In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, D’Angelo says he’s had “quite a number of interesting conversations about this and in preceding months where people will want to segment with a very hard line between performance marketing and brand marketing.

“And I think there’s a bit of an analogy also between digital marketing and analog marketing,” D’Angelo adds. “Those two things don’t exist in two kind of separate universes.”

In “very traditional advertising and marketing,” it was always about performance. “We were always trying to elicit a response from consumers.”

What’s different from half a century ago is that “the response was somewhat delayed and you didn’t have the immediate return path and ability for interactivity with consumers.”

D’Angelo believes that if marketers can maintain “that kind of holistic vision that there are points on the scale, I think that’s incredibly healthy.”

When it comes to campaign KPI’s, he notes that the vast proportion of P&G’s consumer packaged-goods sales still occur in brick-and-mortar stores.

“I think the key for us is to find ever concrete KPI’s that we can begin to measure consumer response. Whether that’s quality visits to our websites, appointments with beauty advisors in department stores or clicking to download a coupon. If we can continue to move along that spectrum I think we’re going to be in a good place.”

In a similar vein, D’Angelo talks about the “big bifurcation” between Game Of Thrones-like, extended long-form content “that plays out over a number of years” and very short video content on the other end of the scale.

“I think as advertisers, we should be inspired by that because the traditional workhorse of the thirty-second or the fifteen-second commercial I think is coming under scrutiny. I think we have to respond to that as advertisers and take note of the fact that consumers will want to be much more flexible in terms of how they’re consuming their video content and that we need to respond to that in kind.”

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page.

“We’ve been focusing on reinventing brand building for the past couple of years, a lot on media, a lot with agencies, a lot with innovation and now advertising,” P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard says in this interview at Cannes with Beet.TV.

“What we’re trying to do is merge the ad world with other creative worlds of film making, music, comedy, technology, journalism and the encouragement that I would provide is for others to join forces with these worlds.”

P&G LifeLab showcases the integration of technology into brands to create better consumer experiences. “It includes a partnership with Thrive and Arianna Huffington where we’ve embedded her micro steps for positive mental well being and emotional well being into our everyday products like Oral B,” says Pritchard.

Also within P&G LifeLab is the company’s SK-II FutureX Smart Store “so you can get the entire retail experience, which kind of replaces advertising to a large extent,” Pritchard adds.

A creative partnership with John Legend integrates multiple genres to explore various aspects of humanity and the human experience—including parenthood, modern masculinity, music and social justice—with P&G and its Pampers, Gillette and SK-II brands.

“We have a partnership with Saturday Morning premiering THE LOOK, a film that will help change your perspective on racial bias and it includes VR experiences from Verizon Media RYOT so you can immerse and have empathy at the same time.”

THE LOOK follows The Talk, which two years ago addressed racial bias and the Black Lives matter social movement, as Campaign reports.

“Finally, to make sure that we can get diversity and inclusion behind the camera, we’re working with Alma Har’el on re-launching Free the Bid into Free The Work, which will get women and underrepresented creators behind the camera,” Pritchard says.

“We love our existing agencies, and add on top of that creative partnerships with these different geniuses to be able to create a new abundance of creativity.”

You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes.  This series is presented by Teads.   For more videos form our series, visit this page.   Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019, right here.  

“This isn’t some fad, some flash in the pan,” Kawaja says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

While it’s still early days in the sector, “We are seeing companies in a variety of verticals, in a relatively short period of time with relatively little capital, garner significant market share, in some cases double digit-market share, away from category incumbents who have been building their brand equity for decades.”

In its D2C BRAND LUMAscape, the investment banking firm identifies more than 400 direct-to-consumer companies. The overwhelming majority are in clothing and apparel, followed by personal/family care and home/furnishings, then food/ drink and travel.

The rise of these companies “has major implications for the marketing world writ large, and our message to traditional marketers is don’t take this lying down,” Kawaja says. “Take a good hard look at what is causing the success of these startups because yes, while like any tech ecosystem, many of them will die but some will live and become major competitors.”

It comes down to a build-versus-buy scenario, but it can be very hard for legacy marketers to create a cool, new direct-to-consumer brand, according to Kawaja. His hypothetical example is a company selling a high-margin product through traditional means. “It’s like having a virus. The antibodies will come out and kill it. Good luck with your new division that’s going to circumvent that and disrupt that. That’s hard for a legacy company to do.”

Companies that have opted for buy versus build include Walmart and its acquisition of Jet.com for $3.3 billion. “Now they’re sort of infusing the culture that Mark Lore developed at Jet to drive Walmart’s broader ecommerce business.

Then there are Unilever and Dollar Shave Club and Procter & Gamble’s purchase of natural deodorant brand. These and other well-established companies “are capturing the growth, capturing the magic if you will, of these DTC brands. Not just for the business per se, but also to sort of infuse that thinking, that culture, that approach to the marketplace,” says Kawaja.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

AT&T used a local meteorologist/social influencer to help inform and people prepare for the hurricane, while providing journalists with free WiFi data cards afterward and using satellite television programming time to inform children sidelined by school shutdowns. P&G provided free mobile laundry services so that people had clean clothes to wear. Telemundo took to using a live Facebook feed to communicate news developments while hosting gatherings of friends and competitors alike in the industry.

Beet.TV’s efforts to galvanize support for Puerto Rico relief efforts continue on February 5 at Xandr/AT&T in Manhattan. Accompanied by advertising and media executives, the program will explore fund-raising and other charitable initiatives to further support the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.

“The media landscape was basically starting over again,” Andres Claudio, MD of Hearts & Science/Omnicom, Puerto Rico, said during a Beet Retreat session titled Puerto Rico Media Transformed by Hurricane Maria and moderated by former GroupM executive Phil Cowdell. “Imagine in New York City if you have no power, no signals, no cell phones, nothing. At least you have another state around you.”

