NDA’s podcast series, Masters of Media talks to heads of media at brands to understand how advertisers are able to keep pace with the frenetic speed of development of media and its fragmentation across channels. In this episode we meet Peter Rowe, Head of Media at NatWest Group.

On moving from procurement to marketing: In procurement, I looked at inputs, such as how many agencies you need, and at outputs but also outcomes And procurement teams have output targets where marketing has outcomes, so they're not always aligned. Outcomes are what got me excited, hence the move into media."

On media fragmentation. "You can’t do it on your own, you need brilliant people around you. Communication is critical here to mange the complexity You need to operate a very simple model in a complex situation.

Essentially you need to make sure we are backing the things we know work well, that we can measure it all and optimise it At that point was know we’re mature enough to add to that mix."

On telling a consistent brand story; "The thing that’s challenging about consistency is scale and pace. In media we need to make sure that when the customer sees something from us that it’s relevant to them on any channel."

Agency relationships: A one team culture if what work, when everyone’s working to the same outcomes. Relationships used to be transactional and binary but now we need a multiple of expertise from multiple sources. The relationship is now more flexible.

On search marketing: "Search is not a media channel but a behaviour and it tells you that the way people’s behaviour changes as they go from platform to platform."

n the latest in our NDA Meets podcast, Editor Justin Pearse sits down with James Hill, Chief Commercial Officer, Exte.

With an industry career spanning twenty years, James is two months into the new job, with responsibility of driving growth in new markets as the Spanish-born adtech company embarks on ambitious global expansion.

The conversation covers subjects including: how Exte is planning to solve the disconnect between media, technology and creativity in digital advertising; the role of AI-enhanced contextual targeting; the fragmentation of CTV advertising and its solution; innovation in ad formats; and the challenges and opportunities of cookieless advertising.

"With contextual 2.0, if you can provide macro targeting at scale - we read 4 million URLs every day - we can understand the exact sentiment of that content, build a sophisticated targeting model and then overlay that with attention-grabbing formats and guaranteed KPIs, you have a very compelling proposition for a world post cookie."

In the latest NDA Meets podcast, NDA Editor Justin Pearse sat down in Cannes with David Winstone, Trading Director UK, Channel Factory to discuss the future of the digital advertising industry.

Topics covered included contextual alignment and how Channel Factory is helping brands align with the right content and using context as a proxy for performance.

“Context is one of the main strategies in preparing for a post-cookie world,” he says. We’re looking at signals like geo and IDs and working with partners like Comscore which provides us with predictive audiences.

What surprises clients most is the granularity we can go into with context to let you really hone in on the audience you are after.”

Other areas of discussion included how to deal with issues of mis-attribution in CTV advertising, how AI is helping to close the loop between ad delivery, context and creative, sustainability in digital media, attention and more.

“Attention is a leveller as it’s the closest we’ve been able to get to a real-world measure of if people actually are watching ads, and it’s a much better predictor of brand uplift. We’re now starting to trade campaigns based on attention sessions.”