That was the message from the leader of an umbrella group representing tens of thousands of US brands, as his own conference got under way this week.

Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), spoke with Beet.TV for this video interview at ANA’s Masters of Marketing Week in Orlando.

“As we lost sight and gotten distracted by the shiny objects of all the new media forms, the emphasis on building our brands began to de-emphasise and it went away,” Liodice said.

“Growth is the most important issue, the function (that) marketing has to focus on. A 1%, a percentage change in the growth rate of the Fortune 500 will elevate sales by $500 billion over three years.”

The ad industry has spent the last 10 years in rapture to a host of new technology super powers, much of which has allowed brands to combine data sources to find specific audiences around the net and then buy ads to them in a microsecond.

In 2019, the focus is shifting slightly toward opted-in relationships with known audience members, following privacy outcries.

Additionally, Liodice’s sub-text is, at the high level, brands need to drive real business growth, not just obsess over low-lying efficiencies.

He calls the current moment a “puddle of confusion”.

“Now a marketer has to understand about data, has to understand about brand safety, understand about ad fraud, things that they typically have not spent a lot of time or attention on and have had to grow up and realise that data is the heart and soul of optimum decision making,” he says.

“Those are enormous challenges and everybody is struggling with it in various ways. (Marketers) are leveraging technology to try to harness that. But, because most of us have not necessarily had the firsthand experience at how to harness that while simultaneously respecting the rights and privileges of the consumer, we end up making less than optimum decisions as to how to approach it.”

“Everybody needs to grow. Everybody wants to grow. But if you read lots of reports, growth is substandard, is suboptimum,” Liodice says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2019 Cannes Lions confab.

Before joining forces with Cannes, the ANA’s Master’s Circle had already started to develop the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing and #SeeHer, whose goal is to improve gender equality.

The three priorities that have emerged since then involve “reinventing the academic curriculum and marking students understand what the marketer career can be”; upskilling and reskilling “because most marketers don’t have the skills to compete in this world”; and how to build a better CMO.

“How do you build a CMO that understands the wide span of responsibilities and understands what is necessary to develop their respective organizations?” is the way Liodice explains it. “It’s a very, very complex job and no two CMO’s are alike. They’re like fingerprints.”

Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, how to balance “taking back responsibility as a marketer with the role of your partner ecosystem,” Liodice cites the wave of change that has swept the marketing world.

“It starts with a stake in the ground that says it’s the marketer’s agenda, it’s the marketer’s money,” he says. “And when the marketers win everybody wins. Because you generate more resources that can be distributed to the agencies, media publishers, consultants etc.”

Liodice believes that in recent years, that vision had been lost “or at least it had been muted and in some cases almost disintegrated. I’d say over the past decade, that model had changed as the Googles and the Facebooks and the agencies all changed and totally disrupted what the ecosystem looked like.

“The marketers became almost paralyzed, did not necessarily understand how to react as they were dealing in an increasingly non transparent world. And in that non transparency, their ability to navigate and make the ultimate business decisions to build their brands and businesses was frittered away.”

As Liodice was being interviewed, the CMO Growth Council was in the process of figuring out how to prioritize “four big buckets” consisting of data, technology and measurement; brand innovation, creativity and experience; and talent, society and sustainability, which includes equality diversity brand purpose.

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.

“The in-house agency phenomenon is something that really just popped out of surveys that we were doing,” says ANA CEO Bob Liodice in this Beet.TV interview at the ANA In-House Agency Conference, who also credits the Boston-based In-House Agency Forum.

“The more we began to learn, the more we realized that in fact in-house agencies are a function of growth,” Liodice adds. “Growth is our middle name. Driving growth for brands and businesses is what we are all about.”

After a survey of ANA members in 2018, “we saw how explosive it was. In house agencies were growing because marketers were feeling like this was an important element to gain greater control, to take their industry back.”

So now the option of taking work in-house is considered a fundamental growth element for brands and companies. What’s been missing from many conversations about building sustainable businesses were the words “brands” and “creative,” amid a decline in brand loyalty, according to Liodice.

“If you notice, there aren’t a lot of creative conferences or creative meetings. What was happening was creative was being pushed aside in favor of speed to market, the shiny objects that were out there.”

He cites survey data showing that young consumers consider only 26% of brands to be necessary or desired. “That is awful. The way to do that is we have to bring back that loyalty factor.

“We need to reach them in new ways that we’ve been missing on for years and years. There’s an atrophy and a deterioration that we can no longer accept.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos please visit this page.

After buying media in-house in one capacity or other for about six years, “We were pretty surefooted that we knew how to do it and we knew how this was going to play out,” Smith explains in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ In-House Agency Conference. “And we said, like, ‘Hey let’s triple down on this and let’s really build out a global presence in media buying and planning.’”

Along the way came the realization that EA had ended up “competing with Google and Facebook for talent” and that media buying and planning is “still really regionalized,” not just in the United States but also abroad. “And that influenced which hubs we were going to hire out of,” Smith says.

A key hiring question was how to bring “a new organ into the body” without experiencing “tissue rejection.” In other words, “How do we onboard all of these people to what makes EA special and give them a really good experience, and make sure that we’re growing people within our company as opposed to just hiring random onesies, twosies.”

