In this week’s episode of the #BeetCast we explore the topic through the initiatives of the Publicis Groupe and the Spark Foundry agency. Our guest is Jason Smith, President, Diversified Investments at Spark Foundry, a unit of Publicis Media.
Jason is twenty-year veteran of the agency world with time as Horizon and Mindshare. He joined Spark Foundry earlier this year in a newly created role
In our chat, he speaks to the imperative of media investment around the increasingly diverse U.S. consumer population. He says one of the barriers to investment is the under representation of diverse groups in panels and other audience planning measurement methodologies.
This is a very open and direct on the need and outlook of real change in the advertising business.
Great conversation. Thank you Jason.
And thanks to our sponsor Mediaocean for supporting this podcast.
And thank you for listening!
]]>But many in the industry are not as pessimistic as some may have you believe.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lisa Giacosa, president of Publicis Media agency Spark Foundry, suggests that the erosion of the accepted infrastructure also carries with it opportunities to do something better.
“The cookie was a means to an end anyway,” she says of the humble client-side text file. Usage of third-party cookies – a method many have used to match up identity profiles from users’ different devices – has already been eliminated by Apple and Mozilla and, soon, by Google’s Chrome.
“Cookies are only a proportion of the media mix. When you think about popular media channels, like marketing channels like in-app or connected TVs, they’ve never supported cookies. TV has never been a connected cookie-based medium.
“So it doesn’t frighten me as much as it does a lot of people.”
The ad industry is involved in a big effort to replace the kinds of features enabled by cookies, as well as mobile identifiers, in digital advertising.
Except for two things:
“The decline of the third-party cookie means that some data segments in certain contexts will become obsolete,” Giacosa concedes.
“Measurement is the other piece of the puzzle that gets impacted when we start to think about the fact that we can no longer use those third party cookies to understand and track ad exposure.”
However, Spark Foundry’s Giacosa thinks what comes next is an upgrade.
“We can start to really look at other data signals that get us to a place where we can be more relevant,” she says.
“In the activation space … that will mean that we are looking at increasing our reliance on first-party data.
“So that value exchange with a client becomes even more important in terms of how a client acquires first-party data around their consumers, what they’re offering, and how they deliver that. Which means that (use of) contextual will increase.
“It’s quite exciting from point of view of looking at the aggregating metrics, the lift testing, in terms of brand metrics, and of course, using probabilistic models like econometrics, like various other ways of measuring to get to the true answers.”
You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel For more videos, please visit this page. The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.
]]>Amongst the leading contenders – contextual advertising, the practise of targeting not the audience for content but the content itself.
As contextual ad targeting gains prominence in 2020, many people are coming to liken it to the traditional craft of pre-digital ad adjacencies, and as the flip-side to data-driven digital ad targeting.
But Lisa Giacosa doesn’t see it that way. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the president and global head of data, technology, analytics and insights at Publicis Groupe’s Spark Foundry agency says it’s not an “either-or”.
“I think it (should be) both,” Giacosa says.
“Contextual, to me, is making sure that you have the right type of environment, the right type of content and the right type of message jiving together and working as hard as possible for your brand, so that your consumer deems it as ‘relevant to me, right for me, and a brand that I want to build a connection with and have in my life’.
“But all of the data-driven targeting is what helps us to understand that context.
“When you bring the two things together, it’s even more powerful in terms of understanding who, when, where, and how we’re going to target our audiences.”
For ad-tech companies facing the death of cookies and the ramifications of GDPR and CCPA in 2020 and beyond, “context” is the new black.
Giacosa isn’t crying over the end of the humble traditional user tracking file. She says the end of cookies is “exciting”.
“It served a purpose for a while in that cookies were a great way of us measuring digital media in a silo,” she says. “(But) I want to look at that whole holistic mix.
“We survived a long time with TV with no cookies, and we will survive without cookies again.”
Attempts at reconstituting consumer targeting and profile consolidation continue apace.
Last year, Spark Foundry’s parent Publicis Groupe acquired data marketing business Epsilon for $4.5 billion, enabling mass ad personalization and what Giacosa calls a “true picture” of users.
All of which, plus the addition of contextual cues, makes advertising not just about data but about psychology.
With all those pieces combined, Giacosa is using words like “mindset”, “feeling”, “tonality”, “experience” and “emotional connection” to describe advertisers’ imperatives.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>In the ‘50s, the industry was trying to prove that TV worked through things like econometric modeling. By the ‘90s, there was a growing over-excitement at the thought that everything could be measured, yet there’s still no full picture.
“There are two reasons why TV attribution is important,” Giacosa said. “One is that we do need to redress that balance, but two, we need to make sure that we don’t do it in a silo.”
Giacosa explained that it’s important to look at the consumer experience as a holistic mix. Attribution must be done but within the context of everything else that the industry does and every experience that the consumer has.
This has become easier in some sense, because there’s no lack of data, but also a bit harder for two reasons. The first is the communal industry lexicon that is used, and the second is the currency.