While brands have a responsibility to understand consumer needs, “we have a social responsibility” as well, said Melissa Burgos, Marketing Director, USVI/Puerto Rico, AT&T Mobility. In the case of Maria, that responsibility started with the mobile service company helping people prepare for what lay ahead. AT&T leveraged the effort by using a local meteorologist who had a substantial social media following.

“What we did not expect, besides the fact of what happened after the hurricane, was that influencer became the top trending person within all possible influencers,” said Burgos.

“Basically we were in the dark ages” in terms of the ability to communicate through everyday media, with the exception of AM radio, said Freddie Hernandez, Site Leader, P&G Puerto Rico. When the company saw images of people washing their clothes in rivers and other waterways, P&G knew it had to do something.

“There’s a lot of health issues related to using non-purified water to clean your clothes,” said Hernandez. And while P&G had learned from such U.S. natural disasters as hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, it had no logistical way to bring its Tide Loads of Hope community service from the mainland. “We decided to create our own asset” in the form of a Coach bus transformed into a laundromat with 12 combo units of washing and drying machines that assisted more than 2,000 families.

“It’s incredible the reaction of the people,” said Hernandez. “You take for granted what you have. People were just crying when they would see the bus getting to a town and people would be wearing clean clothes for the first time in about three weeks.”

Telemundo had been broadcasting “all the way up to the storm” but was forced to shut down early on the first morning that Maria made landfall, according to Jose Cancela, President of Telemundo/NBCU Puerto Rico. “When we cranked back up we were really broadcasting to the States because there was no power here. Whatever cell phone probably you had you probably used it up,” said Cancela. Reporting news live via Facebook was “for four days how we were broadcasting. Radio became the media of the day for a number of months.”

From the onset of Maria, advertising and media competitors pulled together, initially using Telemundo as a base for meetings. Meanwhile, Cancela credited Nielsen for doing “a great job in bringing their panel back on track. Without that measurement, our currency was zero and it wasn’t until May of this year that they were finally able to bring it on track. But during the whole process, they really kept the broadcast community and the agency community very much informed in getting their panel back up.”

One exception to media outages was satellite TV for those fortunate to have a source of electricity, said Burgos. Since all schools were either shut down, destroyed or being used for community services, “we had children at home doing nothing, so there was a need to educate or entertain those children.”

So AT&T organized a tour of education professionals under the auspices of DirecTV and used programming time to provide useful content to kids in 10 different towns. “They were dying for information,” Burgos said.

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

“Marketers need to be part of the news environment because our consumers are engaged in the news environment,” P&G’s Chief Brand Officer says in this interview with Beet.TV. “They’re getting information about the world and about society and about trends, and therefore that’s an opportunity for them to get information about our products and our brands.”

Engaging with consumers beyond headlines and quick news stories can convey messaging that brief ads alongside such content cannot, according to Pritchard.

“We can create content that a journalist or a news company can do a better job of communicating. They can unpack it in maybe a more in depth way and create different views of that particular area that might be of interest to people.”

Last year, P&G partnered with Great Big Story on a 20-minute film titled Words Matter chronicling the venerable marketer’s journey to endorsing its acceptance of all things LGBTQ—a journey that took about 30 years. The film gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the internal process that ultimately produced its LGBTQ stance.

“That was a great story and it got a lot of interest from a lot of people,” Pritchard says. “It shined the light on our company in a way that we probably couldn’t have done ourselves. It was better and more credible for a news organization doing so.”

Those same capabilities are one reason why P&G has a partnership with Katie Couric Media. “She’s a great journalist. She’s told some of the best stories and done some of the best investigative journalism of anyone.”

Asked about the company’s brand safety guidelines for news content, Pritchard says the standards are the same across every piece of content or program in which P&G advertises “because you’re judged by the company you keep. If a line is crossed then we’ll pull our ads.”

He’d like to see a higher bar for expectations of news content in the areas of truth and transparency. Light needs to be shone on situations “in such a way that has multiple views as opposed to one skewed view.” In addition, Pritchard would prefer to see less focus on “those things that are sensational and focus on a range of things. Because the news has a huge impact on culture, on images, on portrayals of people and it’s really important that they get the right balance of both the positive and negative in their programming.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers.  The series is sponsored by CNN.  For more from the series, please visit this page.

While the People’s Choice Awards had long been owned and produced by Procter & Gamble, “We wanted to make it new young and fresh in E!’s voice. And we recognized that if we just did it in the linear space it really wouldn’t be new and fresh. So we had to use our partnerships to offer marketers even greater opportunities for their content they were doing with us,” Molen says.

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, she explains how NBCU custom builds programs for marketers that span various channels and platforms in “one cohesive plan.” At the awards ceremony, Ebay sponsored backstage views while Subaru had a commanding presence near the red carpet, as Variety reports. Metro by T-Mobile sponsored a “live look-in” of a music performance by Rita Ora that garnered 2.3 million social media views—an audience that was 90% composed of 18-24-year- olds, according to Molen.

“So it’s that kind of impact that we’re looking to help marketers make by distributing their content wherever the consumer is. On Telemundo, we see this all the time.”

NBCU has social partners that include Snap and Twitter, while its Social Synch offering makes it easy for brands to reach audiences across various social media platforms.

“We sell all of our content, even if it’s distributed across other people’s platforms,” Molen says. “We give our marketers one cohesive plan, making it very easy for them to buy.”

She draws a parallel between premium content and most of social media because “that’s where the conversation is around premium content and long-form content.” Her conversations at CES include improving the commercial experience so that consumers enjoy the content better “but they also engage more deeply around a marketer’s brand.”

