A new year has come: three top media agencies executives explain where will they be focusing their initiatives in 2017 and where they see the biggest opportunities.
Laura Molen, EVP Lifestyle and Hispanic Advertising Sales Group, NBCUniversal declares:
“We want to continue to educate the marketplace on the value of the entire NBCUniversal portfolio, particularly Telemundo where we are seeing significant momentum. 
We are investing in programming and live events like the World Cup so we can continue this momentum and growth. We plan to find opportunity in reinforcing to marketers that we are the place for their messages and ad dollars to engage consumers.
We’re seeing an emphasis across our company in investment in content, data and distribution and this is going to be key as we continue to emphasise our leadership position.
How do our investments in technology and people for next year differ from those you made, say, 5 years ago is about taking the solid stream of premium content that our viewers crave, helping advertisers create innovative, targeted marketing campaigns and distributing this content in authentic ways that make sense across platforms. We are continuing to invest in the data we can offer marketers to help them get an understanding of our audiences, and how to be the most effective with their ad spend. Our content is on the pulse of pop culture and the engagement we are seeing from our audiences not only for the programming but for the advertisers associated with it, is surpassing our competition. We want to continue to build out the systems that quantify this for our brand partners. For our sales teams, it’s about helping them become experts on our robust infrastructure here at NBCUniversal.
In 2017 I’d like to see my brand marketing partners to “lean in” more and experiment with us in ways that they haven’t previously. We have some of the best teams in the business who are finding unique, authentic ways to partner our advertisers with our content. I’d love to see more companies engage with us from the beginning of a partnership and work with our teams to come up with more innovative campaigns.”
Check also NBCU and Vox Media Announcing Cross-Platform Advertising Tools.
Jeffery Liberman, COO of Entravision refers the following plans and expectations for 2017: 
“In 2017, we plan on focusing our initiatives on mobile apps, integrated content leveraging Entravision’s radio talent with a vast audience reach and relevance, and programmatic elements with enhanced data enrichment.
We already have a deep roster of radio talent, so for mobile apps and integrated content, we want to execute as efficiently as possible with minimal investment. In 2016, we also made investments in programming so we hope to realise these benefits next year in 2017.
The investments in technology and people for next year differ significantly than the ones we made five years ago. Mobile apps were not as strong, our radio talent had yet to reach its full potential, and programmatic was not a solution back then. We don’t make investments in technology for the sake of technology. We make technology and solutions investments to provide an integrated omnichannel strategy for our clients.”
For 2017, we would like to increase the opportunities to work with our partners on integrated digital content campaigns”.
To the same questions about top media agencies’ priorities for 2017, these were the answers of Rafael Ubina, CEO, Batanga Media.
“We see the biggest opportunities for 2017 in Video. In 2016 we have greatly expanded our video production capabilities in the US and abroad and this has resulted in a rapid growth and massive scale in terms of video views and reach, now generating in excess of 700 million monthly video views across social platforms. We’ve been creating highly engaging video content for partners this year, and it only makes sense to expand our in-house video production capacity. In 2017, we’re set to deliver billions of branded video views on Vix’s many social platforms.
We have developed a world-class video and creative team to sharpen our organisational know-how in screen production. Overall, our product direction will be more video-focused for both editorial and branded content creation. We’re also investing in the latest video production technology, and building new and bigger studios. Part of our DNA is to be a data-driven publisher, keeping true to our roots, in 2017 we’ll intensify investments in data-science to continue to support the growth of our video creation and distribution efforts.
While producing content for mobile and social consumption continues to be important—and we have been advocating for those early on—the laser focus on video and branded content is a new development compared to five years ago. These came as a response to more efficient video technology paired with savvier users who increasingly reject ads that interrupt their experience.
In order to talk to every segment, in a way that is personal and resonates with them and their own realities, we must recognise that language preferences may shift and acculturation progress, but the cultural distinctions between market segments, and what is important to those markets, are as great as ever”.
