But old needs a reboot.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wavemaker global chief client officer Aaron Smith redefines the “Ps” for a new era.

“The old ways of building relevance no longer work,” he says. “To really drive relevance in today’s world, brands need to think differently about what I would say what are historically the classic four P’s of marketing….”

1. Purpose: “For me, relevance today is about creating a really strong brand purpose. What do you stand for as a brand?”
2. Pride: “How you promote your message with integrity and honesty.”
3. Partners: “If you look at any of the successful brands today, they can’t do it alone … they need to bring in external thinking.”
4. Protection: “Increasing amounts of data … can be both a blessing and a curse. Brands need to make sure that they’re really using that data in the right way and protecting consumers’ best interests.”
5. Personalisation: “As we collect that data, we need to make sure that we’re using it in ways that are helping to drive more meaning and relevance to the consumers’ lives without crossing that line of being creepy or invasive.”

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wavemaker global head of strategy Stuart Sullivan-Martin says proving value is getting harder, not easier, as two imperatives of marketers come together in a clash.

“Accountability, understanding of what’s working, what’s not working … that sounds easy, right?,” he says. “But of course it’s not. It’s almost never been harder because there are so many layers of metrics and some of them don’t tell the truth, and you have to find the truth through the story in terms of what properly delivers to the brand in the short, medium and the long term.”

The time factor is a critical one, and now more than ever, because Sullivan-Martin says agencies are facing two competing demands.

“A lot of my clients at the moment are facing down short-term quarterly pressures in their business – and all businesses around the world, let’s face it – at the moment, to understand the true value of marketing,” he says.

The problem? That quest to understand value is a short-term one because those same pressures are short-term – but, Sullivan-Martin says, the value of marketing can often only be seen over the long term.

“There’s a tension point there which is something we’re having to work with our clients or trying to help resolve at the moment,” he adds.

But Wavemaker, which started up in September, is responding to the talk of agency disintermediation with a clear plan.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, its global chief client officer Aaron Smith says he sees his organisation’s role as “future-maker”, and sets out what different qualities agencies like his must bring to the table in 2018 and beyond:

• Proactivity
• Orchestrating talent
• Great storytelling

“We have to evolve to be much more proactive consultants to our clients,” Smith says. “Rather than responding to briefs and reacting to questions that our clients have, we have to go to clients with strong recommendations and points of view around how they can build the strategy for the future and what’s that roadmap look like, as opposed to waiting for them to ask us questions.

Last year, Wavemaker parent GroupM launched [m]Platform, a “suite” that comprises data analytics, audience insights, data scientists, technologists from across other GroupM divisions, and in to it wrapped Xaxis, its programmatic and data-driven ad unit.

How did we become #FutureMakers? Our CMO, Nathalie Haxby [@NatHaxby] speaks to @Communicatemag about the ins and outs of merging two 'entrepreneurial' companies and the lessons along the way! https://t.co/rgS2vezZ9W pic.twitter.com/PFDtnE6PnS

— Wavemaker Global (@WavemakerGlobal) May 15, 2018

That’s one part of a strategy Smith says is all about enabling brands to build the future.

But what does it mean to be a “future-maker”?

“It’s about bringing bold transformative ideas to clients, that can help their brands break through the clutter,” Smith adds.

“It entails really coming up with creative, innovative, transformative ideas and packaging those ideas up into compelling stories that our clients can buy into. Ultimately, we then translate into different consumer communications and experiences.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, global CEO Tim Castree offers three pillars…

Marriage of media content and technology: “Media is not just about the distribution of paid messages anymore. It’s also about how dynamic content, and one-to-one content, and technology, data and platforms, and the new forms of distribution, are really coming together to create a different experience for consumers and different outcomes for advertisers.”

Simplify the noise: “There’s a lot of noise in the world of media at the moment, and we were really looking for ways to simplify. How can we take something which just feels endlessly filled with buzzwords, baloney and BS, and just start to really simplify what media is for our clients, and how we help them to create a change in their business?”

