“For some perspective, cookies were invented a long time ago for a different purpose. Advertising has piggybacked on top of that vehicle,” Metzer told Beet.TV’s Jon Watts in an interview at LiveRamp’s RampUp Summit. “Now that cookies are starting to disappear, and reliability is going away, different methodologies can be applied.”
Those methodologies largely rely on first-party data. “Understanding that engagement point with your consumer really creates a bridge into people-based marketing,” he says. From there, advertisers can build a model audience and target them.
At least in the short term, this methodology benefits large scale media outlets because they have the biggest pool of logged-in users from which they can collect first-party data. That should change within a year as the marketplace normalizes around the currency of addressable first-party data. Without the strategy of mixing first and third-party data, all companies will have to find new ways to model audiences off of first-party data alone.
During that transition period, fragmentation may present an issue, which Metzer says can only be confronted with try-and-repeat methods. But new methodologies won’t break the industry.
“It won’t shake up and break everything. Other models are being created,” he says. While there are more restrictions, there are also more dimensions to the strategy, namely more devices, formats, engagement and attention. “When you balance it all together we’re in a better spot.”
The most important next step is to understand the consumer and engage with them in a consented environment. But consent isn’t binary.
“What you want is high-quality consent, where the consumers understand why you need their data and what you’re doing with it,” says Metzer.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>That is according to one ad agency exec charged with data oversight.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hearts & Science chief data officer Megan Pagliuca describes changes flowing from actions like Apple’s decision to limit ad-tracking in Safari and Google’s removal of DoubleClick ID in Europe from Chrome following GDPR.
“If you take a step back, there’s been a lot of change in the industry because of the focus on data and privacy – Apple making the changes with Safari, Google making the changes on the Google ID deprecation,” she says.
“It actually makes the walled gardens stronger because they have identity, because they have all of that PII (personally-identifiable information). It’s worse for the rest of the publishers … so there definitely needs to be this rise of a universal ID.”
“Bid rates have plummeted on Safari month over month. We see, on the same publisher, premium inventory (at) 50% cheaper prices for that same quality inventory.”
Pagliuca’s team is helping advertisers take advantage in canny new ways. “(For example), planning against audience on a premium publisher in Chrome,but then buying it in Safari and Chrome, so (we are) getting some of those pricing advantages”.
“There was this vision of having all of your data in one place, like one DMP (data management platform), one customer database – that’s no longer going to be a thing.
“As soon as you can accept that, the better. You (will) have different ‘clean rooms’ – the Facebook advanced analytics clean room, the Amazon clean room, Google’s Ads Data Hub clean room. You have to be very good at working in those environments and realise that your data is going to be in these different places.”
This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr. Please visit this page to find more videos from the series.
]]>But, little by little, other platforms are getting lit up with these new tricks, too – even good ‘ol linear TV.
“On the linear side, (we) really have been focused on ‘How do we apply that programmatic mindset to our linear teams?’,” says Megan Pagliuca, media agency Hearts & Science chief data officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
She says that involves a transformation in measuring, planning and allocating linear TV ads.
“We essentially have pulled together a view of TV consumption and TV performance data … using ACR (automated content recognition) and set top box data sets,” Pagliuca adds. “We can then tie that into our digital log so we have a connected view.”
The new capability allows agencies to start thinking about even linear TV ad inventory as though it were akin to digital media inventory.
When platforms are able to measure real consumption of even linear TV ad play-outs, using the automated content recognition algorithms that report what viewers are really watching as opposed to panels, the data supports more sophisticated actions.
“Then we can plan with an audience-first approach, and then we can allocate,” Pagliuca explains. “The inventory we’ve gotten through the upfronts … we buy it the same way we always have, but then we reallocate that inventory based on this smarter, more data-driven view.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to our sponsors of our festival coverage which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>There was no doubt that consumers had completely changed their viewing television venues, but that was just one component of the larger picture, Smolin related in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science.
“You have to have the broadcasters and programmers that are in a position where they really want to lean in for what is bringing data into advanced television,” Smolin said in response to a question from Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM.
“But you also have to have on the buy side, you have to have the agency ecosystem be in a position where it’s really ready to start using that and converging maybe the TV investment team versus what had been the digital trading desk.”
Amobee made its wager after assessing a variety of technology providers and determining that Videology was unique compared to companies that had fashioned themselves to fit into the programmatic space “for a world that came out of remnant display advertising and frames every problem like that,” Smolin explained.
