The chief marketing officer of Mastercard’s health business says the quest for user privacy is right-on.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rajamannar explains which replacements may work best, and how advertisers should respond.

Privacy is right

“I completely agree with a statement which Tim Cook had made brilliantly, ‘Privacy is a fundamental right’,” he says.

“There are so many data breaches that are happening. If you guys don’t know how to protect my data, you have no business collecting my data.

“As a marketer, I have to behave in a very responsible way to my consumers.

“I think it’s a good decision that they have taken, but we need to find solutions.”

Congratulations to Mastercard CMO @RajaRajamannar for on not only being awarded the @Adweek Brand Genius Award, but also being recognized as the Grand Brand Genius for your creativity, leadership & #marketing innovation. https://t.co/VIWHgTy8jy

— Mastercard News (@MastercardNews) September 27, 2021

Safety in numbers

Vendors across the industry are racing to cook-up alternatives to third-party tracking cookies – not only as Apple has reduced its own identify offering but with Google’s deprecation of Chrome cookies now looming by 2023.

Rajamannar sees three categories of replacement emerging:

Cohorts – “It is one step better than blindly bombarding all consumers with all kinds of ads. It’s a step better, but still not good”

Vendor-specific alternatives – “You’ve got companies like Trade Desk, LiveRamp and a whole bunch of other companies out there, they’re coming with their own solutions, which we need to see how they are.”

Broad-based initiatives – “ANA is working on some solutions at the industry level, which I think is the smartest way to do, taking advantage of the scale that all of us collectively bring to the table.”

I am excited that my book, Quantum Marketing, is now published in Korean, and reaching more people as we head into this next paradigm of marketing! pic.twitter.com/LrI3khvVHl

— Raja Rajamannar (@RajaRajamannar) September 7, 2021

How to act

Regardless of what comes after the cookie, the Mastercard CMO thinks brands don’t have to wait; they can take two key steps now:

1. Minimise the collection of data

“What information do you really need to know about the consumer? Do you really need to know all this stuff? Or can you actually come up with the same decision, with the same precision, knowing a lot less data?”

2. Reach the user right

“How do you then track the consumer, or how do you contextually serve the right advertisement in a non-intrusive non-repetitive fashion that makes sense to the consumer?”

Production Notes:   This video is an except from an extended conversation which will be published 10.11 on the BeetCast, the podcast. The BeetCast is sponsored by TransUnion.

It is imperative that marketers understand AI, Augmented Reality and other emerging technologies to remain relevant.  Already the role of CMO has eliminated from major companies, he notes.

Much of Rajamannar’s thesis around the crisis in marketing and a way forward is laid out in his forthcoming book:  Quantum Marketing: Mastering the New Marketing Mindset for Tomorrow’s Consumers. It comes out in February, published by Harper Collins.

This video is an except of the next #BeetCast podcast which is a an extended conversation about the “existential threat” to marketing, the impact of the pandemic on brands and how Mastercard has been managing its people through these difficult months.

Rajamannar serves as president of the the WFA, the World Federation of Advertisers.

This podcast episode drops this Monday (November 16).   You can subscribe for free right here.

The #BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.

In 2020, the nation is living through a virus pandemic and racial tension. Marketers had already been challenged to respond to the former, now they are also contending with the latter.

So, how should brands best behave? Using a unique empathy or not at all, says Raja Rajamannar, the chief marketing officer of Mastercard and president of the World Federation of Advertisers, in this video interview with Beet.TV

These topics will be explored later this month as the virtual IAB NewFronts takes place June 22-26.

‘Be unique’

“You can quickly fall into a trap of looking like everybody else,” he says. “In a sea of sameness, you are just one of those folks who are out there, and consumers cannot differentiate one brand from the other.

“In those situations, it is not to even just worth spending your money, because you are just saying something, but nobody is noticing what you’re saying, so what’s the point?

“So it’s very critical for you that you are true to your brand and be differentiated and the unique, but highly relevant to the consumers.”

