The chief operating officer of Omnicom’s two-year-old agency Hearts & Science says the future of advertising depends on finding the right people.
“Being that we’re in a world where we have to figure out mobile, I think I would go as far as saying, advertising is at risk of being as successful in growing brands if we don’t figure out mobile for the future,” Brookbanks says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Right now as an industry, we don’t know how to be persuasive in mobile.”
Hearts & Science was founded to service Proctor & Gamble, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, but recently has expanded to add new business, Brookbanks says.
But, both as it expands and as it looks to do mobile right, the company has been in a quest to add the right new staff.
“We have to hire 800 people in our first year,” Brookbanks adds. “We’ve now opened nine offices in North America, up to 16 globally.
“I think that probably the hardest thing to do right now is have great talent, honestly – harder than all the data and the technology. It was hard in the beginning to find those people.
“What we’ve done is brought in a chief experience officer – a whole new thing. This person does marketing, but they are also the chief of culture. HR reports to them, but this is truly a very senior person who is all about taking the vision of the company and merging that with the culture we want to have. Easier to do when you’re building something from the ground up than when you inherit something, but still really hard work, still really hard work.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to the privacy chief from the world’s largest media investment group.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came in to effect back in 2016, whilst the final deadline for compliance comes this May. Now any global company which deals with EU citizens’ data must comply with a new and more stringent set of demands, risking a fine of up to 4% of global annual turnover, up to a maximum of €20 million.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM privacy director Rachel Glasser gives her prediction for GDPR’s impact.
“What the GDPR will do in the industry in a year or so’s time will, number one, it’s going to cause a lot of consolidation of a lot of the smaller, more innovative partners that we see coming into this space,” she says.
“A lot of newer, smaller companies are not going to be able to really emerge. The bar for entry is going to be too high. They won’t have the money to buy their way in and make these partnerships with the bigger publishers because there’s going to be a lot more scrutiny on the specifics (like) ‘who’s placing cookies on their website?’ or ‘who are dropping device IDs?’
“Those things will become much more difficult for the smaller companies to get involved with.”
New GDPR stipulations give consumers new protections including:
This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world. The series is presented by Criteo. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“They want to see that every minute of the day, every hour of the day, every day of the week. That’s really where I see a difference between how we’re working today and just a few years ago.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Data Summit, Alphonso’s SVP, Research talks about attribution in three phases: pre, during and post ad exposure.
On the pre side, it’s pretty much the way brands have used consumer databases like MRI or Simmons to help advise media and audience selection, according to Kelly. “We can do that directly with brands and their agency partners where we’re taking their CRM data, their first-party data, and creating an audience.”
One example could be an insurance company with homeowner policies coming up for renewal in the next 90 days wanting to know the media behavior of those policy holders. By matching data in a non-personally identifiable manner, Alphonso can provide “a complete analysis of the content they consume. Networks, programs, dayparts, frequency of viewership, that sort of thing.”
The “during” attribution phase involves “what we see in real time.” Exposure activity and the response to it inform whether a particular campaign is working and whether adjustments need to be made. On the post side, “that’s where the performance numbers come in for attribution.”
Alphonso’s biggest data set is its automatic content recognition footprint in 34 million households—roughly one out of four TV households. On the “ingestion” side, it “watches” 200-plus live national networks in some 10 DMA’s. Knowing what households are watching constitutes the “exposure” side and a match is done.
“From there we can understand audience size, ad interaction, and then connect that to all the other types of attribution that are possible,” Kelly says.
The company’s SDK resides not only within TV sets but also connected-TV devices and more than 1,000 apps in the United States. “Every few microseconds on the app side we’re tapping the microphone to see whether or not we recognize what’s on the TV. It’s about understanding what’s on the TV. We’re not listening to peoples’ conversations.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>What if they launched and operated their own ad-tech?
That’s where TrustX comes in. Owned by publishers’ non-profit trade association Digital Content Next, which has strongly criticised ad-tech vendors and big digital platforms’ tactics alike, TrustX is a not-for-profit cooperative programmatic private marketplace.
