In April, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), of which Liodice is CEO, issued a call seeking a consultant to conduct a study to help the organization understand how much actual spend is siphoned off in assorted fees.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Liodice and O’Connell use the language of military strategy to discuss the “information asymmetry” and “unknowables” at the heart of the industry.
ANA’s interest was sparked by a report by ISBA, the trade body for UK advertisers, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and auditor PwC, which found 15% of advertiser spend could not be attributed, whilst publishers receive only 51% of advertiser spend on average.
The figures were described as “mind-boggling” – especially several years after earlier industry reports first raised the problems around “ad tax” and transparency.
“The ad tech community is probably the least understood within the purview of brands and marketers,” Liodice says.
“It’s extraordinarily complex. There are billions of transactions that happen second by second, there are an incredible amount of handoffs and deals that take place between buyers and sellers, between SSPs and DSPs.
“The ad tech community knows a hell of a lot about what’s going on, they understand data flows, money flows – and the marketers pretty much do not. A lot of times, brands are flying by the seat of their pants.”
The problem, Liodice says, is “you don’t know what you don’t know”. He describes the “lack of information that we have to be able to make these decisions and optimise” as “almost opaque for us”.
That, in a programmatic world, is a far cry from history, when marketers had far more certainty about where fewer ads ran, in fewer destinations.
O’Connell and Liodice both hope a byproduct of the new focus on consumer privacy will be a cleaner, simpler and more transparent ad supply chain.
“Particularly now, as Google is deprecating its cookies and Apple is changing its IDFA policies, the marketers are essentially in the dark,” Liodice says.
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on data, identity and a transparent supply chain is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
]]>A growing number of marketers are coming to that conclusion.
In Beet.tv’s Responsible Media Global Forum with GroupM and the 4As, plus with IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and Pubmatic, a series of guest speakers wrestled with balancing the new capabilities with a drive for simplicity.
ANA CEO Bob Liodice said a major problem is “information asymmetry”, the “increasing level of opacity” over advertising data.
“This is very different from where we were 10 years ago, when we had such a relatively simple landscape,” he said.
“Marketers are receiving relatively less and less information for which to be able to make responsible media investment decisions. We have less to make those calls and less to be able to analyse the impact of those results.”
4A’s EVP for government relations Alison Pepper said agencies are having to live with the new regulated environment – but they deserve a consistent approach.
“I think we’re no longer in an environment where we can really truly rely on self-regulation to do what needs to happen to keep our industry thriving and vibrant,” she said. “I think we are at an inflexion point.
“We’re really going to have to regulate … at a national level so that we don’t see this bifurcation of different privacy regimes happen at the state level. Agencies have so many touchpoints into how they’re getting data and how they’re using data that I think agencies increasingly have a really strong interest in seeing one national standard. They really need uniformity.”
IBM Watson Advertising revenue head Jeremy Hlavacek said improvements are coming.
“It’s clearly time for improvement and reinvention. I’m encouraged by the increased transparency that we’re demonstrating on our platforms,” he said.
“And I’m encouraged by how we can take this ecosystem to the next level and have it be both data-driven and intelligent, but also consumer-friendly and privacy-safe.”
GroupM global head of programmatic Max Jaffe said agencies are also having to ensure responsible media buying in this complex environment.
“The idea of inclusion in the social responsibility and understanding what properties our clients in GroupM is really supporting is really at the forefront of our minds and has been for a bit,” Jaffe said.
“Understanding how (players’) alignment and what their focus is on these types of issues and topics is really important.”
The considerations keep coming, however, as 4A’s chief operating officer Ashwini Karandikar says the drive to guarantee the provenance of ad inventory remains important.
“In the past, the notion of cleaning up supply was mainly restricted to programmatic media,” Karandikar said.
“At this point, there is so much programmatic guaranteed buyers that are already in place across all media types, across television, across audio, across just standard digital properties that are applying these same principles in terms of how you plan, buy, optimise, analyse, and go back and feed all this data back into your next planning cycle is possible for all media types.”
It all boils down to a need to balance two key pillars – performance and responsibility – according to MediaMath chief partnerships officer Laurent Cordier.
“We should aim (to) make programmatic performing, make programmatic transparent, make programmatic valuable,” Cordier said.
“The second side is, ‘What’s your responsibility, how do you see your responsibility or your role in continuing to favour or flourishing an open ecosystem?'”
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.
]]>As Masters Circle was being established in the U.S., the ANA “started to recognize fundamental flaws in the way we manage ourselves,” says the organization’s CEO, Bob Liodice. “We’ve lost sight of being able to pursue brand and creative excellence. We’ve lost sight of our efficiency and our infrastructure,” Liodice says in this interview with Beet.TV.
The 12 pillars of the Masters Circle are based in large part by the fact that about half of all Fortune 500 companies have declining revenues and after-tax profits, according to Liodice.
“We can interpret that lots of ways. But in many ways, it’s an indictment on our marketing system. It could be one of the reasons why CMO tenure is as short as it is.”