‘Sea of sameness’

The “sameness” of brands’ response recipe to COVID-19 has been highlighted in a number of recent video skits.

Rajamannar has a prescription he thinks can avoid creative homogeneity.

1. “Be sensitive to people, their feelings, their emotions, and their situations. If you’re tone deaf, that’s going to be disastrous for your company, for your brand, for your product.”
2. “Be authentic. Be genuine. If you don’t have anything to say, simply shut up and save your marketing dollars … Nothing is going to be more wasteful as faking something. Just stay on the sidelines.”
3. “Let people know that you’re there for them. It is about serving them. It’s not about self-service. It’s not about being opportunistic. But it is truly being in service of the people.”

The current moment is, in a way, the high-water mark so far of “purpose-driven” brand marketing, the trend which began a number of years ago.

But it is also a moment in which some consumers are more actively holding brands to account on their purpose, even their lack of expression of purpose, and some are growing weary and cynical of purpose-centric marketing.

Huge responsibility

All that is a minefield for brands to walk through. Rajamannar, whose World Federation of Advertisers members control $1.2 trillion marketing budget, says those companies have “a huge level of responsibility … to either shape the cultures around the world or to address and solve the problems”.

He recommends the companies focus on three kinds of stakeholders:

1. Employees: “You need to give them a sense of reassurance that we understand as a company what they are going through.”
2. Consumers: “Don’t try to sell. This is the opportunity to build a trust that is very deep and on solid foundations.”
3. Communities: “(They) expect you to take a stance on issues that they believe in. They want you to take action.”

This video is a preview in a series leading up to the 2020 IAB NewFronts.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the Road to the NewFronts 2020.  This Beet.TV series is presented by the IAB. 

In an announcement, the ANA demands upfront sales, which were due to be for ads airing between October 2020 and September 2021, now occur this fall for ads transmitting starting 2021.

More than that, it also lined up a series of chief marketing officers to call for “sweeping changes and improvements in the media ecosystem”, including “transformative changes to the upfront marketplace” – effectively questioning not just the timing but the purpose of upfront ad sales.

“While there are benefits to the upfront, it remains an antiquated business system that needs reform,” said ANA chairman and P&G chief brand officer Marc Pritchard.

Delay to the new year

“Right now, we are going through a substantial turmoil, upheaval literally, and we don’t exactly know what to forecast for 2021,” says Mastercard chief marketing officer Raja Rajamannar, one of those firing the ANA’s warning, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“To be able to commit in this level of uncertainty that is prevailing right now, it’s not very easy. So it does help us to have more time.

“In times of crisis, such as this, we are very flexible to our partners and we want the same flexibility to be displayed to us from our partners as well.

“This is the right time, given the level of uncertainty, that the industry has to look at upfronts in a slightly delayed cycle, starting with the new year, as opposed to doing it right now.”

Spooked by agile demand

The ANA’s message will ring alarm bells amongst broadcasters. TV companies have been dealt a blow by diminishing advertiser demand during the pandemic, causing many to discount their inventory.

On both sides of the industry, “agility” is the new watchword, as broadcasters try to keep ad buyers engaged and as ad buyers strive to pivot their spending strategy within the space of a quarter or two.

The key pressure is that marketers, in the current climate, are struggling to gain the visibility and confidence required to make the kinds of annual upfront purchase decisions they have in the past.

But the pandemic may also end up being the straw that broke the camel’s back. Over the last couple of years, broadcasters have tooled-up to offer ad buyers fine-grained targeting of OTT viewers and much closer to transmission.

Many will be asking if now is the moment when the upfronts calendar gets consigned to the history books – or if we are in a particular moment in time that simply calls for a time-out.

End of upfronts?

All this is quixotic because TV demand is booming – yet networks’ production calendars have been impacted by COVID-19, leaving some 2020/21 premium content line-ups looking relatively thin.