Some advertisers are rediscovering the value of premium content, having seen “a lot of shiny objects” and had issues with certain platforms. “Working with NBCUniversal we can give them the things that they need in data, in distribution, in commercial innovation, in ROI and attribution.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“We Believe defies the convention that ‘boys will be boys,’ which is just an excuse for bad behavior,” P&G Chief Brand Officer said in an email to Beet.TV. “Although many examples exist where men are NOT at their best, we believe in the best in men and that by holding each other accountable, eliminating excuses for bad behavior and being a role model for a new generation we can deliver positive and lasting change.”

In this interview at CES 2019, Pritchard explains P&G’s work with the Association of National Advertisers’ CMO Growth Council in the area of society and sustainability. Among other goals, the company is focusing on racial equality “both in the advertising and content that we create, but also behind the camera so we can really create much greater degree of equality, diversity and inclusion throughout our entire creative supply chain.”

At the 2018 Cannes Lions, racial equality was the subject of an initiative by I.D.E.A. hosted by Spotify and P&G and sponsored by true[X]. This Beet.TV series from the event features a range of industry executives discussing how their companies are promoting racial diversity.

The purpose of We Believe is to inspire men to be part of the solution by moving from “inaction to being a role model for positive action for themselves, their loved ones, their peers, and for the next generation of men.” To support that effort, Gillette has launched thebestmencanbe.org, which includes a commitment to donate at least $1 million each year, for the next three years, to organizations with programs that help men of all ages achieve their personal “best,” starting with the Boys & Girls Club of America.

“I’m quite proud of this campaign and of the Gillette team, their partners at Grey, and film director Kim Gehrig (who we discovered through Free The Bid) for redefining what it means to be “The Best a Man Can Get,” Pritchard said in his email.

Pritchard’s desire is that all companies get involved in such movements as the ANA’s #SeeHer and its Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing.

“Because if everybody in the industry is involved it will truly change the way all people view the world.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“What we want to do is use technology to be able to make everyday life just a little bit better with our everyday household and personal care products,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual CES event.

“We studied Silicon Valley because what we knew we needed to do is we needed to move faster. We knew technology was disrupting everything,” he says. “That has spawned this portfolio of seed-stage experiments that are now starting to get into the marketplace.”

Among the innovations P&G has on display in Las Vegas is a Gillette razor blade that heats up in about a second, a smart Oral B toothbrush that visually guides one through optimal teeth cleaning and the Opté Precision Skincare system, as Advertising Age reports. Opté uses a digital camera to help determine the right amount of makeup to apply, which is about 5% “of the normal foundation,” Pritchard notes. “So your skin looks natural without all that makeup.”

P&G has access to some 275,000 startups, according to Pritchard, although it doesn’t work with all of them. The 130 startups are under the aegis of P&G Ventures.

At the retail level, P&G is showcasing the future of beauty retailing in the form of the SK-II Future X Smart Store, which launched in Tokyo in May 2018 and then in Shanghai and Singapore. It’s built around the concept of merging the physical and digital retail environment, beginning with a face scan in a booth that produces five key metrics for specific skin-care treatment, as CNET writes.

The overarching goal is to provide “irresistible superiority” over competitors.

With Olay Skin Advisors, users take a selfie and then technology “diagnoses your skin’s age versus your actual age, which is a frightening experience by the way,” says Pritchard.

He hopes P&G is setting examples for other marketers looking to operate as though they were startups as opposed to big, established legacy companies. At CES, he participated in a panel discussion with P&G Chief Research, Development and Innovation Officer Katy Fish, with whom Pritchard is “joined at the hip. It’s not a silo anymore between R&D and marketing. It is an integrated teamwork to create the experiences, and that’s what I suggest other people do.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

After Maria struck, “there was no electricity, there was no phone, there was no cable,” says Freddie Hernandez. “So we undusted the radio book and started using radio and outdoor as the main vehicles to really communicate with our consumers.”

At Beet Retreat 2018 in San Juan from Nov. 28-30, there will be a special session titled Lessons Learned: Hurricane Maria’s Impact on the Media Industry of Puerto Rico. Among other topics, Hernandez and other executives will discuss how in the absence of broadband advertisers turned to over-the-air broadcasting along with traditional media like outdoor, radio and print.

In this interview with Beet.TV conducted on the island, Hernandez explains how many Puerto Ricans have been cutting their cable cords and migrating to digital services like online shopping after their experiences in dealing with the devastation wrought by Maria.

“We were on the verge of re-launching our media investment, trying to look into digital and how things are changing with Millennials and how media is being consumed on the island,” Hernandez recalls. “It doesn’t necessarily follow how it is consumed in the States and other developed areas as we’re lagging a little bit behind. But we know that we need to get into the digital arena.”

Having to rely on traditional media “was a great exercise to really acknowledge that radio is still there. And we sometimes take it for granted and focus so much in digital, in mobile and other platforms that we forget about radio. It was very helpful for us,” Hernandez explains. “After that we have seen a quantum leap in terms of the media consumption by the consumers here in Puerto Rico.”

Lacking cable television and electricity, many residents migrated to phones and wireless communications where possible.

“So we’re seeing a lot of movement in that direction and you can see in the trends of people not renewing their cable system and looking at other options to consume media. So we are really on the verge of understanding what are the different venues that people are using to really change,” Hernandez says.

Before Maria there was one online grocery provider. “We have three now and they are expanding aggressively because consumers are ready to embrace what digital can bring to their lives and how they can do better by using this technology advances that we have available.”

