This video is a highlight compilation our several of our conversations.
The first three are a related trio of concerns. Quality storytelling derives from consumer data and insights, the end product of which can be ripe for brand integration. Meredith Corporation’s extensive presence at the NewFronts was crafted to address all of these concerns.
“We’re trying to create advertising that becomes what people are interested in, rather than simply interrupting what they’re interested in,” is the way that Shane Akeney, President, Havas Media Group NA, sums things up in this video compilation, which Meredith presented in its NewFronts event on the big screen at Manhattan’s Hudson Theatre. “Big leaps can be made in creating content that is so compelling that consumers want to watch it, want to see it, want to actually be experiencing it.”
Rather than “insert” themselves into content, brand should be there “because they’re making the content better,” says Matt Seilor, President Brand Solutions, Dentsu Aegis Network.
Accountability means measurable returns on advertising spend. “I think the days of an advertiser just kind of spending money and hoping for the best are over,” says Jason Harrison, President and Client Partner, Essence.
Brand safety was a major theme during the week of NewFronts events, echoed by most participants and those featured in this video. They are:
Marla Kaplowitz, President & CEO, 4A’s.
Will Warren, EVP, Digital Investment, Zenith Media.
Yin Woon Rani, VP Integrated Marketing, Campbell Soup Company.
Christine Peterson, Managing Director, Digital Investment Lead, Mindshare.
Shane Akeney, President, Havas Media Group NA.
Matt Seilor, President Brand Solutions, Dentsu Aegis Network.
Jason Harrison, President and Client Partner, Essence.
Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas, GroupM.
Ben Winkler, Chief Investment Officer, OMD.
Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas, GroupM.
Louis Jones, EVP, Media & Data, 4A’s.
This video was presented on May 4 at the Meredith NewFronts presentation on the big screen of the Hudson Theater.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For the full version of videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We’re working hard to combine and collect that across all of our properties, all platforms, and have one unified identity database that we can use in a variety of ways,” says Meredith’s Chief Digital Officer, Matt Minoff.
“We collect a wide variety of data across all of our assets,” Minoff says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Those assets include magazines, “understanding who our subscribers are and all the different titles that they subscribe to.”
America’s largest magazine publisher maintains a digital database that encompasses both implicit and explicit data. This includes what type of content people consume “and what data points have they given us, whether that’s their email address or some information about them that helps inform our understanding of what their interests are.”
Minoff says the unified identity database will yield three primary outcomes:
• “The first is the ability to drive insights, to understand what are people interested in, which informs our editorial strategy as well as our product strategy.”
• Second is “to improve our targeting capabilities for our advertising clients, to help improve the return on ad spend by leveraging that data to improve targeting.”
• Third is personalization. “To create a better consumer experience using all the data and knowledge we have about a consumer to surface things to them that we believe they will be interested in.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Just like we’ve done in print and just like we’ve done in digital, one of the things that we’ll be talking about with brands this year at the NewFronts is our new ability to guarantee positive ROI against video ad campaigns,” says Andrew Snyder, Meredith’s new SVP, Head of Video.
Advertisers have always been focused on increasing their understanding of the true performance of their video advertising, Snyder, who most recently was SVP of Sales at Meredith, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“And as marketers have become much more adept at measuring the impact of digital video, of course they’re more attentive than ever to the performance of their video ad campaigns.”
In addition to its massive scale following the company’s acquisition of Time Inc.’s publishing holdings, Synder says a main point of differentiation is “our willingness to actually guarantee positive ROI performance.”
He talks about the magnitude of change following the Time Inc. deal and the ongoing integration of “two amazing, iconic portfolios of powerful media brands.” Across the combined portfolio, “our focus is programming video content for each of those brands, not unlike how you might program a cable network.”
The company now generates 275 original series.
Snyder says Meredith is the dominant player in categories like food, where it has the “number one reach among all digital media companies, more video viewers than even the Food Network in Meredith’s food category.”
Its other strengths lie in such areas as parenting and homes, celebrities and entertainment.
“No matter the topic, no matter the vertical category, we likely have a solution for you in our portfolio.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s great to have data, but you need to turn it into the so what?” says Alysia Borsa, the company’s Chief Marketing & Data Officer, whose team is responsible for all consumer data and insights across the merged assets of Meredith and Time Inc.
“The common goal for all of my team is really to understand our consumers. When we understand our consumers we drive advertising, we drive product, we drive editorial, we drive consumer revenue. So we have this common goal.”
One element of that goal is capturing and understanding user data not just based on the life stage of a consumer and their interests but on capturing the “billions” of intent signals that Meredith sees.
“Every time someone clicks on a video or opens an email or creates a shopping list or clicks to buy, they’re helping us to understand their intent. So life stage, plus interest, now intent,” Borsa says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Complementing intent signals is the capability of creating profiles to understand consumers who are always changing. This is where persistent and dynamic means intersect.
