Upfront Relevancy and the Importance (Or Not) of Data. The IRTS Newsmakers Panel.

The IRTS is an industry organization of top media executives and also serves as a charity to build future leaders and industry diversity through an educational program initiative. The recent Newsmaker Breakfast not only recognized the thirty students comprising this year’s IRTS fellows program, it also offered a provocative panel of noted agency leaders moderated by Jack Myers, Chairman and Founder of Myersbiznet.

The panel included Lori Hiltz, CEO Global Brands, Havas Media Group, Dave Penski, Chief Investment Officer, Publicis Media, Dani Benowitz, EVP Director of Investment, Magna Global, Rino Scanzoni , Chief Investment Officer, GroupM and Donnie Williams, Chief Digital Officer, Horizon Media. Myers led a lively discussion of the state of the industry from the upfront and newfront to data, automation and disintermediation. 

Upfront 2016

“The upfront has taken some interesting turns this year,” Myers began, “What do you see happening?” Hiltz responded, “The Upfront is the social currency of our industry. It doesn't matter what platform or channel – we are platform agnostic when it comes to investment. But the Upfront becomes the jump start.” Scanzoni countered, “The Upfront marketplace is irrelevant to what the overall market really is. Last year we saw market declines and this year we expect to see low to single digit growth. There is change and disruption but the fundamentals of our business are not changing.” “There is more of a shift from national TV into digital. We have been looking at digital holistically for a while as a way to reach consumers,” Benowitz noted.

The Importance of Data and Closed Loop Initiatives

 Is data a game changer? “We are all talking about data,” Scanzoni said, “But there is nothing new about data. Yes it is more sophisticated and there is more first and third party data. But we’ve used data in TV for many years. We are doing it better – it is more objective and reliable - but there is no nirvana here using data.” But data is being collected and leveraged in new ways. “The closed loop is new,” said Myers. “There are closed loop initiatives from companies like NBCU, Viacom and Turner. Do they have scale and are they sustainable?” Scanzoni responded, “If I were a seller I would do exactly that but as a buyer I do not see the value in closed loops. You have to have a consistent data set to apply to a full TV portfolio. The correlations are different between Kantar and Nielsen, for example. They point you in different directions. You need a consistent dataset and have to find a way to optimize across vendors. Sellers have to work as a group but that is impossible because they have their own self interests. Agencies need to choose data and do their own correlations.”

Automation versus Human Relationships

Programmatic continues to loom large over the industry. Williams noted, “Programmatic has the ability to help decision-making over multiple media touch points, which is great. Investments become more efficient and it is a true value proposition.” But what about the balance between sales automation and the human relationships that are the cornerstone of our business? Penski responded that, “Relationships are important if not more important in the industry now. We have added people to our staff because to buy programmatically now requires even more people. Keeping talent is a big challenge for us. We are still a very human based industry.” Benowitz added, “It is not a matter of traditional versus programmatic. There is room for both. We look at content, engagement and watercooler talk. But the ability to buy auto intenders is certainly where we should be headed. It won't go all one way or the other. It still takes two people talking to hear the passion in their voice. If we lose that we are in a different place.”

Looking Ahead

Between the impact of data and programmatic on creative and consumers, the industry continues to evolve and innovate. Some final words of wisdom were offered by the panel. Benowitz advised, “Don't be afraid. There is a lot going on but there is room to do business.”  Penski added, “There is still a need for humans in our ecosystem. We must continue to work together and find ways to bring competitors together to work together. It is not just about data.”

This article first appeared on www.MediaBizBloggers.com

DPAA Explores the Mediapalooza

If you think at the television space has undergone change in the past few years, you haven't seen anything yet. In the world of out-of-home (OOH) digital placed based media, the impact of digital technology arguably surpasses all other types of advertising media. Which is why attending the annual DPAA conference is so important to understand the pervasiveness and effectiveness of digital messaging on consumer behavior. "It is a great time for video" exclaimed DPAA president Barry Frey, "The world is changing, disrupting, fragmenting and shifting like tectonic plates. Technology is forcing change upon consumer habits which is foisting change on media habits.  It is a Mediapalooza."

Indeed, now we can receive content and messages when we pump gas in our car, sit in a movie or a nail salon, shop at a bodega or a mall, use a vending machine, an elevator, a taxi or Uber or visit a doctor’s office. There are many new streams of data available through such novel sources as vending machines, airports, stadiums and gyms. The opportunities to reach consumers at every point in their day wherever they are, makes for new collectable datasets that can lead to an all-encompassing view of their behavior.

Currently “forty-one percent of OOH is digital,” according to DPAA Chairman François de Gaspé Beaubien and this is posed to increase over the next few years. Looking ahead, Frey predicts that "by 2017 more than half of all ooh revenue will be digital and 10% bought programmatically. There will then be a steep curve towards programmatic. *

So where is all of this disruption leading?

Change, Change, Change

Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategist for Publicis Groupe mapped out three areas of massive change - Globalization (which he deems “unstoppable”), Demographic shifts (noting that the average age in Africa is under 21 and the aging of China led to the reversal of the one child rule) and Digitization (which is driven by phones that today have “1000 more processing power than in the first space shuttle.”)

Marketing Without Borders

Tobaccowala reprimanded marketers who he said, “have to learn how to market. They haven't done so in 30 years. Eighty percent of what marketers were doing was logistics and managing revenue points.”  Relying on comparing yourself to a traditional set of competitors is risky because “threats and opportunities come from the outside.” Take, for example, the iPhone. “When iPhone came out Nokia and Blackberry did not take it seriously because it had no keyboard and, anyway, what did Apple know about phones? If you don't take people seriously, things happen. Benchmarking against other pathetic people doesn't make you any less pathetic.”