Given the difference between display and long-form, premium video, “Videology to their credit had designed from the ground up to solve the problems of how TV works. That was uniquely powerful, and we thought it was the right technology at the right time and it’s had a huge impact on our business.”
Now, with Videology’s assets and Amobee’s partnership with Nielsen “we are able to bring converged measurement to linear plus digital activation. When we use the term advanced TV, it’s very much about being able to take that digital-first audience, first-party data, and to use that within what is video, what is OTT, what is connected TV but also to linear.”
Noting that eMarketer predicts linear will be 50% or more of all TV budgets by 2022, Smolin said it’s important for many brands to think holistically and for Amobee to provide “true, converged media solutions.” Another thing Videology had in its favor was its sell-side presence, “and that’s also critical because if they’re not positioned with the right tools to be able to sell the way that the advertisers want to buy, then it doesn’t work on either side.”
He echoed the concerns of many in the industry that agency structure remains an impediment, as some still have siloed TV investment and digital trading teams. “They don’t have to be the same people, but getting them to look at the same measurement data and turning that same measurement data into integrated planning” needs to happen.
Asked how TV can win back ad dollars that have flowed to Facebook and Google, Smolin cites data, targetability, measurement and scale. Where TV has an edge is that premium, long-form content “is not the strength for Facebook and YouTube. If the broadcasters, the programmers, are now bringing the data that gives you the audience and the measurement at the scale they already have, they’re now in a position to compete very effectively with much higher value ad units than what Google and Facebook have been doing.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>Thast is according to one agency exec speaking amid the discussion at the Cannes Lions ad industry gathering.
“With ITP and ITP 2.0 (Intelligent Tracking Prevention), I think we’re seeing clients really starting to take this much more seriously,” says Erin Matts, the new US CEO of Omnicom’s Hearts & Science agency.
“Google and Apple are taking two different routes of this. One is being very restrictive, while Google is actually giving consumers a choice, which seems to be a much more sort of forward-thinking kind of approach to this that still allows for advertisers to take part in some tracking capabilities there, too.
“It’s (about) that value exchange between the publisher, the platform, and the consumer that is respectful of the consumer, allows them have that choice.”
Over the last year, industry discussion has focused on the two main revenue models being used in media today – advertising and payments.
Apple has taken web services companies to task for funding themselves with ads, whilst some of those companies protest increasingly high device charges levied by Apple.
But some services companies employ a freemium model, and Matts thinks that puts consumers in charge of the use of their personal data by digital services.
“I mean, it’s similar to what Hulu has done and what Spotify has done,” she says. “If you have a free model or a premium model, that’s a choice that consumers have. I think that, to me, will be part of the key in making sure that advertising is viable after all of these major changes come about.”
Matts recently moved to be the CEO of Omnicom’s data-driven agency Hearts & Science after being North America CEO of Annalect, OMG’s data and analytics division.
In this interview with Beet.TV, she also discussed the challenges presented by brands in-housing their traditional agency functions.
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to our sponsors of our coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>As that importance grows, so does the position of companies offering identity “graphs”, records of consumer profiles.
In this panel discussion at Beet.TV’s Identity In Focus leadership forum, two ad agency executives discuss how identity is being pieced together by both graph vendors and brands themselves.
Prohaska Consulting CEO Matt Prohaska interviewed:
“There’s a number, about 20, different measurement attribution companies all working on either their own ID graphs and/or being able to measure off of that,” Prohaska said. “Are you having to piece together ID graphs all over the place?”
Matts replied: “Frankly, a lot of (clients) are making their own decisions with regards to identity graphs. They’ve got their own, and I think most of the work that we’ve done in the past 18-plus months has been stitching together different identity graphs from major partners in the marketplace, client partners as well, and then thinking about how you enrich that with other data sets, too.”
GroupM’s Danish agreed: “Especially those that are at the high end of enterprise spectrum, they have internal investments (in customer data). That has evolved to now CDPs (customer data platforms), and there’s authenticated identity graph and first party identity graph.”
Hearts & Science’s Matts said identity graphs are important because advertisers should recognize that individual audiences are vastly different, that broad demographic buckets may not be suitable.
She said some clients are in-housing their customer data on to an Amazon Web Services environment and are not inclined to port it out, placing importance on linking together fragmented pieces of data in a privacy-compliant fashion.
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The newly appointed U.S. CEO of Hearts & Science sees progress being made on the collaboration front, some of it client driven, she explains in this interview at this week’s Beet.TV Identity Forum in Manhattan.
