With the group for 16 years, Mendonça had been president of OMD Worldwide’s EMEA region, responsible for 6,500 marketers running brands like McDonald’s and PepsiCo.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mendonça, now president of Accenture Interactive Operations, says the pace of change is still accelerating.

“The ability to sort of integrate the big desire brand building and the personalization … I think a lot of advertisers are asking us that they want to do both,” she observes.

“As more and more (media) touch points (become) shoppable, it’s incredibly important that I take some of their expertise and being able to almost truncate that purchase funnel so that you’ve literally got desire building, demand generation, and conversion happening in a matter of minutes – for example, on the Instagram platform. There’s a lot of interest around that.”

Mendonça is talking about the emergence of features inside many media channels that don’t just support the delivery of messaging that could spark purchase consideration later down the line, they also enable that purchase to be completed there and then.

That is increasingly the case with some interactive TV ads, and it is the case inside Instagram photos as of 2019.

And, by the sounds of it, this isn’t just a theory. Speaking with MTM’s Jon Watts at Cannes, Mendonça says brands are all over the opportunity.

“A plethora of advertisers are all searching for a new model,” she adds. “I didn’t think that the sort of groundswell of interest would be that intense.

“The moment we went out to market, the moment we said that we were in the business of activation and experience activation, then a lot of clients started calling. So now I’m really trying to build a global offering to keep up with that demand.”

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page

“With programmatic, we’re starting with a lot of client interest in terms of them wanting to in house and gain more control over the programmatic execution,” Mendonca, who is Global President of Accenture Interactive Operations, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Many of Accenture’s clients want to build “a hybrid model in terms of programmatic execution,” so the company is helping them decide what to control in-house, how to staff for it and determine what they want Accenture to take over as a managed service, according to Mendonca.

“And then, of course, in time we’re building out our capabilities to be able to operate and scale global programmatic services for clients.”

Until January of this year, Mendonca was President of OMD EMEA, were she was responsible for the financial and operational performance of all OMD offices across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

She’s seeing a “burgeoning interest” in tailor-made, bespoke programmatic solutions as Accenture helps its clients procure the right marketing technology and develop the most appropriate marketing stack. “That is where the sort of sweet spot of the need is at the moment. And of course being a technology powerhouse we have a lot of skills when it comes to systems integration,” Mendonca says.

Over time, Accenture will build out “more of an orchestration of a suite of technology” tailored to specific clients and be able to “develop something a little bit more industrialized for those clients who really want a global marketing activation to run on their behalf.”

Asked about flaws in the digital media ecosystem, Mendonca believes that it needs more “governance” and that Accenture will be helping clients gain added transparency “to basically increase the power and potency of the working media.”

Given Accenture’s “myriad number of C-Suite client relationships,” she sees the company providing agnostic advice on data-directed marketing activation. “Because this is the first time where we really do have the ability to see proper marketing ROI on every single dollar spent. So giving that that clarity and transparency to clients is very, very important.”

“There still is this tendency to prioritize measurement on desktop and kind of treat mobile and connected TV as also-rans in the measurement space,” says West, who is Director, Multiplatform Research, Disney-ABC Television Group.

The situation is acute given the amount of video consumption happening on both mobile and connected TV’s.

“We really need our measurement partners to find a way to bring their mobile and connected TV capabilities up to par with some of the more mature solutions they’ve developed for desktop based measurement,” West opines in this video with Beet.TV. “Because we’re at a point where this is the area where our growth is and we are no longer in a position where good enough measurement on mobile and connected TV is good enough for us.”

This is the main reason why ABC is calling for platform-agnostic measurement. He draws a distinction between the situation several years ago—when desktop “was basically platform-agnostic” and there were two major mobile operating systems—and now.

“But when you look at connected TV, if we began to do a platform-by-platform measurement solution, it’s going to take us a decade to get to a point where we have complete measurement,” West says.

Moving much faster “means piecing together data that is maybe tag-based, or possibly server- based, that’s calibrated against different types of demographic sources or other audience information sources,” he says.

ABC has research that provides an impetus for speeding things up in the form of the study it commissioned by Accenture that looked at spending by 20 different advertisers and ROI across media.

“It’s really essential that we define the groupings that we’re looking at a little bit differently,” West says. “We didn’t want to take this traditional TV definition and call TV everything that’s in a Nielsen C3 rating.”

One of the key takeaways of the Accenture study is that it’s typical for digital to get over-credited for advertising ROI and for TV to get under-credited.

West cites the halo effect of combining multi-platform TV with digital (a results lift of 18%) and the long-term impact of multi-platform, measured by the study as 1.3 times the impact in years two and three as in year one of a campaign.

