Rob Norman

It’s an oft-cited trope in adland that media fragmentation is still on the rise, but GroupM’s Rob Norman believes there’s an end in sight because of the rise of apps.  This is the crux of his DMEXCO keynote address he will present this week in Cologne. Norman points out that more than 80 percent of […]

What does the flow of attention across social platforms and news article look like when it is actually happening? That’s what WPP’s advertising clients may get to find out, thanks to the ad holding group’s new partnership with BuzzFeed. Announced last month, the deal sees GroupM and WPP constituents gain a “creative residency” amongst BuzzFeed content producers and a […]

CANNES — Social platforms have made some big announcements in recent weeks, with both Twitter’s Project Lightning and Snapchat’s 3v Advertising due to usher in auto-playing, full-screen videos. You might expect that vertically-oriented video would present a challenge to advertisers, who, traditionally, have redeployed ad creative first designed for TV’s landscape screen. But GroupM chief digital officer […]

AUSTIN — Many digital media executives expect it is only a matter of time before “programmatic” advertising – the collection of techniques which automate online ad-buying and which has taken hold in the display ad world – will work its magic on television. Indeed, many tech and data vendors are already trying to make this happen […]

COLOGNE — Some digital media transitions aren’t that pronounced and TV isn’t such a problematic medium after all, says one of the leading ad agencies’ top digital thinkers. “It’s very easy … to take a view that the fast-streaming, uninterruptable, buffer-free, over-the-top experience is the actual experience of humans at large – it turns out not […]

CANNES, France – While the predominant consumption of video still takes place on the television screen, the industry is moving to a world where the delivery of commercial-free  services like Netflix and Amazon will grow as will the consumption of short form video and mobile. All this presents advertisers with a new set of challenges. […]

From being a niche advertising sector not too long ago, mobile advertising has fast become the dominant digital advertising platform, says Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer of GroupM Worldwide in this interview with Beet.TV   The rapid  transformation has been propelled by Facebook and Twitter, he explains. The transformation to mobile provides new opportunities and […]

LOS ANGELES — You can’t go to a digital industry conference these days without someone espousing the value of “data”. For ad group Group M Worldwide’s chief digital officer Rob Norman, data’s value is clear: “Data is to marketing as science is to religion. The more facts you have, the less faith you need.” But marketers are […]

The emerging space of editorial video content produced by brand marketers is so new that there are few benchmarks for a successful campaign, says GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman. But he has identified at least one golden rule already. “Make sure the first five or six seconds are really, really good – so that […]

VIEQUES, PR — The massive reach of YouTube has drawn in a new range of advertisers to sight, sound and motion for the first time due in part to the site’s audience composition, says Rob Norman, Chief Global Digital Officer, GroupM Worldwide, during a deep-dive interview about online video at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat. The YouTube […]

VIEQUES, PR — Everyone’s talking about “content marketing”, “native advertising” or “branded content” – the hybridization of editorial and marketing materials in to a single content type of mutual benefit to publishers and brands. That’s forcing the ad agencies to offer their services in these spaces. But, for agencies as used to the traditional church-and-state […]

CANNES — Advertising group GroupM’s chief digital officer thinks the top challenge for marketers is to insert themselves in new platforms like Twitter and Facebook that are all about chronologically-ordered, stream-based real-time media consumption. “Every time the distribution channels change – and the stream is a new distribution channel –  typically the manufacturing problem changes […]

Most of the advertising startups who pitch their new services and products to agencies will never return money for themselves or their investors, says Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer at GroupM Global, during an interview with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat 2013 in Vieques, Puerto Rico. “Of every 100 companies that come to see me, 85 won’t […]