Think "web first"
Introduction
The Super CMO
Social media versus complexity
Think "web first"
The IAB's challenge to Nielsen and comScore
Making online safe for digital immigrants
Berens: You started with the IAB in January. How's it going?
Rothenberg: Great. I think that is the short report, but it is a wonderful place. Obviously it is a strong trade association, beginning with what Rich LeFurgy did now more than a decade ago, then, with Greg Stuart’s stewardship during the last five years.
There is an enormous amount of goodwill generally in the media industry and in the agency community for the work of the IAB. So, it is very nice and invigorating to inherit something that is in such a strong position at exactly the time when the market is asking for more integrated activity.
Berens: It is certainly a time of great change. So, let’s talk about that change for a minute. If you were to isolate what you think the two or three biggest challenges facing the interactive advertising industry are, right now; and then concurrently how those challenges facing the industry are challenges for the IAB, what would they be?
Rothenberg: It is the challenge of abundance that is facing the interactive media industry, and more broadly the interactive media and marketing enterprise.
Serious large marketers have effectively “come out of the closet” over the last eighteen to twenty-four months and said, “This is it. Interactive is the fulcrum on which all marketing efforts balance.” That raises the bar for interactive media companies, interactive units in diversified media companies, and raises the bar as well for interactive agencies, or interactive units in large marketing services companies; and also for the interactive teams at consumer marketers and B-to-B marketers.
For most of the past decade, senior marketers were content to say, “You know, I have got it covered. I have got it covered. I got a team working it, and they are working with the interactive agency, and they are working with some interactive media companies.” It was almost more like R&D preparing for a future that would happen at some point unknown.
And now the future has happened.
I have been dragging around a David Workman quote. David, who, as you know, is one of the most respected, best known, most experienced media agency leaders said, just two weeks ago, in his Keynote address at the AAAAs Management Conference, “I believe the future of our business is to think web first.” That raises the bar for everyone in terms of process, systems, recruitment and retention.
Then there is the whole talent challenge. And, I think probably more seriously than anything else, relationships and operations across the entire value chain.
Then the issue of how marketers relate to agencies -- how agencies relate to media companies on questions large and small -- really looms as a serious challenge, underneath that umbrella challenge that we have of abundance.