Not only do ad agencies have to get their own corporate practices straight, they also have to represent wider society in the work that they bring to the world.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Engine Group CEO Kasha Cacy explains what her company is doing and why it matters.
“There’s a business advantage to diversity,” says Cacy. “The reason Florence flourished was the Medici family brought in so many different kinds of people, artists and scientists and philosophers.
“That cross-section and that intermingling of ideas is what drives innovation.
“If we don’t have a company that represents the US, then there’s no way we can market effectively to the US.
“The history is that many, many, many agencies have not had representation in terms of women, not had representation in terms of black and brown people.”
"If you step back, it’s easy to understand why emotion matters. Brands that connect emotionally are humanized – classified differently," states Jim Nelson, SVP at @ENGINEInsight. Explore his blog on how brands can succeed in a post-COVID world. https://t.co/EweWy4fba1
— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) July 7, 2021
Over the last year, the industry has stepped up initiatives to enhance diversity.
Of course, doing so isn’t just a nice-to-have. Cacy’s view is that speaking better to distinct communities can enhance results, too.
We are proud to partner with @NYWICI to conduct a national research study (https://t.co/kptrcYKxeT) to understand how COVID-19 has affected women across all demographics in the field of communications. Participate in the study at the link. https://t.co/kptrcYKxeT #WomenHeard pic.twitter.com/NVzldlx0Px
— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) August 20, 2021
But Engine’s CEO has had to make internal changes to get there.
“What we’ve been doing over the past year is really pushing our employees to understand the core issues of equity and systemic racism,” she explains.
“So we’ve had lots of really tough conversations facilitated by some great folks in the company, things around the historic inequity in terms of housing and mortgages and financing of housing and how that affects wealth over generations.”
For Cacy, diversity is not just a one-and-done, box-ticking exercise.
“In years past what I’ve seen is we do unconscious bias training once a year, and then it’d be one and done and you’d go off and focus on other things,” she says. “This is something that we’re talking about if not monthly, more frequently
“It really takes that kind of consistency and persistence to see those changes happen.”
You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Many who have dabbled with advertising through streaming TV services know that its lack of cookie identifiers has historically been a problem. But the deprecation of third-party cookies in web browsers is proving to be a great leveller.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Michael Zacharski, CEO of ENGINE Media Exchange (EMX), the supply-side platform linked with Engine Group, says he is betting his company on CTV being the fulcrum for the advertising future.
“We went completely cookie-less in the top of 2021, and we were still testing both a cookie and non-cookie model back in the middle of 2020,” Zacharski says. “And so we’ve tested both and we found that we liked the cookie-less future.
“We found that solutions that work in CTV can be extensible to their environments. And we’re big believers that the TV is going to continue to be the centrepiece of the household, the primary medium around which families gathered together
“So we’re centering our offerings around that premise and making sure that we can deliver in CTV and omni-channel media.”
EMX’s platforms include:
In February, it also launched Device Graph+, an offering supporting CTV and omnichannel media placement using data from EMX, Engine Insights and data partners bringing ACR, cross-device data, location data and identity resolution.
“We found we are able to not only deliver audiences and even hard to reach audiences and tough DMAs in CTV, but we can also target those same households and create meaningful omni-channel campaigns for clients who are looking to reach the household,” Zacharski adds.
EMX is a member of prebid.org, contributor to swan.community, testers of Flock and has dozens of different identifiers that are passed through the UID field, through the OpenRTB protocol.
That is testament to show companies are trying out many options for post-cookie identity.
“There’s a need to understand that change is happening and innovation is happening,” he says. “We want to be prepared to look at any new technology, make sure that as our partners look at new solutions, we have the engineering and tech teams on standby and ready to go.”
But, for Zacharski, moving fast is not only about pivoting toward new integration partners.
Zacharski says agility has had to be internal, too.
“We actually rebuilt our entire ad tech stack,” he says. “We started back in 2018, built prototypes 2018 and 2019. And we moved our entire business to a modern infrastructure thinking about things like making sure that we’re prepared for CTV and even things like 5G where consumer latency expectations are going to continue to be such that things need to load fast and increasingly faster while as things are loading faster.
“Now there’s more signals that everyone has to sort through.”
You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>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.”
]]>That is the view of Andy Davidson, head of analytics and data strategy at Engine Group, a company that uses audience data that helps advertisers reach their targets.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Davidson, who previously worked at GfK Group and Bank Of America, explains the industry transformation as he sees it.
Davidson says change has been driven by three main factors:
“Sources of data that are available on individuals in the programmatic ecosystem are much richer than they’ve ever been before – to the point where we’re able to evaluate interests and sentiments and behaviours based on what people consume online,” he says.
“With the improvement in the quality of the data through digitization, have come a lot of innovations in terms of the analytics,” Davidson adds. “We’re now able these days to harness datasets in ways that we really never could in the past.”
