Companies are compelled to take a positive stance on a range of outward issues – but often find that benefits nevertheless flow back in.
As part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, advertising agency executives discussed what they are doing on that front:
“When we used to think about things like responsible media, we used to go straight to brand safety,” said Mindshare global CEO Adam Gerhart.
“But, more and more, the definition and the view of responsible media and the obligation that we have to consumers in the world is becoming much more progressive and much more encompassing.”
He said he is most excited about the “depth” represented by a responsible stance. Gerhart cites data ethics and privacy, media plan practices, carbon neutrality, journalism and minority communities.
“(We can make) carbon-neutral media plans that encourage media partners and owners to offset their own activities,” Gerhart said. “We are now creating things like a series of inclusion PMPs (private marketplaces) which is directly aimed at putting money back into the hands of underrepresented voices. It started with LGBTQ community, has moved into black communities, and now we’re doing the same from a responsible journalism perspective.”
For 4As president and CEO Marla Kaplowitz, responsible media is “not something anyone should take lightly”.
“We actually launched media responsibility principles last September, building on the work of our advertiser protection bureau focused on brand safety and brand suitability,” she said. “It was about taking action to really put a point of view out there and say what does this mean in terms of promoting respect, making sure that we’re addressing hate speech?” The principles cover 10 areas.
“Words only go so far. Actions go the distance,” Kaplowitz adds. “We’ve seen some brands, some agencies, do that, but now I’m really seeing a collective focus on this. We still have a lot of work to do with misinformation and disinformation.”
GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald says brands and agencies should respond to what consumers are saying. His responsibility commitment covers five areas.
The first is authenticity, something McDonald says the pandemic has shown the importance of. “Your brand had better be authentic and it better be able to live in the moment and react and move in the moment,” he said.
Other commitments for GroupM include a “data ethics complex“, sustainability, brand safety and diversity and inclusion.
“In dynamic, profound, changing times, the partners that truly are living evolve or die realise that if you don’t dynamically change, you won’t keep up,” McDonald added. “The bold are going to actually have this proportionate outsized wins as a result of actually living their promises to their clients, their guests, their consumers.”
In this interview with Beet.TV, U.S. CEO Gerhart discusses the “perfect balance” between TV’s scale and addressability along with the challenge that accompanies the need for increasing amounts of consumer data for targeting purposes.
“One of the biggest things that we’re starting to see is the unbundling of services,” says Gerhart, citing the Consumer Technology Association’s projection of a 27% increase in streaming revenue in 2019. “That’s huge and it has massive implications when you think about the control that it gives to consumers in terms of building their own packages with their own channels, their own networks.”
Byproducts of this customization can be positive or negative. Among the former is greater fragmentation, while the latter includes “understanding more about who those consumers are through the data that we have, from the suppliers providers and carriers that are actually starting to create some of those bundles,” Gerhart says.
He sees opportunity in the “perfect balance between the scale that TV can afford and actually the addressability that it creates. I don’t think we have many clients that are on one extreme or the other.”
Mindshare has a lot of small “challenger brands” that use addressable TV and new technologies to precisely target people who may be in market for a particular product or service. Then there are clients that need traditional scale and eyeballs, reach and impressions.
“And it’s the combination of those two and understanding where and how they intersect, that’s the art and science of what we do,” Gerhart says.
He believes there’s a paradox now in that “everybody wants to be as addressable and precise as possible. But in order to do that it means that we need more data and more information from consumers from providers, third party, first party, you name it. That’s the tension that we’re constantly faced with.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>Mindshare is one agency that has dipped its toe in the water – but it now thinks artificial intelligence technology may help catapult the brand bots idea thanks to more natural linguistic experiences.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mindshare US CEO Adam Gerhart explains that his company was a beta partner for IBM’s Watson AI technology. He says the application of AI is diverse.
“It’s about how we engage with consumers more readily, in a more appropriate way, whereby they feel it’s more personalized, relevant and something that they want to engage with,” he says.
“Chatbots is interesting but it’s still one-dimensional – there are still limitations to the number of different responses you can program, whereas (with) things like IBM’s Watson, there’s almost an infinite number of iterations that you can come up with – from a messaging standpoint, an executional standpoint – and that’s what we’re really excited about.”
ButGerhart concedes a risk that the industry may focus too much on using technology and data to solve problems.
He sees the ad world bifurcating along the lines of “EQ” and “IQ” – emotional intelligence and data savvy – with the best campaigns employing a mixture of both.
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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