Jim Riesenbach

CMOs demand guaranteed delivery, lowest CPMs, strategic flexibility, and outcome-based pricing. Physics says you can't have all four simultaneously. Principal media delivers three of them. The question is which three matter most. Forrester's new principal media report from the inimitable Jay Pattisall is very much worth a read, and it's going to trigger the predictable debate. Critics will argue agencies are creating conflicts. Evangelists will tout cost savings. Both will miss the strategic reality: CMOs facing compression don't have the luxury of perfect markets. I've watched boards push CMOs for guaranteed outcomes while slashing budgets. In that environment, academic arguments about strategic flexibility mean nothing. The anti-principal media argument assumes unlimited client patience, perfect information, and rational markets. Reality looks different. Reality is: your board wants cost certainty so they can model P&L without media volatility. Reality is: your CFO wants guaranteed delivery so you're not scrambling for Super Bowl inventory in scatter markets. Reality is: your CEO wants outcome-based pricing that ties media spend to business results. Principal media trades strategic flexibility for the three things boards actually care about: cost certainty, delivery guarantee, and outcome alignment. The Forrester report shows 80% of marketers are interested in principal media advantages. That's not because CMOs are naive about conflicts of interest. It's because they're making rational trade-offs under real constraints. The criticism of principal media comes from people who've never faced the impossible triangle. They can afford to optimize for strategic flexibility because they're not accountable for the P&L impact when media costs spike or inventory disappears. Yes, principal media requires transparency. Yes, it needs contractual controls and performance accountability. Yes, clients should cap how much spend flows through principal arrangements. But the mechanism itself? It's agencies finally building inventory positions that enable the outcome-based pricing we've demanded for years. I'm a big supporter as, for two decades, I've watched CMOs demand that agencies move from billing hours to pricing on outcomes. "Put skin in the game," they said. "Share the risk." Now agencies are doing exactly that with principal media, and the industry is calling it a conflict of interest. We can't have it both ways. Forrester predicts principal media will grow to one-third of billings by 2026. Read their report, then decide which three variables matter most for your business. https://lnkd.in/eKHg5qmk #PrincipalMedia #MediaBuying #CMO #MarketingLeadership #MarketingStrategy

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A new report from Hightouch found that even though marketers most often cite tools as their top pain point, 75% of the time the reason is actually disconnected data. https://ow.ly/xMiY50XxTfG

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KREAM Corporation's refurbished tech transactions surged 63% in Q1 2025 compared to Q4 2024, with the monthly Net Merchandise Value doubling. Additional product categories maintain a 90% monthly inventory depletion rate. #CircularEconomy Link: https://lnkd.in/gSycCNas

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Graybar, like many others, is investing in / piloting AI tools to improve efficiencies, accuracy, reduce repetitive manual tasks, gain greater insights and enable more profitable scaleability. In other words, and no disrespect to Graybar, but many are beginning a comparable journey. And this is a very good, and informative, article, that if you work for Graybar, sell to Graybar, or compete with Graybar, you should read. But David Meyer made a very interesting quote - “AI should free up sales and service teams to build relationships and develop new business, versus spending hours manually looking for information and responding to a customer request.” He is 100% right. My question though is "when all (or many) electrical distributors that are positioning for the future invest comparably, how will distributors invest differently into their people to be their differentiators?" Since the base line will be AI, and the differentiator is salespeople (so, knowledge, compassion, empathy, extra-effort, personal relationship, etc.), will companies train differently? Value people differently? Manage differently? And, if so, why not do now? And, if they are going to be valued more, the natural next question is ... Thoughts?

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Clients increasingly want immediate answers, not just access to expensive partners. By bottling expertise into self-service portals, firms can meet this demand without adding headcount. https://lnkd.in/eand9qi2 #B2B #Marketing #Strategy

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$ONAR ONAR Labs' first initiative is Cortex, an AI-powered marketing intelligence platform that has been powering the ONAR network and serving as the engine for its agencies to optimize and deliver for clients. #WednesdayWisdom @BuiltwithOnar @SCStocks https://www.onar.com/labs