Mastercard’s Rajamannar, who is also president of the World Federation of Advertisers, says: “I think that upfronts are absolutely essential and do serve a purpose, clearly.

“Depending on how this entire upfront situation ends up, there might be some scenario where you are making some upfront commitments still, probably, and in some cases you’re not able to.

“Every marketer is significantly after good content, less clutter and, of course, very good economies that are supported by the kind of impact that gets created when you have less clutter, when the content is good, when the consumer engagement is good, etc.”

Shifting sands

The ANA broadly is articulating what its media advisory board said in mid-May, when its white paper called for upfronts to be “shifted from a broadcast year to a calendar year to reflect and improve business planning, elevate marketer decision-making, and align television buying with most marketers’ fiscal years”, as “an immediate priority”.

This year’s upfront sales season would be for ads due to air between October 2020 and September 2021.

Instead, the advisory board wants upfronts moved to the fall for inventory in the year of 2021. “That would be after advertisers have greater financial certainty and the major network groups are able to publicly share their approach to programming based on studio production limitations and their contingency plans around sporting events based on league decisions,” it says.

The ANA’s demands don’t just pertain to the upfronts. P&G’s Marc Pritchard also repeated his historic calls for improvements like transparency, decrying the “sub-optimal media ecosystem”.

This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr.  Please visit this page for additional segments from the series. 

In contextual targeting, ad buyers would seek optimal adjacency to various kinds of content.

But, to Raja Rajamannar, there is one overriding context that everyone shares in 2020 – a global pandemic.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CMO of Mastercard says brands need to recalibrate their messaging because a number of tectonic shifts have occurred.

“Data clearly shows that people’s movement patterns have dramatically altered,” he says. “The screens that they are watching has dramatically changed, the mix of the screens, and the kind of content that they are watching has changed.

“Right now the larger context is that the whole world is in a crisis. So be attuned to it, be appropriate in terms of what you’re communicating.”

Change your plan

Rajamannar thinks the ongoing pandemic crisis has thrown consumers in to a number of different contexts, and that means brands must adapt.

“Once you have got this data, for every brand, you need to identify, in addition to the right audience, the right context in which you are going to communicate your message in a most appropriate tone and manner,” he says.

“You need to really make sure is that you are absolutely tweaking, or correcting, or modifying your media plans completely based on the new audience behaviour, and their viewing habits, and viewing patterns.

You’re in the business of selling some luxury product, you have to be much more careful. A lot of people have lost their jobs … You cannot be tone-deaf and say, here is a fantastic luxury product that you should (buy). The message is critical, the product that you’re selling is critical. The context is very important.”

Out of context

An article by Gartner senior director analyst Laurel Erickson last week brought the problem of context and tone in to sharp focus.

She was taken aback by seeing an ad depicting a woman jumping for joy, placed in an article about COVID-19 deaths.

“Your users have landed on your site in the middle of stressful days probably filled with worry and uncertainty,” Erickson writes, making four recommendations: “Check tone”, “Provide easy access to COVID-19 specific content,” “Adjust to current traffic trends” and “Adjust to current consumer concerns”.

Consider These COVID-19 Content Adjustments to Your Website

Digital ads down

A follow-up survey of brands and agencies conducted by Advertiser Perceptions shows that, in the last few weeks, they have become progressively more worried that the impact on advertising will worsen in Q2 and will stretch in to Q4 and Q4.

Of the immediate impact, the worst may be experienced by digital media. A UBS survey of ad executives shows “ad spending in digital is down over 45% year to date and is expected to drop by that same amount for the rest of the year”, Yahoo Finance reports.

According to an IAB survey, digital display is pegged for the biggest short-term dip in digital ad revenue, eMarketer says.

But the extent of any digital retrenchment may be exaggerated by the extent to which it has long since been the dominant ad channel.

An analysis by Enders Analysis, published Monday, says: “Almost all the evidence we have is that advertising budgets, including online, have been massacred.”

