For Marlo Skiko, it also marked another change. From being EVP ad ad agency Starcom, Skiko went brand-side at Ford Motor Company, as US and global head of media.
In this fireside interview with Mindshare North America CEO Amanda Richman for Beet.TV, Skiko says her time has been characterized by quests toward brand safety, ad-buying transparency and understanding of a diverse consumer set.
“As we look for ‘where’s the growth going to come from?’, that leads us to audiences that we may have been courting,” Skiko says.
“But maybe we need to put some more effort there, and understanding that and what that leads us to, ‘Okay, who’s next? How are we most relevant for growth audiences for diverse audiences, for women, audiences that we’re saying we have some of, but these new products may help us engage in even better ways than we have already?'”
That drive is becoming more important. Ford US sales in June 2021 were 26.9% down on the prior year.
But the company is now pushing the pedal on a new generation of electric vehicles, with a Mustang all-electric and electric and hybrid versions of F-150 and Escape.
It’s the truck of our past, and our present. On May 19, it becomes the truck of our future.#F150Lightning #BuiltFordProud pic.twitter.com/I72ZVTc1oQ
— Ford Motor Company (@Ford) May 10, 2021
Skiko wants to ensure that she has adequate sight of where Ford is showing up.
Last year, she set a new series of expectations around ad transparency and brand safety, re-setting expectations of its partners in a more deliberate fashion.
“If we’re not defined in what our expectations are and we set what the accountability is, it’s really hard to lead that conversation” she says.
“In this past year, we became even more laser-focused and set very refined criteria where there can’t be a question. And we broke it down and had just a very methodical framework.
“Then we went to our partners and we had purposeful conversation … a two way dialogue that we lay out what’s really important to us and that we have a roadmap to get there.”
That roadmap will now be key in Ford understanding who, amongst a diverse customer set for a diverse vehicle line-up, it is reaching and how effectively.
.@mskiko, Head of U.S. & Global Media, @Ford, assumed her position in Jan. 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning to spread.
What's one of @Ford's key takeaways of 2020 according to @mskiko? Don't think about women one-dimensionally.
Read more: https://t.co/bLnwd4EfJr pic.twitter.com/pCMhtVfu23
— SeeHer (@SeeHerOfficial) June 11, 2021
But Skiko doesn’t think Ford can, or should, make the journey alone.
The group is part of PRAM, the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, a diverse range of ad-interested groups trying to re-think the use of technology in light of software vendor changes.
“No one marketer can define this just on their agenda,” Skiko says.
She says she wants to answer a broad set of questions, like: “How are we being perceived? How are we showing up? And what do we need to do to be as clear and transparent to people when they come to us, no matter how they visit us?”
But, she says: “That takes all of us working together because it won’t just fall into place if we don’t connect those dots in the right ways. It really takes all of us together.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
]]>The industry is now entering a second phase of the COVID pandemic where companies are thinking more long term about the opportunities available given the evolved consumer behaviors.
“[We are now figuring out what it means] to think about media overall and how we can better connect media itself and messaging using all that we have at our hands when it comes to data and technology,” Richman says.
The goals of this next stage include making the tonality of the messaging more relevant and being more service-focused in that messaging. It also means thinking creatively about how companies invest differently.
“Now it’s more towards that creativity and how do we really unleash the power of technology and data to make that happen and make it real,” Richman says.
Richman also touched on the popular questions that are specific to brand marketers at the moment.
“There’s always this aspect of inspiration and what does the future look like and am I moving fast enough to get there,” Richman says. “But there’s also the underlying principle of what is measurable and how will this drive my business.”
Right now there is more emphasis than ever on what incremental dollars can be added where against what audiences, programs, and platforms in order to see what equates to meaningful sales. It has created a dynamic where the more innovative forecasting techniques must also be balanced with a more conservative approach.
“You’ve got that dichotomy of the creativity and the innovation and the no boundaries with also the realities of demonstrating how we can learn, understand, and iterate to get to their sales goals,” Richman says.