The 12 pillars of Masters Circle are:
Advocacy; Brand and creative excellence; Brand safety; Digital media supply chain; Future growth; Gender equality; Inclusiveness; Measurement; Media transparency; Organizing; Purpose; and Talent development.
“To be a transformative force, you have to focus in on the one or two significant issues perhaps in all of the areas and attempt to make a difference with them,” Liodice says.
He cites as an example the joint effort by the ANA, 4A’s and IAB to combat digital advertising fraud under the auspices of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG).
“What we needed to do was create an institutional presence that allowed for confidence to grow in the entire digital supply chain that we could attack fraud at its roots.”
As a result, research has indicated that ads that go through the TAG certification process show an 84% improvement in fraud rates versus the general market.
“That’s the type of progress we’re looking to make,” says Liodice.
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>“If you look at the digital media supply chain, as an enterprise, the jury is still out because we still have a LUMAscape which is as complex as Einstein’s theory of relativity,” says ANA CEO Bob Liodice during a break at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“And because of that, marketers don’t understand how to best leverage that supply chain to their advantage.”
As proof of the extent of dysfunction, he says that only 25 to 40 cents on every digital dollar reaches the consumer. “That’s awful. We need to find a way to improve that productivity. We haven’t gotten there yet.”
The ANA has been working with Digital Content Next to support TrustX, a programmatic advertising marketplace designed to help maximize marketers’ digital advertising expenditures. “The early read is that we can get twenty percent improvement, but there’s so much more work to be done,” says Liodice.
This year, the Cannes Festival is an opportunity for the ANA to “globalize” its CMO Masters Circle initiative. It’s composed of 1,000 executives from leading brands across ANA member companies who are trying to help solve what Liodice calls “the universal problem in our industry, which is growth.”
According to Liodice, 50% of Fortune 500 companies have declining after-tax profits while 40% have declining revenues. Masters Circle has crafted a 12-point strategic and is “building machine around that effort.”
He says Cannes recognized that the program is working and “they thought that this was a good opportunity to spread that message on a global basis.” Some 20 to 25 of the leading CMO’s around the world will “discuss the issue, come together and decide what it is that we want to do to attack the growth agenda worldwide.”
Among the ANA’s other ongoing initiatives is providing its members with more of a grounding in various futuristic technologies that have marketing implications, like artificial intelligence, blockchain and virtual reality. To this end, the ANA recently acquired the Data & Marketing Association, which was founded in 2017 as the Direct Marketing Association, as Advertising Age reports.
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>But one outcome that is sorely lacking, according to the man who speaks for big-brand marketers? Advanced ad tools are not driving actual business growth.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, ANA CEO Bob Liodice says innovation and enhanced creative possibilities are great. But, he asks: “How are they really translating into improved business building models?
“This is fundamentally important because, if you look at last year’s Fortune 500, 42% of those companies listed had declining revenues, 53% are declining after tax profits. So, we’re kind of failing as an industry.
“We can’t keep beating our chest saying, ‘We’ve got all these new tools, all of this information – and yet we’re declining‘. Where is it getting us? It’s not getting us into the place we need to be.”
Liodice’s comments are a useful macro assessment, and a scathing critique of the broad value of many of the key developments in digital advertising.
What is the cause? Liodice laments a “fractionated” industry in which, after years of tub-thumping, there still is no common, consistent system of governance for measurement.
He suggests marketers are swimming in data but, lacking a consensus basis on which to understand its implications, end up resorting to “homegrown” measurement systems, which frequently don’t provide key indicators like attribution, cross-platform analytics or plug in to existing practices that can support decision-making.
“What do we end up with?,” Liodice asks. “We end up with a very, very low-growth mentality, because we’re making decisions on the fly.
“We need to know how they’re translating into business growth. That’s the next phase of what we’re really trying to get at.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Digital ad fraud, ad blocking, transparency, viewability and most recently brand safety—the latter owing to ads appearing unexpectedly alongside sketchy video content—are things that “confound and confuse us,” Liodice says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
And that’s not counting the countless middlemen in the digital ecosphere that, by Liodice’s reckoning, garner upward of 60% of money spent in digital channels.
“And what has resulted within digital is that only 40 percent of our digital dollars are actually reaching the publisher,” Liodice says. “Now this is a god-awful number in my opinion. I’ve never seen such a high ratio of non-working media.”
The result is that marketers are prevented from fully taking advantage of their media investments to drive brand growth. “Brand marketers need to work hard and take the industry back. Get back to those fundamentals,” he adds.
On the bright side, he sees innovation seemingly “bubbling up out of everywhere” in the form of opportunities in OTT television, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence and neuro science and marketing. It all needs to be boiled down to an effective marketing solution.
“What we as marketers have to do is be able to find the mass of marketing and bring it down to a one-to-one level,” says Liodice. This means not just accepting new forms on blind faith “but essentially to think hard about what it is that’s going to work for their brand and get back to the point where one plus one does equal two.”
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.
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