Not only do ad agencies have to get their own corporate practices straight, they also have to represent wider society in the work that they bring to the world.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Engine Group CEO Kasha Cacy explains what her company is doing and why it matters.
“There’s a business advantage to diversity,” says Cacy. “The reason Florence flourished was the Medici family brought in so many different kinds of people, artists and scientists and philosophers.
“That cross-section and that intermingling of ideas is what drives innovation.
“If we don’t have a company that represents the US, then there’s no way we can market effectively to the US.
“The history is that many, many, many agencies have not had representation in terms of women, not had representation in terms of black and brown people.”
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— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) July 7, 2021
Over the last year, the industry has stepped up initiatives to enhance diversity.
Of course, doing so isn’t just a nice-to-have. Cacy’s view is that speaking better to distinct communities can enhance results, too.
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— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) August 20, 2021
But Engine’s CEO has had to make internal changes to get there.
“What we’ve been doing over the past year is really pushing our employees to understand the core issues of equity and systemic racism,” she explains.
“So we’ve had lots of really tough conversations facilitated by some great folks in the company, things around the historic inequity in terms of housing and mortgages and financing of housing and how that affects wealth over generations.”
For Cacy, diversity is not just a one-and-done, box-ticking exercise.
“In years past what I’ve seen is we do unconscious bias training once a year, and then it’d be one and done and you’d go off and focus on other things,” she says. “This is something that we’re talking about if not monthly, more frequently
“It really takes that kind of consistency and persistence to see those changes happen.”
You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But, through her agency Engine Group, Cacy wants to help brands get the best of both worlds.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Engine’s CEO describes how she wants to connect the dots for clients.
Cacy, who joined Engine in 2018 from Universal McCann, says connected TV (CTV) advertising is one of the hottest opportunities for brands.
“Having grown up in a media agency, I know the clients like TV,” she says. “It’s scalable, you get big reach, there’s sight, sound, and motion in terms of the messaging.
“It had been, in years past, a little hard to target. And so, you ended up with a lot of waste and you ended up having to sort of be in front of consumers that maybe weren’t the consumers you’d necessarily wanted to be in.
“I think the promise of CTV and applying data to CTV is really that you can get the best of both worlds. You can get the impact of TV advertising with the targetability, the measurement, the ability to look cross-screen and really design much more nuanced and strategic advertising programmes basically.”
But, whilst connected TV is a best-of-both situation, Engine’s Cacy is still trying to push digital advertising to be as effective as linear for certain clients and certain goals – namely, brand-building.
She says digital’s habit of leaning on behavioral data does not necessarily fit that goal.
“The problem is, a lot of my clients have segments that aren’t behavior based.,” Cacy says. “They’re attitudinal based, they’re emotional based, they’re based on their feelings about a brand. It’s been hard to make those connection points.
“A lot of the clients I’ve had in the past … are looking for a change of attitude or a brand lift. They’re trying to reach a target that doesn’t have an affinity for their brand or they’re trying to reach a target that has a specific attitude. It’s been hard to do that in digital.”
So Engine Group has been trying to combine measurement and data capabilities with a brand-building mindset in a programmatic environment.
Engine Group had previously grown with an assortment of agencies under its wing, including operating in programmatic.
But, under Cacy’s leadership, the group has consolidated it all under the Engine brand.
Cacy last year was recognized as one of the Workings Mothers of the Year by She Runs It, an industry organization.
She says she was as frustrated as many agency clients were about how opaque the inner workings of digital advertising had become – something she has sought to make more transparent through Engine.
You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.
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