Futuresource Consulting says: “We should expect to see a long-term reinvention in advertising, as the industry will be pressured to make up the shortfall in revenue.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

But being MasterCard’s chief marketer isn’t all about experience, however. The financial services company is also swimming in consumer financial data to better customize its own offerings and its marketing.

In this video interview with Beet.TV at the ANA Masters Of Marketing conference, Raja Rajamannar explains how his team is doing that, sensitively.

“As people are spending on their cards, the data is moving over our rails,” he tells Beet.TV. “We know things like where they are spending, but we don’t know who is spending or what they are spending on. We know the frequencies, we know the intensities.

“If I’m launching a new campaign or a new product, I’m easily able to … see the results saying that has my spending on the overall network gone up in that space or not. Based on those learnings, we can plan our media and all the promotional activities much better in a very, very well-targeted fashion.”

This year, MasterCard added “senses” to “Priceless”:

• Sight: New symbol brand, introduced in January, dropped the name from its famous interlocking circles.
• Sound: The company has a new “sonic brand identity“, a track scored with the help of Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, including a brief tune that will play whenever consumers use their cards in physical, digital and voice environments.
• Taste: Next up, MasterCard recently recreated four international restaurants in New York and one in Rome, aiming to “curate priceless experiences and make ‘Priceless’ tangible”.

“We’ve used the same dishes, the same menu, the same utensils, and people even speak Swahili,” says MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar in this video interview with Beet.TV. “You get a near-real experience as though you’re sitting on the beach, you’re watching the waves come by, and then slowly the sun starts setting.

“We’ll be, hopefully, embarking on this journey even more aggressively and launch a lot, many more restaurants around the world.”

This video is was produce in Orlando at the CMO Growth Council.  The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv.    For more videos from the event, please visit this page.   

But those qualities are not just nice-to-haves or boxes to tick – they also lead to natural uplift in business effectiveness.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mastercard chief marketing and communications officer Raja Rajamannar shows how adequately balancing the gender of his team produces positive results.

“Seventy-five to 85% of all purchase decisions in the world are made by women – how strange would it be to not focus on them as the primary target audience?,” Rajamannar asks. “Who can sell things better and communicate things better to a woman than another woman?”

The trouble is, women are not necessarily as equally well represented at the levers of marketing power as they are in the general buying population, Rajamannar says.

So, five years ago, MasterCard began a program to more adequately represent females in senior echelons of Rajamannar’s marketing and communication team. Now more than 70% of that team is female, including at senior level, he says.

But diversity goes beyond gender.

“You need a diversity of thinking,” Rajamannar adds. “That comes from people with different cultural backgrounds, different mindsets and that’s what you have to bring to that if you have to be successful.”

Similarly, the very role of the marketer itself is becoming diverse.

“Marketers are no longer specialists,” Rajamannar says. “They have to be general mangers. They need to understand PR. They need to understand technology. They need to understand numbers. You have to be a consumer advocate.”

The interview was conducted at the annual ANA Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando earlier this week.

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions.  Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video.   Please find more videos from the series here.

So it’s a bit ironic that brands’ best hope derives from a trend dating to the 1990’s: one-to-one marketing, but with a twist. “Storytelling is dead,” says Rajamannar, who is CMO & CCO of the financial services company. “It’s all about story making.”

Not that pursuing this strategy comes easy, Rajamannar explains in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“Many of the CMO’s have bigger technology budgets than the CTO’s. And that really calls for a level of understanding,” he says before declaring that finding the marketing talent that is required these days “is going to be a nightmare.”

While one-to-one personalization became something of a fad in the 1990’s, there’s no reason why the concept won’t work today, according to Rajamannar. But there’s a hitch.

“Should we be focusing on advertising the way we always focused on advertising at all? Whether it’s one-to-one or one-to-many, consumers are telling you ‘I don’t want your stupid ads. I want my uninterrupted experience.’”

As evidence, he points to the continued rise of ad-blocking software, with some 200 million active users at the end of 2016. By the first quarter of 2017, this had increased by about 25 million, driven in part by manufacturers preloading the software into their devices.

