Amongst other stipulations, the European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) measures include:
The measures apply to any global company processing EU citizens’ data, with penalties of up to 4% of global turnover. Steps data handling and data processing companies should take include conducting risk assessments, appointing data protection officers and overhauling policies and systems.
So, with less than a year ticking on the compliance clock, how are advertisers and their agencies responding to the new regimen?
At a panel debate convened with Beet.TV, four agency data executives said GDPR compliance was a big deal, but they framed privacy regulation in the context of consumer aversion to “creepy” ad tactics generally…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“There are a couple of things (clients) probably miss on… an understanding that there is a true impact of what many of these regulations are, and how the EU and the US are not necessarily going to be in sync.
“(Clients) are not at the point where they’re willing to have a conversation around, ‘If someone’s giving me data, what am I giving in exchange?’ It’s going to get harder to justify bombarding consumers with impressions that they don’t need, just because you know who they are. Less is more. That is a far more fundamental shift that has the come – privacy is one part of it.”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser
“We have more conversations about how advertising can be relevant engaging without being creepy… there very rarely is (a breach of privacy). Part of our job as agencies is to ensure clients don’t find themselves getting sued for breaching privacy laws.
“Privacy is not an issue for our clients so much as following the law; that’s never been an issue – it’s more about … using data for good to make the consumer experience better.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray
“If we use some insight about an audience to personalise a communication … the trust is there because you’re using the data in a way that there’s a value exchange.
“As we start to use data across more parts of the agency and client, there’s an education that has to happen, so that people that haven’t necessarily been handling data previously and are now having data conversations know the implications and are trained on how to handle that data or send an email without being in breach.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“I think clients should own all their own ad-tech contracts, agencies should operate them, and they should be fully transparent.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The answer rests on delivery systems, according to Joe Marchese, President, Advertising Revenue, Fox Networks Group.
“The idea is, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you know who’s watching and, secondarily, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you can either change the ads or not change the ads?” Marchese said during a panel discussion by Comcast at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. “Last portion is, is it being delivered on demand or live?”
Additionally, he suggested separating content from delivery vehicle. This yields a definition of TV as “long-form storytelling, sports, news and information.”
To panelist Eric Johnson, EVP, Global Advertising Revenue at ESPN, behavior is a key component. People watch on average 63 of live sports, whether on a TV set or mobile phone. “The behavior looks the same. If they’re watching SportsCenter they’re watching for 15 minutes on a television or a mobile phone.”
Beyond definitions, the only thing that marketers should care about is the likelihood that their message was delivered, according to Marchese. The problem is “pricing mechanisms and the currency we trade on. So we can innovate on the format all we want but if we don’t change the currency, if we don’t change what success is, none of it matters.”
ESPN is moving to a Nielsen Total Live Audience metric this year, Johnson said in response to a question by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
“We’re seeing a 9 percent lift with young men in terms of streaming that’s not being counted by the current Nielsen measurement tool. I think it’s going to help immediately,” Johnson said.
Marchese would “love to have Nielsen measure 9 percent more audience” but wondered whether “I have to take the same ads that were in the linear TV environment and then put them into the place, that other 9 percent where I could do a digital ad where you could get a different ad from me? Is that the only way I’m going to get paid on that extra 9 percent?”
Johnson’s response: “We are passing through the commercials for the part that’s being measured by Nielsen and then we have another half that we’re dynamically ad serving, that we’re selling digitally, so to speak. So it’s a little bit of the best of both worlds.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We’re seeing a lot of that now with the Entertainment Lions, the awards for content and creativity, the Creative Data awards as well,” Haxby, who is Global Marketing Director, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Making waves is the responsibility of MEC’s WAVEMAKER unit, which uses data and analytics showing how consumers behave and how they buy to inform content creation. The goal is to figure out which points in consumer’s journies are the most valuable to particular marketers.
With “tons and tons” of data available to her teams, “Our job is to try to make sense of that and really glean the insights that come out of that data,” Haxby says.
MEC brings to the table its own research study—called MEC Momentum and running for several years now. Its purpose is to close gaps in understanding what buyers do during the purchase journey, how their perceptions of brands influence their behavior and how they make their choices.
“We’ve surveyed more than 350,000 people in 30 countries, 60 categories to look at how they go around the purchase journey. We use that data and blend it with our clients’ data to create really targeted messages at certain points throughout the purchase journey,” Haxby explains.