“So multi-platform TV is able to drive impact for the brand and impact to sales over a longer and more sustained period of time,” says West.

We interviewed West at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.

This is easier said than done in a world marked by the proliferation of skinny programming bundles and rampant cannibalization. The capital demands of investing in infrastructure and platforms can be a dizzying maze for established broadcasters to navigate while trying to cling to their audiences and generate new ones.

Seeking to be the tour guide for this trip is Accenture, which just weighed in with its annual road map called Bringing TV To Life, which provides strategies for both traditional video content distributors such as TV networks and programmers, as well as content aggregators such as pay TV operators.

“The interesting thing about a broadcaster is that they are a B to B business generally but at the same time they have B to C capabilities,” Sef Tuma, who is MD & Global Lead at Accenture Digital Video and the author of Bringing TV To Life, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.

“In their old world it was very broadcast capabilities. The fact is they don’t have any of the CRM, one-to-one or any sort of relationship-based capabilities in their operating model,” Tuma says.

The delicate balancing act is one of retaining and growing the value of each of household while investing in generating engagement and, most important, reach. “Because reach is really what their competitors care about, whether that’s Google or Facebook. They care reach that’s unbounded by infrastructure,” he adds.

Tuma cites as one example BBC, an Accenture client that “took power of all of their digital capabilities and put a personalization platform under it to be able to start creating new ways of having conversations with the audience.”

Broadcasters need to understand their audiences not solely for the traditional purposes of advertising, but to inform decisions about content investment and “be able to find their most valuable audience.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Shimmel provides a look under the hood of OpenAP and the mechanics of trying to standardize audience targeting beyond age/sex demographics across several publishers.

“There is an immense appetite among agencies and advertisers to do audience deals, but nothing has made the infrastructure easy for them to do it cross publishers,” Shimmel says.

The problem has been that different publishers have used different data sets for audience targeting and schedule management has been disparate as well. “The whole idea behind OpenAP is to standardize that,” he adds.

Buyers use the OpenAP interface to identify their audience targets and will be able to see the size of those targets, according to Shimmel. The targets are then published so that all partners are aware of the deal.

“We then go through the normal process of optimization and managing the schedules,” says Shimmel, while on the back end buyers come back to OpenAP “and they will get a verified, third-party post in terms of delivery against the audience.”

Each publisher manages its own inventory in OpenAP, with Turner using its proprietary methodology, according to Shimmel. He notes that Turner tries to find the most appropriate inventory given the advertiser and its goals as opposed to “carving out” inventory specifically for OpenAP.

He hopes that more publishers join OpenAP so that it will incent advertisers and agencies to get involved.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

ABC and Accenture began by redefining what is TV and what is “digital,” according to Steve Whittington, Exec. Dir., Consumer Data & Analytics, Disney ABC TV Group. In the multiplatform TV bucket they placed long-form video experiences via live, DVR, VOD, online, app and OTT, while digital consisted of search, display and short-form video.

“One of the drawbacks around some of the studies that we’ve seen thus far is that they’re primarily based on syndicated data,” Whittington says in an interview with Beet.TV following a presentation at the recent 6th Annual Cross-Platform Media Measurement & Data Summit of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement in Manhattan. “We also felt that it was time to readdress the way that we’ve defined the different media channels today.”

Among the findings: Multiplatform TV advertising amplifies paid search and display in particular, along with short-form video ad performance. Specifically, digital ROI was overstated by about 18% and the ROI for television was understated by about 10%. “It was sales that had been incorrectly attributed solely to digital when the reality was it is the effect of the two working together that was really driving that,” says Whittington.

Most media mix models tend to look at short-term windows, for example a campaign period, a quarter or a year. “But we know that television by its nature is designed to drive brand awareness and drive the health of a brand over time,” he adds. So Accenture created a model to look at a three-year horizon and found that a dollar spent on multiplatform TV in year one “continues to work in fact in some cases an additional 1.3X factor across a three-year period,” Whittington says.

This long-term effect, if not accounted for properly, could tempt marketers to shift spending to digital because it’s cheaper and shows short-term impact, according to Whittington.

“But once you look at the full, long-term effect, the actual ROI across a three-year period can actually be lower because you’re kind of stealing from your outer years and some effectiveness of the brand in order to fund more conversion within a short-term time frame,” he says.

Phase two of ABC’s engagement with Accenture will dig deeper into the $12 billion worth of ad spending to parse out insights from “a lot of unanswered questions,” Whittington says, including dayparts, ad lengths, primetime versus daytime and 30- versus 15-second spots.