Month: June 2019

Within the walls of any company, it’s the marketing department that boasts the deepest understanding of customer data. It’s marketers who work directly with ad tech platforms and analytics tools to understand exactly how customers are behaving across devices and channels. Interpreting the data and making it work for a brand’s strategy is still largely a human endeavor — or at least it should be. That’s where marketing intelligence comes in.

Diving into the data
Marketing intelligence isn’t just a corporate mindset, and it’s not enough to hire a few analysts. Taking it a step further, it’s a holistic approach to analyzing and using data.

Marketers operating under a “marketing intelligence” ethos combine first-party data with data related to paid media. By unifying paid media data with owned-and-operated data, marketers can glean actionable insights from mountains of customer data that’s previously been siloed on various platforms.

“It depends on the campaign and the genre of course, but generally you can’t just look at paid media and advertising in such a silo anymore,” said Lauren Jennings, media director at Havas. “Marketing intelligence is the summation of everything. What’s your PR doing? What’s your CRM doing? All of the different pieces in addition to paid.”

It all comes back to plugging the right people into the work at the right time. The solution here isn’t sexy: Marketers need to empower experts, educate their employees and put people in the right places so that all this data can be analyzed, synthesized, understood and acted upon.

Re-building legacies
It’s often the major legacy brands that struggle to operate from a true marketing intelligence standpoint. That may seem counterintuitive — after all, they have major resources, including a lot of data. But marketing intelligence isn’t about possessing resources — it’s about supplying marketers with the proper human expertise and technological sophistication to form a complete understanding of all the data flowing through the organization.

Personnel is just as much of a concern. Legacy brands have found that they haven’t hired enough tech-savvy marketing experts who know how to synthesize and act upon the information flowing in from different parts of their organizations. Nor have they been able to effectively recruit against the Netflixes or Ubers of the world.

Many of these companies are struggling to fundamentally comprehend their data and communicate it effectively on an interdepartmental level, creating rifts in priorities and workflows.

Companies have customer intelligence, business intelligence, artificial intelligence and media intelligence. But they don’t have the people or the human ingenuity necessary to synergize and interpret all of it.

If brands need to seek synchronicity between their numerous platforms and meld their first-party and paid data, while weaving the human ingenuity of specialized technology experts and data scientists into their marketing DNA, as well as empower their marketers.

Tech-savvy brands, such as Netflix and banking brand Monzo, come to the table with a good understanding of marketing intelligence. They are tech-born, tech-bred, and the marketers

that drove their success possessed a mastery of data from the beginning. Brands that follow suit will continue to emerge — and they’ll be able to work much, much smarter.

The post Businesses don’t understand the true value of their data appeared first on Digiday.

To try and close the diversity gap, Unilever asked 63 of its marketers and agency execs in London, Rotterdam and New York to take a DNA test earlier this year. The concept is to provide evidence that if marketers have a better understanding of their own backgrounds — assisted by psychologists — they’ll be able to scrap preconceived views of who people who buy their ads actually are.

Digiday caught up with Santos to discuss the study’s results and find out whether it can be scaled beyond the initial three tests. Below are excerpts from the discussion, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What have the DNA tests revealed about the company’s advertising?
When we did the test we weren’t sure it would work. The psychologists who worked with us said initiatives like this don’t often make a difference. The people who took part in the test took part in one test prior to a workshop they had with the behavioral scientists and then they took another one after. There was a 34% drop in the stereotypes employed by the group between the sessions.

What happens next?
Lots of marketers who weren’t able to participate in the test have asked about it. Our agencies want to scale it across their own organizations. We’ll start rolling out the test to other markets. We’re hosting an important meeting in Cannes with the key heads of all the agency networks and their creative directors to talk about the experiment. We will ask them to roll it out across their own organizations because the results were dramatic. The aim is for this part of the “Unstereotype” initiative to become something that influences everything we do.

What happens if agencies don’t support the move?
We’ve seen strong leadership from the heads of the WPP, IPG and Omnicom main agencies we work with. Competitors who would never normally sit together are cooperating to tackle this issue because they see diversity as a critical problem for their own businesses. That said, if there are agencies that are not on the same page as us then naturally we’d put distance between us as there’s a lack of shared values. There are people in the industry that are opportunistic and like to jump on these issues. It’s easier to spot those businesses that aren’t serious about addressing something like stereotypes in ads. The money, hours and resource spent by our agencies to remove these stereotypes from our ads tell me that they are serious about it.

