That is the view of one man making media buying decisions at one of the world’s leading financial services institutions.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lou Paskalis, Bank Of America’s Senior Vice President, Customer Engagement and Media Investment, discusses the relationship between price and volume.
He talks about the recent trend with which some TV networks are now reducing the number of ads they show viewers – a response to growing complaints of excess.
“I’m actually happy to see the industry is maturing with regard to ad load,” Paskalis says. “The solution isn’t carving out more time for ads. It’s actually being able to deliver less ads that are more valuable to an individual which will have a higher take rate and will allow marketers to pay fair value for that.
“We give away advertising in this country today in some channels, and it really vexes me that I can buy a news audience for the same price that I can buy a primetime audience, when, in fact, we know that news audiences are six times more likely to recall your ad and five times more likely to engage with your ad. And yet they’re not sold at any kind of a price premium.
“I think that, when we get smarter about the relative value of audiences, those pieces of inventory will come at a significant premium, which will ultimately reduce ad load and improve the consumer experience.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January. The series is presented by Samsung Ads. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>The new opportunities presented by a plethora of different marketing channels mean brands need to generate more messaging in more formats and more combinations than ever before.
That is according to the man who spends advertising money for Bank Of America.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lou Paskalis, Bank Of America’s Senior Vice President, Customer Engagement and Media Investment, says: “Creative has never been more important than it is today. We need a lot of what I would call ‘core stock’ of really good creative experiences – not just ads, but also content and, frankly, even utilities; things that help people … calculate or to understand what their options are.
“I think the net production of creative over the next several years from agencies and also from in-house as well, is going to increase dramatically. I think the average asset will get exposed to less people because there’ll be more total assets out there.”
Paskalis also speaks about dynamic creative optimization (DCO), the technology which allows advertisers to take raw ingredients of advertisements and mix them in to different versions for different platforms and different audiences.
He suggests Bank of America is keen on harnessing the DCO opportunity, and is making steady progress on exploiting.
“We’re hoping to give folks an experience that makes them say, ‘Wow, the bank really understands me’,” Paskalis says. “It’s a real gas/oil mix of data science and intuition, but we’re learning our way forward and we’re really excited about the progress we’ve made.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January. The series is presented by Samsung Ads. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, BoA SVP for customer engagement and investment officer Lou Paskalis explains the change the company has made.
“We have taken a hard look at how our investment lays out,” Paskalis says. “We have engineered a return to a little bit more reliance on traditional.
We are in a lifelong relationship with our customers, and we have many more touchpoints in the digital world than we do in other forms of media, so we are never going to move away from it.
“But, as walled gardens become more and more central in people’s lives, we are going to have make choices between going where the audience is, and doing things that are really accountable toward our investment, and for our shareholders.”
In the last year, advertisers and publishers alike have grown concerned about the dominance of two internet’s two biggest platforms, and the way that some ad-tech vendors withhold vital data for campaign assessment.
At the ANA Masters Of Marketing event, P&G chief marketer Marc Pritchard, who arguably kick-started advertisers’ fight-back in a seminal speech in January, spoke about providing consumers with more useful, valuable ad messages.
And Paskalis explained the rationale behind Bank Of America’s strategy shift.
“As a lifelong media person, we have principles that we actually live by -,” he said
“If I lived by just those two principles, I would be in massive conflict right now, because the audience is clearly on these walled garden platforms like Facebook and Google, but I’m not in a clean, well-lit (advertising) environment.
“I am not able to really see if the media is performing the way that I need to understand it. I am not able to understand those data signals that are coming off, so that I can curate more relevant experiences, not just within the confines of Facebook and Google, but across the digital world.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>The bank hopes that Erica will help to humanize relationships in what has historically been a very transactional service category. As The Wall Street Journal reports, a client could say things like, “I want to send money to a friend,” or “I want to pay a bill,” and Erica could easily facilitate the transaction.
“I think this is really going to be a paradigm shift as we become much more relationship-centric,” Verdone says.
Another transition that has been under way at BOA is that of being more “audience-first” instead of looking for solutions and delivering them to audiences, according to Verdone.
“And what we’re finding, not surprisingly, is people do need more information about their finances. What we’re trying to do is deliver it in a digestible, easy way that they want to engage with it.”