“Persistent is I am a mom, I’m interested in sports. There are persistent aspects about who I am and what I’m interested in. But on Monday mornings versus Saturday afternoons I have different needs.”
Bringing everything together to create the “so what?” is what really unleashes the power of consumer data, according to Borsa.
“The whole team is focused on how do we develop insights to create, for example, video programming that impacts a client or that can drive engagement.”
Two recent examples are when the Better Homes & Gardens team “saw a really interesting trend toward an interest in whipped cream and decorating eggs,” Borsa explains. They created a video about dyeing Easter eggs that garnered 60 million views on Facebook, was shared one million times and was “cross-promoted across multiple brands where we saw a seventy percent completion rate.”
Meredith’s Real Simple title created a “momfessions” video based on insights. The resulting brand-sponsored video got 17 million views, according to Borsa.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>One agency exec says he is hoping to find a worthy rival to Google and Facebook, and proof that old-line publishers can prove themselves in the new world.
“One thing we’ll be looking for is if more traditional publishers can prove that they deserve to be at the digital table, whether that’s Meredith or Viacom, or ESPN and their first run-in with the NewFronts. Can they deliver a killer digital product?,” says OMD’s Ben Winkler”
“We’ll also be looking to see if Oath can be a legitimate player on the big, big stage. Can they create a triopoly with Google and Facebook? We’ll be looking to see if Twitter, for example, can expand from being a publisher around big events to being a publisher of big events, with their video product. There’s a lot of things to prove out, and we’re going to be listening closely.”
The NewFronts is organized by IAB to allow publishers a space to pitch their content ideas to eager advertisers on Madison Avenue.
Starting avenue, more than 15 such publishers will be presenting – fewer than last year, when some agencies complained at the complexities of meeting that number.
“I think what I’m most excited about is the culling of the NewFronts from, last year, there were 32 partners, to 15 this year, and critically, just one week,” Winkler adds. “Obviously, there’s logistical benefits of that, but more importantly now, everyone out there, to a greater or lesser degree, can credibly say that they deliver great video content at scale.
“That means less running around, less introducing clients to publishers. The publishers can spend less time explaining who they are and more time explaining what they do and how they can benefit our clients and their businesses, which is good for everybody.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>As Variety reports: “Digital players such as Hulu, YouTube and Vice are all slated to pitch Madison Avenue power brokers at this year’s slimmed down NewFronts, which kick off April 30 as a complement to TV’s annual upfronts. This year’s lineup is smaller overall but more tightly focused on premium content companies.”
As well as the shift to premium, what else could be different?
One media agency exec wants to see a more concerted commitment from publishers on how they can use their data in ad campaigns.
“With regard to the NewFront, one of the things that has come up historically has been almost an abstract discussion of data,” says Zenith Media digital investment EVP Will Warren.
“I think what needs to come into play is, ‘How are publishers themselves using those types of information that they own specifically to help drive their own business forward?’
“I think the potential is still there but it is one that is I’d say slightly unfocused, that maybe it needs to have a bit more focus as we shape solutions moving forward.”
The NewFronts, almost by definition, are centered on how publishers use content to sell ad space to advertisers. But, in the new advertising world, agencies like Warren’s also want to see that they can offer audience data as part of the sell.
It’s not that Warren doesn’t see the value of content in its own right.
“The value of some premium content producers is that it’s not only a brand-safe environment, it’s one that should be brand accretive as well,” he says. “The context of what is being the story that’s being told, the opportunity to connect more deeply with that content in a way as marketer that could have much more value in that front.”
But he wants publishers to go deeper with data, saying: “Data by itself is dumb.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But which space that is, exactly, and how big it might be, is now open to question.
For PHD Media chief operating officer Stacy DeRiso, 2018’s NewFronts are happening at a time when the menu of available ad opportunities has exploded – and, suddenly, all bets are off.
“It’s a pretty exciting time actually,” she says. “There’s new formats. There’s new ways to integrate in and around content. There’s pressure on brands to probably think about how they can activate power and maybe enable some of the content that they play in and around.
“We have an opportunity to rethink the 30-second spot whether we think about it in terms of unit length and the format or whether we think about it in terms of how the brands actually play in the content themselves. That can be integrations. That can be experiences that brands are creating on behalf of some of the partners and publishers. Lots of new things.”
DeRiso is particularly excited about the ongoing search to redefine the nature of ads in linear TV, citing the emergence of six-second ad spots and the prospect of integrating brands directly in content.
She says that brands are pushing agencies to smartly use data to more precisely target specific audience segments in a digital age. But DeRiso also says reaching a scaled mass audience can be just as important.
