aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews gave ad:tech's keynote interview on everything from surviving the first bubble, to mobile, social media and beyond.
This year's ad:tech San Francisco conference got off to an insightful start with Fast Company Senior Editor Lynne Johnson's
onstage interview with aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews.
Brian P. McAndrews has served as chief executive officer and director of aQuantive, Inc. since September 1999, and has been president since January 2000.
"Five years ago there was a bust," Johnson began. "How did you come out of it? How did you survive?"
McAndrews replied that aQuantive was founded on "the power of an idea… that digital would become increasingly important. Even during the downturn there was always this belief." While employees left other companies in droves, aQuantive "had a lot of people who continued to believe in where we were headed, and stuck it out because of that belief."
"There were a lot of companies that had non-sustainable business ideas… some of them were our clients," McAndrews continued. "So we lost a lot of business" in the downturn, but at the same time aQuantive was also working "to bring traditional businesses into the space, the businesses that were going to be around."
Two keys to aQuantive's growth and stability were that the company was always "looking for ways to diversify our revenue stream," which led to aQuantive's spinning off Atlas as a separate business in 2001. In addition, the company "brought in people from different spheres." McAndrews himself came out of television, and Avenue A | Razorfish's worldwide president Clark Kokich came from traditional advertising.
Given the significant rise in the industry's fortunes, Johnson asked, "What's different this time?"
"Certainly," McAndrews replied, "there is a more stable foundation in the industry now… The reality is that there are so many companies that are firmly footed" in the industry and profitable. Whereas, looking back, in 1999 marketers "recognized that people needed to go digital, but it wasn't strategic." Flash forward to 2007 and "companies are going into digital because it's good business." Companies like Time and Disney "recognize that digital is where their customers are going."
Turning the conversation to the future, Johnson asked, "Where do you think we're going in the next five years? Will we still be looking at the integration of digital and traditional?"
"All media will become digital," McAndrews replied. "You see the most significant medium of them all, television, becoming more digital… 60 percent of all households will have on-demand video in the next few years…. Digital will become multichannel. It will be much more the norm, and a key development will be in television."
With same-time viewing becoming less and less common, McAndrews said, aQuantive is working to repurpose its digital expertise into other media. For example, Atlas is working with Cable NSOs and television networks on a pilot program that inserts ads dynamically into on-demand video, and then measures the effectiveness of those ads, just like online.
Key to McAndrews' understanding of how media is evolving is his notion that "the website is replacing the thirty second spot as the central expression of a brand. That doesn't mean that television is going away, but the ability to interact deeply with a website for thirty seconds, three minutes, thirty minutes… that's where marketers are heading today."
