The Marketing Journey. Interview with Jessica Navas

Jessica Navas, Chief Planning Officer for Erwin Penland is a polymath who studied communications, French and psychology in college. Her career in advertising started as a receptionist at Chiat Day. “I began my career in advertising not knowing which area I wanted to go into. It wasn’t until I started working with planners that I truly understood what they did – and I realized I’d actually been a planner my entire life,” she confided. 

Luckily she was taken under the wing of her idol, Jane Newman, known at the time as “the mother of account planning.” From there, she launched into an illustrious agency career moving from Merkley, Newman, and Harty to Cliff Freeman & Partners to J. Walter Thompson and now as Chief Planning Officer of Erwin Penland. 

Charlene Weisler: Jessica, describe your planning and marketing journey.

Jessica Navas: I learned the rigors of strategic planning from Jane Newman in a very pure way. And while it’s fascinating to see how planning’s application has evolved, the essential core of the discipline still holds true: identifying the real business challenges and creating an authentic and compelling brand platform – and have course, communications - that can help to take on those challenges. Though Account Planning was pioneered in the UK, I’m also an impatient, pragmatic American – so I was well-trained in hunting, gathering and analyzing insights while also very much in the camp of uncovering news I can use. Ultimately my training at Merkley Newman Harty was terrific, and the work I helped create was solid, but after a few years I was looking for new challenges.

My next stop was Cliff Freeman & Partners. In the late 90’s, early 2000’s, the agency was a hotbed of creativity and served as a finishing school for me. Here, take your strategic chops and now here’s how to refine and put them into action. There I worked with some of the smartest creative brains in the business – they truly challenged my strategic thinking and we all arrived at a better place because of it. Plus, I think Cliff Freeman the man is one of the unsung heroes of our business. Eventually, at that point in my career, having been at small agencies, I wanted to experience a larger agency with big brands and global impact, so I went to JWT, where I worked on JetBlue, Lean Cuisine, Rolex, T.Rowe Price and Puma. Around us, the media landscape was exploding and many of our clients had several agencies on their roster, each with their own lane of responsibility. And while we created work in a variety of channels for our brands, I was often envious of the opportunities smaller agencies were given. Shops that were kind of reinventing themselves intrigued me, defying expectations of being a traditional ‘agency.’ A former co-worker had moved to Erwin Penland, which I’d never heard of, but then when I checked them out, I was blown away.  Yes, they are an up-and-coming agency but more like this ninja brand that came out of nowhere, doing all sorts of interesting things - clever brand communications and experiences in every channel – not to mention social media dynamos. 

What I really love about EP is that we aren’t focused on just marketing or advertising; we’re helping our clients define – and even re-imagine – their categories in actual behaviors and experiences. But it all begins with a meaningful, confident brand story. Clearly the media landscape has evolved, and that’s where my role has stayed true, in uncovering the brand story and ensuring it comes to life in acts, gestures and demonstrations. Some of our clients may arrive with a brand story, but we make it work harder. This is how we build trust with the consumer, based on delivering on the brand promise and then growing the relationship.

Charlene Weisler: How do you do that?

Jessica Navas: True brand missions have to be felt and embodied internally and externally. Denny’s is America’s Diner. Califia Farms is all about plant-powered innovation. Whether we come up with  or we inherit it, the brand story must be felt inside and out to be believable. Certainly there is so much more opportunity to connect with people nowadays but that doesn’t mean that a brand should be doing absolutely everything just because they can. It comes back to being rooted in a brand story that inspires the RIGHT brand behaviors. You now have amazing test-and-learn opportunities, but there is also a sense of pollution – if actions aren’t meaningful then there is the risk of tune-out.

Charlene Weisler: Do you use data for analytics and if so how?

Jessica Navas: We’re constantly gathering data – of course we always have, but now there’s so much more, with so much based on real world behavior, rather than ‘reported’, so it’s more truthful. And of course, there’s data about everything: consumer behavior, media usage, brand perceptions. We have never had more tools and inputs, and everything happens simultaneously. Today we need to find ways to connect the dots, to uncover stories that serve not just our brands, but also our consumers, helping to bring them closer to how they view and ultimately brand themselves. There is a great quote our Social Media Director always uses: “People don’t buy your product because they like the product. They buy the product because they like themselves.” It’s true! We are humble and explore how our brands can be in service of what consumers want for themselves.

Charlene Weisler: How do you achieve work / life balance?

