Ad Age Ad Lib

When Nicolas Bidon talks about his business, he talks about becoming an “outcome” media company. As part of WPP and GroupM, Xaxis is a billion-dollar business — arguably the world's largest global programmatic media and technology platform — boasting some 3000 clients across 47 markets. The evolution to an outcome-based focus, Bidon says, represents a shift away from fairly crude metrics like CPMs to more real, specific business goals—with an assist from emerging tech like artificial intelligence. We get into all of that, plus some weedy topics like arbitrage, transparency and FBI investigations.