Hence the small steps a company can take as opposed to trying to assemble a team ASAP. “Don’t be afraid to baby step it,” Smith says. “I would say plan as much as you can and know that while you’re planning, those plans are going to change constantly.”

She advises not to get caught up “on having enough people in seats and having this one perfect discipline, but really think about it from how is this going to transform my business, who do I need to bring along for that journey and what are the steps I can take to get there. Because you don’t have to do it overnight.”

Asked to comment on the traditional status of agency of record, Smith, whose background includes AT&T, PubMatic, the Internet Advertising Bureau and 360i, suggests it comes with limitations.

“We buy media across more than 40 countries, and I can’t think of an agency of record situation that would allow us to be as nimble, as fluid, as reactive and as experimental as we would want to be. I think there are definitely certain businesses that it makes sense for, but for me, personally, I don’t think I really resonate with agency of record.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference. This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos please visit this page.

Now, because in-house talent at companies like Verizon are in close in proximity to corporate leadership, among other factors, “that is attracting creatives because they get to see more of their work actually go on air than when you work at an external agency,” Warren Chase explains in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ In-House Agency Conference.

It all begins with finding the right talent and defining—and, more to the point, confining—the in-house staffers’ day-to-day roles, according to Chase, who spent more than two decades at BBDO Worldwide and a brief stint at Wunderman. He makes the job of finding in-house prospects sound rather old-school compared to today’s Internet-intensive, algorithm-driven job application machinations.

“Most effective to us has been to pick up the phone and call the people that you worked with before,” says Chase. “This is a business where if you’re a creative, you’re in it for life, that’s what you do. You build multiple relationships with people throughout your career.”

Asked about creating an in-house organization from scratch and managing workflow and asset management, Chase cites the brilliance of the “business gaze” that was Verizon’s strategy. There is a scope of work, staffing plan and specific funding.

“I am not a catchall department that anybody can call within the Verizon organization and say, ‘hey I need help with a banner, can you design something for me?’ We don’t do that work. We keep all of that unfunded work at bay.”

The key to collaborating and getting along with Verizon’s external agencies rests on establishing clarity when it comes to responsibilities and swim lanes.

“We don’t want to be seen as the team that is going to come in and steal business from agencies,” Chase says. “We don’t pitch against other agencies. Agencies are not briefed to pitch against each other. We don’t find that that contributes to the overall strength of the relationship or the quality of the work that ends up going out.”

He’s excited that Verizon is “finally taking off the hat of being just a telecom and being a technology company,” including being the first company worldwide to launch 5G as a technology platform. “The things that you are going to be able to do with that are just unimaginable at this point.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA In-House Agency Conference.   This series is sponsored by Extreme Reach.  For more videos please visit this page.

“I like to think about the CMO as actually the chief consumer officer. So I guess marketing people should always be the people with the best knowledge about consumers,” says Marcel Marcondes, U.S. CMO, Anheuser-Busch. “Marketing needs to deliver on creativity on advertising and everything. But if you really want to drive growth, we must lead the conversation on innovation as well. Because this is how we fulfill their needs through our products.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Masters of Marketing conference, Marcondes explains A-B’s quest for agility and why it’s no longer enough to simply steal market share from competitors.

“First and foremost, we’re radically changing the way we do innovation. We’re reducing lead times by half so we can really bring great beers and great products to life in a much faster way,” says Marcondes. “We’re really trying to bring more people to the category” in order to expand the category, he adds, citing health and wellness beverages. “And we’re developing new kinds of beers that can really address that in a very effective way.”

Whereas beer brands are used to planning and delivering “whatever we want to do” to drive business, that strategy has gone flat, according to Marcondes. “Now it’s all about listening to consumers first. So it’s harder to plan. You must pay attention on a daily basis to what’s going on out there, what’s relevant in culture, what people are talking about. This is really time sensitive.”

Asked about A-B’s longtime use of brand-building television advertising, Marcondes says TV still occupies an important place in the company’s communications. “I still believe in TV to support innovation. It’s all about driving fast awareness. This is exactly what you need when you’re launching something new to the market.

“Nowadays, that’s the beginning of the conversation. We need to have TV and we need to go way beyond that because either we are part of the conversation or we’re irrelevant. I cannot allow this to happen to our brands or to our categories.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

“Talent is critical to the journey of transformation for marketing these days. As we all know, many of our organizations have been disrupted and are all undergoing transformation to drive growth,” Sison says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“We talk about how we build brands in this new world, we talk about marketing technology, data and analytics. But we often forget about the importance of people and talent as a critical component to driving successful growth and change within the industry itself.”

Within J&J, the marketer has decided that “All of our marketers need to be better scientists,” along with better strategists to sort out data that can drive business success and better storytellers “to make sure that we’re able to tell a consistent brand story across screens.”

The final “s” is for socializers, “because we need to create that relationship that’s much more social with our consumers and our brands,” Sison says.

J&H’s engagement with its consumers reveals that they are expecting “a great deal of value exchanged with our brands these days in terms of not just the education but also a broader set of experiences.”

It goes beyond mere products to services powered by technology, for example apps or the Internet of things.

