We spoke with her last month at Cannes in Color event, immediately following a session featuring Proctor & Gamble’s marketing chief Marc Pritchard who implored to group to make aggressive moves to diversity in the management ranks of the marketing business.
Coleman is a board member of I.D.E.A Initiative, the group that organized Cannes in Color program. In this interview, she explains a key goal of the I.D.E.A. group to is place woman and people of color in C-suite and board positions in media, technology and advertising companies.
This video is part a series of interviews with members of the I.D.E.A. Initiative produced at Cannes Lions 2018, at the Cannes in Color event hosted by Spotify and P&G. This series is sponsored by true[X]. Please find more segments on this page.
]]>After the session, we sat down with Spotify’s Danielle Lee who reflected on Pritchard’s commitment to advocacy in the face of controversy. Lee is Global Head of Partner Solutions. Spotify c0-hosted the Cannes in Colors event at the Spotify beach complex at Cannes.
Lee is a board member of I.D.E.A Initiative, the group that organized Cannes in Color program. In this interview, she explains a key goal of the I.D.E.A. group to is place woman and people of color in C-suite and board positions in media, technology and advertising companies.
This video is part a series of interviews with members of the I.D.E.A. Initiative produced at Cannes Lions 2018, at the Cannes in Color event hosted by Spotify and P&G. This series is sponsored by true[X]. Please find more segments on this page.
]]>Reasons for the variations include corporate financial “short-termism,” thinking in narrow silos and measuring campaign performance in ways that aren’t always the most accurate or pertinent.
The panel by media agency Wavemaker was moderated by Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. It brought together Peter Naylor, Hulu’s SVP of Advertising Sales, Twitter’s Managing Director of Media & Entertainment, Jennifer Prince, and Jacqueline Corbelli, the Founder, Chairman & CEO of BrightLine.
Citing Forrester research showing that not all consumers love or hate advertising, O’Connell posited, “My suspicion is that marketers don’t understand this at all.”
Hulu’s research has revealed “a spectrum of ad acceptance,” responded Naylor. “On one extreme end are people who are ad avoiders at all costs. The trap people fall into is that everybody avoids ads at all costs, and that’s just not true.”
According to Naylor, among those who sign up for Hulu on any given day, “The wide majority will take advertising.”
On Twitter, brand marketers “expect to hit consumers because eighty two percent of our users expect to see a message from a brand,” said Prince. Another thing she believes differentiates Twitter is that its advertising is “extremely native, it’s within the timeline and a tweet and so there’s not as much of a separation between ads and content, there is this blend.”
Given its “leaned-in, receptive audience,” Twitter does see marketers thinking a lot about consumers and the consumer journey, according to Prince.
Brightline has taken its cue from the desire of consumers to bring together their experiences with premium video and other content, said Corbelli. Giving credit to Hulu as an innovator, she explained that Brightline got involved “when we started noticing folks like Roku and streaming consoles like Sony PlayStation were vehicles for actually bringing these two things together.”
As for consumer ad tolerance, Corbelli believes “absolutely that viewers will not just tolerate but I think that in certain cases they’ll even embrace advertising. I think the personalization piece of this is really big. Things as simple as geo location and being able to personalize the dialogue a little bit.”
Again citing research, O’Connell pointed out how “highly variable” consumers are in their opinions of personalization. While some “super- progressive,” digital savvy people are “totally okay with personalization in exchange for something useful to them,” other super-progressives “are absolutely opposed to it.” O’Connell’s bottom line: Don’t assume we should always use technology in a certain way.
Naylor coined the term “short-termism” when asked about the barriers to widespread if not uniform adoption of approaches to advertising that do not repeat mistakes made early in the digital media world. “I think short-termism is a real problem when publicly traded companies have to lead ninety-day by ninety-day existences. When CMO’s are so nervous that they continually pout their accounts into review,” Naylor said.
Another symptom is “whatever you can measure you measure, irrespective of whether it’s the right thing to measure,” for example the “rush to last-click attribution and you lose sight of what drove the demand and you only give credit to the last click,” Naylor added.
Explaining Twitter’s approach to test-and-learn, Prince acknowledged that some features it’s rolled out have not been without controversy. “Like when we went from 140 characters to 280 characters and there were a few haters. Maybe more than a few. It has really done wonders for those who need more space to communicate.”
Corbelli pointed to the disparity among the top TV networks, each of which see things from their own, individual perspective and act accordingly. “They all are thinking about this directionally the same, but in terms of how they execute on it, pretty different. And they want to stay in charge of those decisions. So I think that for now, the experience in terms of personalization is going to vary depending on what content you’re watching, where and when.”
]]>That kind of consensus is forming, with executives promising to rebalance the audience relationship through better messaging.
Still, even as the industry looks to correct itself, it is also challenged to respond to the omni-channel demand – the reality that brands now need to engage with consumers across a wide variety of devices and touchpoints.
The Catch-22? As a Beet.TV panel moderated by Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell discussed, the solution to omni-channel is all about… technology.
The panelists lamented that technology capabilities have led the industry toward simply using tech for tech’s sake, bamboozling consumers with advertising – and prompting a backlash…
Essence president Jason Harrison: “It still is really amazing to me the number of advertisers and marketers that pour money into advertising without a really concrete understanding of what actually works. Technology is way ahead … whether the technology is working or not working, if it’s being used for good or for bad.”
Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell: “We have this habit of saying, ‘Because the tech exists, we should do this thing. Because I can personalize, I always must. Because I can target, I will only target the people I think I care about – until they hate me’.”
Adobe SVP and GM of Advertising Cloud Keith Eadie: “The metrics have followed the technology platforms … but not nearly to the point where we’re creating experiences and understanding how different audiences or individuals are reacting to that advertising and adjusting accordingly. We’ve given all of these marketers a hammer and then everything’s looked like the nail and the last 10 years has been about mass tonnage of advertising … it’s not surprising, given that context, of the outcomes we have now in terms of receptivity to advertising from our consumers.”
Panelists debated how the way to solve matters was be reconnecting with message, by turning attention to using data to fuel more creative stories that reach audiences, not just for targeting.
Essence president Jason Harrison: “If you look at consumers’ expectations of what they see in terms of advertising, what’s rising fastest is, ‘I want something that’s relevant’. But there’s still a big gap in the way that I think creative storytelling happens in advertising. The next frontier of advertising is, ‘How do we get that right?'”
Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell: “We see in the data that some consumers are totally okay with personalized advertising, because they feel like they’re getting some value. Others are really, super not cool with it.”
IBM VP digital strategy and sales Jordan Bitterman: “You’ve got to be able to build for something that you know can scale. There’s a lot of great formats that are out there – but there’s a lot of clients that don’t want to spend that kind of money to build those different kind of ads out unless they know it can scale because. at some point, the wallet dries up and there’s only so much they can do. I think the same is true for omni-channel.”
IBM VP digital strategy and sales Jordan Bitterman: Bitterman left panelists with two predictions for how the industry will reconfigure itself to meet these challenges:
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>Sky is the UK’s leading pay-TV provider, whose AdSmart was one of the world’s first and biggest addressable TV services. Finecast is GroupM’s agency aiming to be a single point of access to buy inventory across multiple UK TV platforms and operators, including Sky.
In this Beet.TV discussion panel, Sky advanced advertising group director Jamie West and Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen say addressable TV won’t kill linear – but could soon gobble the majority of TV ad spending.
EY global advisory leader for media and entertainment Janet Balis led the discussion…
West and Nielsen said they have numbers to prove how addressable TV advertising works.
Sky’s West: “In ad breaks where there is an addressed client, channel switching … reduces by more than a third. that means more relevance or engaged audiences, and that’s a win for the advertiser; that’s a win for the consumer.”
Finecast’s Nielsen: “Advertisers today are starting to struggle just to get their reach across in the linear environment. Wherever you are in the world, linear is declining. Ten years ago the way we watched TV was in front of a box. We didn’t have distractions as we have today. If you are an advertiser and there are too many distractions for you that’s not going to work.”
The future will not be wholly on-demand. Whilst addressable can drive brands’ business, there will still be a role for traditional TV, the pair said…
Sky’s West: “I don’t think that linear TV is dead. What a marketeer is trying to do when they use TV is build brand fame. You will still do that using TV, whether it be on-demand or through linear. Addressable makes TV more relevant; it allows you to customize the message; it allows you to understand, household-to-household, the efficacy of your campaign, which means that you can optimize, prioritize and sequence campaigns through that process.
Finecast’s Nielsen: “We don’t think addressable TV will be 100% (of TV ad spend). We think traditional, live, linear TV is very, very important. You still have an tremendous amount of clients that needs to keep investing in their brands and do the reach. The small companies can disrupt your business very, very much if you forget to invest in your brand.”
Sky’s West: “I have a very clear line of sight to getting to 65, 70 percent household penetration for addressable by 2020. That is sort of market-leading or world-leading in terms of household penetration.”
West and Nielsen said it is challenging to drive adoption when brands are thinking short-term. West said the benefits are clear to brand sat the start, it’s just institutional adoption that needs education…
Finecast’s Nielsen: “Today companies are unfortunately becoming more and more short-sighted; there’s more and more pressure on P&Ls; there’s a tremendous amount of disruption in the market, whatever industry you are in, (your value) could replicated if you don’t have a powerful band. Clients are more and more focused on the short-term. I think that’s a really, really dangerous trend. I think we are doing what we can to kind of keep educating.”
Sky’s West: “What we’ll see is that the market will coalesce around a common standard and common goals, and that’s when you’ll really see addressable go from being whatever percent it is of the market today to being the numbers that Jacob talks about. Forty or 50% (of TV ad spend) is eminently achievable, in my mind.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>Kantar has been collaborating with the ANA to “make sense of all the changes that are happening at marketing organizations” around the world and come up with “some real levers that they can pull that we know have effect and go beyond somebody’s view of what works but actually is data-backed,” says the CMO of Kantar Consulting, Marc de Swaan Arons.
Marketing2020 is led by Kantar Vermeer in partnership with the ANA, Spencer Stuart, Forbes, MetrixLab and Adobe, as well as the World Federation of Advertisers and its organizations in China, Brazil, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, and France.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Arons talks about the impact of changes in consumer behavior and media fragmentation. “What we’re seeing is that there is growth, but it’s moving to very uncomfortable places for most of the established players,” he says.
