This was the challenge for Chicago-based advertising agency SCC, which became the Cubs’ agency of record in late 2012—when the team had just capped a 101-loss season. SCC’s work involved crafting “a different theme or campaign every year that really has followed the cadence of the team’s progression,” President & Managing Partner David Selby says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
That progression continued as this was written, with the Cubs losing game #2 of the National League Championship Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Chicago Tribune provides details of the game at Dodgers Stadium.
Prior to engaging SCC, ownership of the Cubs had just transferred to the Ricketts family and the team had recruited as its President Theo Epstein from Boston. The plan to turn the franchise around wouldn’t happen overnight, nor could predictions of its success.
“In 2013, when we couldn’t talk about players and we couldn’t talk about baseball as we were rebuilding the team, what we could talk about was commitment,” Selby says. This was communicated in the form of “dramatic, authentic fan stories.”
Fortunately, 2014 was the 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field, “this iconic venue where we play.” So the Cubs created a season-long event called The Party of the Century.
Things picked up the following year with the addition of Joe Madden as Manager and pitcher Jon Lester, formerly of the Boston Red Sox, to the point where “we could maybe shift our voice to be a little more confident. And so what we did was introduce a little more aggressive language,” says Selby. The next theme was Let’s Go and it focused on team momentum, not individual players. “It seems subtle but it was actually more confident than maybe we were confident in or comfortable with at the beginning of that season.”
The Cubs made it to the playoffs in 2015 but lost to the New York Mets. Heading into 2016 expectations were high “but we wanted to keep everything in check. We’re going to be honest with you,” Selby says of team communications to fans. “We invited them along on this journey.”
At 5 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 3 of 2016, after the Cubs had notched the World Series, the team issued a commemorative spot featuring musician and Cubs fan Eddie Vedder’s Someday We’ll Go All The Way, which eventually earned some 36 million views.
“The Cubs didn’t spend one dime of paid media on it,” Selby says. “That was this powerful statement from our fans to us about what this win meant.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>Now brands are also increasingly hoping to use digital to place top-of-the-marketing-funnel awareness campaigns.
Tracking the effect of such campaigns has traditionally been complex – but that doesn’t mean brands don’t want the same super-powers in these kinds of campaigns all the same.
“Right now, internally, they’re dealing with a lot of trying to figure out how to transform their brands, and use advertising more effectively, but balancing that with a lot of data that’s really particularly useful for understanding short-term sales impact.
“I’ve been hearing this for months – a need to focus investment on brand, but balancing that with demands from CFOs, largely, to demonstrate short-term ROI,” says Enid Maran marketing effectiveness managing director at media measurer Nielsen, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“One thing that’s been particularly tricky, I think, for a lot of them is, ensuring that their success metrics match their goals. So there’s certainly a need for attribution.”
Nielsen is trying to help brands do that across platforms with its products like Total Audience Suite and Digital Content Ratings, which follows its Digital Ad Ratings service that has been i- market for six years now.
It may help that Nielsen is now measuring video viewership on Hulu, Facebook and YouTube as of this summer.
But Maran wants the ad-tech world to be far more simplified overall.
“It shouldn’t be as complex,” she adds. “Perhaps the best end state, and I don’t mean this in a negative way at all, but perhaps the best end state is we don’t actually need the Lumascape.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>A year ago, Marriott itself comprised 19 different brands. Then came its acquisition of Starwood Hotels and the combined brand tally now exceeds 30.
“Bringing those brand perception levels higher to actually drive the right consumers into the purchase journey is key,” Desai says in this interview with Beet.TV. “So we’re helping them sort of reinvent that purchase journey to make sure it’s connected from the top to the bottom.”
Among other results for these efforts, Marriott and MEC picked up Gold and Silver Creative Data Lions at this year’s Cannes International Festival of Creativity. The awards, given to M Live—Marriott International’s global marketing real-time center—were in the categories of Social Data and Use of Real-time Data.