Knowing that MEC itself has audiences that it needs to reach, the agency is constantly evaluating its own presence on platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. “It’s a learning curve for us all, but we would be remiss if we didn’t do what we said our clients should be doing,” says Haxby. “We have to do it for ourselves.”
She references an MEC session at Cannes in which iHeart CEO Bob Pittman talked about the power of radio, a medium sometimes overlooked.
“Ultimately, 250 million people listen to radio in the U.S. every day, so that’s something we have to tap into. We forget sometimes that it’s another platform. It’s called podcasting now, but it’s still radio.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For many, that has meant a promotion for the executives who once ran outlier data divisions within an agency but who now are calling the shots.
What changes when that happens, and what have those people learned along the way? In this recorded panel discussion at Cannes Lions, four agency executives opened up. Here is what they said…
Brian Lesser, CEO, GroupM North America (previous: CEO, GroupM’s Xaxis):
“It’s a sign of the times that people with data, analytics, platforms backgrounds are now being put in a position to manage media agencies.
“For me, it’s a matter of making sure our agencies have appropriate platforms… make sure we are data-informed at every step along the way … activation across all channels.”
Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer, IPG Mediabrands (previous: president, IPG’s Cadreon):
“In this role, I’ve started to see the reality of the imbalance between planning and buying. Planning tools are activated by data sets which are still not quite where they should be.
“There are silos being created which are legacies from the past, you need to clean them to make some of the tech and systems work. That’s all I’ve been focused on for the last there of four months since starting the role.”
Doug Ray, product and innovation president, Dentsu Aegis Network (previous: CEO, Carat):
“I’ve always been on the planning, strategy and management side, not so much on the buying side. What has made great plans and strategies … is human insight, to have a deep understanding of customers. Clients are looking for the human truth, the insight to help them with better outcomes on their media.”
Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Hearts & Science (previous: CEO, Omnicom’s Annelect):
“We under-leveraged the audience creation and syndication side of it. The buying side of programmatic is actually the least important side of programmatic. The three most important sides… are the audience creation, syndication and also using some of the new ad-serving capabilities like an Innovid … to do the orchestration of the creative assets in the product.”
In this video interview with Beet.TV, ad agency Omnicom Digital CEO Jonathan Nelson defines AI, outlines how his company applies the tech, and casts a note of caution.
“AI’s been in our business for years – it’s just people are talking about it now,” Nelson says. “AI is all over our business, we’re working with all of our partners at Amazon and Google and we use (IBM) Watson,” some of the big sellers of cognitive services.
Nelson says AI is used to optimize media, produce advanced creative, perform image recognition and conduct deep data analysis, leading to more effective creative, better images, better text and better outcomes.
In our specific example, Omnicom’s Annalect division built a chatbot that, in a conversation with media planners, can find and speak back key facts from vast databases of consumer behavior.
“Chatbot helps media buyers, planners, data people… give(s) them insight in to all kinds of data… a chat text-like interface in to all of the data that’s in our networks,” he says.
But Nelson is respectful to growing concerns that increased automation will lead to lost jobs and that consumers may have greater privacy concerns over how their data is processed by AI algorithms.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>This was the view shared by representatives of MEC and Videology at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and moderated by Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink.
When MEC’s Global CEO, Tim Castree, considers TV and video convergence he’s less concerned with where it’s at than he is in the context for doing it, because context “is where the motivation comes from” for the industry to move faster.
“We are in a really consequential time for our industry. For agencies, it’s a jump ball whether we’re going to more relevant or less relevant five years from now,” said Castree.
The best hedge against a lack of relevance “is solving technologically the cross-screen convergence opportunity. I actually see it as a competitive imperative that we continue to solve this challenge.”
Asked by Spiegel why agencies should fixate on that particular challenge, Castree pointed to the sheer ad dollars brands invest in television and premium video inventory and the manner in which they do so. He says this inventory will always be traded principally in an upfront, futures manner, which lends itself to media agencies’ “trading scale and the role we play in the market as the market makers.”
Adding technology to achieve more advanced optimization would seal the deal, according to Castree.
“Obviously, Google, Facebook, Accenture are never going to be traders of the upfront commodity of television and premium video. So bringing those two things together gives us a unique hedge against what others are trying to do to us,” he said.
