Cannes Lions

CANNES — He is better known to Beet.TV viewers as the man who helped grow Publicis’ programmatic advertising business. But this year Marco Bertozzi jumped out of the agency world and in to a music subscription startup, when he was named Europe VP and head of sales for Spotify. Why music? Because Spotify has a […]

CANNES — He had spent six years leading the build-out of GroupM’s programmatic audience-buying division Xaxis in the EMEA region, but now Caspar Schlickum has moved on to another part of the sprawling WPP empire. Last year, Schlickum left Xaxis to become CEO of Wunderman’s APAC division – a move he says was motivated by […]

CANNES — Could the technology behind Bitcoin be used to power digital advertising data, not just a digital currency? At Cannes Lions, the festival of advertising creativity, technology and ad execs alike have been discussing the potential application of blockchain. But “potential” may already be an out-of-date description – because Comcast used Cannes to announce what […]

CANNES – NBCUniversal’s Symphony initiative keeps adding new players to its promotional ensemble, wherein all company units pull to together to promote a specific initiative. This year Symphony will benefit from NBCU’s partnerships with the likes of Apple News, BuzzFeed and Snapchat. Therein lies a paradox of sorts, given NBCU’s public bashing of some of […]

CANNES – When Lucas Cridland compares broadcast television to digital video, he sees data gaps and a lack of flexibility in the former. “The dynamic nature of the premium marketplace is constantly moving,” says the President of Dentsu Aegis Networks’ Amplifi US. But while there seems to be “a lot of innovation on the supply […]

CANNES – Is the semantical divide between “television” and “digital video” crumbling? Judging from discussions at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, the answer is yes. At least it is in the mind of Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink. Following his role as moderator of the FreeWheel/Beet.TV New […]

CANNES — At the latest assembly of the world’s largest festival for creative marketing, the hottest topic up for discussion was… artificial intelligence? It may seem incongruous, but, as executives in industries the world over scramble to assess the benefits promised by AI, advertising decision-makers are amongst those getting excited. “At the agency level, we […]

CANNES – Advertisers aren’t getting less protective of their audience targeting data but they are increasingly willing to work with data and content providers. At the same time, they’re relying less on intuition to choose the most suitable programming for their brands, according to Mel Berning, A+E Networks’ President of Sales. He sees these trends […]

CANNES — Imagine a future in which a brand advertised to you through your TV, then followed you out of your apartment, down the street, in to the store and inside the movie theater. That future is now, as a new crop of TV ad data companies is rising up to offer not just TV […]

CANNES – As more marketers seek to use data to achieve the kind of accountability that direct-response media has typically provided, agencies are improving the way they handle sensitive consumer information. In the past month alone, Dentsu Aegis Network rolled out a PII-based data platform and appointed a global data compliance officer in advance of […]

CANNES — Clippy was never this clever. Artificial intelligence is now taking us on a journey to a time where we will interact with lifelike digital avatars in virtual worlds populated by thousands of artificial actors. That is the vision of artificial intelligence pioneer Mark Sagar. He should know – the CEO of Soul Machines […]

CANNES – Call it digital déjà vu. The global convergence of television and video that has set off a wave of consolidation and new market entrants in the United States first began to emerge in Europe about two years ago. Fast-forward and you had deals like NBC and Comcast and now the pending acquisition of […]

CANNES — Brands spend too much time measuring the wrong metrics and should, instead, switch focus to look at a holistic overview of what matters in world in which they take back control. That is according to the chief of the media agency network launched by Omnicom last year. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hearts & […]

CANNES — GroupM is reconfiguring its agency businesses for a new advertising world in which advertisers expect to measure and pay for ads that bring real, identifiable business results. In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM north America CEO Brian Lesser explains the group is responding a world in which the agency business model is fast-changing, […]

CANNES – Brands need to break away from the limitations of traditional digital ad measurement, to embrace a world in which they can achieve true business outcomes. That is according to the tech chief of one leading ad agency. Compared with analog, digital advertising may be sophisticated but, without having full sight of outcomes like […]

CANNES – Sir Martin Sorrell says marketers are changing their attitudes toward programmatic media buying at the same time as the growth of alternative content continues unabated. In this interview with Beet.TV, he also talks about WPP’s investments in content producers and how advertising “in one form or other” is seeping into Netflix. In the […]

CANNES – Having spent nearly four decades in advertising, Carl Fremont perceives artificial intelligence as “beyond transformational” and “completely disruptive.” For their part, marketers need to be brave and experiment with AI while not thinking short term about it, Fremont says in this interview Beet.TV with The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman at the Cannes […]

CANNES – Solving the challenges of optimizing advanced television and premium video surely will provide better audience targeting and advertising performance. But just as important, it’s also a “bulwark” for agencies to defend their turf against consultants and other forms of disintermediation. This is the viewpoint that Tim Castree brought to global advertising and media […]

CANNES – OMD’s Chief Investment Officer welcomes a warming of the discourse between traditional TV content providers and their digital counterparts. Not only does it reflect reality, embracing both is the only way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, says Ben Winkler. In this interview with Beet.TV, Winkler mentions a conversation he had onstage […]

CANNES — At this point in the early development of artificial intelligence, many people probably assume that typical AI applications revolve around textual deployments. But we if you could use AI to create lifelike digital brains that, implanted in 3D facial models, could give life and character to virtual avatars? As far-fetched as it may seem, […]