M Live is the touch point across all 30 Marriott brands used to identify pop culture trends and create real-time content directly with on-property guests on social channels based on geo-fencing technology.
One benefit of working in the hotel category is that unlike insurance or packaged goods, which are often pitched as necessities, “it’s something you want to do. It’s aspirational. You want to go on vacation,” says Desai. “We have that to our advantage.”
As a part of GroupM, MEC shares its digital brand safety standards and works with Marriott and other clients to build brand safety guidelines for global implementation “to make sure that our ads aren’t being seen where they shouldn’t be seen.”
While he acknowledges that working with walled gardens like Facebook and Google “is tough because they see a lot of our media spend,” Desai says maintaining close partnerships with digital and traditional media providers produces learnings that can be applied “across the board.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>“One of the refreshing parts of the conference today is seeing the marketing community galvanize as trying to be a single voice and just renewing the importance of the investment and what marketing can do.”
In this interview with Beet.TV, Zambianchi reflects on the importance of measuring campaign results and how quickly the digital media ecosystem has advanced when compared to the traditional television business.
“Measurement is everything,” says Zambianchi. “I don’t think anyone’s comfortable anymore with just having communications out there but really tying it back to how we can affect the business.”
Agencies can be “very powerful” by collaborating and setting up frameworks to measure their efforts to determine “what we’re doing is moving product off shelf, is bringing foot traffic into stores.”
Asked about the growing potential of reaching consumers with premium video, Zambianchi references the evolution of TV “let’s say from how prevalent it was in the 1950’s, when it was in fact in every household.”
It took roughly 30 to 40 years to get beyond three TV networks, and 40 to 50 to get into cable and satellite offerings. Comparatively, digital consumption and the accompanying ecosystem has changed dramatically in just 20 years and shows no signs of slowing down.
“It’s so difficult to even project where it’s going to go, it’s moving so rapidly,” says Zambianchi.
He believes advertisers and agencies have just started to tap what premium video can do.
“Consumers have proven that they’re willing to trade their time to spend with brands with interesting content.”
MediaCom counsels its clients to “be true to their own brand values, bring interesting, engaging stories, be more creative. Media can be a force for that. It’s just beginning to blossom.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>Like other publishers, Meredith both partners with and competes against Facebook and Google. What differentiates Meredith is the roots of its own brands coupled with ad tech prowess and those guarantees of ad performance, according to the President of its National Media Group.
“We are trusted brands that have been around for 115 years, and it takes a long time to build that brand equity,” Jon Werther says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
Doubling down on the value of connecting its brands with those of its advertisers, Meredith is in the second year of its Brandfront—in which it highlights video content partnerships and original cross-platform programming initiatives. The company’s content leaders range from Liz Vaccariello at Meredith Parents Network to Stephen Orr at Better Homes and Gardens to Martha Stewart.
Werther says there’s been a shift in the consumer mindset over the last year “where the consumers we serve are really looking to regain control. They’re looking to make things happen. They’re looking make a difference. They’re looking to lead healthier lives.”
At Brandfront 2018, Meredith announced a new live video series partnership with Rachael Ray that will launch in 2018; showcased a new travel and fitness television show with renowned trainer Rebecca Kennedy; and unveiled results of a new accountability study for the pharmaceutical category under its Meredith Sales Guarantee program.
“We guarantee a lift in sales for our strategic partners,” says Werther. “We’ve done more than 70 campaigns and we haven’t missed one yet.”
In addition to brand safe editorial environments, Meredith boasts of reaching 110 million women every month, 70% of all millennial women and 70% of all Latino women.
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>That ended with the World Series in 2016, triggering a change in communications strategies for the venerable Midwest sports franchise.
“We’re on an interesting journey with our fans,” Kenney explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
In recent years, as the Cubs struggled from one season to the next, stadium attendance mirrored the team’s on-field performance. Meaning it declined.
“There was a conversation really about filling the seats and coming back to Wrigley and staying involved and staying engaged with the team even if the results weren’t what everyone hoped for,” Kenney says.