An obsession with purchase journeys: Castree’s team focused on consumers’ purchase journey to clients’ products. By understanding that journey holistically, he says, agencies can help brands make the right interventions.

Last year, Wavemaker parent GroupM launched [m]Platform, a “suite” that comprises data analytics, audience insights, data scientists, technologists from across other GroupM divisions, and in to it wrapped Xaxis, its programmatic and data-driven ad unit.

Castree says [m]Platform is a “big bet on audience-based targeting”, with data for 1.4 billion people.

But, by year’s end, he says, Wavemaker will have added a million purchase journeys to the system, via sibling Kantar’s Lightspeed product.

Castree is also jury president of the Media Lions for the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

In ad-tech, many software vendors are risking ending up in the last category, as a dizzying array of function-specific tools risks confusing buyers.

That is according to one agency boss communicating how technological complexity is actually working against buyers and their vendors.

Oleg Korenfeld, chief platforms officer at Wavemaker, was speaking in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Often enough this technology actually is serving the opposite of what it was supposed to be,” he says.

“Where it’s supposed to deliver in this kind of efficient way to activate the audience to cut media waste, we’re getting this fragmentation and fragmentation is doing the complete opposite of that.”

Korenfeld’s Wavemaker was formed from the merger of Group M’s MEC and Maxus.

In 2018, the ad industry is looking back on at least 10 years of explosive growth, during which new tools and data sets aligned to give marketers unprecedented new targeting capabilities.

But, in that explosion, the industry is now wrestling with complexity. The VC rush to ad-tech propelled a thousand flowers to bloom. Now buyers are grappling with which way to turn.

The display LUMAscape explained by @AdOpsInsider http://t.co/MtEzCcOmCV #digitalmarketing #adtech pic.twitter.com/3aoAOERKZS

— Remi Boudard (@rboudard) June 19, 2015

It is an irony, perhaps, that – as the industry continues suffering from fraud, transparency and brand safety problems – yet more new tech platforms are launching, playing whack-a-mole.

Korenfeld hopes for a contraction.

“As an industry, we’re over-engineered,” he says. “I think a lot of technology companies been developed to address very specific niche issues.”

“In order to simplify the stack, in order to understand what are the critical components of that stack, you need this kind of platform’s approach of very specific skillset.”

Unless that happens, Korenfeld fears buyers will simply give up on the whole ad-tech stack.

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

His first-time judging gig comes after the Cannes Lions reached a tipping point in 2017 as some agencies pushed back on the cost and scale of the venerable event. “It’s going to be a little bit more subdued this year,” Castree, the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Nonetheless, he’s “excited to dig into the work.” With pre-judging efforts already under way, “I’m up to my eyeballs in looking at work at the moment.”

Castree believes that there’s a “simple mission” to Cannes: celebrating the context of creativity from both a macro—the “zeitgeist” of what’s happening around the world—and micro scale. About the former, he points to all the “excitement and change going on in the world,” along with disruption and cause-related movements.

“There’s a lot of places and spaces for brands to get involved in the conversation in the larger context of all the excitement and change going on in the world,” Castree says. “Great brands love to be part of bigger conversations.”

As a judge of award entries, he’s interested in the contextual aspects of media and “how brands take advantage of what is going on in our times and to be part of those conversations in ways that are interesting and engaging.”

On the micro side of things, Castree talks about addressability, data and targeting and “the context of one to one.” Combining the macro with the micro provides “great opportunities for brands to show how they marry creativity and context” to drive business outcomes.

He brings a particular view to his judging duties when it comes to entries that might stretch the strict definition of a Cannes media entry, noting that “media entries come from everywhere.”

So he will be on the lookout for entries that “get stacked with a lot of things that aren’t always about media. I’ve seen a little bit of that already, to be honest. Ideas matter, but there’s a lot of other places at Cannes for ideas to get recognized and rewarded.”

