Doug articulates the vision of his company as becoming more meaningful to the consumer and to brands. He speaks about marrying sophisticated targeting and AI with personally optimized creative. Meaningful Media is the new mantra at Dentsu, he explains.
Thanks Doug for a fascinating conversation.
Big thanks to Mediaocean, the sponsor of the #BeetCast
And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>In this video interview, Doug Rozen, 360i Chief Media Officer, says that video no longer has to be used as a top-of-funnel, brand-building channel.
Rather, he says, it can be measured accurately and support performance and outcome goals.
“No dollar gets a free pass,” Rozen says. “Video dollars should be held to the same level of accountability as your search dollars.
“Today you can do that. It just requires a different orientation, a different way of thinking about planning.
“A lot of times people get caught up in the technical aspects of how you do this and don’t think about the strategic elements.
“You have to plan differently for an outcome-based approach versus a more traditional reach-based or impression-driven approach.”
How does 360i do that? Rozen says his teams still employ media mixed modelling.
Whilst the practice was not necessarily devised to measure outcomes per se, Rozen says he either works with a third party or carries out in-house media mixed modelling that is created to accommodate both awareness and outcomes.
On top of that, 360i has created scenario planning tools, using artificial intelligence, that allow clients to imagine dialling up or down certain channels in their marketing mix.
360i was founded back in 1998 as a search engine marketing agency and has since branched out into social, strategy, media and creative. It is the agency Oreo’s “Dunk In The Dark” Super Bowl campaign.
Rozen says the company is increasingly looking at multi-channel campaigns.
“One of the things we’re doing more and more is connecting at full-funnel,” he says. “So just because somebody has been exposed to a video unit, especially online, how do we then start to see what the downstream activity is?
“So, obviously we see a lot of search signals, we see a lot of other digital signals as well. We can start to stitch that together and then be able to understand, is this somebody that’s been in a repetitive process before?
“You just have to almost flip your mindset. Instead of thinking about how do you embed or infuse digital into traditional, why can’t every channel or every media decision be done in a way that is digital first?”
You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But it is the control, power and automation promised by digital that has made media placement faux pas harder to take.
That is a takeaway from one digital agency exec currently undertaking an audit of every brand client’s risk tolerance.
“Risk is a client by client decision,” says Doug Rozen, 360i Chief media officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We sit with every client. In fact, it’s something we’re doing in Q1 this year, with every single client. We are helping them reclassify their risk.
“In many cases, it might remain the same. We give the client a risk score based on what their tolerance is, what their willingness is, what their brand and audience are like. Therefore, for most clients, we do not look at news programmatically. What we do though look at is the individual.”
In the last couple of years, advertisers that have embraced automated buying became concerned at occasional appearances next to unsavory content.
Now some are even questioning whether to appear on news sites at all, such is the deteriorating tenor of public debate in current affairs.
But, for Rozen, who says: “There’s no such thing as 100% risk free digital media,” bad news can also be good news.
“We’re excited about the fact that attention is being put towards the news, real news, good conversation,” he adds.
“I think that’s what we’re really looking at, is the conversation aspect of it, not just buying banners and buttons that surround the news.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers. The series is sponsored by CNN. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“That’s because there’s not only the interest but the capability and also the audience. This will be the first time as we go into the video season that you have those things together,” Rozen says in this interview with Beet.TV.
He separates advanced TV into three buckets, beginning with its increasingly programmatic nature for automated buying.
“We’re really excited about the programmatic television, and that scale is growing ridiculously fast. We’re able to do more and more today to address more individuals than ever before,” says Rozen.
The world of smart TV sets occupies Rozen’s second bucket. He cites a “cacophony of partners and players” that are providing technologies and platforms that enable IP targeting, tracking co-viewing and listening and understanding what’s being displayed.
All of this information can be used to retarget viewers or for “individualized household delivery of nuanced creative because I know who you are versus somebody else,” Rozen says.
Third is OTT disruption of the traditional linear broadcast TV model and the advanced advertising opportunities created along the way.
Prior to joining 360i this summer, Rozen was at OMD, where he drove all digital and innovation activities, including Ignition Factory (trend spotting), Zero Code (gaming and virtual reality) and OMD’s mobile and social divisions. Now he’s helping to scale the media capabilities of the agency that has a deep heritage in search and now integrates creative and media capabilities.
Clients, says Rozen, are trying to understand the shift from such historical TV measures as reach and frequency with GRP’s in mind to being able to correlate ad impressions with sales. Historical comparisons of reach and frequency must yield to used advanced identity tools and media selection “and then be able to attribute that to a direct sale.”
While 360i’s roots are in performance, “We have been driving very quickly beyond that to be a full-service agency, which is refreshing, exciting and certainly I think ripe for where the market’s going as media and creative really need to be tied together more closely,” Rozen says.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“The creative agencies are fantastic at telling stories. But stories just being told isn’t enough anymore,” Rozen adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “We see our job as story builders as much as the story telling still needs to happen.”