P&G has customers who are doing 10% of their business “with online selling that was nonexistent a year ago. It’s a movement that is moving very fast and it’s here to stay. So we need to make sure that we get ahead of the curve and start looking at what are the options we can tackle…try to be the number one investing in technology, investing in venues that are going to help us continue leading the market in the categories that we compete in.”

Joining Hernandez to discuss media in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Maria will be Melissa Burgos, Marketing Director USVI/Puerto Rico, AT&T Mobility; Jose Cancela, President, Telemundo/NBCUniversal Puerto Rico; and Andres Claudio, General Manager, Hearts & Science, Puerto Rico. The session will be moderated by Phil Cowdell, President of Client Services at GroupM, who has been deeply involved with Puerto Rico relief and recovery.

The session will conclude with a briefing by Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, who will present data on the impact of the storm on the island’s youth and her organizations’ efforts to improve their future.

“Accountability in marketing to me means growth. Ultimately, I think marketing are the growth architects of the business. Every thing we do should inspire, lead and shape towards that growth vision,” Wakely adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Being a self-described “evidence-based marketer,” the company has made it “a bit of a life mission to identify what are the key levers of growth at Mars,” says Wakely, who expects her marketing teams to be “enterprise-wide leaders and to really influence the growth agenda at the board.”

Having consulted with Wharton and other institutions, Mars did a deep dive on what makes some 50 global product categories grow, along with the brands within them, according to Wakely, who spent several years at Procter & Gamble before joining Mars in 2001.

“And from that we’ve tried to distill a very clear philosophy of growth, which of course advertising plays a big part in, but it’s certainly not the only lever for growth,” Wakely explains.

The company codified its resulting “Laws of Growth” philosophy into an operating model that identifies “all the key levers we think that grow categories, that grow our brands, and our whole business now cross-functionally is geared toward driving into that operating model for growth.”

Asked about established brands versus startups, Wakely dismisses provocative headlines proclaiming, among other things, the death of big brands or the demise of mass advertising.

“The question we asked ourselves as an evidence-based marketing company is what is real, changing dynamics in the marketplace that we need to address and what is hashtag fake news,” she says.

Having analyzed its 20 top markets and 35 categories, Mars found on average that about 50% of category growth is being driven still by big-scale brands and the other 50% by small, more disruptive players.

“That is a dynamic we need to respond to. But what I would say is that big brands are certainly not dead. There are big brands that are winning and there are big brands that are losing.

“To win, we really have to harness what we know drives growth. Mass penetration, mass reach, mass distribution. But we also have to be very agile and innovative to respond to the new digital age.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

As advertisers increasingly seek better audience targeting and efficiency, “The marketplace has kind of come our way,” says the company’s President of Advertising Sales, Jim Tricarico.

Less than five years ago, Cadent was “a DR product,” Tricarico explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan. “It was a way for people to get inexpensive GRP’s. But we knew that in order to evolve, we had to create a network-like solution.”

That solution is used by a host of premium brands, including Amazon, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal and Procter & Gamble.

Tricarico says Cadent can access network inventory for advertisers at a 30% to 50% discount from direct-network buys. “We’re never out there saying we’re better than network, we’re instead of network. We really just want to be a complement to network and solve some of those problems that are going on in the marketplace.”

Cadent has access to inventory on all networks and such major sporting events as the Olympics and NCAA tournaments.

A TV veteran whose background includes stints at MTV Networks, Viacom and Screenvision, Tricarico smiles while noting that some people talk about data as though it never existed before. “Every plan has data behind it. The question now is how deep is that data that they’re using,” he says.

Noting that Cadent eschews “walled gardens,” Tricarico says the company does what data tells it to do.

“Whereas when you go to a network group, they actually optimize to their portfolio because they don’t have access to every network. We buy directly against the data and optimize to the data and not to the portfolio.”

In addition to its own data, Cadent has partnerships with companies like 605, which has access to Charter Communications’ 10 million set-top boxes, and with Adobe and Videology. Cadent can cross-reference advertisers’ data with that of 605, “or we become more of an execution arm where we work with the Adobes and the Videologys of the world to execute on the fact that they’ve already put data over their plans and they use us as the inventory source.”

To broaden its footprint on the local broadcast side, Cadent has spent the past year hiring an internal buying group and now has relationships with more than 600 local TV stations, according to Tricarico.

“People are so desperate to find efficient GRP’s that even in cable there’s not enough reach to find them all. What’s growing so much right now is both news and syndication on the broadcast side.”

This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.

“There’s a lot of negative narrative out there about what’s going wrong for agencies,” says Marla Kaplowitz, President and CEO of the 4A’s, long known as the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

But, Kaplowitz adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the organization’s annual Accelerate conference, “What about the client of the future? What does that look like?”

She cites comments made at the conference by Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun, who shared a stage with Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard and Grey New York CEO Debby Reiner to discuss client-agency relations.

“One of the things I was happy to hear Arthur Sadoun talk about today is there’s so much focus on the agency of the future, which we think of more as the agency of today and tomorrow because agencies are constantly evolving and have that entrepreneurial spirit,” Kaplowitz says.

As Campaign reports, Sadoun questioned the role marketers need to play when he noted, “Every client is talking about growth, but there’s no growth unless you have strong partners.”

Says Kaplowitz, “What is the responsibility of marketers to really understand the intersection of data and creativity and technology and connecting with consumers and how you deliver that in those brand experiences?”

On the personnel front, the 4A’s has for nearly 50 years offered a multicultural intern program for its agency members. “But what’s clear is that we haven’t focused enough on the inclusion side. And that’s where you’re going to start to see some change. It’s really about action and no more talk. There’s enough talk at this point.”

