In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Donohue explains how data “opens up everything in the creative process, from start to finish. It’s all about personalized experiences for the consumer.”
She sees an industry facing “a ton of transformation, and to a certain degree there’s pressure on that transformation.”
But on the other side “there’s just so much enthusiasm for that change. What’s possible is amazing. And what we can do to build consumer experiences is very powerful and so you see a lot of optimism from people.”
Asked by interviewer Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, about the challenges agencies face in mastering data and technology, she admits those haven’t traditionally been core competencies. “Agencies are historically a service-based business. However, there are lots of industries that have had to change and pivot from what their core business is.”
Spine was created by Publicis in the fall of 2017 as a team of 3,500 engineers, data scientists, analysts and tech leaders to serve as a platform that helps brands to target specific individuals, as Advertising Age reports.
“At the core of it what we’re really trying to do is foster both the marketing transformation and the business transformation side of it. In the center of that is the consumer,” Donohue says.
“Clients are very rich with data. It’s usually not that they don’t have data, it’s that their data is housed in silos and it’s not connected. So we help them very much with that.”
If agencies understand their clients’ growth objectives they can determine which consumers they need to talk to. “And that helps us ideate. Even at the ideation stage data can be very informative. Then as you go into personalization, data can help us create versions, data can help us create sequential messaging and better storytelling and “even start to get the toe in the water of dynamic creative,” Donohue says.
Will there be thousands of creative within the same campaign? “There can be. If we better understand where a specific consumer is in the journey, then we know what message they need to hear at that point in the journey and to move them along to the next phase.”
Donohue isn’t suggesting that such personalization is just around the corner.
“We have all talked about it at length and we all know that it’s going to make sense and it’s going to help both consumers and brands. But there is a lot of work to implementing it, especially when you think about implementing it for global brands.
“Implementing a strategy like that in Russia is very different than the US and it’s very different than Brazil. So I think it’s really going to be focused on how do we take the promise of personalized experiences and be able to implement it sustainably,” Donohue says.
You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Donohue talks not only about the prospects for AI but the talent needs of the modern media agency and how Starcom has doubled down on its human experience positioning.
The continual increase in data and technology fosters the ability for brands to be more personal and “recognize people for what they are, human beings,” which is a change for the better, according to Donohue.
Regarding AI, she sees on one end of the spectrum machine learning leading to better insights “from a significant amount of data as well as then building strategies off those insights.”
On the other end of the band is the promise of more personal relationships, for example the growing use of chat bots. “Bots is a very technology term, but the reality is bots are allowing a more human interaction with a brand,” says Donohue.
Unlike technology that facilitates website transactions, bots can provide users with a direct dialogue with a brand “that can enable me to figure out how the brand can better serve my needs.” Overall, the range of the AI spectrum “is pretty powerful in how it can change marketing overall.”
Donohue segues to the organizational change at Starcom within the past year or so during which management “took a step back” and decided to determine whether the human experience positioning it had staked out was a viable one.
“The resounding answer among our people and among our clients is that human experience is absolutely the right positioning,” she says. “And in fact, you could argue that it’s more right than when we first created it.”
So Starcom “laser focused” on the notion of the power of a human experience with brands. “Human experience is right, but what’s the modern iteration of it? That’s what we spent the last year on.”
With about 30 years of agency experience behind her, Donohue has a keen perspective for the changing role of what used to be referred to as personnel or human resources. The modern media agency needs everyone from data engineers and scientists to storytellers to managers who can horizontally manage those resources.
“It’s a diverse range of talent needs that we have, which on one hand does make it challenging,” Donohue says. “It also opens up a much broader competitive set that we have to deal with.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Lisa Donohue offers this observation as she attends the Mobile World Congress 2017, the global intersection of all things mobile.
“Currently people think of mobile first,” she says in an interview with Beet.TV. “I really think that it is now mobile throughout.”
Thinking about mobile along the consumer journey encompasses such routine activities as seeking information, watching content (a brand building opportunity) and purchase/conversion, according to Donohue.
The shift must be accompanied by a new mindset with regard to looking at mobile and only seeing “advertising” potential because such thinking “hurts the mobile device,” she adds.
This is because when most people think of mobile advertising they are constrained by traditional formats like 30-second commercials, which are a “negative” on mobile devices. Instead, stress the positives: a near and personal screen, easy and seamless connections to commerce.
“It’s messaging rather than advertising,” Donohue says.
As with most ad/media industry gatherings these days, how brand marketers can harness artificial intelligence and augmented reality are big topics of discussion. “We’re only at the tip of the iceberg,” is how Donohue describes AI.
Nonetheless, many marketers are already using AI in their products or in how they conduct customer service. The challenge is finding what works best for a particular product or service.
Asked about the upcoming television Upfront negotiation season in the United States with regard to video content, Donohue stresses the need for a greater understanding of how people continue to shift their viewing across devices.
“What really needs to happen is the right measurement that actually shows how we can follow those consumers, understand who they are across the devices and get more personal with them,” Donohue says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Starcom Worldwide Global Brand President Lisa Donohue joins the excitement with an emphatic ‘yes’. But how should brands and agencies use this new technology, now that it is finally shaping up?
“VR and AR… is the number-one topic in our industry right now,” she says. “We’re really starting to see things that could scale.
“VR enhances storytelling by making it a more immersive experience. It’s not like ‘here’s another channel that we need to shift money to’, here’s a technology that can enhance our storytelling. That’s fitting with our position as a human experience company.”
Some of the publishers cited are on-record as seeking brand advertisers to bankroll their VR content. What could that look like? Donohue calls out some examples of campaigns she says work really well in the format:
“Think about that range – wow. Any brand can use it to enhance storytelling.”
This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders at the exposition. The series is sponsored by Videology. For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.
]]>“Given that the world is changing rapidly, the benefit is that they have no status to break, only rules to rewrite,” she says. The best way for an agency to help to build these type of brands is to be quick, agile, and in sync with who they are as a brand. “We immersed ourselves with them as a company. We set up shop at their offices and met everyone at Airbnb to truly understand the ethos of the company and how they operate.”
Starcom’s focus with this client has been centered around content creation and storytelling, rather than on flowcharts detailing reach and frequency, she says. More established brands can learn from these upstarts about how to be more agile and not be controlled by process, while newer brands can benefit by embracing process more, she says in explaining what newer and established brands can learn from each other.
Donohoue was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.
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