That messaging lasted from 2012 to 2014. “By 2015, we could see the beginnings of a really great team. Then the narrative changed from rather than celebrate the ballpark or your commitment to the team and started focusing more on the players.”
Now it’s “more a celebration of this American pastime. Our team is now worthy of our fans’ love. It’s been kind of an evolution of messages.”
Throughout the decades-long journey, the Cubs benefited from their relationship with WGN, which by virtue of its status as a “super station” broadcast Cubs games to 70 million fans outside of Chicago, including Arizona, Colorado and Florida. That changed in 2015 when WGN converted its national outlet to a basic cable network.
“The super station allowed us to create fan bases in markets where they don’t have a team or where they recently got a team,” Kenney says. “When we play the Diamondbacks or the Rockies or the Marlins, a lot of times those are home games for us because WGN has created such a following in those markets.”
Partially offsetting the loss of super station carriage is the way that Cubs fan interact with multiple screens and platforms while keeping tabs on the team’s travails. “The additional information that’s available to everyone now has really created this very social experience when people watch games, even when they’re not at Wrigley field.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>But, if you are an advertiser, nothing beats the power wielded by premium video, according to one man representing the interests of big TV companies.
“There are platforms and all sorts of conduits that are getting good quality video whose being distributed on so many different conduits and platforms,” says Sean Cunningham, CEO of th Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“And, yet, in that environment, in any given minute, in this country, 91% of all video is consumed on television. Eighty-eight percent of all video, in any given minute, for millennials is consumed on television.
“The overwhelming, sort of, nationwide addiction to video has never been stronger. As it proliferates and we just make more of it, what we find is there’s just an endless appetite for high-quality, premium video.”
Cunningham should know. His VAB was formed in 2015 out of the old Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB0 and represents national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPDs, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business.
In a new piece of work, it seeks to expose the “Echo Chamber Effect“, in which it says views grown in to trends have escalated in to reports of seismic change that have spread like wildfire throughout the advertising industry – but which are untruths.
The work skewers beliefs that digital is disrupting traditional TV as fast as many claim it is, saying “less than 1 % of cable+ households have cut the cord in 2016 and 2017”.
And, despite heavy investment from Netflix and Amazon in to original premium programming, Cunningham tells Beet.TV it is incumbents who still make the industry tick.
“My members, ad-supported television, they’ve spent over the past five years, $225,000,000,000 on original content,” he adds. “A hit television show right now needs to be distributed on as many as 90 different platforms. What the great arbiter should be to marketer is committed attention.”
]]>That report kickstarted a cacophony of “transparency” talk, including the ANA issuing a series of recommended solutions.
Since then, chatter from industry folk is that things have improved, though not as much as may be desired.
For ANA group EVP Bill Duggan, progress has been made on brands’ agency contracts, auditing and programmatic buying.
“It’s been sort of a slow build,” he say sin this video interview with Beet.TV, “but we’ve been hearing increasingly from our members that they’ve been looking harder at their contracts.
A great time to look at contracts is during media pitches. What we’ve learned is that, among our members that have taken some action regarding the rebates, that 60% have taken action around agency contracts.”
Whilst the first report focused on agency buying behaviour, the latest area of transparency concern is emerging as the production of creative assets.
This summer, ANA issued a report on that topic, finding issues around whether agencies disclose the use of either in-house or commissioned creative producers.
“The production unit that may be doing some business for that client (may be) part of the agency, but the client may not know that,” Duggan adds. “Equally troubling is the fact that there are cases where those internal production units are competing against external independent editors.
“All those relationships need to be disclosed. And if there is a case where an internal agency unit is being considered, those bits (must not) initially go through the agency producer. They need to go through either a third party cost consultant or directly to the client.”
]]>“The strategy that we employ for DCO is very different on the consumer side of the business than it is on our commercial side of the business, says Dina Gowar, Chief of Staff, Digital Marketing Team, Dell, which has employed the targeting technique for about three years.