He feels that this year’s event will be more subdued than last year because “agencies have pulled back a little bit. Without Publicis there it’s going to make a difference,” he says in reference to the holding company’s voluntary absence from Cannes 2018.

In any case, he thinks it’s “appropriate to reset a little bit and refocus on the central themes of the power of creativity to move business and to move people.” Distractions at previous Cannes festivals have included celebrities, luxury and scenery, “which are fun and wonderful but that really can distract from the central focus and message of what Cannes is all about.”

For Wavemaker, Cannes is about the “density of intellect, the density of talent, the density of great thought leaders, thinkers. For us that’s about media, content and technology and how the marriage of those three things are really creating the future of media.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview series of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions.   The series is presented by FreeWheel, a Comcast company.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  

Wavemaker uses a two-step process that begins with identifying “the gaps, barriers, challenges, opportunities” associated with the purchase journey, the agency’s Global CEO says in this interview with Beet.TV. “The second question within that is what are the audiences that we can most tap to unlock growth in the context of that purchase journey opportunity.”

“The connection between our macro purchase journey research and insight tools and our programmatic audience platforms is really how we connect the world of purchasing journey planning into the audience-driven activation models that exist for us today.”

The “connective tissue” is largely [m]Platform, Group M’s means of unifying WPP Group agencies’ access to data and technology. “We do all of our purchase journey research on top of mPlatform, connected through a Kantar product called LIVE Panel. That enables us to seamless connect what we see in the macro trends around purchase journeys to the audiences that we want to trade on programmatically once we understand them in that purchase journey context.”

When it was introduced two years ago, LIVE Panel provided access to a global panel of more than 5.5 million consumers in 30 markets. Components included such Kantar offerings as Lightspeed, Kantar Worldpanel, Kantar Shopcom, Millward Brown BrandZ, TGI and TNS Connected Life.

Even with the advances of programmatic technology, advertising media will continue to be a mixed trading model for a long time to come, according to Castree.

“There’s a lot of people in the industry who think that this whole thing is on an inexorable march to everything being bidded and I couldn’t disagree with that context more.”

Premium video, for example, will always represent “a relatively scarce environment. More places are going to want to continue to transact on an upfront basis and lock pricing in and manage that holistically,” Castree says.

“I think we’re going to be operating in a world of mixed trading types, upfront traded, futures traded and real-time trading well into the foreseeable future.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

“The idea that you go somewhere, you decide you want something, you make that purchase and then you’re done is incorrect. Inherently it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t really exist in real life,” says Whitney Fishman Zember, Managing Partner, Innovation & Consumer Technology, Wavemaker US.

Wavemaker, the self-described media, content and technology agency is quite literally obsessed with deciphering the consumer purchase journey.

“You’re never not considering or thinking about something you may need or want to do, whether it’s a week from now a day from now a month from now. There’s always something top of mind and percolating,” Zember explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Wavemaker’s approach is to “flip the quote unquote funnel upside down” and look at things through the purchase journey, according to Zember.

“There’s active and there’s passive stages, but the reality is that consumers are always in some state of the purchase journey.”

Whether it’s understanding, exploration, fact finding, making a purchase, reviewing a purchase, sharing a purchase, engaging in a purchase, “There’s something that’s always going on with a consumer with regards to brands.”

The agency also takes a different view of technological solutions in a sort of cart-after-the-horse scenario.

“I always say it has nothing to do with the technology,” Zember says. “If you start with the technology, you tend to look for reasons to apply it and it’s not always genuine use cases or genuine opportunities to impact the consumer positively.”

Starting with understanding who consumers are and where they are within the purchase journey should take precedence.

“What is their everyday experience and those opportunities to alleviate everyday frictions that people don’t even think can be alleviated that they don’t even realize are a problem?”

