Advertising veteran Carl Fremont, CEO of Quigley-Simpson, has spent decades at the forefront of industry change, with senior roles at leading agencies including WPP and Digitas. An early champion of digital and a founder of the NewFronts, Carl has worked with top brands across sectors from automotive and finance to retail and technology.
Curation Conversations sat down with Carl to discuss the ongoing evolution of marketing and why he continues to find the industry’s constant change so exciting.
You’ve been doing direct-to-consumer marketing since long before there was digital let alone programmatic campaigns. What lessons can we take from the early days of DTC that can apply to what we’re doing today?
I always say the best way to think about the future is to take a look back. The principles of marketing have not changed. They're all about where you're investing and how to get the biggest return on that investment. One of the ways we used to evaluate direct mail lists was referred to as RFM: recency, frequency, and monetary value. How recently did the consumers on this list make a purchase? How frequently did they convert? How much did they spend? This was how we evaluated who was responding, which offers they were responding to, and how loyal they were over time.
What was so different than it is today was that back then it could take upwards of six months before you knew any of this. Now we can know right away whether audiences are responding, and we can even test different messages and different creative in real time. None of us could even have dreamt of such instantaneous responses back then.
You’ve really been in programmatic marketing since it started. What do you think are the biggest recent changes?
The biggest shifts have been in how AI is being applied. AI is not new in programmatic, but it is being rethought and adopted at scale in ways we haven’t seen before.
It’s becoming an important component of the bidding process. The speed at which AI tools can understand how certain audiences and marketplaces are performing allows buyers to adjust their bidding strategy in real time in ways we couldn’t do in the past.
Similarly, AI is also becoming a key component in mid-flight optimization. When a campaign is already running in programmatic, AI tools can look at all the elements—audience, data segments, supply, offers, creative, messaging—and determine the combinations that are performing the best. All of this work has always been done, but AI once again allows us to do this in real time so that advertisers can potentially change their audience or the supply they’re working with to get better results.
And AI will get better. It’s a funny loop. AI is trained on the data we’ve collected. AI is now collecting more and better data. That data will, in turn, make the AI better.
In addition to AI, it feels like everyone is talking about CTV. How important do you think CTV is for programmatic marketing overall?
It’s the holy grail. When we were all watching linear TV on the networks or even cable, it was nearly impossible to target individuals. As an advertiser, I would ideally know that you were a pet owner and whether you had a dog or cat so I could target the right pet food commercials to you when you were watching ABC, CBS, or TBS. Some technology existed for that even years ago, but it was clunky and very expensive. So, I’d have to settle for using Nielsen ratings and their panel data to get an indication of whether the audience was—in general—made up of pet owners. But you—the owner of an aging dog who would have been likely to respond to a commercial for senior dog food—would see the same commercials as everyone else. Over the years, there were various attempts to get to one-to-one advertising on linear TV, but they were never worth the investment.
Even in the last 10 years, when we’ve been focused on digital ads in multiple channels, CTV was a bit of an outlier. It was often not part of the programmatic campaign. Instead, buyers would work directly with publishers like Roku or Netflix. The nature of streaming is more personalized than network or cable because consumers choose what they’re watching and when (they’re curating their own experiences), but the ad buys were more like linear TV buys and less targeted than programmatic.
Now we have the technology to pull it all together. We can include CTV in our programmatic campaigns and plan them simply by asking, “How can I reach and engage somebody at any time of day through whatever channel they’re involved with at the time?”
AI will let us assess more data points, be more targeted, and optimize our spend both at the front end and mid-campaign. Marketers will be able to spend more time on strategy, more time testing, and more time on analyzing what is working, and ultimately get a higher response for their spend.
This month we had the Super Bowl and the Olympics which are unique. Aside from those kinds of events, what do you think is going to happen to linear TV advertising as CTV becomes integrated in programmatic campaigns?
You’re right to set those two events apart because live linear event TV—which is basically sports and award shows—its their own thing. They give you immense reach, but they're few and far between and not very targeted.
There is still a role for linear TV advertising on regular shows whether it’s cable or network TV. If you need to sell toothpaste or toilet paper, for example, why would you bother doing the targeting? You’d be paying for the data to target specific audiences, the technology to reach them, and the AI tools to analyze success. There is still a lot of good, high-quality content on linear TV and a good-sized audience. If you’re a consumer packaged goods company selling something that everyone uses, it makes sense to keep advertising there. Obviously, things could change because consumer habits change, but it’s still a good avenue for brands that need to sell low-cost products to a wide audience.
Shifting to our favorite topic, curation has been a bit of a buzzword in the last few years, but sometimes we wonder if everyone is even speaking the same language. Can you explain your vision of curation?
Curation has been around for quite a while. At its core, it brings together information about different audience groups, segments, and publishers. The data collected for curation can be demographic, behavioral, or shopping/commerce-based. It’s about understanding who people are from multiple perspectives. Then it combines those data sets with the supply side—the actual impressions and publisher inventory—in a way that is brand safe, so you know where your advertising is going to show up.
What you’re ultimately doing is bringing together the best audiences with the best ways to reach them and get them to engage and respond. Private marketplaces are curated—that’s been true for many years. What’s newer is the level of access to data and the ability to pinpoint and match different audiences with different offers and different ways of engaging, whether that’s online banners, private marketplace deals, or CTV. Curation lets us bring data, supply, format, and environment together in a much more precise and actionable way.
Before we let you go, what are you most excited about in the world of advertising in the year to come?
What gets me excited is that we are continuing to evolve. We are continuing to learn. And every year, for the past 40 years, I've said this is the best time to be in marketing because every year presents new opportunities, and thank goodness for that, because it’s what keeps us working.
I know some people are scared of change, but the only time is scary is when you are afraid to do it. Believe it or not, I used to work with Columbia House record and tape club. For those too young to remember, you would get a membership and then be able to order albums cheaply through the mail. They were my client for years. I watched them switch from LPs to 8-tracks to cassettes and then to CDs. Every time there was a new technology, they were fearful that the old technology was going to go away and that people wouldn’t like the change, but they kept evolving and they stayed in business.
Then what happened? They didn’t believe that digital audio was going to be disruptive. They assumed that people would always want to own a tangible version of an album. So they never negotiated for digital rights. They didn’t evolve, and they became obsolete.
I like to think of evolution as a dial, not a switch. You’re not turning it on or off, you’re turning a dial so that you’re always moving forward. Of course, if you’re not embracing marketing evolution, your switch will get turned off.
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