Forget Data Ownership. The Secret to Success is Storytelling

And the lure of owning your data? Tobaccowala is unimpressed. He said, “Owning data alone will be obsolete. It is how you access data not own it. It is the algorithms. Owning is so 1980s.” The secret to success is storytelling. “We have to recognize that we are talking to humans. Storytelling is very, very important. And mobility is also important.” He concluded, “Change sucks. The more things you want to stay the same, the more you have to change yourself. How do we change the people? We need to learn to collaborate.”

Ecosystem Dichotomies
Lori Hiltz, CEO Havas Media spoke of the “complexity of our business where the largest retailer does not own a store, where families are connected and disconnected at the same time and where technologies shape the dynamics of the new us.” Despite rumors to the contrary, David Sable, Global CEO Y&R asserted that, “TV is not over. Cinema is still strong. They say that print media dead but catalogs are having resurgence.” He also refutes the theory that as media gets fractured, TV audiences will likely get smaller. He said, “How do you define TV? We are watching more video than we have ever watched in the history of mankind. We are watching for longer and longer time. There are more screens and more shows to watch. In 1999 there were 26 series to watch. In 2014 there are 1715 series shows available to view, not including short form video.”

The Future is Expansive and Expensive

“Let’s set the record straight,” advises Sable, “The narrow definition of TV is digibabble. As Michael Wolfe wrote in his new book, TV is the new TV. It is simple. Think about the entire ecosystem. Twitter doesn't kill TV. It makes it better.” The idea that content can be free is unsustainable to Sable. “The future of free is dismal and not sustainable. Advertising pays for content. There are three ways to access content - steal it, pay for it or watch ads.” And just wait – “NFL contracts are up in 2022,“ Sable warns, “That is when the next big change will happen. That will be the next huge inflection.”

Time to Re:Think The Role of Research

This year’s ARF Re:Think conference showed the industry how far Research has come in impacting the overall media business model. In the days of spots and dots and proxy demographic targets, Research played more of a report card role asking the eternal question - How well did we do within our limited universe of influence?

But now, thanks to digital video across devices, big data, technological advances such as machine learning and qual / quant hybrid measurements such as neuroscience, we find that the business advancements of programmatic, cross platform and advanced TV require a strong, visionary Research department role. And the race is on. Gayle Fuguitt, CEO of the ARF noted that “Our tech solutions haven't kept up with the consumer.” So beyond the usual reportage of how a company is performing, researcher now grapple with issues that emanate from unanticipated sources. Here are a few that were discussed at the Re:Think:

Data Analytics and Integration

Stan Sthanunathan, SVP Consumer & Market Insights at Unilever summed it up when he said, there are “50 billion devices all throwing off data. But it's not about the data. It's about what we do with it.”

We have all of this great data at our fingertips and there is more and more big data coming at us from many sources. Of course not all data is valuable and much of the data is siloed. But how will we know what drives our insights and what doesn’t if we cannot easily and efficiently bring it all together to analyze? As CBS CRO David Poltrack noted, “Big data analytics is an emerging field.” Emerging yes, but still diffuse. Bruce Friend, Vision Critical’s President of Media and Entertainment, believes that data integration is a priority, “More and more of our clients are looking inwards towards their own dataset, trying to integrate that with the other research information they are collecting and unfortunately there is no elegant way of doing that right now.”

The Business Stress of Cross Platform

The migration of video across a multitude of platforms not only has measurement challenges, it is also changing the entire business model including sales, marketing and branding. Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Unilever cited the full compendium when he said that we are going from “TV centric to content everywhere, linear to multi touch and mass marketing to hyper targeted marketing.”  According to Joan Fitzgerald, SVP Television and Cross-Media Services at comScore, we talk about a “decline in live TV viewing but viewing is fragmenting across viewing opportunities. 87% of the total US internet population watches online video. Millenials lead the way in online video viewing. 60% watch smartphones in a month 15% watch every day. It is a big driver of change in our business.” Lori Hiltz, CEO Havas, concurs, “Cognitive thinking, applied analytics, social insights, mobile distribution, cloud computing are all impacting the business today. Mobile is driving everything we do. Facebook bypass the model of working through agencies. This resets the way we access insights.”

Viewability

Viewability is a crucial challenge for all types of media businesses – not just cross platform but also with digitally placed based media outside the home. So while the solution for viewability – whether a piece of content can actually be viewed on the screen - will benefit many types of content and advertising platforms, we currently lack standard measures. Fred Leach, Head of Marketing for Facebook suggested that we “need accreditation for ad servers.” But it is more than that. It is a bit of the Wild West out there, as Nathalie Bordes, Senior Director, Emerging Platforms ESPN noted, “There are technological challenges for premium publishers. There are standards now for desk top and mobile browser, but we need to be platform agnostic. There are also many vendors and different metrics.”

Non-Human Traffic

A sibling issue to Viewability is non-human (or invalid) traffic of search bots, scrapers and hacking tools.  According to Incapsula, in 2013, 61.5 percent of traffic on the web was non-human. It seems high, but even if that were halved, it is still a large percentage of internet traffic. Josh Chasin, CRO for comScore is focused on this issue. He said, "Non-human traffic is more frustrating for publishers. ComScore has seen that one of the biggest drivers of the variance in reported viewability across the different vendors is treatment of non-human traffic and fraud. If reported viewability is unrealistically high, you are probably paying for fraud.”

Adding to all of the above is the age old challenge of measurement – from cross platform to engagement to ROI. Do we create new metrics or do we retro-fit current industry standards?  Some, like Sthanunathan believe that we “need to get insights that we can't get from a traditional approach.” But the foundation of the business is built on metrics developed decades ago.  No matter what direction the industry takes, it is nice to know that Research and its ability to mine insights will be in the center of all the action.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com