Month: May 2022

One example of clean rooms’ complexity is that, while typically associated with first-party data, a marketer is not required to have first-party of its own to use a clean room, according to Rossen. “For an advertiser or brand, in particular, whether you have first-party data at scale or not is really not the question,” he said. “What the question is is how are you bringing yourself today in a capability, in a position to use clean rooms in your ecosystem for media impact management, optimization and really planning and investment insights as well.”

Those use cases will be contingent on publishers and platforms plugging their own first-party data into clean rooms for advertisers to be able to measure and assess their campaigns’ performance. And while some on the sell-side are still sorting out their clean room strategies, others such as Disney, Google, Meta and NBCUniversal have either rolled out or begun testing clean rooms with advertisers and agencies like OMG.

“Every major supply-side publisher is going to be building out their own clean room environment,” Rossen said. Some will rely on clean room providers, such as Habu, InfoSum and Snowflake, which can facilitate some interoperability among publishers’ clean rooms, while others will opt to build their own proprietary clean rooms.

Of course, the widespread rollout of clean room options complicates matters in its own way. Publishers have already complained about the prospect of needing to support all kinds of different clean rooms, and Rossen acknowledged this complexity.

“The challenge is going to become how do we take all these disparate clean rooms — if you have media dollars in a walled garden ecosystem, media dollars in streaming and TV, media dollars in multiple different places — how are you going to bring that all together to look at a consolidated holistic view of your media investment. [This connection among clean rooms] is the next challenge we have to tackle together,” Rossen said.

But doesn’t the idea of connecting data across clean rooms defeat the entire purpose of having these information-safe houses? Nope, said Rossen. “It doesn’t defeat the purpose because it’s about protection of data rights.”

Rossen explained the clean rooms’ function for protecting data in a way that recalled an analogy of a locked metal briefcase handcuffed to a courier’s wrist in order to secure its custody. In that analogy, the clean room would be the briefcase, its contents would be the data and the courier would be the clean room provider. 

All analogies are oversimplifications, but this one would seem to hold up once there are standards in place that would enable data stored in one clean room to be shared into another clean room while complying with privacy regulations as well as companies’ own privacy policies. When it comes to clean rooms that level of standardized interoperability appears to be the biggest challenge and complexity of all.

“How do you share data in a more privacy-compliant way without any identity at all through using analytics and algorithmic matching, which is a step above where we are today?” Rossen said. He noted that the IAB Tech Lab’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies working group — of which he’s a member — is working on such standardization. “No clarity on what that’s exactly going to be yet, but that’s the direction we’re heading together.”

If you ask marketers and agency execs the easy answer you’ll hear is “no” and then something about the way they’re changing their relationships with creators to stand out. Some are taking a more long-term approach to their partnership with creators, inking deals to be exclusive for a year rather than for one-off posts. Others are broadening their scope, working with influencers to hit each possible target audience they’re aiming for. Marketers can’t simply add a few creators with 50,000 or so followers to their marketing mix and call it a day anymore.

“People used to be running [campaigns saying], ‘Let’s work with two people a month and let’s work with a couple celebrities’ and it’s like, nope. That’s not the game,” said Vickie Segar, founder Village Marketing, an influencer marketing agency that was recently acquired by WPP, when asked how brands’ relationships with creators has evolved. “The game requires you to be showing up in different pockets.” 

Segar continued: “That means that you have to be working with macro [influencers], micros [influencers] and nano [influencers]. You might need to be working with interior designers, people in beauty and fashion, moms. You need to have a truly diverse strategy and make sure that you have it scaled.”

Segar isn’t alone in that belief. Marketers and agency execs believe brands need to view creators as more than just another media buy to spread a campaign’s message. Instead, marketers need to be working with creators to figure out how they can make additive content that feels authentic to creators’ followers. Without doing so brands and creators risk blowback from fans.

“There has to be a real connection between the influencer and the brand,” said Aleco Azqueta, vp of North America for Grey Goose, when asked about the brand’s creator strategy. “We tend to work with a lot of the same influencers so that they really understand our brand.”