This video is a preview in a series leading up to the 2020 IAB NewFronts. Please visit this page for additional segments from the Road to the NewFronts 2020. This Beet.TV series is presented by the IAB. To request a free invitation to the 5-day virtual event, visit this page:
]]>The GroupM agency recently landed the Novo Nordisk Danish pharmaceutical giant with a reported annual media spend of $400 million.
Richman talks about managing the agency virtually and how this has lead to increased productivity. “Remote work is bringing us closer,” she says.
]]>How marketers engage with agencies:
“The needs of how clients engage with media agencies has started to really shift from the sense of how do we buy media more efficiently and how do we connect with the consumers but how do we act as their guide to finding the next opportunity for growth.”
From impressions to outcomes:
“Just measuring the fact that the impression was delivered is where we used to work in the space. Today it’s all focused on outcomes. So yes, there’s an expectation of how we report on delivery of media, but then how are we delivering the experience, how is that driving through to sales, how are all the channels working collectively together, what are the forms of content people are engaged with, how can we serve up more of that with sequential messaging so that we’re bringing them through the entire purchase journey and not just building brand bias but building it all the way into sales and loyalty.”
Why values matter to brands:
“Brands are shifting really from the sense of a campaign around change into how do we think about our values as an organization, how do we think about representing those values in the culture of our organization, do our partners reflect that and how collectively can we actually bring that into culture and better reflect the diverse culture in particular.”
On direct-to-consumer brands:
“They’re leaning into traditional media because they realize actually once they’ve gone through their own in-housing with search, with social, with display, with programmatic and have flooded enough of those channels and have enough performance driven from that they realize that next customer needs to come through other ways and other channels. And so they’re leaning in and helping to reinvent digital out of home, as they’re leaning into television and understanding how to bring data and actually make that more of a relevant experience as well. They’re leaning into print they’re leaning into all the channels that used to be seen as maybe not digital enough but through the last years as they have reinvented, as they have shown how they can drive outcomes, they’re driving some performance for DTC brands.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
]]>
A recent Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey showed 35% of marketers expanded their in-house media buying capabilities in 2017
But, speaking at a new ANA event, one agency rebooted for the new world made a strong case for retaining an agency relationship.
“Now is the time, more than ever, to really look at partnerships differently and look at agencies, I believe, as your true partners in sifting and navigating through this and working with the media companies, agencies, clients, consumers, all at the table to try and sort our way through this,” said Wavemaker US CEO Amanda Richman in this video interview with Beet.TV
“I think it’s a world where there can be divides. We need to start to bring the organizations together, because everyone really want trust to be an imperative in the marketplace and we need trust with our consumers and we need to earn that back again.”
Wavemaker was formed in 2017 out of the merger of MEC and Maxus Global, with brand clients like Vodafone, L’Oréal, IKEA and Paramount Pictures.
Richman says there is an opportunity for agencies to help at both the big and the small levels – that is, helping brands hit marketing scale, but also helping them understand how to personalize individual content experiences for their audiences.
This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.
]]>“What everyone’s anxious to understand is a bit more of the how. With a massive footprint, with all the opportunity across data and content, how are they bringing that together seamlessly from an agency perspective and to marketers?” says Amanda Richman, U.S. CEO of the Wavemaker agency.
“How are they distinguishing themselves and how might they set some new industry standards as well?” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to the AT&T confab.
When the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics takes on a new moniker that will be announced early on at the event, one of its big competitive advantages will be its understanding of audience behavior across various platforms. Given its progress into digital television “and with the content layer on top of that now with all the Warner Media assets, it seems to be an opportunity for a seamless end to end solution.”
She notes that the term “relevance” is very often tied to targeting and precision marketing, which encompasses eliminating waste, “But I think there’s a white space around that emotional connection that brands need to make and how brands can actually connect on the heart as well as the mind across devices,” says Richman.
A WPP Group-owned media, content and tech agency, Wavemaker was created in 2017 via the merger of agencies Maxus and MEC. Contemplating what the future entails “starts with the people themselves and a physical space. Thankfully, now we’re at 3 World Trade Center. We have that new space and new energy that comes with a great environment.”
What follows includes trying to develop more seamless processes “with better navigation of all of our assets so we can customize what the solution is for each client instead of just one single approach.
