This article and accompanying  video highlight interviews from this series.

Sheri Bachstein, Watson Advertising and The Weather Company

“It’s time for us to evolve,” Sheri Bachstein, global head of Watson Advertising and The Weather Company, says in this highlight reel from Beet.TV. “It’s time for us to leap forward. We’ve been working with the same traditional identifiers and cookies for a long time — really, since programmatic came into play almost 10 years ago.”

She says artificial intelligence (AI) technology can help to address four key priorities for the advertising industry: first, reduce the dependence on “walled gardens” like internet search and social media companies. Second, avoid over-reliance on third-party cookies and device identifiers that are becoming less effective for audience tracking. Third, stop over-targeting the same consumers among different media channels. Finally, avoid paying fees for unnecessary tech services.

“There’s just a lot of change that needs to happen in the advertising industry,” she says. “It’s not going to happen if we keep doing the same things – if we keep using the same tech, and expecting different results, which we desperately need.”

Norman de Greve, CVS Health

CVS Health, the drugstore store chain with more than 9,900 locations throughout the U.S., uses IBM Watson’s AI to comb through data and help to target ads more appropriately to its customers — a key priority as the weather grew colder and flu season started.

“The speed of it and the ability of it to handle massive amounts of data and associations create opportunities that just haven’t been even on the radar before, ” Norman de Greve, chief marketing officer of CVS Health, says. “We used different data to find a highly accurate way to predicting if flu is going to be rising in a locale. We can get our advertising into that locale before flu happens.”

Allyson Witherspoon, Nissan Motor

Reaching consumers in a way that’s contextually relevant requires a data-driven strategy for Nissan Motor, which has different car models for different segments of the automotive market.

“We’re finally at a place where we’re taking that digital-first approach,” Allyson Witherspoon, U.S. chief marketing officer of Nissan Motor, says. “We’ve been talking about it for years, and based on what we’ve seen and how consumers are shopping and consuming media, it’s here.”

Consumer worries about privacy have led to calls for more regulation on data sharing, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that may become a model for a federal law.

“As we get to a much more privacy-focused environment, how do you continue to do that with the data that you have available?” she said.

Ben Jankowski, Mastercard

Using data for ad targeting makes investments in media “powerful and productive” as part of a broader effort to improve media measurement and the walled gardens.

“The work that the industry is trying to do around cross-media measurement has the potential for a huge change,” Ben Jankowski, senior vice president of global media at Mastercard, says. “We believe we’re making progress in breaking down the walled gardens that we’ve whined about for the last number of years, and trying to make progress on: how do I really understand the consumer journey across platforms?”

Stuart Pennant, Wavemaker

Predictive analytics to help make smarter decisions about media buying are a key advantage of AI technology.

“In terms of applications for machine learning in our industry, they’re very rich,” Stuart Pennant, executive director of data and product at Wavemaker US, says. “Understanding how much money or how much funds should be going into certain channels, let’s say search, and predicting what your response would be based on other media that’s running…This is very valuable to our clients.”

He also sees important applications in sentiment analysis that provides insights into consumer attitudes and online buzz that’s part of earned media.

Michael Lampert, Mondelez

A data-first approach underpins the strategy of Mondelez International, the packaged foods company whose brands include Oreo, Triscuits, Ritz Crackers and South Patch Kids candy.

“We need to move from the old legacy models we grew up with, where you had a TV budget that you allocated first, and then you started to figure out what could be done after that,” Michael Lampert, global marketing data lead at Mondelez International, says. “Because of the decisions of consumers and the way they’re consuming media — the omnichannel approach we all talk about — you have to look at where the consumers are.”

Randi Stipes, Watson Advertising and The Weather Company

IBM’s AI technology is capable of handling a variety of big data applications, including those for media and marketing. As an indication of AI’s power, it has been applied to cybersecurity to help ward off online attacks, and currently helps to mitigate 1 trillion security events a month.

