Cadent Network's Great Upfront "Debate"

I believe there is always room for an energetic discussion in the media business, even when it is billed as a “debate” and both sides essentially agree on the matter at hand. There was just such a “debate” presented this week by Cadent as part of its Upfront event. It consisted of two panels designed to answer the question: What can we expect from this Upfront and future Upfronts when data moves to center stage and content needs to further adapt to multiple platforms?

"We are exploring the pros and cons of audience versus content today,” said Jim Tricarico, CRO of Cadent. “There have been many changes in the media ecosystem in the past two years and today is a coming out party for Cadent. We have rebranded for a new heritage and a new vision, repositioned and totally reinvented the service backend with technology, data, analytics and automation."

This is certainly a media market in flux. But many look at it as an opportunity. “The marketplace has never been more exciting and challenging,” Tricarico explained. “The market is changing fast with programmatic, addressable and advanced TV. While the TV landscape changes and evolves, prices continue to go up and ratings are down. There is fragmentation in viewership and shrinkage in ratings.”

With lower ratings and reduced ad loads, networks can be selective on what types of business they decide to take. Right now it looks like they may make room for higher priced scatter. Cadent’s promise is that they deliver across a full national footprint comprised of more than 200 partners, 210 DMAs and 80 million homes. The company is focusing time and resources on technology development, automation and data analytics and has just built an inventory management system for more effective media planning.
Nick Troiano, Cadent’s new CEO, revealed the company’s future plans. “I came to Cadent through their acquisition of BlackArrow, which we then rebranded for Cadent,” he said. “We are able to do dynamic ad insertions through VOD, OTT and DVR and even deliver targeted ads in live TV. TV is changing. The living room is changing. We are uniquely qualified to transition advertising into this new TV world.”

Agency Perspective
In moderating the debate between content and audience, Jack Myers, Media Ecologist and Chairman of MyersBizNet, asked the first panel of agency executives where they thought the market was going. Erica Schmidt, Executive Vice President and Managing Director North America, Cadreon, responded with a data-centric perspective. “From the data viewpoint, we are in an interesting time in the industry and are thinking differently about TV buying,” she said. “There are the issues of pricing and harder to find audiences. This gives us an opportunity to think differently and we are basing our decisions on audience and data. There are huge pressures on CPMs but we continue to push the envelope.”

“So are we moving away from the golden age of programming?” Myers asked. Rino Scanzoni, Chief Investment Officer, GroupM, responded in the affirmative. “We have used content as a surrogate to identify audiences for years,” he explained. “The TV business is going away from looking at content to find audiences to using data to do so. We are moving to an audience-based transactional system.”

Catherine Warburton, Chief Investment Officer, Assembly added, “We have always been buying content and audience, so the idea of content versus audience is not new. You have to balance super premium content for a client. We are looking beyond TV for audiences. We look across all screens. There are places other than actual TV to get these audiences.”

Client Perspective
Turning to clients in the second panel, Myers asked Tim Sullivan, former Vice President, Media at The Wendy's Company and Andy Jung, Director of Marketing and Communications at The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company whether they, like the agencies, had business silos. “You are dealing with silos even on the client side,” Sullivan responded. “We are currently in an evolution as to how to move money to different forms of advertising. TV is trying to learn about new solutions and we clients need to be willing to change.”
“Silos are a huge reality of the business,” Jung added. “I need to sell a certain amount of grass seeds within this year and we rely heavily on big box stores. But we also see changes with new home ownership and the new entry points. We are looking at technology. Weather is a big data factor for us and we need to reach audiences in an abbreviated time period.”

“Is the business becoming more adversarial with the use of data intelligence?” Myers asked.  “Definitely,” Sullivan replied. “Everyone is leveraging different types of data. It will be interesting to see if we can work together or if there will be turf battles. We want solutions so that everyone understands that we are trying to build our business in the most effective way with the highest results.”

Conclusion
The debate of content versus audiences may not be settled during this Upfront but if we as an industry can all work together to find the right balance of creative and quantification, we will be able to move the entire media ecosystem a big step forward.  As Myers summed it up, “It is a changing game and we need to remain flexible.”

Saying "I do!" The Marriage of Creative and Data in Out of Home

Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising has reached an important crossroad between creative and data.  Impactful, engaging creative has always been a given. But now, advancements of technology enable OOH advertisers to access a range of data sets that map and measure the impact of creative on the consumer experience through the sales funnel. A lively discussion at the recent Advertising Club Out Of Home Now conference highlighted the importance of both creative and data in advancing the business.