“And then make sure that we’re measurable and held accountable even in our own compensation for delivering growth to our clients. We think that’s the best future.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>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.
]]>At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Witherspoon was one of four panelists who discussed new video ad formats and how creative and media agency professionals are working more closely together to build stories relevant to specific audiences. It was one of several discussions at Cannes under the auspices of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.
Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink kicked things off by asking “How much more will you pay for a non-standard ad?”
Responded true[X] President Pooja Midha, “It’s how much more will you pay for impact. Non-standard, who cares?”
That’s where things got complicated, as Witherspoon explained. “It’s difficult, because sometimes you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. Within this campaign or within each kind of percentage of always on, what amount of that is going to be something that you’re going to be testing.”
Which is where Nissan’s “pilots” come in and how testing is needed to help change the thinking within procurement. “Once you take the results from that, how do you actually start to scale that? I think that’s when you can start to advance the financial discussion, once you’re able to show that impact across, in the case of Nissan, all of our models, across all of our markets, that’s a very powerful discussion to have,” said Witherspoon.
Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman said the test-and-learn approach also needs an activation plan. “So as you’re presenting a learning road map, you actually can say, ‘if this works we’re going to scale immediately.’ We’re not going to wait and have another committee meeting, it’s not going to be three months. Turn on a dime and then roll on to the next test.”
Along the way, people on both the creative and media side need to come together more than ever, said John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA, because media plans traditionally have been built in a process wherein storytelling has been relegated to creative agencies.
“There’s a gap in between, which is story building, and I think it’s amazing what happens when you get tight teams sitting together, working together from the onset, as opposed to the traditional iterative process where sometimes media comes in late in the game,” Osborn said.
He described the process with Nissan, TBWA and OMD “literally welded together at the hip, working on which types of data will better inform the right kinds of storytelling.”
true[X] does real-time creative optimization for Nissan as it simultaneously measures real-time brand lift. “We launch with one version of an engagement, and as we see the data coming back we’re able to actually build with Nissan and its agency a more elaborate version, or a version that lets you go deeper or let’s us hone in on what we see really lifting,” said Midha.
Spiegel wanted to know whether creative personalization is right for all brands, particularly the biggest ones with the widest target audiences.
“One of the things we’ve seen across the tens of thousands of engagements we’ve built is that strong, persistent branding, even for very, very well advertised brands, is really important in actually driving results for them,” Midha said.
Richman related that one of Wavemaker’s clients describes its target audience as “anyone with a mouth.” Still, such a brand might need to achieve relevance with a new generation of consumers or could be missing opportunities for frequency or selling across its whole portfolio.
“A level of personalization may not be one hundred segments, but looking it from the lens of two or three it will drive the business forward,” Richman said.
The panelists agreed that campaign measurement will continue to be one of the biggest challenges, given cross-platform content consumption. The fact that advertisers and publishers alike recognize this and want to change old habits, there are fundamental barriers that will take time to overcome.
“Right now, to launch anything, for example inside of CTV, which is such an important environment, it’s not one platform. It’s a bunch of different devices that are all built on different code bases. It’s not simple,” said Midha.
As the discussion shifted to things like total ratings points and sound media strategies, Osborn summed things up by observing “Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in the media jargon there’s a great brilliance in just thinking as a human would think.”
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.
]]>When she eyes the video landscape, Richman sees it evolving toward the opportunity for more precision targeting without taking away from the scale “that all the big players and certainly the television networks bring to the party.
“So it’s starting to shift from the conversations that used to happen that really separated the two worlds of digital and linear,” the U.S. CEO of the agency Wavemaker adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Guided by data and a better understanding of where audiences are and how they’re consuming video, Wavemaker’s focus on the purchase journey and where people are consuming video within the journey “creates just much more fluidity in how we can think about budgets, how we think about planning and connecting at the right time.”
These insights also fuel conversations with creative agencies “to make sure it’s not just about where we’re connecting with the consumer, but what’s the right messaging that’s really going to draw them in.”