Jessica Navas: I think the word balance is overused and not necessarily at the core of what makes people happy, so I don’t really hold it up as a goal. Do what makes you feel good and excited and alive, which could be ‘unbalanced’ living, but who cares? I don’t have children but we all have our own juggling to do. I have strong relationships, friendships; I get involved in charity and volunteering. How much energy do we have to give? Certainly like everyone, there are times when I feel out of balance and need to take a breath. If you don’t feel good and centered, you won’t have much to offer. I feel grateful that my female and male co-workers are very supportive of balance, meaning the pursuit of whatever makes me feel most energized.

Charlene Weisler: What are your views of mentorship?

Jessica Navas: I feel very lucky that I’ve had great mentors throughout my career – both female and male role models who have always been great supporters and champions. I love that they help me feel confident and I try to pass that on to my team – I want to help them shine by supporting them and pushing them forward.  I also believe that we learn from the next generation. Certainly I have 20+ years of experience, but I also learn from the kids every day. It is important to learn both up and down. There is a favorite Malcolm Gladwell quote I love: “Change your mind about something important every day” – for me, staying open minded is everything. 

Charlene Weisler: What advice would you give a college student interested in a career in media?

Jessica Navas: Know yourself. Of course I look for someone who is studied - but also open and receptive to the world. The most critical thing is curiosity. I always want to know what they read, listen to, and watch – what intrigues them. I want someone who understands where we’ve been and is fascinated how that impacts what is happening now and how it may impact us in the future. Curiosity is key.

 This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

Using A.I. To Measure Marketing. An Interview with Adgorithms’ Or Shani

Or Shani, CEO and Founder of Adgorithms, wanted to change the way marketing programs were executed and how marketing decisions were made. In an attempt to streamline marketing processes (from execution and optimization to analysis and calibration), he created an artificial intelligence-based marketing system he calls Albert (for Albert Einstein). “The complexity in the way we were buying, analyzing and conducting marketing was immense, and over the years it has gotten even worse,” he explained. His company, Adgorithms, purports to break through the complexity of digital marketing with Artificial Intelligence.

Charlene Weisler: How does Albert work?

Or Shani:  We developed artificial intelligence technology, which helps to do many of the time-consuming, manual tasks involved in modern day digital marketing without the complexity. We currently integrate with nearly 30 vendor platforms within the martech and adtech ecosystem. Albert comes in and acts as a single centralized point of contact. Within minutes, we can run Google Search, social, paid and non-paid campaigns on the fly without any manual input (other than the KPIs and target customer information the marketer gives us upfront).

Charlene Weisler: What does your company contribute to TV measurement to gain a greater understanding of how TV is being used/consumed?

Or Shani: When it comes to TV measurement, we integrate with any third-party solution the advertiser is already using. By doing this we’re able to use their viewer data to inform all facets of their digital campaigns, which brings online and offline efforts into greater alignment. Ultimately, this approach gives TV and digital efforts a shared focus, where digital insights inform TV efforts, and TV data informs digital targeting and conversion.

For instance, Albert can use TV data to correlate certain consumer behaviors that he sees online—on websites, social, and search—with specific TV advertising spots. Equipped with information about the relationship between TV and specific user patterns and trends, Albert can now make assumptions about different audience micro-segments and begin acting on them. This introduces a new way for brands to convert customers online and on mobile, who they’ve initially identified through TV. Whereas most second screen solutions are primarily focused on pairing conversion opportunities directly with specific show content, we’re able to use viewer data to “find” specific user-types and lookalikes online, which we can then target and convert using the content that's most likely to appeal to them (rather than TV-specific content).

Charlene Weisler:  What data metric do you use to match digital to TV?

Or Shani: In matching digital advertising to TV, Albert utilizes both deterministic data from the different media providers and different targeting methodology.  For example in a digital campaign coinciding with a TV one, Albert could target users based on a number of different interactions they have with the specific TV program during which the TV Ad will be shown.  This could include targeting users that have the TV show as one of their interests on Facebook, liking its social pages, or even those that are following the show's main stars on Twitter.  When it comes to the Search channel, Albert could target users that are searching for the TV show or related searches before, after, or during the time of the program.

Charlene Weisler: Do you work with segmentations?

Or Shani:  In a way, yes, but segmentation works differently in our system. For example, one of our clients might come to us not knowing exactly who they should be targeting. Maybe their target customer only represents 2% of the market they’re in and they don’t know exactly how to find them. Or maybe their recent campaign didn’t produce, so they are reluctant to keep targeting the same audience over and over. Albert will step in and find the right audience for them.

