In April, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), of which Liodice is CEO, issued a call seeking a consultant to conduct a study to help the organization understand how much actual spend is siphoned off in assorted fees.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Liodice and O’Connell use the language of military strategy to discuss the “information asymmetry” and “unknowables” at the heart of the industry.
ANA’s interest was sparked by a report by ISBA, the trade body for UK advertisers, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and auditor PwC, which found 15% of advertiser spend could not be attributed, whilst publishers receive only 51% of advertiser spend on average.
The figures were described as “mind-boggling” – especially several years after earlier industry reports first raised the problems around “ad tax” and transparency.
“The ad tech community is probably the least understood within the purview of brands and marketers,” Liodice says.
“It’s extraordinarily complex. There are billions of transactions that happen second by second, there are an incredible amount of handoffs and deals that take place between buyers and sellers, between SSPs and DSPs.
“The ad tech community knows a hell of a lot about what’s going on, they understand data flows, money flows – and the marketers pretty much do not. A lot of times, brands are flying by the seat of their pants.”
The problem, Liodice says, is “you don’t know what you don’t know”. He describes the “lack of information that we have to be able to make these decisions and optimise” as “almost opaque for us”.
That, in a programmatic world, is a far cry from history, when marketers had far more certainty about where fewer ads ran, in fewer destinations.
O’Connell and Liodice both hope a byproduct of the new focus on consumer privacy will be a cleaner, simpler and more transparent ad supply chain.
“Particularly now, as Google is deprecating its cookies and Apple is changing its IDFA policies, the marketers are essentially in the dark,” Liodice says.
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.
]]>A growing number of marketers are coming to that conclusion.
In Beet.tv’s Responsible Media Global Forum with GroupM and the 4As, plus with IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and Pubmatic, a series of guest speakers wrestled with balancing the new capabilities with a drive for simplicity.
ANA CEO Bob Liodice said a major problem is “information asymmetry”, the “increasing level of opacity” over advertising data.
“This is very different from where we were 10 years ago, when we had such a relatively simple landscape,” he said.
“Marketers are receiving relatively less and less information for which to be able to make responsible media investment decisions. We have less to make those calls and less to be able to analyse the impact of those results.”
4A’s EVP for government relations Alison Pepper said agencies are having to live with the new regulated environment – but they deserve a consistent approach.
“I think we’re no longer in an environment where we can really truly rely on self-regulation to do what needs to happen to keep our industry thriving and vibrant,” she said. “I think we are at an inflexion point.
“We’re really going to have to regulate … at a national level so that we don’t see this bifurcation of different privacy regimes happen at the state level. Agencies have so many touchpoints into how they’re getting data and how they’re using data that I think agencies increasingly have a really strong interest in seeing one national standard. They really need uniformity.”
IBM Watson Advertising revenue head Jeremy Hlavacek said improvements are coming.
“It’s clearly time for improvement and reinvention. I’m encouraged by the increased transparency that we’re demonstrating on our platforms,” he said.
“And I’m encouraged by how we can take this ecosystem to the next level and have it be both data-driven and intelligent, but also consumer-friendly and privacy-safe.”
GroupM global head of programmatic Max Jaffe said agencies are also having to ensure responsible media buying in this complex environment.
“The idea of inclusion in the social responsibility and understanding what properties our clients in GroupM is really supporting is really at the forefront of our minds and has been for a bit,” Jaffe said.
“Understanding how (players’) alignment and what their focus is on these types of issues and topics is really important.”
The considerations keep coming, however, as 4A’s chief operating officer Ashwini Karandikar says the drive to guarantee the provenance of ad inventory remains important.
“In the past, the notion of cleaning up supply was mainly restricted to programmatic media,” Karandikar said.
“At this point, there is so much programmatic guaranteed buyers that are already in place across all media types, across television, across audio, across just standard digital properties that are applying these same principles in terms of how you plan, buy, optimise, analyse, and go back and feed all this data back into your next planning cycle is possible for all media types.”
It all boils down to a need to balance two key pillars – performance and responsibility – according to MediaMath chief partnerships officer Laurent Cordier.
“We should aim (to) make programmatic performing, make programmatic transparent, make programmatic valuable,” Cordier said.
“The second side is, ‘What’s your responsibility, how do you see your responsibility or your role in continuing to favour or flourishing an open ecosystem?'”
