That kind of consensus is forming, with executives promising to rebalance the audience relationship through better messaging.
Still, even as the industry looks to correct itself, it is also challenged to respond to the omni-channel demand – the reality that brands now need to engage with consumers across a wide variety of devices and touchpoints.
The Catch-22? As a Beet.TV panel moderated by Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell discussed, the solution to omni-channel is all about… technology.
The panelists lamented that technology capabilities have led the industry toward simply using tech for tech’s sake, bamboozling consumers with advertising – and prompting a backlash…
Essence president Jason Harrison: “It still is really amazing to me the number of advertisers and marketers that pour money into advertising without a really concrete understanding of what actually works. Technology is way ahead … whether the technology is working or not working, if it’s being used for good or for bad.”
Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell: “We have this habit of saying, ‘Because the tech exists, we should do this thing. Because I can personalize, I always must. Because I can target, I will only target the people I think I care about – until they hate me’.”
Adobe SVP and GM of Advertising Cloud Keith Eadie: “The metrics have followed the technology platforms … but not nearly to the point where we’re creating experiences and understanding how different audiences or individuals are reacting to that advertising and adjusting accordingly. We’ve given all of these marketers a hammer and then everything’s looked like the nail and the last 10 years has been about mass tonnage of advertising … it’s not surprising, given that context, of the outcomes we have now in terms of receptivity to advertising from our consumers.”
Panelists debated how the way to solve matters was be reconnecting with message, by turning attention to using data to fuel more creative stories that reach audiences, not just for targeting.
Essence president Jason Harrison: “If you look at consumers’ expectations of what they see in terms of advertising, what’s rising fastest is, ‘I want something that’s relevant’. But there’s still a big gap in the way that I think creative storytelling happens in advertising. The next frontier of advertising is, ‘How do we get that right?'”
Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell: “We see in the data that some consumers are totally okay with personalized advertising, because they feel like they’re getting some value. Others are really, super not cool with it.”
IBM VP digital strategy and sales Jordan Bitterman: “You’ve got to be able to build for something that you know can scale. There’s a lot of great formats that are out there – but there’s a lot of clients that don’t want to spend that kind of money to build those different kind of ads out unless they know it can scale because. at some point, the wallet dries up and there’s only so much they can do. I think the same is true for omni-channel.”
IBM VP digital strategy and sales Jordan Bitterman: Bitterman left panelists with two predictions for how the industry will reconfigure itself to meet these challenges:
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Essence president Jason Harrison says the roll-out of the omni-channel approach is still a mixed bag.
“Some are really good at it, where there is an experience that is very connected between touch points,” Harrison says.
He says some brands which reach people through app, website, advertising and products are doing so effectively. But that is not the view across the board.
“You see a lot of companies where you’ve got a head of digital, you’ve got a head of traditional, you’ve got an e-commerce and the three report to different places and maybe they collaborate, maybe they don’t,” Harrison laments.
“You know, I just think you’re set up for a situation where those things are bound to be not connected to one another.”
So how can brands finally think holistically on behalf of their audiences? Harrison recommends:
“Somebody could appear amazing in the advertising yet when you interact with that brand at a retail touch point or in a phone conversation or whatever, it’s a miserable experience, nothing, it doesn’t matter what happens in the advertising realm to over compensate for that,” he says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>“I think the two have to work together and you need to be careful that you don’t optimize toward specific audiences and optimize yourself out of business,” says Jason Harrison, President & Client Partner at GroupM’s Essence agency.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, Harrison discusses the growing use of marketers’ first-party data and why it’s important to understand “the role of advertising” within the context of desired business outcomes.
“For certain advertisers right now, they really can’t live without first-party data,” Harrison says. He cites retailers “or somebody that’s really concerned with driving consumption, having that data available enables them to really tightly target those individuals that they have a reason to believe are going to be in their stores.”
Closed-loop attribution can then determine how many people who were exposed to particular ads actually visited stores.
Broad-based brand building via mass media is still relevant to young brands, according to Harrison. “Some advertisers aren’t known to customers. They need to become known so they drive a lot of brand advertising to create awareness. Once you’ve done that, then you can begin to move toward stuff that’s lower funnel, that is much more targeted.”
On the opposite end of the broad-brush approach, one-to-one TV targeting is limited by scale. “Addressable television is a great example. It’s highly effective. We know it works at driving specific kinds of actions but there’s a limit to how much of it you can do,” says Harrison.
The trick, he adds, “is in understanding what the balance is between the two and how much of one does one job versus another and that’s really where I think there’s been some evolution recently.”