How? “At a time when there’s more content that people love watching than ever, there is more pressure on us as agency partners to think about new ways for brands to play in and around that content,” DeRiso adds.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“At the end of the day, we’re not saying to brands ‘you have to jump in and pick sides in the culture wars necessarily.’ But we are saying ‘you have to stand for something these days.’ People want to deal with brands whose values align with theirs,” says Scott Donaton, Chief Content Officer, Digitas US.
On Thursday, Digitas executives will share a stage with a range of figures who have made headlines associated with all manner of controversies and protest movements. “We try to be very provocative and to bring forward themes and topics that we think our audience needs to care about,” Donaton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
Not that long ago, the age of “interruptive advertising,” brands could say whatever they pleased without having to worry about being “timely or topical,” Donaton says. “When you want people to interact with stories, which is something they can choose to spend time with or not, you have to be relevant to them. There’s this idea that brands are becoming activists and almost have to. This doesn’t always mean controversy.”
The agency’s featured guests will include:
• Scott Hudler, SVP & CMO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, who will explain how the company has changed the way it sells guns.
• Jodi Kantor of The New York Times, who with Megan Twohey just won a Pulitizer Prize for their reporting on the Harvey Weinstein saga.
• New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, who will discuss the publisher’s Truth Matters campaign.
• Nola Weinstein, Global Head of Culture and Experiential at Twitter, to reflect on the We Are Here Movement.
• Awesomness CEO Jordan Levin on the company’s coverage of the March for Our Lives student anti-gun violence movement.
“We like to bring in speakers who are outside of the ad business per se,” says Donaton. “For this year, a lot of it is not just how are brands reacting to all the social, cultural political upheaval out there but how’s it going to change storytelling of all kinds.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“When I’m on Facebook, I’m in browse mode. I’m scrolling through a feed and I’m looking for things that capture my attention. When you’re coming to us, you’re coming with a purpose,” Minoff adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
That purpose varies by title, generating “both the implicit and explicit data” the company collects from its reach consisting of some 175 million consumers monthly.
“You’re coming to our recipes because you’re looking to make dinner or you’re thinking about going grocery shopping. That’s an ideal moment for a client to capture consumer attention and to be part of that experience.”
Visitors to Better Homes & Gardens are considering “planting your garden or doing some type of home improvement project. When you’re coming to Shape, you’re thinking about how do you improvement your fitness,” says Minoff.
When you pair intent, data, creative capabilities and scale, “I think we have something that very few others can offer.”
On the branded content creation side, Minoff mentions the Foundry, Meredith’s New York-based facilities where data, insights, storytelling and scale are leveraged to connect brands with consumers. The Foundry was recently nominated for three Webby Awards, presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and two Emmy nominations from The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in the Outstanding Innovation category for virtual reality projects.
“I think how all great branded content starts is an understanding of what consumers are looking for and then figuring out how do I weave a brand into that in a way that still drives return for them,” says Minoff.
Asked to assess the near future of the publishing business, his “deepest hope” is that most publishers are able to find business models that support the great content and products that they create.
“I think there’s been a challenge with advertising shifting a lot toward the platforms, that a lot of publishers have been trying to figure out what’s the next generation business model,” Minoff says.
Subscriptions are one such model. With some 50 million print subscribers, Meredith sees “a big opportunity to extend that into our digital properties as well.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s just what do you use as the measuring stick? In the digital sphere, we have a lot of measurement at our fingertips,” Peterson adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “It is a custom question for every single client. It’s not something I can easily say is one-size-fits-all for every client out there.”
Results can range from changing brand perception to “opening the eyes of new consumers, different audiences, that this brand is right for them,” to measuring footfall in-store or actual sales, online or offline.
“It’s built in. No matter what the original objective is, it comes down to driving performance, driving brand goals and key business objectives.”
Striking a balance between precision targeting and mass messaging requires a balance, according to Peterson. Some clients need to speak to a very specific set of audiences. “And for others, it’s less about isolating and more about sub-segmenting. So you’re talking to everyone and selling a product that has mass appeal.”
So how do you custom tailor the message within those segmentations?
“So even where it might feel like you may not need to apply data to get very, very niche targeted, it plays its role,” Peterson says. You can be mass but use data to tailor the message “to each individual nuance of an audience, from people who are in market today to people who might be in market six months down the road. Somebody who’s considering your product and somebody who’s never been exposed to it before,” she adds.
Even if a brand or product appeals to everyone, “You can’t talk to everybody the same. So data plays a role not only for niche but also for messaging.”
Peterson believes the most unique opportunity digital media affords is co-creation of content. As she describes it, it’s about bringing a brand’s message to life “with the authority and the authenticity of that brand or influencer voice. And that’s just so much more easy and flexible to do in the digital space.”
She’s always looking for those opportunities.