Agencies need tech talent that “intellectually understands that there has been a disconnect in the industry in terms of the data that we’ve used from an upper planning perspective and the data that we use from an activation perspective and measurement as well,” says Matts, who joined Hearts & Science last month from Annalect, where she had been North American CEO.
“Unless we’re able to wrap our heads around the identity graph and actually pull that through the entire process to deliver an ideal consumer experience, we’re missing the whole thread and we’re missing the whole buyer.”
Asked by interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., whether the creative leadership at agencies is “open and ready to ingest data into the process,” Matts says absolutely, with some exceptions to the rule.
“There’s still, like, the creative directors with their black turtlenecks who are thinking about things in a very traditional way,” says Matts. “But nine times out of ten, every creative director I talk to is really interested in making sure that the work they’re producing actually works. That’s where a data-infused strategy really comes into play.”
She sees the media side becoming more adept at talking to its creative partners “in a way that doesn’t alienate them and actually ensures that data inspires creativity and doesn’t limit that.”
As for the traditional finger pointing between creative and media over campaign success or lack thereof, some of it has been mitigated by client-dictated teams.
“That means teams sit together, they collaborate together. I think what I’ve found particularly successful is when you have a collaborative team that sits together maybe three days a week but sits back at their own home agency the other two days a week or whatever combination of those days are.”
Preserving and leveraging the “magic of your agency and what that means” can perhaps involve something as simple as having everyone don a Hearts & Science T-shirt for a meeting. “If you lose that you lose the nuance and the magic associated with that agency, which will be valuable to that collaborative approach. It sounds really tactical but that to me has been a really great way to mitigate the finger pointing,” Matts says.
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, at Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These and other impacts on the media community in Puerto Rico will be the topics of discussion during a special session at Beet Retreat 2018 from Nov. 28-30. Claudio, who is General Manager of Hearts & Science on the island, will be joined by other industry practitioners to share their on-the-ground experiences before and after Hurricane Maria.
In this video interview with Beet.TV conducted on the island, Claudio says his agency is using more radio and outdoor, in addition to being more creative in the way it buys TV. “We are emphasizing the importance of digital and social media as well, because people are connected now and they are using more of those vehicles to be able to understand what’s going around,” Claudio says. “Brands are maximizing that opportunity in creative ways to find all their options on how to become relevant within those communities.”
A big change for Hearts & Science is the realization that it had to become more flexible in the way it does planning. “It’s more real-time planning based on the situation. We are maximizing the resources the best way we can by looking at day-to-day involvement of the community.”
As counselors to its clients, the agency “now are more on board with their businesses as well. We take into consideration what’s going on and we decide what to do next in a better way,” Claudio says.
He considers Puerto Rico to be a test market “because everything happened very quickly. After that situation, I guess we learned that it’s important to be prepared, to have plans and be ready to move on in cases of a disaster and how you maintain your brands and messages across the market without loosing your leadership and your strategies.”
When the full extent of the impact of Hurricane Maria became clear, it galvanized the media community to get involved so as to move forward as an industry. “And that’s all we did. We got together, we helped each other.”
Consumers on the island “are now more connected than ever,” presenting advertisers with “great opportunities on TV, streaming video as well. Many people are moving from cable TV and traditional TV to other devices for content. We have been finding ways to connect with those different communities now with different opportunities,” Claudio says.
Joining Claudio for the Beet Retreat 2018 special session titled Lessons Learned: Hurricane Maria’s Impact on the Media Industry of Puerto Rico, will be Jose Cancela, President and GM, Telemundo Puerto Rico & NBC Puerto Rico; Melissa Burgos, Marketing Director USVI/Puerto Rico, AT&T Mobility; and Freddie Hernandez, General Manager, Procter & Gamble Puerto Rico. The session will be moderated by Phil Cowdell, President of Client Services at GroupM, who has been deeply involved with Puerto Rico relief and recovery.
The session will conclude with a briefing by Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. She will present data on the impact of the storm on the island’s youth and her organizations’ efforts to improve their future.
]]>The chief operating officer of Omnicom’s two-year-old agency Hearts & Science says the future of advertising depends on finding the right people.
“Being that we’re in a world where we have to figure out mobile, I think I would go as far as saying, advertising is at risk of being as successful in growing brands if we don’t figure out mobile for the future,” Brookbanks says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Right now as an industry, we don’t know how to be persuasive in mobile.”
