BeetCast

Today we kick off our second season with our new sponsor in Mediaocean. A huge thanks for the continuing partnership.

Our guest today is Nicolle Pangis, CEO of Ampersand, the cable TV sales and data company owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox. More on Ampersand and its expanding business in my chat with Nicolle.

Nicolle is one of the most accomplished media innovators we know. She started her career at 24/7 RealMedia, moved on to and Xaxis and then to GroupM in senior positions. In 2018 she joined NCC Media as CEO. The company was later rebranded a Ampersand.

Happy to have Scott Schiller on this episode of the BeetCast.

Scott is a media pioneer, leader and teacher. Many of you know him from his role at NBC Universal as Executive VP of Advertising. He is a former chairman of the IAB.

Presently, Scott serves as Global Chief Commercial Officer of the ENGINE Group, a global advertising and marketing services firm.

In addition to his "day job," For the past four years, Scott taught media studies to undergrads at New York University.

In our chat he explains how much he enjoys teaching and speaks to the value of being connected to his students to better understand attitudes and trends.

In our chat, Scott talks about the big transformation in television, the changing make-up of the UpFronts, the growth of programmatic in TV and the role of private marketplaces.

Finally, he calls on his colleagues in the media industry to embrace change. Great conversation.

About the BeetCast and Our Next Season!

This episode marks the end of our first season of the BeetCast sponsored by Tru Optik. I wanted to thank Andre Swanston, Matt Spiegel and the great crew at Tru Optik and its parent company Transunion for sponsoring the launch and first season of the BeetCast.

It has really grown in influence and popularity and I really enjoyed doing it. It was Andre's idea for a podcast and I am forever grateful to him!

A special thanks to our podcast producer E. James Ford.

Happy to say our next season begins in May with our new sponsor MediaOcean.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.

I am so delighted to welcome my dear friend Tracey Scheppach to this episode of the #BeetCast.

I call her the "mother of addressable TV". Well, she didn't exactly invent addressable TV but she was by all accounts the first buyer of the medium.

She was deeply involved with pilot projects in Colorado and Alabama in some twenty years ago. In our chat, she recalls those early days and her move to Starcom in 2005 to head the agency's advance TV practice.

In 2016, she left Starcom to start her own company which is a boutique addressable TV buying agency and an industry consultancy. It is called Matter More Media.

In our conversation, Tracey talks about the evolution of addressable TV over the past 20 years. She speaks of her disappointment that its scope has been limited, increasingly by new "walled gardens of data" now in control of TV manufacturers. She shares her mantra: DATA MUST BE FREE.

We also talks about measurement and the importance of understanding the impact of creative.

The most predictive signal for economic action is search and it's the gateway to all lower funnel activities, says Kevin Krim, CEO of EDO, a data company that correlates television advertising with search.

I've covered Kevin's work over the past 10 years in his top digital leadership roles at Bloomberg and CNBC.

We've spoken many times about the changes of TV news from linear to a digital media. It's been a fascinating sector to cover and Kevin has been way in front of it for many years.

Since 2105, he has headed EDO, a TV data firm that allows programmers and advertisers the tools to understand the outcome of TV ads by understanding Web search. The company works with many leading programmers. Recently, it announced its newest partnership with Univision.

Separately, Kevin and his wife Marina founded an incredible non-profit organization called Choose Creativity. It is an educational initiative that empowers children and adults to build resilience, creative confidence, and social-emotional skills through engagement. It is being widely adopted. And is particularly valued during the pandemic.

As Kevin explains in this interview, the organization was founded in the wake of the terrible loss of his two children. It's an amazing, inspiring story. I hope you will visit ChooseCreativy.org to learn more, and will join me in making a contribution.

This week, our podcast guest is with Gila Wilensky, President of of Xaxis US.

She was appointed to the head the agency one year ago, coming from GroupM's Essence where she was Head of Media Activation for North America.

In 2013, Gila joined the growing Google account at Essence and built a team to run Google's SEM and biddable media efforts. Gila also helped Google codify its global Adwords and DoubleClick best practices.

She grew Essence's social practice by 50x between 2013 and 2016.

In this interview, she talks about her path to leadership and the efforts to bring diversity, equality and inclusion to Xaxis. She speaks about the focus of outcomes at Xaxis as a core value of the programmatic unit of GroupM. She covers AI and the future of of a more efficient programmatic ecosystem.

This year marks the agency's 10th year anniversary.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.

For many of us, the issue of hate against Asian Americans hasn't been talk about. But through hate crimes, fostered by the pandemic and economic strains, this has become a pressing matter for us to understand and address, particularly for us in the marketing and media industries.

To put this in perspective is one our industry's leading voices, Yin Woon Rani who is our guest in this episode of the BeetCast.

Yin was born in Malaysia, raised in Singapore. She emigrated to the United States where she attended Yale. She went on to senior positions at IPG, the Campbell Soup Company and most recently took over as CEO of the nation's milk industry marketing group, known to many by by its iconic slogan "Got Milk".

Yin explains that for most Asians, assimilation has been the top priority. Asians want to be "invisible" she says. But racism has been part of the Asian American story and it's become impossible to ignore.

She is involved with industry advocacy groups including Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate, known by the hashtag #StopAAPIHate and #StopAsianHate.

Yin addresses the needs for DEI in the marketing industry for all marginalized groups and suggests real change will come as companies become truly inclusive and as those changes bring better business outcomes.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.

Alysia Borsa, President of Digital at Meredith Corporation, the giant women's lifestyle publisher, discuses how she is navigating the post cookie world in this episode of the BeetCast with guest host Matt Spiegel, EVP for Media at Transunion.

She explains the rising value of contextual marketing, the need for unified identity solutions, and "clean rooms." Addressing the upside of the pandemic for Meredith, she says the publisher's editorial focus on home and family has become more relevant during these times.

Since its inception, the distribution of podcasts has relied on a downloaded file, sent to users via RSS feed. But that system has limitations in understanding consumption. It's akin to delivering a magazine but not knowing if it was opened or read.

Spotify's platform for podcast distribution is streaming as it is for music. The company has invested heavily in the podcast field.

According to eMarketer, this year, Spotify will pass Apple in the number of listeners to podcasts in the U.S. The evolution of podcast to streaming will fundamentally change the value of the medium, says Sean Kegelman, Global Head of Data and Audience Solutions at Spotify.

In this episode of the #BeetCast podcast, Kegelman also explains the value of the Spotify's listeners' music preferences and playlists in enhancing listening experiences and by effectively identifying users for advertiser messages.

In our chat, Kegelman reflects the evolution of digital media spanning some 23 years, as seen from his work at Digitas to Vivaki and Spotify.

The introduction of big, complex streaming video services, which are not interoperable, are creating new closed ecosystems or "walled gardens" - presenting new challenges to buyers.

This is one of the many topics covered in this episode of the #BeetCast with guest host Jesse Redniss and guest Ashley Swartz. They also covered video pricing, inventory, privacy and data. Lots to unpack from these industry veterans and long time colleagues.

Swartz if founder and CEO of Furious Corp, an TV advertising infrastructure play. Redniss, a longtime advance TV executive at NBCU and Turner/Warner Media, co-founded Brave Ventures, a media consulting and advisory firm

Data will redefine the value of media brands and the efficiency of media buys for marketers. To make this happen, data collaboration is essential, says Matt Spiegel, EVP of the Media Vertical at TransUnion, in this Beet.TV podcast moderated by Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp and a regular contributor to Beet.TV

From a unified identity graph, to "clean rooms" to establishing an interoperable "marketplaces" - all the while in a privacy compliant, are some of the industry future.