This article and accompanying video highlight interviews from this series.
“It’s time for us to evolve,” Sheri Bachstein, global head of Watson Advertising and The Weather Company, says in this highlight reel from Beet.TV. “It’s time for us to leap forward. We’ve been working with the same traditional identifiers and cookies for a long time — really, since programmatic came into play almost 10 years ago.”
She says artificial intelligence (AI) technology can help to address four key priorities for the advertising industry: first, reduce the dependence on “walled gardens” like internet search and social media companies. Second, avoid over-reliance on third-party cookies and device identifiers that are becoming less effective for audience tracking. Third, stop over-targeting the same consumers among different media channels. Finally, avoid paying fees for unnecessary tech services.
“There’s just a lot of change that needs to happen in the advertising industry,” she says. “It’s not going to happen if we keep doing the same things – if we keep using the same tech, and expecting different results, which we desperately need.”
CVS Health, the drugstore store chain with more than 9,900 locations throughout the U.S., uses IBM Watson’s AI to comb through data and help to target ads more appropriately to its customers — a key priority as the weather grew colder and flu season started.
“The speed of it and the ability of it to handle massive amounts of data and associations create opportunities that just haven’t been even on the radar before, ” Norman de Greve, chief marketing officer of CVS Health, says. “We used different data to find a highly accurate way to predicting if flu is going to be rising in a locale. We can get our advertising into that locale before flu happens.”
Reaching consumers in a way that’s contextually relevant requires a data-driven strategy for Nissan Motor, which has different car models for different segments of the automotive market.
“We’re finally at a place where we’re taking that digital-first approach,” Allyson Witherspoon, U.S. chief marketing officer of Nissan Motor, says. “We’ve been talking about it for years, and based on what we’ve seen and how consumers are shopping and consuming media, it’s here.”
Consumer worries about privacy have led to calls for more regulation on data sharing, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that may become a model for a federal law.
“As we get to a much more privacy-focused environment, how do you continue to do that with the data that you have available?” she said.
Using data for ad targeting makes investments in media “powerful and productive” as part of a broader effort to improve media measurement and the walled gardens.
“The work that the industry is trying to do around cross-media measurement has the potential for a huge change,” Ben Jankowski, senior vice president of global media at Mastercard, says. “We believe we’re making progress in breaking down the walled gardens that we’ve whined about for the last number of years, and trying to make progress on: how do I really understand the consumer journey across platforms?”
Predictive analytics to help make smarter decisions about media buying are a key advantage of AI technology.
“In terms of applications for machine learning in our industry, they’re very rich,” Stuart Pennant, executive director of data and product at Wavemaker US, says. “Understanding how much money or how much funds should be going into certain channels, let’s say search, and predicting what your response would be based on other media that’s running…This is very valuable to our clients.”
He also sees important applications in sentiment analysis that provides insights into consumer attitudes and online buzz that’s part of earned media.
A data-first approach underpins the strategy of Mondelez International, the packaged foods company whose brands include Oreo, Triscuits, Ritz Crackers and South Patch Kids candy.
“We need to move from the old legacy models we grew up with, where you had a TV budget that you allocated first, and then you started to figure out what could be done after that,” Michael Lampert, global marketing data lead at Mondelez International, says. “Because of the decisions of consumers and the way they’re consuming media — the omnichannel approach we all talk about — you have to look at where the consumers are.”
IBM’s AI technology is capable of handling a variety of big data applications, including those for media and marketing. As an indication of AI’s power, it has been applied to cybersecurity to help ward off online attacks, and currently helps to mitigate 1 trillion security events a month.
“We think AI can help, and play a critical role. We’ve seen AI address foundational problems and foundational challenges in other industries,” Randi Stipes, chief marketing officer of Watson Advertising and Weather and the Developer Ecosystem Group at IBM, says. “If AI can help with these incredibly complex problems, surely it can play a vital role in the marketing and the media industry.”
You are watching “Break The Cycle: Making AdTech Better in 2021,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“We’re finally at a place where we’re taking that digital-first approach,” Allyson Witherspoon, U.S. chief marketing officer of Nissan Motor Corp., said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’ve been talking about it for years, and based on what we’ve seen and how consumers are shopping and consuming media, it’s here.”
