Creating change – it is not all plain sailing

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Two days in Chicago at the VivaKi Nerve Center Management meeting and one thing really struck me, that change even when it is really needed is pretty tough. Key to getting through it though is by having a plan and sticking to it. The VNC started in 2008 and we were laughed at, Curt Hecht who leaves us this month was there at the start and he recalled some of the comments at the time. That plan though has been sturdy and continues to be at the core of everything we do and it is resistant to country whims and individual blocks and that change we are bringing can not be stopped now.

VNC was a slow burn Internationally but in recent times things have accelerated rapidly. Over the last two days we have had people from the VNC from US to Australia and everywhere in between and each person was ringing the bell on the old models, it is time to step up and be prepared to change. Only two years ago we had VNC in US, UK, Dubai and Spain. Add to that now Italy, France, Germany, Australia, China, Russia and more to come, amazing growth.

Trouble with change is that it unsettles and some people don’t want it and are willing to slow things down and say ‘it’s not like that here’ and excuses to that effect. The encouraging thing though is that those people are becoming far and few between now and most people have started to embrace. I met recently with Maurice Levy and it was clear where he expects to see development, what areas should be moving faster and that is the biggest encouragement of all when it comes from the top.

Change your mind or change the people was a phrase mentioned by someone recently and I agree. I have always loved change, it is so exciting and creates so much opportunity so I assume everyone will but I am afraid that is not always the case. The VNC over the last two days has presented some amazing work and propositions and it is no wonder it has been copied by most of the other groups – whether it was market leading Partnerships, the worlds first and largest trading desk, driving innovation through The Pool, VNC has lead and shown the people laughing behind their hands that in fact it has become a blueprint.

The work we are doing with our agencies is moving so fast in many many markets and the ambition in the room has been palpable so expect to see more and more from this group over the coming weeks, months and years.

See you Chicago, it has been a pleasure (apart from your terrible airport).

I only recruit from NASA – you?

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Well I say that, in actual fact I have recruited two people into the Head of Product roles from within our agency group, NASA did not really come into it, although I am sure some people would claim it! It is something I am asked all the time – where do you recruit from? What type of people should we hire? Will my Head of adserving do? 

One thing I am sure about is that I fear the return to the days of when search took off and they became a hugely overpaid, under experienced, high churn group of individuals, around 2005 it was a merry-go-round of people in the search teams with each agency ignoring their best search strategies and allowing us all to  bid up the price endlessly. It was partly this factor that led to search teams not being as efficient as they could have been since staff costs got out of hand. There is a danger of us returning to those days within the exchange space, but at the same time I believe we have more choice, on the basis you are a little more open minded.

As I said at the top a common question is what type of people do you employ, I struggle to answer that. Looking round the team we have people from adserving, mobile DSPs, agency, Data, and so on, so yes of course they all have some common DNA but that is not the key. Curiosity is the key, the desire to want to learn, to want to look under the bonnet and see what is happening and to do it all the time not once a month. Everyone in the team has that, and in my opinion that makes them different from the majority. Too many digital planner buyers have become a little too process driven and not inquisitive enough. They are not questioning the numbers, they are not trying to work out a different way, or challenge a target, too much is paper pushing and and that is why the new generation of people, as much tech as media are different BUT because you work with tech does not make you an immediate candidate.

When I interview I want to see passion and interest, I want to see a history of someone who likes the ecosystem and has been reading about it before they even got the job, I want them to know all about the space, without really knowing all about it because the one thing they lack is working experience. Come in and challenge us, come in and want to understand more. We don’t mind what your background is, just show us that you don’t just want a job in this new space because you think you should.

I have seen some really good candidates, often those who are actually working in competing trading desks, we have never employed one. Too many of them looked like they fell into it rather than wanted it.  So for those starting to recruit the interview recipe to grow a team is curiosity plus desire sprinkled with a big dollop of instinct (perhaps the key ingredient at the end of it all).

