With closing arguments set for Monday, the Justice Department has a final chance to frame its arguments after five weeks of testimony featuring few major revelations.
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Prologis to Buy DCT Industrial Trust for $8.4 Billion
Prologis agreed to buy logistics-property owner DCT Industrial Trust for $8.4 billion including debt, as a surge in e-commerce ramps up demand for warehouses and distribution centers.
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Breaking Silos: Passive Consumption + Active Engagement FTW!
Today something complex, advanced, that is most applicable to those who are at the edges of spending money, and thus have an intricate web of internal and external teams to deliver customer engagement and business success.
The Marketing Industrial Empire is made up of number of components.
If you consider the largest pieces, there is the internal (you, the company) and the external (agencies, consultants).
If you consider entities, you’ve got your media agency, your creative agency, your various advertising agencies, your website and retail store teams, your analysts, marketers, advertising experts, the UX teams, campaign analysts, fulfillment folks, the data analysts who are scattered throughout the aforementioned entities, the CMO, CFO, and hopefully your CEO. And I’m only talking about the small portion of your existence that is your marketing and analytics.
Whether you consider the large, simplistic perspective (internal – external) or the more complex entity view, it’s really easy to see how things can become siloed very quickly.
It’s so easy for each little piece (you!) to solve for your little piece and optimize for a local maxima. You win (bonus/promotion/award). It is rare that your company wins in these siloed existence.
That’s simply because silos don’t promote consideration of all the variables at play for the business. They don’t result in taking the entire business strategy or the complete customer journey. Mining a cubic zirconia is celebrated as if it is a diamond.
Heartbreakingly, this is very common at large and extra-large sized companies. (This happens a lot less at small companies because of how easily death comes with a local maxima focus.)
So how can you avoid this? How do you encourage broader, more out-of-the-box thinking?
This might seem simplistic, but sometimes it helps to give things names. Naming things clarifies, frames, and when done well it exposes the gaps in our thinking.
Today, I want to name two of the most common silos in large and extra-large companies, in the hope that it’ll force you to see them and subsequently abandon siloed thinking and solve for a global maxima.
1. The Advertising Ecosystem: Passive Consumption.
2. The Business Ecosystem: Active Engagement.
Name abstract ideas, draw pictures, deepen appreciation, take action.
Could not be simpler, right? 🙂
Let’s go!
The Advertising Ecosystem: Passive Consumption.
I’m randomly going to use Geico as an illustrative example because the frequency at which they are buying ads means that every human, animal, and potted plant in the United States has seen a Geico commercial at least once in the last 6 hours (contributing to Geico’s business success).
Typically the ads we see are the result of the external creative and media agencies, and their partners in the internal company team/s.
Geico purchases every kind of ad: TV spots, radio ads, billboards (OOH), digital displays (video, online,– social media), print (magazines, newspaper, your cousin’s Christmas letter), and so much more.
The teams naturally gravitate towards optimization and measurement that spans their individual mini-universes.
Was that a great ad? Can we test different spending levels in that market? What is the best way to get people to remember the delightful gecko? Can we automate the placement of display ads based on desired psychographics?
Did we get the TRPs that we were shooting for? What was the change in awareness and consideration? What was the reach/frequency for the Washington Post? How many impressions did our Twitter ads get, and how many people were exposed to our billboards?
These are important questions facets of, and delivery optimization of, the advertising. Questions like these, and adjacent others, tend to drive the entire lives of creative and media agencies/teams. For entirely understandable reasons. Siloed incentives delivering siloed local maxima results.
I cannot stress enough that these results can be positive (for the ad business and, in this case, the sales of insurance products). And yet, as a global maxima person it does not take a whole lot of effort to see a whole lot of opportunity if both the siloed incentives can siloed execution implied by the above questions can be changed.
Here’s an incredible simple way that every human seeking global maxima can look beyond the silo: “So, what happens after?”
As in, what happens after the finite confines that are the scope of my responsibility/view?
To see that, the first step is to paint a picture that illustrates the current purpose (your silo), and then give it a name.