One particular target is the Millennial cohort, which Verdone describes as wanting to “follow their passion” but not fully knowing whether they can afford to do so. This is one reason why BOA maintains an ongoing relationship with online learning center Kahn Academy.
On her list of exciting developments in advertising are addressable TV, “something that we’re starting to tip our toe into” given BOA’s range of service offerings and audience needs.
“The other thing we’re seeing a lot of success with is sequential video,” Verdone explains. For example, instead of running three separate 30-second spots on Hulu considering it an opportunity to have “90 seconds in front of this audience. What is the story that we want to tell them in 90 seconds and to really think about it as a short film.”
Amid all of the talk of technology at Cannes, what Verdone doesn’t want to lose sight of “is the amazing creativity that is here.” At the end of the day, “how we connect on a very human level and break through and touch our customers is really what’s going to make the difference.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>BOA’s agency, Publicis GroupeConnect, decided that the UpFront planning model “just wasn’t suiting our needs our needs anymore as a business,” Video Investment Lead Jenny Schauer explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
She also offers her encouragement for the audience-targeting consortium OpenAP while pointing out some early shortcomings.
With regard to the UpFront, “This year we actually decided to take the leap of faith and make the move to calendar UpFront planning. It’s a pretty big shift,” Schauer says.
Following the traditional broadcast planning model “wasn’t allowing us to be as strategic as we could because we had to make pretty big and sizable decisions in the TV space before we had any idea who our audience was going to be for the next year, what our products were going to be.”
This had resulted in “force fitting” things into plans that didn’t address BOA’s total business needs. Moving to calendar planning gives BOA the opportunity to get briefed at the same time as all other channel providers, according to Schauer.
Now it will use the UpFront week to identify key partners. “At the end of the day, we decided that’s really the value for us.”
Because Publicis GroupeConnect has been moving toward audience-based TV buying, Schauer is encouraged by OpenAP and the leadership being shown by founding members Fox, Turner and Viacom. “It’s a small step but it’s a very important step,” she says.
What’s tricky about OpenAP in its early stages is that it’s “essentially a consortium of three separate teams,” with no centralized hub.
“It’s streamlined in that you can use one audience, but it still goes to each individual publisher, gets planned using their tools and you have to go to each publisher with your contract,” Schauer says.
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.
]]>The as-yet unnamed channel won’t rebroadcast footage from Bloomberg’s existing television operation but will be composed of live news reporting from the news outlet’s bureaus around the world. In addition, it will feature a curated and verified mix of video posted on Twitter by the social-media platform’s users, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Paskalis cites the real-time nature of Twitter combined with “the analytics and the deep insights” that Bloomberg brings to the table as major attributes of the new streaming news service.
“Whether it’s connecting to the culture at the speed or now, whether it’s reaching influencers on topics that matter to them right now, whether it’s an audience that I know is influential within their overall spheres of interest, I can’t think of a better partnership from a marketing standpoint for Bank of America,” he says.
The deal represents a realization that Twitter recognizes the power of news and connecting brands to what’s happening in both the news and in culture, according to Paskalis.
“It’s an opportunity for marketers to find relevancy in an era where it’s harder and harder to compete for attention. So I welcome these kinds of partnerships,” he says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
]]>“We just can’t be in business with any company that is facilitating that,” says Paskalis. “Its not a 99.9 percent requirement. It’s a 100 percent requirement. That’s the regulatory nature of the banking industry.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, the SVP of Enterprise Media Planning, Investment & Measurement at BOA discusses the parameters of reputational risk, his enthusiasm for the new OpenAD venture by three TV networks and why legacy media measurement needs to change.
“Brand safety is vitally important to Bank of America,” says Paskalis. “But you also have another set of concerns, which is some of the content that’s out there is promoted by companies that have some connection or in some way are promoting terrorism.”
YouTube and others have garnered negative headlines since the beginning of 2017 because of ads showing up alongside objectionable content, prompting some brands to pull their ads.
“The magnitude of the challenge that our friends at Google, who are a very important partner to us, is daunting because of the sheer volume of content that’s uploaded,” says Paskalis. “That said, contractually, they need to guarantee 100% brand safety.”