“We’ve been trading off GRPs and old lexicon for quite some time and we’re quite happy with that,” Giacosa said. “But we need to redress that balance and think about how to take that to not even the future—it’s still years ago at this point that we have to catch ourselves up to get to a place where we have all of that set top box data, all of that connected TV data in one place because at the end of the day TV attribution is not just TV, it’s every video platform.”
There’s a lot of fragmentation across the industry, and in order to help solve it, there has to be a shift in focus on data costs that come with outcomes.
“For me, it’s more about how we connect the dots,” Giacosa said. “How we collaborate as an industry, and make the data more accessible and more palatable for clients and corporates to get to understand that business, because I think it’s all there, it’s just a case of how we break down the walls, how we bring all that together and bring it across different platforms.”
Stitching together a common methodology, lexicon, and currency will be the first step needed to make this happen, and Giacosa said that the industry collectively has the people and resources to make that happen.
A lot of performance advertisers work in small increments, day to day or hour to hour. Brand equity has a huge impact on how fast that works. She cited the success of Peloton in the past several months as an example.
“The impact that social media can have on brand equity and how fast it moves really changes how we think about TV attribution because how the brand is performing has an impact also on how it’s going to perform in terms of the TV attribution and the effect that it’s having on your business,” Giacosa said.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>And also some big headaches. Because, whilst embracing multiple destinations and even closing the loop to consumer action can maximize audience, it also means many different masters to serve.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lisa Giacosa, EVP and global MD of data and analytics at Publicis Media’s Spark Foundry, explains that lack of commonality in the way agencies can buy across uniquely-different new video and TV platforms is causing a problem.
“TV attribution (is) great,” she says. “(There are) some great data sources out there. (But) we don’t have a common currency yet – in order to get a full picture across the industry … we have to work with multiple partners.
“It makes it a very cost-prohibitive opportunity for clients to get the full picture. We can work with set top box data, we can work with connected TV data, we can work with ad server data, all of those areas. But the reality is that that’s then dipping into multiple data sets that cost multiple times and also aren’t interconnected.
“If you think about the data you might get off of a Sony TV versus a Vizio TV, you’re potentially looking at very different data sets.”
She is calling for commonality and consistency. But she says legislation in GDPR and CCPA have introduced commonality in a way that doesn’t understand what agencies are trying to do – namely, give viewers control over the ads they receive.
She wants either an independent body to ensure checks and balances on the industry or a coalition of suppliers or buyers to hold the industry accountable.
Giacosa was interviewed by Jon Watts at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>Case in point – Publicis agency Spark Foundry is using machine learning on audience data points to enable the creation of dynamically-produced ad creative, customized for distinct audience types.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lisa Giacosa, Spark Foundry global EVP data, technology, analytics and insights, says the machine speed is fantastic – but she also wants the machine to become more human.
“The reality is is that we can’t move as fast as a machine can go,” she says. “We’ve already rolled out machine learning on a number of campaigns across the Publicis network, to great success.
“In an instance in Europe, we have over 500 permutations of creative running within a week, within one campaign across multiple markets. And that’s limitless – it starts to get to the point where you can get completely one-to-one in terms of how creative you can get in terms of the bespoke messaging.
“We have a plethora of data, enables us to truly understand where people are and what they are doing, but we need to overlay that emotional connection.”
So, how exactly is Spark Foundry getting data in to the machine learning system? And how is it building up those fragments in to a picture of an audience member’s actual identity.
Giacosa lifted the lid on a series of data sources she uses:
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Overall, Giacosa says in this interview with Beet.TV at the CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit, “I think we are still solving problems that we probably should have already cracked. But as an industry there are challenges with getting all of that data to live in the same space, with walled gardens over here and set-top box data being over there.”
Giacosa, who is EVP, Global Managing Director, Head, Data, Technology, Analytics & Insights, acknowledges the need to build scale and reach across platforms that are still somewhat siloed. “We’re getting some of the data signals, but it will be so much more powerful when we bring all of those together,” she says.
Having participated in the CIMM session titled TV Attribution Takes Center Stage, Giacosa thinks “there’s no doubt that TV drives other media as well. Certainly in the models that we do at Spark Foundry,” which include POEM—Paid, Owned and Earned Media mix models.
“What that does is it looks at not only the TV attribution and the direct plays but also the indirect plays it has on other media,” she explains. “When something happens in TV, what was the impact on paid social, search, in-store or website?” Bringing those elements together helps to avoid marking “dark decisions on what to reinvest in or take out of the mix.”
Spark Foundry, which is part of Publicis Media, also incorporates brand equity data for a baseline not only of sales performance but in “how we can get to be more fast moving in terms of how we look at brand equity as well. I’m very fearful oftentimes that people follow ROI off of a cliff” because the focus typically is short-term results.
Advertisers also need to think about content and “those longer-term, brand-building investments that we make to then look at the long-term return on ROI as well by building that hybrid of a model that looks at the ROI plus brand equity” and, finally, de-duplicated reach and frequency.
Asked about the subject of identity graphs, she prefers to see a move toward a “meta graph” given, among other things, the impact that the General Data Protection Regulation has had in Europe. “What we’re already starting to see in Vermont, in L.A. and other places within the United States is they’re following that path too.”
Giacosa predicts we will see “GDPR-esque within the United States fairly soon.”
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