Says Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Omnicom Media Group in this BeetCast podcast moderated by Matt Spiegel, EVP of Transunion.
Part of the problem is that sensational content optimizes algorithms that in turn pull advertising in. While the number of impressions might be high, associations with the content is not necessarily valued and potentially detrimental to the advertiser, Hagedorn warns.
In this wide-ranging conversation, topics include identity, privacy and the importance of the integration of the supply chain with media investment.
The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Opik, a Transunion company. Please visit this page to find more episodes of the BeetCast and to subscribe via your preferred podcast service.
]]>Weaknesses in links in the ad-tech chain allow rogue ad sellers to present their sites as though they were those of peers with premium inventory. It is called “domain spoofing”, and it bugs the heck out of media agencies.
So Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn decided to do something about it.
Together with Megan Pagliuca, the former boss of Omnicom-owned Accuen, who joined his agency in September, Hagedorn began poking around in the ad supply chain to understand the fraud problem more deeply.
“We spent probably the last half of 2017 looking at unauthorized sellers that were entering into the mix, or spoof domains that were selling like they were CBS when they really weren’t CBS at all, they were another site completely,” he in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Typically, those three things (DSPs, the SSPs, and the publishers) would bundle together and there would be hidden margin from somebody in that, or some unauthorized inventory. We, instead, did a lot of clean-up, and it’s a lot of work for us, but we cleaned up, I’d say, the supply chain on the publisher side.”
In January, News Corp’s UK newspaper division News UK cried fowl on domain spoofing when it published conclusions of its own experiment that revealed 2.9 million bids per hour were made on fake inventory purporting to be that of its own The Sun and The Times news sites – in just two hours on December 4.
It concluded ad buyers are being duped in to wasting up to £700,000 ($972,000) per month on misplaced advertising, saying: “Brands are being tricked into thinking they’re buying quality inventory, bidding on what they think is a premium site when it isn’t.”
But fraudulent tactics look like a game of Whack-a-mole.
No sooner had Hearts & Science’s Hagedorn cleaned up the domain spoofing problem, by working with White Ops, a company that exists to root out such tactics, he discovered a new threat practiced by fraudsters.
“They quickly migrated into building bot extensions that live within a lot of the browsers that spoof human activity,” he tells Beet.TV.
“The crazy thing about that is you can cookie, essentially, a bot, and then the bot potentially gets retargeted by ambient retargeting campaigns later. So now we’re starting to really study identity management, and identity resolution, and how we can stop potentially advertising to bots that are spoofing being humans.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>“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.
]]>To be sure, the U.K.-based executive is “a big fan of supporting a strong media ecosystem,” Ralston-Good explains in this interview with Beet.TV. But as a planner, she sees a constant tension between context and audience that could shoestring audience targeting.
On the subject of transparency in general, Ralston-Good notes that it’s “one of the tenets” of Hearts & Science rooted in the efforts of agency CEO Scott Hagedorn. Before running H&S, Hagedorn founded Annalect, which became the data technology platform supporting all Omnicom agencies worldwide.
“He created an approach which was transparent from the get-go,” Ralston-Good says during a break at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade conference.
Transparency extends to the code H&S builds for its models, which they can view in Bitbucket. “They can also see into the complete media supply chain as well and with the right to audit. When we talk about transparency it’s very holistic,” she says.
As in the U.S., her clients have become more educated in their desire to know more about where their ads appear, leading to a lot more private marketplace programmatic deals. Here’s where the caveat arises.
“As a planner, it starts to challenge some of the things that are great about programmatic, like defining audiences behaviorally and then activating those audiences wherever they appear,” says Ralston-Good.
So while having clear inventory “is table stakes,” there’s a constant tension between context and audience “which could be derailed by the whole debate about what’s happening in terms of inventory.”
Another tenet of H&S from its launch in 2015 was a focus on personalization and one-to-one messaging. What has evolved is a penchant for agility and dismantling rigid customs and procedures.
“That’s having some super interesting impact with our own staff in terms of how we train them and upskill them and get them thinking about agile ways of solving problems, rather than rigid approaches,” she says. “And the same with clients.”
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Amongst other stipulations, the European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) measures include:
The measures apply to any global company processing EU citizens’ data, with penalties of up to 4% of global turnover. Steps data handling and data processing companies should take include conducting risk assessments, appointing data protection officers and overhauling policies and systems.
So, with less than a year ticking on the compliance clock, how are advertisers and their agencies responding to the new regimen?