To this end, the 4A’s recently launched the Enlightened Workplace Certification Program aimed at creating safe and productive work environments that create cultures of inclusion, equity, creative dialogue and social transformation. “The intent is to support agencies in eliminating discrimination, harassment, bullying, intimidation and retaliation,” according to a release announcing the program.

The 4A’s is working with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), a nonprofit that facilitates the development of standards by accrediting the procedures of standards-developing organizations.

In addition, the 4A’s is a supporter of the TIME’S UP movement, “which we believe is a fantastic way to really have the dialogue but also really push forward in a very positive way and in a very inclusive way,” says Kaplowitz.

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.

Over the course of many months, brands like Procter & Gamble “have really asked that we as an industry start being more introspective about what we’re actually providing,” Feigenson adds in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “And I think what we’re seeing as a result of that is a group of companies that are spending more time making sure that their products are actually what they say they are.”

What are the end results? “That’s healthy for everybody. It’s going to grow digital, it’s going to grow use of data,” says Feigenson.

He observes that there are different uses for data—citing the top and bottom of the funnel—but that the industry has become “so obsessed with the tactics of media” that good brand strategy may have taken a back seat.

“Bad brand strategy won’t yield a result, good strategy will,” Feigenson says.

We’ve moved to a world where “we look at individual campaigns and those individual campaigns are used as a proxy for other strategies on or off. That translates into data as well.”

While large, deterministic datasets may be great for targeting, they’re not necessarily representative to a whole market analysis, according to Feigenson. He believes that more companies that have first-party data or rent large, third-party datasets “are going to calibrate that against panels to get a very holistic view of their consumer.”

Until recently, Simmons data were used to help plan media in a linear capacity. “We’re excited that after 60 years we finally realized that programmatic and we’ve on-boarded our segments through Acxiom and LiveRamp to be used in programmatic exchanges.”

The company’s game plan encompasses better technology plus “bigger and faster data.” The goal at the end of the day “is to get anybody to a game changing consumer insight about an audience quicker than they can get a cup of Starbucks coffee.”

This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The IAB announced this week that Schiller is the newly elected Chairman of the IAB Board of Directors. He has served in that position since October 2017 due to board executive changes, according to an IAB news release.

As was the case at last year’s event, when Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard and other brands were outspoken about the shortcomings of the digital ecosystem, this year that role was filled largely Unilever’s Keith Weed. Together they “set the stage at the high level of what the bigger, more established companies are thinking,” Schiller, who is EVP, GM, Marketing, Advertising & Client Partnerships, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Meanwhile, smaller companies are always emerging on the landscape with their own hopes and needs. “The industry needs to work with this disparate group of companies,” he adds.

As regards the ecosystem, media sellers need to keep finding new ways to make dealing with them as smooth as possible. “We have to be more thoughtful in how we transact and we have to be focused on bringing results whatever they are to our clients,” says Schiller.

Sponsored content and the creation of branded content is becoming increasingly important “as so much of what we do in the media business is algorithmed or commoditized.” How advertisers find their way into content is critical for two reasons: It can enhance the consumer experience and “The money that comes from sponsorships is what ultimately fuels in large part great content,” Schiller says.

Asked about NBCU’s ongoing coverage of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, he mentions its Total Audience Delivery solution and how the event has not only always been a “hotbed of change” but also “a great example of what’s going to happen.” The Olympics were the first place that “digital really came together with television.” Now the natural emphasis is measuring all viewers on all possible devices.

“From a programming and marketing perspective, you’re seeing us try everything with every platform that makes sense.”

Apart from the IAB, more discussion and education are needed to help everyone find their way forward, unlike the pre-digital advertising and media world.

“In the old days it was very clear. The brands did what they did, the agencies did what they did and the consumers ingested it. Today everyone does everything,” says Schiller.

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

“I think it’s going to have the effect of dramatically reducing hidden fees, hopefully eliminating them, and increasing the amount of spend from marketers that gets all the way to publishers,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Leadership Meeting of the Internet Advertising Bureau. “Trust means we have to provide transparency.”

Steps taken by AppNexus include publicly disclosing its “take rate” for its supply-side business, which it says is “by far the lowest in the industry.” It’s extending its transparency on take rates all the way through to the brand.

“So any brand who says ‘where did my money go through my DSP to AppNexus,’ we’ll tell you exactly how much the publisher made,” O’Kelley says.

Partners in this effort include Adobe and third-party auditor Amino Payments.

O’Kelley says the AppNexus DSP, called AppNexus Programmable Platform, is fully transparent for every fee.

“We should see publishers making more money, marketers seeing better outcomes and a dramatic reduction in the inefficient intermediaries that we’ve seen in this space for two decades now.”

He traces the path to opaque digital practices in part to the shift to audience buying in the last decade or so. Brands didn’t seem to care where their ads appeared as long as they were told they were targeting the right people.

That indifference has given way to extreme concern by brands large and small, most notably Procter & Gamble and Unilever, whose Chief Marketing Officer, Keith Weed, used the occasion of the IAB gathering to issue a public threat to pull spending from digital platforms.

“Imagine you’re a marketer. You think you’re buying relevant data but it turns out that’s fraud. Really what you’re spending this on is terrible for your brand and having no known outcome.” O’Kelley says.

In the not-to-distant future, he foresees brands reducing the breadth of inventory they’ll buy, working only with quality publishers “maybe one hop away. But this multiple hops isn’t going to work.” They will also reduce their purchases of third-party data “unless it comes directly from a source” and there will be “a lot fewer intermediaries in the space. I think it’s going to be amazing.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

Other industry semantics need to be updated as well, IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg says in this interview with Beet.TV. The Annual Leadership Meeting takes place Feb. 11-13 at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, Palm Desert, CA.

