Two broadcast executives are now thinking outside the TV box.
Following Clear Channel Outdoor Holding’s recently completed $6.2 billion acquisition by Mubadala Capital, the company is adding two veteran TV executives in key C-suite positions.
Wade Davis, current vice chair of Univision and the company’s former CEO, is joining as CEO and executive chairman of the board, and John Halley, Paramount’s former ads leader, is joining as chief commercial officer. As the deal closes, the current CEO, Scott Wells, is exiting the company.
Davis spearheaded the acquisition deal with Mubadala Capital, which takes Clear Channel, one of the largest out-of-home companies with more than 70,000 outdoor and airport displays, private. The move will allow the company to be agile without the constraints of quarterly benchmarks, as Davis and Halley utilize their TV expertise to revamp and modernize out-of-home, looking to make it easier to buy and moving beyond exposures to outcomes.
“There are two things that really excite me. The first is the strength of the medium, and the second one is really around the opportunity to help it realize its potential,” Halley said on making the jump from TV to out-of-home.
Halley, who exited as Paramount ads leader earlier this year, previously worked with Davis when the executive was CFO of Viacom prior to the CBS merger. In his new role, Halley will work with Clear Channel leadership, including Bob McCuin, evp and chief revenue officer; Erika Goldberg, evp and chief of business operations and president of markets; and Dan Levi, evp and chief marketing officer, to focus on key areas such as media revenue, product, marketing, and measurement.
“We’re investing in a tech roadmap to make the business operate better, internally and externally,” Halley said. “There are a lot of interesting developments, particularly in the ways of programmatic and data, which will make the digital footprint look a lot more like things that people have seen before and are familiar with.”
Halley noted that out-of-home is already a proven addition to a marketing mix and, unlike TV’s current struggles with fragmented audiences, it has guaranteed exposures and credibility. The exec noted that Clear Channel’s massive footprint already makes other investments work harder across channels such as social and digital, and there’s opportunity to prove that value.
“Out-of-home, in its current state, influences consumer behavior. What’s changing is our ability to prove it, to optimize it, and to connect it to outcomes,” Halley said.
According to Halley, out-of-home can be challenging to buy and is “effectively unmeasured,” but advances in currency, measurement, standardization, and digitization can transform the medium, making it a modern, data-driven channel.
“This notion of making out-of-home more intelligent and easier to buy is a separate but related thing: better audience data, more sophisticated planning tools, greater digital inventory, programmatic capabilities—all those things allow advertisers to deploy out of home with more precision and flexibility,” Halley said.
As former president of Paramount Advertising and former chairman of OpenAP, an advanced activation platform for the convergent video marketplace enabling new currencies, Halley has a long history navigating the world of advertising measurement. The executive noted that a major goal will be connecting exposures to outcomes.
“We’re building the measurement structure to understand not just how many people saw an ad, but how that exposure contributes to things like store visits and customer acquisition, and ultimately ROI,” Halley said. “I think, importantly, that involves connecting out-of-home to the same marketing mix models and measurement frameworks that advertisers use to evaluate their other media investments.”
Halley said, though there are all sizes of players in the out-of-home marketplace, none have a stranglehold nationally, and he and Davis will look to create a better unified platform where advertisers can focus on the audiences they want to reach and buy the combination of assets that help them do that.
“These things don’t happen tomorrow. They’re going to require investment. But the opportunity is making this thing look and work within an omnichannel media strategy, and we have a very good idea of what that requires, given our histories in television,” Halley said.