Launched in May on tech ultimately built by Iponweb and Moat, TrustX is a consortium of 35 publishers – like CBS, Meredith, NBC, Vox, Hearst, ESPN – making their inventory available to buyers together with a human-viewable guarantee.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, TrustX CEO David Kohl explains why it was founded.
“I don’t think there’s anyone who would disagree that programmatic, particularly open programmatic, has been an unfulfilled promise,” he says. “It hasn’t delivered.
Premium publishers, (whose) inventory is being commoditized in what is otherwise a cesspool of open programmatic inventory, are throwing up their hands and saying, ‘It’s time to act.'”
The action in question is aimed at correcting an ecosystem in which up to 60 cents in every ad dollar spent are taken by intermediaries like agencies and technology platforms, according to the World Federation of Advertisers.
TrustX may set out to fundamentally change some of the practices being seen in the industry – but Kohl is doing so by using some of the very same technology he is fighting against.
“(It is) a curated private marketplace but that acts, smells, looks and feels like the open exchanges,” he says. “It’s 100% curated supply, 100% curated demand, fully transparent, 100% human viewable and designed to be the benchmark for what open programmatic should be.”
One thing that is very different from most companies in that category, however – TrustX is a non-profit, B-corp company and runs as a membership organization; there will be no land-grab here, no rush to IPO.
Already it connects to buy-side partners like The Trade Desk, DBM and Media Math, with more to come, Kohl says. He even imagines adding “another couple of dozen major brands”.
There are already several cooperative marketplaces operating around the world. Until TrustX, however, the idea was slow to have been embraced in the United States.
Right now, there is a large-scale bearishness gathering around big online platforms, with publishers raling against perceived dominance. Whether they can really tip the scales back in their favour, only time will tell. But, if they can, initiatives like TrustX will play a big part in it.
“I’d like to see a couple hundred brands in our marketplace trading actively through the end of this year,” Kohl adds.
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>“It is fascinating to me that the creative agencies really want to have access to the data, and as media agencies we want to give them access to the data. It’s only going to cause the creative to be better,” says Reed.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Data Summit, Reed discusses the excitement of using data to send clients down creative paths they might not otherwise entertain, and how a cleaner digital ecosystem will impact both ad inventory (lower) and CMP’s (higher).
While acknowledging that creatives “always have that beautiful instinct inside of them,” Reed says that good data brings a lot of possibilities to the table. “I can show you, dear client, why it’s the right strategy, not just because it feels right to me, but have the data to back it up and we can support them,” she says.
Along the way, things can get “really exciting” when an agency can craft a data story for a client “that may send them down an entirely different path that they weren’t already headed on, which could create something entirely new and interesting.”
After campaign execution, “We get to actually prove out that that creative work,” says Reed. The minutiae of creative iterations can range from “that creative with that talent versus that talent, that background versus that background, logo first versus logo last. We can start to play with all of those pieces and see the iterations and truly start to ladder up what’s going to work best.”
She predicts more progress will be made in cleaning up the digital advertising ecosystem, referencing a discussion at the 4A’s conference on the difference between transparency and trust.
“Transparency is the foundational layer of what we need to provide to our clients in order to then develop that trust. But trust is really the goal,” Reed says.
Specifically, trust that fosters good working relationships with clients, showing that “we’ve got their back. That we’re making sure that the data is correct. That we’re cleaning up the ecosystem.”
Among other things, this cleansing requires that demand-side and supply-side platforms “are actually giving us true inventory that’s real, that is human. I want to know I’m reaching you. Not the bot version of you. Because the bot version of you isn’t going to buy something from me.”
When the dust finally settles, the industry can expect a “step change in what the actual paid CPM is,” says Reed. “I actually think CPM’s will go up, but the actual available inventory is going to ultimately go dramatically down as we clean up this ecosystem.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>“We’re able to stich together a profile that’s not a static view of you. It’s a very dynamic way of looking at your life,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Data Summit.
Agile data platforms yield not just one big audience but “multiple, different audiences that are scaled in size that allow us to know that its big enough that it’s actually going to move your business.” The goal is to find “an own-able, distinctive and very authentic place to engage with you.”
