“Media has become more complicated as we’ve seen more fragmentation, the shift to digital and the shift to mobile media consumption,” Ron Amram, senior director of global media at Mars, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The ROIs and effectiveness of media are more volatile than anything that we’ve seen.”
Stricter privacy laws and the eroding support for tracking cookies in web browsers add to the challenges in measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns. In some cases, market mix modeling (MMM) and 360-degree have complemented strategies to improve predictions of results.
“We’ve shifted to modeling to do what we may have outsourced or used cookie data for in the past to fill the gap,” Amram said.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze vast troves of data and help with decision-making are gaining prominence amid the more complex media market. The technology can provide insights to optimize ad creative and media investments as consumer habits change.
“What we’re finding is there’s not one model. We’re laying models on top of models to try and find the best course forward,” Amram said. “You used to hear about things like weather prediction – now, we’re applying that same science to marketing.”
As more consumers resume their former habits of commuting to work, going to restaurants or traveling by plane, out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is showing signs of bouncing back. Mars is weighing the opportunities to raise visibility in those channels, depending on the signals it receives from consumers.
“If you can optimize quickly, and digital out-of-home placement allows you to do that, then you’ll start to see us using it more,” Amram said.
Mars also is looking at the opportunities in addressable advertising to personalize its messaging, whether it’s promoting its chocolate brands like M&M’s or pet-food products like Iams.
“It depends on the category, it depends on the product, and the amount of personalization and customization,” Amram said. “For us, addressable is a broad category of different content and for different media types.”
You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“The upfront as a whole is changing. More and more consumption is pivoting away from traditional television,” Ron Amram, senior director of global media at Mars, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s happening slowly, but it’s been more drastic, especially over the last calendar year during COVID.”
Mars is video-centric in its communications strategies for its top brands, he said, which isn’t going to change as the company seeks to reach a mass audience among a variety of linear and digital channels.
“In the world of COVID, we do need a bit more flexibility,” Amram said. “The upfront is important. I still think you’re going to see future brands commit to long-term investment for key properties, sponsorship-like elements and the highest quality inventory. But the upfront as a whole is probably going to diminish in its relative importance, especially during tricky, recession-like times that we’re facing.”
Mars is broadening its media investment among the over-the-top (OTT) and digital video platforms of its key broadcast networks.
“We’re pivoting toward broader video distribution platforms, whether it’s YouTube or social media or even TikTok,” he said of the social video app that’s popular with U.S. teens. “We’re matching the consumption behaviors of today’s consumers in order to get our reach right.”
A key challenge is optimizing its media investment as viewers spend more time in “walled garden” environments that don’t provide enough data to help compare performance and to avoid overexposing the same consumers to ads.
“We’re investing more and more in research to try and learn what’s working and what’s not working, and what the right balance is,” Amram said. “In the past, we didn’t need to focus on it as much, but in the evolving media consumption shifts of consumers today, and how much that’s accelerated recently, we have to have a stronger understanding of what’s working.”
He said Mars is evaluating multiple research vendors to find media metrics that are correlated to sales. He also foresees more growth in programmatic TV as advertisers seek the same kind of flexibility they have with digital media.
“It’s kind of evolving. It hasn’t hit critical mass yet, but in a world of recession where you’re trying to optimize, have flexibility, measure at speed and optimize your content and media mix in flight, the time is now for these types of things,” he said. “We’re looking at things more holistically than these siloes. The more that you can bring media and collapse it together into one strategic planning and buying tool and platform, the more effective we believe you can be.”
You are watching “Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>USA region senior media director Ron Amram tells a Cannes Lions panel discussion: “We are not big users of data, we don’t have a lot of first-party data, because of the three-tier system, specifically in the US. We’ve been told very specifically to stay away from understanding some consumers, because of the age barrier – we don’t want to target below the age of 21.”
The three-tier system means alcohol producers can sell their products only to wholesale distributors who then sell to retailers, and only retailers may sell to consumers. That means Heineken has precious little data about end customers.
“But, in the new world, you can leverage programmatic and the ad stack overall, the usage of data, to be smarter about your media,” Amram says. “Programmatic is a fantastic learning engine that allows you to apply data to see what’s working and feed that back in to our creative process or target segmentation for the brands to creative better DNA, whether’s it’s improving our products or creating new ones.”
Last year, Heineken USA tapped programmatic video ad tech platform TubeMogul for campaign delivery.
This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event. Please find additional videos from the series here.
]]>“MediaVest has completely rethought staffing on our business. For the most part, it’s been very positive and our campaigns have benefitted from it,” according to Heineken USA senior media director Ron Amram.
Speaking alongside Amram on a Cannes Lions panel, MediaVest digital data and technology president Carrie Seifer said the idea was to free people to be more creative.
“If we use programmatic correctly, it should give creatives the data they need so they can go and be creative – look at the data, then create something great,” Seifer said
Digital people thrive when they’re allowed to master digital. It’s risky to decentralize digital sometimes. But we’ve found, by decentralising AOD, it became … AOD at the table way upstream, thinking about how programmatic could affect the strategy. All of a sudden, the RFP is informed with programmatic built at the centre.”
Update: After Cannes, Heineken announced the selection of Publicis for the global creative.
This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event. Please find additional videos from the series here.
]]>“The thing that concerns me the most as we go in to programmatic is the neutrality of exchanges,” Mondelēz International’s VP of global media and Consumer engagement, Bonin Bough, tells Beet.TV
“As media owners also become exchange owners and there’s a limiting of inventory that’s available to other exchanges, I worry that that’s not a free marketplace.”
Heineken’s senior USA media director Ron Amram tells Bough: “As an advertiser, you move your money to where you have the broader-scaled open exchange. You have to reward the ones that are more open and have the scale.”
Bough was a panelist at a rooftop panel at Cannes presented by SpotXchange and TubeMogul. Find more clips that event here.
In the same panel, ad trading desk software vendor Accuen Media’s CEO Josh Jacobs said: “We’ve seen a tremendous amount of M&A in the ad tech space – it hasn’t impacted our ability to partner with folks.”
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“We’re getting to the point where the wall between traditional television and digital video are coming down,” Ron Amram tells Beet.TV. “You can literally see across it – looking at GRPs across the whole landscape.
“With programmatic … you can potentially buy all of them based on what your KPI is – you’re not buying media in silos. We’re getting close to the point where it’s one-screen planning and buying for all your media. That wall is probably coming down even further in the next year or two.”
Heineken is currently placing a video campaign using TubeMogul’s programmatic platform but Amram says the brand is still only trying to figure out its preferred programmatic model.
He was speaking with Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. You can find more of our Cannes coverage here.
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