Caspar Schlickum

CANNES — Asia is big, but the scale of its digital transformation right now is bigger. In fact, businesses there are pushing to make their operations digital at such a clip that the process risks breaking down. That is according to one digital ad agency boss who says there is a need for marketers to […]

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 […]

LONDON — After revolutionizing online display and digital video ad sales, many expect so-called “programmatic” technology to shake-up the TV advertising industry, too. Even a sliver of the $79bn US TV ad industry would be worth a small fortune. But indusstry opinion appears divided on whether “programmatic TV” will take off any time soon. However, two […]

Over the last couple of years, the ad industry has put itself through the wringer, when it comes to the combined threats of fraud, viewability and, now, ad blocking. One of those, viewability, is improving somewhat, as publishers pare back and focus on quality, says a top programmatic ad exec. “Publishers are being more responsible […]

Despite the emergence of ads networks and individual targeting that allows advertisers to reach consumers on whatever site they may be, many ad tech execs say context – the art of simply placing an ad in a related publication or TV show – will continue to prove valuable. But can context actually work against effective ad targeting? […]

COLOGNE — So far, “programmatic” technology for planning, targeting and trading adverts have revolutionised online display advertising, and has extended far in to digital video. The opportunity in the multi-billion-dollar TV market is even larger – but don’t expect that to happen easily any time soon, according even to an exec from a programmatic ad tech […]

COLOGNE, Germany — In an advertising world that is increasingly enamored with mathematically-advanced methods of targeting messages, it may be easy to overlook the industry’s underlying creative necessity. But the two are not mutually exclusive, says a chief from WPP’s data targeting division. “I’m definitely starting to see the creative agencies within WPP engage more […]

Now that TV viewers are using mobile devices to distract themselves from TV ads, GroupM’s data-driven Xaxis unit is trying to bring those ads to the palms of their hands. The unit recently launched Xaxis Sync, its technology for buying ads on social networks at the same time they run on TV, in further global markets, following inception […]

LONDON — Media people are talking a lot about “barbells” – Tim Armstrong’s metaphor for an advertising world that is coalescing around the seemingly polar forms of sponsored content on the one hand and data-driven display sales on the other. But one ad exec reckons those opposite ends aren’t as distinct as the metaphor suggests. […]

LONDON — 2014 looks like being an even bigger year in video for Group M’s Xaxis data targeting unit. Group M parent WPP last week announced it would merge stablemate 24/7 Media’s collection of publisher-side technologies in to Xaxis to cater to an ad market seeing publishers and advertisers dealing with each other, cutting out […]

LONDON — The rise of super-targeted “programmatic” online ad buying may be cast as the rise of “Maths Men” over “Mad Men” – but one ad exec says marketers should refocus on using the new wealth of numbers to tell traditional creative stories. “The language we’ve created for our industry is very difficult for most […]

LONDON –Videos is the fastest part of Xaxis, the data and technology of GroupM, media agency division of  WPP.  It has been a “watershed” year where the agency is using data to target about half of its video buying across the EMEA region, says Caspar Schlickum, MD of EMEA, in this interview with Beet.TV The […]

COLOGNE — “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” wrote sci-fi novelist William Gibson. And that’s exactly the landscape for so-called programmatic and real-time automated ad bidding techniques. “The way publishers have engaged with the programmatic space in Europe has been much more careful – they’ve thought about it much more,” […]

COLOGNE — Automated, programmatic ad-buying technologies are disrupting the display advertising market. And, increasingly, they will do the same for video ads, says one exec. “From an advertiser point of view, the idea of audience targeting is something they’re extremley keen to do across video as much as they are across other places,” Caspar Schlickum, […]

Nowadays, programmatic digital ad-buying technology automates targeted ad buying and removes the task from human operators. But those ad buyers should rejoice at throwing off the shackles of the mind-numbing task, according to a GroupM executive. “What programmatic does is free up resource,” Caspar Schlikum, the EMEA managing director of GroupM’s data-centric ad unit Xaxis, told […]

LONDON – Everyone is talking about how consumers’ electronic breadcrumb trails can make for highly effective digital media advertising campaigns. Two years ago, WPP’s GroupM launched Xaxis, an in-house division dedicated to leveraging  audience profiles to even better target marketers’ messages. “It’s an evolution of the role of the media agency,” Xaxis’ EMEA managing director […]