New limits from privacy regulation and shifts in consumer behavior provoked by the rise in ad-free media are redefining advertising.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Peter Sedlarcik, managing partner for Havas’ Media Group’s health practice, explains how things are changing.
“The form factor and the format of the ads, particularly from a TV and video perspective, has finally caught up to what consumer expectation is and what the market needs,” Sedlarcik says.
“I think for a long time, we’ve talked about 30-second (ads)… in healthcare, often 60-second or longer ads. We’re starting to see more of an embracement of shorter length units.
“As we’ve seen in the Olympics, for example, there were a lot more kind of interstitial, quick-hit, short-form ads that were inserted, not necessarily within a traditional commercial break. I think that there’s going to be more of that coming forward, not only in the linear TV platforms, but certainly in the CTV and other video platforms that are more consumer-controlled and on-demand.
Our latest @prosumer_report, ‘Health and Hygiene in the Post-COVID-19 Era,’ provides a cross-cultural perspective on reactions to the pandemic and explores the new expectations of Prosumers regarding #health, the medical community, and #brands. https://t.co/HUpvZF4p1j
— Havas Group (@HavasGroup) April 29, 2021
Sedlarcik also says ad creative is more likely to be produced to match the delivery channel.
In other words, the age of shovelware may be drawing to a close.
“I think we’re starting to see more adaptation of creative so that it can be relevant for the platform on which it’s being delivered, and also that it’s very relevant for the audiences that it’s being targeted at,” he says.
Jerlyn Thomas, VP, Design Director, @HavasHealthPlus explains the #HumanPurpose that drives her work in #InclusiveDesign. Havas Health & You is made of over 4,500 individuals, each intrinsically motivated by the change they want to see in the world. #HumanPurposeFriday pic.twitter.com/EtGyNnMLTs
— Havas Health & You (@HavasHealthYou) April 9, 2021
Havas relaunched its business serving health ad clients back in 2017 as Havas Health & You, uniting Havas Life, Health4Brands (H4B), Havas Lynx and Havas Life PR.
The agency has also responded to COVID-19 by seeking to become more agile. CEO Donna Murphy previously told MM+M: “Our business is moving into short snippets of content and movement so we have folks end-to-end going from writing, creative, shooting — delivering straight across. As we move forward the model will change quite dramatically.”
For Sedlarcik, the privacy wave also means an emergence from reliance on off-the-shelf consumer datasets.
“There’s more of a balance now between purchased based data sets that have been kind of preeminent in a lot of the planning that we’ve been doing as an agency… (and) contextual data sets,” he says. “Some of the partners that are really building out those assets are increasingly part of the conversation.
]]>That is the emerging viewpoint when it comes to the new trend in marketing – outcome-based advertising.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Peter Sedlarcik of Havas Media Group says brands no longer have to write off the top of the marketing funnel, brand awareness, as an unmeasurable expense.
Thanks to software that can link purchase to initial ad exposure, they can now follow initial ad views all the way through to check-out.
But Sedlarcik says the best results start with clear goals.
“Upfront assessment and prioritisation of audiences and targets is really a big part of the equation in order to ensure that the strategy is on point and is going to most effectively deliver the business outcomes that the brands are looking for,” he says.
In the emerging world of outcome-based marketing, traditional ad metrics like media delivery, engagement and viewability are coming to be seen as mere proxies for the true goal of a campaign – business results.
Sedlarcik says those metrics are now starting to get seen as “peripheral” for many brands.
“They’re mostly interested in understanding how that’s all converting to sales and the growth of their business,” he explains.
Business outcomes are being seen in sharper relief in 2020 as COVID-19 has put many companies at risk. Making money has rarely been as important.
“We had many clients who had to pull their media activity,” says Havas’ Sedlarcik. “They pulled back on those investments.
“As they’ve slowly started to come back into the market, as they started to seek some type of normalcy in terms of the way they’re marketing their brands and connecting with their customers, there’s an increased focus on directly connecting that to outcomes, to sales, to volume growth.”
Stitching together all those data points, from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom, is no mean feat.