He predicts TV will become “more and more targeted” and then questions the future of commercials as we now know them.
“Do they continue to be beautiful, brand-building, equity based messages or does television as a medium move more in the direction of driving promotional conversion? I think that will be very interesting to watch.”
Harrison says the mission of Essence is “to make advertising more valuable to the world by viewing it as something that creates value. It has created a lot of interesting dialogues with our clients about the nature of advertising and how we think about what advertising should be and what it could be.”
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.
]]>These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.
Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:
“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”
Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:
“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”
Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:
“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”
Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”
Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.
To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”
Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>So it was at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 when representatives of Tru Optik, Inscape, Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Team Arrow Partners gathered on stage with moderator Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. While there was overall cordiality, there was no mincing of words when discussing the business and technical challenges of audience measurement.
They ranged from agency compensation that accentuates cheap CPM’s over business outcomes to the speed with which campaigns can be analyzed for return on investment. After summarizing the four core ways to measure TV—panel, set-top box data, automatic content recognition (ACR) data and in-app—Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston offered these observations on device validation and audience de-duplification:
“If I spent a million dollars with Hulu and a million dollars with NBC and a million dollars with Fox and a million dollars with Crackle, that’s great that I had 100 million impressions. How many households did I reach?” De-duplicating across multiple publishers and platforms is “not anything super sexy or exciting, but it’s some of the basic things that people come to expect across linear and digital.”
Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, cited speed to market as a big challenge. “Campaigns are running longer and longer, or somebody is always on in the marketplace, so our traditional methodology of test and control is just too slow quite honestly. So we’re investing very heavily in new models that are based upon artificial intelligence and multiple models running simultaneously so that we can get faster results and so that we can get true in-flight reads that somewhat mimic what the end result is.”
Then there’s the issue of whose data are deemed to be the most useful, according to Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development at Inscape. “What we hear a lot of is ‘we think that the legacy data sets and specifically Nielsen data is flawed.’ And then people will look at our data and they’ll go ‘well this doesn’t match up with Nielsen data.’ The same people that believe that those legacy data sets are flawed have business systems and operations historically built around those datasets that you literally would have to practically blow up the entire market just to get everybody to change.”
Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, GroupM’s dedicated agency for retailer Target, addressed one of many elephants in the room: how some agencies are compensated. “The idea that you want to target tightly to reach an audience to drive a response but you’re being held accountable to declining CPM’s is wrong, obviously. It’s misaligned. It sets up the wrong incentives.”
More than one panelist took issue with the preponderance of companies that claim to be able to do various things—leading to people at other companies burning time just trying to find the truth.
Said Swanston, whose background is in finance (J.P. Morgan), to much laughter: “I’ve never kind of experienced an industry where there’s so much smoke blown. The advertising and tech. A lot of people are full of it in this industry. And I say that in a nice way.”
Added McAfee: “There are an absolute crap-load of companies that are way out over their skies and we think it does a disservice to the market. We spend entirely too many cycles trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. As opposed to just doing our day jobs.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Agency units dedicated to specific clients were also more the norm a couple of decades ago. But it’s probably going to happen more often now given the enormous complexity of what marketing has become, according to Jason Harrison, CEO of Team Arrow Partners.
Target not only runs 1,800 stores but also sells online and has a “publisher-side business where they leverage their vast guest database for the benefit of other advertisers,” Harrison explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We needed an agency model to be able to manage across the breadth of everything that Target needed.”
Following a pitch by GroupM global CEO Kelly Clark to Kristi Argyilan, SVP of Media & Guest Engagement at Target, the foundation was laid for Team Arrow Partners. GroupM’s Gain Theory consultancy, of which Harrison was the founding CEO, had worked with Target on measurement and would provide talent to Team Arrow, along with assets from other GroupM entities and an integrated planning team built from scratch.
“And all that came together as one team physically sitting together working for Target,” Harrison says.
One of the more prominent Team Arrow ventures has been to team Target with NBCUniversal, providing the retailer access to the company’s ad inventory using an application programming interface. “We really viewed the NBCU partnership as a way to learn,” says Harrison.
While in the test phase, Team Arrow has been participating in NBCU’s Audience Studio targeting and linear optimization offering and with the media company’s partnership with 4C Insights programmatic TV. “So we’re looking at that to assess whether or not that makes sense as part of the larger video mix for target. What we’re doing is probably a microcosm of what’s going on more broadly in the industry.”
Asked if there will be more such dedicated agencies, Harrison says “You can’t help but probably see that be the case. You’ve got so much happening in corners of the marketing ecosystem where the complexity just continues to accelerate. It’s very difficult for a single agency to be excellent at all those things.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
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