This past spring, Grey Goose worked with creators, some of whom the brand had previously worked with, to tout its sponsorship of the Grammy Awards by having some influencers attend the show. Rather than dictate how they should be sharing the experience, the brand allowed the creators to find ways to post about it in a more natural way for their audience. 

“We want it to be in their authentic voice,” said Azqueta. “From a brand standpoint, you have to be open to letting people talk about your brand in their own voice in an authentic way. If not, I think it comes across [as] disingenuous and consumers would be right through that.” 

While that might seem obvious to more savvy marketers, agency execs say that there are brands who continue to have a dated approach to working with creators, dictating what they should say and how they should say it. As brands continue to build out their relationships with creators and understand what works, some believe brands need to better integrate working with creators into the overall marketing strategy. 

“Marketers should be thinking about how they can work with creators as part of larger, holistic campaigns versus siloing their creator marketing as a separate strategy from the rest of their marketing and advertising,” said Katy Wellhousen vp, social account director at Deutsch in Los Angeles. “Viral TikToks, for example, are a great place to kickstart a brainstorm and generate new, unique ideas.” 

Aside from new ideas, marketers and agency execs say they are still just beginning to understand the power that creators have with their audience. That power makes the proposition of working with a creator potentially more valuable, even if it’s no longer unique to be working with creators. 

“A TV ad is not unique; that doesn’t mean people aren’t still doing it,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer for Mekanism. “What is unique is the relationship that creators have with their audience. People develop a parasocial bond [to creators], their audience develops a parasocial bond with you that is invested in you as a brand.”

The famous line from Field of Dreams applies pretty perfectly to the need for data and quantification when it comes to agencies investing clients’ dollars into the burgeoning world of creators and influencers. The flow of ad dollars will jump up to more than $4 billion this year, as three out of four marketers plan to use influencers in their marketing efforts.

The relationship between creators and the agencies that negotiate how to fold their talent into clients’ marketing efforts is maturing. Fading fast are the days when fistfuls of dollars were handed over — guided mostly by hunch — to see how influential marketing would perform. Agencies, and their clients, want data that demonstrates the impact of creators.

This trend has grown up alongside other industry truths: creators have more sway as the platforms they occupy have also grown in terms of audiences. From Snap and Tik Tok to Meta’s variety of copycat products that mimic them (Instagram Reels, for example) — to even YouTube’s generous revenue share with creators — this cohort’s clout is no longer subject to debate. And agencies have stepped up their expertise in these areas, from Horizon Media’s Blue Hour Studios (which in mid-April announced the creation of an upfront market of sorts for influences, called the Infront) to shops like CreatorIQ.

“Creator content at its basic element is creative, so once we took the stigma off of it of being influencer content and just thought of it as creative, we were able to then unlock all the different methods of measuring creative and just apply that to the influencer space,” said Monika Ratner, vp of content marketing and business development at Blue Hour Studios.

The agency is doing full-funnel influencer campaigns that are “really outperforming traditional creative in a lot of ways,” Ratner said, adding that creator content has performed well in a variety of areas, including media mix model driving awareness, ROI, signups, and e-commerce sales.

The creator space is only predicted to expand, particularly with Gen Z — a cohort that has grown up with digital devices at their fingertips.

“Creators selling merchandise, or doing advertisements for fans, are just a lot more engaging and lot more authentic versus a display ad, and Gen Z’s brains are just attuned to ignoring those ads,” said Borui Wang, CEO of Polarr, a photo-sharing operation that helps creators make their content. “[Agencies are] all trying to help brands connect with a wide catalog of creators. We’ve seen that exploding.”

In this growth period, Wang has observed agencies focusing less on creators with millions of followers in favor of using comparatively cheaper creators with smaller followings who — theoretically — have a stronger and more trustworthy connection with each of their followers.

The problem is, it’s far more laborious to work with 100 small creators than 10 with huge followings, but here’s where the agencies are starting to bring order to the chaos, Wang said.