On the consumer side, Dell uses DCO in the traditional retargeting sense of cross-selling and up-selling. Such tactics are “based on what that customer was doing, what we know about them, what they were looking at, what they would genuinely be interested in,” Gowar adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
Dell is more focused on relationship building with its commercial clients and prospects, seeking to nurture trust and loyalty. Thought leadership content in the form of ads touting white papers or case studies are employed depending on the solution a website visitor had viewed.
Online selling changed dramatically for Dell with its landmark acquisition of EMC a year ago, which yielded “a huge portfolio of solutions and services that you can’t just buy with a click,” says Gowar. “It’s a much longer process…nine months from when someone might start looking at something to when they ultimately buy that solution.”
In the interim, sales and marketing need to be closely aligned to ensure that messaging is appropriate, because a prospect that expressed interested in particular solutions or services at the beginning of their search might be looking for something entirely different over time.
While at the Masters of Marketing confab, Gowar is pleased with the “feel good factor” expressed by so many brand representatives and encouraged for the advertising and consumer-engagement implications in a city that was ravaged by Hurricane Irma.
“There’s so much wrong in the world right now, let’s leverage the eyeballs that we get, our brand position and brand equity and followers to try to bring people together,” she says. “It’s great to be here and share the love amongst your peers and colleagues.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>“I think a lot of marketers today start with a creative brief and the idea, ‘Here’s my message. Go find me places to put that message at.’ I think that is the backward- looking view, says Brad Feinberg, Sr. Director, Media & Consumer Engagement, MillerCoors.
MillerCoors’ planning starts with “dimensionalizing the person, humanizing the business and the brand and understanding them from a multidimensional perspective,” he says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
Going beyond demographics requires studying peoples’ behaviors and attitudes, especially as it relates to consuming beer and on what occasions. “Then you go to the right places,” says Feinberg, an aspect that has major geographic implications.
Then comes defining “the moments that matter” when MillerCoors messaging will resonate best and that will break though. “Something they don’t avoid.”
Asked for his thoughts on the value of one-to-one marketing, Feinberg points to the elimination of waste in not serving ads to people who aren’t likely prospects. And while the “funnel” may exist, it’s not an off-the-shelf item.
“I don’t think there’s a very linear funnel as has always been described in marketing textbooks. I actually think the funnel is much more complex than that.”
One-to-one marketing takes in such elements as geography but also shopping behavior. For example, in some markets the convenience store is the primary destination for those seeking a 24-once beer at the end of the workday, but shoppers haven’t necessarily made up their minds as to exactly what to purchase.
“A lot of it is very impulsive behavior. As long as we’re there at that moment, that’s the opportunity for us to create something customized,” Feinberg adds.
Like other marketers, MillerCoors is aiming less at disruption and more at earning consumer attention.
“I think we need to refocus ourselves on reinforcing their behavior than disrupting their behavior. It’s really critical for us to create messaging that consumers are seeking out. Content that they are seeking out in environments that are most relevant to the brand,” Feinberg says.
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>“Doing good can be very good business,” says Beitler. “In the future, particularly with the way millennials and even the next generation feel about companies’ responsibilities, it’s very likely that you won’t be able to do good business without doing good.”
Lane Bryant was one of many brand marketers showcasing their purpose-driven positioning and communications strategies at the 2017 Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers. In this interview with Beet.TV, Beitler explains Lane Bryant’s efforts to change the way women see themselves and how the world perceives them.
“We want a world where all women are seen as beautiful, all women love fashion, all women have access to amazing fashion. If she’s more confident, if she feels more comfortable, the truth is she’s going to spend more on apparel.”
Along the way, Lane Bryant has broken new ground in sponsorships with the likes of Sports Illustrated and Glamour, to name just two. Just over a year ago, the retailer founded in 1904 took the title sponsorship of the first SI Swimsuit Issue to feature plus-size models in a campaign titled “This Body.”