Videology’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said that Castree “nailed it in terms of his answer” and went on to list companies that are gradually invading the space that has long been the territory of agencies.
“The number of times we’re hearing names like Oracle and Accenture and PWC in conversations these days which we didn’t hear a year ago is incredible,” Jamboretz observed.
Spiegel opined that it’s not as if the more established media players like NBCUniversal, Viacom and Turner under AT&T are going away anytime soon.
“They are essential, they probably aren’t going anywhere, but they’re in the same fight we’re in,” said Castree.
For both the buy-side and sell-side, the rate of change needs to increase dramatically, regardless of what has already taken place, he added.
“We’ve had a massive rate of change in our business in the last five years. But if the rate of change in our business for the next five years looks like the last five, we will have fallen behind,” Castree said.
Meanwhile, on the the sell side, “The more complex and advanced guys are saying, ‘How do I use this to stitch together all my distribution points into a converged offer,’” said Jamboretz.
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So it was when Comcast presented a panel at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity featuring Amplifi US’s Lucas Cridland, Magna’s David Cohen and David Penksi of Publicis Media Exchange. Moderated by Matt Spiegel of MediaLink, the discussion tended to underscore the reality that while agencies would like to move faster on their clients’ behalf, many aspects of measurement just take time to coalesce.
First the metaphors from Cridland, who is President of Amplifi US, with regard to measurement challenges. “A game of football or soccer isn’t as interesting without a referee,” said Cridland. “And for the moment we have different tools and different rules and different referees trying to adjudicate what is essentially the same game.” And there’s nothing wrong with different tools, Cridland added, noting that golfers use different clubs on different holes.
Cohen, who is President of Magna North America, said that agencies are always juggling “tradeoffs” from one platform to another and trying to understand the implications for clients.
“For lack of a better one, Nielsen DAR is a kind of equalizer for today,” he said. “We see today 30% of video consumption is not linear, going up to 40% by 2021. So this is a thing that is not going away, is growing.”
Penski, who is CEO of Publicis Media Exchange Americas, opined that his industry has a tendency to swing pendulums from one direction to another quite quickly. It’s not always a good thing, particularly regarding audience targeting—say, “Mothers who are exactly 33 years old, live in these two states with this many children. “We have a tendency to move far one way. There’s a line we need to draw. It goes back to scale. Sometimes what we’re doing now is going the other way.”
Asked by Spiegel why agencies seem to be wrestling with producing a great number of creative iterations, Penski gave them credit for what they have been able to achieve.
“Not that long ago, a marketer might do 6 to 20 ad spots and now it’s 600. The problem is we want 6,000. It’s improving and I think it’s moving almost as fast as the media side. I’ve definitely seen huge progress within the last two years,” said Penski.
When the discussion turned to walled gardens and the resources required to figure out and transact with them, Cridland said it just takes time. “Not all of our clients are saying you can have more resource to investigate this and fund it,” Cridland said. “Everybody believes that digital addressability is going to take labor and people out of the equation. At this moment in time, we’re nowhere near that because it’s increasingly complex.”
Asked whether Magna will embrace Facebook’s going Hollywood, Cohen said “Definitely” because it provides more opportunities to reach audiences at scale.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>When the world was betting on a Hillary win, Havas deployed what, like large tech firms, it is now calling its “cognitive” technologies, on 15 million news articles, candidates’ speeches and a billion social posts by 10 million US voters.
“The platform was predicting a Trump win even two to three weeks before the election,” Havas global head of marketing innovation Jason Jercinovic tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We were mystified. What came out of that was how Donald was doing that – he was targeting voters that had been switched from voting for Obama (using) very sophisticated targeting and pushing material to them to cause them to think in a certain way.”
Jercinovic’s crystal ball partly relied on topic classification technology from IBM Watson’s suite of cognitive APIs. Havas deployed the findings in an election-night special show by the UK’s ITV News.
Now Havas is building the platform in to an offering its calling Eagle.Ai, for determining the outcomes and key issues of other elections.
But, for Jercinovic, Eagle.Ai’s findings have actually given cause for concern – about the technology now available to both politicians and advertisers alike. The practices of Cambridge Analytica have concerned some observers.
“You can predict the future, outcomes, even influence those outcomes and effect behavior,” he tells Beet.TV. “Thus, we need to act with a mature responsibility and speak from a point of ethics. Now is the time to do that … we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.”