“We at J&J have begun to recognize this and are building new engagement touch points, if you will, with our consumers to make sure that our brands are relevant in that exchange of value.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

That age cohort, consisting of those born between roughly 1995 and 2008, has been the subject of focus groups, the results of which have formed the Navy’s most recent content for its Forged by the Sea campaign, says Capt. Matt Boren, CMO, Navy Recruiting Command.

“Most of them have something unique that drew them to the Navy, and we define those as rewards of the Navy,” Capt. Boren explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

Some prospects are drawn to meaningful venture or creative innovation, while a third group is “traditionalist” in nature by virtue of having family members in the military. The last group respond to ads or displays of strength, according to Capt. Boren.

“All three of those pillars really want to find teamwork and opportunity, so we call that a stability seeking behavior across all three genres.”

Asked about specific KPI’s, he says the big picture starts with creating awareness about a branch of the armed forces with which not everyone is completely familiar.

“We have a system where we go from awareness to them engaging with our content, ultimately driving them to navy.com. We consider that our recruiting hub and there we have a call to action,” says Capt. Boren.

That might be an 800 number someone can call, filling out lead-gen form or an email. “They will do some form to get their name and information in our system, at which point we take that from a gross lead and we start a process we call blueprinting.”

After checking those prospects for age, citizenship and other aspects of eligibility, “then we get them on the phone” gauge interest and eliminate such disqualifiers as medical or criminal backgrounds. At the bottom of the funnel emerge qualified and interested leads. “That’s what we pass to our field recruiters.”

Since 1973, when the Navy became all-volunteer, it’s had nine different advertising taglines, but none of them invoked the word “sea” until now, Capt. Boren notes. The Navy’s agency in Memphis is Y&R, whom he describes as an “outstanding team. I’ve been ecstatic with what they’ve produced” in partnership with media agency Wavemaker to drive a deeper connection between media, content and technology.

He presented on the main stage of the ANA with Amanda Richman, CEO  of Wavemaker, U.S.

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.

Noting margin inadequacies at agencies and profit-and-loss challenges at marketers, it’s logical to take a close look at what can be done in-house, Kassan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“Those are competing dynamics and I think it’s a chaotic moment and I think there is more that clients, marketers can do themselves. That doesn’t negate the need for an agency because the agency is that outside-in perspective that you can’t always get looking inside out,” says Kassan.

“You run the risk if you create an in-house agency at brand X, that your team is only focused on brand X and they don’t get the horizontal visibility and influence that you get if you’re working across many brands.”

Taking more functions in-house also impacts the recruitment of talent when creative or media practitioners decide whether they want to work on just one client or vertical category, according to Kassan. “Or do they want the variety is the spice of life approach where they get to work across a portfolio of clients?’

The ANA surveyed 412 of its members in August 2018, 52% of whom were at the director level or above. According to the survey, 78% of ANA members have some type of in-house operation compared to 42% 10 years ago.

Kassan believes that advances in technology and automation will continue to be driving force for marketers deciding to do more themselves. “Will that trend continue? Yes.”

He perceives more transparency in what people are talking about at the ANA conference, and not just pertaining to media buying and placement “but also transparency about the actual conversation. Marketers and agencies actually talking about what are the benefits and liabilities of going in house. I think it’s a good conversation and we’ll see a lot of movement in that regard.”

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.

“We put a lot of effort on remodeling restaurants and making sure that the restaurants have the latest design. We always study the type of guests who come to our restaurants and we try to offer a layout to accommodate them,” Machado adds.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference, Machado talks about a company culture focused on design, good service and modern technology.

The “design bucket” includes being able to accommodate, say, families who need four seats or people who need a power outlet and WiFi to get some work done at a Burger King location. “Try to understand who is the guest of that particular location or the country so that we make sure we offer that experience,” Machado says.

Bucket #2, “guest friendliness,” covers seemingly simple concepts like getting someone’s order right and serving food while it’s still hot. “It’s basic stuff, but if you don’t get that right, the experience will not be great. It’s one of the biggest challenges we have to make sure that our culture permeates to the restaurant.”

Rounding out Burger King’s trio of priorities is using technology to change the way that people interact with the brand. “I’m not even talking about advertising or social media, I’m talking about at the restaurant,” Machado says, citing amenities like self-ordering kiosks, mobile ordering/payment systems and CRM. “The basic things that we have to do at the restaurant because today technology is empowering us to do that.”

Asked about his participation with the ANA’s CMO Council in conjunction with the Cannes Lions, Machado calls it a “huge opportunity and responsibility. I want to learn and I also want to contribute.”

Noting that things are “just getting started” with the CMO Council as people continue to get to know each other and decide what to pursue, he shares his hopes for the next gathering in June of 2019 at Cannes. “My expectation for Cannes would be to have even more clarity in each of the work streams, in each of the pillars that we have as part of this initiative” along with having better connections with Council members “because I think that’s also part of the benefit of having a council is the networking.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

Whereas shoppers’ in-store experiences might once have involved interacting with a cashier or other employee, now they’re researching and buying products online, engaging in customer service follow-up and making a lot more returns, Rogers explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“All of that has really changed the nature of the relationship with the customer and now what we have historically defined as marketing or the communication piece is really a small piece of the overall pie now,” says Rogers, who had been Chief Marketing Officer at Walmart. “Structurally, what we’ve done is we’ve made the job of the chief marketer bigger. And so now it’s chief member officer instead of chief marketing officer. Every customer touchpoint digitally and physically along the way now resides within the marketing team, and that’s a big change.”