Within consumer packaged-goods, known as FMCG in Europe, 90% of the growth over the last five years “has actually been driven by people outside the top 25. In other words, there is growth but it’s being pulled in by other players.”
Big, established companies are finding that their traditional models for marketing and sales are much less relevant in a world where consumers are choosing very personalized solutions and media is fragmenting, according to Arons.
“Our program is a research study that aims to give marketing and business leaders real practical tools” by January of 2019. The study will explain how growth over-performers differ in how they define growth “but also how they build growth strategy, organize for growth and how they build the new capabilities and combine those with the traditional capabilities of marketing and business.”
Early insight from 50 of about 500 interviews with business executives that will be conducted worldwide shows an evolving role for marketing. In the past it was the brand captain. Over the last few years, marketing “evolved into a role of almost the purpose coach, the marketing coach within the organization. Bringing alive the brand purpose, delivering solutions to consumers.
“We see a next step, which is really required, is for the marketers to evolve into the mindset of business owners. It’s all about now what drives growth in a business sense. What drives bottom and topline growth. What drives personal growth for your staff and how do we recruit the best people. It’s much more of an owner mindset.”
By moving from captain to coach to owner, “that’s when you have the invitation in the boardroom to really be a peer. If marketers are seen to be playing with brands with different metrics rather than the hard business metrics that everybody else on the board works with, they’re not part of the team and they’re not part of driving real growth strategy,” says Arons.
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>Nielsen is about to launch its marketing cloud services in Israel and Australia, where the company is a data provider to joint industry committees for currency measurement services.
“Essentially, in Australia it’s very hard for any marketer who’s looking to make some decisions and who’s looking for the transparency that they need for those decisions to not bump into Nielsen data in every single step of their process,” Petra says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
In Hong Kong, Petra cites the example of a broadcaster whose assets span print, online, offline and addressable that wanted a total audience solution.
“What we’ve really done is we’ve taken every data asset we have, from the TV audience measurement and online census measurement, we do mobile measurement, Homescan panel and added that to the broadcaster’s OTT and subscriber data,” she says.
“But I think what’s really amazing about the Hong Kong project is that the broadcaster is actually now inviting marketers to actually onboard their data too. And so they really are powering an ecosystem of complete transparency with advanced segments defined by the marketers planned on, forecast on and eventually paid for.”
Outside of the U.S., in many instances markets are organized either through “very formal joint industry committees or, at the very least, through technical committees that we liaise with,” Petra adds.
“We work very closely with these joint industry committees and technical committees, to define standards, to report back on our performance against those standards. And so we really work on the presumption that the marketer is guaranteed of quality because the entire industry has bought into the common standard and common currency that we’re producing.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>These are among the takeaways from a panel discussion at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. It brought together representatives from OMD, Nissan, true[X] and Wavemaker led by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman likened the current wave of video ad format experimentation to the early days of digital media. While there were potentially innovative solutions, they came at such a pace that “you really didn’t get the time to absorb the learnings and focus. So it just became another version of spray and pray with new ad formats,” Richman said.
Her advice to the audience: “You want to choose your partners wisely. Because there is the potential risk right now where there’s a new-ad format fatigue, where everyone is coming out with different formats.”
Alternately, having worked with true[X], Richman suggested focusing on “learnings across a few different formats, understand the measurement, understand the operational impact all the way through billing, because that’s what really matters too when it comes to scaling solutions.”
true[X] President Pooja Midha said that engagement ads only belong in front of truly premium and compelling content, so as to offer a real value exchange. “We’ve done some incredible work with Nissan where we’ve gotten to talk about both a new model, the LEAF, as well as Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time. That’s a lot to get across even in a 30, but when you’ve got this rich canvas you can really go deeper and I think that’s what engagement is all about.”
Allyson Witherspoon, who heads up Global Brand Engagement at Nissan, would like to add value-based ad measurement to the industry’s standard measurement metrics.
“Lead generation is a big thing in automotive, but that may not be the most important metric for an individual experience,” said Witherspoon. “So you have to look at it by experience. If we keep measuring agencies and media performance based on the last several decades, we’re never really going to advanced what we need to do.”
Asked by Spiegel “What do we have to do to be here next year or the year after and this becoming commonplace?,” OMD’s John Osborn said the industry has a habit of productizing new things and then trying to force fit them into legacy measurement. “And the two don’t always meet,” said Osborn. “I think that we need to figure out different ways of looking at different measurement systems that are matched to the types and formats that are coming out faster than ever before.”
One challenge with emerging ad formats is that “everyone’s kind of trying to attack it, but they’re all in their own swim lanes and I think we need to come together. It’s got to be intentional and deliberate and I think we collectively need to come together to tackle it. I don’t think any one party alone can do it,” Osborn added.
Richman described the role that marketer procurement people play in innovation as “huge.” They can either allow spending in new ways “or they can control and say, ‘no it’s year after year, it’s like for like.’ And you’re going to be judged only by the money that you save, which tends to lead just to measurement only being by the CPM cost.
“Until we bring them into the conversation, it feels like we’re still going to have this logjam of only so much money can be spent on innovation because we’re not being judged by anything but pricing,” said Richman.