“It’s great to see what original content is coming out, but it’s also good to see what is really still in idea stage where brands can get involved early on and have a really authentic voice within the content.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At the same time as turning its PeopleTV in to a full24-hour linear TV channel through FuboTV, Meredith is also carving out a new piece of PeopleTV, especially for Twitter.
“Chatter” will be its first live talk show on Twitter, hosted by TV personality Rocsi Diaz. That echoes an earlier move in which Bloomberg launched TicToc as a Twitter-only live news streamer.
Meredith’s new video SVP Andrew Snyder tells Beet.TV Chatter “will only make sense on Twitter”.
“It will be a show that’s built entirely for the Twitter audience, and it will focus on a real-time update on everything’s that’s happening in the world of celebrity and entertainment,” he says.
Everyone’s favorite #HollywoodMedium is stopping by the latest episode of #chatter! Tweet us your questions with #chatter and @tyhenrymedium could answer them LIVE on air. https://t.co/HlsBmYS8Ni pic.twitter.com/PoQuLIdO09
— PeopleTV (@peopletv) April 25, 2018
Why is Snyder embracing someone else’s network? The clue is in the data.
“In 2017, through no change in our production of content, our distribution approach, we saw a 1,200% lift in the total consumption of video on the Twitter platform alone,” he says.
That gave Meredith a big signal – it needed to do a Bloomberg, partnering with a Twitter that has increasingly become obsessed by video ad dollars as a major component of its ad sales revenue.
So how will the commercials work?
“The opportunity on Twitter is for us to lead the sales effort, but of course, we do that in close collaboration with our partners at Twitter,” Snyder adds.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Leading up to the 2018 Digital Content NewFronts, “We offer an unparalleled combination of things no one else has,” says Jon Werther, President of the company’s National Media Group.
The industry’s leading publisher now reaches 175 million people monthly, 110 million of them women, plus 80% of all Millennial women and nearly two-thirds of all Latinas. It leverages insights from this audience via a combination of proprietary technology platforms and capabilities that range from shopper marketing to branded content, over-the-top video to augmented and virtual reality.
“Video is a massive opportunity for us as a company, and we’re very excited for our capabilities together with the combined company,” Werther says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We have a unique ability to provide premium video content to consumers, from short-form to long-form wherever consumers want to consume that content.”
Live video in particular is a pathway to reaching consumers who may not be familiar with the content—primarily print—that Meredith has produced for the past 116 years. The company does about 1,500 hours of video programming annually and now offers 50 live-streaming programs each week.
“Live video is incredibly important,” says Werther. “Ultimately, live to us is an opportunity for us to continue to engage new consumers, often younger consumers, perhaps different consumers than we traditionally engage on our more traditional owned-and-operated, short-form video.”
The upcoming royal wedding of Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will showcase Meredith’s live-streaming offerings, which will differ by title and provide the company with the opportunity to “bring that iconic moment to life across multiple brands.”
For example, PeopleTV will live-stream the wedding while Martha Stewart Living will focus on beauty tips. In Style’s coverage will detail “shoppable moments” from the wedding and Real Simple will cover “the things we would envision the royals doing leading up to that wedding.”
Asked about the state of the digital media ecosystem, Werther says, “Our brands have never been stronger. Our traffic is pristine in terms of real users consuming our content each and every day. We have industry leading viewability.”
As for Meredith’s value proposition for advertisers, “We can drive results as no one else can” and the company is “willing to stand behind that with results guarantees like our sales guarantee to drive unparalleled return on advertising spend,” Werther says.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In recent months, many agency holding groups have reported revenue trending down and share prices have fallen, after challenges including the rise of brands buying direct from online platforms.
But Matt Seiler would chalk another reason up – greed.
“I think that holding companies in general and media agency groups have kind of gotten what they deserve,” says the president of Dentsu Aegis Networks brand solutions in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“If you consider what the model has been predicated upon, it is convincing clients to spend as much money as possible. And that’s kept television alive as a much more robust medium for advertising than it probably had any reason to be.
“Convincing clients to spend as much money as possible is good maybe for those that are reaping the commissions or keeping the numbers of people employed to spend all that money, but not so good for the client. If you’re an agency, you’re going, ‘Oh, this is a big problem. Oh, we’re screwed’.”
Of course, Seiler, an agency veteran who took his latest role earlier this year, doesn’t put Dentsu in the same bracket.
He says his group was “built the right way”, taking pains to tell clients where they should and should not be spending.
Now the role of agencies must evolve to become a trusted companion that advises against a spray-and-pray approach, he says.
“There’s a role for mass communications in terms of brand awareness and so on, but that’s not where you should be spending the preponderance of your dollars, probably,” he adds.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>By itself, “First-party data, although powerful, it limits scale, and if you can’t scale in this environment, scale with the pace of a consumer, it becomes very limiting,” says Musi.
