AdExchanger

Planning for 2021? Break out your blindfolds and dartboards. This week we dig into how marketers are handling the huge uncertainty of this moment, with guest Jed Meyer, Managing Director of Ebiquity North America.

Data-driven marketing giant Merkle has merged five of its B2B agencies into a single global agency brand. Merkle, DWA, gyro, B2B International and Digital Pi are now grouped together under the name Merkle B2B, employing 1,000 people. CEO Michael McLaren discusses the rationale and what's changed with B2B marketing during the shutdown. 

As EVP of Oracle CX and Data Cloud, Rob Tarkoff oversees several data platforms and ultimately decides which receive investment going foirward. In this episode he talks about brand safety, contextual targeting, third-party data and the coming identity storm. 

Nancy Marzouk founded MediaWallah in 2013 to pursue the emerging market for customer data onboarding and "people-based" identity resolution. She shares her long perspective on the history of identity in ad tech – from cookies to our current petri dish of proposed solutions.

Consumers lives have changed permanently due to the pandemic, and brands will need a hard reset on their data and research strategies, says Omnicom Media Group CEO Scott Hagedorn. Also, worried about the loss of online identifiers? Listen in to hear how Hagedorn and OMG are thinking about it. 

"Busting up this inflexibility that I think has hamstrung a lot of us would be a good outcome, in my view," according to Boff. "I love what I think is going to be the speed of change, the agility. Not the set it and forget it but how do we lean into these moments. Things are changing not weekly, not daily, sometimes not even hourly. They’re just changing all the time.”

Google's new VP and GM of ads sees the big picture of Google’s advertising business, from top-of-funnel video ads on YouTube, mid-funnel display ads served through DV360 and Google Ad Manager, and Google search and shopping ads.

Eric leads global brand building and media innovation at the CPG giant, as well as P&G’s programs on racial bias. He talks about the #TakeOnRace films and P&G’s current view in areas like programmatic and supply chain transparency.

With its latest acquisition, Mediaocean has taken a divisive step into digital ad execution - placing itself in direct competition with DSPs. CEO Bill Wise says the company can win on cost. "If you listen to [The Trade Desk] quarterly earnings, they talk a lot about TV and next generation TV and video solutions," Wise says in this episode. "They’re going to run into a wall and that wall is Mediaocean." 

Bill Koenigsberg founded Horizon Media in 1989 and grew it to some 2,300 employees and $8.5 billion in client investments. Along the way he has weathered three or four economic recessions. In this episode he talks about the pandemic and its consequences.