“The technology, whether it’s software or storage or other platforms, enables us to make quick decisions at scale, which is really, really critically important as you’re attempting to deliver media. ”
Deliver the right message to the right audience, at the right time. Learn how ENGINE's Audience Intelligence platform has the audience data and insights you need to reach and understand your target audiences. https://t.co/NBOl93SCxL #audiencetargeting #consumerinsights pic.twitter.com/A8uJ3heWlD
— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) August 31, 2021
Even so, Davidson says there are “a few things getting in the way” of even faster reform.
“The reality of things like privacy protections such as CCPA and GDPR (is) that it becomes quite a bit more difficult to qualify impressions in an impactful way,” he says.
“Oftentimes, while there is tremendous opportunity with data, a lot is often asked of data and the wrong things are asked of data. Decisions around where to deliver impressions sometimes falter simply because of those choices.”
“There’s something uniting about football – and the country is in desperate need of that now.” Eric Corliss, Manager at ENGINE Insights, dives into how NFL fans are feeling about the upcoming season, even if it still may feel a bit different than “normal”. https://t.co/cNAY3kxWEu
— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) August 30, 2021
Engine Group had previously grown with an assortment of agencies under its wing, including operating in programmatic.
But, under CEO Kasha Cacy’s leadership, the group has consolidated it all under the Engine brand.
The group offers data and insights, digital transformation, innovation, integrated advertising and public relations.
“In the past, it was really more about what I like to refer to as ‘audience intelligence’ or ‘audience analytics’, where publishers would provide information on the profile of the individuals who were visiting their platforms, their publications,” Davidson adds.
“What’s changed really in the last few years … is the opportunity to make that fit between media delivery and the individual that you’re delivering to much more precise and personalised.
“The access to data and rich data signals is really unprecedented these days. We’re able to make judgments about the relevance of particular campaigns and particular products and services in ways that we never were in the past.”
]]>But, through her agency Engine Group, Cacy wants to help brands get the best of both worlds.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Engine’s CEO describes how she wants to connect the dots for clients.
Cacy, who joined Engine in 2018 from Universal McCann, says connected TV (CTV) advertising is one of the hottest opportunities for brands.
“Having grown up in a media agency, I know the clients like TV,” she says. “It’s scalable, you get big reach, there’s sight, sound, and motion in terms of the messaging.
“It had been, in years past, a little hard to target. And so, you ended up with a lot of waste and you ended up having to sort of be in front of consumers that maybe weren’t the consumers you’d necessarily wanted to be in.
“I think the promise of CTV and applying data to CTV is really that you can get the best of both worlds. You can get the impact of TV advertising with the targetability, the measurement, the ability to look cross-screen and really design much more nuanced and strategic advertising programmes basically.”
But, whilst connected TV is a best-of-both situation, Engine’s Cacy is still trying to push digital advertising to be as effective as linear for certain clients and certain goals – namely, brand-building.
She says digital’s habit of leaning on behavioral data does not necessarily fit that goal.
“The problem is, a lot of my clients have segments that aren’t behavior based.,” Cacy says. “They’re attitudinal based, they’re emotional based, they’re based on their feelings about a brand. It’s been hard to make those connection points.
“A lot of the clients I’ve had in the past … are looking for a change of attitude or a brand lift. They’re trying to reach a target that doesn’t have an affinity for their brand or they’re trying to reach a target that has a specific attitude. It’s been hard to do that in digital.”
So Engine Group has been trying to combine measurement and data capabilities with a brand-building mindset in a programmatic environment.
Engine Group had previously grown with an assortment of agencies under its wing, including operating in programmatic.
But, under Cacy’s leadership, the group has consolidated it all under the Engine brand.
Cacy last year was recognized as one of the Workings Mothers of the Year by She Runs It, an industry organization.
She says she was as frustrated as many agency clients were about how opaque the inner workings of digital advertising had become – something she has sought to make more transparent through Engine.
You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Scott is a media pioneer, leader and teacher. Many of you know him from his role at NBC Universal as Executive VP of Advertising. He is a former chairman of the IAB.
Presently, Scott serves as Global Chief Commercial Officer of the ENGINE Group, a global advertising and marketing services firm.
In addition to his “day job,” For the past four years, Scott taught media studies to undergrads at New York University.
In our chat he explains how much he enjoys teaching and speaks to the value of being connected to his students to better understand attitudes and trends.
Scott talks about the big transformation in television, the changing make-up of the UpFronts, the growth of programmatic in TV and the role of private marketplaces.
Finally, he calls on his colleagues in the media industry to embrace change. Great conversation.
About the BeetCast and Our Next Season!
This episode marks the end of our first season of the BeetCast sponsored by Tru Optik. I wanted to thank Andre Swanston, Matt Spiegel and the great crew at Tru Optik and its parent company Transunion for sponsoring the launch and first season of the BeetCast.
It has really grown in influence and popularity and I really enjoyed doing it. It was Andre’s idea for a podcast and I am forever grateful to him!
A special thanks to our podcast producer E. James Ford.
Happy to say our next season begins in May with our new sponsor Mediaocean.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.
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