“We think AI can help, and play a critical role. We’ve seen AI address foundational problems and foundational challenges in other industries,” Randi Stipes, chief marketing officer of Watson Advertising and Weather and the Developer Ecosystem Group at IBM, says. “If AI can help with these incredibly complex problems, surely it can play a vital role in the marketing and the media industry.”

You are watching “Break The Cycle: Making AdTech Better in 2021,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos, please visit this page.

• As a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, retailers and not Mondelēz own the data about its customers.
• The looming deprecation of digital identifiers like third-party cookies posed an additional problem.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mondelēz’s global marketing data lead Michael Lampert explains how the giant tackled the problems with a strategy dubbed “empathy at scale”.

Getting to know you

“We don’t own any of the data, we have to create partnerships and capture it ourselves,” Lampert says.

So Lampert’s company began a quest to acquire consumer data – from the consumers themselves.

“What I’m trying to do is ensure that all of the campaigns we have globally for Mondelez across all of our brands – from Oreo to Sour Patch Kids to Triscuits to Ritz Crackers – have a component of data capture and data activation added,” Lampert adds

“We’re trying to make sure that data has an equal seat at the table, just like comms planning or creative or media, so that everything we do seeks to acquire data and then activate data so that we can deliver the brand experiences that we want based on what consumers are telling us.”

Custom commerce for data

Case in point – OreoID. Last year, Mondelēz launched a personalized-commerce initiative, allowing customers to customize the colour of their Oreo biscuit creme color, or even add a photo, text and custom sprinkles.

Oreo lovers can build their own Oreo creations in time for the holidays through an online experience called OREOiD. https://t.co/U725Xdsd6K

— Ad Age (@adage) November 14, 2020

Even Lady Gaga got in on the act.

The packaging alone almost made me buy these. Well done, Marketing design team for Oreo and/or Lady Gaga. pic.twitter.com/X3EL7l88h1

— Sugar Dumplin (@racquibaby) March 26, 2021

But, for Lampert, it was all about capturing data on Oreo’s other, less-famous fans.

“From my point of view, it is a way for us to capture data from people who are raising their hand and engaging with the brand,” he says.

“The value of that data that we’re capturing can then lead to a long-term ROI positive value exchange that just builds off the relationship that the consumer has said they wanted with the brand.

“And now, because of the technology infrastructure and the partnerships that we’ve spent the last three years building, we now have the ability to activate across the data that we acquire.”

Cookies after cookies

It is, if you like, a way of advertising cookies, the snacks, without relying on cookies, the rudimentary ad-targeting capability.

But Lampert says the deprecation of third-party cookies is not a threat to Mondelēz. It prepared itself for that day a long time ago.

“We’re out of the third-party data business,” he says. “We were preparing for what Google decided to do many years ago. So the shift from third-party data to first party data is something that Mondelez was preparing for over the past three years.”

All of which is the more impressive since data about Mondelēz’s customers was traditionally the preserve of retailers.

“Consumers are telling us so much, and with what they’re giving us comes great responsibility, and the value exchange that they expect from us is very different from what they expected in the past,” Lampert adds.

“Consumers expect their engagement to be delivered a value message that really makes a difference to them.”

You are watching “Break the Cycle,” a leadership series brought to you by IBM Watson Advertising and Beet.TV. For more videos, please visit this page.

Given the changes in consumption, the industry needs a streamlined analytics approach to cross-channel behaviors, he says. “If we are going to acknowledge that people are going from Place A to Place B to Place C, we shouldn’t just look at what they do last…We need to make sure every impression counts to some degree,” Lampert says. That means marketers need to understand how consumers are moving across properties and what is making an impact at each point in the journey. He points to both Google’s and AOL’s purchases of attribution firms this spring as evidence of the importance in understanding the links in consumer behaviors across platforms.

Lampert recently moved from Digitas to MediaCom, and works with clients such as Dell and Volkswagen. Lampert was one of  the speakers at the Beet.TV video advertising summit on “outstream” advertising presented by Ebuzzing & Teads. Please find more videos from that event here.