Podcast
Next in Media
Hosted by Mike Shields · EN
Everything we know about the media, marketing and advertising business is being completely upended thanks to technology and data. We're talking with some of the top industry leaders as they steer their companies through constant change.
125episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Creators, Campaigns, and Cannes: Navigating the Evolving Media Ecosystem
Jul 24, 202500:10:41Summary readyNext in Media spoke with WPP Media's Jessica Brown and Spark Foundry Worldwide's Kelly Metz, focusing on YouTube's growing role in the TV marketplace, the shift towards holistic video measurement, the increasing importance of AI and streamlined approaches in media buying, and the evolving challenges and opportunities in creator partnerships and cross-platform attribution.💡Takeaways:📺 YouTube's Growing TV Presence: YouTube is increasingly seen as a significant part of the TV landscape, with viewership numbers supporting its inclusion in TV consumption.📱 Short-Form Content on TV: YouTube Shorts are surprisingly popular on television, prompting discussions on whether short-form content like TikTok and YouTube Shorts should be considered alongside traditional TV in video strategies.🚀 Social-First and Short-Form Strategies: Brands should consider starting with social-first and short-form content, depending on their audience and message, as there are various options for reaching consumers.🤝 Streamlined Creator Partnerships: While finding and activating creators at scale remains challenging, companies are making strategic acquisitions and developing agile processes to simplify creator deals and get campaigns to market quickly.📊 Need for Holistic Measurement: There's a strong demand for better, more comprehensive, and consistent measurement across all media platforms, including walled gardens, to compare performance effectively and understand ROI.🤖 AI and Tech in Media Buying: Technology and AI are becoming increasingly important for media buying, helping to streamline approaches, inform product choices, and create more effective and impactful campaigns.🎙 Guests: Jessica Brown & Kelly Metz🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsor: Elemental TV🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummaryWhat Happens to Retail Media When Agents Start Taking Over Shopping?
Jul 22, 202500:25:02Summary readyThis episode is brought to you by Walmart Connect. From homepage to home improvement. Win Carts and Minds with Walmart Connect.Next in Media spoke with Sarah Hofstetter, chairwoman of Profitero, a division of Publicis, about the haves and have nots in retail media, whether the big players TV presence is going to cause a bifurcation in the market, and what agentic shopping might do to the whole category.💡Takeaways:💸 Retail Media Explosion & Consolidation: The retail media sector has seen significant growth, with major players like Amazon and Walmart developing substantial advertising businesses, leading to a tiered market with a few dominant players and a long tail of smaller networks.🔄 Buyer vs. Seller Disconnect: There's a fundamental disconnect between media buyers who desire consolidation and retailers who view retail media as a crucial revenue stream from suppliers, creating tension in the market.🛍️ Shifting Budget Allocation & Mindset: Traditional shopper marketing budgets, historically controlled by sales teams for in-store presence, are now clashing with digital media spending, requiring a shift in mindset within brands to prioritize "digital end-caps" like search and display.🛒 Omnichannel Attribution Complexity: Measuring the impact of digital shelf presence on in-store purchases and vice-versa is a significant challenge, as current attribution models often fail to connect these fluid customer journeys.🤖 AI's Impact on Shopping & Search: Agentic AI is poised to disrupt traditional search and shopping behaviors, compelling retailers, agencies, and brands to collaborate on co-creating future shopping experiences and leveraging AI for workflow automation and efficiency.🎙 Guest: Sarah Hofstetter🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsor: Walmart Connect🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummaryAre You Ready for Gen Alpha? Insights from Razorfish CEO Dani Mariano
Jul 17, 202500:10:12Summary readyIn this episode of Next in Media, Mike Shields interviews Dani Mariano, CEO of Razorfish, about their research into Gen Alpha, highlighting this generation's unique media consumption habits, brand maturity, and influence on household purchasing decisions, as well as Razorfish's "creator collab" program designed to meet the evolving demands of creator-centric marketing.💡 Takeaways:👶 Gen Alpha is more "Gen Z than Gen Z" at age 10 and will fundamentally change marketing, moving beyond the "mini-millennial" or "mini-Gen Z" expectations that marketers had for previous generations.🤝 Gen Alpha seeks co-creation with brands, desiring to be part of shaping a brand's future rather than just earning loyalty through transactional means.