Six Questions for Colin Kinsella

If you think media is the back office of the advertising business, you've been asleep since the late 80s. As CEO of Mindshare North America, Colin Kinsella knows it's now the center of gravity. He'll share his thoughts in an intimate discussion at the Seller Forum on Tuesday October 28th in New York.

1. Disruption is a key theme of the Seller Forum. How are you proactively disrupting the business of Mindshare?

By creating products that change the culture. We've created THE LOOP, which helps make us collaborative (with more constituents), and helps us make faster and smarter decisions for our clients. Through this data-infused system, we develop insights that are put into action every day. This system is changing our culture. It's a new way of working, thinking and delivering for clients.

2. Agencies like yours are evolving rapidly. What's one thing you value less in publisher relationships than you would have two years ago?

Off the shelf content solutions. We want to partner to build more specific, real time, programs for our clients that enhance their marketing efforts. So often we're served standard added value products that we don't necessarily want to shoehorn into an idea or program.

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3. Describing programmatic trading in 2010, we used phrases like "real time bidding," "land rush" and "open exchange." How would you describe it in 2014?

Real time, strategic media investment.

4. A media sales leader asks you for advice in building a strategy for growing business with Mindshare. What do you offer?

For the right partners, they are active members of the team.

5. What are the non-traditional places where we should seek the next generation of talent for our business?

This year we just launched an intern program called Data Bytes. All our interns came from engineering, math, and science disciplines to work in our Marketing Sciences group discovering data correlations and insights. I would encourage all our partners to find those excited by math and art.

6. Complete this sentence: "The media agency business is approaching a renaissance because...."

Marketing begins and ends in media. With change accelerating, point solutions will lose out to connected solutions. Only a media agency can connect the dots to drive smarter decision and better results. Our time has never been brighter.

There are just 9 seats left for the Seller Forum. If you are a qualified attendee -- top sales leadership in a company that sells advertising and media services to companies like Mindshare and its clients -- contact us today for your invitation. Don't miss the kinds of insights and conversations that can happen only at Seller Forum.