Month: April 2022

The following interview has been edited for space and clarity.

How is Known leveraging clean rooms? 

Clean rooms basically provide us with the ability to use first-party data when the client has to better target the planning, and better target the buy. And it’s definitely made it possible to unlock performance when you’ve got a great data set. It’s one of the tools that we think about when we’re thinking about how to drive better performance for a client. Like, can we build something on top of their dataset? Or if it’s a newer brand and their first-party data is still growing, how can we design things so that we are growing the data and adding to it over time — whether it’s through experimentation or better telemetry?

Skeptic (Known’s proprietary test-and-learn software to assess and optimize client campaigns) has been your secret weapon. How does it work?

We have all of the clients’ first-party data, all their research, all this new research we bring to the process to develop the campaign concept and develop the initial batch of creative. But we like to essentially design the campaign to be a learning campaign, a campaign that’s going to help us learn and optimize and get better over time. And in that process, we can literally design this so that, in addition to being a marketing campaign, it’s also a research campaign on what creative does well. And use that to literally say, “We know that when you do this, it works better, and when you do that, it doesn’t.” The idea that the use of data and insights stops at the brief is very old school. The day we know the least is the day when we launch, right? We only can know more after that.

It’s not just why we think about our data science and technology investments the way we do. It’s vital that the creative team is calling our data scientists and saying, “Which creative did well? Which one won?” When you gamify the system and are using the clients’ KPIs as your scoreboard, it all works a lot better.

How does Skeptic help clients improve both performance- and brand-driven advertising. 

There’s a whole class of marketers and advertisers who’ve grown up digital- and social-first, and their organizations, their boards, their leadership are really used to those kinds of metrics that you get from those kinds of systems. But once they reach a certain scale, they need to start investing in brands, they need to start building awareness. How do you teach an organization how to spend millions on brand advertising, and feel really good about it when up until now they’ve been used to having, like, eight dials and speedometers every day? And if it’s not showing immediate results are like, “Why are we spending this money?”

Aspects of this come up all the time, whether it’s thinking about how to advise a client in terms of moving them and their organization into investing more in the long term. Or how to use science and data in sort of experimentation to make the brand stuff more measurable and, hence, better set up to be accountable to the board around the budget you’re getting.

Part of that is helping the CMO speak the language of the CFO, though, right? 

It’s absolutely critical these days for CMOs to really be in tight collaboration with the CFO. We actually spent a lot of time thinking about how do we make sure that we understand the internal dynamics that are going on around budgeting and KPIs. Some of this ends up getting into a little bit of management consulting. For an agency to do their best work as a partner to a company, they really need to understand what’s on the CFO’s wish list. How do you make sure that you’re really designing the approach in a campaign to support people on that journey? Can we run tests that answer questions that are critical for the C-suite? Having that information may mean that they continue down on the right path or can make key decisions.

IAmIdea, a five-year-old creative agency based in Kyiv, has been focused on pro-bono projects, particularly social media posts for War Against War, to help keep people informed about what’s happening on the ground.

“Our commercial Ukrainian clients are not doing projects now,” said Igor Finashkin, founder and creative director of IAmIdea. “All of our projects are dedicated to the war, support, insight, communications in the companies. The main thing [we’re doing with our clients] is to help our clients to keep communicating with people.”

Without commercial work for its Ukrainian clients, which make up the majority of the agency’s clients, which have included ride-sharing service Uklon and clothing brand Intertop, the shop is surviving on a reserve fund and is not currently earning money. Those funds are dedicated to paying salaries and providing additional support to the team, according to the agency. The agency did not share how much is in its reserve fund.

IAmIdea is now actively looking for more foreign clients to create commercial work for to earn money and continue to work. “As a service company, we want to keep producing ideas, creative materials, and all kinds of things for our clients,” said Finashkin. “We’re facing a necessity now to have international projects” which has led the team to begin to seek out conversations with prospective clients internationally, including in Europe and the U.S., he said.

Rather than commercial projects for their clients, creatives for the agency have been making videos, banner ads, and informational content to talk about what’s happening in their country and support efforts to end the war with projects like War Against War. Before the invasion, the agency’s creatives would typically work on commercial video productions for four to eight weeks. Now, those same creatives are producing videos in two to five days.

“Our process is 4X faster than it was before, maybe even 10X faster than before,” said Finashkin, adding that the team has to work quickly to make sure the information it is putting out is current. “It’s not like you’re working on commercials. You don’t have a lot of time.”

Prior to the Russian invasion, the agency had 24 employees; two of those employees have stopped working for the shop. Now 22 of the agency’s employees remain, working from their homes or from safe spaces they fled to following the invasion. The agency’s Ukrainian clients, which make up roughly 80% of its client base, stopped advertising in that time and it is unclear when they will begin again.