At a panel debate convened with Beet.TV, four agency data executives said GDPR compliance was a big deal, but they framed privacy regulation in the context of consumer aversion to “creepy” ad tactics generally…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“There are a couple of things (clients) probably miss on… an understanding that there is a true impact of what many of these regulations are, and how the EU and the US are not necessarily going to be in sync.
“(Clients) are not at the point where they’re willing to have a conversation around, ‘If someone’s giving me data, what am I giving in exchange?’ It’s going to get harder to justify bombarding consumers with impressions that they don’t need, just because you know who they are. Less is more. That is a far more fundamental shift that has the come – privacy is one part of it.”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser
“We have more conversations about how advertising can be relevant engaging without being creepy… there very rarely is (a breach of privacy). Part of our job as agencies is to ensure clients don’t find themselves getting sued for breaching privacy laws.
“Privacy is not an issue for our clients so much as following the law; that’s never been an issue – it’s more about … using data for good to make the consumer experience better.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray
“If we use some insight about an audience to personalise a communication … the trust is there because you’re using the data in a way that there’s a value exchange.
“As we start to use data across more parts of the agency and client, there’s an education that has to happen, so that people that haven’t necessarily been handling data previously and are now having data conversations know the implications and are trained on how to handle that data or send an email without being in breach.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“I think clients should own all their own ad-tech contracts, agencies should operate them, and they should be fully transparent.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For many, that has meant a promotion for the executives who once ran outlier data divisions within an agency but who now are calling the shots.
What changes when that happens, and what have those people learned along the way? In this recorded panel discussion at Cannes Lions, four agency executives opened up. Here is what they said…
Brian Lesser, CEO, GroupM North America (previous: CEO, GroupM’s Xaxis):
“It’s a sign of the times that people with data, analytics, platforms backgrounds are now being put in a position to manage media agencies.
“For me, it’s a matter of making sure our agencies have appropriate platforms… make sure we are data-informed at every step along the way … activation across all channels.”
Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer, IPG Mediabrands (previous: president, IPG’s Cadreon):
“In this role, I’ve started to see the reality of the imbalance between planning and buying. Planning tools are activated by data sets which are still not quite where they should be.
“There are silos being created which are legacies from the past, you need to clean them to make some of the tech and systems work. That’s all I’ve been focused on for the last there of four months since starting the role.”
Doug Ray, product and innovation president, Dentsu Aegis Network (previous: CEO, Carat):
“I’ve always been on the planning, strategy and management side, not so much on the buying side. What has made great plans and strategies … is human insight, to have a deep understanding of customers. Clients are looking for the human truth, the insight to help them with better outcomes on their media.”
Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Hearts & Science (previous: CEO, Omnicom’s Annelect):
“We under-leveraged the audience creation and syndication side of it. The buying side of programmatic is actually the least important side of programmatic. The three most important sides… are the audience creation, syndication and also using some of the new ad-serving capabilities like an Innovid … to do the orchestration of the creative assets in the product.”
Often, the question is framed as an “either-or” in which Netflix would have to choose between continuing its current premium SVOD model or ripping it up in favour of ad funding.
Previously, Ampere Analysis’ Richard Broughton has told Beet.TV Netflix could make up to $8bn a year from advertising if it switched over entirely, but would have to accept churn would knock off some of the gain, as angry consumers quit.
But one ad agency executive doesn’t think the choice has to be so dichotomous. Speaking in this panel debate recorded by Beet.TV, GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser said an ad model for Netflix could be a lot more intrinsic and less disruptive.
“The question is not necessarily, ‘Is Netflix thinking about how to infuse advertising in to its model?’,” Lesser said.
“Netflix is, I would bet, having conversations about how big-brand advertisers can get involved in content creation so that they can have a more effective engagement with their consumers.
“I think, over time, all over-the-top content, with Netflix being the gold standard, will have to be financed in some way by what we, traditionally, know now as the advertising business.”
Also in the panel, ad agency tech and data executives discussed whether the modern-day precision capability to target only customers known to be in-market for a particular brand or product will mean an exclusive focus on performance advertising, at the expense of traditional top-of-funnel or brand-based advertising of the like commonly seen on TV.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That was the main question on the lips of moderator Jay Sears, the SVP of MasterCard’s advertising intelligence, when he chaired a panel discussion on the topic on the shores of the Cannes Lions festival of creativity.