Hearts & Science was founded to service Proctor & Gamble, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, but recently has expanded to add new business, Brookbanks says.
But, both as it expands and as it looks to do mobile right, the company has been in a quest to add the right new staff.
“We have to hire 800 people in our first year,” Brookbanks adds. “We’ve now opened nine offices in North America, up to 16 globally.
“I think that probably the hardest thing to do right now is have great talent, honestly – harder than all the data and the technology. It was hard in the beginning to find those people.
“What we’ve done is brought in a chief experience officer – a whole new thing. This person does marketing, but they are also the chief of culture. HR reports to them, but this is truly a very senior person who is all about taking the vision of the company and merging that with the culture we want to have. Easier to do when you’re building something from the ground up than when you inherit something, but still really hard work, still really hard work.”
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.
]]>Weaknesses in links in the ad-tech chain allow rogue ad sellers to present their sites as though they were those of peers with premium inventory. It is called “domain spoofing”, and it bugs the heck out of media agencies.
So Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn decided to do something about it.
Together with Megan Pagliuca, the former boss of Omnicom-owned Accuen, who joined his agency in September, Hagedorn began poking around in the ad supply chain to understand the fraud problem more deeply.
“We spent probably the last half of 2017 looking at unauthorized sellers that were entering into the mix, or spoof domains that were selling like they were CBS when they really weren’t CBS at all, they were another site completely,” he in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Typically, those three things (DSPs, the SSPs, and the publishers) would bundle together and there would be hidden margin from somebody in that, or some unauthorized inventory. We, instead, did a lot of clean-up, and it’s a lot of work for us, but we cleaned up, I’d say, the supply chain on the publisher side.”
In January, News Corp’s UK newspaper division News UK cried fowl on domain spoofing when it published conclusions of its own experiment that revealed 2.9 million bids per hour were made on fake inventory purporting to be that of its own The Sun and The Times news sites – in just two hours on December 4.
It concluded ad buyers are being duped in to wasting up to £700,000 ($972,000) per month on misplaced advertising, saying: “Brands are being tricked into thinking they’re buying quality inventory, bidding on what they think is a premium site when it isn’t.”
But fraudulent tactics look like a game of Whack-a-mole.
No sooner had Hearts & Science’s Hagedorn cleaned up the domain spoofing problem, by working with White Ops, a company that exists to root out such tactics, he discovered a new threat practiced by fraudsters.
“They quickly migrated into building bot extensions that live within a lot of the browsers that spoof human activity,” he tells Beet.TV.
“The crazy thing about that is you can cookie, essentially, a bot, and then the bot potentially gets retargeted by ambient retargeting campaigns later. So now we’re starting to really study identity management, and identity resolution, and how we can stop potentially advertising to bots that are spoofing being humans.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>“We preplanned out a lot of how we wanted the social to work around it and how we would activate social channels and key opinion leaders to do a really smart push full strategy,” says Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Procter & Gamble media agency Hearts & Science. “It worked out really well.”
Well enough that ADWEEK dubbed the four Tide spots collectively as “the runaway winner” ahead of efforts for Amazon, Doritos/Mountain Dew, Tourism Australia and the NFL’s own campaign.
Hagedorn says the strategy for the Super Bowl work, ads for which were produced by Saatchi & Saatchi, started with the client. The idea was to cast actor David Harbour, known to Netflix viewers as scruffy sheriff Jim Hopper in “Stranger Things,” as a kind of narrator in sparkling clean clothes who talks to viewers about commercials they are seeing.
Tide was able to co-opt its ads “into other Super Bowl ads to make them Tide ads, and they ultimately became P&G ads,” Hagedorn explains in this Beet.TV interview following his speech at the 4A’s Data Summit.
Tide had purchased a 45-second spot in the first quarter to set up the narrative and one 15-second ad in each succeeding quarter. “The interesting thing about marketing now is you can create kind of a multidimensional solution. You can plan for the social ramp up and the social ramp down,” Hagedorn says.
Last year, Bradshaw appeared in a Tide spot with a fake stain on his shirt during what appeared to be a live broadcast but was shot weeks earlier. “This year that was all a tease” to make fans believe that “were going to do a repeat of last year’s Super Bowl stunt.”
In 2015, Hearts & Science won the P&G media account in North America, setting the stage for the agency’s launch the next year. It has since won business from AT&T, “quietly started working on QuickBooks with TBWA,” won the Barclays account with OMD in the U.K. and had a hand in the New York Times Golden Globes “He Said, She Said” work with Droga5.