Here’s that picture for the example we are using, and the name I gave it is “passive consumption.”
Over 90% of advertising is passive consumption. This means that the ad is in front of the human and they may see it or not see it.
Even on the platforms where interactivity is at its very core (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), almost all of the advertising does not elicit any sort of interactivity. If you look at the percentages, almost no one clicks on banner ads, a small percentage on search ads, and you need only speak with a few people around you to see how many people actively engage with TV ads vs. run to the bathroom or pull out their mobile phone the moment forced-watch TV ads come on.
Keep in mind, this is not a ding against passive consumption or the hard work done by Geico’s agency and internal teams. Blasting ads on TV does cause a teeny tiny micro percentage to buy insurance – a fact provable via Matched Market Tests, Media Mix Models. The teeny tiny micro infinitesimally small number of views of brand display ads will cause outcomes. (Hold this thought, we’ll come back to that in a moment.)
So, what is the passive consumption challenge?
First, how far the vision of the creative and media agencies/teams will see (thus limiting success – global maxima). Second, trapped in the silo the vision for what will be measured and deemed as success.
The first is heartbreaking. The second ensures the death of any long-term impact.
Let me explain.
With over 90% passive consumption…. Well, passive… Smart media and advertising agencies/teams will primarily use post-exposure surveys to measure awareness (what companies provide car insurance) and consideration (which brands you would consider).
The brilliant agencies will also measure elements such as purchase intent (how likely it is that you’ll consider Geico as your next car insurance provider) and likelihood to recommend (how likely is it that you’ll recommend Geico to your family and friends).
All of these metrics will cause surveys to be sent via various mediums to people who’ve seen the TV ads, the banners on Facebook, and the video ads on YouTube. And a subset of users who were not exposed to the ads. Usually, there is anywhere between a few hundred to a thousand survey responses that will end up providing a statistically significant sample.
The scores from these responses are presented in weekly, monthly, or quarterly meetings. Segmented by marketing activity, they are the end-all be-all justification for media spending. Snapchat increased aided awareness by +23%, let us spend more there. Or, billboards in Georgetown and Austin shifted purchase intent by +2%, we should triple our spend in Chicago.
Every measurement and optimization initiative is based on this cocktail of metrics. Thus delivering a positive, but local, maxima.
Even the next best innovation in media will be based on results from the same metrics cocktail. Thus delivering a little more positive, but still local, maxima.
Why not global maxima?
Because success is determined by, innovation is driven by, measurement that is self-reported feelings.
That name captures the actual thing that is being measured (feelings) by the metrics above, and where the data comes from (self-reported) after being exposed to our advertising.
This will help your company, your agencies, understand limits. Limits in terms of what’s happening (mostly, passive consumption) and what data we are looking at (all post-exposure and self-reported).
Limits in measurement that incentivize solving for a local maxima.
Let me repeat one more time. Passive consumption measured by self-reported feelings does drive some success – else Geico would not be the financial success it is. In the short-term some campaigns are trying to drive long-term brand influence or causing a shift in public opinion or simply to remind people your brand still exists as a choice. All good. Self-reported feelings are wonderful. Appreciate that even in those cases where you are not trying to drive short-term sales, if all you have are feelings converted into metrics… You are limiting imagination.
An obsession with just passive consumption by your agencies and internal teams delivers 18 points of success. I’m saying if you think global maxima, remove limits, you can do 88 points!
The Business Ecosystem: Active Engagement.
Getting those additional 70 points success requires breaking the self-imposed creative/media/advertising silo and caring about the human behavior if people lean-in instead of passive consumption – when they take an action (a click, a phone call, a store visit).
Time to draw another picture, and give this behavior a name.
I call it… drum roll please… Active Engagement!
Some people, between 0.01% to 10% (so rare!), who see Geico’s online ads will visit a Geico retail store or Geico’s website.
People are actually doing something. They are walking into your store, talking to an agent, picking up the literature, calling you on the phone, clicking on to your site, watching videos, comparison shopping, and more. This is all human behavior that your tools can report for you.
