Brand fuels demand. Prove it or lose the market. And meet the marketer where they are.

Scott has always worked the media side, but what excites him is the creative, what happens in the Palais. He loved communications and the arts, and the people making a living through them. He started in television, did an internship with an NBC affiliate in Chicago, and grew to love the whole ecosystem. From TV he moved to connected TV, spent nearly nine years at Samsung Ads in North America, and is now six months into leading global revenue at LoopMe, focused on bringing brands into mobile apps.

Coming from television, it was all about reach, and blunt: age and gender. Now the industry can do precise targeting, measurement and optimisation, and at LoopMe in real time. As the business gets closer to Wanamaker's dream of measuring every penny, marketers face so many options that part of the job is pulling back and trying to make it simple.

As consumers lean on AI assistants rather than clicking through search results, the web sessions brands relied on are disappearing. All that traffic's gone. So where do brands find people on a mobile device when mobile web is shrinking? The jump is towards a brand experience inside the app, which is immersive: full screen video and custom units that tell a brand story in new ways.

The SDK sits in over 300,000 apps, and mobile carries an immediate opportunity to transact. After eight and a half years at Samsung, Scott says it is nearly impossible to transact on a television the way a consumer can one click deep link into a product page on a phone. Mobile also makes the impulse purchase easy, and it is no longer a candy bar at the checkout, it is a 200 pound item.

Public company pressure to hit a quarterly number pushes CMOs towards lower funnel measurement, so investment chases last click. But a brand is how you introduce new customers and cultivate the relationship. If all you do is invest in the lower funnel, sooner or later you burn out of in market and have to keep filling. The smart marketers think about it both ways, brand health and conversions together.

When the CFO asks what a 100 million dollar campaign delivered, lower funnel answers are easy. The harder conversation is the value of the brand. LoopMe measures upper and mid funnel impact, brand lift, consideration and intent, and translates it into a quantifiable number that shows how brand spend drives consumption to the bottom line, turning brand from a nice to have that is hard to quantify into a must-have.

Marketers have become far more data driven, and even verticals you would not expect, like CPG and fast food, are turning to apps to build a direct data relationship. Scott cites Publicis paying 2.2 billion dollars for LiveRamp as a sign of how central the data identity spine has become. With first party data brought in a privacy compliant way, marketers can value high value users themselves rather than let a third party define who is in market, which differs across Mercedes, BMW and Jaguar.

Privacy regulation, from GDPR to CCPA, has pushed the need for first party data and a genuine relationship with an audience rather than shoving messages at them. The point is to engage people who want to hear from you, which reduces waste across all media.

For 14 years LoopMe has built non identity consumer surveys that sit on the phone, capturing preference, awareness and whether someone is in market, over 300 million a year. It is completely anonymised, with no PII exchanged, and it all sits inside AI agents that help marketers with insights and optimisation. Scott is confident because he can see it work, pointing to 5X brand lift on a single campaign.

LoopMe has been machine learning since it started, built from the tech up rather than a value proposition down. On engineering, AI gives leverage on simple code so features ship faster. Beyond that, seven patents with 11 more in the pipeline sit behind how it builds and optimises audiences in near real time for mid funnel outcomes, which lets it offer guaranteed outcomes rather than a brand lift survey that arrives six months too late to action.

Fifteen years in, Scott still resents the invented vocabulary of ad tech, serve an ad instead of run an ad, and suspects it was intentional opacity, a club you had to learn to belong to. In the end it is an amazing disservice, because busy marketers do not have time to go to Ad Tech 101. The more simple, the better: common language, one problem, what you will deliver and how it matters to their KPIs.

You meet marketers where they are. Ironically, given the creative in the Palais, they tend to be measurement and analytics junkies focused on the numbers. Some want a deep product conversation, and product specialists make the complex simple. Others just want to know they are getting value without brand, commerce or overpaying risk. Either way, understand the objectives and be clear about the value.

Scott admires brands intent on long lasting relationships, consistent in message and positioning, that do not jump from promotion to promotion. Having run a creative agency for nine years making custom magazines for Rolex and Sotheby's, he prizes the long view of high consideration categories: planting a tree you will never see grow to 100 years old, and being a good steward of the brand.

His advice to a person starting out, including his own son now at a PR firm, is to just say yes, say yes to everything and be there. Your 20s are about exposure and learning, and you never know what you will bump into, so do not judge anything and find mentors. You are not supposed to have all the answers. He values being in the office too, because you learn by observing in the margins of a day, and that is where you build pattern recognition.