“If somebody really doesn’t have a strong bias towards a brand and you decide to serve them what we would call active phase content, utility content, ultimately that’s wasted because they’re not predisposed to picking you anyway,” Acampora adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s a lot about customizing content to the platform and then starting to personalize the right kind of content to the individual or the segment.”
The Wavemaker agency takes its lead on clients’ creative needs by considering their existing partnerships and what’s best for them. “There are definitely instances where we’re creating new custom content, everything from what we call hero content to utility content.”
Wavemaker works with vendors like VidMob, a technology platform that connects marketers with a global network of expert editors, animators and motion graphics designers.
The agency’s Momentum consumer insights database is the largest of its kind, with some 400,000 “individual journeys” across a host of categories and countries. “That data is the starting point to help us segment and sub-segment audiences,” says Acampora.
He relates how Wavemaker worked with Ikea to promote its living room offerings. “For one segment, it might be way more about quality and design, so those are the things we drummed up about their living room message. Another might be way more about price and ease of putting it together, more utility content.”
MEC, which along with Maxus constituted the basis for the combined entity called Wavemaker, had handled Ikea’s media planning and buying for more than a decade. Last month, Wavemaker successfully defended the U.S. business, as ADWEEK reports.
To help clients navigate the maze of segments and creative iterations, “We try to make that as turnkey and bite-sized for them as possible. You want to limit it to a certain number of meaningful segments that will actually help to unlock growth for the brand,” says Acampora.
The proof point or benchmark Wavemaker has used “is roughly a one and a half times increase in ROI. Whether through attribution modeling or longer-term market mix modeling results, we see a significant increase in the overall ROI. That or if we go more toward a performance level we’ve seen roughly a two times decrease in the cost per acquisition when we start to customize and personalize messaging.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“The idea that you go somewhere, you decide you want something, you make that purchase and then you’re done is incorrect. Inherently it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t really exist in real life,” says Whitney Fishman Zember, Managing Partner, Innovation & Consumer Technology, Wavemaker US.
Wavemaker, the self-described media, content and technology agency is quite literally obsessed with deciphering the consumer purchase journey.
“You’re never not considering or thinking about something you may need or want to do, whether it’s a week from now a day from now a month from now. There’s always something top of mind and percolating,” Zember explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
Wavemaker’s approach is to “flip the quote unquote funnel upside down” and look at things through the purchase journey, according to Zember.
“There’s active and there’s passive stages, but the reality is that consumers are always in some state of the purchase journey.”
Whether it’s understanding, exploration, fact finding, making a purchase, reviewing a purchase, sharing a purchase, engaging in a purchase, “There’s something that’s always going on with a consumer with regards to brands.”
The agency also takes a different view of technological solutions in a sort of cart-after-the-horse scenario.
“I always say it has nothing to do with the technology,” Zember says. “If you start with the technology, you tend to look for reasons to apply it and it’s not always genuine use cases or genuine opportunities to impact the consumer positively.”
Starting with understanding who consumers are and where they are within the purchase journey should take precedence.
“What is their everyday experience and those opportunities to alleviate everyday frictions that people don’t even think can be alleviated that they don’t even realize are a problem?”
Choosing the right tools, technology and platforms comes after “you recognize inherently what those needs are and how you can provide for the consumer.”
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>“We’re moving away, I would argue, from media planning and saying ‘well, we actually need a content strategy,’” Gaines says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Media creativity involves how to represent the story of a brand in a way that’s appropriate, including during the priming stage, “when I am trying to create a position for my brand of favor, so that when somebody gets to the trigger point…there is a better predisposition for my brand relative to the things I need to say once they’re in that purchase journey cycle.”
The plethora of options for media consumption have pushed creativity in a way “that we’ve not really been able to think of it definitely a decade or so ago,” Gaines adds.
The concept of having “one big idea” and exposing it to lots of people is no longer operable, according to Gaines. “That only really works if you have brand new news,” he says. “Or you’ve got a new launch. Ninety-nine percent of the products we work with are trying to create greater share, growth in some shape or form. Revenue, share of market, consumption.”
Thus media creativity now involves generating a conversation that keeps people engaged all the way around their purchase journey. “So that what I do from a broadcast perspective and awareness perspective has an amplified effect on converting people to buy my product or buy my service,” says Gaines.
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>This is why Wavemaker’s “principal and defining obsession” is with the purchase journey, says Global CEO Tim Castree.
It’s not simply that chief marketing officers care about the purchase journey, Castree explains in this interview with Beet.TV. Research from IBM indicates that 83% of “progressive, transformational CEO’s organize themselves and their own thinking around consumers and how they make their way to products and brands on the path to purchase,” he says.
