John joined OMD in 2017 from the global creative agency BBDO where he was CEO.

In this conversation, he speaks about managing brand’s media investments during the time of COVID.

He talks of the high wire act that marketers face with the ebb and flow of the pandemic, where hope turns to despair as the virus reemerges and hope inches back.

He addresses the “new normal” of the workplace, and the challenges of keeping the agency focused, trained and inspired in the home/office hybrid.

And he speaks about the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and explains the recently launched training program for people of various backgrounds.

A longtime volunteer in the not-for-profit sector,John says that commitment to community action and philanthropy is essential for both brands and for each of us in our lives.  John lives this credo as the Chairman of the Red Cross of Greater New York.

Great, inspiring conversation.   Thank you, John.

Thank you to our series sponsor TransUnion.

And thank you for listening.   I hope you enjoy the episode.

These are among the takeaways from a panel discussion at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. It brought together representatives from OMD, Nissan, true[X] and Wavemaker led by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.

Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman likened the current wave of video ad format experimentation to the early days of digital media. While there were potentially innovative solutions, they came at such a pace that “you really didn’t get the time to absorb the learnings and focus. So it just became another version of spray and pray with new ad formats,” Richman said.

Her advice to the audience: “You want to choose your partners wisely. Because there is the potential risk right now where there’s a new-ad format fatigue, where everyone is coming out with different formats.”

Alternately, having worked with true[X], Richman suggested focusing on “learnings across a few different formats, understand the measurement, understand the operational impact all the way through billing, because that’s what really matters too when it comes to scaling solutions.”

true[X] President Pooja Midha said that engagement ads only belong in front of truly premium and compelling content, so as to offer a real value exchange. “We’ve done some incredible work with Nissan where we’ve gotten to talk about both a new model, the LEAF, as well as Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time. That’s a lot to get across even in a 30, but when you’ve got this rich canvas you can really go deeper and I think that’s what engagement is all about.”

Allyson Witherspoon, who heads up Global Brand Engagement at Nissan, would like to add value-based ad measurement to the industry’s standard measurement metrics.

“Lead generation is a big thing in automotive, but that may not be the most important metric for an individual experience,” said Witherspoon. “So you have to look at it by experience. If we keep measuring agencies and media performance based on the last several decades, we’re never really going to advanced what we need to do.”

Asked by Spiegel “What do we have to do to be here next year or the year after and this becoming commonplace?,” OMD’s John Osborn said the industry has a habit of productizing new things and then trying to force fit them into legacy measurement. “And the two don’t always meet,” said Osborn. “I think that we need to figure out different ways of looking at different measurement systems that are matched to the types and formats that are coming out faster than ever before.”

One challenge with emerging ad formats is that “everyone’s kind of trying to attack it, but they’re all in their own swim lanes and I think we need to come together. It’s got to be intentional and deliberate and I think we collectively need to come together to tackle it. I don’t think any one party alone can do it,” Osborn added.

Richman described the role that marketer procurement people play in innovation as “huge.” They can either allow spending in new ways “or they can control and say, ‘no it’s year after year, it’s like for like.’ And you’re going to be judged only by the money that you save, which tends to lead just to measurement only being by the CPM cost.

“Until we bring them into the conversation, it feels like we’re still going to have this logjam of only so much money can be spent on innovation because we’re not being judged by anything but pricing,” said Richman.

Witherspoon has made progress on that front because procurement at Nissan has been open to new ideas. “That was kind of the aha moment for me is that they’re actually kind of dying for this innovation as well because they’ve been doing the same thing over and over again they don’t know any different. They were really open to it.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Witherspoon was one of four panelists who discussed new video ad formats and how creative and media agency professionals are working more closely together to build stories relevant to specific audiences. It was one of several discussions at Cannes under the auspices of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.

Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink kicked things off by asking “How much more will you pay for a non-standard ad?”

Responded true[X] President Pooja Midha, “It’s how much more will you pay for impact. Non-standard, who cares?”

