Marco Bertozzi, the former president of programmatic technology provider Vivaki, has been appointed Starcom MediaVest Group’s CEO of performance marketing.
Both are part of Publicis Groupe, and Bertozzi’s appointment to the newly created role will see him responsible for ‘uniting’ SMG’s global performance marketing strategies – social, search and programmatic – into one practice.
Bertozzi’s transfer follows a year-long restructuring of Vivaki, made with the aim of decentralising the company’s programmatic capability, making it available throughout Publicis Groupe.
This has seen the majority of its ad traders reassigned and some 120 employees sent out to Publicis Groupe agencies.
In this role, Bertozzi will be tasked with spotting capability gaps in the agency’s global offering where these can be implemented, describing his challenge to Digiday as akin to solving a “big jigsaw with pieces missing all over the place”.
Universal view of the customer
With the aim of improving the overall capability of the business and product, Bertozzi claimed there was opportunity with new data sets and technologies to create a performance offering centred around the “universal view of the customer”.
This approach will be based on a bedrock of attribution and data, said Bertozzi, that measures beyond the click to offline sales, with the former, and online sales, no longer reliable metrics.
“Where a customer wants to engage from calls to retail we have to pull that together and move away from last click, sweating each channel in isolation,” he added.
Bertozzi’s appointment is his latest in an expansive career under the Publicis Groupe banner, which includes roles at ZenithOptimedia, Zed Digital, and latest stint as helmsman of Vivaki.
His former post saw him work alongside senior global advertisers on programmatic strategy as the ad-buying format entered into a new stage of maturity. Programmatic now powers approximately $14 billion in global ad spend, according to data from Magna Global.