Rogers is one of many marketers who are involved with the ANA’s CMO Council along with the Cannes advertising festival. He likes the opportunities to brainstorm, think and ideate with other marketers who are experiencing similar challenges.

“The challenge is when you’re in your own organization, everybody kind of already expects you to know all this stuff. So it’s cool to have a safe place where you can go and network and think and be around a bunch of smart people to cultivate ideas that you can then bring back to your company. This group has a high ROI in terms of the things that I’m able to take from it and bring back to my company.” Rogers adds.

When the CMO Council convenes again at Cannes in June of 2019, Rogers hopes to see guidelines or recommendations “about what companies can do in terms of their org structure, to position themselves to really go and address customer experience broadly.” He thinks it’s a “good idea for this group to provide guidance to corporate America on how to do that.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

“You need to nurture it and you need to sort of grow and develop that talent. I’m a firm believer of great marketing talent is going to lead to great and big growth for our companies,” Rutledge adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

Rutledge had a key role in two sessions at the conference: Leading Disruption To Drive Growth, wherein she shared the stage with executives from Procter & Gamble, Deloitte and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, and Leveraging An Iconic Brand To Fuel Business Globally.

“American Express does a lot to nurture its talent,” Rutledge explains. “We have great learning programs that help our marketers understand and grow as well as we’re really caring so much about leadership and personal leadership and are really caring about their career development and how we can be there for them and have their back every step of the way of their career.”

Reflecting on one “fabulous” conference session, she cites examples of action items that can be taken both as individuals and as a group in terms of furthering the marketing industry, from partnering with universities together, from clearly defining and expanding the definition of marketing.

Also a firm believer in the need to “market the marketing,” Rutledge says “that’s what I think we need to do.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, A+E’s EVP of Ad Sales discusses why advertisers haven’t taken the full plunge into advanced targeting and the likelihood that the ad-supported model is in the future for companies like Amazon, Netflix and the planned Disney service.

He says advertisers are “getting so pressured to prove the effectiveness of every nickel they spend. Everyone’s known for a long time TV works, especially on the upper-funnel metrics of awareness and all that. But there’s been like a vagueness to that. It doesn’t really tie back to ROI as cleanly as some other things.”

Being able to more closely tie TV ad exposure to tangible business results “gives the ammunition that the marketers need to keep recommending premium video as that centerpiece and not be shifting money somewhere else,” Olsen says.

Advertisers are looking to strike a balance “between what digital is claiming it can do and what we’ve always known TV could do, and then just really getting to kind of the right balance to answer on the effectiveness of both,” he adds.

It’s worth noting that while age and gender has been the transactional TV demographic for years, secondary targets have been available for more than three decades, Olsen observes. TV networks have the tools to go beyond, say, trying to reach everyone ages 18-49 to more strategic targets.

“Clients I think are interested but they’re not jumping in with both feet yet” given questions about data quality and scalability. “So I think it’s finding the right balance between what is still mass, what is targeted and then you take it a step further, what should go to addressable, et cetera.”

Then there’s the viewer balancing act. While many are seeking to avoid ads, that comes with a higher cost.

But Olsen points to signs of hope. “Some of the stuff we’ve seen, though, isn’t as daunting as it may look right now,” he says. “Some of the S-VOD penetration is kind of hitting a ceiling here in the U.S. and I think those companies are actually looking at ad models themselves.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix has an ad model, Amazon, the new Disney service. All those things eventually have ad models as part of that product. I think they will be more tailored ads and more personalized will be kind of the magic to it.

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.

“I took the time to read through it and understand what they were seeing, and I think that sometimes there are facts that are buried in that tell a broader story, Marla Kaplowitz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference. “We speak to agencies every single day who are either working with some in house teams or they’re working directly with marketers. And there is no right way and you have to really consider what is right for you.”

The ANA surveyed 412 of its members in August 2018, 52% of whom were at the director level or above. For 44% of respondents, their in-house agency was established within the past five years, contributing to the recent rise in overall penetration of in-house agencies, according to the survey.

Among other survey findings, services performed in-house that have grown significantly over the past five years are content marketing, creative strategy,
 data/marketing analytics,
 media strategy,
 programmatic media and
 social media (both creative and media).

The survey reveals that top perceived benefits of in-house agencies are:

*Cost efficiencies

*Better knowledge of brands

*Institutional knowledge

*Dedicated staff

*Speed, nimbleness

Asked to identify a single primary benefit of having an in-house agency, cost efficiencies was top ranked by a wide margin, according to the survey.

“The most telling stat in the report is that 90 percent of ANA members still continue to work with an outside agency,” Kaplowitz says. “I think that when you look at the kind of work that is going on right now in the marketplace, from media and the complexity that is happening in the digital supply chain, if you’re looking at programmatic and all the technology, you need outside perspective.”