King believes there is a place for dynamic creative optimization but not as a one-size-fits-all solution. “It’s a great place to test with different audiences what’s actually not only going to resonate with them but get them to drive to action.”
When technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence become more advanced, agencies will be building a lot more dynamic and programmatic experiences for people.
“We’re not going to just be delivering ads,” says King. “We’re going to be delivering whole experiences that surround the consumer that they’re going to want to engage in because they’re so enjoyable.”
Part of the enjoyment will be ads that resonate on an emotional level. “They give them a sense of you’re with them. Which is where we really want to be with our brands versus talking at people and not really knowing who they are.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>But what does that look like in practice? To the North America MD of IPG Mediabrand’s ad-tech unit, data and creativity are not two separate worlds – they are just two hemispheres of the same planet.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Cadreon Erica Schmidt says the company has been leveraging the principles and the basics programmatic, applying them to the entire digital suite of investment that an advertiser has, to ensure all of its digital activities sit under the management of one singular lens.
It’s that – the ability of an agency to use programmatic to insert itself as a broad-based foundation under a wider range of client activities – which powers the refocus on creative.
“When you have all that under one umbrella or house … we’re now starting to move much more upstream and influencing … not just the media strategy but also the creative strategy,” Schmidt says.
“A lot of the work that (IPG) Mediabrands is doing in terms of the underpinning of data and technology infrastructure means that we are going to be speaking from the same ‘OS’ (operating system) with our sister creative agencies, which means that we’re moving upstream and influencing the creative storytelling on the basis of data.
“Now, we know that creators don’t love data when they come up with their brilliant ideas, but we’re helping move that. And what it means is, the results are 10 to 50 times better than they were without that piece of the pie.”
We’re saying there is an opportunity because we know more than demography and because we know behavioral patterns. What we could then do is segment out so that you can create different types of creatives that’s just based on large audience clusters.
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>Weaknesses in links in the ad-tech chain allow rogue ad sellers to present their sites as though they were those of peers with premium inventory. It is called “domain spoofing”, and it bugs the heck out of media agencies.
So Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn decided to do something about it.
Together with Megan Pagliuca, the former boss of Omnicom-owned Accuen, who joined his agency in September, Hagedorn began poking around in the ad supply chain to understand the fraud problem more deeply.
“We spent probably the last half of 2017 looking at unauthorized sellers that were entering into the mix, or spoof domains that were selling like they were CBS when they really weren’t CBS at all, they were another site completely,” he in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Typically, those three things (DSPs, the SSPs, and the publishers) would bundle together and there would be hidden margin from somebody in that, or some unauthorized inventory. We, instead, did a lot of clean-up, and it’s a lot of work for us, but we cleaned up, I’d say, the supply chain on the publisher side.”
In January, News Corp’s UK newspaper division News UK cried fowl on domain spoofing when it published conclusions of its own experiment that revealed 2.9 million bids per hour were made on fake inventory purporting to be that of its own The Sun and The Times news sites – in just two hours on December 4.
It concluded ad buyers are being duped in to wasting up to £700,000 ($972,000) per month on misplaced advertising, saying: “Brands are being tricked into thinking they’re buying quality inventory, bidding on what they think is a premium site when it isn’t.”
But fraudulent tactics look like a game of Whack-a-mole.
No sooner had Hearts & Science’s Hagedorn cleaned up the domain spoofing problem, by working with White Ops, a company that exists to root out such tactics, he discovered a new threat practiced by fraudsters.
“They quickly migrated into building bot extensions that live within a lot of the browsers that spoof human activity,” he tells Beet.TV.
“The crazy thing about that is you can cookie, essentially, a bot, and then the bot potentially gets retargeted by ambient retargeting campaigns later. So now we’re starting to really study identity management, and identity resolution, and how we can stop potentially advertising to bots that are spoofing being humans.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>For starters, agencies need to perform a basic assessment for their clients and not avoid tough challenges, Paskalis, who is SVP, Consumer Engagement & Media Investment, explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Data Summit, where he was one of the featured speakers. That assessment should include asking:
• Does the client actually have a really strong customer lifetime value model?