“A lot of creator agencies really stepped in and are trying to solve the problem of how to identify a group of people you’re going to work with, how to streamline the contract or the planning process, how to be sure creators know what they’re doing, and to index the smaller creators,” said Wang.

Agencies have also come to understand which are the best platforms that benefit creators, and by extension, their own clients. Rob Pierre, CEO and co-founder of Jellyfish Group, a network of agencies and marketing services firms, is a strong believer in investing in creators on the platforms in which they feel most supported.

However, Pierre noted the inconsistencies when it comes to how platforms fund creators for their content. Every platform seems to have its own measurement of success, which can be a challenge for creators — and therein brands — to navigate.

Still, to marketers, the ability to measure creator content isn’t up to snuff. “While there are surely individual case studies and brand-specific benchmarks and experiences that speak to the success of influencer marketing, providing comprehensive quantitative proof of the success of influencer marketing is not an easy task — potentially even impossible for now,” said Nathalie Bordes, executive vp of measurement for marketers at the Association of National Advertisers.

Among those multiple challenges, Bordes said, include each social media platform’s differences in counting relevant metrics such as reach, video views, engagement and even impressions, to the lack of distinction between paid and organic performance, to the lack of attribution standards among the platforms.

“It’s no longer enough for brands and creators to claim purpose, as consumers demand quantitative transparency. More users, and therefore clients, want to know how far their content will go and how it will convert audiences to take some sort of action” added Sandie Cheng, head of social media at digital agency Convicts. “As creators and agency partners, we’re all competing for attention when it comes to storytelling.”

So while there are something like 15 million content creators currently operating, according to Shahrzad Rafati, founder and CEO of video publisher BBTV, order and organization remain the predominant focus of the agency world and the cottage industries supporting the creator world. It’s one reason Rafati in January brought on Martin Cass, former head of Assembly and MDC Media, to be BBTV’s CMO. He’s the bridge between brand and agency attached to the creator pool she has built since starting the company in 2005.

“Brands in the future are going to be defined by the stories that people tell about them as much as the stories that they tell about themselves,” said Cass. “And that’s what this creator economy and its connected communities do every single day of the week because if they don’t do it, they die — they disappear.”

Other agency execs are less worried about timing and more about conflicting interests. “We have a lot of different groups, committees and forums going on on the same topic — and it’s really difficult when that’s going on to keep everyone on the same page,” said Brian Hughes, executive vp and managing director of audience intelligence & strategy at IPG’s Magna unit. “It has nothing to do with the nobility of the ANA’s effort, it’s just that when we have all these different things happening in silos, it’s very difficult to keep everyone on the same page.”

CMM is intended to reestablish unduplicated reach and frequency metrics on a campaign level for marketers, and to get the entire industry to agree or at least offer their input on the blueprint, said Nathalie Bordes, the ANA’s executive vp of measurement for marketers. The effort is supported by the World Federation of Advertisers, and has several research partners with which it’s testing various currencies and workflows at the table. Privacy-safe methodologies and granular first-party data measurement are at the forefront of the conversation, she said.

“At the moment, that’s just something where not a lot of the measurement efforts are focused on, but it’s the foundation,” said Bordes. “If you cannot count properly, how can you do all of these other amazing measurement initiatives?”

Initial results of the effort are on the horizon: findings of a test on reach and frequency curves using Videoamp will be available to the ANA in the next few weeks. And another two-part test with Comscore that fuses virtual IDs with personalized household data for another way into reach and frequency guidance is in the works, Bordes added.

“it’s like a good car, the first test drive is always fun,” said Bordes, who is German. “But then once you put it on the autobahn, you kind of need to see can it really perform?”

CMM is also finalizing an RFP selection process for a panel-based element to the blueprint. Although Bordes declined to identify any of the eight submissions, they appear to be the usual suspects: Nielsen, Comscore and Kantar, Digiday has learned.  

Media agencies are playing along to ensure their input into CMM, but there are growing frustrations, not least of which is how it’s being funded. “The way they’re going about it is, the companies involved in measurement have to fund the research, which means Google has a disproportionate share or seat at the table because they are disproportionately providing their version of identity — and their engineers — to prove it out,” said Kelly Metz, Omnicom Media Group’s managing director of advanced TV activation. “Their version of identity doesn’t work for television. They have no concept of householding and persons within.”