She adds that producing “brilliant” creative requires “outside provocation and thinking. When you’re working with an agency on content, you want a strategic planner who is looking at what is going on in culture and not just looking at one particular brand but looking across all the different categories and working with different people in the agencies.”

Kaplowitz says the most important thing to understand about agencies is their ability to help drive business growth and “helping to be an extension of that client and that client team. You need that outside perspective, you need that outside thinking to push and provoke.  You don’t get that when you’re with your own team.”

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.

It’s a situation that many retailers would love to find themselves in, Gomez explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“The retail industry is going through a massive transformation,” Gomez says. “If you read the headlines, what you’re reading about is there are so many retailers that are on the verge of bankruptcy or actually going bankrupt. They’re closing stores.

“Those retailers that are going to survive are going to be the ones that can invest to create a differentiated, compelling guest experience.”

For Target, whose brick-and-mortar locations and online presence Gomez says are frequented by 80% of Americans, investments are made with an eye toward creation a shopper experience that can’t be found elsewhere. “We’re remodeling our stores, we’re opening new stores in urban locations, on college campuses, we’re investing in supply chain so we can get product to you faster than anybody else and we’re launching a ton of new owned brands,” he says.

So the Target challenge is “how do we come across as small? How do we come across as local? How do we come across as your Target?”

While mass-targeted advertising across the country is a given, Target also invests in such a way that’s “very bespoke for that community.” Tactics can include charitable works and local events to “make sure that we’re showing up in a way that’s going to be relevant for that neighborhood.”

Asked about the work he does with the CMO Council partnership of the ANA and the Cannes advertising festival, whose representatives gathered in Orlando recently, Gomez points to common issues as a binding element.

“It doesn’t really matter what industry you’re in or how big your company is. We’re all dealing with the same challenges. And Cannes gives us a great forum to get together to talk about the solutions and that’s what I expect to happen in June.”

His hope for the agenda next June in Cannes is “that it becomes very clear, specific and tangible and that we have some early wins so it can build some momentum.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

Suitably, Charney’s presentation at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference was titled The Most Feared Four-Letter Word In Marketing. That word is risk, and it’s something that the marketing department of the insurance giant has long championed, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Risk? First of all, it’s my favorite four-letter word of any four-letter word in marketing and in general. You’ve got to take risks. It’s got to be a company, a culture of risks,” Charney says.

With Flo, portrayed by actress and comedian Stephanie Courtney, one might not think there’s too much risk involved, even though some of her characters can be hard to relate to. Fact is, she’s attracted a great deal of detractors (to put it mildly) among American consumers. But it’s helped Progressive stay top-of-mind.

“It’s all about being part of the consideration set, Charney says. “If I’m thinking about insurance, I got to think about Progressive. I see that woman Flo, I’m thinking about Progressive. Then I go and I quote with Progressive and I convert with Progressive. Next thing I know, I’m a customer for ten, fifteen years. It’s a very competitive environment right now.”

There are 36,000 “marketers” within Progressive, according to Charney. “And in some ways, they really represent our brand, and they also have to be themselves. We don’t want to change who they are, we want them to be who they are. And if they get a chance to take a risk and we support that risk, it extends throughout the company.”

When Flo emerged 10 years ago, there was an obvious risk, Charney says, because she was a woman with black hair and a beret, red lipstick and crazy eyelashes. “That was a risk ten years ago. Now it’s nothing. But we have eight other campaigns besides just the Flo campaign.”

If it seems like some Progressive commercials are impromptu, that’s on purpose. They are shot using script outlines and improvisational actors exclusively.

“We don’t try to get normal actors. So the energy on set is incredible,” says Charney. “It’s almost like Curb Your Enthusiasm, if you follow that. We get script outlines and then we’ve got to get certain messages across, but we let the improv actors have fun with it. And we are surprised sometimes with some of the content we get.”

While he professes an inherent love for marketing, Charney believes that his compatriots need to get braver. “Take risks. It’s a good thing. And when it pays off, it pays off big.”

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.

“I think we’re at an inflection point,” Rothwell says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing Conference. “Scale has been lacking in certain areas, which made it tough I think as an investment prioritization for some brands and agencies,” Rothwell adds. “But now we see a lot more scale coming through those OTT, set-top box VOD and, increasingly, addressable linear opportunities.”

Calling advanced TV “the umbrella term for all of those opportunities or anything outside of the linear stream,” Rothwell says he’s “getting the sense that people are really leaning into it now. ”

In a Beet.TV interview with Brian Wallach, who is SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, FreeWheel Markets, Wallach explains how FreeWheel’s new DRIVE platform is designed to unify advanced TV offerings with unified audience measurement.

To align with a more scaled, dynamic TV offering, Rothwell discussed the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video’s latest output: A Buyer’s Guide to the New Living Room.” This reference guide provides media planners and buyers with tactics and workarounds to take advantage of what the new living room can do for advertisers.

Every quarter, increasing volumes of digital and dynamically delivered video advertising are accessed via set-top boxes and (OTT) devices on the big screen. This now accounts for 57 percent of all non-linear impressions, according to the FreeWheel Video Monetization Report (VMR) Q2 2018.