That’s where things got complicated, as Witherspoon explained. “It’s difficult, because sometimes you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. Within this campaign or within each kind of percentage of always on, what amount of that is going to be something that you’re going to be testing.”

Which is where Nissan’s “pilots” come in and how testing is needed to help change the thinking within procurement. “Once you take the results from that, how do you actually start to scale that? I think that’s when you can start to advance the financial discussion, once you’re able to show that impact across, in the case of Nissan, all of our models, across all of our markets, that’s a very powerful discussion to have,” said Witherspoon.

Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman said the test-and-learn approach also needs an activation plan. “So as you’re presenting a learning road map, you actually can say, ‘if this works we’re going to scale immediately.’ We’re not going to wait and have another committee meeting, it’s not going to be three months. Turn on a dime and then roll on to the next test.”

Along the way, people on both the creative and media side need to come together more than ever, said John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA, because media plans traditionally have been built in a process wherein storytelling has been relegated to creative agencies.

“There’s a gap in between, which is story building, and I think it’s amazing what happens when you get tight teams sitting together, working together from the onset, as opposed to the traditional iterative process where sometimes media comes in late in the game,” Osborn said.

He described the process with Nissan, TBWA and OMD “literally welded together at the hip, working on which types of data will better inform the right kinds of storytelling.”

true[X] does real-time creative optimization for Nissan as it simultaneously measures real-time brand lift. “We launch with one version of an engagement, and as we see the data coming back we’re able to actually build with Nissan and its agency a more elaborate version, or a version that lets you go deeper or let’s us hone in on what we see really lifting,” said Midha.

Spiegel wanted to know whether creative personalization is right for all brands, particularly the biggest ones with the widest target audiences.

“One of the things we’ve seen across the tens of thousands of engagements we’ve built is that strong, persistent branding, even for very, very well advertised brands, is really important in actually driving results for them,” Midha said.

Richman related that one of Wavemaker’s clients describes its target audience as “anyone with a mouth.” Still, such a brand might need to achieve relevance with a new generation of consumers or could be missing opportunities for frequency or selling across its whole portfolio.

“A level of personalization may not be one hundred segments, but looking it from the lens of two or three it will drive the business forward,” Richman said.

The panelists agreed that campaign measurement will continue to be one of the biggest challenges, given cross-platform content consumption. The fact that advertisers and publishers alike recognize this and want to change old habits, there are fundamental barriers that will take time to overcome.

“Right now, to launch anything, for example inside of CTV, which is such an important environment, it’s not one platform. It’s a bunch of different devices that are all built on different code bases. It’s not simple,” said Midha.

As the discussion shifted to things like total ratings points and sound media strategies, Osborn summed things up by observing “Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in the media jargon there’s a great brilliance in just thinking as a human would think.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel prefaced the conversation by calling into question the age-old format of 40 minutes of TV content leavened with 20 minutes of commercials. Encountering no disagreement, Spiegel elicited the following condensed thoughts from the varied panelists.

Amanda Richman, CEO, Wavemaker US: “This battle for attention is really sparking different ways of working. And we’re excited about now it’s becoming less of a focus just on the precision and data and targeting and keeping that within the realms of digital media only. And maybe back to the creative agencies and a different level of collaboration to recognize that we need to actually help develop the stories and messages that are bespoke to these new ad formats and platforms and broader distribution.”

John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA: “I think media more and more is just as innovative and in some ways just as creative as the creative storytellers in a creative agency. No one’s ever gone wrong by considering the consumer first and foremost. You’re seeing I think some real evolution in terms of innovation in different formats if you think of what Fox is doing with JAZ pods or NBC with Prime Pods and you’re seeing a variety of different formats coming to life. But I think a lot of the conversation is around formats. I think more and more we have to change and tilt the conversation more to experiences.”

