A key stepping stone on the way to omnichannel utopia is developing a way to identify audiences among different platforms including traditional media like radio and TV, and the growing number of digital video choices.

“We’ve come a long way with identity resolution. It’s creating more unique opportunities to marry capabilities in the RTV space with more of our premium publisher deals,” said Lauren Bernard, vice president of market solutions at Kinesso, the marketing technology platform started by Interpublic Group. Kinesso seeks to improve ad targeting with consumer data from Acxiom Marketing Solutions, which IPG bought for $2.3 billion two years ago.

In this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean, Bernard describes how the media marketplace is evolving, including efforts to include the “walled gardens” of social media and internet search that have proprietary consumer data.

“We’re making great progress in getting some of these walled gardens more open to these ideas about different ways of participating in this type of value exchange,” Bernard said. “We’ve been pursuing a lot of work with our publishing partners to integrate their databases into our world of audiences.”

CTV Apps Packaged With Upfronts

As much as the media marketplace is splintering, it’s also consolidating as major media companies acquire streaming services that work as apps on connected TV platforms. Before its merger with CBS was completed, Viacom this year bought Pluto TV for $340 million, while Fox acquired Tubi for $440 million and Comcast snapped up Xumo for an undisclosed sum.

Those acquisitions are being felt as the digital platforms get included in upfront media buys, Bernard said.

“CTV apps that had premium content and larger levels of viewership are now owned by our upfront partners,” Bernard said. “What used to be really easy to transact in open marketplaces is now part of upfront negotiations. The deal terms definitely change in those scenarios.”

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“The linchpin for omnichannel anything is really to start with the audience and with the consumer, versus starting with the channels,” George Manas, president and chief media officer at OMD USA, said. “It’s all about planning that reflects how consumers actually consume media and move about the world today.”

In this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean, Manas describes OMD’s approach to omnichannel marketing that includes strategies to reach consumers inside the “walled gardens” of digital media that have vast troves of their own consumer data.

Part of the strategy involves moving past prior ways of doing things, such as organizing people into specialized teams that now need to collaborate on omnichannel efforts.

“We recommend that clients organize themselves more like we have, which is about bringing together different skillsets into a truly integrated planning organization,” Manas said about his company’s XMP team for cross-media planning and optimization. “That is a migration of digital skillsets and competencies, along with marketing science, into our core planning function.”

To help formalize its processes, the company created OMD Design as a codified approach to audience-based planning and strategizing.

“That codified process really helps us break with some legacy ways of working, and really tries to institutionalize a more modern, audience-based approach all the way from consumer insights gathering to recording and optimization,” Manas said.

Technological Underpinning

A key challenge is developing the technological underpinning to support people and those processes, and more effectively harness data.

“There’s not a single platform that solves it all. It’s really about platforms talking to each other,” Manas said. “It’s more about building out the capability and infrastructure to really integrate and synthesize different data sets and disparate systems into a unified work flow.”

Walled garden environments like Google, Facebook and Amazon that command about 60% of the U.S. digital ad market make omnichannel strategies more challenging. However, Manas said those hurdles aren’t insurmountable.

“We see our role enabling more of that capability that works more in harmony with the walled gardens rather than against them,” Manas said.

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“We are part of the digital-first economy … spending so much on television is quite unusual,” Alex Weinstein, senior vice president of growth at Grubhub, said in this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean.

“We are a top 200 advertiser on television by spend in the U.S., and arrived at that emphasis on television through rigorous experimentation,” he said. Grubhub in the past couple of years has run tests to compare the effects of advertising on TV, radio, out-of-home and paid social.

“From that, we have been able to discover that the old, boring, stodgy cable television that nobody watches is actually extremely effective,” Weinstein said. “As such, we have reallocated a significant amount of spend over to TV.”

Omnichannel Challenges

While Grubhub’s tests help to hone its media strategy, Weinstein said the company still faces challenges in determining whether its advertising dollars are being used most effectively. There isn’t a unified way to see whether it’s reaching the same audiences on social media as it does on television.

“What is really required is a set of analytical tools that helps you see across all channels, and helps you connect the identity and helps you see how a specific variant of the messaging is performing across every touchpoint with the customers,” he said.

Marketers tend to organize their media buying based on specialties — such as social media, TV or search — and each of those channels has its own group of analytical tools.

“Attribution is perhaps the most complex and most important part of anything that has to do with marketing,” Weinstein said. “A big job for any CMO is to figure out which part of their investment is actually making a difference. Unfortunately, the state of the industry is such that in many cases we reply on anecdotal evidence. We rely on vendor data where there is meaningful misalignment of incentives.”