“Combine the reach of broadcast television with the dynamic insertion and dynamic advertising opportunities through these new devices and you can combine that reach now with precision. TV being that full-funnel opportunity for advertisers,” says Rothwell.

This is not to suggest these still-growing channels are not without their challenges. “Currently, there’s a lot of constraints getting in the way, whether that be measurement, technology and partners.”

Hence the following guideposts for buyers from the FreeWheel Council’s “A Buyer’s Guide to the New Living Room”:

• Become a subject matter expert in the new living room to gain advantage for your clients while these channels are still nascent and growing

• Create a plan using complementary channels to balance reach and precision, leveraging the common and unique attributes of each

• Work through measurement hurdles and leverage the tools and KPIs that are available to access these engaged yet underserved audiences

• Personalize messaging and manage frequency through addressable options with creative diversity on all campaigns delivered to the new living room

• Optimize for scale by adjusting your KPIs for platforms as necessary such as viewability targets in channels that aren’t able to be measured

“We are as an industry starting to understand what we need to do to make it a more viable opportunity for brands,” says Rothwell, who is VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations. “Really get that first and third party data to light up and create additional value, create additional precision for those advertising campaigns.”

He sees a “wide appreciation” for the reach of TV programming, regardless of how it is accessed, to help build the purchase funnel and using addressable advertising options to help push consumers to the transaction phase.

“Consistency and standards obviously come next, and we’re starting to see some of that already as well,” Rothwell says.

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.

“I’m going to suggest that we have to figure out how to pull them both together around one consumer in order to really drive the growth we want. But it’s not an either or. But it’s an and,” says Eric Reynolds.

Reynolds was referencing his talk at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, where he discussed “the tension between performance marketing, or growth marketing, and brand marketing.” His presentation was titled Path To Growth: A Modern Marketing Dilemma.

Among other insights Reynolds shares in this interview with Beet.TV, he talks about the slow and steady decline of linear television as a means of reaching consumers and how Clorox has been moving out of both print and TV in favor of digital—video in particular.

Why performance marketing does very well is because it’s data-rich, agile and nimble. “It’s actually way much more consumer-focused than classic brand marketing, which is the way I grew up. It’s because they’re very intimate with the consumer and they change fast,” Reynolds says.

The problem with performance marketing is “you run out of steam fast…because you fundamentally don’t know the person you’re trying to build a relationship with your brand. It’s just a bunch of clicks and data and sets. And that will get you so far.”

On the other end of the spectrum, brand marketing provides a strong understanding of consumers at a life and a category level. “It creates enduring ideas that keep people coming back. And you need both is the point. If we’re all just about activation through data, then we really don’t have a brand,” Reynolds adds.

“But if we’re only talking big, thematic, large-scale ideas that are slow, well we’re not rising to the challenge that consumers expect us to do, which is to have that real time, that intimate, be-useful relationship so you really need to do both.”

Asked for a breakdown of Clorox’s media choices, Reynolds says they’re constantly changing but tied less to a “big, strategic choice” and much more to “following where consumers are open to receiving messages and information from us. And what that means broad-scale is for a us a consistent decline in linear TV, year on year on year, and a rise in more assignable media like digital display, video, social. And we see these trends continuing.”

As the company’s analytics have evolved, providing ever more insight into how media is performing for sales, “well over” 60% of Clorox’s media is now digital.

“Now video, though, is the place where it’s all heading towards, because for our categories and our brands, it’s the place where we tell the richest stories, the kind of stories whether they’re product stories or category stories or brand stories, that seems to be the place where consumers want to engage with us.”

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.

“We’re trying to put this all together, create scale and apply data and measurement so it’s a really transparent, easy to execute environment for buyers,” says Brian Wallach, SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, FreeWheel Markets.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing Conference, Wallach explains how partnering with Nielsen also benefits digital media buyers and talks about the big rise in live digital TV viewing and the challenges ahead for reaching those audiences.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth in live TV consumption on apps and connected TV devices. That’s a huge opportunity. That’s probably one of the biggest areas that we see growing quickly,” he says.

Unlike some people, Wallach doesn’t believe that the trend of viewers migrating from linear TV is a catastrophe. “I think there’s still plenty of scale in linear TV. We’re just all trying to focus on the new living room and the TV being a device rather than it being the distribution means,” he says.

“It’s really exciting to us because linear TV buyers are asking how to do their linear campaigns with age and gender and GRPs and also tap into this new supply in OTT,” Wallach adds. “And we’re the only people in town really that have this kind of scale on full-episode inventory across the TV programmer universe versus a whole bunch of clips or long-tail websites that are trying to mimic that experience.”

Nielsen’s DAR provides a comprehensive view of digital audiences in a way comparable to linear TV. Using FreeWheel’s proprietary methodology, DRIVE enables marketers to assess total TV reach across linear and digital viewing, control reach and frequency, and ultimately, tie outcomes to anonymized, household-level data, according to a FreeWheel news release. Wallach says the need for DRIVE’s capabilities spans both linear TV and digital media buyers.

“As you start to explore different measurement types and all the different data partners that we’ll work with out there, making scale against this inventory isn’t just a TV buyers need. Digital buyers are looking for this type of need as well and they have all sorts of psychographic data that they want to target against and we’ll be able to unlock that on this inventory at scale within the next couple of months.”

