4A’s Transformation 2017 presented by Extreme Reach

LOS ANGELES – In an age of advertising as storytelling, it starts with deciding what stories to tell that are worthy of an audience’s time. The next part is what gets tricky, namely figuring out the best places and ways to tell those stories. As much as some brands might wish to create a particular […]

LOS ANGELES — Trying to target an individual consumer when people’s breadcrumb trails are scattered across a plethora of devices feels like a headache for many marketers today – but those data trails can be united to piece people back together. Started seven years ago, Tapad was one of the first of what is now a rash […]

LOS ANGELES – People are unpredictable and messy, so understanding what drives their purchase decisions is truly a work in progress despite oceans of data. Then there are machines like Alexa and Siri, who are slowly nudging humans from the decisioning process. But these realities are what excite Stephanie Stopulos, the SVP of Advanced Analytics […]

LOS ANGELES – Being big for the sake of buying clout used to differentiate media agencies. Now creative agencies are finding ways of trimming down to keep pace with ever-speedier, lower-paying client demands. For Steve Erich, “not your typical agency model” means contracting for the best creative talent for the nascent Erich & Kallman shop […]

LOS ANGELES – If you could hold a mirror to the current world of content marketing it would largely reflect what’s been happening for a long time in sports and entertainment sponsorships. One of the elemental rules is that just borrowing enthusiast audiences doesn’t cut it unless you actually connect with them. “It’s not about […]

LOS ANGELES — For TV advertisers eager to see the effect of their campaign more quickly, a US- and India-based company claims to have the answer. Alphonso, which offers the ability for buyers to serve ads on to digital devices based on an understanding of consumers’ TV viewing behaviour, also this month launched closed-loop attribution. The […]

LOS ANGELES — At a time when publishers’ spoils from relying on social platforms for distribution are coming under scrutiny, the man responsible for brokering Twitter’s deals with news organizations says the busy current news environment makes the platform perfect for publishers and advertisers alike, In its last-published quarter, Q4 2016, Twitter made $638mn from advertising, slightly less […]

LOS ANGELES – It’s been a busy six months for Matter More Media CEO & Co-Founder Tracey Scheppach. The addressable television specialist formerly of Publicis has a new partner in Co-Founder and Publicis colleague Steve Murtos and a new strategic data partnership with Tapad. Scheppach is particularly excited about new addressable TV operators and the […]

LOS ANGELES – Reaching the right audience with advertising is only part of the bigger puzzle called engagement. It starts with figuring out the role of media in driving creative decisions. “I think the opportunity around creativity is to divorce it from the visual design standpoint,” says Doug Rozen, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer at […]

LOS ANGELES – The year 2017 could see set-top box and other forms of addressable advertising become truly scalable, while a great deal of work is still to be done on creative versioning of campaigns. That’s the prognosis of GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb, who doesn’t think media owners should be thrown “under the bus” because of […]

LOS ANGELES – One of the challenges of understanding cross-screen content consumption is knowing the right time to go cross-screen with advertising messages and at what depth. Then there is the separate hurdle of finding enough places to target consumers with addressable ads. These are two subjects that occupy the mind of Kathleen Brookbanks, Chief […]

LOS ANGELES – While in the larger world there’s nothing wrong with building silos, the advertising industry just has to break the habit when it comes to the digital space. Every time there’s a “new thing,” a new vertical is created even as consumers are craving ever more seamless experiences. “We as an industry, in […]

LOS ANGELES – There’s something reassuring about knowing that a company called Target is very good at targeting its guests. In return, they inform the retailer about their television preferences along with “how they’re moving from one screen to another,” says Kristi Argyilan, SVP of Media, Guest Engagement & Measurement. “Because we’re a retail organization, […]

LOS ANGELES – OpenAP, the fledgling audience-buying partnership of Fox, Turner and Viacom, will use Accenture for back-end posting of campaign results as it seeks to add more publishing partners. “The third-party post will come from a company who’s got a great reputation in the media management field,” says Howard Shimmel, Turner’s Chief Research Officer. […]

LOS ANGELES – After a month in which advertisers, agencies and publishing platforms have been pilloried in the press for allowing ads to fund shady content like terrorist recruiting videos, the world’s largest media agency is asking platforms to make a simple change it says could solve the problem. “We think we can catch 99.9% of […]

LOS ANGELES – Despite great advances in digital and television audience targeting, platform-specific creative is a milestone the industry has yet to achieve. Until a silver bullet arrives, there’s some “simple stuff” that agencies and brands can do, according to Amanda Richman. “One of them being, let’s bring together all the right parties that all […]

LOS ANGELES – By their very nature, financial institutions are held to standards of conduct that most marketers never have to worry about. So when Bank of America’s Lou Paskalis talks about brand advertising showing up alongside digital content that promotes terrorism, he’s unflinching about what needs to change. “We just can’t be in business […]

LOS ANGELES – Taco Bell CMO Marisa Thalberg knows that despite viewing shifts, traditional television is still a powerful medium for the fast-food giant. What she finds “very scary” is spending money on digital platforms given issues like viewability, fraud and the potential for the company’s ads to appear in the wrong environment. “TV’s still […]

LOS ANGELES – Some brand marketers are tired of hearing about things like ad tech stacks, data integrations, measuring click rates and figuring out last-touch attribution. But there is a growing focus on things like dynamic ad insertion to tailor messaging to the right audience at the most appropriate time. “What they want to know […]

LOS ANGELES – When there was just linear television, delivering the commercials—i.e. the creative—to TV stations was a fairly standard if not boring process. But with the explosion of viewing across screens and instantaneous delivery of creative, it’s a whole new ballgame. The “dirty little secret” that much of the industry is either unaware of […]