One of five global Publicis brands, Blue 449 calls itself “the open source media agency.” Its goal is to “move the equation to create a tighter connection between marketing and business,” Musi explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference.
“I think what’s happened in this day and age with the abundance of information is that the first-party data has become so expansive, it’s lost in its core focus of what we ultimately need it for.”
The key to leveraging first-party data is how to structure the information so that “it’s most meaningful for me as a business so that I can work with my agencies in order to connect the right data sources, second party, third party.”
Musi believes that just because micro-targeting, particularly with digital media and increasingly via television, exists doesn’t mean it’s applicable in every instance for every brand. “So I have a philosophy that’s saying you don’t really want to be too precise,” he says. “Pizza, everybody loves pizza, everybody loves hot dogs. Why do we need to be one-to-one at that level?”
Contemplating the “past, present and future of our business,” Musi thinks the fundamental things have not changed. “We’re still trying to connect a consumer to a brand. What’s changed is everything in the middle. I don’t know why we think performance or accountability is a new thing. It’s always been around.”
What is different is marketers’ expectations of the pace of ROI for their media investments. “What I think the expectation is today, which is maybe sacrificing the long-term health of a brand, is the short-termism of the ROI that is expected today,” says Musi.
So it pays to think both short- and long-term. “For every dollar we’re going to invest, we expect the return to be X, that X will be delivered today, because we’re meeting the demand that people are presenting today. The Y will be delivered as we meet the demands in the future.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“If somebody really doesn’t have a strong bias towards a brand and you decide to serve them what we would call active phase content, utility content, ultimately that’s wasted because they’re not predisposed to picking you anyway,” Acampora adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s a lot about customizing content to the platform and then starting to personalize the right kind of content to the individual or the segment.”
The Wavemaker agency takes its lead on clients’ creative needs by considering their existing partnerships and what’s best for them. “There are definitely instances where we’re creating new custom content, everything from what we call hero content to utility content.”
Wavemaker works with vendors like VidMob, a technology platform that connects marketers with a global network of expert editors, animators and motion graphics designers.
The agency’s Momentum consumer insights database is the largest of its kind, with some 400,000 “individual journeys” across a host of categories and countries. “That data is the starting point to help us segment and sub-segment audiences,” says Acampora.
He relates how Wavemaker worked with Ikea to promote its living room offerings. “For one segment, it might be way more about quality and design, so those are the things we drummed up about their living room message. Another might be way more about price and ease of putting it together, more utility content.”
MEC, which along with Maxus constituted the basis for the combined entity called Wavemaker, had handled Ikea’s media planning and buying for more than a decade. Last month, Wavemaker successfully defended the U.S. business, as ADWEEK reports.
To help clients navigate the maze of segments and creative iterations, “We try to make that as turnkey and bite-sized for them as possible. You want to limit it to a certain number of meaningful segments that will actually help to unlock growth for the brand,” says Acampora.
The proof point or benchmark Wavemaker has used “is roughly a one and a half times increase in ROI. Whether through attribution modeling or longer-term market mix modeling results, we see a significant increase in the overall ROI. That or if we go more toward a performance level we’ve seen roughly a two times decrease in the cost per acquisition when we start to customize and personalize messaging.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I think what’s most exciting, and this might sound odd from an agency person’s perspective, is Netflix,” Seiler adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
Why is that?
“Because subscription has led to way better content. And like all things free capital market, that’s led to more choice means got to be better. Content’s better everywhere you look.”
He calls pay-TV content “extraordinary.” That, in turn, has made free TV content “have to be that much better.”
But there’s a need for aggregation of all that content because we can’t all possibly keep track of where it is, according to Seiler.
“And I think that the notion of that really good content being interrupted by nasty ads is wildly anachronistic. I love the platforms that are pushing for fewer interruptions that are being smarter about how brands are integrated.”
Integrating brands into “the really valuable stories that are being told and ensuring that they’re there in a way that’s reasonable” is paramount. Brands should not engage in integrations just because they’re just looking to insert themselves. “They’re there because they’re making the content better.”
He thinks this year’s Upfront rituals will produce “a lot better partnerships with the content creators and the brands and the agencies that work with them to ensure that when a brand’s showing up that’s a good thing.”
Along with proliferation of choice comes the need for aggregation and therefore a few trusted partners. “They’re probably not going to be the few trusted partners that you and I had growing up of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, et cetera. Those channels are going to look more like Prime and Netflix and YouTube as well as NBC, as well as some of those other channels,” says Seiler.
Nonetheless, he believes it’s a great time to be a brand and a marketer. “It’s confusing, but the choices are so much better and the idea of integration in the truest sense of the word is I think here.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Havas Media Group North America president Shane Ankeney acknowledges “everyone is a little intimidated” by the disintermediation chatter.
