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.
]]>Is this the nail in the coffin for the traditional ad agency? Not necessarily, but their role may well evolve in the next few years.
That is the view from one exec whose company is trying to sell tools to help the industry make and deliver ads better.
“Consultancies obviously see this as an opportunity,” says Adobe Advertising cloud SVP and GM Keith Eadie. They see this as akin to what they’ve done with email platforms and other marketing software platforms. Now media buying looks more like that, so they’re evaluating what they can do there.
“But I think there’s still a sweet spot for agencies in terms of their strategy capability being brought to bear and enabled through the technology platforms. ”
For months, ad land has been attuned to the appearance of big consultants aiming to capitalise on ad agencies’ troubles.
At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the festival chairman noted the arrival of consulting firms like EY. Philip Thomas said they had not “taken over”, but were more visible.
So how will things change? Eadie sees rejuvenation at the nexus of maths and makers.
I think data and media activation. Those have been baked, right? We’ve spent the last 10 years evolving data and media activation platforms.
He says the industry has spent the last decade advancing data capabilities: “But we’ve completely forgotten about creative. We need to rebalance that focus area. We need to provide brands and agencies with creative management platforms that increase the velocity of content, helps that creative value chain iterate more quickly, redistributes what parts of the creative asset building and editing are done between creative agencies and media teams.”
That would raise the question of a “recombination of creative and media agencies to actually pull that off”, Eadie adds.
Typically, the two kinds of services are separate. Could the evolution of tools bring them back together?
]]>“We obviously don’t have that utopic state in linear TV right now,” says TubeMogul CMO Keith Eadie in this video. “We don’t have it perfectly in programmatic digital media either – but we’re a lot closer to it.”
TubeMogul this month announced it would bring its own targeting data to bear on cable TV ad inventory aggregated by AudienceXpress, allowing its customers to “programmatically” buy ads on cable TV just as they do for online video.
“It is the first step of many toward realizing the promise of programmatic TV for brands and agencies. There’ll be more to come on this,” Eadie adds.
We spoke with Eadie for “The Road to DMEXCO,” a series of interviews with industry leaders produced in New York, London and San Francisco. It is sponsored by the automatic content recognition (ACR) technology provider Civolution.
Please find more videos from the series here. Beet.TV is a media sponsor of DMEXCO and will be covering the conference extensively.
]]>