‘Let the data do the work’: 6 zinger quotes from Miami’s Possible

The advertising world brought its energy to Miami this week for the third annual Possible conference, with many wondering: Is this becoming the U.S. version of Cannes Lions?

Conversations centered on Google, tariffs, upfronts, AI and measurement — on panels and in side conversations alike.

Big names like Martha Stewart and Katie Couric and ad tech celebrities like Linda Yaccarino, Michael Kassan and Gary Vaynerchuk (aka Gary Vee) took the stage, offering their takes on where the industry is headed.

Here are the standout quotes from six marketing leaders shaping that future.

1. Dan Larkman, CEO and founder, Keynes Digital

“CPM as a metric for success in CTV is a flawed metric and it’s also a dangerous metric. The reason it’s scary is [you question] ‘what is TV?’ And that’s where it’s changed. We don’t consider YouTube as CTV. We consider TV as TV content. We don’t consider UGC [user-generated content] or short clips as connected TV. There’s definitely a gray area. You get cheaper inventory appearing that [looks like] it’s the same quality, but it’s not.”

2. Jeff Alderman, SVP of sales and marketing, AdMedia

“I think [the Google search antitrust ruling] will get appealed for about five years. As far as the outcomes that are forced upon the company, what we don’t want is for one thing to move to another company and that company has power which controls a monopoly just by passing it over. But we’ll see. Again, competition is healthy.”

3. Tammy Henault, CMO, NBA

“We ended the regular season down 2% [in viewership] in the climate where television was down 8%. We just kicked off the postseason with our highest viewership in 25 years. We’re feeling pretty good about where we are right now.

4. Brian Quinn, president and GM, North America, AppsFlyer

“Where we see real productivity gains in [generative AI] creative is on the analytical side, it’s not on the generation side. We’re seeing immediately with a predictive algorithm you can understand what should be in your video ad to drive a conversion, and that drives massive economic value. That’s way ahead of the generation of creative. The hype is on one side, but the actual business value is on the other.”

5. Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO, VaynerMedia

“If we do not prove value [as agencies] we will not exist. There’s a reason s--t’s going in-house. It’s because we f---ing suck.

“For 70 years, we have been guessing in boardrooms — through our egos and our politics — on what the campaign or commercial should be. And then [we would] spend an ungodly amount of money disguising that it was probably a piece of s--t. And now we can post at scale with content that is relevant. [We can] see that human beings, not us in the industry, care about [content] and have the ability to amplify it or campaign on top of it.”

6. Joel Cox, co-founder and EVP of innovation and strategy, Strategus

“There’s so much attention on the [streaming] inventory itself, whether it be Netflix or Max. But I think if you’re going to do this thing right, you have to look at the inventory almost as a commodity. Deterministically retargeting audiences across the rest of their devices and measuring the outcome of those campaigns is more important than the inventory. Your best opportunity for differentiation is the targeting and the measurement. Let the data do the work for you.”