Having helped to create Innovid 11 years ago to transform video experiences on the advertising side, “It’s finally here if you look at connected television. We see dramatic changes in that environment,” CEO & Co-Founder Zvika Netter says in this interview with Beet.TV. Among other topics, he discusses Innovid’s participation in special sessions featuring a roster of industry leaders at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month.
Citing companies like Netflix, Roku and Amazon, Netter observes, “if you see what they’re doing, they’re basically working on the experience. It’s the selection, it’s the quality of the content, the personalization, how you navigate. Companies are trading in the billions just because they pay attention to the user and optimizing their experience.”
What Innovid is about is “exactly that for advertising,” Netter adds. “How do we create the technology and the process and structure to create a better balance between advertising and content?”
If done correctly, this balancing act produces winners in the form of viewers, publishers and advertisers. “We work with all three contingencies. We’re in a great spot in the middle and we’re growing very fast.”
Earlier this year, Innovid secured $30 million in funding from Goldman Sachs to help expand its global footprint, and the company recently hired 60 more people. “We built a three-year plan to keep expanding the company both from a product offering but also geographically,” including in Japan, Spain and soon Germany.
“Connected TV is everywhere physically in the world. There are similar needs on that front,” Netter says.
“It finally has enough scale for them to care about it to have a conversation and see what the industry really needs,” Netter says of connected-TV. “It’s not just about us pushing the great next feature to buy something from your TV to your phone. It’s actually listening to CMO’s and publishers and understand what do they need, what do they care about these days and addressing that.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>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.
]]>That report kickstarted a cacophony of “transparency” talk, including the ANA issuing a series of recommended solutions.
Since then, chatter from industry folk is that things have improved, though not as much as may be desired.
For ANA group EVP Bill Duggan, progress has been made on brands’ agency contracts, auditing and programmatic buying.
“It’s been sort of a slow build,” he say sin this video interview with Beet.TV, “but we’ve been hearing increasingly from our members that they’ve been looking harder at their contracts.
A great time to look at contracts is during media pitches. What we’ve learned is that, among our members that have taken some action regarding the rebates, that 60% have taken action around agency contracts.”
Whilst the first report focused on agency buying behaviour, the latest area of transparency concern is emerging as the production of creative assets.
This summer, ANA issued a report on that topic, finding issues around whether agencies disclose the use of either in-house or commissioned creative producers.
“The production unit that may be doing some business for that client (may be) part of the agency, but the client may not know that,” Duggan adds. “Equally troubling is the fact that there are cases where those internal production units are competing against external independent editors.
“All those relationships need to be disclosed. And if there is a case where an internal agency unit is being considered, those bits (must not) initially go through the agency producer. They need to go through either a third party cost consultant or directly to the client.”
]]>Whereas the AFE had previously focused on the quality of family entertainment overall, “This year we’ve really focused on #SeeHer, which is all about the accurate portrayal of women and girls in media,” Quinn says during a break at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
According to Quinn, data show that the vast majority of parents are dissatisfied with the content that’s available for families to view, and the number one issue within that is the portrayal of women and girls. “They believe it’s either negative or is not representative of the diversity that actually exists in families and society at large,” Quinn says.
This can take the form of unconscious bias, poor representation of women, or basically ignoring them. “That’s particularly why it’s called #SeeHer,” Quinn adds.
It’s not just about promoting gender equality per se. The AFE believes that companies will achiever greater ROI for their marketing spend in doing so.
On the eve of the Masters of Marketing event, Quinn shared proprietary new data with the ANA board of directors showing that removing conscious or unconscious gender bias from advertising increases purchase intent by more than 26% for all consumers and more than 45% among women. This is why the ANA and AFE hope their Gender Equality Metric, which is fueled by ongoing research, will become the industry standard.
Scores from the new metric will be presented to #SeeHer members quarterly to track progress and help the movement to reach its goal: a 20% increase in the accurate portrayal of women and girls in media by 2020.
On a broader palette, Quinn sees fruit in the labors of the ANA’s Marketing2020 initiative, kicked off in 2014 to help its members determine how to best align marketing strategy, structure, and capabilities for business growth. One of the big takeaways was the importance of “purposeful positioning” for brands.
“Even today I’ve seen so many examples on the screen here of brands that have taken on incredible things from a storytelling standpoint, values of the culture, that really adds an additional layer of purpose to the brand,” says Quinn. “The thing that I’m seeing this year especially is the need for the industry, the marketing profession, to be seen as doing something good and valuable to society.”
We interviewed him at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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