This presents an ultimatum of sorts for the digital giant.
“I think they have a lot of engineering work to do, and they’re also going to need to wrestle with are they a technology company or do they have an editorial disposition in order to create that brand safety,” he says. “And I think that’s going to be a hard series of conversations with them.”
Paskalis praises Fox, Turner and Viacom for their OpenAD consortium, which enables advertisers to target TV audiences uniformly across their programming. “If this is the final idea or it’s an interim idea until the next step, it’s the first major step I’ve seen companies take and I applaud it,” he says.
Asked to cite the biggest transformational change needed in the industry, he singles out media measurement—specifically, how to measure the value of interaction.
“I don’t believe that the measurement community has been able to keep apace of the changes that are required in marketing,” Paskalis says.
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.
]]>At Mobile World Congress, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told Beet.TV mobile technology still wasn’t attractive enough to make it a truly engaging ad medium, while P&G marketing VP Sophie Blum said the small screen was a challenge.
Now another global chief marketer is raising the issues around mobile advertising.
“We’ve taken a lot of advertising logic in to what is ostensibly a one-to-one marketing medium – (but) advertising is a one-to-many experience,” according to Bank Of America enterprise media planning, investment and measurement SVP Lou Paskalis.
But Paskalis may have an answer for the industry. Speaking at the congress, he gave Beet.TV a menu of three considerations mobile marketers need to address:
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>Enter the Moat Video Score, a new impression-level metric for measuring digital video exposures that focuses on length of creative, plus its sound and viewability, along with the portion of a user’s screen in which it appears.
“Interestingly, we’ve never really asked questions about what we call screen real estate,” Moat CEO and Co-Founder Jonah Goodhart says in an interview with Beet.TV at the the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “So for the first time we’re asking if you have an ad, is it on 10 percent of the screen or 100 percent or 50 percent.”
While it may or may not impact effectiveness, “we think it’s important to understand how much of the person’s attention did you potentially get and for how long,” says Goodhart.
One of the things that makes video “incredibly exciting” right now is that so many platforms are becoming video-first in their approach to content and advertising, according to Goodhart. “The question we ask is how do you effectively measure video. What are the right questions to ask when you’re measuring video?” he says.
The Moat Video Score, which is census-based and uses a scale of 0-100, has early supporters in brand marketers like Unilever and Bank of America, media agency GroupM, Condé Nast, Fox Networks Group, Hulu, NBCUniversal and Snap Inc.
The jury is still out on what video ad experience will rise to the top of consumer preference, according to Goodhart.
“What we know for sure is we’re changing the way we consume content and we know it’s increasingly mobile and increasing video,” Goodhart says. “How that plays out is anyone’s guess, but I think it’s going to be fun to watch.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
]]>Merrill Edge is BoA’s investment platform for customers that like to control their own investments.
And Andrew Deming, BoA’s media leader, says the company needed a fresh approach, to become more “relationship-driven”.
“We’re shifting from being product-led and everything revolving around the credit card or an investment or a home loan, and it really being more focused on what is right for this audience,” Deming tells Beet.TV in this panel interview.
“The traditional mindset of mass marketing … is all about the product value prop. And that just doesn’t work anymore for everything. We’re trying to get away from designing for a product and delivering to the masses and really designing for an audience and delivering to individuals.”
The main problem was, Bank Of America was only reaching 15% to 20% of intended audience. So the company turned to addressable TV advertising, with a nine-week campaign delivered by Starcom Mediavest Group to re-use an existing piece of TV creative.
Deming says the Merrill Edge campaign was able to reach a smaller but more relevant audience than with mass TV advertising.
So what were the proof points of the campaign? Deming cites multiple returns on investment:
Dan Bruinsma, SMG’s media activation lead on the group’s Bank Of America account, says he would like to see more dynamic audience segments buildable with addressable TV.
This panel was moderated by Tracey Scheppach, CEO of Matter More Media.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>What becomes clear from the mix of agency, marketer and media company panelists at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016 is that technology really hasn’t made the budget allocation process any easier, and that the Upfront period of forward spending commitments not only endures but is spreading to digital as well.