👨👩👧👦 Gen Alpha, referred to as the "gateway generation," holds significant influence over household purchasing decisions, including major items like smart refrigerators and cars, due to their consumption of influencer content.📈 Gen Alpha exhibits extreme brand maturity, favoring sophisticated brands like Nike, Apple, and Samsung at age 10, unlike previous generations who preferred typical young-people brands such as cookies and cereal.🎯 Gen Alpha has twice as many interests as Gen Z did at the same age, requiring marketers to consider how influencer programs can scale and break through a high volume of content consumption.📝 Razorfish utilizes an in-house "creator collab" with on-staff creators to quickly produce polished, on-brief social content for clients' organic feeds, distinct from traditional influencer programs focused on creator followings.🤖 AI-powered decisioning tools, like those at Publicis Groupe, are crucial for understanding audiences at an individual level, enabling marketers to match content format with media platforms for targeted reach and efficient media strategy.🎙 Guest: Dani Mariano🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsor: VuePlanner🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummarySnap's CMO Grace Kao: Beyond Social Media - Connecting Audiences, Brands & Developers
Jul 15, 202500:23:33Summary readyGrace Kao, CMO of Snap, discusses Snapchat's unique position as a platform focused on authentic connection and creativity, highlighting its diverse audience (consumers, B2B, developers) and innovative features like Promoted Places on the Snap Map and opportunities for brands in Chat, emphasizing the platform's ease of use and its appeal to a generation valuing real self-expression.💡Takeaways:📸 Camera-First Communication: Snapchat's core design, opening directly to a camera, has fostered a culture where anyone can create and easily share their point of view, emphasizing connection over curated perfection. 🤝 Diverse Audience Engagement: Snap's CMO, Grace Kao, emphasizes that Snapchat serves multiple audiences, including consumers, B2B marketers/advertisers, and developers, indicating the importance of a multi-faceted marketing approach for platforms.🔄 Beyond Single-Use Platforms: Snapchat's integration of various functionalities like video, messaging, and maps into one experience provides diverse canvases for advertisers, moving beyond the limitations of single-use platforms.🗺️ Social Maps & Promoted Places: The surprising social use of Snap's map feature, where users connect by seeing friends' locations, has led to "Promoted Places," allowing brands to appear on the map for real-life experiences and discovery. 💬 Brand-Friendly Chat: Snapchat is opening its chat feature for brands to have one-on-one conversations with their audiences. 🧘♀️ Authenticity and Imperfection: The "Snapchat Generation" prioritizes authenticity, embracing imperfect and uncurated content (e.g., blurry snaps, empty food plates). 🎙️ Rise of Voice Memos & Mini-Podcasts: An unexpected trend is the significant growth of voice memo usage on Snapchat, with users creating "mini intimate one-on-one podcasts" with friends. 🎙 Guest: Grace Kao🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsors: Elemental TV & Linkedin🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummaryKasha Cacy, Known CMO: Navigating YouTube's "Other" Category for Advertisers
Jul 10, 202500:05:33Summary readyChief Media Officer at Known, Kasha Cacy, discusses YouTube's growing prominence against traditional television, despite challenges for brands regarding content predictability and measurement. Cacy, also touches on the evolving landscape of big creators acting as media companies and the current economic outlook from a business perspective.💡Takeaways:📈 YouTube's Continued Growth: YouTube consistently gains viewership from traditional television, stealing audience year over year. 🤷♀️ Content Predictability Challenges: A key hurdle for brands on YouTube is the less predictable nature of its content compared to TV, leading to uncertainty about ad placement. 👴📺 Generational Perception Gap: There's a "snobbiness in media" where older generations may perceive YouTube content as "not high quality," despite younger audiences (like 14 and 16-year-olds) spending significant time on the platform.🤝 Evolving Creator Ecosystem: Large creators are now operating like media companies, with "creator studios" producing content that can jump from YouTube to other platforms like Netflix. ⚖️ Embrace "Good Enough" Measurement: Media professionals are often too "precious" in seeking perfect measurement solutions. 🎙 Guest: Kasha Cacy🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsor: Elemental TV🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummaryLive From Cannes with Walmart Connect and Omnicom Media Group