“It’s a very well understood context.”
The main reason why media, content and technology agency Wavemaker is “principally obsessed” with the purchase journey is that it lets the agency simplify “in a very complex world how we talk about our products, services and solutions. And how they work to benefit our customers and prospects.”
Asked about the biggest challenges facing CMO’s these days, Castree points to the broad area of fragmentation—less from an audience standpoint than a maze of choices in the digital era—and how best to calculate ROI. He believes there has been an excessive obsessiveness with ROI.
“People are over obsessed with ROI past the point of diminishing returns. So we’re optimizing increasingly to the lowest cost things, but we’re not looking at the full picture of marketing returns over time.”
While market mix modeling has long been a staple of CMO activity, modern times have brought a lot of focus on multi-touch attribution. But according to Castree, “A lot of those attribution models don’t take full account of the effects of marketing over time and the way they build performance over time.”
The bottom line is over optimizing “to the point of diminishing returns” to the bottom of the purchase funnel.
“I think there’s a lot of more fragmented decision making happening in the boardrooms as we think about things like programmatic or working with Google or on and on and on,” Castree says.
Wavemaker sees opportunity in bringing all the essentials together in a much more holistic and fully attributed approach to media and marketing, which leads full circle to understanding the consumer purchase journey not just as a concept.
“Understanding it econometrically is really the key for us to be able to give our clients the best advice about how to really reintegrate all of those pieces to drive a better outcome,” says Castree.
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>The new GroupM agency that launched in the U.S. last November debuted in Canada in January 2018, led by CEO Ann Stewart, formerly CEO of Maxus Canada. In this interview with Beet.TV, Bhopalsingh explains what clients are looking for in a modern agency and why being slightly behind the consumer trends curve has its advantages in the Great White North.
One of the key things in the creation of Wavemaker was to be able to identify and prioritize client needs. “Trading on media inventory is table stakes,” says Bhopalsingh, whose background includes stints at Aegis, OMD and MEC. “It’s expected of us but as consumers have evolved, as technology has evolved, clients’ needs of media agencies have evolved as well.”
Helping marketers navigate “the new consumer journey” and how it evolves requires covering many bases.
“That can extend from anything from paid media though to omni-channel experiences to how they collect and analyze data to impact their business,” Bhopalsingh adds.
What others call a purchase funnel Wavemaker sees as “momentum.” The rationale is that consumers will always be impacted by messages they see in-market, even if they’re not at the stage of actual purchase consideration of, say, an automobile.
“Even though I may not be in the market for a vehicle, I’m constantly seeing messages and making subconscious decisions about the brands that I like and align with.”
Eventually, that leads to a “trigger phase,” which could be having a child, starting a new job or something along those lines, according to Bhopalsingh. “You then move into different phases where you are evaluating and through to purchase.”
Canada is unique in the sense that a lot of the technologies on display at events like CES 2018 will take about a year and sometimes two or three to reach the market. “Things tend to roll out in Europe, Asia Pacific and the U.S. rather quickly. It gives us a bit of leeway and a runway to help prepare our clients.”
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>“It has to be more than a merger. If all we did was take two great brands and cultures and teams and mesh them together, we have failed,” says Amanda Richman, U.S. CEO of Wavemaker, the global media, content and technology agency unveiled one year ago.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Richman explains the impetus behind creating Wavemaker was “Let’s really reboot and redesign what a modern marketing agency is. With a single focus on the consumer journey and with that understanding how we can grow our clients’ revenues and opportunities in the marketplace.”
If Wavemaker sounds more like a consultancy with traditional and contemporary media chops, it’s not far off the mark. “The future of the agency business has definitely shifted to not just buying on impressions and cheapest CPM and fill out the pricing template,” Richman says, noting that there’s still a component of investment management that’s about driving efficiency.
“But as you think about our role today in the middle of the ecosystem, in having to not only understand and embrace and evolve our clients’ approach to data but also to their broader business issues.”
Richman, who was appointed U.S. CEO last August, sees an opportunity to “get a greater share” of clients’ problems along with providing a greater share of solutions to solve the challenges they face. This entails having a “laser focus on consumer understanding,” not only from a purchase journey lens but how are they adopting and adapting to the breadth of content and distribution opportunities.
“Our role is really sifting through all of that to find out what’s most meaningful and relevant to their consumers and what’s the brand relationship that can be established with those insights,” Richman says.
This involves not just another innovation play or understanding what the next platform is, the next channel, the next partner. “It’s all of that and so much more that really leads to a deeper understanding of their audience and how to move them to that next step forward.”