Metz said she’s also unsure of the length of time it will take, and if the industry won’t pass the effort along the way. “We’re already operating in a world where we are buying cross-platform executing cross-platform,” she said. “Three years is a bit long. The television space is innovating too quickly to to accommodate their need for patience and diligence.”

Some agency execs fear that impending changes to privacy rules could also upend CMM’s conclusions, which Magna’s Hughes acknowledged and noted that he hoped legislation in the EU could help inform that in the U.S.

“We have to go back to basics on the value exchange of how do we make sure this ecosystem remains healthy,” agreed Metz. “I would rather see the ANA focus on privacy and consumer opt-ins and making the advertising experience safe. I think that’s a better use of trade organizations’ funds and efforts.”

As a self-described “Switzerland” in the debate about measurement, Amobee’s general manager of advanced TV solutions, Tim Spengler said he doubts the industry can come up with a unified solution. “There could be some mutual agreement in pockets around alternative currencies,” said Spengler. “But because it is so complicated and so messy, I don’t know if there will be one Bible.”

Color by numbers

E-commerce has been one of the hottest growth trends in the industry — it’s one reason Publicis purchased Profitero last week (see below for more details). But hold the phone, because in-store appears to be making a comeback, based on how some media are experiencing growth. Place Exchange, an OOH programmatic in-store retail media network, said:

• 86 percent of all retail sales in 2021 took place in-store, thanks to trends like Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store (BOPIS) and new digital technologies being deployed
• It experienced 2x growth in ad spend across retail media in 2021 over 2020
• It saw a 13 percent increase in CPMs for retail media over the same period.

Takeoff & landing

• Several media agency sources said last week’s NewFronts have been “super-spreader” events, with attendees saying their inboxes have pinged with alerts from some of the NewFronts presenting companies about multiple people testing positive for COVID in the days following the events. It remains to be seen if the Upfronts the week of May 16 will have the same undesired effect. Demand for tickets to them has apparently outstripped capacity — with a behind-the-scenes scrum happening for access.
• Publicis Groupe bought e-commerce software and analytics firm Profitero for a reported $200 million, as a means to jumpstart its e-commerce efforts. Profitero’s leaders — CEO Bryan Wiener and president Sarah Hofstetter, both of 360i fame — will maintain their roles in the company.
• In sad news for the industry, longtime media agency and ad-tech leader Sean Finnegan passed away suddenly from a heart attack just over a week ago, generating a massive outpouring of remembrance and sadness across social media. Finnegan, 50, most recently was co-founder and CEO of VO, which true to his character was a connector organization across media, content, tech and talent.

Direct quote

“The principles of the IAE and the training provided to CEAEs (Certified Ethical Advertising Executives) empowers all those who touch a brand to move from the ethics of compliance to the ethics of achievement. Rather than simply ‘doing no harm,’ the training and framework encourage the ethics of achievement: ‘trying to do good.” …. With millennials increasingly looking to work at organizations that have a strong CSR policy and contribute to social and environmental issues, the CEAE is a clear commitment to value and protect voices within an organization and establish a shared sense of purpose.”

— Ben Downing, global managing director of strategic partnerships and media ethics at Havas Media Group, on why it is the first agency network to offer free externally validated ethics certification to its staff and to clients in concert with the Institute for Advertising Ethics (IAE)

Speed reading

• If you haven’t been reading Digiday senior media reporter Sara Guaglione’s exhaustive updates from the front lines of the NewFronts, then your chance to do so is right here right now. Day 1;  Day 2; Day 3;  Day 4. 
• Digiday’s gaming and esports reporter Alexander Lee and I collaborated on a rundown of the important elements of WPP’s announced partnership with Epic Games last week. Take a look. 
• Check out Digiday’s The Creator Machine, an exhaustive package on the rising influence and power of Creators from a number of vantage points, a section overseen and edited by managing editor Sara Jerde.