john montgomery

CAPE TOWN — For a couple of years, it was the key issue facing brands – ensuring their “brand safety” in automated advertising environments. Now technology has helped iron out kinks in where ads get placed – but the man leading the charge says “brand safety” concerns are still around, they have just morphed. In […]

VIA BEETCAM — The brand safety leader at the world’s biggest media-buying agency is urging advertisers – blacklisting ad inventory against coronavirus news stories could kill newspapers and, with them, democracy. Last week, Comscore said 22% to 30% of all ad impressions were appearing in coronavirus-related content. Such content is now being widely blacklisted by […]

You don’t need to tell Beet.TV how problematic it can be when advertisers, seeking “brand safety”, use keyword-based blacklists to ensure they don’t get placed against certain news stories or even whole sites. This March, we ran a whole series – Why News in Today’s Marketplace – on how news publishers were arguing for their […]

Around the world, news organizations are being caught in a perilous pincer movement. On the one hand, many consumers are now ebbing away from classical news outlets, instead getting their information through social platforms. On the other, advertisers are following suit – alarmed at either the consumer migration or the increasingly downbeat tenor of news […]

PHOENIX — Two years after the world’s biggest advertiser lit a fire under a litany of digital advertising supply chain concerns, the world’s biggest ad buyer says things have improved. Now he hopes advertisers can pay a price that reflects the improvement. In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Montgomery, GroupM global brand safety EVP, […]

CANNES – Over the next couple of years, ensuring digital brand safety for marketers will become table stakes for publishers. In the meantime, GroupM is shifting the conversation with its clients to how ads perform better in truly brand-safe environments. “I think we’re moving into a stage where brand safety will become a commodity. Within […]

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 – 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 […]

It’s a world in which more data can be measured than ever before – and marketers are on the cusp of being able to thread them all together. But, just because they can’t quite yet, they shouldn’t be hard on themselves. That was the view of panelists convened at an industry discussion. “There are too many areas that […]

According to PageFair’s latest report, ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months and there are now 198 million active adblock users around the world. That fact is worrying advertisers. But what’s the reason? Over-zealous publishers who litter their pages with ads that clutter users’ experience, say a couple of executives who […]

It’s no wonder so many people are blocking ads if the mobile content experience is so iffy, right? With increasingly-rich mobile ads trying hard to get more screen time as consumers browse the web or apps, would it help to just… ease off a bit? “Ad blocking has been around for years and years now – but […]

Whether it’s fraud or viewability, the growing laundry list of things advertisers are now complaining about, in the digital advertising ecosystem, was neatly summed-up this week in a tweet by LUMA Partners’ Terence Kawaja: Ad Tech's SUM OF ALL FEARS pic.twitter.com/E1IQVduQi4 — Terence Kawaja (@tkawaja) September 15, 2015 But there is yet another industry practice to add […]

AUSTIN — If you believe some of the shocking stats over the last 18 months, close to half of online ads sold may not even technically be able to be viewed by human users. Since then, industry bodies have taken great strides to iron out the problem, whilst ad tech vendors are selling ad buyers on “viewability” solutions. GroupM […]

LOS ANGELES —  The revelations of vast personal data collection by the U.S. government  has had a big impact on consumer’s perception  of the advertising business, says John Montgomery, Chief Operating Officer for GroupM Activation and the 4A’s privacy chief, in this interview with Beet.TV Last week, he and other advertising and media leaders met […]

COLOGNE — The US PRISM data snooping controversy has hampered efforts to argue against European ad-targeting rules that are already too onerous, says GroupM Interaction COO John Montgomery.   GroupM is the media agency  holding unit of WPP. “The US is trying to support self-regulation – we’re trying to avoid any form of legislation by regulating […]