Dave Yacullo, President & CEO of Outdoor Media Group, opened the meeting by saying that "OOH is the perfect marriage between art and science. We now have contextually relevant content in many formats and we are going digital. "

Creative
The creative keynote speaker, Mark Tutssel, Global Chief Creative Officer, Leo Burnett Worldwide, waxed poetic about how outdoor, one of the oldest advertising mediums, is also one of the most compelling to change hearts and minds. He said, "Outdoor, for me, is one of the great canvases. When I first got into the industry I was told that when you have an idea, first create an outdoor poster because this form of advertising distills an idea to its essence. It can transform business and impact society. It can stop people in their tracks. The poster is the oldest form of outdoor information exchange and is also the medium of the future."

So with that in mind, Mark demonstrated the impact that outdoor can have when creative is merged with technology. This merging can go beyond the mere commerce impact of advertising. It can enable social good and health. Examples included Samsung which rolled out Smart trucks, enabled with cameras and back screens showing on-coming traffic that helped lower car accident deaths on Brazil's one lane roads. Another example was Coca Cola which used location based screens in Lahore Pakistan and in Delhi India to bring people together and share a positive, friendly moment between two nations that sometimes view each other with suspicion and hostility. These initiatives, in my opinion, are brilliant, brand effective and socially beneficial, bringing "the poster" with its historical impact to change hearts and minds, into the 21st century.

Mark concluded, "Great brands have unmistakable brand identity. They capture the human spirit. They are delightfully simple. They grab people by the eyeballs and reward them for their time and intelligence. People are looking for ways for brands to reward them and enrich their lives. The message must open up inside our minds."

Data
One can have great creative and an amazing initiative but without the ability to measure its impact, we may never know how much it helped reach the campaigns goals. That is where all this new data, made available via the digitization of media, can make an impact. Plus, the sophistication of blending location based technology with digital data enables OOH to more effectively target consumers at a time when they are most receptive to those ads. Stacy Deriso, Group Director PHD Google, explained, "We are using data to identify an elusive target. We are very scientific as to how to reach them and are targeting more specifically where they work and play in order to create contextual messages."

Andy Stevens, SVP Research and Insights, Clear Channel Outdoor, has recently moved to OOH from digital. What drew him to OOH was that, "In digital we can get diverse audience insights. We can optimize in real time. But in OOH we have high impact. There is no ad skipping. There is no ‘below the fold’. Traditionally, in OOH it is hard to measure who is actually seeing that ad but we know there is a huge opportunity in data to change the industry."

Hard data alone may not tell the entire story. How do we know that the consumers’ mindset is receptive to receiving and processing the message? Enter neuromarketing into OOH. Alan Smith, Chief Digital Officer at Assembly, explained, "We use the emotional mindset to decide when to serve ads going beyond surface metrics to emotions." Alan realized that we get an emotional high after going to the gym rather than on a stressful commute and that may make us more open to ads from a company like Timberland. He confided that, "We shifted media towards gym type locations and inside gyms and maximized the mix." The combination of emotional behavioral insight coupled with location technology helps feed an ad at the right time in the right place when the consumer has the right mindset to receive it.

Where there is data, programmatic cannot be far behind. When asked if OOH programmatic is in the near future, Stacy said, "Yes. Programmatic allows us to be more elegant. We can create messages or bodies of messages that are more powerful and engaging." Alan added, "We embrace programmatic. It has daunting complexity but automation is a good thing. The more you are embedded in technology the more buyers you have."

Conclusion
The final panel, moderated by Media Village’s Stuart Elliott, put all of the OOH pieces together – the creative and the quantitative - with a discussion of connected cities that are essentially partnerships between municipalities and marketers. “Smart Cities is a very nascent field,” Stuart began, “It is fast moving but still early.” Programs like Citi Bikes, the Highline and now Sidewalk Labs in NYC are, according to Dave Etherington, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer at Intersection, “focused on improving the urban experience.” This is done with creative, seamless partnership integration that can be quantified.

The future looks bright for OOH. As Elyssa Gray, Director, Head of Brand and Advertising NA Cards at Citi, noted, the range of OOH is expansive because we are “not confirmed to ad format. If you can think it up you can probably execute it.”

And now you can even measure it.





This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com