“So as a consumer, with two clicks you block the marketers form your interface altogether.”

It gets worse when one factors in services like Netflix, with nearly 100 million users. “That’s millions of hours of viewability that’s gone,” Rajamannar says.

About four years ago, Mastercard pivoted to experiential marketing. One example from early 2017 was its campaign for the Grammy Awards that included an experiential record store and interactive music experiences for fans who unlocked special offers via a $1 Masterpass purchase, as RetailDIVE reports.

“Give experiences to consumers which are memorable, which are positive, which are maybe once in a lifetime. Then they will tell the story of the brand to their circles. They become your brand ambassadors.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

Jakob Nielsen, Managing Director at GroupM Digital in the U.K., has been named Chief Executive Officer of Finecast. The company is headquartered in London with Rich Astley as Chief Product Officer supported by Kelly Clark, Global CEO of GroupM, and Irwin Gotlieb, Chairman of GroupM.

“The time is right for traditional TV and over-the-top providers to scale their new classes of addressable inventory to the benefit of our advertisers and to meet demand for targeted TV advertising,” Nielsen said in a news release. “With the rapid growth of digital advertising, TV budgets may be at risk from new competitors, particularly as digital video improves in quality and ease of access.”

Nielsen will be one of the featured speakers at the 2017 Beet Retreat in Miami, where the theme will be The Future Of Advanced TV.

Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.

Beet.TV interviewed Nielsen last year at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London where he discussed the potential of addressable TV ads in the coming years. We are republishing the interview in light of today’s news about the rollout of Finecast.

About 42% of US homes are now able to receive so-called “addressable advertising” – TV ads custom-targeted at individual homes thanks to one of a variety of return-path TV systems. But how much of the multi-billion-dollar TV advertising industry could be funneled through that channel in the years ahead.

It’s early days, but ad agency GroupM’s UK MD Jakob Nielsen says his group is taking a guess.

“You are changing how you are thinking from the past – therefore, it will take some time,” he cautions, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“But, if you look across all our clients, we think 30% to 50% of all TV could eventually – not tomorrow – be addressable TV. You will have some clients having 60% of their total mix, in five or 10 years, being addressable, other clients being 20%.”

Nielsen says Europe is farther behind on roll-out, but dominant UK pay-TV provider Sky is already an early leader with its so-called AdSmart technology, pushing multiple alternative ads to consumers’ set-top boxes for subsequent decisioning and play-out during standard ad moments.

The beauty of the idea is two-fold. First, it is opening TV advertising to smaller new advertisers. Second, it means those advertisers can target people close to the point of purchase, not just spend money on raising initial awareness.

“You have the top of the funnel, but all of a sudden TV can start going in to the mid and lower parts of the funnel, that they weren’t part of in the past,” Nielsen adds. “AdSmart, in the beginning, 70 to 80% of their advertisers came from non-traditional TV advertisers.

“They were able to reach a BMW dealership who wanted to sell a BMW in Edinburgh. That puts a completely new perspective on what you can do with TV.”

“I think privacy is of the utmost importance for clients. It always has been,” says Doug Ray, Dentsu Aegis Network’s President of Product & Innovation.

At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, where Ray was a panelist at the Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel, he explains to Beet.TV how the way media is planned and purchased has become much more dynamic and why his company has “doubled down” on leveraging data.

This includes both PII information—names, physical addresses and email addresses—and cookie data within client data management platforms.

“That’s at the end of the day why clients are directly managing their DMP’s and leaning in to CRM, because they’re looking to try to understand and know their customers better,” says Ray.

Particularly in Europe, regulators go to great lengths to restrict what marketers can do with consumer data. This will only increase as companies become more sophisticated about mining that information.