Looking at learnings from, say, feed consumption of video or OTT viewing can be scaled across other platforms and “it gets much more interesting from a sense of how do you plan for that engagement and plan the right message,” Richman says.
Asked about Wavemaker’s interactions with creative agencies, she says the main goal is to get insights faster and integrate them into story and message development. “That is fueled by often the media agency’s data inputs and for Wavemaker, it’s thinking through momentum and our purchase journey understanding and the database of data points that we have that can then fuel more insights into how to connect and what message to deliver.”
Providing its data assets to a creative agency “gives them a deeper understanding of the consumer than they might have typically gotten on a brief from a client and that’s where the magic starts to happen.”
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.
]]>“It has to be more than a merger. If all we did was take two great brands and cultures and teams and mesh them together, we have failed,” says Amanda Richman, U.S. CEO of Wavemaker, the global media, content and technology agency unveiled one year ago.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Richman explains the impetus behind creating Wavemaker was “Let’s really reboot and redesign what a modern marketing agency is. With a single focus on the consumer journey and with that understanding how we can grow our clients’ revenues and opportunities in the marketplace.”
If Wavemaker sounds more like a consultancy with traditional and contemporary media chops, it’s not far off the mark. “The future of the agency business has definitely shifted to not just buying on impressions and cheapest CPM and fill out the pricing template,” Richman says, noting that there’s still a component of investment management that’s about driving efficiency.
“But as you think about our role today in the middle of the ecosystem, in having to not only understand and embrace and evolve our clients’ approach to data but also to their broader business issues.”
Richman, who was appointed U.S. CEO last August, sees an opportunity to “get a greater share” of clients’ problems along with providing a greater share of solutions to solve the challenges they face. This entails having a “laser focus on consumer understanding,” not only from a purchase journey lens but how are they adopting and adapting to the breadth of content and distribution opportunities.
“Our role is really sifting through all of that to find out what’s most meaningful and relevant to their consumers and what’s the brand relationship that can be established with those insights,” Richman says.
This involves not just another innovation play or understanding what the next platform is, the next channel, the next partner. “It’s all of that and so much more that really leads to a deeper understanding of their audience and how to move them to that next step forward.”
She’s looking forward to being able to “really hit reset in this robust environment, listen more to our clients and understand what are their needs when it comes to an agency today and build around that.”
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>“Amanda is a fantastic choice to be our US leader,” Castree said in a news release. “She is universally liked and respected by her people, her clients and her partners in the marketplace and I’m delighted that she’s joining our global team.”
In the same release, Richman said the MEC offer “was just too good of an opportunity to pass up. With leading talent and tech in place, we have an opportunity to drive the new agency model forward faster, in partnership with our clients and the marketplace.”
As President of Investment at Starcom USA, Richman architected and led the agency’s cross-channel investment practice across clients including Airbnb, Bank of America, Kraft Heinz and Samsung. Previously, she served as President of Digital for Mediavest, building its digital team and capability. Prior to joining SMG, Richman held digital leadership roles at The Interpublic Group as Managing Director of their first digital agency, and at Time Warner leading client services for the company’s interactive television division.
The merger of MEC and Maxus takes effect in January 2018.
Beet.TV interviewed Richman earlier this year in Los Angeles at the 4A’s conference. We are republishing the interview with today’s news.
Despite great advances in digital and television audience targeting, platform-specific creative is a milestone the industry has yet to achieve. Until a silver bullet arrives, there’s some “simple stuff” that agencies and brands can do, according to Amanda Richman.
“One of them being, let’s bring together all the right parties that all have the same interest in success in the briefing process,” says the President of Investment & Activation at Starcom USA.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Richman discusses the need for creative—not just media—to drive effectiveness and the eternal value of human input in a technology laden industry.
Richman believes that digital audience targeting has been perfected and new network television audience optimization products are showing lots of promise toward the same end. Programmatic “is certainly elevating our game” with respect to brand safety, when it comes to controls and processes.
“But we still have not put sufficient time, resources and attention really to the space around creative messaging that is more bespoke to the audience,” she says.
The goal is to make a more meaningful impact with consumers and engaging with them not only in a campaign “but maybe across a longer period of time.”