Hagedorn credits four tenets—agility, empowerment, intelligent scale and open standards—for the agency’s “hot and heavy” new business winning streak. “We’re hoping to wrap a lot of the pitches up that we’ve been working on and carry it through into Q2, but then I look forward to slowing us down a little bit and trying to ingest it and bring it all in.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>In the wake of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, for the media industry “It’s going backwards, 25 years ago. You have to take your car and visit your clients, you have to do radio, probably billboards and basics to communicate,” says Andres Claudio, GM of Omnicom’s Hearts & Science agency on the island. “Life is before Maria and after Maria.”
Freddie Hernandez, who runs P&G’s operations in Puerto Rico, is already looking beyond relief to reconstruction—rebuilding infrastructure while convincing companies to invest there for the future. “We will recover from this. We will impact the communities and we will get to a better position,” he says.
Beet.TV interviewed Claudio at this week’s Festival of Media/LATAM conference, where the STAND WITH PUERTO RICO: The Industry Steps Up initiative was launched. His interview is followed by a segment with Hernandez that was produced by P&G in Puerto Rico where one of the company’s mobile Ace detergent units was operating.
“This is a time that companies have to show their commitment to the island and the community with their brands,” says Claudio. “Besides advertising, this is the perfect moment for companies to get connected to the people with their realities and needs.”
On Puerto Rico, brands don’t have to look very far to identify with causes and be “relevant” to the situation, according to Claudio. “Once the brand understands there is a need in the market, you can relate your brand to that particular need. It gets a connection that people will love and people will acknowledge that you are doing something right for them.”
After thanking the organizers of the Festival of Media/LATAM for hosting and supporting the STAND WITH PUERTO RICO initiative, Hernandez explained that the relief mode is still under way and that sometimes, the basic necessities aren’t so obvious.
“We take things for granted. We never thought that just having your laundry done was so important to people. It’s overwhelming to see how people are reacting to this effort,” says Hernandez.
As relief progresses to recovery, reconstruction will follow, posing more challenges that will require widespread participation and support. “The donations that we’re getting and the support that we’re getting is fantastic but it’s not going to last a lot,” Hernandez explains. “We need companies to look at Puerto Rico once again as a place to invest, as a place to bring their best talent to grow our economy, to leverage the talent that we have on this beautiful island, to help us and together bring this island to the future.”
Claudio is realistic and optimistic looking forward. “It’s not easy but you can do it and make it happen. This is a time that companies have to show the commitment to the island and the community with their brands,” he says.
Stand With Puerto, The Industry Steps Up
This video reports on the pressing issues facing Puerto Rico and the organizations that are having an impact. It is part of a media industry initiative titled Stand With Puerto Rico. It is organized by Beet.TV and Omnicom Media Group along with founding partners AT&T AdWorks and Teads. Please find additional videos from the series here. The series was recorded in Miami at the Festival of Media/LATAM on October 30.
]]>To be sure, the U.K.-based executive is “a big fan of supporting a strong media ecosystem,” Ralston-Good explains in this interview with Beet.TV. But as a planner, she sees a constant tension between context and audience that could shoestring audience targeting.
On the subject of transparency in general, Ralston-Good notes that it’s “one of the tenets” of Hearts & Science rooted in the efforts of agency CEO Scott Hagedorn. Before running H&S, Hagedorn founded Annalect, which became the data technology platform supporting all Omnicom agencies worldwide.
“He created an approach which was transparent from the get-go,” Ralston-Good says during a break at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade conference.
Transparency extends to the code H&S builds for its models, which they can view in Bitbucket. “They can also see into the complete media supply chain as well and with the right to audit. When we talk about transparency it’s very holistic,” she says.
As in the U.S., her clients have become more educated in their desire to know more about where their ads appear, leading to a lot more private marketplace programmatic deals. Here’s where the caveat arises.
“As a planner, it starts to challenge some of the things that are great about programmatic, like defining audiences behaviorally and then activating those audiences wherever they appear,” says Ralston-Good.
So while having clear inventory “is table stakes,” there’s a constant tension between context and audience “which could be derailed by the whole debate about what’s happening in terms of inventory.”
Another tenet of H&S from its launch in 2015 was a focus on personalization and one-to-one messaging. What has evolved is a penchant for agility and dismantling rigid customs and procedures.
“That’s having some super interesting impact with our own staff in terms of how we train them and upskill them and get them thinking about agile ways of solving problems, rather than rigid approaches,” she says. “And the same with clients.”