“The time has come to get rid of this notion of sell-side and buy-side. It is deficient and it actually harms everybody because it makes it seem as if brands and their partner organizations are in kind of commander service relationships,” says Rothenberg.

IAB research shows that in the Direct Brand Economy, buyers and sellers come together in “vital integrated supply chain relationships that the brands cannot live without and nor obviously can publishers and others live without.” Thus buy-side, sell-side linguistics constitutes “awful language and ought to be banished for all time.”

The same research casts new light on the notion of “brand safety” in digital advertising environments, according to Rothenberg. Among other things, the research proves it has nothing to do with that “soft thing” called brand reputation but everything to do with unfettered access to first-party data.

Data fuels every function of the brand enterprise, from new-product development to figuring out what to charge individual customers. It’s all done increasingly in real time with decisions made on feedback loops.

“Companies need continuous access to first-party data, which means that it requires the complete trust of its consumer base. No trust equals no data equals no company,” Rothenberg says.

Therefore, brand safety isn’t optional. “It is essential to the future of a brand.”

The IAB has been a major proponent of the need for greater transparency on digital advertising platforms. Rothenberg says 2017 was probably the best year ever in terms of the progress that has been achieved. He points to comments by Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, in an interview with Digiday in which Pritchard says the drive for a more transparent digital ecosystem is “80 percent complete.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

In this interview with Beet.TV, IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg explains why incumbent brands that have been dominant for more than a century need to be more directly connected with their customers and the role publishers play in that interaction. The Annual Leadership Meeting takes place Feb. 11-13 at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, Palm Desert, CA.

“The center of gravity is changing,” says Rothenberg.

Brands have traditionally created value by erecting high barriers to entry for competitors and by relying on capital-intensive, owned-and-operated supply chains. Today’s direct brands create value with low barriers, are capital flexible and avail themselves of leased or rented supply chains.

Moreover, indirect brands extract value “not through this very cumbersome, indirect process of working through multiple third parties. Advertising agencies, publishers and retailers. But they extract value increasingly through the direct relationship between the company and the consumer,” says Rothenberg.

Direct-connections with consumers go far beyond being able to interact with them on, say, Twitter, according to Rothenberg. Direct connections generate reams of first-party data.

“And at a modest degree of scale, that first-party data fuels every other function of the enterprise. Product development, service development, customer value analysis, pricing, pricing mechanics. These are the things that modern companies need to compete.”

Not all legacy marketers are lagging on this competition curve. Rothenberg cites Nike as “a perfect example” with its projected 2X increase in direct-to-consumer revenue “in just the next three years.” Procter & Gamble is behind in this regard but is actively “orienting some of their strategy in this direction,” he adds.

Asked about the role of publishers in the modern marketing mix, Rothenberg points to the necessity to “step outside the impressions-based economy” and work to create direct relationships.

“Clearly, publishers always have and will continue to play a role in helping all brands acquire new customers. It’s just happening in many different ways than it used to happen before.”

One reason why popular brands like Madison Reed in hair coloring and Warby Parker in eyeglasses need content marketing to differentiate themselves is that they cannot simply blast out billions of ad impressions.

“Because these companies are drawing promiscuously from the same set of available supply chain resources, they are as subject to and potentially more subject to commoditization perceptions as offline companies,” Rothenberg says. “That makes it very difficult for them to differentiate on the basis of price or function. It needs to be on lifestyle, psychographics and demographics.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

“We preplanned out a lot of how we wanted the social to work around it and how we would activate social channels and key opinion leaders to do a really smart push full strategy,” says Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Procter & Gamble media agency Hearts & Science. “It worked out really well.”

Well enough that ADWEEK dubbed the four Tide spots collectively as “the runaway winner” ahead of efforts for Amazon, Doritos/Mountain Dew, Tourism Australia and the NFL’s own campaign.

Hagedorn says the strategy for the Super Bowl work, ads for which were produced by Saatchi & Saatchi, started with the client. The idea was to cast actor David Harbour, known to Netflix viewers as scruffy sheriff Jim Hopper in “Stranger Things,” as a kind of narrator in sparkling clean clothes who talks to viewers about commercials they are seeing.

Tide was able to co-opt its ads “into other Super Bowl ads to make them Tide ads, and they ultimately became P&G ads,” Hagedorn explains in this Beet.TV interview following his speech at the 4A’s Data Summit.

Tide had purchased a 45-second spot in the first quarter to set up the narrative and one 15-second ad in each succeeding quarter. “The interesting thing about marketing now is you can create kind of a multidimensional solution. You can plan for the social ramp up and the social ramp down,” Hagedorn says.

Last year, Bradshaw appeared in a Tide spot with a fake stain on his shirt during what appeared to be a live broadcast but was shot weeks earlier. “This year that was all a tease” to make fans believe that “were going to do a repeat of last year’s Super Bowl stunt.”

In 2015, Hearts & Science won the P&G media account in North America, setting the stage for the agency’s launch the next year. It has since won business from AT&T, “quietly started working on QuickBooks with TBWA,” won the Barclays account with OMD in the U.K. and had a hand in the New York Times Golden Globes “He Said, She Said” work with Droga5.

Hagedorn credits four tenets—agility, empowerment, intelligent scale and open standards—for the agency’s “hot and heavy” new business winning streak. “We’re hoping to wrap a lot of the pitches up that we’ve been working on and carry it through into Q2, but then I look forward to slowing us down a little bit and trying to ingest it and bring it all in.”

This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, for the media industry “It’s going backwards, 25 years ago. You have to take your car and visit your clients, you have to do radio, probably billboards and basics to communicate,” says Andres Claudio, GM of Omnicom’s Hearts & Science agency on the island. “Life is before Maria and after Maria.”

