This Viacom Team Is On the Front Lines of TV’s Ad Future
Aug 16, 2019
The product, operations, and sales executives behind Viacom Vantage.
The members of Viacom's Vantage team are at the forefront of the reinvention of the television business—where data plus new forms of media have created entirely new opportunities for marketers to reach consumers.
They are responsible for building, selling, and delivering the Vantage product as an essential part of Viacom’s larger Advanced Marketing Solutions (AMS) division. It's a fast-growing segment of the overall ad sales organization that drove the domestic ad sales revenue last quarter with an 84% increase in revenue YOY and is expected to nearly double in fiscal 19, which would make it nearly 20% of total domestic ad sales revenue.
Viacom was one of the first television publishers to sell ads based on advanced data when the Vantage platform launched in 2015. The client-focused team has a first-mover advantage as a leader in a space that’s expected to grow to $3.3 billion by 2020—a 343% increase from 2016.
The team is comprised of professionals with a diverse set of skills—from data junkies to product experts, many of whom come from outside of the television industry—who each have a slightly different perspective on what drives them in their day-to-day work.
Hover your mouse across the image to learn more about some of the members of the Vantage team. This experience is best viewed on desktop.
From left - Greg Morra, Lauren Gordon, Sarah Kerr, Michele Stone, Joseph Maracich, Dave Krenn, Sean Wagner, John Quinn, Richard Bertodatti, Nadya Mason, Bryson Gordon, Gabe Bevilacqua
From left – Susie Barth, Nathaniel Hochman, Melinda Lombard, Julian Zilberbrand, Meng Li, Amarachi Miller, Jack Callahan, and Scott Morin
“This team, in particular, is still very new, especially when you're comparing it against how TV's been for the past 40 years,” says Nadya Mason, sales service executive for Vantage.
“There's still a lot to learn and a lot of processes that are ever-changing, and we sort of figure out what's best as our business continues to grow and we get more people on board.”
Vantage uses predictive analytics to pinpoint the specific and ideal consumers that advertisers want to reach for highly-targeted campaigns that can run on linear, addressable, and digital.
For years, digital marketers successfully used consumer data to enhance their media buys, while traditional TV networks were slow to engage with the new technologies. Now, many realize big data, advanced targeting, outcome optimization and addressable are the future of TV advertising.
Vantage Senior Director Michele Stone says learning about the capabilities of the Vantage product, while working at an agency, was what got her interested in the team. “It’s dynamic at Viacom, with the people you want to be around,” she says. “So, it felt like the right environment for me.”
Viacom’s recent acquisition of ad-supported free streaming service Pluto TV opens up more opportunities to use Vantage to drive premium video addressable impressions among cord-cutters, cord-nevers, and the coveted younger generation of viewers.
As VP of Viacom Vantage Solutions Richard Bertodatti says, “The trajectory and the speed with which Viacom is turning itself into a multi-media, client-first, analytics-driven, cross-platform, international media conglomerate is a complete pivot from what people thought Viacom was, and where Viacom is going."