She’s looking forward to being able to “really hit reset in this robust environment, listen more to our clients and understand what are their needs when it comes to an agency today and build around that.”
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
]]>“Amanda is a fantastic choice to be our US leader,” Castree said in a news release. “She is universally liked and respected by her people, her clients and her partners in the marketplace and I’m delighted that she’s joining our global team.”
In the same release, Richman said the MEC offer “was just too good of an opportunity to pass up. With leading talent and tech in place, we have an opportunity to drive the new agency model forward faster, in partnership with our clients and the marketplace.”
As President of Investment at Starcom USA, Richman architected and led the agency’s cross-channel investment practice across clients including Airbnb, Bank of America, Kraft Heinz and Samsung. Previously, she served as President of Digital for Mediavest, building its digital team and capability. Prior to joining SMG, Richman held digital leadership roles at The Interpublic Group as Managing Director of their first digital agency, and at Time Warner leading client services for the company’s interactive television division.
The merger of MEC and Maxus takes effect in January 2018.
Beet.TV interviewed Richman earlier this year in Los Angeles at the 4A’s conference. We are republishing the interview with today’s news.
Despite great advances in digital and television audience targeting, platform-specific creative is a milestone the industry has yet to achieve. Until a silver bullet arrives, there’s some “simple stuff” that agencies and brands can do, according to Amanda Richman.
“One of them being, let’s bring together all the right parties that all have the same interest in success in the briefing process,” says the President of Investment & Activation at Starcom USA.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Richman discusses the need for creative—not just media—to drive effectiveness and the eternal value of human input in a technology laden industry.
Richman believes that digital audience targeting has been perfected and new network television audience optimization products are showing lots of promise toward the same end. Programmatic “is certainly elevating our game” with respect to brand safety, when it comes to controls and processes.
“But we still have not put sufficient time, resources and attention really to the space around creative messaging that is more bespoke to the audience,” she says.
The goal is to make a more meaningful impact with consumers and engaging with them not only in a campaign “but maybe across a longer period of time.”
As for the “simple stuff that we still need to crack,” it starts with having the right people at the table during the briefing process and then sticking to the brief. “Let’s map out what it is that we’re trying to achieve and understand where we actually can make that happens,” says Richman.
The process includes tapping the best practices of publishers that can help agencies understand, say, how to make the best six-second commercial format or the best experience on Snapchat. The end goal is to “really sequence and synchronize campaigns in a way that can make an impact over time,” Richman says.
“Humans and their ideas and their creativity lead the best work,” she adds. It’s something “you can’t replace with technology.”
]]>But one ad woman says that isn’t happening – now, according to the Maxus Global agency’s CEO Lindsay Pattison, it is time to finally unite the two hemispheres.
“Programmatic should be seen as an opportunity for creativity,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Data and creativity coming together has been talked about for a number of years, I don’t think we’ve really seen it.
“When we look at the winners at Cannes (Lions), we sometimes see examples of data being used to prove that creative work was effective, I don’t think we’ve seen brilliant work that has data at the heart of it. I hope we see more of it this year.”
What could data plus creativity equal? Take Pattison. She says programmatic algorithms should already be showing her ads for pink and red businesswear ahead of her company’s upcoming sojourn at Cannes. With the June festival just around the corner, many suitcases are about to be packed.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Maxus’s global CEO Lindsay Pattison observes that her agency is applying the same principles to technology solutions that it does to the traditional discipline of media buying, and it comes down to agnosticism.
“Bringing together a clear tech stack is a bit like putting together a brilliant agnostic — and I use that word really carefully — media plan,” she says in an interview with Beet.TV. In other words, an agency would never develop a media plan that was 100-percent Google or 100-percent Rupert Murdoch-owned properties, and it shouldn’t go all-in with a single technology vendor either.
“We’d never invest all our money in one area, so why would you invest all your tech money with one provider,” Pattison says. “We believe that for every single client, we should craft a bespoke tech stack — look at the ads server, look at the DSP, look at the DMP — and work out what’s going to work for that particular advertiser.”
Agencies are currently being challenged to prove they can consult on technology services just as ably as they can on media, and in one key respect, they have a leg up on consulting firms with technology offerings: insight into potential impacts on media spend.
“We’re adding on a layer that those other competitors can’t possibly add,” she says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“I think it’s becoming the norm now for clients, quite rightly, to expect flawless execution and great value for money and brilliant client service, and I think now that we’re seeing an increasing desire among the client fraternity to have a more rounded offer actually, which is about creativity every bit as much as it’s about data and technology,” says Steve Williams, Maxus’s CEO-Americas, in an interview with Beet.TV.