Freddie Hernandez, who runs P&G’s operations in Puerto Rico, is already looking beyond relief to reconstruction—rebuilding infrastructure while convincing companies to invest there for the future. “We will recover from this. We will impact the communities and we will get to a better position,” he says.

Beet.TV interviewed Claudio at this week’s Festival of Media/LATAM conference, where the STAND WITH PUERTO RICO: The Industry Steps Up initiative was launched. His interview is followed by a segment with Hernandez that was produced by P&G  in Puerto Rico where one of the company’s mobile Ace detergent units was operating.

“This is a time that companies have to show their commitment to the island and the community with their brands,” says Claudio. “Besides advertising, this is the perfect moment for companies to get connected to the people with their realities and needs.”

On Puerto Rico, brands don’t have to look very far to identify with causes and be “relevant” to the situation, according to Claudio. “Once the brand understands there is a need in the market, you can relate your brand to that particular need. It gets a connection that people will love and people will acknowledge that you are doing something right for them.”

After thanking the organizers of the Festival of Media/LATAM for hosting and supporting the STAND WITH PUERTO RICO initiative, Hernandez explained that the relief mode is still under way and that sometimes, the basic necessities aren’t so obvious.

“We take things for granted. We never thought that just having your laundry done was so important to people. It’s overwhelming to see how people are reacting to this effort,” says Hernandez.

As relief progresses to recovery, reconstruction will follow, posing more challenges that will require widespread participation and support. “The donations that we’re getting and the support that we’re getting is fantastic but it’s not going to last a lot,” Hernandez explains. “We need companies to look at Puerto Rico once again as a place to invest, as a place to bring their best talent to grow our economy, to leverage the talent that we have on this beautiful island, to help us and together bring this island to the future.”

Claudio is realistic and optimistic looking forward. “It’s not easy but you can do it and make it happen. This is a time that companies have to show the commitment to the island and the community with their brands,” he says.

Stand With Puerto, The Industry Steps Up 

This video reports on the pressing issues facing Puerto Rico and the organizations that are having an impact. It is part of a media industry initiative titled Stand With Puerto Rico. It is organized by Beet.TV and Omnicom Media Group along with founding partners AT&T AdWorks and Teads. Please find additional videos from the series here. The series was recorded in Miami at the Festival of Media/LATAM on October 30.

“Brands belong to society and are part of society,” Julian Porras says following the launch of STAND WITH PUERTO RICO, an new initiative to generate awareness and provide support to storm victims.

“The first priority always is to make sure that our people are doing okay and their families are doing okay,” Porras says of the disasters’ aftermath in this interview with Beet.TV. “Our clients and other partners of the community and industry. Luckily no one was harmed, but certainly the impact of those natural disasters have slowed down business.”

In Puerto Rico, six weeks after Hurricane Maria, “it’s just simply been a hardship not only for business but just day to day getting to your routine, getting to your family, getting to your friends. It’s just been tough going.”

Asked what the advertising and media community and its clients should be doing to help storm victims, Porras cites creating awareness and helping to keep the devastating living conditions in Puerto Rico front and center.

“In the news cycle that we live in, news comes and goes very fast and we forget about things. We want to make sure that folks are aware of what’s happening and how the industry can contribute both on the media side, on the agency side and on the client side.”

Launched at this week’s Festival of Media/LATAM conference, STAND WITH PUERTO RICO is joint effort by Omnicom Media Group and Beet.TV, with AT&T AdWorks and Teads as Founding Sponsors. Its goals are:

• Brief the industry on the immediate and long-term needs of the island

• Match media, creative agencies and marketers with NGOs

• Brainstorm creative solutions using technology, social media and traditional media

• Enlist volunteers to accompany relief groups to Puerto Rico

• Build key partnerships to make this effort ongoing

“It’s not something that’s kind of the flavor of the month,” Porras says of brand marketers stepping up to help provide humanitarian aid. “It’s what companies stand for and they simply just go ahead and do it. They do the right thing for the community, for their employees and for the markets and communities where they make business.”

Stand With Puerto, The Industry Steps Up 

“Make an impact, make peoples’ lives better, build businesses, create jobs, build brand equity. I think that’s really positive,” Stengel says at the annual gathering of the Association of National Advertisers.

Spoken like a true educator, befitting Stengel’s status as Senior Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, which he joined this summer to help run the Kellogg Markets and Customers Initiative. In addition to Masters of Marketing, he still keeps tabs on events like Advertising Week in New York and is well versed with marketers’ concerns about brand safety within the digital media ecosystem.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Stengel, who runs the consultancy Jim Stengel Co., talks about the importance of giving creatives a free rein to collaborate with marketers so that each brand can activate its unique purpose.

“I think the creative community still brings so much value to companies,” Stengel says. “The ones that are getting the most value from the creative community are the ones that are sharing their business challenges, sharing their opportunities, sharing their business goals and giving them simple, inspiring briefs.”

A good example would be Apple’s Think Different campaign in the late 1990’s because it derived from a simple brief, according to Stengel.

“Make us relevant again. That’s what Steve Jobs said.”

Whether it’s computers or Cadillac’s desire to build “a modern luxury brand,” the creative minds involved should benefit from shared thinking and then be free to follow their instincts.

“You don’t want to put creative people into a disciplined silo,” Stengel says. “Get really good people, get a sense of team, give them your purpose your business challenge and then let the ideas fly.”

He’s happy to hear discussions about purpose, ambition, meaning and ideals as brands try to stay relevant in a sea of consumer choices.

“Purpose is here to stay,” Stengel says.

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.

“It forced us to raise the bar even higher on ad creativity,” says P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard.