So Havas is involved in bringing together ad agencies to develop guidelines around how to use new AI technologies. Media agency executives are now sharing ideas for how to conduct consumer profiling using artificial intelligence, as one agency urges the industry to adopt its code of conduct to avoid damaging privacy violations.
Jercinovic says the power of AI applied in advertising could be huge – and also destructive.
“Potential violation of trust could be damaging beyond belief,” he says. “Many companies have deployed a set of APIs which you can basically interrogate a data set. That allows you to pull these insights out that can be very personal, can be very intimate…
“(With) 400 or 500 Facebook posts (analyzed), I can effectively map (a person) to Myers Briggs or an OCEAN personality demographic and infer a lot of things. Therein lays the existential challenge – with that power to have those insights, you can know more about a consumer than potentially they know themselves.”
The application of running those APIs on available consumer signals is significant, for anyone trying to target the right consumers.
Jercinovic imagines: “It’s not hard to determine inferences of things like sexual preference, political affiliation, purchase intent etc. and thus the responsibility is critical now for us to look at ways we can protect them, make sure they see the value of these exchanges.”
For one thing, Europe’s forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) make this sort of profiling highly questionable without explicit consumer opt-in permission.
And Jercinovic reveals agency rivals are now discussing with each other how best to exploit the new opportunities whilst also ensuring consumers’ wishes are respected.
“We’ve been putting forward a code of conduct around this, a system of trust which is based around self-regulation, industry-wide,” he says. “We share ideas across many of the holding companies.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Those were some of the conclusions of a panel of ad agency technology executives, who debated the topics in a session recorded by Beet.TV.
In the panel, the quartet spoke about the problem of inconsistent data taxonomies and how advertisers can make hay where consumers are already buying.
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“When I say an audience segment is ‘somebody who is interested in fashion’, am I defining it the same way across these different datasets, are the taxonomies similar? If they are not, then, even if it’s deterministic, it fails, because I’m actually not reaching the audience I think I am.
“How quickly do you refresh this data? If my data is a year old, should I really be using that or not?”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“We’ll never get to a category standard because the industry thrives on information asymmetry – everybody wants to know more than their competitor.
“We have to tell (clients) things they don’t already know about their own consumer but also model out their potential consumer. You’re seeing a cottage industry crop up to answer these questions.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“The mobile device is the gateway to people’s passions. We can instantaneously learn about a product, the price and buy that product at that moment in time. If there’s one thing that will continue to transform the way our clients market, it will be mobile.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So OMD’s Jean-Paul Edwards commissioned a Europe-wide research study to understand how companies in different countries were treating the emergence of AI tech.
“AI has been in our culture for 200 years, since Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re now at the point where AI solutions can scale in to mass-market everyday consumer realities.
“Now is the time you move from it being led by technology to being led by consumer thinking, marketing thinking.”
Edwards, who is OMD’s EMEA strategy and development director, says OMD has been going out to talk with customers, stage hackathons and commission research, all to educate and understand customers’ views on AI.
The aim?: “Start to make those big strategic decisions based on empirical data,” he says.
So, what does the data show? Edwards explains: “In the UK, two thirds of people are either using AI or open to using AI, 34% are pushing back. People in Spain and Italy are actually more open to AI, which surprised us.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Parr, a former Mashable writer, co-founded Octane AI last year, to help brands deploy AI-powered chatbots that can interact with customers and prospects for marketing.
Why chatbots? “Businesses spent millions of dollars communicating with customers … yet those people are spending less and less time on email and social and more time on messaging,” Parr tells Beet.TV, in this video interview.
“Three billion people use messaging apps. Businesses will have to figure out a messenger marketing strategy.”
So, what would a marketing strategy run through a bot look like? More real-time and a lot more engaging, Parr says.
“Run campaigns like you would with MailChimp (through email), but, instead of being a one-way conversation, ti would go back and forth,” he says.”
About 7,000 businesses already use Octane AI bots to interact with audiences, including acts of music labels Universal and Warner.
But Octane AI doesn’t want to just power bot chat as an adjunct to marketing activity that remains run out of email strategy. Parr wants to demonstrate that chatbots should become the default way businesses engage with audiences, and is adding features that echo some of the bigger email marketing automation suites, like targeting, segmentation and customized messages based on an understanding of recipient preferences.
