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.
]]>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.”
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Now, slowly, as new attribution technology hots up, brands are being promised the ability the ability to close the loop.
But, whilst, to many, this evolution appears to be driven by brands, agency tech chiefs, in this Beet.TV recorded panel discussion, say some clients have a long way to go. Here is a flavour of what they said…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“Depending on who in the client organisation you talk to, you tend to get get a couple of different definition of ‘What is an outcome?’
“There is a disconnect in the conversations you have in procurement (and the brand). There is a desire in one part of the organisation to drive toward the outcome – and the other part doesn’t necessarily believe that that is measurable or comparable across a wider set of the ecosystem. There needs to be an alignment.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“You get what you measure. If you’ve got a procurement department, they’re looking at ‘How do we extract cost and drive down that cost? … If I can buy what I bought before more cheaply, the thesis is the return on investment will be improved’.
“There is a race to the bottom. It can only be bought so cheaply before you’re starting to fundamentally disrupt the quality of that inventory.
“We’d like to change the conversation and look at the value-in versus cost-out. It may cost you a higher CPM – but, if the response from the consumer is greater, then the overall value of that media buy is going to be better for that client.”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“The technology would be easy to solve. The most powerful media companies right now have a better understanding of consumers than many advertisers do – they want to hold on to that leverage, they want to define their own metrics, they want to grade their own homework. We’re left with Nielsen, which is imperfect at best.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“A lot of clients believe there’s one true god and that god is Nielsen – and that is wrong.
“If you’re an application … you have to install the Nielsen app in to your SDK, and there’s not a lot of room for that. We think 40% of all video or content that could be measured is not. That’s a big problem.
“The great thing about programmatic … and fusing different panels … in to a DMP is, you can actually start to look at the causality of marketing.”
In this discussion panel recorded by Beet.TV, ad agency tech executives say many clients are capable of moving forward – but they are caught between two worlds…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“The newer companies look at performance (marketing) very differently and they’re far more open to restructuring and not having silos. They’re very good at lower-funnel, they’re structured internally to do that.
“Where they struggle is, in many cases, they see that as a battle for market share, as opposed to figuring out, ‘How am I going to get to the top of the funnel?’”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“Market-mix modelling has been the holy grail of channel allocation fora very long time. When you come from the new school, you say, ‘Market-mix modelling is looking through the rear-view mirror, that can’t possibly be right.’
“You get part of your media plan using real-time media to buy and optimise, and part of your plan that’s looking backwards. The answer is not either-or, frankly – tis’ about updating that model more often.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“The big problem with the market-mix models right now is the competitive data set which powers most of those are powered by Nielsen, and 75% of Nielsen’s money comes from the TV networks – so the mixed models themselves are totally based on TV and don’t take in to account what’s really happening in digital.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“We’re working with a lot of our clients on, ‘How do you bring those two worlds (clients’ media team and and customer data team) together? How do you apply the precision and audience understanding that those groups had, how do you leverage the understanding that those CRM or ecommerce teams and leverage similar types of data in a mass-media ecosystem?’ That’s evolving, we’re able to apply some of those principles in the mass-media space.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I think privacy is of the utmost importance for clients. It always has been,” says Doug Ray, Dentsu Aegis Network’s President of Product & Innovation.
At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, where Ray was a panelist at the Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel, he explains to Beet.TV how the way media is planned and purchased has become much more dynamic and why his company has “doubled down” on leveraging data.
This includes both PII information—names, physical addresses and email addresses—and cookie data within client data management platforms.
“That’s at the end of the day why clients are directly managing their DMP’s and leaning in to CRM, because they’re looking to try to understand and know their customers better,” says Ray.
Particularly in Europe, regulators go to great lengths to restrict what marketers can do with consumer data. This will only increase as companies become more sophisticated about mining that information.
Last week, Dentsu Aegis Network recruited the Chief Privacy Officer from British Telecom Group, Mark Keddie, to become its first Global Data Protection Officer. It came a year before such a position will be mandated by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
The move is “very important and something we’re certainly taking quite seriously particularly as we pivot into utilizing PII more and more for our advertising campaigns,” says Ray.
The pivot includes its acquisition last August of a majority stake in data marketing firm Merkle. Baltimore-based Merkle specializes in so-called “customer relationship marketing,” which includes crafting loyalty programs for marketers and managing their vast customer databases that hold reams of consumer information, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
Earlier this month, Dentsu Aegis Networks’ media agency brands began using Merkle’s PII-based M1 platform for centralized data planning and activation. For some initial campaigns using M1, Ray says there’s an average improvement of 20% in return on investment “and that’s simply by cleaning up the supply side in terms of costs, duplication of cookies and so on.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to the chief of the media agency network launched by Omnicom last year.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn worries: “Everything’s gotten broken apart.