Jul 8, 202500:17:49Summary readyNext in Media discusses the evolving role of influencers in marketing with Megan Pagliuca, Chief Product Officer at Omnicom Media Group, and Khurrum Malik, Head of Marketing for Walmart Connect, focusing on how data and new strategies are integrating influencers into broader media plans to drive sales and brand building.💡Takeaways:🛒 Retail Data for Influencer Selection: The integration of retail data, particularly from large retailers like Walmart, is revolutionizing how brands select influencers. 📈 Shift to Niche and Rising Influencers: There's a growing recognition that niche and rising influencers can offer more resonance and relevance due to their authentic connections with smaller communities, leading to more impactful campaigns compared to relying solely on celebrity endorsements.💡 Influencers as Content and Performance Channels: Influencers are no longer just a PR function or a branding tool. 🔗 Convergence of Social Commerce and Retail Media: The lines between social commerce (driven by influencers) and retail media (focused on direct outcomes) are blurring. 📊 Influencer Marketing Becoming Programmatic: The process of working with influencers is becoming more programmatic and scalable, moving away from purely custom, one-off integrations. 🤖 AI's Role in Content Creation: AI is emerging as a significant factor in content creation, particularly for small to medium-sized businesses, by simplifying content generation and enabling one-click buying. 🎙 Guests: Megan Pagliuca & Khurrum Malik🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsor: Walmart Connect🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummaryRetail Media's Future with Anne Harrell of Pacvue in Cannes
Jun 30, 202500:08:38Summary readyIn this episode of Next in Media, Mike Shields interviews Ann Harrell, Head of Product Enablement at Pacvue, about the evolving landscape of retail media. Harrell explains the challenges of data availability and cross-channel attribution in retail media, highlighting the role of data clean rooms and the blurring lines between retail, social, and traditional search as all become channels for commerce.💡Takeaways:The Challenge of Cross-Platform Attribution: While closed-loop attribution is effective within single retail platforms, the major challenge lies in attributing performance across various retail media channels and broader marketing channels due to data silos and retailers' reluctance to share data outside their own networks.🔒 Data Clean Rooms as a Solution: Data clean rooms are emerging as a key tool to overcome data availability challenges. 💰 Cross-Channel Measurement Drives Budgets: Demonstrating cross-channel measurement to retailers is crucial because it often leads to increased and sustained budgets for brands. 🛍️ Evolution of Social Shopping: Social platforms like TikTok are actively integrating commerce features, moving beyond organic social strategy to offer "shop ads" that link creative content directly to products. 🌐 Building Retailer Ecosystems: Major retailers like Walmart are building comprehensive ecosystems that span various media touchpoints, including on-site display, off-site programmatic (e.g., through Trade Desk), and connected TV (CTV) via partnerships like Vizio. 🎯 Custom Incrementality Models: A one-size-fits-all approach to incrementality modeling is ineffective due to varying data and attribution capabilities across retailers. 🎙 Guest: Anne Harrell🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsor: Walmart Connect🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummaryA Tale of Two TV Upfronts
Jun 26, 202500:11:01Summary readyAs part of its exclusive series on the YouTube Ecosystem, Next in Media spoke with John Terrana, President, Americas at VaynerMedia, about why most clients aren't racing to lock up much inventory beyond sports this year, and the 'weirdo' spot YouTube still finds itself in.💡Takeaways:🏈 Sports Media Dominance: Live sports, particularly NFL and NBA, are highly competitive and fast-moving in the media marketplace, unlike other content which is experiencing slower movement and caution from buyers.⚠️ Post-Upfront Caution: Following the upfronts, there's a prevailing sense of caution, with buyers proceeding slowly due to concerns about inventory value, viewership trends, macroeconomic conditions, and political environments.📊 Increased Optionality and CTV/OTT Shift: Clients are seeking increased optionality for next year, prioritizing sports while shifting other media spend towards CTV (Connected TV) and OTT (Over-The-Top) to maintain flexibility.📺 YouTube's Misunderstood Potential: YouTube, especially the proper app on TV, is still largely misunderstood and underutilized by many in terms of its reach as the number one app on smart TVs, its creative potential, and its targeting capabilities.🔁 Always-On Creator Engagement: The trend for creators and influencers is moving from campaign-by-campaign activations to an "always-on" strategy, continuously sourcing and testing new talent, similar to the shift seen in performance marketing.🛍️ Rise of Social Commerce and Live Shopping: Social commerce, particularly through platforms like TikTok Shops, is a major growth area and a significant bet for agencies, driving substantial commercial outcomes and offering branding opportunities through integrated commerce units in feeds.🎙 Guest: John Terrana🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsor: VuePlanner🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummaryCan Spotify Become a Bigger (Video) Ad Player?