Automotive marketers like Nissan are looking for publishers whose content is valuable to consumers and whose advertising formats provide an opportunity for more interaction.
“The days of banners and things like that — that needs to go, because more and more shopping is happening online,” Witherspoon said. “As advertisers, we need to have interesting and engaging formats in order to be able to communicate our message.”
Reaching consumers in a way that’s contextually relevant requires a data-driven strategy. However, consumer worries about privacy have led to calls for more regulation on data sharing, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that may become a model for a federal law.
Data-driven targeting is important for Nissan, which has 19 different models of cars for different segments of the automotive market, Witherspoon said. She cited the Rogue, Nissan’s compact crossover SUV, as an example of a vehicle whose marketing is more specific.
“If you are a new family, you probably are looking for more safety technology, probably looking for more capability, more room — a vehicle like the Rogue is perfect,” she said. “We need to make sure that we’re targeting those new families if they’ve given us all the signals that that’s what they’re interested in.”
At any given time, only 10% of the general population is looking to buy a car within the next 30 to 60 days, making that window critically important to closing a sale. Outside of that window, the messaging tends to be more about “romancing the brand,” Witherspoon said. The challenge is differentiating consumers at different stages of the purchase funnel.
“As we get to a much more privacy-focused environment, how do you continue to do that with the data that you have available?” she said.
As with many other industries, the automotive sector faced massive disruption because of the coronavirus pandemic. With consumers spending more time at home, engaging them through digital experiences became a priority.
“All that shopping process, and what we could call ‘kicking the tires’ — all of that started to take place digitally as there were lockdowns,” Witherspoon said. “In many cases, dealerships were closed due to state regulations.”
Nissan in December launched a program called “Nissan@Home” to provide a complete car-buying experience to consumers who may have been reluctant to visit a showroom.
“It’s about shifting that business process, and allowing for that e-commerce journey,” Witherspoon said. “Online retail is not new, not by any means, but it was not as prevalent in the automotive space. The number of consumers that are going to be doing that from beginning to end — it’s small right now — but we’re building toward the future. We’re building toward how consumers want to shop.”
You are watching “Break the Cycle,” a leadership series brought to you by IBM Watson Advertising and Beet.TV. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Auto brands like Nissan have had no choice but to move to a more digital strategy. Many dealerships are not considered essential businesses and instead of forcing consumers into a shopping process that they’re not comfortable with, brands now want to offer options for both. This way, even when these businesses do open back up, the customers feel as safe and supported as possible.
“We and our dealers have been working really closely with our local governments on, how we can actually start to have virtual retailing, which, in automotive wasn’t very prevalent, and what we’ve done on our end is actually start to accelerate ecommerce projects and shopping tools that were maybe seven months if not a year down the road and accelerate those so that we could begin implementation and launch those over the next weeks into the next couple of months,” Witherspoon says.
According to Witherspoon, higher priced items like cars still aren’t retailing online at the same rate as they would at dealerships, but that this is due to regulatory reasons, and lack of infrastructure there, which is what Nissan is working to fix with more urgency. For marketing, Witherspoon and her team have tried to look more specifically at the consumer sentiment in these times, and then evolve their marketing messages accordingly.
“It’s definitely a different approach versus what typically happens which is, ‘this is what we as the brand or marketer wants to say, now we’re going to put it out there and let you adapt to it,’” Witherspoon says. “It’s definitely the other way around. And even now that we’re a couple of months in, we’re starting to tweak and adjust all of our existing communications over time based on the feedback that we’re getting from consumers and what the consumer sentiment is.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, this meant avoiding a heavy sales push and focusing more on instilling trust and confidence in Nissan as a brand and an awareness of what is going on in the world. Over time, this has adjusted slightly, with the brand pinpointing confidence factors, whether it is services they can provide, payment deferrals, or other more specific messages.
Plans have changed around planning large media buys as well. For Nissan, this meant pausing the launch of one of their newest Sentra model until a time in which there will be more demand.
“We’re looking at re-planning that,” Witherspoon says. “We’ve spent a lot of time over the last several weeks looking at the ways that we can predict or project where consumer sentiment and where their media behavior is going to be.”