As a result, the company is moving deeper into one-to-one marketing and “the next generation of brand building,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

With greater visibility into viewability and verification, P&G found that the average ad was being viewed in some social media feeds for less than two seconds. But the company was serving 30-second ads.

“So we said, ‘we need to make sure these ads work in two seconds.’”

P&G also was serving digital ads with too much frequency, “so we needed to be able to deal with that through things like programmatic.”

Now, innovation and consumer targeting have taken center stage for the packaged-goods giant. “We want to really find the next generation of ads and it’s moving us very quickly into mass one-to-one marketing,” says Pritchard.

As examples he cites work for Pampers, along with the futuristic Oral-B Genius electric toothbrush and the Olay Skin Advisor platform. These are not campaigns slated for mass, mixed audiences.

“Because we have consumer ID data, now we’re able to target specifically,” says Pritchard. “We’re going to give you something that’s useful to you when you need it and where you need it and not serve something to you when you don’t.”

Asked about targeting the right consumers across various digital platforms, Pritchard says “it remains to be seen” whether it can be accomplished. For now, platform-by-platform targeting capabilities are very effective.

“But at minimum, we’re able to do it within a platform like an Alibaba in China, which allows us to be able to use their consumer ID data and then be able to serve somebody an ad when they have a higher propensity to buy. The same thing is happening in Amazon.”

Pritchard and P&G have become standard bearers in the push for gender equality. Besides being the right thing to do, it’s good for everyone’s business objectives.

“With equality comes better society, but it also drives better growth because with economic equality it actually injects money and purchasing power into the market,” Pritchard says. “That’s good for everybody because when markets grow everybody grows.”

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.

That $100 million “was just part of that effort where what we found is there was not enough assurance that our ads weren’t going to show up in the wrong place. We did not want our ads showing up in anything associated with violence, bigotry or hate,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

“Since we couldn’t be assured of that, we pulled the money.”

Two reasons why P&G has been so adamant about cleaning up digital media stems from its inherent waste and fraud, according to Pritchard.

“Part of that is the maturity of the ecosystem. Now that it’s 200 billion dollars it was time to make sure that it’s cleaned up,” he says.

P&G teamed up with, among others, the ANA and the Media Ratings Council to focus on digital ad viewability, verification of ad delivery, anti-fraud and brand safety.

The company cut some of its estimated $2.4 billion in annual ad spending to reduce digital ad waste and “invest in doing what really matters, which is better advertising and better innovation,” Pritchard says. “It was kind of a pretty big move, but it paid out because we still grew, we still delivered our objectives.”

In addition to digital media, P&G also cited cuts to agency and production spending that lead to a quarter-over-quarter profit margin boost of nearly one percent in the fourth quarter, as ADWEEK reports.

P&G has four main expectations for its partners in digital advertising, according to Pritchard: delivering data show ad viewability, third-party verification of audience reach, assurance that P&G ads aren’t being served to bots and, finally, “make sure they can assure us that our ads are going to show up where we want to place them, not in terrorist videos.”

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.

“It’s not about writing a check and being part of something,” says Chris Weil, Chairman and CEO of brand marketing agency Momentum Worldwide. “You’re borrowing the equity of a team, a celebrity, a league and you’re borrowing their audience and you’re trying to connect with them.”

In the sports sponsorship world, whether it’s American Express, United Airlines, Coca-Cola, SAP or Verizon, “A sponsorship is a borrowed equity programming,” Weil says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

So if one looks at what brands are trying to do with content, the learnings from many years of sponsorship marketing come to the fore. It’s about how to create content “that is not just push messaging but is about how you add utility and value to the consumer’s life and to their experience,” Weil says.

In other words, successfully sponsoring content always begins with the audience and the value exchange, but the most important part is the desired connection. “Everybody talks about targeting, targeting, targeting and how we’re going to deliver the specific message at the specific moment,” says Weill. “The reality is that more than targeting it’s the creative. How are you actually going to deliver a message that somebody cares about at a given time.”

Asked about measuring ROI on sponsored content, Weil eschews things like viewability and click-through rates. “Those are just distractions to what the real game is, which is to drive growth for our clients,” Weil adds, citing Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard’s comments at Transformation about the importance of P&G’s agency partners.

When it comes to leveraging influencer audiences online, Weil says that in order to guarantee earned reach there has to be a buy involved. “Things don’t go viral just simply to go viral. You have to look at how you use influencer audiences to help expand and amplify your message. And that is a value exchange that typically is money,” Weil says.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“It’s not that easy,” Claudio says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Not all the data that is needed is available in all markets.”

Claudio was among the several dozen advertising and media executives who convened here for the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat. Noting that Hearts & Science is “not a media agency anymore,” he describes the company’s mission as it staffs up around the world to service clients like Procter & Gamble and AT&T.

“Work on data to identify resources that can give us enough information about consumer behavior. Therefore, we could deliver better resources to our clients,” Claudio says.

P&G is its biggest client in North America, Canada, the United States and Puerto Rico. Then there is AT&T in the United States and Mexico. In short, the agency grew from zero to about $5 billion in billings in seven months, as ADWEEK reports.

“We’re growing. We’re already over 800 employees around the globe,” with offices in such far-flung locations as Dubai, London, Japan and China. “Our clients are telling us they want to deliver better messages to better audiences in a way that they can measure the resource.”

But simply being big and thus far successful doesn’t overcome all challenges, particularly with regard to data availability. “In Puerto Rico, we don’t have all the resources that we have in the States,” says Claudio. “In Mexico we have other challenges as well.”

He chooses to look on the positive side.

“That’s a good challenge for anyone in the market because it’s no longer a media buy or digital buy. It’s how you deliver the right message in the right platform at the right time to the right target,” Claudio says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.