Lane Bryant inked the Glamour magazine’s first-ever apparel licensing deal and teamed with Refinery29 to help surface the “invisible majority”: the 67% of American women who wear plus-size garments. “Our goal is to reshape the way that we see women,” Beitler says.
Asked how the company measures campaign success, he cites brand growth and consumer perception. Last month, the YouGov BrandIndex listed Lane Bryant #1 in most improved brand sentiment among millennials, ahead of brands like GE, Royal Carribbean Cruises, Tesla, Forever 21, Payless and Nintendo Wii.
As Beitler notes, that ranking was among “not just women but millennials in general.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>Last spring, one2one Media set out to leverage an integrated set of systems and technology to drive efficiency and yield by automating workflows and providing a unified reporting approach for addressable video. Six months later, President Mike Bologna voices no regrets.
“Our thought process has been spot on. There’s huge demand in the market for what we’re doing and the reception from agencies and advertisers has been fantastic,” Bologna says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
One-to-many could well describe advertisers and agencies “having to communicate and talk to 12 different systems using 40 different pieces of technology and 100 different data partners,” Bologna adds. “We do that all for them.”
Right now, the primary source of addressable video right comes via the two minutes of ad inventory each hour that MVPD’s serve up either through linear or the video-on-demand stream. This represents most of one2one Media’s campaigns, with the other 30 percent extending out on to connected television, tablets and smartphones.
“Because we use the same data sets and the same matching agents, we’re able to create an unduplicated reach and frequency of the ads delivered to those specified segments and then tie it back to sales,” Bologna says.
Advanced TV company Cross MediaWorks launched one2one Media in April of 2017, adding to a portfolio that consisted of creative and media agency TCA and video solutions provider Cadent.
“Over last six months alone we’ve seen an increase in customer billings by over 50 percent. That leads me to believe that the industry is really starting to tie together the value of a one-to-one video spot and the sales attribution associated with it.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>“Make an impact, make peoples’ lives better, build businesses, create jobs, build brand equity. I think that’s really positive,” Stengel says at the annual gathering of the Association of National Advertisers.
Spoken like a true educator, befitting Stengel’s status as Senior Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, which he joined this summer to help run the Kellogg Markets and Customers Initiative. In addition to Masters of Marketing, he still keeps tabs on events like Advertising Week in New York and is well versed with marketers’ concerns about brand safety within the digital media ecosystem.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Stengel, who runs the consultancy Jim Stengel Co., talks about the importance of giving creatives a free rein to collaborate with marketers so that each brand can activate its unique purpose.
“I think the creative community still brings so much value to companies,” Stengel says. “The ones that are getting the most value from the creative community are the ones that are sharing their business challenges, sharing their opportunities, sharing their business goals and giving them simple, inspiring briefs.”
A good example would be Apple’s Think Different campaign in the late 1990’s because it derived from a simple brief, according to Stengel.
“Make us relevant again. That’s what Steve Jobs said.”
Whether it’s computers or Cadillac’s desire to build “a modern luxury brand,” the creative minds involved should benefit from shared thinking and then be free to follow their instincts.
“You don’t want to put creative people into a disciplined silo,” Stengel says. “Get really good people, get a sense of team, give them your purpose your business challenge and then let the ideas fly.”
He’s happy to hear discussions about purpose, ambition, meaning and ideals as brands try to stay relevant in a sea of consumer choices.
“Purpose is here to stay,” Stengel says.
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>This is one of the concepts behind comScore’s rollout of its new Activation suite, an offering that enables cross-platform targeting based on audience segments while drilling deeply into website content.
“One of the keys there is safety can have a different specific meaning depending upon whom you are as a brand,” says Aaron Fetters, SVP National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore.
“What our capability enables is for a brand to be very specific as to I’m okay showing up against this type of content but not this type of content,” Fetters adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
“Our data’s ability is to go down into the actual text level within a page and say this is what this page is about and it’s a place that I’m okay to be.”
comScore Activation incorporates both digital and television viewing data along with contextual and verification technology to account for brand safety, viewability and invalid traffic. It is currently available in more than 15 leading ad tech platforms, including Adobe, AppNexus, Centro, Salesforce, Tru Optik and Videology.