Witherspoon has made progress on that front because procurement at Nissan has been open to new ideas. “That was kind of the aha moment for me is that they’re actually kind of dying for this innovation as well because they’ve been doing the same thing over and over again they don’t know any different. They were really open to it.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Now, it seems, they want to kick it up in to the next gear.
Last year, Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes the next phase.
‘Not waiting’
“We’ve been in market seven, eight months with a platform that essentially does very little … but that is not where it’s ending,” he says.
“What more can we do around planning? What more can we do around, ‘Well, I have an advanced audience; what if I want to plan against that, what if I want to buy against that?’ It’s really about ‘What do we do next?’, not ‘Where do we stop?’
“This is why we have developers. We were waiting and we were waiting for companies or ad tech to try and solve this for us, and I think what happened is when we got together and we looked at the problem, we said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna go develop a bespoke solution that is going to solve some of the foundational elements.'”
Brands ‘thirsty’ for more
That was something welcomed by a brand marketer on the panel. L’Oreal SVP Nadine McHugh said “working together is a step in the right direction”.
“We need scale,” McHugh said. “I don’t think TV any time soon is ever going to go away. We need you guys to evolve into the future in a meaningful way. We definitely want more targetability.”
Like Gordon, McHugh said L’Oreal hadn’t been sitting on its hands, waiting for technology to be invented to serve its goals.
“We’ve been trying to push ourselves forward while we waited for the industry,” she said, telling Gordon: “So, you should get some of us involved to … during the plumbing stage, so that we can move faster when you’re ready to launch some of these new things because we’ve been thirsty, and we’ll drink faster if we’re in it with you.”
Tech ‘not ready’
Another TV company, NBCUniversal, said the technology “is not there yet” and would take a couple more years.
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said: “We have the ability now to create incredible segments in OpenAP. It’s come a long way but it’s not quite there yet.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Such was the case at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity when Marchese was interviewed on stage by Dave Clark, GM of Comcast’s FreeWheel, as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.
Never one to mince words, Marchese described the complexity of trying to figure out just how many commercials a given consumer is willing to watch on a given platform and how sellers like Fox should price newly emerging ad formats.
What’s not complicated is the silent clock ticking in the background for an industry that is known to advance in capsulized increments, according to Marchese.
President of Advertising Revenue at Fox Networks Group, Marchese was blunt about “what sucks” about television. “TV and advertising have been for so long negotiating with each other and they didn’t have to worry about a third party in the negotiation. Building a business model for consumers first, that’s what’s different,” Marchese said.
“Why does anybody like you?” asked Clark.
“I’m not sure anyone does. I say what other people I think are thinking, I hope,” Marchese responded.
The ticking clock analogy refers to the two or three years he estimates might pass “before you start to see massive, tectonic shifts in how viewers behave.”
Clark: “Is there a simple way to think about the amount of advertising that consumers will accept?”
“It’s variable,” said Marchese. “The real problem is we haven’t even gotten to how complex it’s actually going to be.”
Since consumers are not “some giant, homogenous group of people” but individuals who value their time differently at different times, “I think we have to have a test and learn approach to what’s intrusive and what isn’t.”
That approach will reveal that there is content people are willing to endure ads to access “and there’s content people won’t sit through ads to get,” Marchese said. “Google’s already doing this in a lot of places. On YouTube, not everyone sees the same ad load. I think TV has to get a little bit smarter about when and where.”
Asked by Clark whether advertisers are willing to pay more for exclusivity in a commercial break, Marchese said “They have and they are” while noting that Fox’s two-ad JAZ pods “sold out early in the Upfront.”
Nonetheless, there’s no easy formula at this point for exactly how much to charge because marketers in certain categories might be willing to pay more, according to Marchese.
“The real problem is, saying what are they worth or how much more is so relative to who buys it. And so until these things are out there and the market can get set, we don’t know how much more yet.”
As a founder of engagement-ad pioneer true[X], a startup that Fox acquired for approximately $200 million, surely Marchese has some advice for TV networks, said Clark.
“Be prepared to work in chaos, things are going to change,” said Marchese before explaining that companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix are in the video space “because they want to be the operating system for peoples’ lives, but people choose their operating system based on where the best stories are.”
Citing FX, Clark asked whether the highly awarded network holds lessons for other networks. Marchese said it was among the first to abandon the model of producing cheap programming in bulk to fill a 24-hour schedule. This helps to explain why when it comes to Emmy and Golden Globe awards, the most have gone to HBO, Netflix and FX, “and only one of those still sits on a cable-operated system, ad-supported,” Marchese said.
Asked by Clark whether he’s worried when he sees people like Shonda Rhimes leaving ABC and Ryan Murphy exiting Fox to join up with Netflix, Marchese said Ryan indicated that interruptive ads weren’t his main motivation.
“Shows had to be exactly 42 minutes and the episodes had to have exactly these arcs,” Marchese observed. “Then you add in the fact you’re scheduling to a clock that has ads in very particular breaks. When they add a new break, they actually have to add a new act to the show and that’s a lot of actual work and creativity.”
On a positive note, Marchese said that when Fox announced its JAZ pods, Seth McFarland said he wanted them for the entire season of The Orville. “That’s a creator being excited about a better ad system,” said Marchese.