“You’re going to see, in the next few months, more ecommerce integrations – you’ll be able to directly sell items through the bot,” Parr adds. “Drip campaigns, follow-up messages and receipts could all be done through messaging.”
]]>The May 8 issue of SI was an AR-lover’s dream as it enabled readers to scan its content without the use of QR codes and to share the experience of two climbers and a 360-enabled camera crew throughout the ascent. Even the Coors ad on the front cover flap could be activated via image recognition software, as PSFK reports.
The Coors integration and others like it “all starts with a deep conversation,” Time Inc.’s SVP of Sales, Andrew Snyder, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. “In fact, many of the conversations look and feel a lot like the ones we’re having here in Cannes, which start with a creative concept.”
From there, it’s a matter of finding “the right type of platform, the right type of innovation, the right type of treatment for the brand,” Snyder adds. “When we get that right, it creates much deeper engagement, much more success.”
Overall, the groundbreaking SI issue “was a fun way for us to bridge the digital world and the VR world legacy of our company deeply rooted in print.”
Like other publishers, Time Inc. has been surfing the wave of all-things-digital by following consumer preferences and testing emerging platforms. Its “holistic view” led it to acknowledge early on that people weren’t watching video just on destination properties like those of its own brands, prompting it to launch a syndicated platform. “We’ve been aggressive in responding to that,” says Snyder.
Within the last couple of years the company also perceived “a big uptick” in the number of video views occurring on social media platforms. Not only did Time Inc. begin pushing more video content into social, it launched brands like Well Done “that live entirely in social media.”
Looking ahead, Synder sees no ebbing of the digital tide in the near future.
“One of the things that really strikes me is that if you look out over the next several years, there’s approximately 20 billion dollars in new digital video investment coming into the market,” he says. “There are a limited number of companies that have the full scope of assets to fully compete for that opportunity to land their fair share. We believe we’re one of them.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Everybody’s trying to reinvent themselves in one way or another,” says Renato de Paula, CEO of MEC Latin America. “We are experiencing video on demand, we have OTT all over the region as well. There’s a lot of growth.”
There are parallels for brands as well, as TV “continues to be massively important, particularly when it comes to categories like fast-moving consumer goods,” de Paula says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
As in the States, LATAM channels have been improving the quality of their programming along with their audience targets, with more “content-related programs that actually speak with niches,” he adds.
This is due in large part to shifting consumer viewing habits that impact traditional broadcast ratings. “Every year there is a small decline. It varies by country and network, because of digital and because of everything that’s going on.”
Mexico has had a unique TV marketplace because two dominant players, Televisa and TV Azteca, “have been there forever,” says de Paula. “They are incredibly strong.”
In the past two years, two new networks—Grupo Radio Centro and Cadena Tres—have added to the competition, as Variety reports.
“They are fighting for space knowing that the market is tough, knowing that clients are looking for accountability, looking for ROI.”
Mexico and Brazil are probably the most advanced TV markets in LATAM, according to de Paula.
Asked for his reflections on the Cannes Lions, he says he’s impressed by “the brain level of the youngsters nowadays.” He recalls hearing presentations by two CEO’s, one 22 the other 24, and was impressed by their “level of eloquency.”
What also caught his attention is “the conversation about women leadership, which is a very important, serious topic that we should all pay very close attention.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But they also swung advertisers’ ire toward ad-tech platforms that, for a time, seemed unable to stop brands funding the fakers.
That is why Wayne Gattinella introduced a new way to stop the practice. At the end of last year, Gattinella’s company DoubleVerify, which aims to describe the content against which ads may be served, added a fake news detector.
“Given the political environment in the united States last year, there are hundreds and hundreds of new sites cropping us with very politically-charged headlines and links that had a hint of something that was surprising and … really not fact-based,” the DoubleVerify CEO tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Brands started finding themselves showing up on questionable sites.”
So DoubleVerify included a checker for what it calls “inflammatory politics”, part of its DV Digital Impression Quality suite and open to programmatic buying platforms.
“Our technology is able to identify the context of the site and the page based on either the URL string being fed through … and, with our code inside that particular publisher, can also look at other components of the page to determine its context.”
]]>
Often, the question is framed as an “either-or” in which Netflix would have to choose between continuing its current premium SVOD model or ripping it up in favour of ad funding.