Audience One Demand is always happy to receive CVs and always on the look out if you want to fire them over.

Confessions of a ….@Digiday leave the National enquirer to do the gutter press

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I read today’s confession of an Ad Tec Executive and it leaves me a little uncomfortable with this whole series. It is not the information that it hands over, I am sure some is correct, and I am sure some of the practices are true but there is a big but..who are these people?

Are they reputable, have they been offended by some one or something, were they any good? Let’s face it there are plenty of people who talk about things that you would not listen to and take seriously. I think it is a little gutter press and I think that is a shame, this is a trade site not a gossip site, not sure we need to have this kind of reporting. 

Every post I see from ‘anon’ is one to ignore in my opinion and so these whole pieces lack credibility. Brian covers some good stuff and agree with much of his approach but this stuff leaves me cold. I keep getting told I am too opinionated and get into trouble but I would rather that than these anon posts from people with axes to grind.

All change at The VivaKi Nerve Center

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The one consistent in life is change (I think there is a more eloquent phrase) but it is true and I am excited to be in the heart of that change. Curt has been a great leader but everyone moves on at some point and our team is really strong and we are excited about VNC 2.0. Below is the release that went out yesterday, exciting times all around.

CHICAGO,  4/12/12 – VivaKi CEO Jack Klues today announced that Kurt Unkel has been named President of the VivaKi Nerve Center. Unkel assumes responsibilities from Curt Hecht, who moves to a new role at The Weather Channel. Unkel will report into Frank Voris, global chief financial officer for VivaKi. Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer of VivaKi, will serve as advisor to Unkel and the Nerve Center leadership.

Prior to assuming the role of president, Unkel had been EVP/general manager of Audience on Demand™ (AOD) – one of the Nerve Center’s fastest growing practices and largest revenue-drivers.  Today the practice services 350+ clients and manages over 15,000 daily campaigns across display, search, video, mobile and social.

Unkel has been a member of Publicis Groupe for more than a decade and among the Nerve Center’s first employees. Prior to joining the Nerve Center, Unkel created and led digital strategy, investment, analytics and ad operations teams across Publicis Groupe, with a special focus on General Motors (GM). Unkel resides in Detroit and will be based there.

“Curt Hecht has built a strong foundation for the VivaKi Nerve Center, and Kurt Unkel is just the right person to drive our vision forward,’ said Klues. “Kurt has shown great leadership in building and developing AOD from one of the first agency-led ad trading platforms with two clients and three employees to a world-class practice that has been replicated in markets all over the world, and leads the competition.”

“The Nerve Center is comprised of some of the sharpest minds in digital and tech,” said Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Maurice Lévy. “With Kurt at the helm, we look forward to more aggressively pursuing new opportunities in arenas such as data, mobile, social and technology.”

Unkel and the Nerve Center are supported by a seasoned leadership team, including Doug Kofoid, who is EVP of product development. Kofoid is an operations expert and co-author of several Nerve Center products, including AOD Social.  The Nerve Center will leverage his expertise more broadly across the globe in the coming months.

Sean Kegelman has been named EVP of partnerships, and will continue to lead global partnerships and create new opportunities with companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and others for the Nerve Center and the VivaKi agencies it supports.

Marco Bertozzi has been elevated to executive managing director of Nerve Center EMEA, focusing on continued expansion of the Nerve Center throughout the region.  Co-founder of The Pool, Tracey Scheppach will continue to explore engagement models of the future while serving as EVP/innovations director for VivaKi.

The Nerve Center leadership team also includes Pradeep Ananthapadmanabhan, who continues to serve as chief technology officer for the Nerve Center and Project Olympic; Ken Wiesman, who leads Finance and Barb Jobs, who continues to lead Talent.

The Nerve Center was formed in 2008 to provide tools, technology and offerings that give VivaKi agencies and their clients an edge when it comes to digital media and marketing solutions. The Nerve Center currently employees more than 250 employees worldwide, with a presence in  Australia, China, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Spain, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States.