Asked for his thoughts on the move from agency to client by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink, MasterCard’s Ben Jankowski—who spent 28 years in the agency world—says “It’s more different than I thought it would be.”
What stands out most is the amount of time that Jankowski, who is SVP of Media, has to spend thinking about AdTech. “I spend probably three times more time than I thought I would on things like ad technology,” says Jankowski. “It’s a colossal amount of time.”
Nonetheless, putting aside the quantitative side of media optimization, Jankowski believes “the cool part of what we’re doing” is applying data and insights around more qualitative factors. This includes “how we can use data to become better story tellers,” Jankowski says.
Jason Baadsgaard, Chief Revenue Officer for video marketing technology company Eyeview, says his clients took Eyeview into addressable TV. “What I do know is the space we created is very powerful, but it’s also very confusing for the buyers out there,” Baadsgaard says. “I think we overemphasize the technology too much, make it too tech driven and the marketing gets lost. Buyers are just very confused.”
In response to a question from Spiegel about budget allocation, Dan Bruinsma, SVP, Director at GroupConnect, says it’s a combination of top-down and bottom-up activity. It begins with setting a clear vision, according to Bruinsma.
“If we’re plotting the future of what we want to accomplish in video, then we compartmentalize it in such a way that it allows us to be very forthright when we go into the market,” says Bruinsma.
On the bottom-up side, while addressable TV “may be important,” Bruinsma says he can’t just indiscriminately decide “go ahead and put $5 million in there. We need to do the work to understand all of the economics associated with the size of the segment and communication goals we want to hit.”
As in many things in life, timing is everything. “Typically we’re still doing a lot of planning and a lot of investment in and around an Upfront, whether it’s a broadcast year or calendar year,” Bruinsma adds.
His comments provide a segue for Spiegel to inquire about the importance of Upfront deals and how marketers should decide how much budget to commitment ahead and how much to hold back.
“It’s really a balancing act. We’re constantly mixing with a lot of different moving parts on that,” says Andrew Deming, SVP of Marketing at Bank of America. “Some years I feel like we actually put a greater importance on the upfront process. Then there are other years where we’re putting less importance on it. Just depends on where we are.”
Twitter is new to the forward spending commitment game, according to Ryan Moore, the platform’s Global Agency Development Head.
“This is the first year where some agencies are actively committing upfront TV dollars to our video products,” Moore says. “That’s an interesting experience where we’ll do year-long contracts based on fixed prices. That was not the twitter world a year ago.”
Deming cites Turner Broadcasting’s audience guarantee deals as a positive sign in the trend away from targeting on age and sex demographics. “These types of insights make me a lot warmer to the idea of laying a higher percentage of the dollars down upfront, because of the fact these tools give you a lot more opportunity to optimize against your audience segments,” Deming says.
“Even if you don’t have that fully designed at the time you lay the money down, if you’re working with a Turner and are able to say we have this shift” in audience segments during a campaign, “we can actually shift the inventory around to align to that. It lowers the risk there,” Deming adds.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>The company’s overall goal is a shift to one-to-one marketing and a more relationship-driven model as opposed to the “old transactional-style, product-driven model,” Deming says in an interview with Beet.TV conducted by Tracey Scheppach, who recently launched the Matter More Media consultancy.
BOA will still have an umbrella brand message that it pushes out to the masses to tell its brand story. “But then when it comes down to each different audience group, we can deliver to individuals within them messages that are relevant and resonate to them,” Deming says.
For example, people looking for their first credit card would receive a specific pitch. “But if you already have a credit card with bank of America and you’re just recently married and are looking for a home loan, we can provide different home loans and mortgage solutions for you,” he adds.
Asked by Scheppach about BOA’s recent experience with addressable TV ads, Deming notes, “I think we’ve really just cracked the surface on it by launching our first campaign there. We’re working on one, possibly two, additional addressable campaigns. It will be in a very similar vein to what we did the first time.”
As technology evolves in the addressable space and the national footprint gets larger, Deming hopes to drive sequential messaging aligned with consumer needs.
“We can have more dynamic segmentation where we can actually have one group that’s in a segment for investing products but they may be in a different segment for cards,” Deming says.
One irony for BOA in an age of split-second digital ad delivery is the time it takes to prepare for an addressable campaign because of confidentiality surrounding its first-party data.