Last week, Dentsu Aegis Network recruited the Chief Privacy Officer from British Telecom Group, Mark Keddie, to become its first Global Data Protection Officer. It came a year before such a position will be mandated by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The move is “very important and something we’re certainly taking quite seriously particularly as we pivot into utilizing PII more and more for our advertising campaigns,” says Ray.

The pivot includes its acquisition last August of a majority stake in data marketing firm Merkle. Baltimore-based Merkle specializes in so-called “customer relationship marketing,” which includes crafting loyalty programs for marketers and managing their vast customer databases that hold reams of consumer information, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

Earlier this month, Dentsu Aegis Networks’ media agency brands began using Merkle’s PII-based M1 platform for centralized data planning and activation. For some initial campaigns using M1, Ray says there’s an average improvement of 20% in return on investment “and that’s simply by cleaning up the supply side in terms of costs, duplication of cookies and so on.”

This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.

The CEO and Co-Founder of Eyeview believes there’s no substitute for actual outcomes, meaning a person sees a video and then buys something.

“A lot of the video campaigns you see out there are optimizing toward hitting a demo, or targeting a DMA, or making sure the videos are completed, or they’re viewable and a lot of intermediate metrics like recall,” Harnevo says in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017.

Eyeview’s VideoIQ platform infuses consumer, brand and retail data into a decisioning engine to programmatically deliver one-to-one personalized video. One of the company’s recent case studies details a $7.83 return for every $1 in ad spend for TriHonda—representing dealers in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York.

“What’s special about focusing on outcome is that it kind of cures a lot of the ills and worries of the industry right now,” says Harnevo.

He cites “crazy, unprecedented” hacking attacks and “almost about $5 million fraud a day with video ads, and that gets advertisers very frightened and it should be.”

He says focusing on sales rises above such concerns because Eyeview is buying real people. “You can’t fraud a sale,” says Harnevo. “You can fraud a completion. You can fraud a viewable demo but you can’t fraud a store sale.”

Eyeview uses data partners that vary by business category, including marketers’ first-party CRM data, Nielsen Catalina and others in consumer packaged-goods, Cardlytics and MasterCard in financial services and, as in the case of TriHonda vehicles, J.D. Power and Associates.

“It’s really closing the loop from the view of a real person all the way to the end to see if they actually bought,” is how Harnevo describes the process.

Screens are becoming less important, according to Harnevo. “We need to make sure that we can find this individual again or find any person again. It doesn’t matter where he’s at,” he adds. “For us it’s television, Facebook, mobile.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

What becomes clear from the mix of agency, marketer and media company panelists at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016 is that technology really hasn’t made the budget allocation process any easier, and that the Upfront period of forward spending commitments not only endures but is spreading to digital as well.

Asked for his thoughts on the move from agency to client by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink, MasterCard’s Ben Jankowski—who spent 28 years in the agency world—says “It’s more different than I thought it would be.”

What stands out most is the amount of time that Jankowski, who is SVP of Media, has to spend thinking about AdTech. “I spend probably three times more time than I thought I would on things like ad technology,” says Jankowski. “It’s a colossal amount of time.”

Nonetheless, putting aside the quantitative side of media optimization, Jankowski believes “the cool part of what we’re doing” is applying data and insights around more qualitative factors. This includes “how we can use data to become better story tellers,” Jankowski says.

Jason Baadsgaard, Chief Revenue Officer for video marketing technology company Eyeview, says his clients took Eyeview into addressable TV. “What I do know is the space we created is very powerful, but it’s also very confusing for the buyers out there,” Baadsgaard says. “I think we overemphasize the technology too much, make it too tech driven and the marketing gets lost. Buyers are just very confused.”

In response to a question from Spiegel about budget allocation, Dan Bruinsma, SVP, Director at GroupConnect, says it’s a combination of top-down and bottom-up activity. It begins with setting a clear vision, according to Bruinsma.

“If we’re plotting the future of what we want to accomplish in video, then we compartmentalize it in such a way that it allows us to be very forthright when we go into the market,” says Bruinsma.