A small percentage will end up buying insurance – mazel tov! –, providing perhaps the most valuable data.
The lucky thing about active engagement is that, in addition to self-reported feelings, you also get tons of highly-useful quantitative data representing human behavior.
I call this type of data: Observed Human Behavior.
If you are a part of an creative, media, or an internal company team, you have two powerful issues you can solve for: passive consumption (happens most of the time) AND active engagement (happens some of the time).
Likewise, you can seek to understand performance using self-reported data where the people reflect on how they feel, along with behavior data that represents what they actually do.
The combination of these two factors deliver the much needed Global Maxima perspective.
That is how you shatter silos. The creative agency has to care about how ads perform in their labs, in the real world, and what kind of online and offline behavior the creative is driving (end-to-end baby!). The media agency has to care about the creative and where it needs to get delivered (recency, frequency FTW!), and the bounce rate (70% ouch, 30% hurray!) and profit from each campaign. The retail experience team, the call center delight team, and the site experience team will break their silo and reach back into understanding the self-reported feelings data from the media agencies and the ideas that lead to the creative that delivered a human to them.
Everyone cares about the before and after, solving for the overall business rather than their little silo. Passive consumption plus active engagement equals global maxima. Or, self-reported feelings plus observed human behavior equals global maxima.
: )
Here’s a massively underappreciated benefit: It also encourages every employee – internal and external – to take full credit for their impact on the short and long-term effects of their effort.
It is rare to see this happen in real life, even at top American and European companies.
What’s usual is to see the three silos between creative agencies, media agencies, and company internal team. There is usually further sub-segmentation into passive consumption teams (also lovingly referred as brand agencies/advertisers) and active engagement teams (performance agencies/advertisers). The further sub-sub-segmentation into products and services (depending on the company).
They then quickly fall into their respective measurement silos, solving for the local maxima.
Change starts with naming things and drawing pictures. Gather the key leaders at your company and agency partners. Show them passive consumption and self-reported feelings along with active engagement and observed human behavior. Talk through the implications of each picture. Ask this influential audience: What can you contribute to when it comes to breaking silos?
I have yet to meet a single company where simply drawing the picture did not result in a dramatic rethinking of focus areas, responsibilities, and ultimately priorities.
Accelerating Success: Five Quick Changes.
Once you have that discussion, what should you do to truly cause a significant change in behavior?
Five Es form the core of the strategies that I end up using (please share your’s via comments below). They are:
1. Expand the scope of data your employees use.
For the people who buy your television ads, include both store and website traffic data. Break the shackles of GRPs and Frequency.
For people buying your display ads on Facebook, include page depth, bounce rate, as well as micro-conversion rates for those campaigns. Break the shackles Awareness and Views.
For people buying your videos ads on Hulu, complement Hulu’s self-reported feelings metrics with user behavior and conversion rates.
And continue going in this fashion.
2. Expand the incentives structures for your employees.
Most marketing employees, both internal and external, undertaking passive consumption initiatives are rewarded for cost per TRP, effective reach, awareness and consideration increases, etc. Whatever this bucket as an employee incentive, it can stay.
Consider adding one or two KPIs from active engagement. For example: Store visits, phone calls (as a result of that increase in consideration). Website visits, loyalty, micro-outcomes, and 25 other easily-available observed human behavior metrics are available to you pretty much in real-time.
For people who own responsibility for your stores, call center and website, take a metric or two from passive consumption and make it a small part of their incentive structure.
People respond to what they are compensated with, or promoted for. Use it to solve for a global maxima in the company and its customers.
3. Expand the time horizon for success.
This is really hard.
You buy 100 TRPs, it’s expensive, and the executives tend to start badgering you for immediate results.
The problem is that self-reported feelings data takes time, and since at least 90% of passive consumption leads to no immediate active engagement, all this does is incentivize bad behavior by your agencies and employees. Long-term objectives are thrown onto the chopping block and long-term strategies are judged on short-term success – which immediately ruins the campaign’s measurement. Oh and the audience being bombarded by your ads that are trying to deliver short-term outcomes from long-term creative and campaigns… They despise you because you are sucking, they can see that, and they instantly realize your are wasting their time.