The value that clients are looking for their media agencies to deliver has shifted, in part, because “with more data, there are more ways to see clearly through to ROI,” Williams says, making it incumbent on media agencies “to ensure we’re testing and learning every day.”
In terms of emerging platforms that are getting him excited, Williams says he’s been fascinated by video platforms like Snapchat and how the latter is driving the trend toward vertical video.
“Snapchat would be an example of one of the leading-edge technology vendors out there that are getting us jazzed,” he says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>A Beet.TV panel discussion heard executives’ answers:
They were interviewed by Elaine Boxer, director of industry initiatives at the IAB, last month at the Beet.TV video summit about video advertising outside of the pre-roll. The event was presented by Teads.
]]>Some Maxus clients lean on branded video to change brand perception. “We have a client filming local activation and distributing it online, and distributing that emotional message coupled with an ad can work nicely to change brand perception,” Langan says. Other marketers use video for targeting because of the efficiency. “We have a tourism client that recently changed their target to a much younger one…and the branded content is more fun, irreverent, very true to the audience and targetable,” she explains. In addition, some form of interaction in the branded video can help.
When it comes to native content, marketers need to make sure the native ads deliver value in the form of entertainment or information. While native ads are on the rise, however, the programmatic opportunities in them are still small, she adds.
Langan was interviewed earlier this month at the Beet.TV video summit about video advertising outside of the pre-roll. The event was presented by Teads.
]]>They were interviewed by comScore co-counder and executive chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni, at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group. You can find more videos from the summit here.
]]>That includes amplifying and distributing the content, but also determining the best fit for the publisher, such as native content, branded video, or pre-rolls, as examples. Overall, short is still best for video; Bahler says two minutes or less is the ideal length for branded video.
Brands should bear in mind that reach isn’t always the KPI; engagement often is and that can be measured by views, shares clicks or other metrics. In general, marketers are working more closely with publishers to strategize the ideal format for branded content, the frequency of it, and the length per view.
Bahler was interviewed by Gian Fulgoni, co-counder and executive chairman emeritus of comScore at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group. You can find more videos from the summit here.
]]>“We’ve had an explosion of formats,” says Maxus’ north America chief strategy office Mark Egan
We’re seeing a lot of this roll in to a common unit which is represented in the stream format that you see in Facebook on mobile, a lot of what Yahoo is basing their new mobile product on – and is fixated around image-based messaging along with a little bit of text.
“That’s really exciting. Things are beginning to coalesce and make themselves more available, more digestible, more palatable for mobile-first consumers.”
We spoke with him as part of our series, “The Road to Cannes.”
]]>Numerous studies have been conducted pointing to the success of branded video that tap into specific emotions to drive sharing, according to this Harvard Business Review article. Emotions like curiosity, amazement and astonishment can help, the article said. Key to brand success is being authentic and transparent with the content and revealing the brand at the end of the video, Greene says. “That’s the most powerful way to reach the audience,” she says. Greene recently joined Maxus after working as a TV producer.
Greene was a speaker at the Beet.TV Content Marketing summit hosted by Mindshare and presented by Taboola. You can find more videos from that event here.
]]>He outlined areas of addressable buying that need more work including automation, bringing in best practices from the online environment, and reaching consumers across platforms via data. “By fourth quarter we will be working with agencies to make it easier to access addressable homes,” he says. In addition, there are platforms and systems in place, and automation is emerging too in addressable buying. “It’s all about reaching consumers with the right touchpoints and addressable lets us do that in a more credible, deliberate and positive way…Addressability will be in all mediums,” he adds.
Maxus is owned by WPP, which is making a play in addressable TV these days. Earlier this year, WPP launched Modi Media to focus on addressable ads and interactive TV. That unit is being helmed by Mike Bologna, a long-time industry addressable TV advocate.
For more insight into how addressable advertising will extend across media, check out this video interview.
]]>
Ruth Cartwright, the broadcast director at GroupM’s Maxus agency, told Beet.TV at the recent London Video Ad Strategy Summit her outfit is spending six to 10 percent of clients’ budgets on online video ads.
“Ninety percent of the clients in the UK are using their TV copy – a standard 30- to 40-second campaign, using that straight on to pre-roll. There is a lot of research that 15 seconds is the best time length on pre-roll. If we have the opportunity, we should be making more of the creative opportunities of VOD.
“We don’t want to have to go back to them and say they have to change certain time lengths or make the process harder.”
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