Previously, Ampere Analysis’ Richard Broughton has told Beet.TV Netflix could make up to $8bn a year from advertising if it switched over entirely, but would have to accept churn would knock off some of the gain, as angry consumers quit.
But one ad agency executive doesn’t think the choice has to be so dichotomous. Speaking in this panel debate recorded by Beet.TV, GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser said an ad model for Netflix could be a lot more intrinsic and less disruptive.
“The question is not necessarily, ‘Is Netflix thinking about how to infuse advertising in to its model?’,” Lesser said.
“Netflix is, I would bet, having conversations about how big-brand advertisers can get involved in content creation so that they can have a more effective engagement with their consumers.
“I think, over time, all over-the-top content, with Netflix being the gold standard, will have to be financed in some way by what we, traditionally, know now as the advertising business.”
Also in the panel, ad agency tech and data executives discussed whether the modern-day precision capability to target only customers known to be in-market for a particular brand or product will mean an exclusive focus on performance advertising, at the expense of traditional top-of-funnel or brand-based advertising of the like commonly seen on TV.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>And it’s probably not going to get much easier going forward, Reed explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“I think we’re going to learn some things over the course of the next year that are really surprising,” says Reed. “We know that consumer attention us dropping every time we turn around. We have less attention span than a goldfish. We’re not getting any better.”
The implications are profound because “as we start to look at ad formats, we’re going to have the expectation that those ad formats need to be shorter and faster to grab attention.”
The need for speed will ultimately rest on the shoulders of creative because they won’t be thinking of “that anthem 30- or 60-second unit that they used to build but how do I build something that’s fast, gets to the point and engages instantly.”
On the subject of data and walled gardens, Reed is asked whether her agency gets everything it needs from Facebook. “Does anyone get the information they need from all of the walled garden partners?” she says with a laugh. “No. Certainly not.”
On a positive note, she believes the caretakers of the gardens “have actively taken an approach to say that they are willing to try to find a solution with all of our clients. It’s going to take time.”
Nonetheless, the clock is ticking. Reed thinks that in the next year or so Facebook and its ilk might have to get more magnanimous and “figure out how to give data back to the advertisers in order to be able to truly address ROI, or it will significantly affect their investment levels.”
In the meantime, new players are emerging all the time that could become the next Amazon, Facebook or Snapchat. “Let’s not forget that AOL was the behemoth many years ago, and now they’re starting that resurgence again with Oath,” Reed observes.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That was the main question on the lips of moderator Jay Sears, the SVP of MasterCard’s advertising intelligence, when he chaired a panel discussion on the topic on the shores of the Cannes Lions festival of creativity.
In The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel, Sears questioned a line-up of agency leaders:
In this enlightening, 46-minute recording of the panel, they touch on a variety of topics, including:
Enjoy the full, insight-packed video, or look out for our individual segments.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It’s that “other” programming that concerns media sellers like ESPN and Fox, as evidenced by the discussion during a Comcast panel at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. In fact, it keeps them up at night.
For ESPN, live is a North Star given its connection with fandom, according to Eric Johnson, EVP of Global Advertising Revenue.
“What has become live sport is expensive and at the same time we continue to just grow the way that consumption looks like,” said Johnson. “In live, real time. It’s complex, without a doubt. We try to make it as simple as possible for marketers.”
Fox Networks Group’s Joe Marchese is a big fan of live programming because it’s a choice of that or on-demand, where viewer attention isn’t a given. “Live doesn’t have that same problem. I will keep signing up for making money on live,” he said.
Asked by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink what keeps them up at night, both Johnson and Fox cited the options available to consumers who don’t want to see ads. Then there is a “virtual tonnage of garbage impressions out there that try to keep the price down. That keeps me up,” said Marchese.
Johnson believes the industry has lost sight that “ultimately good marketing is good marketing. We’ve overcomplicated the industry a little bit to get away from that.”
What keeps Johnson awake is that amid the demand branded, native and other forms of interruptive content, “we’re not thinking about advertising in the same way.”
He explained that most clients could buy a full season of football and run one just commercial with lots of frequency, but that wouldn’t be the optimal way of doing things. They need to be shown that varying creative iterations is desirable.