As for the “simple stuff that we still need to crack,” it starts with having the right people at the table during the briefing process and then sticking to the brief. “Let’s map out what it is that we’re trying to achieve and understand where we actually can make that happens,” says Richman.
The process includes tapping the best practices of publishers that can help agencies understand, say, how to make the best six-second commercial format or the best experience on Snapchat. The end goal is to “really sequence and synchronize campaigns in a way that can make an impact over time,” Richman says.
“Humans and their ideas and their creativity lead the best work,” she adds. It’s something “you can’t replace with technology.”
]]>Several of the big US TV networks have declared they will make moves to let advertising buyers use granular and first-party viewer data, over and above traditional Nielsen data, to target ads on linear TV to guaranteed audiences.
The recent announcements included:
Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, Starcom USA investment and activation president Amanda Richman welcomed the moves.
“The networks leaning in to their audience optimisation products … demonstrates that they are committed to understanding we do need more precise targeting, we are pushing harder for more granular measurement,” she said.
“Doing that in premium environments is certainly welcome.
“Much of the targeting and optimisation that’s been happening in digital can now been brought in to the television space.”
Richman also observes an “explosion of content” presenting “new opportunities for us to find that audience in different spaces”, including the possibility of shorter and more interactive TV ad formats.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“One of them being, let’s bring together all the right parties that all have the same interest in success in the briefing process,” says the President of Investment & Activation at Starcom USA.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Richman discusses the need for creative—not just media—to drive effectiveness and the eternal value of human input in a technology laden industry.
Richman believes that digital audience targeting has been perfected and new network television audience optimization products are showing lots of promise toward the same end. Programmatic “is certainly elevating our game” with respect to brand safety, when it comes to controls and processes.
“But we still have not put sufficient time, resources and attention really to the space around creative messaging that is more bespoke to the audience,” she says.
The goal is to make a more meaningful impact with consumers and engaging with them not only in a campaign “but maybe across a longer period of time.”
As for the “simple stuff that we still need to crack,” it starts with having the right people at the table during the briefing process and then sticking to the brief. “Let’s map out what it is that we’re trying to achieve and understand where we actually can make that happens,” says Richman.
The process includes tapping the best practices of publishers that can help agencies understand, say, how to make the best six-second commercial format or the best experience on Snapchat. The end goal is to “really sequence and synchronize campaigns in a way that can make an impact over time,” Richman says.
“Humans and their ideas and their creativity lead the best work,” she adds. It’s something “you can’t replace with technology.”
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.
]]>In addition to new tech and new devices, Richman will have an eye on the continuing evolution of measurement as consumer behavior shifts from linear to online video, to mobile, to over the top, as well as the different ad formats for those mediums. “As we have more platforms, we get more signals frrm consumers about how they’re watching, and when,” she says, and that input can help optimize ad offerings and measurement.
Richman also touched on addressable TV, emphasizing that the term itself is becoming more broadly defined. “Today as we talk about addressable, it can be how do we find new narrow segments online, what can we learn about them, what new targets can we discover about them that we can bring to TV. Much of that is available programmatically so we can get more precise with these audiences…and use that to understand what segments to invest in.”
Looking ahead, Richman expects this type of data-driven planning will play an even bigger role in the upfront. The availability of more data affords flexibility to move ad dollars across mediums to drive performance, she says.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>For an industry that has always prided itself on creative messaging, this is something of a change. But, just lately, even some of the ad execs who run tech initiatives have started advocating a return to advertising’s roots.
“For the last few years, it’s been very focused on data and technology, for the right reasons,” acknowledges Starcom innvestment and activation president Amanda Richman. “But we’ve lost some of the conversation around ideas and creativity. We need to bring that back in.”
She was speaking at Cannes Lions, the annual ad business get-together in the south of France that prides itself on being the “international festival of creativity”, not science. Richman hopes this week’s event will be a “pivot point” for the change.
“At Cannes, we have the perfect opportunity to align ad-tech and creative, and have a conversation about bringing that together again, to have technology and data actually fuel that creativity, instead of it being polarising it, which has been too much of the conversation over the last few years.”