Why Paying to skip video Ads undervalues what we do

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My Opinion piece in NMA this week on the new Skipit service,  link here but behind a paywall

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In December 2003 a version of skippable Ads opened, it was called the M6 Toll road. Designed to make life easier for drivers they were offered the chance to pay a small fee and skip the bad traffic on the normal M6. Surely it is better to pay a couple of quid and get a luxurious stretch of tarmac without delays than have to sit in traffic for hours, especially when we are so time poor? Well the reality appears not. Demonstrating we are not as time poor as we thought. The toll road traffic has consistently fallen since opening, showing that perhaps paying to avoid inconvenience or bad experiences is not as high up on our agenda as some would have us believe.

And that is my view of the new format from Skipit where you can pay 10 cents to skip an Ad. You can build up credits through other means, by liking an Ad or interacting on some level with an advertiser, which I feel equally uncomfortable with.

Let’s stick with the principle of paying to skip an Ad though. Really? I am intrigued as to which Ad is going to push a person over the edge and make them sign up to an account. I find the idea of idly watching some content and then deciding ‘enough is enough, I am going to go to all the trouble of signing up to an account just to avoid a couple of minutes of Ads’ a stretch. As my colleague Paul says, perhaps it will improve completion rates as people are forced to establish the real cost of sitting through an Ad? Perhaps this system will improve performance on average Ads as people realise that it is not a big deal to watch them as long as they are engaged with the content.

Also, this isn’t going to pave the streets with the Gold that publishers might be expecting. To make this a meaningful revenue stream would require LOTS of video content being consumed outside of YouTube and the BBC. Recent Comscore research tells us this isn’t true. Google accounts for nearly 30 million uniques, the BBC accounts for nearly 7.5 million and VEVO (which again has most of its volume within YouTube) accounts for over 11 million. Consumers would also need to be willing to dip their hand in their pocket time and time again. Lastly, the rollout of such an initiative is unlikely to sit within the premium long form content owners. This is important considering the video Ad lengths which dominate the short form content space; am I really going to pay to skip 10/15 seconds of Ads being played on content that I am not really that engaged with anyway?

Now there are skippable Ads and skippable Ads. This approach is the caveman’s club vs. the surgeon’s scalpel where Google’s skippable Ads are the more sophisticated. Their approach is to incentivise advertisers to improve the quality of Ads by penalising bad creative; surely that is the right way round, not giving money to a publisher who carries bad Ads that people don’t want to see? VivaKi’s The Pool and their ASq® format offers users a chance to choose the Ad they want to watch, the impact on completion rates, engagement and memorability is considerable and encourages our advertisers to constantly see their video creative as something that should receive the same level of attention as their TV ads, but differently and with the end goal of their content being chosen over content from another advertiser.

Our job in this business is to make people realise that Ads pay for content, that Ads should be as high quality as possible, and that advertisers need to create content people want, whether that is an Ad or a short film or whatever. Paying for likes, watching an Ad to get something, all these models are blunt instruments and undervalue what we do. They are not what we should be aspiring to. 

Our industry loves scale. Does size matter?

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The first few years of my career at Zenith Media were defined by how big we were. In 1996 we were No1! We were the biggest and that meant so much to so many people. As the years went by Zenith slipped a few places, then we merged, but then so did everyone else and we all jostled for a top 3 spot. As the years have passed the focus became digital. How big was our digital team, how much spend and we all wanted to have more than i-level back then. As time has passed though there seems a little less emphasis on it. There is an acknowledgement that it is less about the scale and more what you do with it. (Heard that somewhere else?). I would say that today it is more about what Tier you are in rather than position. 