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>CAA-GBG’s clients include companies as Coca-Cola, Hershey’s and Cheesecake Factory, as well as artists Jennifer Lopez, Eva Longoria, Kelly Ripa, Kate Hudson and Cristiano Ronaldo, among other lifestyle brands and entertainment companies.
Bracken-Feguson joined CAA earlier this year.
We spoke with her last month at Cannes Lions after the much talked about Cannes in Color event on racial diversity organized by the I.D.E.A. Initiative.
This video is part a series of interviews with members of the I.D.E.A. Initiative and others involved with diversity movement, produced at Cannes Lions 2018, at the Cannes in Color event hosted by Spotify and P&G. This series is sponsored by true[X]. Please find more segments on this page.
]]>Garbaccio, EVP, Advertiser Direct & Marketing Cloud, is working with Sony Crackle and much of its connected TV inventory to better monetize it with addressable programmatic targeting. Nielsen and other data are used to transact on media that’s owned and operated or exclusively operated by Crackle.
“What we see the DMP as really is connective tissue between data assets and measurement assets, with the brands being directly in the middle,” Garbaccio says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “If you want that connective tissue to work and to be valuable for the brand, you need the best data that exists. Transaction-based data, census-based, owned and operated exclusively through Nielsen, and you need to be able to then activate and measure that.”
Advertisers will now be able to reach specific audiences across Sony Crackle content as well as the Sony Crackle Plus Network, including Funimation and Sony Pictures Television Mobile Games. With Nielsen AI, Sony Pictures Television will be able to optimize addressable audiences based on real-time changes in consumer behavior on behalf of its clients, according to a news release announcing the deal between Sony and Nielsen Marketing Cloud.
The Nielsen DMP “allows you to see the data but then also see it as the campaigns run, and get closed-loop feedback. That feedback allows you then to measure and optimize those campaigns. So it’s really an end-to-end cycle that really our DMP allows us to do,” says Garbaccio.
His way of simplifying the semantics of what constitutes connected-TV or OTT viewing is to view it simply as media. “It’s a new, different type of media just like mobile was, back in the day display, and even linear TV. We’re not there yet, but I want a world of when you create audiences, whether with first or third party data, and push them out for targeting or activation.”
It should be viewed as “one centralized ID that can be across all media. So we see connected TV or over the top television as no different,” Garbaccio adds. “It’s just right now is very early, the scale is not there like it is potentially in linear TV or even mobile. But we think that it’s going to be there and you need that underlying ID and that technology in order to make any of those things happen.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>But until recently, data from those cards has taken a back seat to the traditional buying and selling of TV ad inventory. According to Nishat Mehta, President of IRI’s Media Center of Excellence, the industry had been on a trajectory that simply wasn’t sustainable.
“The notion of accountability starts with making sure that the consumer was receiving what we thought was best for them, and then second that what we think is best for them is actually based on accurate knowledge of who that consumer is,” Mehta says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “And I think we had been following a path where neither of those was really being met. That ultimately leads to a consumer who is angry at the advertising industry and ultimately will shut us off.”
Mehta considers the new European Union GDPR initiative to be a “multi-year effort to clean up the industry” and the challenges of Facebook and other digital companies as paving the way for needed changes. Namely, to take lessons from digital targeting and bring them to TV.
“We believe very strongly in the notion of optimizing linear TV,” he says.
And while he’s hardly the first to suggest that age/gender demos for TV targeting are past their prime, IRI is offering “a set of capabilities focused around data and accurate data to the market that allow television to now be bought on sold on what people actually do rather than what we think they do.”
This is where data from the nearly 400 million loyalty cards come in, representing about 110 million households. “We have significant penetration across virtually every household in the U.S. about the types of products that they actually purchase in the physical world,” says Mehta.
Asked to summarize his Cannes experience, he thinks it’s shifting more toward adtech and “a little bit away from the actual advertisers. I hope that’s not a trend we see going forward. I hope we do see some balance coming back.
“I think we need to continue to remind ourselves who we work for. At the end of the day, it’s the consumer represented by the advertiser and if we don’t watch out we’ll lose track of that.
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Witherspoon was one of four panelists who discussed new video ad formats and how creative and media agency professionals are working more closely together to build stories relevant to specific audiences. It was one of several discussions at Cannes under the auspices of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.
Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink kicked things off by asking “How much more will you pay for a non-standard ad?”
Responded true[X] President Pooja Midha, “It’s how much more will you pay for impact. Non-standard, who cares?”
That’s where things got complicated, as Witherspoon explained. “It’s difficult, because sometimes you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. Within this campaign or within each kind of percentage of always on, what amount of that is going to be something that you’re going to be testing.”
Which is where Nissan’s “pilots” come in and how testing is needed to help change the thinking within procurement. “Once you take the results from that, how do you actually start to scale that? I think that’s when you can start to advance the financial discussion, once you’re able to show that impact across, in the case of Nissan, all of our models, across all of our markets, that’s a very powerful discussion to have,” said Witherspoon.
Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman said the test-and-learn approach also needs an activation plan. “So as you’re presenting a learning road map, you actually can say, ‘if this works we’re going to scale immediately.’ We’re not going to wait and have another committee meeting, it’s not going to be three months. Turn on a dime and then roll on to the next test.”