Helping Ailing Restaurants

The restaurant industry has borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic, with many consumers avoiding on-premise dining and many cities and states limiting the indoor capacity of eateries. Only about 39% of U.S. adults said they feel comfortable going out to eat, according to a tracking survey by market researcher Morning Consult. Review app Yelp found that almost 32,000 restaurants had closed since March 1, with about 60% of them shutting down permanently.

Source: Yelp Local Economic Impact Report

“This pandemic has been a very difficult time for our partners, the restaurateurs,” Weinstein said. “Indoor dining has essentially evaporated, and they have come to rely on takeout and delivery as their primary means of survival.”

Grubhub has taken steps to not only help restaurants, including promotions like its “Supper for Support” effort that grouped orders together for bigger savings.

“We have been creating tools that help restaurateurs attract incremental demand — to get orders that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise,” Weinstein said. “We see ourselves as an enabler of new transactions, and as a facilitator of this connection between restaurants and consumers.”

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“There was a lot of hope that we would be further along than we are,” Nicole Whitesel, executive vice president and managing director of Publicis Media, said about the evolution of omnichannel marketing and measurement. “There is opportunity in the chaos, and the chaos can actually deliver new things that you haven’t tried before.”

Whitesel spoke about the media environment for this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean.

Comparing Metrics

Advertisers are grappling with comparisons of traditional metrics like a total rating point (TRP) for linear television with the measurement of impressions on over-the-top and streaming channels that have exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 health crisis.

With many households canceling cable and satellite service while connecting their TVs directly to the internet, media companies are backing platforms like Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi and Xumo that carry advertising and are free to viewers.

“We’ve been working really closely with some of our clients who have an appetite to test out this new area and get some learnings under their belt,” Whitesel said. “When thinking about OTT and the hockey stick consumption that COVID brought on, what are the different ways you can buy? Programmatically? Direct? Are there innovative ways you can think about buy paths and get ahead of your competition?”

Desire for More Scale

Mass marketers would like to see more scale on OTT and streaming platforms, which is challenging amid the splintering of the media landscape and the migration of viewers to “walled gardens” like social networks that have their own first-party consumer data. Programmatic advertising adds another dimension to the process of buying media in “waterfall” auctions that prioritize bidders.

“Most of the time we’re asking for more scale then a lot times those platforms are delivering, and the reason why is because it is such a fragmented ecosystem,” Whitesel said. “As you’re going through that waterfall, understanding where that inventory is accessible and how you can buy it has been a bit of a challenge. That is going to be a key to unlocking the growth there and really getting into a place where you have transparency around which inventory you can access at what cost.”

Pandemic Challenges

The coronavirus pandemic helped to drive a surge in media consumption, though it also profoundly disrupted the production of new programming and broadcasts of live sports. As professional sports leagues like Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association suspended operations, many advertisers scrambled to find audiences.

“A lot of clients were caught off guard,” Whitesel said. “Working through that has probably been one of the biggest challenges career-wise for a lot of us that were on the front lines with clients trying to decide what to run.”

Marketers also needed to change the tone of their messaging to match public sentiment that had grown increasingly worried about the health crisis and its effect on the economy. The pandemic also became a chance to test promising technologies like addressable advertising.

“We saw some really unique opportunities on shifting more into those OTT channels where their consumption was larger,” Whitesel said. “Most of our clients … were just trying to figure out what the right tone and tenor was, while still supporting their business.”

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“Each team is trying to optimize their channel and budget,” Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said in this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. “By starting with a strategic layer, individual pieces of it are operating within that omnichannel plan.”

He foresees companies developing strategies to address the fragmented media marketplace, giving marketers a way to harness various sources of consumer data to develop a consumer-focused strategy.

“There’s still some technology and data barriers that need to be worked through,” he said. “There’s a lot of people working on that, but we’re still pretty far away from having a reliable, scaled dataset that gives that level of controls to marketers.”

How Upfront Sales Will Change

The pandemic’s economic consequences have significantly affected the advertising marketplace, as uncertainties make media planning much more difficult. The lack of predictability is likely to have an effect that outlasts this year’s disrupted upfront sales season.

“We’ve heard for years and years that, ‘Oh, the upfront is outdated and is obsolete, we don’t need it anymore,’ and very little has changed,” Nails said. “Assuming that the networks and media companies see that the sky doesn’t fall on them, they’re still able to sell their inventory, they’re still able to make a good profit, there will be less pressure to go back.

Advertiser demand for greater flexibility is likely to force traditional media companies like TV broadcasters to behave more like digital outlets let marketers adjust campaigns and spending levels with more audience-based targeting. Over-the-top video channels are driving that push into TV.

“That ties in with the change we’re going through in terms of audience-based buying and convergence of traditional linear with OTT,” Nail said. “You don’t necessarily want that schedule locked in months and months in advance. You want some degree of flexibility.”