• Is the marketing organization mapped to that?
• Does the client actually have a Customer Data platform and is the marketing and media function represented in those discussions along with analytics and technology?
• What is the client’s attribution solution? Does it truly have multi-touch in place that’s taking into account first and third party?
“If the answer to any of those questions is less than 100 percent, that’s where the agency needs to focus and they need to bring the clients along the journey,” Paskalis says. The way to make marketing more relevant to business outcomes is to “ensure that marketing has the right seat at the right table and is able to advocate for what we really think from a holistic customer perspective,” he adds.
Identity solutions remain a huge hurdle, according to Paskalis, who believes “the reality is we need to innovate around identity.” Being able to determine whether ad messaging is reaching the same people on different platforms facilitates the delivery of episodic creative. “If we don’t do that, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant. As the social media algorithms get more and more precise around putting things in front of you that are exactly relevant to you, marketers need to build muscle memory in that same area.”
An outspoken critic about brand safety on digital platforms, Paskalis sees much more work that needs to be done, particularly within the walled gardens of digital publishers who do a good job of protecting their own data but are lacking when it comes to rooting out fraud.
“I’m tremendously concerned about the hygiene in the digital space,” he says. “Programmatic has been the single worst thing that’s happened to the advertising industry and it’s the only salvation of marketers going forward.”
There need to be more conversations around the issue, but with some preconditions.
“The walled gardens need to become transparent. They can no longer say ‘we’ve got this’ when in fact they can’t do long division and addition, they can’t provide a brand-safe environment, they can ‘t ensure that the people you’re talking to are actually people with both pulse and respiration.”
He’s excited about the work by companies like TrustX, which bills itself as the cooperative, private marketplace for the world’s must trusted brand marketers and premium publishers.
“We need more of that and we need that to be working in behind the walled gardens as well.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>“We preplanned out a lot of how we wanted the social to work around it and how we would activate social channels and key opinion leaders to do a really smart push full strategy,” says Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Procter & Gamble media agency Hearts & Science. “It worked out really well.”
Well enough that ADWEEK dubbed the four Tide spots collectively as “the runaway winner” ahead of efforts for Amazon, Doritos/Mountain Dew, Tourism Australia and the NFL’s own campaign.
Hagedorn says the strategy for the Super Bowl work, ads for which were produced by Saatchi & Saatchi, started with the client. The idea was to cast actor David Harbour, known to Netflix viewers as scruffy sheriff Jim Hopper in “Stranger Things,” as a kind of narrator in sparkling clean clothes who talks to viewers about commercials they are seeing.
Tide was able to co-opt its ads “into other Super Bowl ads to make them Tide ads, and they ultimately became P&G ads,” Hagedorn explains in this Beet.TV interview following his speech at the 4A’s Data Summit.
Tide had purchased a 45-second spot in the first quarter to set up the narrative and one 15-second ad in each succeeding quarter. “The interesting thing about marketing now is you can create kind of a multidimensional solution. You can plan for the social ramp up and the social ramp down,” Hagedorn says.
Last year, Bradshaw appeared in a Tide spot with a fake stain on his shirt during what appeared to be a live broadcast but was shot weeks earlier. “This year that was all a tease” to make fans believe that “were going to do a repeat of last year’s Super Bowl stunt.”
In 2015, Hearts & Science won the P&G media account in North America, setting the stage for the agency’s launch the next year. It has since won business from AT&T, “quietly started working on QuickBooks with TBWA,” won the Barclays account with OMD in the U.K. and had a hand in the New York Times Golden Globes “He Said, She Said” work with Droga5.
Hagedorn credits four tenets—agility, empowerment, intelligent scale and open standards—for the agency’s “hot and heavy” new business winning streak. “We’re hoping to wrap a lot of the pitches up that we’ve been working on and carry it through into Q2, but then I look forward to slowing us down a little bit and trying to ingest it and bring it all in.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
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