Choosing the right tools, technology and platforms comes after “you recognize inherently what those needs are and how you can provide for the consumer.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

“We’re moving away, I would argue, from media planning and saying ‘well, we actually need a content strategy,’” Gaines says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Media creativity involves how to represent the story of a brand in a way that’s appropriate, including during the priming stage, “when I am trying to create a position for my brand of favor, so that when somebody gets to the trigger point…there is a better predisposition for my brand relative to the things I need to say once they’re in that purchase journey cycle.”

The plethora of options for media consumption have pushed creativity in a way “that we’ve not really been able to think of it definitely a decade or so ago,” Gaines adds.

The concept of having “one big idea” and exposing it to lots of people is no longer operable, according to Gaines. “That only really works if you have brand new news,” he says. “Or you’ve got a new launch. Ninety-nine percent of the products we work with are trying to create greater share, growth in some shape or form. Revenue, share of market, consumption.”

Thus media creativity now involves generating a conversation that keeps people engaged all the way around their purchase journey. “So that what I do from a broadcast perspective and awareness perspective has an amplified effect on converting people to buy my product or buy my service,” says Gaines.

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

This is why Wavemaker’s “principal and defining obsession” is with the purchase journey, says Global CEO Tim Castree.

It’s not simply that chief marketing officers care about the purchase journey, Castree explains in this interview with Beet.TV. Research from IBM indicates that 83% of “progressive, transformational CEO’s organize themselves and their own thinking around consumers and how they make their way to products and brands on the path to purchase,” he says.

“It’s a very well understood context.”

The main reason why media, content and technology agency Wavemaker is “principally obsessed” with the purchase journey is that it lets the agency simplify “in a very complex world how we talk about our products, services and solutions. And how they work to benefit our customers and prospects.”

Asked about the biggest challenges facing CMO’s these days, Castree points to the broad area of fragmentation—less from an audience standpoint than a maze of choices in the digital era—and how best to calculate ROI. He believes there has been an excessive obsessiveness with ROI.

“People are over obsessed with ROI past the point of diminishing returns. So we’re optimizing increasingly to the lowest cost things, but we’re not looking at the full picture of marketing returns over time.”

While market mix modeling has long been a staple of CMO activity, modern times have brought a lot of focus on multi-touch attribution. But according to Castree, “A lot of those attribution models don’t take full account of the effects of marketing over time and the way they build performance over time.”

The bottom line is over optimizing “to the point of diminishing returns” to the bottom of the purchase funnel.

“I think there’s a lot of more fragmented decision making happening in the boardrooms as we think about things like programmatic or working with Google or on and on and on,” Castree says.

Wavemaker sees opportunity in bringing all the essentials together in a much more holistic and fully attributed approach to media and marketing, which leads full circle to understanding the consumer purchase journey not just as a concept.

“Understanding it econometrically is really the key for us to be able to give our clients the best advice about how to really reintegrate all of those pieces to drive a better outcome,” says Castree.

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

“We’re set up to be super flexible,” says Noah Mallin, Head of Experience, Content & Sponsorship, Wavemaker North America. “What that means is we’re not hung up on the idea that we always have to be the one creating every last piece of content.”

In this interview with Beet.TV, Mallin talks about client expectations and creating messaging that doesn’t look like messaging.

He starts with the reality that people are increasingly getting entertainment “and living their lives away from what we would consider ad-supported environments.” While this doesn’t mean they’re not exposed to any ads, “if we just think about that as the only way of reaching people, we’re not really going as far as we can and should be going.”

The job of Mallin’s team is to bring brand experiences to life in any and all venues and “not just showing them the same old thing they’re going to see from any other brand.”

Two big client expectations are an abundance of data to understand consumers in all contextual permutations and reach them in compelling ways they won’t choose to ignore.

“It doesn’t read to them like messaging,” Mallin says. “It reads to them as an experience they can actually take part in and they can have some impact on. Those are two big, tough things to do, especially doing them together.”

