Q&A With ANA’s Bob Liodice: The State of the Advertising Industry

What’s the state of the advertising industry? Ask Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). He’s steering his organization through unparalleled change with a call for greater marketplace transparency. He’s also changing the business model by reappraising the agency and client relationship that helps advertising keep pace with technical advancements.

Described as “a most unlikely revolutionary” by MediaPost, he was named Media Executive of the Year in 2017. Liodice shares his thoughts on industry challenges and opportunities.

Weisler: What is the state of the advertising industry today?

Liodice: Technology has wrought tremendous change to our industry, both good and bad. Some issues remain particularly challenging including the ongoing debate over media transparency, diversity, and gender equality in the workforce; brand safety; brand purpose; ad blocking; [and] talent issues that agencies, marketers, and media companies are trying their best to solve.

What do you see as the industry challenges next year?

There are many challenges, but one of particular importance is influencer marketing. At the last Cannes festival, Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed announced that Unilever would no longer partner with influencers who buy followers. This was powerful. The rise of fraud in influencer marketing has become a growing issue as marketers pay influencers based on their follower count. Because influencer marketing is centrally built on top of two platforms—Google and Facebook (Instagram)—and the platforms control what data is available and how it is accessed, marketers will continue to remain in the dark and limited in their abilities to tackle this growing issue without greater collaboration and transparency from the social networks.

What are the opportunities next year? 

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

The Future of Women in Technology. Interview with Deborah Wahl

Gender discrimination and pay disparity is a hot topic in today’s workplace. Related to that discussion is the representation of women in the STEM fields. Deborah Wahl, CMO, Data Driven Innovator, is known for developing the "Agency of the Future" model, merging talent and technology with digital, data and human intelligence.

She was a marketing professional in the car business (Ford of Brasil, Lincoln, Mazda, Toyota, Lexus) rising to CMO at Chrysler before moving to McDonald’s USA.  “I’m focused on technology because I believe it is necessary for every marketer to understand. .. the transformation with technology - how to use it to get closer to and more engaged with my target consumers,” she stated, “We all need to think like a CTO.” 

I sat down with Wahl and spoke to her about the status of women in the industry and the importance of diversity. 

Charlene Weisler: What are the biggest challenges in assuring company diversity today?

Deborah Wahl: To be successful, we must continue to nurture a diverse pipeline, starting at the beginning, which is why I support initiatives like the ANA’s Talent Forward Alliance with the twin goals of inspiring and elevating the quality of talent from the university system and building skills for existing employees.  Second, we need to stay purposeful and relentless about breaking down stereotypes of what types of people succeed and supporting diverse talent.  My biggest fear is that high performing diverse talent will be fed up with the slow progress in our industry and go elsewhere.  We need to act now.  

Weisler: A study from the 1960s concluded that the best technologists were disinterested in people and disliked activities involving close personal interaction. This led to more men being hired for tech positions at the expense of women. Do you think that this is still the case today? 

Wahl: Unfortunately, yes.  That’s what I mean by breaking down stereotypes and opening ourselves up to talent.  Campaigns like GE’s Female Scientists and State Street’s Fearless Girl are just what’s needed.  Study after study shows unconscious bias exists throughout our culture.  We need to hammer at it and use every tool to change perceptions.  The payoff- campaigns that have high GEM qualified ads increase sales by 50%. (Gender Equality Measure that scores ads or entertainment on how prominently they depict women) And, we desperately need diversity in this space to create better solutions.  

Weisler: What are the biggest challenges for women in technology today?

Wahl: I’ve worked in some very male dominated businesses like Automotive and Homebuilding.  The challenge for women in tech is the same - building networks, being heard, overcoming the cultural walls.  Success comes when women support each other and that their networks can be as effective as any other.  We also need purposeful action.  As an example, conference curators need to be purposeful about what speakers they choose so that a variety of thought and role models is represented.  

Weisler: Gender discrimination is more than harassment. Pay disparity impacts a woman's earning power through her career. What can be done about this?

Wahl: First, we each have a responsibility to resolve this.  I made it a priority in each of my positions.  Second, the issues are related to what we discussed above - the unconscious bias and stereotypes that too often determine who gets promoted and how they are valued.  Transparency is the first step.  We can’t fix what we don’t look at and talk about.  “Pay secrecy is one of the things that continues to pay discrimination and the wage gap” Maya Raghu, director of workplace equality and senior counsel at the Nation Women’s Law Center.  I’d say silence is at the root of a lot of our diversity issues.

Weisler: Give me some predictions of the future for women in technology in the next five years.

Wahl: I’m very hopeful.  There’s a big effort to change our stereotypes and make technology expected and accessible for everyone.  But this doesn’t mean it will be easy.  For every man and women who believes that a diverse workforce makes us more competitive, productive and successful, we each need to do our part every day.  Speak up, encourage, see things differently and take action. 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com
 

Crossroads in Cross Media and Return Path Data

Last week’s Cross-Platform Video Measurement Summit not only addressed new advancements in cross-platform measurement, it also provided an update on the state of return path data. For those of us who have been grappling with how to best measure content in the world of Big Data, it was an opportunity to have some of the best minds in the business present their vision of the digital future.

When it comes to cross-platform measurement solutions in that area seem to be an embarrassment of riches. Research companies such as Nielsen, Arbitron, ComScore, Simmons, GFK MRI and Google are forming partnerships, merging data streams and creating market positions. But the ability to measure a specific piece of video across all potential platforms remains elusive. Artie Bulgrin from ESPN said “We need passive real time measurements” for cross platform in the form of universal watermarks.

CIMM (The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) is doing just that – developing a universal watermarking protocol for the measurement of video across all possible platforms. This initiative, called TAXI (Trackable Asset Cross-Platform Identification) started in 2010 and, as Managing Director Jane Clarke announced, will be entering a Proof of Concept pilot stage this fall. As with CIMM’s Set-Top Box Data Lexicon which strives to form a common language for return path data measurement, TAXI should help create a common language for cross-platform - a universal watermark which enables video across platforms and across companies to be measured and compared.

Moving the industry towards new measurement protocols takes time. Some are impatient with evolution and advocate an upending of today’s measurement shibboleths. As NBC’s Alan Wurtzel said, we need to “rethink the idea of TV video measurement and be open to new ideas.” Maybe that means dropping household and demographic group metrics (which are only proxies for individual behavior anyway) and focus on behaviorally segmented data.

Return Path Data is another area where measurement partnerships are finding fertile ground and where the need for a common language remains acute. In 2010, CIMM produced a Whitepaper on the STB Data Landscape. This whitepaper was recently updated and the results were presented by GroupM’s Lyle Schwartz and ABC’s Mark Loughney at the Summit. Both the original whitepaper and the re-contact study are posted on the CIMM website www.cimm-us.org.

From 2010 to today, CIMM found that there been positive movement in the use of return path data, predominantly in the advancement of addressable advertising and local measurement. There has been much more acceptance over the past year for the use of the data in various forms – both within companies and externally in the industry. There is even some movement in standardizing the data with the creation of foundational datasets.

But privacy concerns continue to be an important consideration in both cross platform and return path data implementation. In the area of RPD in particular, privacy is one of the reasons why there has not been greater roll-out of data across all MVPDs. The perceived limited amount of data as well as the cost associated with the available data is a source of frustration for some data end users.

For those of us immersed in big data for the media industry, the challenges of last year are still challenges this year. But forward movement is palpable. Some of these challenges are finally, albeit slowly, being met in the form of universal watermarks (for cross platform) and foundational datasets (in RPD). Can we be content with a slow but steady evolution or are we ready to foment a revolution?