Looking ahead, Wallach summarizes the challenges related to the rise in viewing of live programming via non-linear means, namely the way it’s delivered. With a traditional digital video ad campaign, there’s a start date and an end date, with everything in between evenly paced over the course of the flight.

“Live happens when live happens. So it’s going to take some time to create a difference in planning and execution and people acknowledging that it’s still great quality inventory and it’s actually really good scale in digital as a complement to TV.”

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.

“Because we do believe that the need to depict women positively is not just incumbent on our female focused brands, but it’s important that all of our brands show up in the right way.”

Launched by the Association of National Advertisers in 2016, #SeeHer and GEM have prompted “a heightened level of awareness and much more sincere conversations around the quality of our communications,” Dilley explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Dilley, who is responsible for PepsiCo’s Better For You & Premium Brands, says that shoppers are basing their brand decisions in part on strong diversity messages and positive depictions of females. Moreover, diversity pays dividends.

“Those businesses that are invested in diversity perform better, and the statistics show that now,” she says. “I think also we know that the GEM score drives better business results, so that’s incredibly important, particularly when you’re speaking to the finance director.”

Dilley has found that GEM helps PepsiCo have wider communications about the depiction of females in its communications. It can also act as a prompt to “get the right message across” and avoid making mistakes.

In addition, #SeeHer has fostered more constructive collaborations with the company’s agency partners. “In the last few months, I’ve been personally involved with a number of my brands and as we’ve developed new creative starting off with the conversation that #SeeHer has enabled us to have and putting that front and foremost as a critical factor of success within creative development,” Dilley says.

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The CMO Growth Council was formed to focus on marketing taking back control and leading disruption because marketing is being disrupted completely but taking control to lead disruption to drive growth,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s Masters of Marketing conference. “Because there’s not enough growth.”

Earlier this year, the ANA Masters Circle got together with 25 CMOs in Cannes and focused on five areas that are perceived to have the greatest opportunity to drive more growth. They are data and technology, customer centricity, brand experience and innovation, talent and capability, and society and sustainability.

“We spent the last couple of days with 200 CMO’s going through what the 25 CMO’s had come up with over the past few months and identified several areas that looked of great interest to us to really advance growth,” says Pritchard. “Data and technology is clearly one of the big ones, because mass marketing is being disrupted and everyone is reinventing media and reinventing advertising for that matter.”

As a result, CMO’s need to know about data management platforms, analytics capabilities, algorithms and related areas.

“What the CMO’s decided is that this is something we really have to just transform from an industry standpoint,” Pritchard explains. “And what we talked about was committing to creating what’s essentially an ANA marketing university that would bring all the best minds together through the ANA to be able to create the capability industrywide to transform our industry.”

He says that ANA CEO Bob Liodice made a big commitment “on the spot to make that happen.” Moreover, Pritchard asked whether CMO’s would be willing to serve as adjunct professors “and a bunch of hands went up.”

Another subject of great interest to the CMOs concerns customer centricity and brand experience and innovation so that brands can create relevant experiences across all consumer touchpoints. “Every single one of us was talking about how we’re using lean startup and lean innovation capabilities to be able to do fast cycle iterations in very small groups to be able to create ideas and get them out in the market much more quickly,” Pritchard says.

He is especially passionate about society and sustainability to be a force for good and a force for growth. “We invited everyone join #SeeHer, join the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, join Free The Bid so you can get equality behind the camera. And then we also introduced an idea of joining #Brands For Good,” one of whose efforts is to recognize brands that try to reduce plastic consumption.

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.

In this interview with Beet.TV earlier this week at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference, Quinn discusses the year ahead and the importance of Meredith Corporation’s adoption of #SeeHer across its digital and print content.

Advertisers that are using GEM scores based on consumer surveys about advertising and content are “using that spend and the influence that they have for the good of their businesses as well as for the good of society. The initiative started as a business initiative, it’s all about growth,” Quinn says.

As #SeeHer has built momentum, business cases were developed showing the impact that GEM scores can have on sales and other ROI metrics. The ANA now has GEM metrics on how females have been depicted in some 600 television shows.

“What’s really exciting that Meredith has done is they’re the first publisher ever to apply GEM scores to their own content,” Quinn says. “The reason that’s important for advertisers is that we’ve proven the business case that when you have a strong GEM-scoring ad and you put it adjacent to strong GEM content, that’s how you get the synergistic affect on your sales and your return on investment.”

Quinn believes advertisers will be “really open to the idea that now Meredith is able to put strong GEM advertising into their books and their other content in a way that’s really accretive to the whole equation of gender equality.”

Asked for a male’s perspective on the #SeeHer movement, Quinn cites gender inclusion as a key component. “For this initiative to be successful, we need everybody to be involved in this. It’s something that’s a real opportunity overall for the whole content creation industry.”

Over the next 12 months, he sees three main priorities, starting with getting more marketers involved. “We talk about that as democratizing #SeeHer. Let’s get every ANA member, for example, involved in #SeeHer.”

Second is the ANA’s response to “a huge demand to take it globally, and so we are in the process of doing that and it will be available globally in 2019 because many of our marketers are obviously operating in multiple countries.”