Along the way, people on both the creative and media side need to come together more than ever, said John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA, because media plans traditionally have been built in a process wherein storytelling has been relegated to creative agencies.
“There’s a gap in between, which is story building, and I think it’s amazing what happens when you get tight teams sitting together, working together from the onset, as opposed to the traditional iterative process where sometimes media comes in late in the game,” Osborn said.
He described the process with Nissan, TBWA and OMD “literally welded together at the hip, working on which types of data will better inform the right kinds of storytelling.”
true[X] does real-time creative optimization for Nissan as it simultaneously measures real-time brand lift. “We launch with one version of an engagement, and as we see the data coming back we’re able to actually build with Nissan and its agency a more elaborate version, or a version that lets you go deeper or let’s us hone in on what we see really lifting,” said Midha.
Spiegel wanted to know whether creative personalization is right for all brands, particularly the biggest ones with the widest target audiences.
“One of the things we’ve seen across the tens of thousands of engagements we’ve built is that strong, persistent branding, even for very, very well advertised brands, is really important in actually driving results for them,” Midha said.
Richman related that one of Wavemaker’s clients describes its target audience as “anyone with a mouth.” Still, such a brand might need to achieve relevance with a new generation of consumers or could be missing opportunities for frequency or selling across its whole portfolio.
“A level of personalization may not be one hundred segments, but looking it from the lens of two or three it will drive the business forward,” Richman said.
The panelists agreed that campaign measurement will continue to be one of the biggest challenges, given cross-platform content consumption. The fact that advertisers and publishers alike recognize this and want to change old habits, there are fundamental barriers that will take time to overcome.
“Right now, to launch anything, for example inside of CTV, which is such an important environment, it’s not one platform. It’s a bunch of different devices that are all built on different code bases. It’s not simple,” said Midha.
As the discussion shifted to things like total ratings points and sound media strategies, Osborn summed things up by observing “Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in the media jargon there’s a great brilliance in just thinking as a human would think.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the chief revenue officer of ad-tech firm SpotX explains that his company has seen a swing for its revenue mix toward OTT – but that is not the case uniformly.
“We’ve seen over the past few years, pretty heavy disruption, cord cutting, and consumer behavior beginning to shift toward these new viewing habits,” Buckley says.
“But, if you look at specific markets, like Germany or Japan, the OTT business hasn’t had that sort of turbocharged growth that we’ve seen in the US.
Last year, Ampere Analysis published figures showing how subscription OTT adoption had reached 84% of US households – more than twice the prevalence in the second-placed market, the UK (41%), and far more than trailing Germany (25%) or Japan (18%).
Ofcom ICMR: Global SVOD penetration, by @AmpereAnalysis. US nearing all households, 2x next-biggest market https://t.co/vkDe7uV1Ji pic.twitter.com/da9XSwoo4B
— Robert Andrews (@RobertAndrews) December 18, 2017
What is the reason the US is so far ahead? A stronger culture of free and linear consumption is one reason, Buckley explains.
He cites “the heavy penetration of free-to-air broadcasts where many folks in the population are actually not even paying for a TV”. “Ad loads (are) lighter,” he adds. “Instead of 14 minutes an hour, you’re seeing something like six minutes an hour.”
Still, what is true today may not be true tomorrow. Buckley, whose company merged with Smartclip earlier this year, says he anticipates the rest of the world may catch up.
“In the long run, especially among the younger generations, I feel like they’re growing pretty accustomed to the app ecosystem, the mobile ecosystem, and I think they’ll drive a similar change in markets around the world,” he explains.
Buckley says SpotX’s “third and newest pillar for the company” is data enablement – helping media companies activate their first-party data in the programmatic ecosystem.
]]>Several initiatives and companies are now trying to tackle that problem. But what will it really take for TV to become a “platform”?
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes his vision.
“If you think traditionally of Facebook, Google, even Amazon as the three large advertising platforms, advertising ecosystems, then what is it about television, this thing that’s been around for 50-plus years?,” he asks, before laying out the template: “I think it really comes down to three things…
Other executives on the panel responses to the idea.
Consumers See TV and Digital as Joined
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said right now we can’t really start thinking about it as ‘TV is a separate entity from digital from addressable’, because the consumer doesn’t care.”
She said consumers don’t see TV as a single environment, because these days they consume TV content anywhere, seamlessly.
Accept inconsistency
But the panel’s brand marketer, L’Oreal’s Nadine McHugh, was skeptical. Responding to Gordon’s wish that the TV makes it easy for brands to buy in a “consistent way”, she said: “When I hear ‘consistency’, I think it’s going to take 10 years to get it to where we need to go.
“It’s about where consumers want to consume video content. And they don’t care. We have to maybe be comfortable with being inconsistent within a consistency.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.,This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>Over the last year, businesses of all kinds have explored the potential it offers to record every action and modification in a distributed ledger.
Chad Andrews knows. “We did a joint venture with Maersk,” says the global solutions leader, advertising and blockchain, at IBM. “Just by digitizing the global shipping supply chain process, the World Trade Organization said that is deployed at scale, we’ll have a 5% overall impact on world GDP, which is about three and a half trillion dollars.”
