For over a century, advertising has been a powerful engine of growth, building businesses and brands with a relatively predictable business model for marketers and media companies alike. But, the traditional media levers for growth are breaking down.  Media fragmentation and social media ubiquity have profoundly changed the marketer-agency-media supply chain relationship, and the consumer has more power than ever to define a brand’s success. As traditional display advertising faces diminishing returns, social media – which is inherently about personal participation and word of mouth – creates new and more impactful avenues …

CMOs are faced with daunting task of effectively spending their money to ensure ROI. They are also faced with a data deluge, and making sense of it all is becoming increasingly complex. Not only in digital as a stand alone but in how digital relates to other channels. In order for digital to really grow we need to embrace the future of buying and selling by leveraging highly scalable platforms that not only allow us to buy "remnant" or "exchange" traded media but shift our mentality into buying and selling all digital media through programmatic approaches. This will allow both advertisers and publishers to …

Mobile “media” will be the mobile growth driver in 2013 and 2014. While mobile applications have become increasingly popular, there have not been many success cases when it comes to monetization. According to analysts, mobile advertising is a $20 billion opportunity in the U.S., yet across the globe, mobile ad spend hasn’t even reached $7 billion. Why the discrepancy, you ask? In its initial stages, mobile advertising mimicked traditional Web advertising. But banners don’t work well for in-app mobile advertising. In mobile, the ads need to reflect the types of apps that people are using. In other words, they need …

The future of media isn’t a channel or a platform or a user experience. Those things will come and go. The future of media is what it always has been – ideas. Ideas born from creativity and collaboration that inspire passion and trigger emotion. When the idea is nailed, the communication plan writes itself- like working with a paint-by-numbers set where the picture suddenly comes to life.But brilliant ideas don’t live in a neat box, they spill over and back between media, digital, social, user experience, content creation, PR and the list goes on. We’ve all heard the …

Forgive me for knocking off an old Rod Stewart song. One of his better ones, actually. The future of media is personalization. Every ad must tell a story that is relevant to the user. We will reach the point in the not-too-distant future where personalization will be the best way to address all audience segments, in particular the affluent segment.

In considering the future of media, attention must be paid to the much ballyhooed and often maligned concept of video convergence.  Finally, it seems video convergence is becoming a reality. Surprisingly though, it is being driven as much by a growing cadre of Hollywood progressives as it is by anyone in Silicon Valley. “Hollywood?” you may ask skeptically. Truly, Tinsel Town is leading the revolution. One that allows for new forms of compelling content distributed in novel ways, which will surely mark the end of an era that has existed since the dawn of cinema, ushering in a new era with video …

A recent Forrester report found 30% of online shopping trips start with Amazon—compared to only 19% with Google. Amazon’s long march to be “the Google of Retail” seems to have come to a successful end. Add the fact that Amazon now allows third parties to advertise within its search results, and it starts to feel a lot like a search engine—and that a profound shift in "SEM" will follow.The phenomenon isn’t limited to Amazon. More and more companies are opening up their on-site search results to third party marketers. It’s already the norm for most online travel agencies. …

The screaming pace of technology has evolved the role media plays in how people consume and share information from special reports and broadcasts to being intertwined in the fabric of everyday life. Digital and emerging media channels continue to advance and complicate the choices marketers have at their disposal to reach and engage their target audiences but few organizations have turned the change into a way to benefit their success.A recent study by the CMO Council reported that just 9% of 200 global marketers have a highly evolved, integrated marketing model with a clear, proven evolution path. This …

Since the beginning of digital media, online has largely been an afterthought relative to TV for brand advertisers.  Consumers are studied for insights that lead to better TV copy.  TV ad concepts are thoroughly vetted and studied before production.   Final cut TV ads are tested and compared to long standing norms.  Then, at some point, the material is repurposed for digital.  This was a rational process given that digital inventory has been dominated by static display ads, digital campaigns reached smaller audiences, and digital advertising effectiveness was tough to reliably measure. Times are changing fast.  The primary driver of this …

Customer loyalty has been at the very heart of advertising for decades. Good advertising gets consumers to remember the brand or product when it’s time to make a purchase. Great advertising means they’ll buy the brand now and well into the future, creating a sizable return on investment for that ad campaign. But as everyone knows, it’s been difficult to actually predict that return when planning a campaign. I’ll spare you the famous “50 percent” cliché, because those days are over. With all the available data at hand, there’s no reason why we can’t predict sales based on advertising spend …