A plethora of software provider is issuing tools to do so. Sedlarcik’s Havas has made some of its own.
“We’ve created a number of tools and platforms and analytics frameworks that help us tie those things together,” he says:
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.
]]>That report kicked off more industry transparency about, well, lack of transparency – including large-scale efforts to shine a spotlight on how a series of “ad-tech taxes” along the ad-tech vendor chain are continuing to mean haziness and over-spend.
Despite the passage of time and effort, this year a PwC/ISBA report again made sobering reading, showing out-of-control and overly-complex supply chains, with 15% of advertiser spend unattributed for after a procession of platform fees.
Andrew Goode has had enough. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the EVP, Head of Biddable Media, North America at Havas Media Group explains efforts his agency has been making to clean things up.
“We have a supply chain that had become bloated, full of players that weren’t really adding value on differentiated inventory supply,” he complains.
In 2017, the group developed its own tool to give clients a complete view of a programmatic buy, from where ads are going to how much they are spending. And the group has reduced the number of partners through which it is buying – supply path optimization (SPO).
“We made a step, a positive step forward to say, ‘We don’t want to have 42 supply vendors accessing our demand’,” Goode says. “We don’t want to have a lack of knowledge over where our dollars are going, so we consolidated this down to seven partners.
“We demanded financial, operational transparency, and subsequently, we’ve seen a lot of other holding companies and a lot of other discussion around this area. The more people are engaged in this, it helps clean up that environment.”
The exercise is working, Goode suggests. “The big implication from it or the big result of this, we’ve seen lower fraud, we’ve seen high viewability and we’ve also managed to start getting a grip on the price of media,” he says.
The consolidation around fewer supply-side platforms (SSPs) and the change of focus means Goode and Havas Media are coming to see more value in a different kind of software.
Goode says demand-side platforms (DSPs) are now “pivotal”.
“DSPs used to be a gateway to supply and used to control those relationships themselves,” he says.
But now DSPs can facilitate Havas Media’s relationships with SSPs, Goode adds. That doesn’t mean the agency is ditching SSPs. On the contrary, Goode says he wants a closer relationship with fewer of them.
He sees DSPs diverging to focus on distinct media channels, playing a “key role”.
“The DSP helps us enforce those buying channels. I can’t buy them on SSP currently with the controls that we need to put in place for a campaign without a DSP,” he says.
“And so, we require DSPs to have those relationships with those SSPs that we choose.”
Case in point – when Havas Media this August launched “social equity marketplaces”, to bring forward ad supply from underrepresented businesses run by people of color, it was DSPs that helped it find SSP relationships that could rise to the call.
You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress 2017, Delport opines that while this year is one of transition and incremental innovation, there’s no ignoring the strides being made by telcos. “They are organizing our digital life. They just want to be back in the race,” he says.
Artificial intelligence is one means of gaining the upper hand with mobile users. Delport cites Telefónica’s announcement at MWC heralding its new AURA platform, which the company describes as “the basis for a new relationship model with customers.” AURA will make “cognitive sense” out of the flow of user data while giving users the means to control which data are used, the company says.
Augmented knowledge about mobile device users, including sharing of devices, will help telcos understand “all these weak signals that will be activated for advertising purposes,” Delport says.
Surveying the landscape of major U.S. players like AT&T and Verizon upping the ante on content creation, he says it’s a clear sign that “convergence is back.” It’s a major reason why telcos induce users to sign up for bigger data packages so that they spend more time consuming content.
Responding to the desire for premium content, Vivendi Content in Latin America and Europe recently launched Studio+, which the company describes as “the first global premium short series offer for mobiles.” Delport, who is also Chairman of Vivendi Content, describes the offering as 10-minute episodes in a series of 10.
The backdrop to the telcos’ advertising and content plays is the increasing integration on the part of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. “They are fascinating but also a bit scary for the other players,” he says.
Delport refers to a prediction that in the next three years, 80% of mobile bandwidth will be consumed by mobile video. “It’s just beginning,” he says.
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.
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