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Amongst other stipulations, the European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) measures include:
The measures apply to any global company processing EU citizens’ data, with penalties of up to 4% of global turnover. Steps data handling and data processing companies should take include conducting risk assessments, appointing data protection officers and overhauling policies and systems.
So, with less than a year ticking on the compliance clock, how are advertisers and their agencies responding to the new regimen?
At a panel debate convened with Beet.TV, four agency data executives said GDPR compliance was a big deal, but they framed privacy regulation in the context of consumer aversion to “creepy” ad tactics generally…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“There are a couple of things (clients) probably miss on… an understanding that there is a true impact of what many of these regulations are, and how the EU and the US are not necessarily going to be in sync.
“(Clients) are not at the point where they’re willing to have a conversation around, ‘If someone’s giving me data, what am I giving in exchange?’ It’s going to get harder to justify bombarding consumers with impressions that they don’t need, just because you know who they are. Less is more. That is a far more fundamental shift that has the come – privacy is one part of it.”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser
“We have more conversations about how advertising can be relevant engaging without being creepy… there very rarely is (a breach of privacy). Part of our job as agencies is to ensure clients don’t find themselves getting sued for breaching privacy laws.
“Privacy is not an issue for our clients so much as following the law; that’s never been an issue – it’s more about … using data for good to make the consumer experience better.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray
“If we use some insight about an audience to personalise a communication … the trust is there because you’re using the data in a way that there’s a value exchange.
“As we start to use data across more parts of the agency and client, there’s an education that has to happen, so that people that haven’t necessarily been handling data previously and are now having data conversations know the implications and are trained on how to handle that data or send an email without being in breach.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“I think clients should own all their own ad-tech contracts, agencies should operate them, and they should be fully transparent.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For many, that has meant a promotion for the executives who once ran outlier data divisions within an agency but who now are calling the shots.
What changes when that happens, and what have those people learned along the way? In this recorded panel discussion at Cannes Lions, four agency executives opened up. Here is what they said…
Brian Lesser, CEO, GroupM North America (previous: CEO, GroupM’s Xaxis):
“It’s a sign of the times that people with data, analytics, platforms backgrounds are now being put in a position to manage media agencies.
“For me, it’s a matter of making sure our agencies have appropriate platforms… make sure we are data-informed at every step along the way … activation across all channels.”
Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer, IPG Mediabrands (previous: president, IPG’s Cadreon):
“In this role, I’ve started to see the reality of the imbalance between planning and buying. Planning tools are activated by data sets which are still not quite where they should be.
“There are silos being created which are legacies from the past, you need to clean them to make some of the tech and systems work. That’s all I’ve been focused on for the last there of four months since starting the role.”
Doug Ray, product and innovation president, Dentsu Aegis Network (previous: CEO, Carat):
“I’ve always been on the planning, strategy and management side, not so much on the buying side. What has made great plans and strategies … is human insight, to have a deep understanding of customers. Clients are looking for the human truth, the insight to help them with better outcomes on their media.”
Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Hearts & Science (previous: CEO, Omnicom’s Annelect):
“We under-leveraged the audience creation and syndication side of it. The buying side of programmatic is actually the least important side of programmatic. The three most important sides… are the audience creation, syndication and also using some of the new ad-serving capabilities like an Innovid … to do the orchestration of the creative assets in the product.”
Often, the question is framed as an “either-or” in which Netflix would have to choose between continuing its current premium SVOD model or ripping it up in favour of ad funding.
Previously, Ampere Analysis’ Richard Broughton has told Beet.TV Netflix could make up to $8bn a year from advertising if it switched over entirely, but would have to accept churn would knock off some of the gain, as angry consumers quit.
But one ad agency executive doesn’t think the choice has to be so dichotomous. Speaking in this panel debate recorded by Beet.TV, GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser said an ad model for Netflix could be a lot more intrinsic and less disruptive.
“The question is not necessarily, ‘Is Netflix thinking about how to infuse advertising in to its model?’,” Lesser said.
“Netflix is, I would bet, having conversations about how big-brand advertisers can get involved in content creation so that they can have a more effective engagement with their consumers.
“I think, over time, all over-the-top content, with Netflix being the gold standard, will have to be financed in some way by what we, traditionally, know now as the advertising business.”
