For my 2025 kickoff of Insider Interviews marketing luminaries Lou Paskalis and David Sable joined me for one of the most candid conversations on the media and ad world for an incredibly candid conversation on the media and ad world that cuts through what David famously coined as "digibabble" years ago.
We moved from their personal passions (don't get David started on The Doors!) to how advertising evolved in the tech era... to its future, jam packed with opinions based on their decades of award-winning experience.
(Lou, who previously ran global marketing at a couple of small brands you may have heard of, like Bank of America, American Express, and where I first met him, E.J. Gallo, is now the strategic mind behind news assessor Ad Fontes Media, The street cred of David - a top voice on LinkedIn, thanks in part to his terrific blog, "Imagine," stems from being former global CEO/Chairman of Y&R (now VMLY&R) and board member for a ton of big companies like American Eagle and Ethan Allen. He is now Vice-Chairman at the forward-thinking mid-size holdco, Stagwell, where Lou is also an advisor, I discovered!)
What informs a lot of the conversation is David's explanation of how Stagwell flipped the traditional agency model on its head: Instead of buying up creative agencies, founder Mark Penn premise to build around tech."... We began by buying tech, aggregating tech and creating a tech platform. Then we went out and wrote in the creative pieces of business." But as David emphasized,
"Tech leads the way for everything. But our model, which is the model that's working the best, is that tech is an enabler: Our job is to tell stories and to tell them well."
Stories - and art itself, even using the most sophisticated tech and AI - is only a result of the information fed to it. David shares a beautiful analogy about what a Monet envisioned using different brushstrokes on, say, Water Lillies. We have to inform our models to consider "impressionism," just as we have to provide data for use.
He says,
"Data is a picture of what happened before. That's it. Now, I can interpret it, I can use it, I can I can create algorithms or models, but at the end of the day, data is a picture of what was. It can predict, and AI is going to be better at that, but that's all it is. So it's only as good as the data that it has."
And don't get him started on OMNICHANNEL as a buzzword, either. The through line of this episode is to appeal to and follow the consumer. Not jam tech terms or "digibabble" down their throats. Unsurprisingly, Lou agrees, comparing ineffective presentations to Charlie Brown hearing his teacher: "Wah wah. Wah wah. Digital." His point when pitching the CFO could also apply to the consumer:
"If you don't contextualize everything into the growth agenda, you might as well not go to the meetings. They don't care what we do, they care how what we do achieves growth."
Be human, even in an AI world. That applies to retail, to advertising and, as we learn, the news media.
The Future of News
Perhaps most compelling was our discussion about the critical importance of news. Insider Interviews followers know this is a clarion call for Lou, which he focused on in his first appearance here last year. Now, backed by Stagwell's staggering study of 50,000 people, Lou shared a startling insight: "The ROI, or return on advertising -- ROAS, on news is higher than any other content vertical you can buy." Marketers are missing out on if they are "news-averse," based on some misguided perceptions about "brand suitability."
"11% are self-identified as news junkies who only read or watch the news when they're consuming media. That's 11% more business for any marketer in America in 2025 who will achieve the growth agenda and win by reaching these very influential people."
(To learn more, all Insider Interviews fans who are publishers are invited to apply to attend Stagwell's Future of News next meeting at 1WTC on January 2...