How do you make sure agencies are walking the diversity walk?
One basic thing we do is at the end of every year we have a scorecard to rank where our agencies are when it comes to diversity. We’re also looking at every ad that airs to see the level of stereotypes that are featured. At the moment 94% of the ads we test are deemed progressive, while the remaining 6% aren’t. In those cases where the ads are regressive, we either pull them off air completely or modify them. It’s the best way for us to check our agencies are being creative and thoughtful of the people who buy our brands.

Why has it taken Unilever this long to tackle ethnic stereotypes?
We launched the “Unstereotype” initiative around gender three years ago because we felt it was the most critical in terms of the problem we needed to tackle. Nearly half our management roles are filled by women and that is up from 38% a year ago. As that representation has improved we’ve seen our approach to diversity take on more dimensions so there’s a level of intersectionality to how gender diversity has made us look more closely at other aspects such as racial, sexual and religion.

We’re on the right track when it comes to challenging ethnic stereotypes in our ads but I want us to be more progressive because that then pushes society. That’s not always easy as not all our brands in other markets are ready for progressive moves. You will see us start to be more progressive in spite of that, however, as we learn more about what it takes. We ran an ad for Brooke Bond Red Label tea in India three years ago that featured a transgender band. It was a conservative society and yet we decided to promote the brand in a different way and when we did we found that we were helping to normalize transgender people. You’ll see some more moves like that which are more reflective of reality and more progressive.

The post ‘We’ll distance ourselves from agencies that don’t challenge stereotypes’: Unilever’s marketing chief on diversity issues appeared first on Digiday.

In order to take into consideration the publisher’s inventory, the demand from advertisers and the reader experience, the news publisher divided up its editorial video into five different categories by length, ranging from under 30 seconds to over 180 seconds. Within that, each editorial video category has its own ad specification and a maximum number of ads. For instance, editorial videos under 60 seconds long only run six-second pre-roll ads.

Before this year, 60-second-long editorial videos ran pre-roll ads that were six, 15 and 20 seconds long, before they were restricted to six seconds. It will alter this again if there a change in market demand. Video ads are capped at one every five visits.

“A lot of people feared it would lose money,” said Denny Plaggenburg, head of video at Telegraaf Media Groep. “We are strict, we say no to a few ads before serving the content. But it is a matter of supply and demand. It’s about quality, not quantity. We have a lot of inventory, we would prefer to have less and sell it for more.”

Plaggenburg said the now around 20% of its inventory is six-second ads. The publisher has 30 million monthly pre-roll impressions on its own site, which now adhere to these guidelines. It also has another 30 million monthly impressions on YouTube, which it can sell itself and keep all of the revenue. Plus another 100 million on monthly outstream impressions.

According to the publisher, by limiting supply on certain editorial videos, CPMs for its on-site pre-roll have increased between 15% and 20% compared with last year. Currently, six-second ad CPMs are around €12 ($13.42 / £10.71), while the floor price for longer formats is €15 ($16.78 / £13.39) CPMs, but the average is higher, with some bidding €30 ($33.55 / £26.74) CPMs. The publisher has also run some campaigns on a cost-per-completed view model. Around 90% of ads are sold in programmatic private marketplace deals, around 10% are sold direct, more often than not because they are part of wider cross-channel deals.

The growth of six-second ad formats has been stymied by a lack of available creative assets and the format’s perceived value. While multiple studies extoll the virtues of shorter ad formats, they mainly focus on human behavior and short attention spans, rather than the effectiveness of the format, according to agency sources.

While six-second ads are growing for De Telegraaf, the most popular on its site are 15 seconds and 20 seconds, while 30 second is a dying breed. But Plaggenburg estimates that in the next few years demand for six-seconds will nearly catch up with that of 15-second ads.

“It’s a bold move,” said Chris Hardiman, product director at Xaxis, about De Telegraaf’s six-second ad limit. “Until [six-second ads] become a requirement it can be an immobile landscape. Using short-form video to reach people, six-second creative is the right way to do it.”

Six-second formats work best when they complement other media, working to peak curiosity, send a key message or tease something new, rather than a standalone ad, according to Hardiman. “You can then be more creative with longer video ads, rather than have to drive awareness, then engagement, then consideration all in one ad,” he added.

However, the tide is moving in the right direction. Two months ago, if an advertiser didn’t have a six-second ad creative the conversation stopped there, said Hardiman. Now Xaxis, with the help of GroupM agencies, helps advertisers create the content. Publishers like De Telegraaf are also increasingly offering to edit advertiser creative to fit the format.

The post Six-second ads account for 10% of video revenue for Dutch publisher De Telegraaf appeared first on Digiday.