Wavemaker is open to working with clients’ own content, creative from partner agencies or third parties and helping to figure out how best to version it. Just because something works well on, say, YouTube doesn’t mean it will do so in display environments or “in the back of an airplane seat.”

There will be times when Wavemaker, a unit of GroupM, will produce content itself “because that’s just the right thing to do and we know we can do it more efficiently than a partner might do it.”

One thing the agency won’t do is try to recreate what a creative agency does “because that’s a very specific model that works well for those agencies.”

Rather, Mallin believes the better approach is to be “super flexible and based on trying to solve problems that exist and friction that exists in reaching the right audience with the right content at the right time.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

The new GroupM agency that launched in the U.S. last November debuted in Canada in January 2018, led by CEO Ann Stewart, formerly CEO of Maxus Canada. In this interview with Beet.TV, Bhopalsingh explains what clients are looking for in a modern agency and why being slightly behind the consumer trends curve has its advantages in the Great White North.

One of the key things in the creation of Wavemaker was to be able to identify and prioritize client needs. “Trading on media inventory is table stakes,” says Bhopalsingh, whose background includes stints at Aegis, OMD and MEC. “It’s expected of us but as consumers have evolved, as technology has evolved, clients’ needs of media agencies have evolved as well.”

Helping marketers navigate “the new consumer journey” and how it evolves requires covering many bases.

“That can extend from anything from paid media though to omni-channel experiences to how they collect and analyze data to impact their business,” Bhopalsingh adds.

What others call a purchase funnel Wavemaker sees as “momentum.” The rationale is that consumers will always be impacted by messages they see in-market, even if they’re not at the stage of actual purchase consideration of, say, an automobile.

“Even though I may not be in the market for a vehicle, I’m constantly seeing messages and making subconscious decisions about the brands that I like and align with.”

Eventually, that leads to a “trigger phase,” which could be having a child, starting a new job or something along those lines, according to Bhopalsingh. “You then move into different phases where you are evaluating and through to purchase.”

Canada is unique in the sense that a lot of the technologies on display at events like CES 2018 will take about a year and sometimes two or three to reach the market. “Things tend to roll out in Europe, Asia Pacific and the U.S. rather quickly. It gives us a bit of leeway and a runway to help prepare our clients.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.

“It has to be more than a merger. If all we did was take two great brands and cultures and teams and mesh them together, we have failed,” says Amanda Richman, U.S. CEO of Wavemaker, the global media, content and technology agency unveiled one year ago.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Richman explains the impetus behind creating Wavemaker was “Let’s really reboot and redesign what a modern marketing agency is. With a single focus on the consumer journey and with that understanding how we can grow our clients’ revenues and opportunities in the marketplace.”

If Wavemaker sounds more like a consultancy with traditional and contemporary media chops, it’s not far off the mark. “The future of the agency business has definitely shifted to not just buying on impressions and cheapest CPM and fill out the pricing template,” Richman says, noting that there’s still a component of investment management that’s about driving efficiency.

“But as you think about our role today in the middle of the ecosystem, in having to not only understand and embrace and evolve our clients’ approach to data but also to their broader business issues.”

Richman, who was appointed U.S. CEO last August, sees an opportunity to “get a greater share” of clients’ problems along with providing a greater share of solutions to solve the challenges they face. This entails having a “laser focus on consumer understanding,” not only from a purchase journey lens but how are they adopting and adapting to the breadth of content and distribution opportunities.

“Our role is really sifting through all of that to find out what’s most meaningful and relevant to their consumers and what’s the brand relationship that can be established with those insights,” Richman says.

This involves not just another innovation play or understanding what the next platform is, the next channel, the next partner. “It’s all of that and so much more that really leads to a deeper understanding of their audience and how to move them to that next step forward.”

She’s looking forward to being able to “really hit reset in this robust environment, listen more to our clients and understand what are their needs when it comes to an agency today and build around that.”

This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.