Building Bridges from the Past to the Future - Brian Wieser

I recently left a role at a unit of Interpublic called MAGNAGLOBAL after nearly eight years. My predecessor, Bob Coen, held that job for more than 60. My team was responsible for forecasting the advertising economy, exploring how and why change would impact the industry in the future. We extensively studied change across other industries to gain perspective on change within our own.

From this research we tried to find variables that most predicted how different sub-sectors of media could change. Our view was that industry change was dependent upon many factors, and that not all media was alike (as they differ in terms of ownership concentration, regulation, value chains, business models, etc.). At the same time, we needed to gain a tactical perspective, and asked buyers, planners, account directors and clients how and why decisions were made to allocate budgets to advertising. Importantly, we also asked lots of questions around why decisions were not made to allocate budgets to different media. With these efforts we were successful in establishing models which Wall Street analysts called “the industry standard” in explaining the history and future of advertising.

Watching the business from this vantage point gave me insight into one of the key problems of our time: while advertisers were successfully using media to communicate with consumers, fragmentation in media consumption introduced challenges that could not have been anticipated or forecast at the beginning of Bob Coen’s era. Although technology and the willingness to deploy it to solve problems associated with fragmentation became increasingly available to all players in the industry there was an absence of sufficient “bridges” to successfully apply technology to today’s existing television industry infrastructure, today’s media owner-agency-advertiser workflows and today’s business models.

Bridges to the future are not that different than the bridges we see in everyday life today – they are durable, lasting monuments to overcoming geographic obstacles. The bridges that need to be built in media must be similarly durable in straddling legacy processes and new ones such that obstacles are rendered irrelevant.

I found such a bridge in my new company, Simulmedia, whose web-like notions of audience targeting and reach extension are applied nationally to traditional TV, enabled by new applications of technology to existing and ubiquitous workflows.

Perhaps needless to say, I think it will be a big part of the industry for the foreseeable future. So much so that 60 years from now, I’m hopeful the work that I am now participating in will have been regarded as critical in moving the television industry forward.

Brian Wieser is CMO of Simulmedia, an audience-targeted advertising network for linear television founded by veterans of companies including 24/7 Real Media and Tacoda. He can be reached at brian@simulmedia.com.

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