“We can do simple banners, simple videos to help people, to gather the nation, to get money and to educate people,” said Irene Ilchanka, creative director for IAmIdea, of the agency’s pro-bono work.

Creating work to keep people informed on what’s happening on the ground isn’t easy as the content has the creatives face the war, the tears and the damage caused daily. “It’s very hard but if it can help our country and our people, we have to do it,” said Finashkin.

Aside from the pro-bono projects like War Against War, the agency is also helping its clients with their internal communications, according to Finashkin.

“We are like every single Ukrainian — we’re trying to do what we do best to help our country,” said Igor Gavrush, a copywriter for the agency on a recent Google Meet call.  “What can we do? We can spread information.”

The move on paper resembles the spate of mergers on the creative side that CEO Mark Read engineered in 2018, which took strong up-and-coming brands and merged them into legacy agencies that had lost some of their sizzle. But that’s where the similarities end. 

Though cost-savings will be realized in the end by reducing the number of back-office needs when agencies merge, it’s not like either Mediacom or Mindshare were struggling. According to Convergence’s 2021 new business rankings, GroupM placed second overall in net new business globally and first in both APAC and Latin America, and secured $11.5 billion in wins and retentions.

First, the facts 

Digitally-leaning Google specialty shop Essence is merging with Mediacom to form EssenceMediacom, which will be led by Mediacom’s global CEO Nick Lawson. Essence’s global CEO Kyoto Matsushita, takes on the new role of CEO of WPP Japan. 

Mindshare will absorb the elements of former Ogilvy digital and performance offshoot Neo that it wasn’t already working with. 

And finally, a grouping of programmatic firms (Xaxis, Finecast) and other centralized “activation” units known as GroupM Services, will be renamed GroupM Nexus, to be led by Xaxis CEO Nicolas Bidon.

GroupM, through a spokesperson (global CEO Christian Juhl was not made available for comment) touted the growth potential in these unions. “We have many jobs open and plan on expanding quickly. And we anticipate career development and opportunities for all our people with increased exposure to meaningful work, new ways of thinking and ground-breaking insights redefining the future of media as well as unique access to the collective intelligence, mentorship, and capabilities of a globally connected organization,” said the spokesperson by email. 

A number of sources with history in WPP and GroupM ultimately agreed there’s decent synergies to be squeezed out of these unions. “Merging Mediacom and Essence creates very complementary capabilities in the same way that putting Neo fully into Mindshare creates complementary capabilities,” said one former high-ranking WPPer. 

A few other observations are worth mentioning

• Some observers in the industry were surprised the Essence name survived the merger — Mediacom is a better-known brand — but it is where Juhl rose to his current position. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Essence becomes the brand name moving forward,” mused one former WPP executive. One observer also noted that Essence, in merging with Mediacom, also adds non-digital expertise it did not possess — even when it was paired with the now-defunct Maxus brand several years ago.

• There simply don’t need to be that many different brand names in GroupM when clients are less sensitive to conflicts than they used to be, said one major media agency executive who declined to speak for attribution. “I think that a big part of this is in line with [WPP CEO Mark] Read and Christian’s philosophy, which is less brands is more and allows them to be stronger at certain components of the business.”

• Technology seems to be winning the day — and Juhl is known as a technology-driven executive. “When he came in there, he was known as the kid that’s going to revolutionize our old stodgy media business,” said one ex-WPPer. Juhl is 49.

• Tech capabilities continue to grow among media agencies, said Forrester global agency analyst Jay Pattisall: “This is more about bolstering the broader media business with digital technology and performance capabilities. These precision/persuasion consolidations are a trend. Dentsu did so in early 2021 combining iProspect with Vizeum and 360i with dentsu X. Dept just did so last week buying 3Q Digital.”

• There’s history behind the Mindshare/Neo consummation. According to sources with knowledge of GroupM, Neo was originally meant to become Mindshare’s digital arm, given that the agency in the early 2000s didn’t have a digital unit. But then Ogilvy CEO Shelly Lazarus put the kibosh on the marriage. 

• As for the rebranding of GroupM Services and the programmatic firms into GroupM Nexus, one former GroupM executive quipped, “When you don’t know what to do with something, you rebrand it.” 

• Finally, the Wavemaker brand was noticeably absent from the news, but observers said to not read much into that. “If WPP had a third digital piece, they would have merged it with Wavemaker, but they didn’t,” said one ex-WPP exec, who added that years ago, Wavemaker’s predecessor agency MEC was supposed to merge with WPP direct response specialist Wunderman (which is now merged with JWT to form WundermanThompson), but the deal didn’t get done.