For advertising buyers and sellers, who, over the last couple of years, have been plagued by the creeping realisation that much of their money is siphoned off by intermediary platforms without full disclosure, that could be mana from heaven. Blockchain could shine a spotlight on every fraction of a cent that might be taken by links in the chain.
“If you look at the media buying supply chain, it’s just wrought, particularly with digital inefficiencies,” Andrews adds. “We all know somewhere between 50 and 60+ cents can disappear between the advertiser and the publisher, and 75% of ads are viewed for less than a second.
“So it begs the question: ‘Is that money really going in the middle of the supply chain, really going to performance?’ The true answer is in many cases, we don’t know.”
With blockchain, IBM, and several other smaller companies also now offering blockchain-for-advertising solutions, aim to find out.
It used Cannes Lions to announce, with Mediaocean, what they are calling “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, with brands like Unilever, and Kimberly Clark and Kellogg.
Andrews says it is about “tracing the life cycle of the media, buy from budget to PO (purchase order) to authorization, to the deal from the publisher all the way through invoicing and payments”.
“Once we’ve established that in later phases, we’re going to start to look at the vendor supply chain and the costs that are being charged across the change in the effort to start optimizing media delivery,” he says.
The consortium will first be piloted. After announcing early brand partners, IBM will be announcing participating agencies and suppliers.
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>That may or may not be true, depending on your persuasion. But a 2018 intervention by new blockchain technology could at least improve the quality of agencies’ lives in the foreseeable future.
That was the hope of one big-brand marketer, excited about the prospect for how the infrastructure which underpins crypto-currency could bring a step-change in transparency to the advertising business, speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV.
The panelists were all members of “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain”, announced by IBM and Mediaocean at the Cannes Lions festival:
The theory goes that a blockchain – in this case, one powered by IBM’s existing open-source Hyperledger infrastructure and plugged in to technology from Mediaocean, which processes $140 billion dollars of ad spend on an annual basis – should enable traceability for how every fraction of a cent gets decided, apportioned and siphoned off in the ad supply chain. Pfizer and Kellogg are also members of the consortium.
Kimberly-Clark global director of integrated marketing, media, and analytics Josh Herman:
“My expectation is that it will be a quality of life improvement. The ease with which you can defend the spend improves your quality of life. The extent to which you have confidence about the numbers that you’re putting in front of the meeting to make actual business decision, improves your quality of life.”
Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise:
“A lot of companies who have fraud running through their businesses. I think we all, as an ecosystem, want to clean that up.
“Our agency partners who are forward-leaning and run transparent businesses are pushing for this. They also want to be involved. We announced the marketers (first) because, at the end of the day, it’s your guys’ money, but the ad agencies are going to also be big participants in the pilot as well and we’re working very collaboratively with them.”
Unilever global media VP Rob Master:
“We spend so much time now around the reconciliation, around massaging the data, trying to track down the data, waiting for things to come in before we can actually spend our full amount of money.
“(Blockchain) allows us to actually spend more time thinking about the consumer.”
IBM executive partner for global marketing for IBM’s iX division Babs Rangaiah:
“We think about this initiative, in baseball terms, as the very first inning. We want to be able to show transparency of the money. The second piece is the speed of reconciliation. Lastly, if we can show any amount of improvement in that percentage of money that gets (ad-)taxed … I think that would be considered a great success.”
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>“They are looking to us as change agents, as transformation stewards, to help them do that because they realize that it’s very difficult changing their own organization sometimes,” Ankeney says in this interview at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“And sometimes it’s actually easier to do it through the partnership with and the lens of an outside media agency partner. No place like Cannes to inspire that sort of thinking and conversations.”
Being accountable to clients’ business outcomes is “a huge challenge,” but having made transparency and data two priorities has paid admirable dividends to Havas as measured by account wins, according to Ankeney.
“For us, we focus on the meaningful data and the meaningful data is what we hold ourselves accountable to. It’s what supports the business challenges and business objectives of every client and that enables us focus on being accountable to our clients.”
Sometimes it’s a matter of leading clients to transformation. “They know they want it, they know they need it, they know that there’s concern there. Sometimes they need us to help them understand it.”
Others are “very advanced and very knowledgeable and they are pushing us, demanding from us that same thing. Luckily we’re of like minds when we get there so it’s a very easy conversation for us to have.”
With a background at such agencies as J. Walter Thompson, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Carmichael Lynch, Doner and Initiative, Ankeney has roots on the creative side but is more than happy to be engrossed in media.
“I love more focus on media because it means our role is becoming more meaningful with our clients and we can have more meaningful partnerships and relationships with our clients,” he says. “Whether it’s accountability or transformation or you name it, the more focus on media the better as far as I’m concerned.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>In America, marketing is now fully multicultural, and the industry has to follow with it its hiring and management, says Wolfe Pereria, echoing comments made by P&G CMO Mark Pritchard at the Cannes in Color program.
Wolfe Pereria is a board member of I.D.E.A Initiative, the group that organized Cannes in Color program.
This video is part a series of interviews with members of the I.D.E.A. Initiative produced at Cannes Lions 2018, at the Cannes in Color event hosted by Spotify and P&G. This series is sponsored by true[X]. Please find more segments on this page.