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Out-of-home advertising and experiential marketing are the remaining outliers in the analog world, though they increasingly are being integrated with digital platforms through mobile devices and social media, despite the disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic.

“In the analog world, it’s becoming primarily place or event-based — once placed events come back — but placed events by their very nature are built around social media,” Rishad Tobaccowala, senior advisor at Publicis and author of “Restoring the Soul of Business,” said. “The electronic world is bringing all forms of television and online together, and they’re connecting to what remains in the analog world. There’s very little space for newspapers and magazines in analog form.”

For this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean, Tobaccowala discussed how marketers are seeking to break down barriers that stand in the way of creating a seamless, omnichannel world.

Breaking Down ‘Walled Gardens’

So-called “walled gardens” including social media and search companies that have direct relationships with consumers and vast troves of data about their behaviors have positioned themselves as gatekeepers. However, marketers want to be higher in the value chain instead of mere makers of commoditized goods with little brand differentiation.

“Marketers have become open to the fact that their future cannot be determined by Google, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera,” he said. “They know in the near term it might be, but they’ve begun to realize they don’t want to be reduced to nothing but manufacturers.”

He also referred to recent news reports of how companies are lobbying the Federal Trade Commission to take action against the digital ad giants. The FTC is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook by the end of the year, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing people familiar with the matter. The Justice Department, another key antitrust authority in the U.S., is planning to file a separate antitrust suit against Google, the newspaper reported earlier.

‘Future Is Omnichannel’

To take on the tech giants, marketers are thinking about how to develop omnichannel alternatives and to create their own sources of consumer data, Tobaccowala said.

“People want a seamless interaction with companies and media,” he said. “The good news is: the future is omnichannel.”

That transformation is influencing how advertisers work internally, with many brands unifying media and marketing strategies that used to be more specialized among media outlets, planning and buying and measurement and financing, he said.

“You’re going to have this unique combination of one team working with different specialists but all with a united consumer in perspective,” Tobaccowala said. “It’s much easier to get to that model when digital becomes dominant than when digital was dominant.”

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“We would like to have cross-channel attribution, reach and frequency, and control,” Deborah King, vice president of media activation paid social for the EMEA region at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM media-buying firm, said. “Due to that not being available, it really opened up a lot of creative and innovative ways for me and my team to plan paid social campaigns.”

In this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean, King described how marketers need to approach their paid social campaigns.

“Social is one of the biggest ecosystems where you have to be a bit of a strategist at heart,” she said. “You always have to remember who is your audience. You have to remember the mindset, the context and the environment.”

Each social media platform has its own style of user experience, ad formats and ways for brands to engage with audiences. Understanding those differences is crucial in running campaigns and interacting with consumers.

“It’s an exciting time to be a digital marketeer with the paid social landscape,” King said. “There’s an element of creativity that we have to deploy and think about in terms of executing our campaigns.”

Marketers need to respect consumer privacy, not only to build trust with customers, but also to comply with stricter data-privacy rules in regions as varied as the European Union and the state of California.

“Privacy has become an increasingly more important, and having a privacy-first approach that we all need to follow through on,” King said.

She also sees more opportunities in livestreaming, which became more popular as people huddled indoors during the pandemic. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google’s YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch all support live video in some form.

“During lockdowns, live has had a place in social,” King said. “A lot of marketeers are going to start to incorporate that into their strategy.”

You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.

For Deborah Wahl, global chief marketing officer of automotive giant General Motors, the rapidly changing media marketplace has pushed the automotive giant to harness data and analytics to help ensure its marketing supports its sales efforts at all stages of the car-buying process.

“This upfront is a true pivot point,” Wahl said in this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. “Our partners at the networks have understood the need for everyone to have more flexibility and agility. It changes the game completely.”

As a sign of how quickly companies need to change direction amid rapid shifts in the marketplace, Wahl cites the example of GM’s sudden response to the emergency need for life-saving medical equipment amid a nationwide shortage.

Its plant in Kokomo, Ind., that normally makes electronics parts for vehicles started cranking out thousands of respiratory ventilators within weeks of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“We discovered during COVID that we can actually do rapid transformation in 18 days,” Wahls said. “We developed a whole new way to manufacture ventilators in 18 days. That’s the new benchmark for agility for everything that we at General Motors do going forward.”

Omnichannel Transformation

The omnichannel universe gets more fragmented every year with streaming channels and mobile apps at the forefront of the latest efforts to grab the attention of consumers. Reaching those audiences takes greater sophistication, challenging marketers to match their skillsets with the demands of the marketplace.

“We’re at a really interesting pivot and transformational point right now. The technology is at a much better place, though we still have a ways to go,” she said. “Customers are rapidly changing, and what we’ve experienced since the beginning of this year has shown remarkable advancement in terms of what customers expect.”

