Magna Global NA President Argyilan: Media Buying Models “Will Fall Apart in Two Years”

SAN FRANCISCO –  Hold on to your hats. The decades-old way advertising has been bought and sold could start to collapse in 24 months.

“A lot of media companies have been good money with the old model,” IPG Mediabrands’ Magna Global north America president Kristi Argyilan tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Our hypothesis is that that model starts to fall apart in another two years.”

Argyilan was speaking to Beet.TV about the consortium Magna Global formed last month with A+E Networks, AOL, Cablevision, Clear Channel Media and Entertainment and Tribune to help it toward an “automated future” in which half of media buying is automated by 2016.

“Our consortium is meant to be a private room where we can start to play around with these new ways of doing business without introducing a lot of risk to any of us as we start to experiment with things,” she says.

“We’re taking all of the manual labor that should be automated out of the system by finding connective technologies to bring all these legacy systems together.

“The intent is for all of our partners to bring inventory to the consortium so that we can start to play around with different ways of pricing and tracking performance against specific target audiences that are client-based audiences.”

Working with Adap.tv

When IPG Mediabrands’ Magna Global media unit announced a partnership with Adapt.tv last month, it was seen as a win for AOL’s video ad tech firm.

Now Manga Global’s  Argyilan says the deal will let her clients target video ads far more specifically than previously.

“From the get-go, they identified themselves as a technology company,” she says in our video interview. “They brought development time to the relationship so that we were able to think about how we could use them as a platform on a broader basis than simply procuring video inventory.

“We’ve incorporated our discrete data stack in to their platform so that we can now star to look at different types of media inventory with our data applied so that we’re buying on a more sophisticated metric.”

We interviewed her in the Magna Global offices in San Francisco offices earlier this week.

In an unrelated development, the acquisition of Adap.tv by AOL was finalized today.