This includes considering a range of scenarios, from the optimistic outcome of a complete return back to normal, to the more pessimistic view of this having a long lasting impact on consumer sentiment. This requires flexibility, from brands to marketers to publishers.
“I think this will change what the Upfront process is,” Witherspoon says. “I think that it was already starting to move in a more flexible direction and a much more advanced targeting standpoint, but I think it’s really, ‘what is the flexibility with your marketing dollars?’ I think that’s where we’ll see the next shift.”
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page. We recorded Allyson in her home in Nashville and Matt at his in Chicago.
]]>“We have to go to market with a very different approach. This is to moment for us to really transform,” VP of Marketing Allyson Witherspoon says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
After long relying on buying TV audiences by demographic, Nissan has been able to shift to its own audience segments “but it’s a manual process. With connected TV, all of that’s kind of integrated. It’s a seamless approach to it.
“For us it’s can we make sure that through video content and through connected TV how can we reach the right type of consumer in the right type of vehicle segments that we have for Nissan at the right time in the vehicle shopping process,” Witherspoon says.”
Asked by interviewer Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, how Nissan has been using either specialist agencies and/or internal data scientists, Witherspoon says “kind of all of the above. From an agency standpoint, we’ve eliminated the silos that have been traditional over the last several years. Basically, we have all of the subject matter experts all on one team.”
Everyone on the team gets the same brief to create a go-to-market plan for both creative and media. “So we’ve completely collapsed our agency silos into one team.”
On the publisher side, Witherspoon notes that Nissan recently attended the annual UpFronts and observes that “I think the UpFronts even are taking a much different approach that is going to be much more about connected TV.”
Nissan “thinks about TV differently now” and also how it approaches content creation.
“You can’t get away with one size fits all when it comes to a TV ad. Now we have to have custom content based on the audiences that we’re trying to reach.”
Her expectation for media partners is “understanding the business challenges that we have, having open conversations about how we need to be reaching the right type of consumers. And then as much as possible, how can we show how our marketing investment is connecting to transactions.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>These are among the takeaways from a panel discussion at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. It brought together representatives from OMD, Nissan, true[X] and Wavemaker led by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman likened the current wave of video ad format experimentation to the early days of digital media. While there were potentially innovative solutions, they came at such a pace that “you really didn’t get the time to absorb the learnings and focus. So it just became another version of spray and pray with new ad formats,” Richman said.
Her advice to the audience: “You want to choose your partners wisely. Because there is the potential risk right now where there’s a new-ad format fatigue, where everyone is coming out with different formats.”
Alternately, having worked with true[X], Richman suggested focusing on “learnings across a few different formats, understand the measurement, understand the operational impact all the way through billing, because that’s what really matters too when it comes to scaling solutions.”
true[X] President Pooja Midha said that engagement ads only belong in front of truly premium and compelling content, so as to offer a real value exchange. “We’ve done some incredible work with Nissan where we’ve gotten to talk about both a new model, the LEAF, as well as Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time. That’s a lot to get across even in a 30, but when you’ve got this rich canvas you can really go deeper and I think that’s what engagement is all about.”
Allyson Witherspoon, who heads up Global Brand Engagement at Nissan, would like to add value-based ad measurement to the industry’s standard measurement metrics.
“Lead generation is a big thing in automotive, but that may not be the most important metric for an individual experience,” said Witherspoon. “So you have to look at it by experience. If we keep measuring agencies and media performance based on the last several decades, we’re never really going to advanced what we need to do.”
Asked by Spiegel “What do we have to do to be here next year or the year after and this becoming commonplace?,” OMD’s John Osborn said the industry has a habit of productizing new things and then trying to force fit them into legacy measurement. “And the two don’t always meet,” said Osborn. “I think that we need to figure out different ways of looking at different measurement systems that are matched to the types and formats that are coming out faster than ever before.”
One challenge with emerging ad formats is that “everyone’s kind of trying to attack it, but they’re all in their own swim lanes and I think we need to come together. It’s got to be intentional and deliberate and I think we collectively need to come together to tackle it. I don’t think any one party alone can do it,” Osborn added.
Richman described the role that marketer procurement people play in innovation as “huge.” They can either allow spending in new ways “or they can control and say, ‘no it’s year after year, it’s like for like.’ And you’re going to be judged only by the money that you save, which tends to lead just to measurement only being by the CPM cost.
