How can they best respond? By uniting their previously disparate business strategies and thinking on their feet, according to one veteran marketing agency leader.
In this video interview with Engine Group’s global chief commercial officer Scott Schiller for Beet.TV, Carl Fremont, CEO of marketing agency Quigley-Simpson, opens up.
Fremont says it is a problem that most marketers’ are set up to address distinct parts of the traditional marketing funnel, often in blissful isolation.
“There are certain teams that focus just on acquisition and teams that focus on CRM, building that relationship with that customer over time – that needs to be all united,” he says.
“There are separate teams that don’t necessarily share the same objective and they work independently.
“You’re not developing a single consumer experience and it could impact each of their KPIs.
“It’s most important that we look at the value of a customer over time, it’s lifetime value. If you’re only looking at it from the front end, in terms of the initial acquisition and the initial revenue opportunity, you’re not looking at what’s the potential of that customer over time.”
Celebrating our 19th anniversary! Much thanks to all our clients, employees and partners for helping us grow from a few people to a team of over 150. pic.twitter.com/wPPj4gFalQ
— Quigley-Simpson (@Quigley_Simpson) September 3, 2021
Quigley-Simpson’s recent client work credits include United, The Art of Shaving and LAPD.
The agency’s thesis is “the unification of brand and demand” – in other words, helping marketers get to results quicker, using media, technology, data, insights and creative content.
Fremont was a long-time Wunderman executive who has since held several further agency positions and board roles and who believes in embracing the future with learnings from the past.
That is why he sees 2021 as being so instructive.
In this interview, Engine Group’s Schiller says major events had been bellwethers for media consumption:
Fremont sees the moment.
“There’s one word to describe it and that’s ‘flexibility’,” he says.
“We need to, as marketers, be flexible in terms of how we’re engaging consumers – looking at it from cross-platform, looking at it from inventory sources – because nothing is exactly predictable the way we would like it to be.
“We have to have contingency planning … not only from the marketing side, but from the media side as well, because we’re in such a state of flux.”
]]>In this video interview, the president of the Wavemaker/Wunderman alliance urges advertisers and agencies to change their approach to meeting consumers’ expectation for a great experience.
“Every brand really needs to find out what’s the right experience for them and their customers and their consumers,” Fremont says. “So taking chances, taking risks today is what we need to do in digital video. We need to keep pressing the envelope on what it is.
“It would be a shame … if we took 30 seconds (ads) and just cut them down, and didn’t create the right brand, consumer experience.
“We need to think about them consecutively, so in a consecutive manner. And tie that into data and into insights, because that should be a continuous loop.”
Wavemaker was formed last year when WPP’s Maxus and MEC were tied in a new entity, a global media, content and technology agency with 8,500 people in 139 offices spanning 90 countries and handling $38 billion in client billings.
Wavemaker’s client list includes Colgate-Palmolive, L’Oreal and Paramount.
Fremont also works with the IAB to tackle the issues he is talking about. “We’re bringing up the right issues, but there’s more work to be done,” he says,
The interview was conducted at the IAB’s Video Symposium in New York this month.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Video Symposium 2018 presented by Tremor Video DSP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For their part, marketers need to be brave and experiment with AI while not thinking short term about it, Fremont says in this interview Beet.TV with The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“For me, artificial intelligence is about the iterative learning process,” says Fremont, who is Global Chief Digital officer of MEC.
From an advertising and media perspective, AI represents a transition from algorithms to “something that is learning on its own.”
He is particularly attracted to the notion that AI could help vehicle marketers configure a car “based not on what you told it but what’s learned about you, your lifestyle, if you have a family, how old your kids are, what you do. You go right to the showroom and your car’s there.”
Fremont dubs AI “beyond transformational” because it touches everything from product design to demonstration and purchase.
“It’s not device oriented, it’s not marketing oriented,” Fremont says. “What I love most about it is that it’s completely disruptive.”
Asked by Bitterman whether AI is just a lot of talk at this point, Fremont posits that marketers need to do a lot more experimentation. Beyond the vehicle design model, he talks about the potential for machine learning from consumer engagement with digital ads.
“It’s really taken the notion of one-to-one personalization to the ultimate.”
Recalling the early days of one-to-one marketing with the direct mail medium, Fremont marvels at the swiftness of the AI realm.
“Now the ability to move at lightening speed is what is so disruptive,” along with “the accuracy that it has.”
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.
]]>“Guess what happened? Nobody was buying,” recalled Carl Fremont, Global Chief Digital Officer at media agency MEC.
That’s because there was no measurement around digital viewing and digital really couldn’t be compared to broadcast buys, Fremont said in a keynote interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
“It was a complete buyer’s market,” Fremont added, in response to a question from Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz. “It forced us to really look at the measurement pieces of it, both the planning side and the buying side.”
While some things have changed since those first NewFronts efforts, much remains the same in the absence of uniform digital video audience measurement. This is a source of much frustration given the universal appreciation for the sight, sound and motion characteristics of advertising messages delivered every second of the day to ubiquitous screens small and large.
“It’s so fragmented,” Fremont continued. “It’s still a confusing marketplace.”
Swartz sees it more an issue of EQ (emotional intelligence) as opposed to IQ, requiring buyers and sellers to come together and forge solutions. “It’s not about cherry picking problems. It’s about providing solutions,” she said.
Both agreed that removing complexity from the ecosystem would lower costs as more brand marketers embrace addressability and an audience-based world. “We do need one way of measurement. We need one way of planning,” said Fremont.
One of the challenges of planning video buys is there’s no line of sight to inventory, particularly premium video. A system that could look across different platforms like OTT and connected TV would be akin to utopia if buyers could gear the right content to the right consumer experience in the right channel.
To Fremont, programmatic is a key component but not just for the sake of technological convenience. There still must be human interaction among partners whose interests are common but whose approaches vary.
“It has to be done in a dialogue manner,” said Fremont. “The relationship that I think we need to have is less about the complexity of the buy side and more about how do we use data to find audiences at scale.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At MEC, the process is called Momentum and it derives from surveys showing how brand perceptions influence behavior. Momentum provides “a deeper understanding of each brand’s purchase decision,” Fremont explains in an interview during the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat. “What’s going to make them make the decision about that brand based on different stages of where they are in that purchase decisioning.”
All forms of data “are critical to ensure we are reaching the audience most receptive to a brand’s message,” Fremont adds. “So when we go out to find those audiences that are most relevant, it’s with an understanding of what’s going to impact them.”
MEC wants to understand people behaviorally, emotionally, active and passively before marrying this intelligence with creative that will “drive their decisioning forward and make it all end to end.”
When it comes to measuring outcomes in terms of brand lift and ultimately brand sales, “That’s what I’m most excited about,” says Fremont.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>We spoke with him for our series “The Road to CES” presented by YuMe.
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Open-source platforms are part of the tech changes driving the ad business. In fact, the way products are marketed today are impacted most by factors including technology, data, behavior and personalization.
“Technology is changing how we shop, how we communicate, how we drive…that leads to behavior changes…There is also a co-dependence between behavior and technology and that has led to unprecedented amounts of data. Every media owner is focused on data…which lets us personalize our communications and content,” he says, adding that media agencies then need to organize themselves internally to align with all these changes. Fremont joined MEC last year and is tasked with overseeing digital platforms, mobile and online video on a global basis.
We spoke with Fremont as part of our series titled “The Road to Cannes,” a preview of the Festival and an overview on the state and future of digital media by a range of thought leaders. The series will be published over two weeks. The series is sponsored by Videology.
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