One way we do this is by integrating with our customers’ CRM and getting further data about their clients or customers. Albert will then start with mini-campaigns, creating micro-segments or audiences of one, as he goes and learns what works and doesn’t. Once he’s determined this, he rapidly expands and continues calibrating along the way until he meet the marketer’s KPI.

Charlene Weisler: What metrics do you use?

Or Shani:  Technically we can track everything. The measurement trend in marketing is to match back to more and more concrete results that are tied to revenue. And that is a good direction for the industry. Some clients aim for clicks and eyeballs but there is more demand for sophisticated optimization metrics that tie back to revenue or sales.

Charlene Weisler: Can you track engagement?

Or Shani:  Everyone has a different definition of engagement. Some define it as one minute spent on the site. Others define it as a visitor reading an article, viewing a video or downloading a whitepaper. It depends on what works for your brand. These things can be easily tracked, but anything based on sentiment or an overall feeling about are hard to assess through analytics. With a system like ours that is committed to performance metrics, we can bypass these more abstract measurements and simply look at the results. Did we do our job? It’s an easy yes or no. The trick is measurement which is very hard. Analytics cannot provide that type of measurement solution.

Charlene Weisler: What about the roll-out of Smart TVs? Will you be able to measure that?

Or Shani:  Theoretically, yes, but it is very complex to do so. Different connected TVs have different operating systems. And just like mobile, it is still evolving. It is not as simple as tracking IDs.

Charlene Weisler: Do you see marketing as a creative job or as more quantitative?

Or Shani:  Marketing has and always will be a mix of art and science. Due to issues I mentioned previously, however, the pendulum has swung more in the direction of “science” in the past decade-plus. As a result, the creative aspect has started to suffer. Marketers own the brand, customer acquisition and retention. The best way to build a strong, sustainable brand, which supports the overall business growth, is through storytelling.  This requires a completely different part of the brain than the part used to analyze things until you’re blue in the face. And marketers as a whole aren’t particularly good at this type of analysis anyhow (mostly because it’s nearly impossible for any human to scour that many channels and produce meaningful insights on each in a short period of time). The need to tell a good story doesn’t go away with data, and marketers are good at telling those stories. Let them focus on tugging at the hearts and minds of customers, while technology focuses on the data aspects of marketing.

Charlene Weisler: Looking ahead the next five years, what do you see happening in the media measurement landscape?

Or Shani:  There will be many more AI-driven technological solutions that will make life easier for us, like self-driving cars or personal assistants. These things will become more common. In media, CMOs will be liberated by technology. Marketers will be free to make marketing fun again and not just focused on execution of a campaign plan.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Getting Insights from Online Communities. A Look at Vision Critical

As the media and entertainment industries move more into programmatic and big data initiatives, we now refer to consumer targets that go beyond the “proxy’ of age and gender and more into a “new-speak” of audience segments or communities. But there are insights and technology companies that have a long history of measuring audience feedback in the context of communities. One of them is Vision Critical, which bills itself as a customer intelligence software company. Over the past fifteen years, Vision Critical has developed online communities of behavioral segments that gather consumer feedback in real time to be used by their clients for ongoing feedback and insight. 

Jack Myers, chairman of MyersBizNet, speaks of “Emotion Tech,” where technology enables us to better connect consumer emotional responses to their motivations and actions. “The current wave of new research is transitional,” Myers believes. “It will be transcended by new neuro-based technology that will connect emotional responses to media and advertising, creating a completely new set of valuation insights. While this may be a few years away, once this data begins appearing, and it will, I believe it will make many of the current performance-based data sets moot.” Myers notes that “Emotion Tech will make panels such as those developed and managed by Vision Critical even more relevant, as consumers will be identified by their emotional patterns and responses in addition to their traditional demographics, psychographics and sociographics.”

I sat down with Bruce Friend, President, Global Media & Entertainment at Vision Critical, and asked him a few questions about his online community-based research service and its impact on the industry.

CW: How many different online community groups are there? How do you create new ones?

BF: We work with hundreds of businesses and organizations globally that interact with approximately five million people within and across all the Vision Critical Insight Communities. Specific to media and entertainment, we work with over two hundred brands today.

We launch Vision Critical Insight Communities every week. We work closely with our customers’ research, product, marketing and digital teams to build an engaging online community where members can interact with our customers. Once the online community is built, Vision Critical works collaboratively with customers to populate the community with members. Once the Vision Critical Insight Community is healthy with enough members--anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 people, customers can begin engagement activities to gather feedback and insight.