Creative versioning has long been based on campaign performance, as in “We’re seeing the red ad perform better than the blue ad. But what we’re also able now to overlay is audience understanding.”
The combination of data and technology facilitates amending creative “to be more bespoke to the situation that the consumer is in,” says Rozen. “Not just is red better than blue, but this call to action is going to resonate better because we believe that we’ve seen certain actions or indicators prior that allows us to optimize.”
Asked whether creative versioning is more suited to niche or broad targeting, Rozen says, “It can scale fantastically because a lot of what we’re talking about is technology driving this.”
With the role of creative agencies being to create assets, as those assets are developed technology “allows us to deliver this type of thinking at scale. More and more of our clients are looking for this type of advantageous way of connecting with consumers.”
Rozen doesn’t believe in a world of end-to-end, one-to-one personalized ad messaging. To him, it’s less about the medium and more about the format and using tools and technologies to drive more personalized stories.
“We don’t have to just serve one ad to all people. We can now get more granular. I don’t think all brands at all times need to be one to one. I think that has its place and it’s not for everyone.”
Alternatives include “one to many or one to fewer or one to some. It doesn’t always have to be one to one, but it also doesn’t have to be one to all, either.”
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.
]]>To Doug Rozen, that means “making stories matter”. It’s one of the mantras of OMD, the global ad agency where Rozen is chief digital and innovation officer.
And he hopes this week’s return to Cannes Lions, the ad industry get-together that has always aimed to represent creativity in the trade, means a return to recognizing the art of messaging, as well as math.
“It can’t just be the machines alone,” Rozen tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We, as people, need to really have an understanding for how to apply this new intelligence to marketing communications.”
Whilst Rozen sees technologies like artificial intelligence play a part in the modern marketing mix, he is also advocating what he calls “artful intelligence”.
“I’m really hopeful here at Cannes that we’re going to pivot in to the opportunity of creativity, how we can break through the programmatic world,” he adds “Whilst automation is key to us continuing to drive greater efficiency, we also have an opportunity to be more creative, rise above the banner ad.
“Anyone can make a story. But how do you make it matter to the business to actually drive impact? Storytelling needs to do something.”
]]>“I think the opportunity around creativity is to divorce it from the visual design standpoint,” says Doug Rozen, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer at global media agency OMD. Rozen and his teams spend a fair amount of time thinking through the role of media in driving creativity and creative decisions, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
In this manner they constantly seek to push contextual understanding to reach people better. “I think the most important thing is to find ways to think beyond a box, think beyond a screen, beyond an ad and create content that a consumer really wants,” says Rozen.
Part of the job is reaching audiences and then engaging them and breaking through to make a meaningful connection. “I think at times we get lost about either just making a connection and failing to reach, or reaching them without that connection. A lot of what we’re trying to do is how to bring those two things together,” says Rozen.
Asked about OMD’s experience to date with artificial intelligence technology, Rozen says it ranges not only from conversation assistants like Amazon’s Alexa to Google Assistant but to insights that can be gleaned from AI to inform media knowledge of things like audience segments. He likens AI in human terms to a toddler in a hurry.
“What’s exciting is that it’s growing up fast. It will not take years for it to be a teenager and adult,” Rozen says.
Transformation in advertising and media means different things to different people. People usually talk about how creative or media agencies have changed to keep pace with consumers and clients, but not Rozen.
“What transformation means to me is evolution. We cannot stand still. If we stand still we are dead,” he 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.
]]>But that places a responsibility on advertisers to take advantage of the technology responsibly, says one executive from a leading ad agency.
In this video interview with Beet.TV at CES, OMD chief digital and innovation officer Doug Rozen says he is trying to help brands offer customers opportunities for “immersion”.
“There’s 200,000 people here,” Rozen says. “What it’s all about this year is immersive marketing.
“In the past, … we would just drive awareness one way. Then we got to ‘interactive’ in the last 20 years. Now it’s about immersive – it can be much more free-flowing, much more autonomous. That’s where virtual reality, AI and bots come in.”
VR and AR have surfaced in recent years as opportunities for both publishers and advertisers like. For some, appetite appears to have diminished in the last year. But Rozen says OMD is helping brands make 360-degree video experiences and “fully-immersive, ‘take me to a new world’ experiences”.
Now artificial intelligence, voice-controlled smart assistants and chat-controlled AI bots are being touted as the next wave of consumer interaction technologies that brands simply must embrace.
But OMD’s Rozen urges an excited caution. “My hope and desire is, we find the simplest way to celebrate the technology,” he says.
“A lot of times innovation is about just chasing shiny objects. One of the most important things not to lose sight of at CES is, while there’s a lot of gadget and a lot of flash, we have to find what’s going to be the simplest way to get a consumer to do something and drive business value.”
This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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