• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, January 20, 2012

Online Media Daily this week caught up with Mark Pavia, executive vice president and digital managing director at Starcom USA, which represents brands including Allstate, Bank of America, and Samsung. He shared his impressions of CES this year, and the landscape for devices and digital advertising in 2012 more broadly.

Prior to joining Starcom last August, where he works out of the Chicago office, Pavia was with the Martin Agency in Virginia, where he was the first director of innovation for the IPG shop. He has also held management positions at marchFIRST and Four Points Digital.

OMD: Coming back from CES, were there any technologies you found especially interesting?

Pavia:  Starting with the most general piece, personally I would love to see more tablets in more hands. That platform is sort of your own personal window, and I don’t know if that window has really been leveraged as much as it could be. So there are enormous creative and media opportunities there.

And who can’t be blown away by the OLED stuff? They looked absolutely beautiful. I want a 4K TV right now. You look at 4K TV next to a 1080P TV, and there really is a difference. That’s actually going to take off more than 3D. I don’t think it will do anything like what high-resolution TVs are going to do.

The last thing I was really impressed with was a lot of the in-car technology. You’ve got platforms like OnStar, which has definitely upped the game. But just the more simple, human interface, with your vehicle and what you can do.

OMD: Based on what you saw, what media technologies do you think might gain more traction this year with consumers?

Pavia: The whole notion of connected TV has been a dream for a lot of people. We’re now starting to see some real scale -- some weight falling behind that. Just the simple two-screen tablet and your TV and being able to co-view socially, get more information about the show you’re watching. From a marketing perspective, the opportunities are pretty obvious, and they can be awesome.

OMD: How do you balance scouting of next- generation technologies with the need not to get too far ahead of consumers?

Pavia: With any sort of new emerging technology, if the early adopters also happen to be your target that you want to market to, that’s great. But if it’s teenage girls who are looking for fashion, and that’s your target -- and that new emerging technology is not appealing to them yet -- then you have to see if that’s going to take.

When I’ve advised clients to take a plunge, it is because there are enormous research opportunities on these new platforms, and you can get a lot of data. Maybe that new emerging technology represents a whole new way of interacting. Strategically, if you’ve got a learning agenda, new emerging platforms can play a pretty powerful role.

OMD: More people are getting smartphones and tablets. When will mobile have the audience scale marketers are looking for? 

Pavia: The tipping point for both smartphones and tablets is moving away from mobile apps and more to the mobile Web with HTML5, because that is not device- or operating system- dependent. I don’t have to develop an app for each different platform -- I can do it once and put it on the mobile Web, and it’s beautiful and interactive in HTML5. That is actually going to loosen up money in that space, because with apps you’ve got that development front-end, which is probably a bigger hurdle to some clients. 

You’ll see the advertising get even richer and better, and that’s clearly what people want to do. The tablet itself is big enough to have a very desirable video experience, so that also will be a factor in loosening up money for that space.

OMD: When do you see more ad dollars flowing toward those areas?

Pavia: You’ll start to see the curve steepen in the latter half of the year as more people become more comfortable with HTML5 and there’s simply more tablets in more hands. The pricing is going to get more aggressive, and that’s certainly going to capture advertisers’ attention because of the scale aspect. Simplify and shorten the whole development front-end, enrich the experience and bring the price down so that there’s scale.

OMD: What are the biggest barriers for marketers right now?

Pavia: Two macro areas. One thing mobile doesn’t do yet is uniformly track and attribute the activity that’s going on. They don’t quite have the cookie figured out in the mobile space. So once somebody figures that out, it’s going to be huge.

From HTML5 we'll get better ads, better marketing experiences, better integration with the device as it relates to where you are, who you are. Right now, things are fairly static, and very transactional, in terms of what the device knows about you. And it’s not very human. And with the advent of programs, or add-ons like Siri, this whole notion of artificial intelligence has moved beyond something that’s cool and on the horizon to being now in your pocket. So interacting with these devices, from a marketing standpoint, means I can create much more relevant, at-the-moment-of decision advertising.

OMD: How do you strike a balance between that kind of pervasive tracking and respecting a user’s privacy?

Pavia: That’s the trick, right?  There are lots of ways to figure out that particular device and all the activity, it’s just that the FCC might have a problem with it. They’re going to make a lot of money once they crack that, because that’s what advertisers are interested in.