Also in the panel, ad agency tech and data executives discussed whether the modern-day precision capability to target only customers known to be in-market for a particular brand or product will mean an exclusive focus on performance advertising, at the expense of traditional top-of-funnel or brand-based advertising of the like commonly seen on TV.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That was the main question on the lips of moderator Jay Sears, the SVP of MasterCard’s advertising intelligence, when he chaired a panel discussion on the topic on the shores of the Cannes Lions festival of creativity.
In The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel, Sears questioned a line-up of agency leaders:
In this enlightening, 46-minute recording of the panel, they touch on a variety of topics, including:
Enjoy the full, insight-packed video, or look out for our individual segments.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Now, slowly, as new attribution technology hots up, brands are being promised the ability the ability to close the loop.
But, whilst, to many, this evolution appears to be driven by brands, agency tech chiefs, in this Beet.TV recorded panel discussion, say some clients have a long way to go. Here is a flavour of what they said…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“Depending on who in the client organisation you talk to, you tend to get get a couple of different definition of ‘What is an outcome?’
“There is a disconnect in the conversations you have in procurement (and the brand). There is a desire in one part of the organisation to drive toward the outcome – and the other part doesn’t necessarily believe that that is measurable or comparable across a wider set of the ecosystem. There needs to be an alignment.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“You get what you measure. If you’ve got a procurement department, they’re looking at ‘How do we extract cost and drive down that cost? … If I can buy what I bought before more cheaply, the thesis is the return on investment will be improved’.
“There is a race to the bottom. It can only be bought so cheaply before you’re starting to fundamentally disrupt the quality of that inventory.
“We’d like to change the conversation and look at the value-in versus cost-out. It may cost you a higher CPM – but, if the response from the consumer is greater, then the overall value of that media buy is going to be better for that client.”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“The technology would be easy to solve. The most powerful media companies right now have a better understanding of consumers than many advertisers do – they want to hold on to that leverage, they want to define their own metrics, they want to grade their own homework. We’re left with Nielsen, which is imperfect at best.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“A lot of clients believe there’s one true god and that god is Nielsen – and that is wrong.
“If you’re an application … you have to install the Nielsen app in to your SDK, and there’s not a lot of room for that. We think 40% of all video or content that could be measured is not. That’s a big problem.
“The great thing about programmatic … and fusing different panels … in to a DMP is, you can actually start to look at the causality of marketing.”
In this discussion panel recorded by Beet.TV, ad agency tech executives say many clients are capable of moving forward – but they are caught between two worlds…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“The newer companies look at performance (marketing) very differently and they’re far more open to restructuring and not having silos. They’re very good at lower-funnel, they’re structured internally to do that.
“Where they struggle is, in many cases, they see that as a battle for market share, as opposed to figuring out, ‘How am I going to get to the top of the funnel?’”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“Market-mix modelling has been the holy grail of channel allocation fora very long time. When you come from the new school, you say, ‘Market-mix modelling is looking through the rear-view mirror, that can’t possibly be right.’
“You get part of your media plan using real-time media to buy and optimise, and part of your plan that’s looking backwards. The answer is not either-or, frankly – tis’ about updating that model more often.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“The big problem with the market-mix models right now is the competitive data set which powers most of those are powered by Nielsen, and 75% of Nielsen’s money comes from the TV networks – so the mixed models themselves are totally based on TV and don’t take in to account what’s really happening in digital.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“We’re working with a lot of our clients on, ‘How do you bring those two worlds (clients’ media team and and customer data team) together? How do you apply the precision and audience understanding that those groups had, how do you leverage the understanding that those CRM or ecommerce teams and leverage similar types of data in a mass-media ecosystem?’ That’s evolving, we’re able to apply some of those principles in the mass-media space.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to the chief of the media agency network launched by Omnicom last year.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn worries: “Everything’s gotten broken apart.
“(Clients’) CRM programs aren’t working anymore, they’re divorced from their media programs… People don’t look at the aggregate anymore. It’s important to look at the broader KPIs… sales, purchase intent, proving out brand equity improvement … versus looking at these little pieces that aren’t connected anymore.”
Hagedorn was drafted in from Omnicom’s Annalect data division to run the new unit that is equal parts data and creativity.
He sees an opportunity for clients to use consumer purchase data, connected to ad exposure measurement, to figure out the true ROI of ads – but Hagedorn also sees a privacy concern emerging.