“It’s an asset and also a complexity at the same time when you have access to your own first-party data,” he says. “In our world, we need to be thinking nine months in advance and we need to be sizing and beginning to start seeking approval on the use of data six months in advance.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>“You wouldn’t expect to see us” on Snapchat, says Meredith Verdone, SVP Enterprise, Consumer & Wealth Management at BOA. Nonetheless, its llama lens—part of the bank’s mobile banking promotion—has garnered some two million views.
“What we’re seeing today to grow a modern brand is it’s more about the experience. We say it’s about 25 percent story, 75 percent experience,” Verdone says in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
BOA and other iconic brands are all grappling with the challenge of maintaining relevance in a world with more than enough brands and brand messages competing for consumer attention and engagement.
“We focus so much of our effort to say how is our brand resonating through the experience our customers have with us across every channel and how do we make sure it’s really a connected experience,” says Verdone. “For us, what happens at the ATM, what happens at the banking center, it all needs to be one connected experience.”
Verdone notes that contrary to some thinking, the millennial cohort cares very much about money. “They’re pretty sophisticated individuals. What they want to do is have enough money to live their lives,” she says.
With some 16 million millennials as customers, BOA has made “a dramatic shift” in its media mix. While channels like outdoor and television are still part of the mix, “We continue to try to learn and understand where our customers are and how can we be relevant on their terms,” Verdone says.
Hence the Snapchat llama and BOA’s partnership with VICE News, the latter of which falls under the Better Money Habits marketing umbrella. “We’re seeing tremendous engagement” with millennials, Verdone adds.
We interviewed her 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.
]]>“Let’s call it what it really is. Orchestration. I think it’s the Holy Grail for where we are in marketing are today,” Paskalis says of addressable advertising in an interview with Beet.TV.
As the financial giant’s head of Global Communications, Planning, Media Investment & Measurement, Paskalis recently oversaw the company’s first addressable advertising test for its Merrill Edge self-service trading platform product. The results will be revealed at Beet Retreat 2016 in Miami Beach.
“I can tell you we learned a lot,” Paskalis says of the test.
Paskalis has been an active participant in the ongoing shift from a probabilistic to deterministic marketing world. It’s not simply for the sake of efficiency, but because brands are competing for consumer attention in ways they never had to.
“We have to compete now because consumer expectations are higher than ever before about relevancy, and consumers are publishing greater and greater amounts of their own content which are highly relevant to their friends and family,” Paskalis says.
“So marketers need to play money ball. In order to do that, we need to be able to orchestrate experience across channels and platforms,” he adds.
Citing things like live Twitter streams of NFL games and presidential debates, Paskalis recognizes both the opportunities and costs involved in engaging with consumers in all of their varied moment-by-moment experiences.
“My challenge to my colleagues in the industry and to our agency teams is are we able to respond to those challenges? Are we able to respond to the variation we’re going to need in our thinking to make sure those experiences are elevatory for our brands, to compete for attention and having all these assets ready to go?” Paskalis says.
It will take a shift in mindset from the traditional media investment approach.
“It’s a longer tail model than a campaign, and we don’t really have a good infrastructure today to rationalize the return on investment for some of the assets we’re going to need to create that might not pay out for three, four, six, ten, twelve months,” Paskalis says.
This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising. The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.
]]>“I absolutely think that’s going to happen,” SVP of enterprise media at Bank of America,” in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We’re doing the first ever dynamic ad insertion in to live streaming video with NBC, in sports programming.”
But Paskalis cautions that assembling a single TV ad from dozens of pre-prepared components may introduce hundreds of alternate ads that brands will need to be careful to screen.
“(They will) need to see and approve every variant of a commercial spot with appropriate safeguards,” he says. “We’re going to have to put more safeguards there. There’s going to be a technological miracle that will allow this to happen. When it does, it’s going to become the norm, not the exception.”
The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.
]]>That’s part of the “one-to-one marketing” that the brand focused on in 2015 with the establishment of a data management center, a content center of excellence and the current move to multi-touch attribution, Paskalis says. “All of those are manifestations of the single view of the customer that we can deliver in mobile and digital environments, and to some extent, TV. It’s moving from the paradigm of mass, reach and scale to the paradigm of customization and engagement,” he says.
