The Brand Proof
Fifteen years in ad tech across television, connected TV and mobile, now leading global revenue at LoopMe and making the case for measurable brand.
"The notion of planting a tree that you're never gonna see grow to 100 years old"
Michael Scott is Global Chief Revenue Officer at LoopMe, the mobile app advertising company he says was built by mathematicians on 14 years of machine learning. He is known for a career selling across television, connected TV and mobile, and for arguing that brand investment can and should be quantified.
Scott started in television, doing an internship with an NBC affiliate in Chicago, where he grew to love the whole ecosystem, the people, the work and his role in it. From there he moved into OTT and connected TV, and spent nearly nine years at Samsung Ads in North America, a period he describes as formative for his views on first party data and the difficulty of transacting on a television. Alongside this, he ran a creative agency for nine years, producing custom magazines for high consideration brands he names as Rolex and Sotheby's.
Six months into his role as Global Chief Revenue Officer at LoopMe, Scott leads revenue for a business he says operates across 192 countries and 25 offices, headquartered in London with North American headquarters in New York and APAC in Singapore. By his account the company runs over 300 million anonymised consumer surveys a year and holds seven patents with 11 more in the pipeline. Fifteen years into ad tech, he remains a vocal critic of the industry's jargon and an advocate for making brand spend measurable.
If you're not building brand value, you're going to lose
"You need to build a brand. A brand is the way that you introduce new customers."
Scott insists that brand is not decoration but the mechanism by which new customers enter and the relationship is cultivated. He warns that businesses obsessed with last click starve the top of the funnel and eventually run out of people in market. For him the smart marketers keep filling that funnel rather than mining the same 5 percent.
"It really gets marketers very excited to be able to take and bring their own first party in a privacy compliant way"
Scott sees first party data as the new foundation, driven by privacy regulation and the fading of easy third party signals. He notes that even CPG and fast food brands are turning to apps to build direct data relationships. Bringing their own data lets marketers define high value audiences themselves rather than outsourcing who counts as in market.
"The more simple, the more better, and the more singular in terms of the conversation"
After 15 years in ad tech, Scott is scathing about the industry's invented vocabulary, which he suspects was a deliberate barrier to entry. He argues it does marketers a disservice because they are busy and have no time for a crash course. His approach is to strip the jargon, talk about one problem, and be clear about the outcome and how it maps to a marketer's KPIs.
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