On the bottom-up side, while addressable TV “may be important,” Bruinsma says he can’t just indiscriminately decide “go ahead and put $5 million in there. We need to do the work to understand all of the economics associated with the size of the segment and communication goals we want to hit.”

As in many things in life, timing is everything. “Typically we’re still doing a lot of planning and a lot of investment in and around an Upfront, whether it’s a broadcast year or calendar year,” Bruinsma adds.

His comments provide a segue for Spiegel to inquire about the importance of Upfront deals and how marketers should decide how much budget to commitment ahead and how much to hold back.

“It’s really a balancing act. We’re constantly mixing with a lot of different moving parts on that,” says Andrew Deming, SVP of Marketing at Bank of America. “Some years I feel like we actually put a greater importance on the upfront process. Then there are other years where we’re putting less importance on it. Just depends on where we are.”

Twitter is new to the forward spending commitment game, according to Ryan Moore, the platform’s Global Agency Development Head.

“This is the first year where some agencies are actively committing upfront TV dollars to our video products,” Moore says. “That’s an interesting experience where we’ll do year-long contracts based on fixed prices. That was not the twitter world a year ago.”

Deming cites Turner Broadcasting’s audience guarantee deals as a positive sign in the trend away from targeting on age and sex demographics. “These types of insights make me a lot warmer to the idea of laying a higher percentage of the dollars down upfront, because of the fact these tools give you a lot more opportunity to optimize against your audience segments,” Deming says.

“Even if you don’t have that fully designed at the time you lay the money down, if you’re working with a Turner and are able to say we have this shift” in audience segments during a campaign, “we can actually shift the inventory around to align to that. It lowers the risk there,” Deming adds.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

MasterCard is one big brand with all the tools at its disposal. So how is it thinking about the right advertising tactics to deploy?

In this video interview, MasterCard’s media SVP Ben Jankowski tells Beet.TV the company sees opportunity in tapping media companies to create its messaging, whilst dynamic creative personalization is filled with burden.

“Media owners are in the business of creating content,” he says. “So, rather than just have us create our own message and then run it on our distribution network (we) utilize them to help us create content.

“So go work with sports networks to create really cool sports experiences, and they can produce messaging around it. You know, food companies, travel partners like TripAdvisor and guys like that. We’re getting into the rhythm of using them to help us create content.”

Branded content is an opportunity many major companies are now embracing. Another opportunity is to customize TV and video commercials for individual recipients.

So-called “dynamic creative personalization” is the art of assembling a video ad from multiple scene permutations, depending on the targeting criteria.

That’s a challenge for MasterCard, which has operated the “Priceless” campaign for years. And Jakowski sees a challenge in the chance.

“Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth … you created one piece of advertising and you ran a campaign around it,” he says.

“Now, if we’re really bringing the promise to full life, you have to create … multiple experiences.

“If we can’t figure out how to build the kind of scale that we need to do bring that to life, it just slows us down a little bit.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

This interview was conducted by Matt Spiegel, MD of MediaLink.

“The juggling act between scale and targetability is the fulcrum that we have to juggle,” says MasterCard’s media SVP Ben Jankowski, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We’re working on various ways to do that.”

Like other brands, Jankowski’s MasterCard, which has used its “Priceless” marketing campaign for many years now, deploys a wide range of strategies, and a complex array of partners for the jobs.

“Back in the day  … you had a very small group of partners that did everything. I had one agency that did all the media,” he adds.

“Now we have a programmatic partner, a couple of social partners, a DMP partner, we’re working through some different dynamic creative partners, people like that make it more complex but we feel like we get a wider range of contemporary expertise.”

Many brands hope that this chain gets shorter as consolidation happens in the ad-tech space, as testified by Adobe’s latest acquisition of TubeMogul.

Despite the current confusion, however, the possibilities are clear.

“It’s an exciting time,” Jankowski says. “It’s no longer science fiction, it’s real, it’s there – no-one’s figured it out yet, it’s a journey.”

This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.