“Until we bring them into the conversation, it feels like we’re still going to have this logjam of only so much money can be spent on innovation because we’re not being judged by anything but pricing,” said Richman.
Witherspoon has made progress on that front because procurement at Nissan has been open to new ideas. “That was kind of the aha moment for me is that they’re actually kind of dying for this innovation as well because they’ve been doing the same thing over and over again they don’t know any different. They were really open to it.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel prefaced the conversation by calling into question the age-old format of 40 minutes of TV content leavened with 20 minutes of commercials. Encountering no disagreement, Spiegel elicited the following condensed thoughts from the varied panelists.
Amanda Richman, CEO, Wavemaker US: “This battle for attention is really sparking different ways of working. And we’re excited about now it’s becoming less of a focus just on the precision and data and targeting and keeping that within the realms of digital media only. And maybe back to the creative agencies and a different level of collaboration to recognize that we need to actually help develop the stories and messages that are bespoke to these new ad formats and platforms and broader distribution.”
John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA: “I think media more and more is just as innovative and in some ways just as creative as the creative storytellers in a creative agency. No one’s ever gone wrong by considering the consumer first and foremost. You’re seeing I think some real evolution in terms of innovation in different formats if you think of what Fox is doing with JAZ pods or NBC with Prime Pods and you’re seeing a variety of different formats coming to life. But I think a lot of the conversation is around formats. I think more and more we have to change and tilt the conversation more to experiences.”
Allyson Witherspoon, GM, Global Brand Engagement, Nissan: “Relevancy becomes what the experience is because we know so much more about who our consumers are and what their interests are that we need to be serving up content and experiences to them that’s relevant. In the case of automotive, we know when they’re going to be in market, we even know what type of vehicle that they’re in market for. So we should not be advertising a van to them if they’re interested in a sedan and we know that type of information. And then it’s to the point of how you can combine media and creative to actually deliver that message, which I think is still not something that we’re able to do at scale but it’s definitely something that we’re trying to build towards.”
Pooja Midha, President, true[X]: I’m heartened and I love the discussion that’s happening these days around bringing the consumer back to the center. While I’ve not been with the company terribly long, true[X] has been around for years and really from the beginning said we need to think about the consumer. We need to respect the consumer. We have got to think about messaging and context, advertising and an experience that is worthy of that consumer’s attention. If we’re not delivering that, then we really have no right to be there and to be expecting something back. It’s nice to be in Cannes because everyone we work with is represented. The creative side of the business, the media side of the business, the agency side, client marketers even the technology companies and measurement companies we partner with to deliver.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“We have so much available data in our hands now that we’re able to customize content and have more personal conversations with consumers, as opposed to just kind of talking at them whether or not it’s relevant to them in their daily lives,” Witherspoon adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Addressable advertising is enabling Nissan to find people who are actually in-market for certain vehicle groupings. “The way we look at our vehicles, it’s by segments. So if you’re interested in an SUV, let’s concentrate and focus on providing messages based around an SUV.”
This is much more effective than the traditional broad-brush approach to selling things, according to Witherspoon. “For example, in a global market, we don’t need to be communicating about convertibles in Russia,” she says. “We can find much more relevant and personalized experiences for people that are in market, currently shopping for automotive, as well as by segment. So if they’re shopping for sedans or SUV’s or trucks, we can actually customize those messages.”
Asked for her opinion about the offerings of the various TV networks, Witherspoon would like to see different types of content, having long been locked in to certain levels of ad formats. “It’s not really based on consumer behavior, it’s just based on how they’ve been sold for decades. So if we can have more types of content that are more relevant for consumers and the way that they consume content.”
She notes that it’s common knowledge that people are using multiple screens as they’re watching content. “But even if you’re looking at something that’s on television and you’re actually engaged in a program, maybe a 30-second isn’t the best type of format. Maybe there’s something else we can use to capture peoples’ attention to drive interest and consideration and move on to the next message.”
As for video ad formats with which viewers can interact, Witherspoon sees that space as a work in progress. “Right now, I think the formats for that are not quite up to speed. I think there are a lot of expectations for it, which I don’t think have necessarily been delivered on yet.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
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