]]>That doesn’t seem about to change anytime soon judging from a one-on-one interview with Marchese, who is President of Advertising Revenue at Fox Networks Group, and Dave Clark, GM of Comcast’s FreeWheel, at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television, the discussion did point to some amount of certainty.
For example, the futures market for national TV inventory known as the annual Upfronts isn’t going away anytime soon, for the simple reason that it protects buyers from price increases the way airlines hedge their bets with oil futures. The process is also something of a comfort to sellers, particularly those with the most coveted (and limited) ad avails.
The search for unification among TV sellers came about because of the digital age, according to Marchese.
“What we’ve never had to compete on before was what the currency metric was because we had Nielsen. People could complain all day about Nielsen, but at least it was consistent for everyone who was trading on it,” Marchese said.
Digital media introduced cost-per-view pricing, but when TV tries to create a new product, “everyone’s like, ‘cool, how does that fit in with what I paid you last year?’ There’s just no consistency.”
Fox has been pushing hard to establish new ad formats while reducing overall commercial load, “But if we do it alone, it won’t matter. You can’t create a market and you can’t understand what the market price of anything is if there’s only one person doing it,” said Marchese.
Given the difficulty in pricing new ad formats in something approaching a consistent manner, the lack of a common market will sow pricing disagreement. “Until then, opinions will differ. And then depending on the creative, one of us is right and one of us is wrong.”
Clark noted that the industry is will run by people who have been at it for two or three decades and asked Marchese what leadership traits and characteristics are most important.
“We need to understand that we’re just used to fighting over things because that’s just the way it was done. We’re used to negotiating with agencies over every penny because that’s just the way it was done.”
Now, in some ways, everyone’s on the same side of the table. “We have the same goal, that we would like to not kill long-form storytelling as an advertising vehicle,” Marchese said.
Responding to a question from the audience about the long-term viability of the TV Upfront, Marchese said he doesn’t think it will die. “I actually think we just get better at predicting where the inventory is going to be.”
Between now and then, he believes the “dumb definition” of a CPM—an impression is an impression—will yield to something akin to the real estate market.
“We analyze real estate not just for the square footage but for where it’s located, what are the amenities, who are the neighbors. There’s a bunch of things we do.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“What we’re hearing from buyers and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says in this interview with Beet.TV in which he also discusses the early impact of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.
Another hot topic at Cannes was “what we politely call next Nielsen, and next Nielsen could involve Nielsen obviously, but sort of what’s next beyond age and demos,” he adds.
OpenAP is not yet one year old, having been announced by Fox, Turner and Viacom in March 2017 and activated that fall, so the current Upfront is its first. Earlier this year, NBCUniversal joined in, as did Univision.
“What we’re hearing from buyers, and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says.
He cites comments by, among others, OMD’s Chris Geraci—who was Prohaska’s boss at BBDO back in the day—to the effect that “there’s some usage there. But the real upside of being able to have proprietary data sets that you keep as a buyer or seller but be able to dip into this great pool and leverage these standards that have been worked on for awhile hasn’t fully been realized yet. I think there’s a lot of energy and excitement about trying to do that more while the legacy television and advanced television buyers and sellers sink their teeth into this marketplace.”
At the outset of Cannes, Prohaska heard of “a couple other” media that should be joining OpenAP in next couple of months, “and that’s all great. But not as much transactional, put to use on a campaign-by-campaign, brand-by-brand basis yet.
“We think we’re sort at that start of the hockey stick and hopefully next year this will become just become the way everyone does business in advanced television and we hope to be helping with a couple of our buyer clients and then one or two sellers maybe, we’ll see.”
GDPR has impacted the EU temporarily, but while many people still think of programmatic in traditional display mobile as sold by open auction, Prohaska says that’s not the case.
“Fortunately, what we’re seeing is a strong move to PMP’s in digital, strong move to deterministic versus probabilistic data strategy. As we’ve been saying for about a year, classic short-term pain for sure with a lot of organizations but long-term upside.”
Prohaska Consulting recently signed its 260th client in the company’s 230th week of business as it expands globally, with its publisher practice representing one-third, tech-one third, the buy-side 20% and the rest investors and trade groups. “Fortunately, that idea of kind of helping everyone move forward under the prism of client first and if we’re there to receive some thanks and compensation, great. It’s been paying off,” said Prohaska.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Essence president Jason Harrison says the roll-out of the omni-channel approach is still a mixed bag.
“Some are really good at it, where there is an experience that is very connected between touch points,” Harrison says.
He says some brands which reach people through app, website, advertising and products are doing so effectively. But that is not the view across the board.
“You see a lot of companies where you’ve got a head of digital, you’ve got a head of traditional, you’ve got an e-commerce and the three report to different places and maybe they collaborate, maybe they don’t,” Harrison laments.
“You know, I just think you’re set up for a situation where those things are bound to be not connected to one another.”
So how can brands finally think holistically on behalf of their audiences? Harrison recommends:
“Somebody could appear amazing in the advertising yet when you interact with that brand at a retail touch point or in a phone conversation or whatever, it’s a miserable experience, nothing, it doesn’t matter what happens in the advertising realm to over compensate for that,” he says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>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….”
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.
]]>