“(Clients’) CRM programs aren’t working anymore, they’re divorced from their media programs… People don’t look at the aggregate anymore. It’s important to look at the broader KPIs… sales, purchase intent, proving out brand equity improvement … versus looking at these little pieces that aren’t connected anymore.”
Hagedorn was drafted in from Omnicom’s Annalect data division to run the new unit that is equal parts data and creativity.
He sees an opportunity for clients to use consumer purchase data, connected to ad exposure measurement, to figure out the true ROI of ads – but Hagedorn also sees a privacy concern emerging.
“A lot of consumers have grown up with the concept of a free internet … they’re not as concerned (about) demographic or behavioural data being utilised (in ad targeting),” he says,
“(But) when you start getting in to purchase data … there gets to be some concerns. I advise our clients … they should own their own DMP (demand-side platform), let the agencies operate and have it be fully transparent. Clients need to own their own ad-tech stacks, agencies need to be adept enough to operate on top of those investments.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page. Hagedord was a panelist at this event.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM north America CEO Brian Lesser explains the group is responding a world in which the agency business model is fast-changing, now that brands can increasingly see consumers’ purchase events and link them to ad exposure.
“We’ve been able to measure the effects of online advertising directly to sales for a very long time – it’s just been expensive in the past,” Lesser says. “Ten years ago, we could take one digital impression and match it to a product bought in-store. The data has become ubiquitous. Today, we’re closer to being able to do that at massive scale.”
Agencies were already coming under pressure from clients to introduce a more transparent charging structure.
The emergence of this attribution technology is another reason why agencies are coming under pressure to change.
“We in the marketing services business can start to change our business model,”Lesser says. “We can move more closely to a performance-based model… generating actual sales or test drives based on awareness we drive online and in linear advertising.
“We’re aggressively changing our organisation structure, how we service clients,”
“We are replatforming our agencies so that all them are planning and activating based on real-time audience data that we have in [m]Platform. We’re combining MEC and Maxus in to one global network… that makes us more efficient … it broadens our network and makes that individual company have the scale.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. Where Lesser was a panelist. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to the tech chief of one leading ad agency.
Compared with analog, digital advertising may be sophisticated but, without having full sight of outcomes like actual sales, for years the industry has relied on currencies that measure things like clicks.
But that is changing, says IPG Mediabrands chief data and technology officer Arun Kumar.
“We do have an addiction to measuring proxies,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“For too long in the industry, we’ve talked about proxies (as metrics), because of our inability to measure the outcome.”
“Advertising has had a problem that broadband has had (in emerging markets) for a long time – the problem of ‘the last mile’. You bring the wire all the way up to the house and then it’s not in the apartment.”
In Kumar’s world, the advertising industry would close that last mile, helping advertisers to understand true business outcomes by abandoning proxy metrics like clicks, and instead by embracing true outcomes data that can, nowadays, be linked to online instigators.
Increasingly, new measuring techniques can capture a moment of sale and cross-reference data trails to match the purchase to the user who saw ads that motivated the decision.
“There are a fair amount of clients making the move,” says Kumar, “saying, ’It’s important for us to go beyond proxies’.
“We desire to drive outcomes. The outcomes are always business-related. It’s a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page. Kumar was a panelist at this event.
]]>To Jay Sears, this means focusing not on proxies or clicks or even intention “but actual sales lift as the result of an exposed population seeing an ad.”
In this interview with Beet.TV, Sears, who is SVP of the Ad Intelligence unit of Mastercard, talks about assisting brands in the categories of restaurants, retail, travel and telcos and the emergence of more infrastructure around planning and measurement.
Although advertising starts with understanding consumer behavior, starting with purchase intent and ending with actual purchase, there are many steps in between, according to Sears.
Because of its trove of privacy compliant consumer data, Mastercard Ad Intelligence is “in a unique position to help the advertiser in the start of that journey and also to complete the journey and understand the return on ad spend and what the impact has been on sales,” he says.
While a lot of infrastructure that grew up around ad technology continues to consolidate, what’s probably more interesting for brands is the convergence of advertising technology and marketing technology.
In marketing tech, there’s an understanding of planning and insights and measurement. Meanwhile, ad-tech has concentrated more on activation.
“As these two things come together, the marketer is weighing in more heavily in the decision making, which is a sign of marketing maturity and it’s a good thing,” says Sears.
He foresees a whole lot more infrastructure built out around “measurement and around planning and understanding in an audience-driven way.”
Asked to reflect on the evolution of media agencies, Sears observes that many have taken capabilities around data-driven advertising that were originally developed in specialty groups within a holding company “and making them broadly available in their operating agencies and pushing them closer to clients. That should be a big benefit for clients.”
A major trend he sees is brands taking action on managing their ad investments as they relate to business outcomes, having already solved for things like viewabiity and attention.
“So just keep going and let’s understand the impact all the way down to purchase, to sales impact,” Sears says.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
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