But he says agencies still have a big role to play in counselling clients that are sometimes too pre-disposed to throw the kitchen sink at ad campaigns.
“Data coming in from anywhere, just because you have a lot of it doesn’t mean that you’re better with it or better at it,” he says.
“Many clients come to us and they bought everything, they’ve signed up for everything, they’ve brought in every tool. What we try to bring some clarity to and try to simplify is ‘What are the most meaningful data that we need to help drive their business?’, and that’s what we tend to focus on and we tend to help our clients focus on.
“We start off a relationship by just cleaning up, organizing and funneling all their data into one usable place so we can get the most out of it.”
The threat posed by platforms to agencies’ traditional place at the fulcrum of media spending is one driver behind the recent downturn in earnings and share prices of some agencies.
Ankeney isn’t the first to say that agencies can protect their place at the table by playing a stronger role as advisor and trusted friend.
But that imperative also comes at a time when changing audience preferences are forcing a re-think in how ads are conceived, created and communicated.
“Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to create advertising that becomes what people are interested in rather than simply interrupting what they’re interested in,” he says.
“I would rather see the industry move toward that to continue to create great content that consumers find compelling enough to actually want to watch, if not even seek out or give us permission to share with them rather than simply interrupting what they’re interested in.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Last month, Publicis Groupe was awarded Campbell’s U.S. retail work, Canadian and Asia-Pacific creative, along with its digital, technology and consumer promotion business plus media planning and buying globally, as Advertising Age reports. “It was not about spec creative,” says Yin Woon Rani, VP, Integrated Marketing at Campbell. “We didn’t ask for any creative work. It was really about who can help us harness data, turn it into creative insights and deliver it with craft.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, Rani explains the benefits and challenges that “giant lakes of data” pose for multi-brand, packaged-goods marketers and how they must balance broad reach with granular targeting.
“I think the biggest hallmark of the marketplace today is the pace and complexity of change,” says Rani. “So I think most marketers are looking for true partners that can help marketers navigate that change, not be fighting it anymore.”
Campbell was looking for “the right operating model to help us compete in the future,” she adds.
CPG brands don’t always have first-party transaction data to inform their strategies, so Campbell sought to become more thoughtful about how it partners with existing data and retail partners and how it uses proxy data. To Rani, the most important thing was to be “clear about what decisions we’re driving to, not just gathering all data in the world in these giant lakes and then sort of like fishing basically, which is what sometimes the industry I think is a bit guilty of.”
When you have a portfolio of brands, you have a portfolio of audiences, according to Rani. “And frankly, in many ways we know television is still the most efficient way” of achieving brand objectives. In addition, “equally legitimately, there’s a role for much more targeted either by audiences, by product or within a big product.”
So Campbell doesn’t see mass and targeted as an either/or choice. “We see it as kind of an and proposition, based again on business goals.”
The company’s media plans “have tilted very heavily to video across screens,” says Rani, who welcomes the advancements being made in television targeting. “We’re excited to see it essentially catch up to the digital world, hopefully with less of some of the digital ecosystem issues that we’ve seen along the way.”
In the “battle for attention,” Campbell like other marketers experiments with “lots of different” copy lengths.
“We don’t over rely frankly, on the traditional thirty-second thing as our starting place. We start with what’s the most important part of the plan. The thirty-second commercial has a role, but it’s not always the most important part of every plan anymore.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But one outcome that is sorely lacking, according to the man who speaks for big-brand marketers? Advanced ad tools are not driving actual business growth.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, ANA CEO Bob Liodice says innovation and enhanced creative possibilities are great. But, he asks: “How are they really translating into improved business building models?
“This is fundamentally important because, if you look at last year’s Fortune 500, 42% of those companies listed had declining revenues, 53% are declining after tax profits. So, we’re kind of failing as an industry.
“We can’t keep beating our chest saying, ‘We’ve got all these new tools, all of this information – and yet we’re declining‘. Where is it getting us? It’s not getting us into the place we need to be.”
Liodice’s comments are a useful macro assessment, and a scathing critique of the broad value of many of the key developments in digital advertising.
What is the cause? Liodice laments a “fractionated” industry in which, after years of tub-thumping, there still is no common, consistent system of governance for measurement.
He suggests marketers are swimming in data but, lacking a consensus basis on which to understand its implications, end up resorting to “homegrown” measurement systems, which frequently don’t provide key indicators like attribution, cross-platform analytics or plug in to existing practices that can support decision-making.
“What do we end up with?,” Liodice asks. “We end up with a very, very low-growth mentality, because we’re making decisions on the fly.
“We need to know how they’re translating into business growth. That’s the next phase of what we’re really trying to get at.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Let’s be very clear. This is not like everybody woke up this morning and discovered that they were giving their data away,” the Global CEO of Y&R says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference. He was referencing the ability of companies like Cambridge Analytica being able to harvest vast amounts of Facebook data.
