2017 Cannes Lions

Pleasing television viewers while meeting advertiser goals is the constant balancing act facing ad-supported content providers. With this in mind, Fox Networks Group recently embraced YouTube’s six-second ad format as it continues to experiment with limited-ad offerings and enhanced audience targeting. “Our biggest form of competition in human attention in the entertainment television space is […]

CANNES – For MEC, understanding the consumer purchase journey involves making waves and showing clients how their “momentum” stacks up against competitors. It’s a blend of data, content and technology—something that the Cannes Lions festival is catching up to, according to the global media agency’s Nathalie Haxby. “We’re seeing a lot of that now with […]

CANNES – So many video ad units and platforms, so many ways to attribute value to those units. “Trying to figure out the value of a video ad unit depending on where it runs seems to be one of our challenges as an industry,” says Shenan Reed, MEC’s Chief Digital Officer for North America. And […]

CANNES – If you are one of the many people whose attention to a television show is shared by another device, there’s a decent chance Alphonso knows what you’re watching. The automatic content recognition company indexes TV like Google indexes the Internet. So when an Alphonso SDK in a tablet, smartphone, smart set-top box or […]

CANNES – Even if unified cross-screen audience measurement remains a bridge too far at present, understanding linear television audiences gets better all the time. This is something that A+E Networks can attest to following an engagement with TV analytics firm 605 in which ad exposure data was matched with transactional records. The result, as moderator […]

CANNES – Call it television, video or neither. What matters to ESPN’s Eric Johnson is that it delivers “value and impact” to advertisers. Like other attendees of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Johnson welcomed the many conversations about how the industry can come together and drive more effective ways of measurement. “We’re trading on […]

CANNES – Global agency MEC has a bias against bias. Toward the top of the list is “unconscious bias” and it’s become an acute problem in a day and age when agencies are facing more competitors than ever. “We’ve done an awful lot of work on unconscious bias. It’s a huge thing in our industry,” […]

CANNES – Live streaming video is helping to break down the perceived barriers between traditional television and premium video, while OTT viewing continues to see tremendous growth, according to the latest FreeWheel Video Monetization Report (VMR). In this interview with Beet.TV, VMR author Ying Wang discusses the first quarter VMR findings, which show that premium […]

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 – 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 – 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 – 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 – 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 – Because it may have grown to become too big and too expensive, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity should be examined for its location and format, according to Sir Martin Sorrell. However, boycotting the event or not participating is not the right approach, according to the Founder & CEO of WPP. Sorrell’s comments […]

CANNES – First off, don’t call them avatars. They’re “digital humans” with their own biologically inspired emotional models. And they are ready to help bring brands to life in amazing ways. In this, Soul Machines Co-Founder & CEO Mark Sagar walks The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman through three immersive and utterly absorbing examples of […]

CANNES – Andrew Feigenson joined Nielsen Catalina Solutions about six months ago hoping that the ad industry was moving toward an outcomes-based approach to measuring success. So far, he hasn’t been disappointed. “From an advertiser perspective, we’re seeing a lot of that right now. Brands that are actually taking sales impact as a KPI and […]

CANNES – Lost in the headlines about so-called fake news is the reality that artificial intelligence is making things better. But it’s not lost on Washington Post. “I think the way we think about AI is how to strengthen our journalism,” Jarrod Dicker, Washington Post’s Head of Commercial Product & Technology, says in this interview […]

CANNES – Bank of America believes that artificial intelligence, along with its upcoming digital assistant dubbed Erica, will make the financial giant more nimble and predictive with its customers. “I think it’s going to be an incredible enabler and make us much quicker,” BOA’s CMO, Meredith Verdone, says of AI in this interview with Beet.TV […]

CANNES – Artificial intelligence offers brands a wide spectrum of new capabilities, from machine learning insights to enabling more human experiences and interactions. “AI is in many ways like that word innovation,” says Lisa Donohue, Global Brand President of Starcom Worldwide. “There are so many parts to AI that fall under the equation.” In this […]