In the year ahead, the financial company is bullish on VOD due to quality and pricing. In VOD, the ads aren’t skippable and the ads loads are lighter. “I know the audience is watching and they’ve gone to the trouble of finding the show,” Paskalis says.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
]]>“We’re at the end of the advertising era – it’s coming to an end,” Paskalis said in a recent industry panel discussion. “Thank God. Because now we can all be marketers, which is why we got in to this business, and get out of this ridiculous business of advertising, which is disruptive, not additive to the consumer experience, and which exactly no-one including your family wants.
“What they desperately want on their mobile device is content. Marketers can make great content. Content has nothing to do with ads. Ads are stories about my brand, content is stuff people want – we have to figure out how to win them over with content, earn their attention and make a connection.”
Vonage media VP Kathryn Szumowski agreed, adding content must engage users actively to be effective.
They were questioned by Tobi Elkin.
Programming Note: Paskalis will be a speaker at the Beet TV executive retreat in For Lauderdale this month.
This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.
]]>But how are some of the biggest brands reading the apparent threat? With a mixture of trepidation and confidence, according to a recent panel discussion.
“There’s always a dire warning – the industry generally figures it out,” said Bank Of America enterprise media SVP Lou Paskalis. “The difference this time is that we to figure it out, we have to move away from the very construct of advertising.”
Paskalis is talking about an end to the old-style, repeated one-to-many push of salesy marketing messages, replaced by a more empathetic customer relationship.
“We have to get out of the advertising business, we have to get in to the people business, we have to get in to the content business, to get in to the engagement business,” he advocates. “When clients come after you about ROI, start talking about ROR, which is return on relationship – that is where the true value is in a longer term.”
But not all brands will be equally affected by ad blockers.
“It’s very segment-specific,” according to Vonage media VP Kathryn Szumowski. “The gal who’s buying home phone service from Vonage is a 55-year-old white gal who watches Judge Judy. Her ability to understand ad blocking and find it and turn it on is far less of a concern for us than when we talk about some of our small business efforts, where we’ve got a much more tech-savvy audience.
They were questioned by Tobi Elkin.
Programming Note: Paskalis will be a speaker at the Beet TV executive retreat in Fort Lauderdale this month.
This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.
]]>But so much pushy-pushy has ended up being counterproductive, says one major-brand ad exec. Instances of ad blocking are, perhaps, testament to that.
“Advertising has to get better,” according to Bank Of America enterprise media SVP Lou Paskalis.
“’Make things people want’ is not a bad axiom. Let’s tell better stories, let’s be more respectful of what the audience mindset motivation is … and earn the ability to talk to folks.
“The greatest thing Facebook did was give us ‘Will they care and will they share?’ as an axiom for marketing in Facebook. I think that’s an axiom for marketing, moving forward.
“We’re going to have to work really hard to get people back to a place where they want marketing messages.”
We interviewed him at Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.
]]>“We are in an upheaval we’ve never seen before in this business, and marketers realize they need a new pathway to market, and they’re going to invest their dollars differently,” he says in an interview with Beet.TV recorded at Cannes.
In terms of what’s causing marketers to rethink their media agency relationships on the pricing front, Paskalis observes that brands are now having to invest in bespoke assets to create relevant ads for the likes of Snapchat, Pinterest and Vice News.
“That’s expensive when you think about a creative model,” he says.
In terms of video strategy, Paskalis observes that some marketers are relying less on pre-roll ads in favor of more attention-grabbing formats. There’s also a trend favoring more episodic ads that tell a story so that binge-watchers don’t see the same spot over and over.
“Smarter marketers are actually saying, ‘Can we use interstitial, can we use mid-roll or post-roll to introduce our brand after the story starts to unfold and the audience is engaged,’” he says. “That all of a sudden sounds like a model that we call television advertising, doesn’t it?”
]]>Why are the brands putting agencies on notice? Because times are a-changin’, say industry execs speaking on a Cannes Lions panel.
