Advanced Advertising Summit: BrightLine’s Michael Bologna Urges Better Teamwork

Michael Bologna, chief accelerator at BrightLine, delivered the closing keynote at the Advanced Advertising Summit. Under the title “What’s Working Now, and a Look into the Future,” Bologna spoke about how ad agencies, media companies and marketing brands must work closer together to ensure better advertising results.

“When those three constituents work together, I do think advertisers are well served,” he said. “They’re not when one or more of those parties fall back.”

B+C senior content producer Jon Lafayette interviewed Bologna, who described BrightLine as “the standard for interactive advertising within connected television.”

Asked about Irwin Gotlieb’s assessment of the ad industry earlier in the day, which saw Gotlieb say , “Are these the best of times? Hell, no,” Bologna agreed with a lot of what his former boss shared, including the industry’s reluctance to work together on common issues.

“I do think every last one of us had plenty of time to prepare for where we are today,” he added. “We brought it upon ourselves when we chose not to act.”

The ad industry is “very good about pointing out what’s wrong, what’s broken, what needs to be fixed, what we don’t like,” he added. “We’re not so good at making hard decisions about what we need to fix those.”

The Advanced Advertising Summit is part of NYC TV Week , hosted by Broadcasting+Cable , Multichannel News and Next TV . Advanced Ads happens September 9, Next TV Summit takes place September 10, Hispanic TV Summit is September 11 and 40 Under 40 happens September 12. The first three events take place at etc.venues in midtown Manhattan, and 40 Under 40 is at 230 5th.

The discussion turned to streaming, and Bologna said there could, and should, be more consistency in terms of ad formats among those players. “Google, Netflix, Amazon, the user experience is fantastic,” he said. “But they all have different models when it comes to commercials, they all have different models when it comes to ad formats.”

“They’re not doing us a great service,” Bologna added.

Bologna added that the streamers are a bit behind the curve in terms of addressable formats in advertising. If Disney and NBC can agree to use a common format, he noted, the big streamers, be it Amazon or Netflix, can too.

As the keynote wrapped, he again urged agencies, media companies and advertising brands to work better with one other.

“Everybody can’t win all the time,” Bologna said. “There has to be a bit of give and take.”