As a member of the “Group of 25” under the aegis of the CMO Growth Council, Lau is hoping to create “congregations of marketing organizations” to restablish the importance of marketing, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“The conundrums of the marketing fraternities that we’re facing today largely has to do with some of us have kind of deviated from the very first mandate or mission of being a great marketer,” says Lau. “Marketing in the past used to be a very, very highly regarded profession that brings great values to society.”

Lau, who is Tencent’s SEVP, Chairman of Group Marketing & Global Branding, gave a presentation at Cannes to introduce “Tech for Good” as an integral part of Tencent’s new vision and mission. His speech outlined how Tencent ignites the goodness in individuals to build a “universally accessible” digital community that addresses the challenges to individual empowerment, community, society and the planet.

One example is the Tencent Foundation, which engages individuals in charitable causes such as monthly donations, bundled charitable programs and daily step challenges and has become the world’s largest online platform for public charitable donations.

One of the goals of the CMO Growth Council at Cannes was to figure out how to turn the passion displayed by its participants in meetings over the past year into concrete action. “It has to move beyond passionate individuals…into an organizational-led movement,” says Lau. “The real thing is not about hastily coming out with solutions, it’s really about being honest to ourselves.”

Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, who is VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, whether marketers face a challenge of process or people, Lau points to the latter.

“Everything leads back to people, because people create process,” he says. In seeking to create a “global center of excellence for innovations and creativity,” the Council must “let information flow, let people really cultivate a life-long learning experience” as opposed to seeking quick fixes.

So how has a company as powerful as Tencent benefitted from its participation in the CMO Growth Council? “Immensely,” Lau says, adding that the company is “very privileged and fortunate to be among the McDonald’s the Googles the IBM’s of the world. But then we must remember that we’re only 20 years old.

“There is also a strong ambition, there’s a strong dream, to share with the world what we thought have made us from good to great, from China, from Tencent, from the so-called first mobile-first land of the world.”

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

“Given this challenge there’s a real need to go beyond the install and go beyond the user acquisition and focus on engagement,” Jeger adds.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference, Jeger talks about the ways of measuring the value of app marketing campaigns and the role that companies like Criteo are playing in that effort.

AppsFlyer helps its app marketing customers collect and surface data “to understand, for example, the impressions and clicks and installs and then further down the funnel within the app all the events that happened and attribute these to a specific source.”

A typical example could be an advertiser running multiple campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and some Tencent social apps in China, according to Jeger. It would want to try to make sense of the performance and how much each of the campaigns cost versus the revenue generated.

“We enable them to do that by having partnerships with all of these companies and being official measurement partners for those companies and putting revenue against cost,” says Jeger.

One of AppsFlyer’s more than 4,000 partners is retargeting specialist Criteo, which “focuses on one of the huge pain points of app marketers. Getting users into the app and then retaining them and keeping them engaged. There’s a huge retention issue when it comes to apps and Criteo is fighting that head on by providing campaigns to get users back into the app.”

Moving beyond user acquisition to focus on engagement, using very personalized and non-intrusive messaging, “is the holy grail of where we need to go as an industry,” Jeger says.

But there’s a learning curve that could be steepened if more people knew the kinds of data that are available and the most sophisticated ways of employing that data. “I think we should be seeing more and more apps in the next year being at the place where they can get to that kind of level of communication.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“Transparency still is a huge, huge issue,” OMD Global CEO Florian Adamski says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.

“Whereas I believe that a lot of things happened and a lot of it improved, and a lot of new adtech providers helped to clean up the supply chain, clients still have an eerie feeling that they don’t have total control over it,” he says.

This leads to a second trend: clients taking control. “Basically they want to own their own data, they want to own their own contracts, they want to own their own adtech.”

Which leads to a third trend, the problem of talent. “Clients can recruit and hire, buy the adtech and the licensing. The problem is how long can they retain and nurture talent to, in the long run, do what in the past agencies used to do,” says Adamski. “Do I believe there is a place in the supply chain in the industry for media agencies still today? Absolutely, because we will be all about recruiting, identifying, nurturing, training those talents that actually need inspiration working across different client industries.”

About a year into his global role, Adamski finds it fascinating to track distinct differences between different marketplaces. He notes that many people might assume that everything in adtech and publishing is fully globalized.

“My verdict is it is absolutely not. And I don’t even have to start talking about China and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) over there or a totally different landscape in Japan or South Korea.”

But more frustrating is working with clients to take the best possible approach to measuring the performance of the money they spend on advertising.

“I still believe in the value of building and creating and fostering a brand that at some point then will deliver sales, downloads, interactions, whatever you define as the key KPI,” says Adamski. “To understand the relationship between this rent-building effort and how it pays off in performance. Only if we tie that together we can see that full picture.”

He adds that it’s “daunting” to encounter marketers that have walled off brand and performance issues. “I think that’s a big problem. It needs to stop. It needs to be reintegrated.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

“I think that we are on the verge of a massive transformation in the way brands are trading with people directly,” Delport says during a break at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and trade show.

He cites as an example a consumer packaged-goods company doing business in China, where the social platform WeChat was released by Internet services provider Tencent in 2011 and has become a way of life for many young people.

“The first thing they tell me is, ‘Oh by the way, we’re doing fifty percent of our business through social networks.’ WeChat is not only one of the most impressive social networks, it’s also a massive social commerce platform,” Delport says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“So if you want to understand what social commerce will be, go to China. They’re already there.”

Peer-to-peer recommendation “is stronger than top-down advertising,” Delport adds. The bottom line for brands: they need to understand influencer marketing, content marketing and social comments “because all of these three components are working together.” An “influencer” doesn’t have to be at the awareness level of a Kardashian.

“An influencer is someone like me. I’m talking about everyone who can publish a video and push advice or the test of a product or service. This the way people will buy,” says Delport.

Recent surveys show that 50% of “very young consumers” would love to buy things on social networks with just one click, according to Delport.

“We are in an organic world now that needs organic marketing. This is exactly what we preach. You need to invent the tools and the measurements for that world where owned assets, earned assets, shared assets and paid assets have to work altogether.”

“Welcome to the Vibrant Future,” a video series of thought leadership from DMEXCO 2017 presented by Criteo. For more videos please visit this page.