Finally, “We need GEM to become much more prevalent in the content world. We’ve got an opportunity for GEM to become really the gold standard measurement across all content.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

In addition to #SeeHer, Georgia-Pacific has its own program to promote gender equality in advertising and media called Strength Has No Gender for its Brawny brand, CMO Douwe Bergsma explains in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“While we were looking at talent through separate efforts, all of a sudden we got a lot of feedback especially from young women that were joining Georgia-Pacific” who had seen the company’s presentations at universities and conferences, “which became a motivator for them to join the company,” says Bergsma. “We heard the same stories from our agencies where some of the top female creatives wanted to work on our business because of the way we embraced #SeeHer. So there was an indirect benefit where we all are challenged with recruiting the best talent that unexpectedly, because of our position and because of our activities, a lot of female talent gravitated to our organization and stayed.”

The #SeeHer GEM metric uses consumer surveys to identify best-in-class advertising and programming that supports girls and women. The ANA rolled out #SeeHer in 2016.

Georgia-Pacific began by using GEM data to inform its advertising creative and expanded to using it in its packaging. “Our Sparkle packaging is fully developed with the help of GEM scores to identify how our fairy should look like on-pack,” says Bergsma.

In addition, the company has used GEM scores “to qualify most of our communication content, especially our TV ads, we make sure that everything has a positive GEM score when relevant.”

Another benefit of #SeeHer has been “It’s extremely motivating for our employees and the agencies we work with.”

Bergsma believes there’s much more unconscious bias in society than people might think. He points to himself as an example.

“Through #SeeHer and GEM, I actually caught myself in some unconscious bias while I thought I was doing pretty well” based on positive scores related to Brawny paper towels but not for Sparkle. “If that’s true for somebody that’s actually involved, I’m sure it’s true for all of those involved but especially those that are not involved.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Demand it from your agencies, demand it from your media partners, and threaten to withhold the dollars unless they fulfill that demand, because that’s how the world works,” says the President of TBWA\Chiat\Day NY. “It’s powered entirely by money.”

One of the more widely known industry efforts for accurate portrayals of girls and women in advertising and media is the #SeeHer movement started by the Association of National Advertisers in 2016, the same year Reyes started at TBWA\Chiat\ Day NY. In this interview with Beet.TV, Reyes talks about the need for female influence in the creative process and the agency’s Circle of Women mentoring program that Reyes has spearheaded.

“In marketing, media and advertising we pride ourselves on being a microcosm of the larger world,” Reyes says. “And we can’t pride ourselves on being that microcosm if we actually don’t reflect what the real world looks like. So without that woman’s voice in the creative process or any part of the process, we’re not really being genuine to the mission we have.”

That necessitates not only mentoring younger talent at agencies but looking for different kinds of talent in places agencies have overlooked, according to Reyes, who rose from Managing Director to President of TBWA\Chiat\Day NY in July of this year.

“I don’t think that women, I don’t think women of color, I don’t think they’re all hiding in some secret place that we all haven’t found,” says Reyes. “I think they’re probably right in front of us the entire time but we have to grow them and nurture them and develop them in ways that we haven’t really been doing in the past.”

Going a step further, Reyes advocates “over-hiring” such prospects “because we have to correct the system. In over-hiring, I think if we can mentor these folks and develop them, then we will even it out in a better way.”

The agency’s Circle of Women initiative began after executives asked female employees what they needed and how they felt about being a woman in the business. “Their main feelings were around a lack of voice, a lack of presence and a lack of confidence,” Reyes says.

Circle of Women identified 17 women “on the cusp of leadership” and gave them free executive coaching. In return they were asked to mentor two to three women underneath them “so that in that way we would constantly create this everlasting pipeline of female leaders. The most important thing for me is more than half of the 17 are women of color.”

As for demanding more inclusion from companies with which agencies work, Reyes says, “we have to put our money where our mouth is on the topic.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We’ve been actively supporting #SeeHer for the past year and a half,” during which time AmEx “got to know a lot of the best practices in understanding gender bias,” Hamilton adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

The Association of National Advertisers launched #SeeHer in 2016 as an outgrowth of its Alliance for Family Entertainment’s drive for more family friendly TV programming. #SeeHer’s goal is to more accurately portray all girls and women in media by 2020.

AmEx has used the data-tracking GEM to identify best-in-class advertising and programming that supports girls and women so that it could “more accurately portray women and move them into hero positions in our messaging,” Hamilton explains.

Within the company’s most recent campaign, AmEx focused on how it could use GEM “as an additional measure to” achieve greater breakthrough and effectiveness.

“The increased focus on gender equality and diversity of thinking and perspective as we work on our messaging and advertising is really critical,” says Hamilton. “We’ve long embraced diversity and inclusion but I think really focusing on women in particular in that has been an important area of focus for us.”

Asked how to communicate to creative teams the value of diversity, she says that in a data-driven organization, “certainly case studies are really effective when you can tangibly show the impact of pulling diversity into our messaging or accurately portraying women and the impact that can have on our overall effectiveness.

“It’s very easy to get people engaged and excited about that. Featuring best practices and really effective case studies was a helpful way to bring additional focus to the need.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.