In The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel, Sears questioned a line-up of agency leaders:
In this enlightening, 46-minute recording of the panel, they touch on a variety of topics, including:
Enjoy the full, insight-packed video, or look out for our individual segments.
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Now, slowly, as new attribution technology hots up, brands are being promised the ability the ability to close the loop.
But, whilst, to many, this evolution appears to be driven by brands, agency tech chiefs, in this Beet.TV recorded panel discussion, say some clients have a long way to go. Here is a flavour of what they said…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“Depending on who in the client organisation you talk to, you tend to get get a couple of different definition of ‘What is an outcome?’
“There is a disconnect in the conversations you have in procurement (and the brand). There is a desire in one part of the organisation to drive toward the outcome – and the other part doesn’t necessarily believe that that is measurable or comparable across a wider set of the ecosystem. There needs to be an alignment.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“You get what you measure. If you’ve got a procurement department, they’re looking at ‘How do we extract cost and drive down that cost? … If I can buy what I bought before more cheaply, the thesis is the return on investment will be improved’.
“There is a race to the bottom. It can only be bought so cheaply before you’re starting to fundamentally disrupt the quality of that inventory.
“We’d like to change the conversation and look at the value-in versus cost-out. It may cost you a higher CPM – but, if the response from the consumer is greater, then the overall value of that media buy is going to be better for that client.”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“The technology would be easy to solve. The most powerful media companies right now have a better understanding of consumers than many advertisers do – they want to hold on to that leverage, they want to define their own metrics, they want to grade their own homework. We’re left with Nielsen, which is imperfect at best.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“A lot of clients believe there’s one true god and that god is Nielsen – and that is wrong.
“If you’re an application … you have to install the Nielsen app in to your SDK, and there’s not a lot of room for that. We think 40% of all video or content that could be measured is not. That’s a big problem.
“The great thing about programmatic … and fusing different panels … in to a DMP is, you can actually start to look at the causality of marketing.”
In this discussion panel recorded by Beet.TV, ad agency tech executives say many clients are capable of moving forward – but they are caught between two worlds…
IPG Mediabrands chief data and marketing technology officer Arun Kumar:
“The newer companies look at performance (marketing) very differently and they’re far more open to restructuring and not having silos. They’re very good at lower-funnel, they’re structured internally to do that.
“Where they struggle is, in many cases, they see that as a battle for market share, as opposed to figuring out, ‘How am I going to get to the top of the funnel?’”
GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser:
“Market-mix modelling has been the holy grail of channel allocation fora very long time. When you come from the new school, you say, ‘Market-mix modelling is looking through the rear-view mirror, that can’t possibly be right.’
“You get part of your media plan using real-time media to buy and optimise, and part of your plan that’s looking backwards. The answer is not either-or, frankly – tis’ about updating that model more often.”
Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn:
“The big problem with the market-mix models right now is the competitive data set which powers most of those are powered by Nielsen, and 75% of Nielsen’s money comes from the TV networks – so the mixed models themselves are totally based on TV and don’t take in to account what’s really happening in digital.”
Dentsu Aegis Network product and innovation president Doug Ray:
“We’re working with a lot of our clients on, ‘How do you bring those two worlds (clients’ media team and and customer data team) together? How do you apply the precision and audience understanding that those groups had, how do you leverage the understanding that those CRM or ecommerce teams and leverage similar types of data in a mass-media ecosystem?’ That’s evolving, we’re able to apply some of those principles in the mass-media space.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to the chief of the media agency network launched by Omnicom last year.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn worries: “Everything’s gotten broken apart.
“(Clients’) CRM programs aren’t working anymore, they’re divorced from their media programs… People don’t look at the aggregate anymore. It’s important to look at the broader KPIs… sales, purchase intent, proving out brand equity improvement … versus looking at these little pieces that aren’t connected anymore.”
Hagedorn was drafted in from Omnicom’s Annalect data division to run the new unit that is equal parts data and creativity.
He sees an opportunity for clients to use consumer purchase data, connected to ad exposure measurement, to figure out the true ROI of ads – but Hagedorn also sees a privacy concern emerging.
“A lot of consumers have grown up with the concept of a free internet … they’re not as concerned (about) demographic or behavioural data being utilised (in ad targeting),” he says,
“(But) when you start getting in to purchase data … there gets to be some concerns. I advise our clients … they should own their own DMP (demand-side platform), let the agencies operate and have it be fully transparent. Clients need to own their own ad-tech stacks, agencies need to be adept enough to operate on top of those investments.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page. Hagedord was a panelist at this event.
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