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With principle-based buying returning to the forefront, Brian Chap's recipe for agency accountability takes me back to Jon Mandel's explosive rebate disclosures back in March 2015. Jon's kimono-opening moment was undoubtedly the catalyst that woke us all up to the billions leaking from media budgets by way of non-transparent kickbacks and fees. The can of worms has yet to be closed. That's why principle-based buying doesn't sit well with me. It feels like we're rewinding the tape after making so much progress over the last decade. BUT ... if you're a client-side media buyer that chooses to engage with a principle-based agency, there are three of Brian's "BENCH" framework activities that I think should be prioritized to the top. These three are relatively simple to do and can dramatically increase transparency and accountability. 1 - Secure platform access to your ad server, your DSP and the major SSPs through whom you are buying. Ensure you know how to compare media costs at each step in the supply-chain. 2 - Conduct audits. Whether as Brian recommends or simply by contacting a handful of publishers where you buy media, you should be able to reconcile your cost input to your media value output. And while you're at it, you'll be strengthening your direct publisher relationships, which has many longer-term benefits both in terms of media cost and priority. 3 - Most definitely hold your agency accountable. This applies also to every adtech vendor in your media supply-chain. I am not a fan of principle-based media buying. But if you're going to try it out, you need to remember that this is far from a set-it-and-forget-it approach to advertising. https://lnkd.in/eDw-Z3w8

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Here's a great example of AI-first adtech creating real business value for media companies. Aperiam portco Gray Swan is partnering with Operative to bring AI-powered observability to media companies managing converged linear, streaming, and digital advertising operations. GraySwan's agentic AI layer continuously monitors performance signals across supply, demand, pricing, and delivery. It automatically surfaces anomalies, inventory and pricing optimizations, and incremental revenue opportunities in real time. No more hours spent pulling reports or missing critical signals. As Zeev Neumeier, GraySwan's Founder and CEO, put it: media is now a data-driven business, and the power comes from turning that data into action. Proud to support the team GraySwan as they bring this vision to the world's leading media brands.

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The CDP consolidation wave is real. "2025 will see massive consolidation of the CDP market as M&A fully opens up" CDP Institute – but here's what the headlines miss. SPEED TO VALUE I've watched too many "composable" implementations take 18 months to deliver what a focused platform achieves in 6 weeks. The market is rewarding solutions that connect data to revenue – fast. Technical architecture is table stakes. What actually drives results? Speed to activation. Quality of identity resolution. Measurable business outcomes. The winners won't be the most technically elegant. They'll be the ones that help marketers hit their numbers while their competitors are still configuring APIs. What's driving your CDP strategy – technical flexibility or business results? #CustomerDataPlatform #MarTech #DataStrategy #MarketingTechnology

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Clean and consistent data across the enterprise is widely considered to be one of the most important building blocks for creating the foundation for #GenAI. Great perspective from Graybar’s #CFO David Meyer on how data clean-up and standardisation across core systems has been a critical success factor in Graybar’s business transformation through AI. https://delo.tt/6008AB8Pk

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Large enterprise CMOs are facing a critical challenge: Drive AI transformation while doing right by the teams that built your organization. The C-suite wants AI transformation yesterday. Their teams—many with decades of institutional knowledge—are skeptical, exhausted, or both. Here's what I keep hearing: "I know we need to move fast. But I can't just blow up my team in the process." These leaders aren't stuck because they don't understand AI. They're stuck because they understand people. They need a plan for that first and foremost when the org gets to a certain size. They know that legacy expertise is still valuable and long-tenured employees deserve honesty about what's coming, not false promises. Transformation that breaks trust isn't really transformation—it's just chaos with better tech. This is the real leadership challenge of AI transformation - navigating the human complexity of change in organizations where relationships, tenure, and culture run deep.

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We're continuing to increase Ora's COGs in order to prioritize the most recent and relevant data to facilitate hyper-personalized emails. Ora combines data from numerous third party vendors, including the most recent news and events, with your first-party CRM data and Lavender 💜🔮 www.ora.im's email intelligence derived from analyzing billions of sales emails. The result? Dynamic emails and sequences that are specifically crafted for the individual, not just the company or the persona. No templates, no fluff, but all based on best practices from top performers. We closed self-service signups to focus on onboarding new users, but will reopen the waitlist soon. www.ora.im

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American consumers are now selecting the ad-supported plan of a premium streaming service almost by default in order to maintain a blend of apps that appeal to their entertainment wishes, according to new research from Parks Associates. https://lnkd.in/gqSmhaiz

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40% of Agentic AI initiatives are set to fail. Read from Kelly O'Hara on how to be at the right side- building data foundation for success. #merkle

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Emry Downinghall of Unwind Media weighs in on the value of supply chain transparency and the dangers of duplication and obfuscation. “OpenAds is worth testing because it aims to challenge a longstanding structural issue in programmatic: opaque auctions, hidden fees and an oversupply of low-quality inventory. Even if you’re a publisher running a clean stack, your partners might not be. That lack of verification hurts everyone.”

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