AW360

Sometimes the most effective advertising is the simplest. Mobile billboard advertising is one of the most effective marketing and advertising tools available, and we spoke with Rod Collins, who has built the business from scratch.

How do you solve the four dimensional puzzle of targeting the right people, with the right message, in the right place at the right time? For Paul Haddad, President and Founder of a4, this was an intriguing technical puzzle that lead him on a runaway journey to build, and acquire the components required to complete the most challenging puzzle in digital advertising.

Creativity isn’t just about creating something clever for your portfolio, it’s about demonstrating effectiveness tangibly in a way that drives results for clients. The difficulty we face now, says a4’s Will Kunkel, the advanced digital solutions arm of Altice USA, is that we used to have very distinct lanes like brand advertising and direct response, whereas now – it’s a crowded space.

We live in bizarre times. Poverty, inequality, youth unemployment and climate change are among the many challenges we are facing as a collective. In business, CEOs have gone from being symbols of aspiration to objects of intense scrutiny. Even startups are being asked the difficult question of: but what is the wider impact your business is having on society? People demand more from brands, and Kindred Media are an organization looking to help brands answer those questions. This episode is guest hosted by Ian Schafer, and features Mary Sculley, VP Client Strategy at Warner Media IMPACT, and Florian Hoffman of the DO School.

a4 were the first to market in the addressable TV space back in 2011, and their philosophy is simple: if you’re going to target the right audiences for your brand you need to have high quality, accurate data. With that in mind they built a closed ecosystem that worked for what they needed, but as the number of screens per household dramatically increased (there’s thought to be more screens in homes now than are rooms on average) they faced a different challenge: how to adapt their model to a far more fragmented audience.

The current 2020 digital political prediction from numerous sources is currently sat around $3bn dollars, a figure expected to rise north of $5bn by the mid 2020’s. That’s according to Jordan Lieberman, Vice President of Sales at a4, who spent five years as a publisher of Campaigns & Elections magazine. And has lectured at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and George Washington University, and has appeared as an analyst for CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. He explained how and where political candidates are putting their spend, but most importantly, why.

There’s been an explosion of CBD related products burst onto the market, much of which is being tracked and analyzed by Nielsen. It’s effect on consumers was the subject of discussion with Rick Maturo, Associate Director of Nielsen’s Cannabis practice.

Brands want assurances over where their ads appear, advertisers want greater supply chain transparency and clarity on where budgets are spent, and consumers want more control over how their data is used. Verizon Media are looking to spearhead this area, and we spoke to its Chief Business Officer, Iván Markman to find out more.

Ahead of Advertising Week New York, I caught up with Paul Woolmington, CEO of media and communications agency Canvas Worldwide. Paul will be hosting a panel at Advertising Week on Thursday September 26th called Disrupters and Provocateurs: Redefining the Medium is the Message for the 21st Century.

In our conversation, Paul and I discuss everything from the modern burdens of having too much choice in the digital age to the ever-increasing impatience of consumers to marketing’s next battleground – empowered technology. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

When he launched his 24-hour news channel, CNN in 1980, Ted Turner made the promise “we won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, we’ll be covering it live, and that will be our last, last event.” The world hasn’t ended, CNN is still here, but their proposition to partners is evolving. We uncovered what makes the nearly four decade old publisher different.