No matter how much your wish, a Chicken won’t birth a Lion’s cub.
If you want short-term success, define the clearly as a goal, pick the right short-term self-reported feelings metric and observed behavior metric, now unleash your creative agency and their ideas (on that short-term horizon), then plead with your media agency to buy optimal placements, and ensure the retail/phone/web experience is not some soft and fuzzy experience, rather it is tied to that clear goal and success metrics. Sit back. Win.
If you want long-term success… Same as above, replace short with long. How amazing is that?
4. Expand the datasets that teach your smart algorithms.
If you’ve only visited this blog once in the last 12 months, or read just one edition of my truly amazing newsletter 🙂, Marketing <> Analytics Intersect, it is quite likely I have infected you with the passion to start investing in machine learning in order to bring smart automation to your marketing and user-experience initiatives.
If you are following my advice, make absolutely sure that you are not training your algorithms based solely on passive consumption, self-reported feelings data. It is necessary, but not sufficient.
Rich observed behavior data will provide your algorithm the same broad view of success as we are trying to provide the humans in #2 above. In fact, the algorithms can ingest way more data and complexity. Thus allowing them to solve for a super-global maxima compared to our humble abilities.
Every algorithm is only as smart as the data you use to educate it. Don’t short-change the algorithm.
5. Expand leadership comfort level with ambiguity.
For your TV efforts, there are limits to what you can measure. You have self-reported feelings data, and usually that’s about it. If you have a sophisticated world-class measurement team, you may be running some controlled experiments to measure one or two elements of active engagement observed human behavior data.
For YouTube or Hulu on the other hand, you’ll have additional self-reported feelings data, and if you follow my advice today, plenty of directly-causal observed human behavior data at your disposal.
Get very comfortable with this reality, and execute accordingly.
When some executives are not comfortable with this reality, they typically end up gravitating towards the lowest common denominator. Even in regards to strategies where more is possible (digital), they just end up using self-reported feelings data for everything.
I do understand why this is; executives are pressed for time, so the executive dashboard needs only one metric they can compare across initiatives. This instantly dumbs-down the intelligence that could help contribute to smarter decisions.
Kindly explain this to your executives, share with them the value of being comfortable with a little ambiguity that comes from using the best metric for each initiative type.
We can achieve smarter global maxima decisions if we just use different metrics in some instances.
The larger the company, the harder it is to solve for a global maxima. Companies need command and control. Companies worry that people are going to run wild in 15 different directions. Companies need to reward an individual, that means creating a finite role that can be defined and measured at a small level. Companies add layers upon layers to manage. Companies create org clusters (divisions). And, more.
Every one of these actions forces a local maxima. Every human can see their few pixels and have no idea what the image looks like.
Even if then the company progresses little by little, they’ll run out of luck one day. Worse some nimble small company – that does not yet have to worry about all of the above – will come eat your breakfast first, then dinner and then lunch.
The lesson in this post applies across the entire business, even if in this instance it is applied to marketing and advertising.
Paint a picture of what the local maxima execution looks like in your division – or better still company. Give these pieces a name. Then, figure out, like I’ve done above, what the connective tissue is that’ll incentivize global maxima thinking and execution.
Carpe diem!
As always, it is your turn now.
In your specific role, are you solving for the global maxima or a local maxima? How about your creative and media agencies? Your internal marketing or product teams? Has your company done something special to ensure that teams are considering both self-reported feelings and observed human behavior? Is there a magic metric you feel that’ll encourage each piece of the business success puzzle to solve for a global maxima?
Please share your wisdom, tips and secrets to success via comments below.
Thank you.
The post Breaking Silos: Passive Consumption + Active Engagement FTW! appeared first on Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik.
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Digiday Research: Voice is a low priority for marketers
At the Digiday AI Marketing Summit this month in Santa Barbara, California, we spoke with leaders from 37 companies interested in applying artificial intelligence to marketing and learned about their plans for voice marketing. Check out our earlier research on AI’s potential to replace media buyers here. Learn more about our upcoming events here.