The automotive market has shown signs of recovery with the broader economy in the past few months as record numbers of people re-enter the work force and resume commuting. While automobile sales are still lower than they were a year ago, average prices of new vehicles hit a record $35,420 in August, according to research firm J.D. Power, as people traded up for more expensive trucks and SUVs. Low gas prices, easier financing and limited inventories helped to spur the increase.

To make sure it’s reaching those potential carbuyers among a variety of media channels, GM is continually hunting for new marketing technologies while also developing internal capabilities and employee skillsets that match the needs of the marketplace.

“I spend about 80% of my time right now on that,” Wahl said. “We’re looking across our own ecosystem with our partners and agencies and internally. We’re on an accelerated developmental path to make sure that everyone does have that learning. We’ve advanced a lot in the past five years, but we need to push it even further.”

Virtual Showrooms

The pandemic is likely to have a lasting effect on automotive marketing — even after consumers feel more comfortable about coming back to dealer lots. Communication technology is now supporting virtual events that provide richer conversations between salespeople and customers.

“The idea of virtual events has been absolutely eye-opening,” Wahl said, pointing to the company’s development of “Cadillac Live” to showcase the luxury vehicle brand. “We started a live showroom where you can actually interact with a person.”

Virtual showcasing is gaining traction among its dealers, and is going to become a permanent part of the company’s marketing efforts, Wahl said.

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It’s helpful to remember the “Five I’s”  when it comes to omnichannel marketing, Lance Neuhauser, president of advertising software platform Mediaocean, said in this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean.

Those “I’s” stand for independence, integration, intelligence, interoperability and impact. They’re a key part of Mediaocean’s platform after acquiring 4C Insights this year to provide more in-depth data analysis to advertisers.

“The platform needs to be independent,” Neuhauser said. “When you have all of these ecosystems being built up, you need someone who can come in and actually look across each of these ecosystems again so that the marketer can represent themselves properly to the consumer. ”

Despite that independence, marketers also need a technology solution that’s integrated with other platforms, he said. Before the acquisition by Mediaocean, Neuhauser had been CEO of 4C Insights for more than six years.

“This is one of the areas that Mediaocean was so excited about at 4C — the level of data science and engineering that we bring to the table so that Mediaocean can go from simply processing $150 billion worth of media to influencing $150 billion worth of media,” he said, “to put the right tools in the hands of both agencies and marketers.”

Interoperabilty provides more seamless functioning among platforms, while data intelligence helps to measure impact, he said.

“You have to be able to take this down to the bottom line, especially now,” Neuhauser said. “We’ve all seen businesses be stretched as a result of the circumstances that are taking place, especially in 2020, where every dollar, every message that goes in market has to be scrutinized more than ever before.”

Omnichannel marketing requires those five elements to reach consumers among a variety of media channels.

“It takes real technology to truly forge ahead in the emerging converging TV space,” Neuhauser said. “Technology needs to mirror that. It enables marketers to market the way consumers consume — all touchpoints, all moments, all screens.”

Mediaocean, whose roots go back to the 1960s with Donovan Systems, has been aggressive about buying software companies that CEO Bill Wise has described as “mini Mediaoceans” in other markets. The acquisitions include MBS and Symsys to expand into Europe, and PIN Systems and BCC AdSystems to push into the Asia-Pacific region.

You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.

“Our vision is to provide the best independent platform for agencies and for advertisers for omnichannel buying,” Anupam Gupta, chief product officer at Mediaocean said in this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. “We know that in order to traverse all these different ecosystems, you need consistency in different aspects of campaign management.”

The omnichannel universe has expanded to include over-the-top (OTT) services as more households connect their TVs directly to the internet. Streaming platforms like Hulu, Pluto TV, Peacock and Tubi are seeking a bigger slice of ad market, while social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have added more video programming to attract more media dollars from major advertisers.

“Converged TV, or as we’re calling it, ‘next-gen TV,’ is one our top priorities,” Gupta said. “No longer can you do TV or and OTT or addressable in different silos, especially given the pandemic. Consumer behavior is changing rapidly.”

Avoiding wasteful media spending among those channels requires data-driven insights into audiences. Mediaocean provides automated buying a selling of advertising inventory.

“You need to appropriately allocate the budget across those different channels using a lot of data science and machine learning and historical information,” Gupta said. “The way you buy TV is changing, but still is very different than real-time, option-based buying in some of the digital ecosystems.”

The company, whose roots go back to the 1960s with Donovan Systems, has been aggressive about buying software companies that CEO Bill Wise has described as “mini Mediaoceans” in other markets. The acquisitions include MBS and Symsys to expand into Europe, and PIN Systems and BCC AdSystems to push into the Asia-Pacific region.

You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.