Allyson Witherspoon, GM, Global Brand Engagement, Nissan: “Relevancy becomes what the experience is because we know so much more about who our consumers are and what their interests are that we need to be serving up content and experiences to them that’s relevant. In the case of automotive, we know when they’re going to be in market, we even know what type of vehicle that they’re in market for. So we should not be advertising a van to them if they’re interested in a sedan and we know that type of information. And then it’s to the point of how you can combine media and creative to actually deliver that message, which I think is still not something that we’re able to do at scale but it’s definitely something that we’re trying to build towards.”

Pooja Midha, President, true[X]: I’m heartened and I love the discussion that’s happening these days around bringing the consumer back to the center. While I’ve not been with the company terribly long, true[X] has been around for years and really from the beginning said we need to think about the consumer. We need to respect the consumer. We have got to think about messaging and context, advertising and an experience that is worthy of that consumer’s attention. If we’re not delivering that, then we really have no right to be there and to be expecting something back. It’s nice to be in Cannes because everyone we work with is represented. The creative side of the business, the media side of the business, the agency side, client marketers even the technology companies and measurement companies we partner with to deliver.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

“We’re living in a day and age when there’s no shortage of innovation,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “Certainly innovation has come in the form of different ad formats. If you look at what Fox has done with JAZ pods and NBC with Prime Pods, you’re really seeing a different way of delivering messaging in a variety of different formats.”

As for experiences instead of formats, he believes complexity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “It think that provides an opportunity for us as sort of Sherpas, if you will, working with the clients to figure out exactly what the right formats are and what the right choices are for clients to make. To distill it down to brilliantly simple solutions that ultimately are an economic multiplier for the clients we serve.”

But old habits can and will endure. Osborn invokes the “our own worst enemy” adage when discussing change in advertising.

“Our immediate impulse is to take something that’s innovative, that’s been proven out in a test and win format and to productize it. And then we set a pricing structure to it. And there are no real benchmarks for that so it leads to a lot of questions.”

A better approach is to “just constantly strive for the right kinds of innovation, figure out the right measurement formats, and then collectively what does it all mean for the marketers we work for,” Osborn says.

At Cannes, OMD has altered its approach to an industry fixture that is also undergoing considerable change. Whereas the company used to craft its own experience and then welcome clients to that experience, “This year, we’re working with the clients to give them more curated experiences that are more customizable to their specific needs.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 on the future of television.   You can find more videos from this series here. 

“I don’t look at it as leaving anything behind,” says Osborn, who made the move last September. “I’m bringing all that I’ve learned from the creative part of the equation and I’m trying to apply that through a whole new aperture. Media is closer to the customer, the consumer, than anything else.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2018, Osborn talks about game-changing technology and advocates for cause marketing as a way to improve people’s lives and give marketers an “economic multiplier.”

When Osborne joined BBDO 25 years ago to work on the Pepsi account, the media side of the traditional full-service agency was considered “a bunch of numbers.” What’s changed is that “we have the data, we have the analytics that tell us who to go target and how they behave, which sets up the foundation of the entire strategy framework.”

Emerging technologies like augmented reality and robotics aren’t front and center on Osborne’s radar screen. At least not yet. Voice-activated devices, the connected home and artificial intelligence seem to have more near-term potential.

“AI is really, really powerful,” says Osborne. “It’s a game changer. Because if it can make our customers’ lives easier, more fluid, more relevant to how they want to live their life, then that’s really, really of high value.”

At CES, OMD is joined by more than 100 clients. Some are obvious—Apple and Intel—others less so, including Clorox, Cigna and State Farm. Osborn says they’re all seeking to apply innovation and invention to their business models to be smarter and more relevant to customers.

“We want to peak their imagination and really push them to think about things from a whole different standpoint.”

Osborn is a supporter of the Red Cross and other philanthropic organizations, so he appreciates the value of cause marketing, calling it an “economic multiplier.” Finding the right cause to align with varies from brand to brand.

“But I will tell you this. Usually it’s much more powerful if the people that work within the company share in the delivery of that sense of purpose as well as the messaging part of it as well.”

This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018. Please visit this page for more coverage.