The real king of advertising is Irwin Gotlieb!

Fortune Magazine - Feb 4th 2008, Jessi Hempel interview with Irwin Gotlieb


Forget Google. The real king of advertising is a mild-mannered 58-year-old media buyer.
It wasn't long ago that the ad biz was ruled by black-clad creative types who could charm an old lady into dropping her last $10 on a jar of get-younger cream. But those days are over. Now, with digital media at the center of the action - Google, Facebook, Microsoft's blockbuster bid for Yahoo - it's all about numbers. And one bookish media buyer is king. His name is Irwin Gotlieb. But we might just as well call him the $59 billion man.

Last year the CEO of media-buying shop GroupM, a division of the ad conglomerate WPP Group (WPPGY), quietly directed more than 16% of the world's $364 billion in global ad expenditures. He not only understands media better than most; he has the power to sway the industry to his vision. And lately that vision entails old media taking lessons from the web. "Say you want to sell grapefruit," he says over an egg-white omelet at London's Four Seasons, where he keeps an extra set of clothes for regular visits. To move a lot of citrus in the traditional way, he explains, you'd buy a spot on "Grey's Anatomy" or run an ad in Vogue, making behavioral assumptions and inferences built on viewer demographics. But in the digital world, ad buyers don't need to assume anything; they have data to work with. Online marketers track actual behavior, so instead of buying a type of audience, they can buy a click, an inquiry, or even a sale. Every time consumers take such an action, it becomes part of their "clickstream," which follows them around the web. This information trail gives marketers an increasingly sophisticated idea about each of us, allowing them to craft an ever more tailored online experience.

But why stop there? What the business really needs is a venue with the reach of old media and the data trail of the web. In 2006, GroupM placed, tracked, and measured 200 billion online impressions, and that figure jumped enormously last year, according to the agency. That's a lot of behavioral data, and it made Gotlieb - who serves as the top field general to WPP Group CEO Martin Sorrell - think how useful it would be to spray that fire hose of information at non-web media. And so whatever you may think it will do to your privacy, our clickstreams are about to follow us to our TVs, enabling marketers to "send a different message to every set-top box," he says. "If you've got three TVs in your home, the teen gets one message, Mom gets a different one, and Dad gets a third."

Gotlieb isn't just envisioning this scenario; he's making it happen. He was the lead investor last fall in a $25 million funding round for Invidi Technologies, a tech startup based in Princeton, N.J., that can determine the age, gender, location, income, and ethnicity of television viewers and send targeted ads to different sets within the same house. The investment, he contends, will help position GroupM to improve ad targeting on any screen - TV, PDA, or computer. "While the technologies are fairly well developed to enable all this stuff, the business rules don't exist," he says. The next step is to hammer out deals with the networks, precisely the sort of work he's been doing for 38 years. "Our single biggest challenge as an industry is to find fair and equitable ways of getting the business arrangements in place."



For full interview: http://www.etribes.com/node/152160
Also published at Fortune Magazine - Turkey, March 2008

Aziz ilker icsel
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