights on the DVR. They see it as a Pleistocene relic […]