“I think the big revelation was Cambridge not just taking your data and my data if it was us, but then taking our friends’ data as well. I think it was that complete vacuuming that freaked everybody out.”
The resulting awakening is how many people make money off of other peoples’ data. With regard to Facebook, “The original deal was yeah you get to target me, which is okay” because television advertisers have always targeted audiences. “In return for that you watched all these great shows for free.”
One difference was that TV networks and advertisers “didn’t make extra money” from audience targeting.
“These guys are making a fortune by limiting, if you will, access to you. They’re the guardian between you and everything else. And it’s not just Facebook. It’s Google, it’s everybody,” Sable says.
He’s long thought that perhaps digital companies should share their revenue with users whose data is the source of that revenue. “What does it cost me to be on your platform? Take that out of the equation. I’ll give you that money up front,” is how he articulates it.
After all, direct-response advertisers have always been willing to pay an “allowable” to secure new customers. That could be, say, $400 for an automaker will to pay to generate test drives. “If they’re spending four hundred dollars to get you into a car and they’re giving that four hundred to Facebook, why shouldn’t Facebook give you two hundred?” Sable asks.
“The truth is, at some point you should be in charge of your data and you should be able to control the amount of money that you either want to take in or give out or whatever.”
Asked about the continued evolution of linear TV ad formats, Sable says he’s “not sure what the new form factor is.” Back in 1976, his agency was experimenting with 15-second ads. “Now we’ve split it in half. Big deal.”
Sable is skeptical about one-to-one marketing being a cure-all for brands, given how “serendipitous” human beings are on their circuitous paths to purchase.
“That’s why you hear more people talking about brand,” he says. “As the Facebooks and the rest began to discover that in fact people weren’t necessarily going that pathway and buying specific things, they started themselves talking about brand advertising. They knew about serendipity.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“There’s a lot of negative narrative out there about what’s going wrong for agencies,” says Marla Kaplowitz, President and CEO of the 4A’s, long known as the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
But, Kaplowitz adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the organization’s annual Accelerate conference, “What about the client of the future? What does that look like?”
She cites comments made at the conference by Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun, who shared a stage with Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard and Grey New York CEO Debby Reiner to discuss client-agency relations.
“One of the things I was happy to hear Arthur Sadoun talk about today is there’s so much focus on the agency of the future, which we think of more as the agency of today and tomorrow because agencies are constantly evolving and have that entrepreneurial spirit,” Kaplowitz says.
As Campaign reports, Sadoun questioned the role marketers need to play when he noted, “Every client is talking about growth, but there’s no growth unless you have strong partners.”
Says Kaplowitz, “What is the responsibility of marketers to really understand the intersection of data and creativity and technology and connecting with consumers and how you deliver that in those brand experiences?”
On the personnel front, the 4A’s has for nearly 50 years offered a multicultural intern program for its agency members. “But what’s clear is that we haven’t focused enough on the inclusion side. And that’s where you’re going to start to see some change. It’s really about action and no more talk. There’s enough talk at this point.”
To this end, the 4A’s recently launched the Enlightened Workplace Certification Program aimed at creating safe and productive work environments that create cultures of inclusion, equity, creative dialogue and social transformation. “The intent is to support agencies in eliminating discrimination, harassment, bullying, intimidation and retaliation,” according to a release announcing the program.
The 4A’s is working with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), a nonprofit that facilitates the development of standards by accrediting the procedures of standards-developing organizations.
In addition, the 4A’s is a supporter of the TIME’S UP movement, “which we believe is a fantastic way to really have the dialogue but also really push forward in a very positive way and in a very inclusive way,” says Kaplowitz.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Talent today in my opinion is a culture game,” Koenigsberg says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, a conversation in which he also shares his views on the present market dominance of Facebook and Google and why he thinks Amazon is most worth watching.
As he discusses the evolution of advertising and media agency holding companies, Koenigsberg recalls a decentralized approach consisting of “a ton of companies, not integrated but selling all kinds of different services. And when you think about companies that are completely integrated and non-siloed, it’s the antithesis I think of a holding company.”
Of the genesis of Horizon, he adds, “We didn’t build the company by buying a whole bunch of different companies that have competing interests.”
The industry talent pool consists of “smart kids” with “lots of choices.” So getting the most qualified ones to join a media agency is easier said than done.
“But we’re fighting a bit of an uphill battle with the pocketbook of Google and Facebook and Amazon and some of the other tech companies,” says Koenigsberg. “I believe that our industry has to somehow figure out an enormous pivot if we are going to get the best and the brightest in our industry.”
In a week that saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining his company to Congress, Koenigsberg observes that nothing is static and that the business world constantly moves.