“That’s part of the process of how do we get to a place where we’re now creating a lot of creative for our customers, because we know what works but we have to help them get to that space of what works,” Johnson said.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So when an Alphonso SDK in a tablet, smartphone, smart set-top box or TV set recognizes what’s being watched, an ad can be served in real time, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mark Gall, explained during a panel discussion about the state of advanced TV sponsored by the MEC agency at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“Now we’re able to target one-to-one on a deterministic manner from TV to mobile but also, and even more importantly, show ROI,” said Gall.
Alphonso’s technology is present in more than 45 million devices in 32 million U.S. TV households, representing about one in three of the latter. It identifies TV shows and commercials and “fingerprints” them. The company plans to make its presence known in the U.K. in the fourth quarter of 2017.
“Most people are using a second screen while watching TV,” Gall said in responsive to a question from moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. “We are now solving the problem of connecting TV to mobile.”
In addition to being able to extend frequency and build reach in real time, advertisers can use Alphonso’s technology to attribute ad exposure to sales and traffic to online sites and auto dealerships, among other things.
“At the end of the day, we’re able to prove the ad was recognized and watched and you bought something,” Gall said.
If someone is watching a commercial on TV for, say, Walmart, a Walmart ad can be served to that person’s device. Contrarily, a competitor could have a conquest ad served. With paid streaming, someone watching Game of Thrones might be avoiding ads during that programming but they can be served ads via Alphonso.
Gall referenced a project his company is doing with an unidentified retailer in which the retailer’s CRM data is matched with Alphonso’s TV viewing database. This way the retailer can focus its resources on reaching its most valuable shoppers.
“Now you can focus in on the seven or eight networks, or the two or three paid streaming shows that they watched, and target them. And don’t worry about the shopper who’s only spending $20 a year. Worry about the ones that are spending $600 a year,” said Gall.
For a glimpse of Alphonso’s database of TV commercials, visit this page.
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The result, as moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink termed it during an MEC-sponsored panel discussion at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, could well be dubbed “myth busting.”
The A+E project involved some 350 million ad-exposure records for 40 million addressable-TV-enabled households over a few months matched with transactional data to produce indices, according to panelist Ben Tatta, Co-Founder & President of 605.
While it’s true that a network like Lifetime is a great venue for reaching buyers of health care, beauty and packaged-goods products, digging deeper unearthed some interesting insights, said panelist Mel Berning, A+E’s President and Chief Revenue Officer.
“What we’re also finding out is that it’s a wonderful environment for reaching women who are the principle decision makers for buying cars. Or investments,” Berning explained.
“One of the things that was really interesting was that across the board for all of the A+E Networks, responsiveness to TV way over-indexed versus the average television viewer,” said Tatta.
Now for the myth busting. It turns out that Lifetime over-indexed both for viewers who are particularly weight conscious and those who are burger lovers. Men’s apparel was among the top-indexed categories for Lifetime viewers, while A+E overall “indexed high against younger families,” running counter to “today’s myth that younger audiences are migrating off the dial,” said Tatta.
As the discussion turned to how a company like A+E balances programming across platforms with the most appropriate ad formats, Berning separated out linear. For those nearly 100 million households, “The quality of the viewing experience is such a key factor to the environment on those networks,” he said. “We’re thinking about ad loads, we’re thinking about the ability to reduce clutter, to deliver a more engaged audience to the ad.”
With cross-platform, advertisers are at “different places in terms of the way they’re thinking about building their media plan across platforms,” Berning said. “It’s very easy to engage advertisers in terms of their requirements for linear. As you then engage them on what are your requirements on other platforms, there is a huge organizational effort to bring all of those pieces together.”
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So, in a world of ad-tech, what place does creativity have at the table anymore? Creativity is still king, says FreeWheel publisher partnerships VP Julie van Ullen.
“Even though we’re looking for the right audience using data-based technologies … it’s really, at the end of the day, about putting the right creative and right content in front of the right person at the right time,” she says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
In FreeWheel’s latest Q1 Video Monetization Report, the company found:
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Taking a cue from online video ad sales, they want to start trading ads using data-infused insights, allowing advertisers to target audiences, not just content.
Brian Golbere wants to help, though he says the prospect has a ways to go.
“It provides a template for what things start to look like, rather than broad demographic buys off rated media,” Golbere says, describing the concept of advanced TV buying to Beet.TV i this video interview.