At the ANA confab, Fetters says he’s heartened to see that advertisers have not just embraced the pursuit of a cleaner digital media ecosystem but that they’re thinking beyond that goal to focus on campaign effectiveness. One of their priorities is the balance between digital reach and efficiency.
“It’s great to know I have a clean supply chain. But the next step is to say am I maximizing the reach of my message to an audience,” says Fetters. “Am I capping frequency at a level that I want to, or is this just a strategy that’s not working for me?”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, BoA SVP for customer engagement and investment officer Lou Paskalis explains the change the company has made.
“We have taken a hard look at how our investment lays out,” Paskalis says. “We have engineered a return to a little bit more reliance on traditional.
We are in a lifelong relationship with our customers, and we have many more touchpoints in the digital world than we do in other forms of media, so we are never going to move away from it.
“But, as walled gardens become more and more central in people’s lives, we are going to have make choices between going where the audience is, and doing things that are really accountable toward our investment, and for our shareholders.”
In the last year, advertisers and publishers alike have grown concerned about the dominance of two internet’s two biggest platforms, and the way that some ad-tech vendors withhold vital data for campaign assessment.
At the ANA Masters Of Marketing event, P&G chief marketer Marc Pritchard, who arguably kick-started advertisers’ fight-back in a seminal speech in January, spoke about providing consumers with more useful, valuable ad messages.
And Paskalis explained the rationale behind Bank Of America’s strategy shift.
“As a lifelong media person, we have principles that we actually live by -,” he said
“If I lived by just those two principles, I would be in massive conflict right now, because the audience is clearly on these walled garden platforms like Facebook and Google, but I’m not in a clean, well-lit (advertising) environment.
“I am not able to really see if the media is performing the way that I need to understand it. I am not able to understand those data signals that are coming off, so that I can curate more relevant experiences, not just within the confines of Facebook and Google, but across the digital world.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>But now a concerted effort has helped overcome one of the key challenges – according to a cross-industry program established to tackle the problems.
“We have turned the corner on acts of omission,” according to Mike Zaneis, president of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a non-profit umbrella through which 400 companies are working on the issues, referring to those outfits which simply ignored the threat.
“Companies just turning a blind eye to these is no longer happening at large scale because marketers and agencies won’t allow it. It’s too important.”
TAG was established two and a half years ago with a mission to fight criminal activity in the supply chain. It now has a membership across 26 countries.
In a study TAG published with E&Y this week, the group says anti-piracy steps taken by the digital advertising industry have reduced ad revenue for pirate sites by between 48 and 61 percent, calling it “notable progress against the $2.4 billion problem of infringing content”.
But the job is not done. Zaneis still sees a lingering problem in tackling actual ad fraud.
“What we still see is a massive problem with that fraud around the criminals that set out to defraud our industry of billions of dollars,” he tells Beet.TV. “It’s going to take more action to identify and filter out this fraudulent non human traffic.
“Our goal is to put these folks behind bars.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>So it’s a bit ironic that brands’ best hope derives from a trend dating to the 1990’s: one-to-one marketing, but with a twist. “Storytelling is dead,” says Rajamannar, who is CMO & CCO of the financial services company. “It’s all about story making.”
Not that pursuing this strategy comes easy, Rajamannar explains in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
“Many of the CMO’s have bigger technology budgets than the CTO’s. And that really calls for a level of understanding,” he says before declaring that finding the marketing talent that is required these days “is going to be a nightmare.”
While one-to-one personalization became something of a fad in the 1990’s, there’s no reason why the concept won’t work today, according to Rajamannar. But there’s a hitch.
“Should we be focusing on advertising the way we always focused on advertising at all? Whether it’s one-to-one or one-to-many, consumers are telling you ‘I don’t want your stupid ads. I want my uninterrupted experience.’”