This interview with Richman is part of a series on video advertising presented by Teads. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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In a closely watched quarterly report titled Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, the big media agency ZenithOptimedia has just reported that online video grew last year at a blistering rate of 34% to $10.9 billion globally – and it is on track to double by the end of 2017.
In Austin last week, at the annual 4A’s conference, we sat down with Amanda Richman, President of Investment and Activation of Starcom USA. She talks about the growth of the medium and its momentum from data, cross-screen consumption and by an increasing creative content creation process.
Our coverage is of the 4A’s summit was sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.
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That’s why it’s so important for brands and agencies to work with the right technology partners as well as the best second- and third-party data providers. The key to using data most effectively is to understand which channels are working best. “It’s all about cross-channel attribution and understanding the storytelling experience across screens so we can design campaigns for brand lift and client objectives across channels,” she tells us. Keep an eye on this area as Richman expects more news to come down the pike as it relates to cross-channel attribution and creativity.
This is part of a series title the State of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series which will published over the next 30 days.
]]>“Some see programmatic as real-time bidding and some see it as the opportunity around automation and the path to addressability…As we look at how to apply programmatic, it moves beyond digital buying and it’s how about how do we as agency embrace data and take those insights across all platforms to influence strategies,” she says. At this year’s upfront, networks began warming up to the notion of private marketplaces for online video, given the benefits of demand and yield management, she says.
This is part of a series title the State of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series which will published over the next 30 days.
]]>Asked by moderator Ashley Swartz of Furious Minds whether marketers are using quantitative or qualitative methods to judge campaigns, guests emphatically said: both!
“CMOs are trying to be more quantitative – but they’re also forced to be short-term,” Nielsen’s digital client services SVP Andrew Feigenson said.
“They always talk about the average life expectancy of a CMO. The moment the brand is not resonating, the CMO also has a problem, because the CEO is going to pick up on that. There has to be a qualitative/quantitative balance.”
Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail echoed: “That idea that there has to be a binary decision is exactly what keeps us stuck in this period. There’s a lot of stumbling around. We haven’t broken the old models. It’s a much more complex world – we’re going to have another two to three years of random experimentation until we find that new formula.”
And Starcom USA investment and activation president Amanda Richman said marketers are still using the “funnel” approach to assessing campaigns:
This is an exciting time because of the mix of art and science. There are many more formats we can start developing beyond 15- and 30-(second ads) – pushing more in to 6-second and shorter-form, but also long-form.”
Watch the full video for more of their lively discussion.
]]>In the last year, Starcom studied the perception of online video and TV ads and learned that consumers don’t distinguish. “We kept coming up against this perception that TV is better from a quality standpoint and premium and therefore should attract more money and that online video might not be the same value…In an environment where we don’t tell consumers the creative source, there is a neutrality [in the perception of what’s better.] It’s not where the content is shown so much as the quality of the content. There is a great opportunity then for online video to compete with TV from the perception of quality once you discover it,” she says. “The big push is how to make online video more discoverable, especially original online video, and how do we increase the exposure because once exposed people have the same positive experience.”
Starcom is a big proponent of cross-screen measurement and storytelling. The next step in the growth of cross-screen video lies not only in being “video neutral” but in being “video knowledgeable” and fine-tuning the video, the ads, and the creative for the particular screen. “We believe context still matters and we ask what’s the right format,” she explains, adding that Starcom is focused on cross-screen experiences through its various brand experience units from Liquid Thread to the recently launched Zero Dot.
For more insight into cross-screen measurement, creative and reach, check out this video interview.
Beet.TV spoke to Richman earlier this week in New York at the Beet.TV summit on cross-platform monetization hosted by Starcom MediaVest Group and sponsored by Dailymotion.
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Starcom itself has redesigned its teams and units to focus on connecting with audience across screens and building engagement on all platforms. Part of that mission includes finding the right mix between data-drive programmatic video buying and the more emotive aspects of storytelling, Richman says.
Beet.TV spoke to Richman earlier this week in New York at the Beet.TV summit on cross-platform monetization hosted by Starcom MediaVest Group and sponsored by Dailymotion.
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