This blog is not about agencies only though, lets take a look at clients. As a client if you are big and have a large Ad budget you expect some benefits with that, more team, cheaper prices, preferential treatment, better ideas and so on. As above though, if you are a clever advertiser or work for a sexy brand you can get the same even with a small budget, so again its how you use it.

Even a VC has a view on this, today we had a talk with the very engaging Scott Ferber or Ad.com and Videology fame and his summary of how the VCs approach business is better to have a business growing with big revenues and less profit, than high profits and less growth, they also want more and bigger and need numbers, why? Well if they invest in 50 maybe a few will come off so again Scale scale scale.

What got me thinking was the effect of Real Time Bidding on our media landscape especially video and eventually Connected TV. Is scale so important? As a media owner of course you need audience but we are scaling niches not trying to buy big one off audiences in Real Time Bidding so that scale is less important to us in the single hit and if that is the case then does that mean we want to fight as hard for these one offs? It is something the ITVs are most scared of, as Scott talked about today ‘unbundling’ they would rather sell a huge 18-49 female audience to an advertiser than have it unbundled through data and technology and reveal that in fact that the big 18-49 female audience was actually only 40% and that actually it had a lot of men and people outside that age. Is that not an opportunity though? surely they have just maximised their commercials, get each audience commercialised to its max – why does that not work? Because of scale and the lack of its importance to the buy.

But then is that not the same for advertisers? How does a £100m advertiser benefit from Real Time Bidding vs a £5m advertiser? The answer is they may get some extra team, some extra inventory arrangements but on the whole they pay the same price as the shop on the corner, just like search and API. So with exchanges, API and Search you are basically saying that a 50m digital advertiser on 70% of their spend gets no price advantage – thats a different world, and not one auditors will like either. Who does that scare most? We actually have a business where there are many vested interests to keep things as they are, big advertisers will always want to be treated differently in the markets, big media companies will always want to have the highest rating programmes, the most unique users, the biggest single readership and so on, the problem is in display and eventually in video we may have unlimited supply, if we have unlimited supply then we can reach scale one impression at a time, social media has helped us get there with its vast audiences. Finally of course agencies also want the rankings and the positions so this is all going to take time but I believe we are now on a journey that ends with scale, size and clout being less important than purity and exactness around audience buying and delivering the right ad to the right audience. Whether it is DSPs, Media Ocean or the next tech around the corner it is just a matter of time before there are more questions asked of the scale players ( generally the least willing to move into the new world of RTB)around the purity of their audience sells they are delivering and whether it is valuable or diluted and over priced.

Now I will caveat all of that with size of organisation delivering all these solutions probably does have an impact, I work for a big organisation so scale of expertise and experience does matter to be able to do a proper job of delivering Addressable media. You need infrastructure, you need rigour and you need investment but once you get to what you are buying and who is buying it, it is a slightly more of a level playing field.

My Media Week

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My Media Week: Marco Bertozzi

Hayley Pinkerfield, 21 March 2012, 3:15pm

This week Marco Bertozzi, managing director EMEA for the VivaKi Nerve Center, visits Spain, plays squash with Greg Grimmer, and teeters on the wrong side of The Thin Blue Line. Link here

 
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Monday

Every day starts pretty much the same as every other day, and has done for the last two years. Baby cries, cats miaow, I wake up and reach for the BlackBerry or iPhone to check what my US colleagues have been emailing about through the night, or to see how late people have been out and posting messages from all corners of Soho Land.

From that point in though, every day is very different. Which is a good thing, as variety is one of the things I enjoy most about working at the VivaKi Nerve Center.

I start today by catching up with Publicis’ global Google lead Simon Birkenhead to discuss what’s going on across the business. In fact, today is a day of meetings with our global partners, as I later met up with our new global lead from Microsoft, Nicole. It’s a tough gig understanding such a complex business and I wish her luck.

An afternoon of calls and a couple of quick meetings, then it’s off for my weekly punishment in the form of a personal training session.