CW: Have your customers been able to get insight that’s been surprising to you? Surprising results or surprising applications of the results?

BF: Our customers engage with their community audience in a variety of different ways. I’m sure that much of the feedback is either interesting or surprising in some way and drives more informed decision-making. Aside from driving advertising revenue, online communities are playing a huge role in anticipating trends and preferences so that networks and publishers can deliver exactly what their consumers want, when they want and how they want. While in some cases we have visibility into how companies use their communities and the results, our software is created in such a way that companies can run with it on their own. We have great examples on the Vision Critical website with regards to how companies have used communities. The Allure, Discovery Communications and Yahoo customer stories on our website are all great!

More specifically, I think the most surprising and inspiring thing I see overall is our customers’ willingness to learn how to leverage their Vision Critical Insight Community and use our technology to run their own projects. The benefits here are that they realize they can turn projects around much faster (sometimes within hours) at a lower cost, when they run the projects themselves.

CW: Have your insight communities been used to make programming decisions and if so can you give an example?

BF: Yes, there are many examples of our customers turning to their communities to help make decisions surrounding programming. We’ve seen our customers launch new channels, come up with TV show names, inform new and returning show greenlight decisions and much more, as a result of working closely with community members. We have a case study available on the Vision Critical website, which highlights how Discovery Communications turned to its community to launch the Destination America channel—it was quite a success.

CW: What is the process in recruiting members for the online communities and how do you keep them engaged?

BF: Vision Critical works collaboratively with our customers to promote the launch of an online community through internal databases, social media channels and email lists (e.g., subscriber lists, loyalty programs, etc.) and so on. We’ve even seen customers promote their communities at public events. Through this promotional effort, people interested in being part of a community join and actively contribute. The members have a vested interest in the company and its success, so we find that they’re eager to share their feedback in order to help make business improvements.

The companies we work with engage their members in projects on a regular basis through dynamic questionnaires and discussions. We’ve also found that community members enjoy seeing how their insight has translated into decisions—so what we call “sharebacks” encourage ongoing engagement and satisfaction, as well.

CW: What kinds of metrics do your clients gather?

BF: Companies use the Vision Critical customer intelligence software platform to gather different forms of feedback and insight. Feedback from consumers via the insight community is captured, analyzed and reported in real-time. Our customers gather different attitudinal and behavioral metrics depending on the kind of information and insights they’re looking to derive from their community. For example, a lifestyle network may be interested in launching a new show targeting affluent women. In that case, this kind of network may want to target that specific audience via its insight community to learn about their behaviors, patters, purchases, etc. in order to deliver a more targeted show.

CW: How do your customers decide on what audience groups or types to target?

BF: Vision Critical customers decide who they want to engage for insight based on people they want or need to better understand, such as specific demographics (age, sex, zip code, etc.) and attitudinal groups. In further detail, our customers can also target and report on behavioral segments, based on their own passive first party data that is collected from various sources such as customer subscriber lists, sales transactions and even recently, digital media platform usage, including social, from both desktop and mobile apps.

CW: How does the data your customers gather relate to sales or content performance? Can you give some examples of how this data can be used?

BF: As mentioned, our customers use their communities in a variety of different ways. Some turn to community members for feedback and insight to dive new product development. Others turn to their communities to improve marketing efforts, such as ad campaigns. We know that feedback from Vision Critical Insight Communities has improved sales efforts and has support content efforts. However, we just can’t provide specifics here, as this data is our customers’ and as such is proprietary.

CW: How do you think your measurement will most benefit insights into cross platform consumer usage?

BF: In many cases Vision Critical’s platform is already enabling a number of our customers to measure usage, satisfaction, performance, etc. of their content and services across multiple media platforms or of those platforms specifically (including OTT services, MVPDs, Digital Radio, etc.). 

We only see this increasing, as more and more of our customers take control over their own product and content distribution data. This evolution of our community platform is really the Holy Grail for us and our customers. Our customers can now:

·         Build large scale communities, numbering tens and even hundreds of thousands of members,

·         Leverage Vision Critical’s customer intelligence platform to capture passive consumer behavior data, which can then immediately trigger surveys and discussion forums to understand who is consuming and the “whys” behind those ongoing behaviors. 

What’s most exciting is that we are just scratching the surface of all the possibilities this new type of customer intelligence community can bring.     

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com