“We’re still in a very transitional phase. The scale and reach isn’t there. Digital is overly complicated.”
But Golbere‘s company has been working at the opportunity longer than most. It first launched in the UK in 2001, and is nowadays an engineering company focused on building algorithms for powering the decisioning inside ad trading systems.
In the US, IPONWEB‘s biggest customer is DISH, which Golbere says has a national footprint that could really give advanced TV a leg-up.
“We’ve built an SSP for them that takes their addressable, linear inventory and makes it available to DSPs,” he says. “It looks just like digital video, even though it’s time-delayed for delivery to satellite.
“(It’s) a completely digital workflow, from the creative management to the bidding process, win notifications and then reporting on the backend.”
]]>But the two hemispheres of the industry don’t have to be divorced from each other, says one leading agency exec. MediaCom’s US CEO thinks data can now help to power ever-more creative advertising.
“Data is the new business fuel, data allow you to design new creative,” Sasha Savic says, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Data will change creative to be more precise and to be more relevant.”
In 2017, we have heard plenty from advertising executives – even many in the data vendor community – who want to talk more about creative enablement. Savic is on board with that – but he doesn’t see enough chat from peers.
“There is reluctance from traditional big agencies to embrace data as the fuel for creativity,” Savic claims.
The industry is now entering a next phase in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are promising to even better target consumers. For MediaCom, Savic says AI “surprises us every day with new opportunities that we didn’t dream about yesterday”.
And, whilst it will be possible for algorithms to mine consumer records to form a better understanding of them than perhaps they even have of themselves, Savic thinks privacy concerns won’t be as big a deal for audiences, if the campaign hits the right note.
He cites an example last year in which Coke wanted to show a bottle bearing viewers’ first name at the end of TV commercials – something which required both viewer data and viewer permission. ‘Eighty percent of people said ‘yeah, do it’,” Savic adds.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Like other attendees of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Johnson welcomed the many conversations about how the industry can come together and drive more effective ways of measurement.
“We’re trading on a CPM currency that maybe is not the most optimal for trying to make television or video look like something that you can understand what the ROI is,” Johnson, who is EVP of Global Advertising Revenue at ESPN, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
He’s not alone when he acknowledges that video is being evaluated differently on different platforms, be it a 30-second TV spot, a pre-roll or a six-second video without sound. “But the allocation of what the value is of each of those components matters,” Johnson says. “At ESPN, we’re measuring the value and impact of a video ad, agnostic of whatever screen it’s on.”
When you add live streaming, all manner of opportunities arise. Not to mention breaking out from standard ratings constructs.
“What’s most important to me about live sports is that it’s absolutely unique to anything else that’s in the market,” he says. “There is nothing that exists from a content delivery standpoint that delivers so many people that are 98% consuming live.”
For advertisers, it’s an opportunity to truly be in the moment. “You’re not getting it aggregated with seven days or 14 days or 35 days. You’re getting it in that live moment.”
ESPN’s streaming content carries pass-through ads from ESPN1 and ESPN2 along with ads that are dynamically inserted.
“So I think we have the best of both worlds available to marketers. We can talk about it like television or talk about it like video or use neither of those terms,” Johnson says. “Addressability is coming and OTT is allowing us to be able to understand that space. This is something that we’re going to make sure we continue to invest in.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At Cannes Lions, AI – perhaps surprisingly – emerged as one of the key trends and opportunities facing modern marketers.
Publicis Groupe chief growth officer Rishad Tobaccowala, in this video interview with Beet.TV, says the opportunities are big.
He says AI is marked out by three characteristics – large datasets, a large amount of computing power and a natural, childlike learning ability.
“Put those together and you can predict and make decisions better than ever before,” he says.
“Human plus AI helper can do amazing things.”
In fact, Tobaccowala likens it to Her, the sci-fi movie in which a man who interacts daily with his AI powered operating system assistant and, ultimately, falls in love with it.
“For a marketer, how do you ensure that when someone calls your name or asks for help, your brand can ask for help?,” he says.
And Tobaccowala has more grand thinking.
“We are at the beginning of the third connected age,” he says.
“The first connected age was around mid-90s with the Netscape browser… In 2007 was the second connected age – the rise of social networks and the rise of smartphones… 2017, we’re now in the third connected age – data connecting to data, things connecting to things, and people connecting in new ways including voice.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
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