“A lot of consumers have grown up with the concept of a free internet … they’re not as concerned (about) demographic or behavioural data being utilised (in ad targeting),” he says,
“(But) when you start getting in to purchase data … there gets to be some concerns. I advise our clients … they should own their own DMP (demand-side platform), let the agencies operate and have it be fully transparent. Clients need to own their own ad-tech stacks, agencies need to be adept enough to operate on top of those investments.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page. Hagedord was a panelist at this event.
]]>“It’s not that easy,” Claudio says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Not all the data that is needed is available in all markets.”
Claudio was among the several dozen advertising and media executives who convened here for the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat. Noting that Hearts & Science is “not a media agency anymore,” he describes the company’s mission as it staffs up around the world to service clients like Procter & Gamble and AT&T.
“Work on data to identify resources that can give us enough information about consumer behavior. Therefore, we could deliver better resources to our clients,” Claudio says.
P&G is its biggest client in North America, Canada, the United States and Puerto Rico. Then there is AT&T in the United States and Mexico. In short, the agency grew from zero to about $5 billion in billings in seven months, as ADWEEK reports.
“We’re growing. We’re already over 800 employees around the globe,” with offices in such far-flung locations as Dubai, London, Japan and China. “Our clients are telling us they want to deliver better messages to better audiences in a way that they can measure the resource.”
But simply being big and thus far successful doesn’t overcome all challenges, particularly with regard to data availability. “In Puerto Rico, we don’t have all the resources that we have in the States,” says Claudio. “In Mexico we have other challenges as well.”
He chooses to look on the positive side.
“That’s a good challenge for anyone in the market because it’s no longer a media buy or digital buy. It’s how you deliver the right message in the right platform at the right time to the right target,” Claudio says.
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.
]]>That transition is “about three or five or seven percent of the way there,” the Chief Research Officer of Omnicom Media Group opines during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016.
Steuer recalls that when he started in the media business, data availability was a major obstacle. “And in particular, the combination of what I would call small data, the data that lets us understand how individuals are using a bunch of different media devices across the day, with what’s now big data,” Steuer explains.
He defines big data as “the device-level data that’s giving us very precise mounds of data that’s hard to connect together because you can’t connect it across the different platforms.”
Even though the industry is on the path to rationalizing the data piece, “The supply side plumbing is what’s missing to get us all the way to the IP-based, highly targetable, very audience-based future of television,” Steuer says.
Then he shifts to a food metaphor to address the combination of highly targetable and broad reach options available today.
“The problem of today is figuring out what’s the food pyramid of TV circa 2016, 2017 where I can have a balanced diet of my addressable as a sometimes food and still deal with the broad reach,” says Steuer.
He notes that clients like McDonald’s want to say something to everybody, but “what they say to different groups is something advanced television can help them to get to in a more and more focused way.”
Panel moderator Tim Hanlon, Founder & CEO of The Vertere Group, asks Steuer whether traditional media agencies, with their broad-based approach to marketing and media, are up to the task of becoming more data driven.
By way of response, Steuer says client wins of AT&T and Procter & Gamble by Omnicom’s Hearts & Science agency were rooted in the belief that “data is a key ingredient of the full stack, all the way from how do you inform building the right creative plan and the right messages all the way through to how do you target and measure it.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Mobile in particular is characterized by “an entire ecosystem of people creating new platforms that live on mobile and therefore new ad vehicles that live on top of those platforms,” Treuhaft says in an interview with Beet.TV.
With an advertising background spanning almost two decades at agencies like Grey, Young & Rubicam, VML and 24/7 Real Media, Treuhaft is no stranger to the digital world. Going from creating one 30-second television spot to “lots of different types of creative” for the likes of Facebook, Snapchat and Google is a big industry challenge.
“I believe that proliferation will just continue,” he says. “It’s incumbent on all of us as an industry to make that adaption, because the format changes will continue to come fast and furious.”
Hearts & Science sees that concurrent with platform proliferation, some of the dynamic will be less ad interruption. “Less sort of brands getting in the way of consumers seeing things that they want and more brands creating things that people want and bringing those things to people,” says Treuhaft. “That’s a lot of where we see opportunity in the future.”
He cites as an example Millennials who “overwhelmingly use the phone as the most important screen in their lives. We need to figure out how to be in front of them in the environment where they are consuming content.”
Treuhaft describes Hearts & Science as agency built with data and consumer understanding at an “atomic” level. “The data is all there and available. It’s just a question of how you action it,” he says.
This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising. The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.
EXPLORING CROSS-SCREEN ADDRESSABLE VIDEO ADVERTISING, PRESENTED BY AT&T ADWORKS
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