Tuesday

I am down to present at an IAA event on the ‘Future of Media’. I expected it to be a relatively small affair, but it turns out to be a big event in a grand venue at Bloomberg (I make a mental note to thank my head of communications, Claire, for the heads-up.)

I think it goes OK, although I might have alienated all of the women in the audience when I described women as waste in the context of a specific audience targeting example – I was misunderstood!

Jump on my scooter to have a catch-up with Steve King, worldwide chief executive of ZenithOptimedia, which always turns out to be an interesting and entertaining discussion.

After about a year of organising, I finally managed to have a quick lunch with Chris Mellish of Razorfish. As well as working with ZenithOptimedia and Starcom MediaVest Group, the Nerve Center works closely with Razorfish and Digitas, and it’s always good to hear what they are up to.

Later on, I also catch up with Olivia Yabsley who runs content for Digitas, to round out the group in a day.

With a couple of client sessions fast approaching on the world of exchanges and some prep for our regular EMEA AOD (our proprietary addressable media capability) call, I sit quietly at my desk and nail some work before home time.

Wednesday

A sickeningly early start – I’m up and out of the house by 4.30am to go to Madrid with my boss Curt Hecht, global chief executive of the VivaKi Nerve Center.

We have a full day of meetings with the management of VivaKi, ZenithOptimedia, Performics and Starcom MediaVest Group, to go through the VivaKi plans. The Spanish guys are always open and enthusiastic and a pleasure to work with, they also lay on a great lunch in the office. It makes our spread look pretty shoddy.

We’re close to launching the results from the UK rollout of The Pool, a global research project to identify the industry’s optimal online advertising model, and I share progress with everyone. The results are in line with the other markets, which is hugely encouraging.

So six hours later, we run for the airport and get back on the plane. I have done a lot of travel over the last two years and it is still enjoyable, but I guess one day it will drag. I never enjoy being away from my wife and child too much though.

Thursday

A morning thrashing Greg Grimmer at squash. Sorry, I should say getting a thrashing from Greg Grimmer. This week, however, I have bought a new racket and trainers – so his days are numbered.

Later today, the UK leads for AOD Activation, Geoff Smith, and AOD Product, Paul Silver, and I have our monthly catch-up with the ZenithOptimedia and SMG trading guys. It is usually part presentation, part piss-take of each other. Mauricio Leon and John Baylon are not wallflowers, so you have to give as good as you get!

We’re celebrating today as AOD has achieved an incredible milestone and delivered 100 billion impressions. And that’s just in the US and UK. No mean feat given it didn’t exist at the beginning of 2008.

In the evening I head to the leaving do of my good friend Phil Christer, who has recently moved to Google. Phil has kept me sane on many occasions and I know he’ll do great things in his new job.

Friday

Today does not start brilliantly. I am pulled over by two police motorbike riders who have been tailing me for the last mile. Shame I hadn’t noticed them in my mirrors sooner because I realise I’ve just performed some of my most reckless scooter-riding of the last few years.

Mounting a pavement, running a very close amber/red, doing 40mph on Tottenham Court Road, with some weaving thrown in, all mean I am up the creek.

After immense contrition from me and puppy-dog eyes, they unbelievably let me off. I get into work pretty happy and thankfully things pick up after that.

I have a good catch-up with Iain Jacob of Starcom MediaVest Group around the VivaKi Nerve Center and SMG progresses across the wider EMEA region. It’s important to make sure that we are lined up with the senior agency regional and global leads as we expand in terms of products and scale.

Lunch is with our tech partner on Audience On Demand video (AODv) and another expansion discussion as AODv rolls out into more European countries. Creating publisher uptake of this new way of buying video is top of the agenda.

It’s a great lunch, but I’m glad to leave – the downstairs of Navarros always smells of bleach. A productive afternoon of clearing emails and a bit of Twitter banter and my week ends with a very cautious scooter ride home. I’m determined not to get pulled over by the police again – well, at least for a couple of days.