As evidence, he points to the continued rise of ad-blocking software, with some 200 million active users at the end of 2016. By the first quarter of 2017, this had increased by about 25 million, driven in part by manufacturers preloading the software into their devices.
“So as a consumer, with two clicks you block the marketers form your interface altogether.”
It gets worse when one factors in services like Netflix, with nearly 100 million users. “That’s millions of hours of viewability that’s gone,” Rajamannar says.
About four years ago, Mastercard pivoted to experiential marketing. One example from early 2017 was its campaign for the Grammy Awards that included an experiential record store and interactive music experiences for fans who unlocked special offers via a $1 Masterpass purchase, as RetailDIVE reports.
“Give experiences to consumers which are memorable, which are positive, which are maybe once in a lifetime. Then they will tell the story of the brand to their circles. They become your brand ambassadors.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>“It forced us to raise the bar even higher on ad creativity,” says P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard.
As a result, the company is moving deeper into one-to-one marketing and “the next generation of brand building,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
With greater visibility into viewability and verification, P&G found that the average ad was being viewed in some social media feeds for less than two seconds. But the company was serving 30-second ads.
“So we said, ‘we need to make sure these ads work in two seconds.’”
P&G also was serving digital ads with too much frequency, “so we needed to be able to deal with that through things like programmatic.”
Now, innovation and consumer targeting have taken center stage for the packaged-goods giant. “We want to really find the next generation of ads and it’s moving us very quickly into mass one-to-one marketing,” says Pritchard.
As examples he cites work for Pampers, along with the futuristic Oral-B Genius electric toothbrush and the Olay Skin Advisor platform. These are not campaigns slated for mass, mixed audiences.
“Because we have consumer ID data, now we’re able to target specifically,” says Pritchard. “We’re going to give you something that’s useful to you when you need it and where you need it and not serve something to you when you don’t.”
Asked about targeting the right consumers across various digital platforms, Pritchard says “it remains to be seen” whether it can be accomplished. For now, platform-by-platform targeting capabilities are very effective.
“But at minimum, we’re able to do it within a platform like an Alibaba in China, which allows us to be able to use their consumer ID data and then be able to serve somebody an ad when they have a higher propensity to buy. The same thing is happening in Amazon.”
Pritchard and P&G have become standard bearers in the push for gender equality. Besides being the right thing to do, it’s good for everyone’s business objectives.
“With equality comes better society, but it also drives better growth because with economic equality it actually injects money and purchasing power into the market,” Pritchard says. “That’s good for everybody because when markets grow everybody grows.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>That $100 million “was just part of that effort where what we found is there was not enough assurance that our ads weren’t going to show up in the wrong place. We did not want our ads showing up in anything associated with violence, bigotry or hate,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
“Since we couldn’t be assured of that, we pulled the money.”
Two reasons why P&G has been so adamant about cleaning up digital media stems from its inherent waste and fraud, according to Pritchard.
“Part of that is the maturity of the ecosystem. Now that it’s 200 billion dollars it was time to make sure that it’s cleaned up,” he says.
P&G teamed up with, among others, the ANA and the Media Ratings Council to focus on digital ad viewability, verification of ad delivery, anti-fraud and brand safety.
The company cut some of its estimated $2.4 billion in annual ad spending to reduce digital ad waste and “invest in doing what really matters, which is better advertising and better innovation,” Pritchard says. “It was kind of a pretty big move, but it paid out because we still grew, we still delivered our objectives.”
In addition to digital media, P&G also cited cuts to agency and production spending that lead to a quarter-over-quarter profit margin boost of nearly one percent in the fourth quarter, as ADWEEK reports.
P&G has four main expectations for its partners in digital advertising, according to Pritchard: delivering data show ad viewability, third-party verification of audience reach, assurance that P&G ads aren’t being served to bots and, finally, “make sure they can assure us that our ads are going to show up where we want to place them, not in terrorist videos.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
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