The Media Revolutionaries, presented by Xaxis and AOL

When you consider the future of the ad industry, demographics are destiny. “Clients will have to be more diverse with the growth of the Hispanic population,” says Daisy Expósito-Ulla, CEO of d expósito & Partners, in an interview with Beet.TV. Expósito-Ulla helped put Hispanic advertising on the map as CEO of Y&R’s The Bravo Group, […]

A child of the Great Depression who grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, avidly reading books and listening to radio, Byron Lewis got a sense from an early age that the media wasn’t geared toward African Americans. And that ultimately planted a seed that led him to start an agency. “I began to wonder why […]

Kay Koplovitz remembers specifically what drew her to the broadcast business: the thought of what satellites could make possible. The future founder of USA Network had a serendipitous moment as a college student while backpacking in Europe over the summer when she went to hear a lecture by Arthur C. Clarke, the author of “2001: […]

Ogilvy & Mather’s Shelly Lazarus found her path to the ad industry by accident. She had accepted a ride from someone she knew from college to New York City, and that woman mentioned she was going to an advertising conference and asked Lazarus if she wanted to come. She went on a lark, though she had never […]

Get set for another big wave in media disruption. That’s according to Joe Ripp, the media executive who has led some of the biggest beasts in the business. “I was vice-chairman of AOL in its heyday when it owned the internet – I watched the transformation of that,” he tells Beet.TV. “We are in another transformation all […]

Bob Jeffrey doesn’t like losing. When the advertising agency exec lost out on some business from long-standing client Microsoft, Jeffrey took it hard, but then moved on strong. “That was very painful,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I take everything pretty personally and emotionally. I thought we had done great work. This was a […]

Keith Reinhard got his first taste of the ad business from the tiny grocery store in northeast Indiana where his mother worked as a clerk when he was a boy. The store didn’t have room to post the promotional materials from the likes of Kraft, General Mills and Mars, so he took them home to […]

IPG’s chairman and CEO Michael Roth has worn several hats in his career. He was an accountant, a tax attorney and an insurance executive before he was tapped to lead one of the biggest ad holding companies in 2005. What’s unique about the ad business? “It has the best highs I’ve ever experienced in my business career […]

Not many kids spend their evenings, curled up in bed, reading mundane acts of national policymaking under the bed covers. But that’s exactly what Tom Rogers did – a few years later, he was writing those rules. “I was an avid reader of TV Guide as a kid – stacked ‘em up on my bedside table,” Rogers […]

When you are sitting on as much data as David Kenny is, you can really move the needle. Over the years, The Weather Company CEO has spearheaded use of digital data to transform businesses. He has variously been president of network outfit Akami, managing partner of ad group VivaKi and co-founder of the digital ad company Digitas, acquired […]

These days, Tim Armstrong may be best known for running one of the world’s leading digital media businesses. But, two decades ago, when online media were just getting going, Armstrong made his first business foray by launching a print media business. It didn’t work out so well. In fact, the newspaper he launched with a friend, “Beginnings of Boston,” […]

He may have joined the company 44 years ago now, but Publicis’ advertising industry was just about the last one CEO Maurice Lévy had in mind when he was picking a career. “The reality is, I wanted to be a surgeon,” he confesses to Beet.TV in this video interview. “I just cannot stand blood, so I had to change. […]

Facebook’s VP-Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson went to college thinking she would become a broadcast journalist. But a subsequent stint in consulting that led her to a job at Disney ignited her love of media and technology for good. “That was the beginning of me seeing what it would be like to work for a […]

In the narrative of media evolution, what was once new becomes old and, ultimately, becomes obsolete. But vinyl music is enjoying a bounce – so what chance a return for other media formats? “I’m seeing people beginning to pick up formats that were considered dead and reimagine them,” says Susan Lyne, the veteran media executive who […]

Riding the crest of a wave is a pretty good feeling. But the bigger lessons can come from falling off and hitting the bottom. Many a business guru is fond of the ironic value of failure. That’s a notion that the boss of one of the biggest ad groups subscribes to, too. “I’ve always learned more from […]

Why did you get in to advertising? For Brian Lesser, it was because his dad showed him the ropes. Now Lesser runs WPP-owned Xaxis, one of the technology companies helping make advertising more targeted and more relevant. “When I was a kid, my father ran advertising agencies … I always liked the commercials better than the […]

Now the chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, Inc., Bob Pittman got his start in the media business as a 15-year-old disc jockey in Mississippi, where he grew up. Motivated to earn money so he could take airplane flying lessons, he first applied to the local men’s clothing store and then tried to get a job […]

Interpublic Group’s chairman emeritus David Bell grew up expecting to become a litigator, but when he decided at the last minute not to go to law school and turned his sights to advertising, he got lucky with admission to Leo Burnett’s training program. “I was the only one of 19 that didn’t have an MBA, […]

In Irwin Gotlieb’s view, what should make the ad industry exciting to young people is the variety of skills they’ll get to learn and clients they’ll get to serve. “If someone were to watch me in any given day, I still read scripts for television shows, I still make calls on development, and yet in […]

CANNES — When Mike Perlis decided to accept the invitation to become the first CEO of Forbes Media from outside the Forbes dynasty, many industry insiders wondered why he would take on such a challenge. “You all were well-mannered and good friends enough to not say it too loudly to me, but I did feel it,” […]