Linda Yaccarino & Josh Feldman, NBCUniversal

“We’re not in the advertisement business. We’re in the engagement business,” says Nick Brien, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Americas. The advertising company was formed in 2013 to manage parent company Dentsu’s operations outside of Japan. Dentsu now generates more than half of its revenue — 59 percent last year — from outside its home market. Yet Dentsu and Dentsu Aegis Network are less known and less understood in the U.S. than the big holding companies WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and IPG. Dentsu, and therefore Brien, has a stated goal of becoming a 100 percent digital business by 2020. We get into that, his background in an industry that he says he loves, creativity (something Dentsu Aegis Network is not particularly known for), acquisition goals and why he’s tired of the narrative of the big bad consulting companies infringing on agency turf.

20 Sep 201835min

Chances are, even if you are an avid consumer of short form streaming videos, you’ve never heard of Studio 71. But you’ve seen their work — or at least your kids have. From Canadian YouTube superstar Lilly Singh to vlogger Roman Atwood to Good Mythical Morning with Rhett and Link — Studio 71 is the media agency behind videos that generate a reported 9.5 billion views across platforms every month. The company, co-founded by Reza Izad, helps creators make money and grow their offering for advertisers, and through merchandizing and intellectual property. Izad joins us today to talk about the streaming media space, where there’s been no shortage of sturm und drang over the past year or so.

13 Sep 201837min

When Hernan Lopez left his post as president and CEO of Fox International Channels in 2016 to launch a podcast company people asked him a straightforward question: Are you nuts? But he saw parallels between the nascent medium of podcasting and the cable industry of the early 2000s. The company he started is called Wondery, and today it produces premium podcast fare like Dirty John and Business Wars. Wondery’s newest show is called Dr. Death. It was released just this Tuesday and is already topping the iTunes charts. Lopez joins me today as the podcast upfronts get underway in New York to break down the landscape as he sees it.

6 Sep 201829min

Michael Ventura wrote the book on empathy. Literally. The founder of the New York strategy and design consultancy Sub Rosa is a multi-hyphenate. When he’s not advising a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients and progressive start-ups, he is running an experiential shopping venture called Calliope with his wife, running an art gallery and event space, publishing a newsletter called La Petite Mort — the french expression for orgasm — and running an eastern and indigenous medicine and healing practice. Now he’s an author, too. His book “Applied Empathy” came out earlier this spring and aims to promote how empathy can be a competitive advantage in business. He joins us on this episode of Ad Lib to discuss empathy, what he means by it, how he arrived at it as a guiding principle and how it’s won him some surprising clients, like West Point Military Academy.

30 Aug 201832min

When Terry Young founded the agency Sparks & Honey in 2012, it was billed as a “next-generation” agency that really gets culture. Last month the Omnicom shop announced that it was — you guessed it — repositioning as a technology-led cultural consultancy. If it sounds like yet another agency scrambling to maintain relevance with buzzwords, Young says it’s an outward reflection of what they’ve been up to internally for years. He joins us on the Ad Lib podcast to talk about how the agency maps culture. Every day at noon everyone stops what they’re doing for an hour for a briefing that distills the Internet’s latest (and next) obsessions. We get into what frontiers fascinate him today – space and voice top the list -- and how a mid-career Peace Corps stint continues to inspire.

23 Aug 201830min

A zen koan for 2018: How, as a media company today, does one build both scale and trust? It might be easy to cultivate one, but it often comes at the expense of the other. The USA Today Network has managed to do both. With 109 local papers scattered throughout the country, the newspaper company has certainly cobbled together scale. And the journalists on the ground are putting the lie to the idea of “fake news,” picking up three Pulitzers for the network this year alone. Still, news is a tough business. And local news is even tougher. USA Today Network has seen continued growth in digital revenue, but not enough to offset declines in traditional advertising. Tasked with solving that riddle is Kevin Gentzel, who joins us on the podcast today.

16 Aug 201838min

On the first day of her job as CEO, Kiran Smith broke her left foot. What could easily be interpreted as a bad omen turned out to be a blessing in a cast: Smith says the boot she’s had to wear these past five weeks have endeared her to new staffers and broken the ice with clients. She could use all the help she can get: In its second quarter earnings release last month, parent company Vivendi blamed weak organic results of its agency network Havas on “the impact of Arnold’s underperformance.” A veteran marketer — her most recent gig was as CMO at Brookstone — with no agency experience, Smith says she brings with her a fresh perspective to a gig that is sorely in need of one. She joins the podcast today to discuss the challenges she faces in her new job, what she brings to the table as a former marketer and what she’s learning from clients like Progressive and Jack Daniels.

9 Aug 201825min

Publicis Groupe has had quite a year. In June of 2017 Maurice Levy stepped down as the holding company’s CEO, handing the reins over to Arthur Sadoun. That same month, the company made waves at Cannes for saying it would abstain from sending work to awards shows for a full year in order to devote resources to an internal tech platform called Marcel. Still, Publicis missed its revenue targets in second-quarter earnings reported last month -- despite winning some major accounts in the first half 2018. Serrano joins the podcast to discuss what distinguishes the Publicis strategy at a time when holding companies are under pressure from clients to cut costs and under siege from consultancies and tech giants Google, Facebook and Amazon. Plus we talk about her childhood as the family’s black sheep — and she tells us about the time she gave advertising legend Lee Clow some really bad advice.

3 Aug 201824min