Bank of America’s global media investment SVP Lou Paskalis:
“The biggest (driver) is pricing We’re seeing exponential growth in data crunching and the needs to support that, which are no longer 25-year-old planners who sleep six to an apartment and happy with entry-level income… You need to make bespoke content for that platform. You’ve got exponential increases in content costs. All of this is saying you’ve got to change the pricing model.”
VivaKi global CEO Stephan Beringer:
“The world, from a marketeer’s standpoint, has become extremely complex. I’ve experienced clients that, not in a mean way, have said to me, ‘We are investing gazillions in to this digital thing … the only ones making money with it are the agencies’. We need to think about how to organise ourselves … so that the extraction (for clients) remains high.
The panel was hosted by Rubicon Project marketplace development SVP Jay Sears.
This segment from the Cannes Lions Festival was part of a series on programmatic advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>The conversation with Vice CEO Shane Smith began in Cannes a year earlier and led to a video series the bank is sponsoring entitled “The Business of Life,” according to Meredith Verdone, Bank of America’s global chief strategy and marketing officer. Meanwhile, the Pinterest partnership encompasses promoted pins that users of the platform discover when they’re looking for relevant content. For example, someone who’s doing searches on “planning a wedding” might find a non-branded pin from Bank of America with 10 financial tips.
“We saw on both of these really great engagement — in fact, better engagement than any of our other ‘Better Money Habits’ content on any other site,” says Verdone in an interview with Beet.TV recorded at Cannes.
Verdone also reflects on the growing urgency for brands to have a direct relationship with platforms and publishers, which was how Bank of America made these deals with Vice and Pinterest.
“The agency isn’t the intermediary,” she says. “It’s not going to work that way. This is too complicated.”
]]>Try telling that to Lou Paskalis, who holds the marketing purse strings as Bank of America’s global media investment SVP.
“The groundwork we’re laying right now is in Pompeii, and Vesuvius is erupting and it’s fraud,” he says in this industry panel discussion. “It was a $8.3bn global problem in March. It’s a $9.2bn global problem as of last week (June 20), according to the ANA.”
“We have to build the wall high. Right now, (fraudsters) are coming over the wall and they’re taking our money. Nero fiddles, Rome burns.”
What’s ad fraud? Usually malware that infects consumer computers to algorithmically traverse publisher sites, generating ad views that humans never see, according to DoubleVerify CEO Wayne Gattinella, whose company helps advertisers and ad platforms weed out fraudulent ad views.
“I want to stop everything and fix that before we move on,” Paskalis says. “We cannot continue to be in denial about the 800 million pound gorilla in the room. Until we fix that, all of this is theoretical and it’s less interesting to me and my leadership by the hour.
“This is the biggest threat we’re facing. If we can’t fix fraud, all this other stuff doesn’t matter.If we’re not blacklisting every hour, we’ve got problems – we’ve got to get there. We’ve got to work as an industry to find and drive fraud out of our business.”
Separately, Unilever, the giant consumer package goods company claims some $10 billion in click fraud, MediaPost reports.
We interviewed Paskalis at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
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At Cannes Lions, the bank announced the launch of The Business Of Life, a video series made by Vice using data provided by Pinterest, which will also promote the content, as AdWeek reports.
“Young people are growing up and need financial advice,” Smith tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Banks don’t have the best reputation. They said, ‘What would you do?’ I said, ‘It’s very simple’ – just give them factual (information); ’here’s what a mortgage is’, ‘here’s how you lease a car’, ‘here’s renting versus buying’.”
Those are the topics The Business Of Life video discussions touch on over the series.
“Pinterest is one of the biggest platforms in the world … especially that’s interactive,” Smith adds. “We didn’t really have a partnership with Pinterest, so we wanted to see how that would work, and it’s worked fantastically. Analytics doesn’t mean anything unless you can convert that in to something. Pinterest’s data actually works.”
We interviewed Smith as part of a series on video advertising at Cannes Lions, presented by true[X]. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Given that shift, it’s important to look at various metrics and brand goals for campaigns today. They might be brand lift or direct sales, but all can be impacted with this storytelling focus, she says, in explaining how brands and agencies can work together more effectively. “You don’t have to tell the story in full in each medium, but to collectivey tell it across mediums,” Finucane says. “As a brand, you have to develop a purpose, positioning and proof point, but the way to execute is different.”
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