“There are some storm clouds over Facebook right now. How are they going to deal with their data play in the future. There are some big storm clouds with Google with regard to brand safety and their data play and where are they going to be in the future.”
Nonetheless, he doesn’t count out media companies with a presence in linear and digital as they consolidate, build out digital ecosystems and invest in subscription services and other forms of entertainment to drive scale.
“So I think that Facebook and Google will be chipped away at over the next five years. They’re not going to have the hold on the ecosystem that I think people think they will have,” Koenigsberg says.
He thinks Amazon in particular is one to watch because of its ability to continue to scale, the data and information it has on purchasing power and “the fact that they’re getting into every business under the sun, including the content business.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Launched at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, APB is a new body through which ad agency groups will notify each other when they see ads delivered in “unsafe” media environments. That will trigger APB to flag the environment for an investigation by agency-client teams, assessing it for compliance with 4A’s Advertising Assurance standard.
The bureau’s go-to guardians of safety? Executives from Dentsu Aegis Network, GroupM, Havas Media, Horizon Media, IPG Mediabrands, MDC Partners, Omnicom Media Group and Publicis Media.
It’s the latest measure by which the industry is trying to wrestle back so-called “brand safety”, the practice through which advertisers are comfortable with the content they are served beside.
“The object is to work together as opposed to work against each other,” says Joe Barone, brand safety partner for Americas at GroupM.
“We compete every day in the business pitches. But this is the kind of thing that everyone can agree on is no good for anybody. So, if we can all work together to help our clients advertise more safely, then we’ll clean up the ecosystem and, most importantly, continue to deliver revenue to the legitimate news sources that deserve to generate advertising revenue.”
4A’s members agreed on the Advertising Assurance guidelines in March, setting out to categorize media environments for risk, create a decency code with the Media Ratings Council and introduce new standards, metrics, methodologies and tools to combat unsafe environments.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That same kind of infrastructure is getting people in several industries excited. In particular, blockchains’ ability to store an immutable, public ledger of every system activity.
In the advertising world, that capability has some people wondering if such a ledger could be the perfect way to record how every cent of media spend is allocated and how every consumer action correlates.
For Jonathan Steuer, Omnicom Media Group’s, chief research officer, the benefits are coming in to focus.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, he says: “The two things that keep coming up over and over again are:
“The two, I think, potentially get solved together in a … blockchainy-like solution… some sort of tokenized identity.”
Whilst the detail is yet to be fleshed out, in theory, Steuer imagines a system driven by how audience members themselves control the data they provide to advertisers.
“On one hand, you empower consumers to control the data about them that gets collected and, on the other hand, you have standard ways of connecting that and rolling that up that extend across all the various different platforms,” Steuer adds.
Today, blockchain is the zeitgeist technology searching for application beyond cryptocurrency. Could it really cure advertising’s ills? Many a vendor is currently launching blockchain solutions purporting to enhance advertising capabilities. But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
“I think that’s where we eventually get to,” Steuer says of his own idea. “The question is, how long does that take and what are the stops along the road to get there?”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I think the two have to work together and you need to be careful that you don’t optimize toward specific audiences and optimize yourself out of business,” says Jason Harrison, President & Client Partner at GroupM’s Essence agency.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, Harrison discusses the growing use of marketers’ first-party data and why it’s important to understand “the role of advertising” within the context of desired business outcomes.
“For certain advertisers right now, they really can’t live without first-party data,” Harrison says. He cites retailers “or somebody that’s really concerned with driving consumption, having that data available enables them to really tightly target those individuals that they have a reason to believe are going to be in their stores.”
Closed-loop attribution can then determine how many people who were exposed to particular ads actually visited stores.
Broad-based brand building via mass media is still relevant to young brands, according to Harrison. “Some advertisers aren’t known to customers. They need to become known so they drive a lot of brand advertising to create awareness. Once you’ve done that, then you can begin to move toward stuff that’s lower funnel, that is much more targeted.”
On the opposite end of the broad-brush approach, one-to-one TV targeting is limited by scale. “Addressable television is a great example. It’s highly effective. We know it works at driving specific kinds of actions but there’s a limit to how much of it you can do,” says Harrison.
The trick, he adds, “is in understanding what the balance is between the two and how much of one does one job versus another and that’s really where I think there’s been some evolution recently.”
He predicts TV will become “more and more targeted” and then questions the future of commercials as we now know them.
“Do they continue to be beautiful, brand-building, equity based messages or does television as a medium move more in the direction of driving promotional conversion? I think that will be very interesting to watch.”
Harrison says the mission of Essence is “to make advertising more valuable to the world by viewing it as something that creates value. It has created a lot of interesting dialogues with our clients about the nature of advertising and how we think about what advertising should be and what it could be.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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