Jun 24, 202500:14:09Summary readyNext in Media sat down with Chloe Wix, Head of Global Product & Commercial Growth at Spotify at the company's beach venue in Cannes, to talk about AI-generated audio ads, why Spotify is leaning more into monetizing non-subscribers, and whether the 'background' medium can graduate into the video ad market.💡Takeaways:🎧 Shifting Perception of Spotify's Business Model: While initially perceived primarily as a subscription service, Spotify is increasingly demonstrating its commitment to advertising, investing significantly in its ad-supported side.🎬 Rise of Video Podcasting: Spotify observes a strong user desire for deeper engagement with podcasters, extending to visual elements like set design and mannerisms. 🔄 Breaking Traditional Media Plans: Spotify's integration of both audio and video advertising is disrupting conventional media buying, where teams are often segmented for audio, video, or social. 🤝 Demand for Native and Upfront Deals: Brands continue to value authentic relationships with creators, leading to an increase in annual, upfront deals with major podcasters. ⚙️ Automation as a Key Goal in Advertising: Spotify's number one goal on the advertising side is automation. 📊 Enhanced Measurement Solutions: Spotify is heavily investing in robust first-party measurement tools (e.g., Spotify Ad Analytics, Pixel) and deepening partnerships with third-party measurement providers like Claritas, Podscribe, and Arts.ai to provide comprehensive data and analytics for advertisers.🤖 AI in Ad Delivery and Creation: Spotify is leveraging AI for ad delivery, allowing advertisers to set goals (e.g., maximize spend, unique reach, purchases) and have ads delivered to users most likely to take a desired action. 🎙 Guest: Chloe Wix🎤 Host: Mike Shields📺 Sponsor: Elemental TV & VuePlanner🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
SummaryLive From Cannes with Walmart Connect's Ryan Mayward
Jun 20, 202500:12:34Summary readyNext In Media spoke with Ryan Mayward, SVP of Retail Media Sales for Walmart Connect, about the company's expansion of its retail media capabilities beyond its own platforms. Walmart Connect is focusing on off-platform strategies through partnerships in CTV (NBC Universal, Disney, Paramount Plus), social media (Meta, TikTok, Pinterest), and new integrations like Vizio. 💡Takeaways:🌐 Off-Platform Retail Media Expansion: Walmart Connect is significantly expanding its retail media capabilities beyond its owned platforms, focusing on reaching Walmart customers wherever they consume content, including CTV and social media, to drive sales outcomes. 📊 Full-Funnel Measurement and Consideration Metrics: The focus is moving towards understanding how each touchpoint contributes to overall sales, emphasizing "consideration" metrics like attributed visits to product detail pages or brand shops, which are effectively driven by offsite media like CTV and social. 📺 Strategic CTV Integrations: Walmart Connect is actively integrating with major CTV players like NBC Universal, Disney, and Paramount Plus to reach Walmart audiences and measure sales outcomes. 🤝 Social Media Partnerships for Sales Outcomes: Walmart Connect has integrated with top social platforms such as Meta, TikTok, and Pinterest, observing strong results in reaching Walmart customers and measuring sales outcomes from content consumption and live experiences on these platforms.💡 AI-Enabled Creative Tools for Advertisers: Walmart Connect is developing AI-enabled creative tools, starting with display and moving into video, to lower the barrier to entry for smaller and medium-sized brands, making it easier for them to advertise on platforms like TV.📈 Expansion to Non-Endemic Brands: Beyond brands selling products in Walmart stores, Walmart Connect is increasingly working with non-endemic advertisers from sectors like financial services, travel, quick-serve restaurants, and automotive, signaling a broader market play in retail media.🎙 Guest: Ryan Mayward🎤 Host: Mike Shields🎬 Producer: FEL Creative
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