Quick takeaways:
- Forty-three percent of companies in Digiday’s survey from the event are investing in technology to enable voice marketing.
- Only 26 percent said developing voice marketing is a priority.
- Forty-four percent believe collecting consumer data will be the most important function of voice devices.
Marketers venture into voice marketing
Americans are becoming more comfortable with voice assistants from smart speakers to those in smartphones, with nearly half of Americans using one, according to Pew Research Center, and Juniper Research estimating the number of voice devices in the U.S. to be approximately 450 million. Research from NPR and Edison Research found that 16 percent of Americans own a smart speaker, and Juniper Research expects that number to grow to 50 percent by 2022.
Given the rapid proliferation of voice devices and consumers’ willingness to use them, companies are examining ways to include voice devices in their marketing strategies. Of the companies Digiday surveyed, which mostly identified themselves as brands, 43 percent said they are developing technologies to use in voice marketing.
This article is behind the Digiday+ paywall.
The post Digiday Research: Voice is a low priority for marketers appeared first on Digiday.
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Envisioning An All-Encompassing Total Video Strategy
“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Allen Klosowski, senior vice president of the advanced solutions group at SpotX. When people say, “I’m watching TV,” many would likely envision them gazing at moving pictures on a television screen while lounging on a… Continue reading »
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Programmatic: A Series Of Cascading, Interconnected Contracts
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Tom Triscari, co-founder and managing partner at Labmatik. While in-housing is often positioned as ramping up headcount, it is first and foremost about rearranging contractual relationships such that external parties can… Continue reading »
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FTC Back To Full Power; Splitsville For Kantar And WPP?
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. FTC OK Go The Federal Trade Commission is finally at full power. More than a year into Trump’s presidency, the Senate voted Friday to confirm a full new slate of commissioners: three Republicans and two Democrats. It was in the nick of time. Acting… Continue reading »
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Mic faces an uncertain future in a post-Facebook world
June 2015 was an ebullient time for Mic.com. The company closed a $17 million funding round. The news site for millennials was chasing hard-hitting stories about the racially fraught police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and sexism in gaming. To celebrate its list of 50 young trailblazers, Mic threw a Grey Goose-sponsored party at Marquee, a swanky nightclub in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood decked out with red leather sofas and LED screens. It was a big step up from the parties that co-founder and CEO Chris Altchek had held at his apartment when the company, founded in 2011, was even younger. “It felt like we were doing something cool and awesome,” a former employee reminisced.
It’s become something of a cliché in digital media: Digital upstart gets funding on pitch to reinvent news for millennials by scaling the Facebook algorithm, only to fall back to earth when Facebook pulls the rug out from under them. Mic looks to some to be another casualty of the social network’s strategy change, after the likes of LittleThings and Attn. It’s massively reliant on Facebook, and its views there have fallen sharply in the past year to 11 million views in March, down from 192 million in April 2017, according to CrowdTangle.
To Noah Mallin, head of experience, content and sponsorships at Wavemaker, the question is whether Mic can find its footing as a small player as the social media landscape changes and show it’s different from other millennial-aimed news sites.
“It’s hard to see how they go it alone and kind of keep things going. It’s hard to stand out even in the niche that they have,” Mallin said. “There are a lot of others saying, ‘We’re going to bring news of the day to millennials with deep dives.’ BuzzFeed has pivoted into being a real, quality journalism machine. NowThis, this has been their niche for a while. That makes Mic less differentiated.”
Altchek has painted a much different picture. He’s said the company, having raised $60 million in funding in total, just had its best quarter yet — and it is on track to break even in 2019, by shifting away from display advertising and to long-term branded content deals for companies like GE and Walmart. Clickbait may have defined its early days, buy Mic has hired seasoned journalists Cory Haik and Kerry Lauerman from The Washington Post to emphasize quality journalism. Last summer, to get ahead of the Facebook algorithm change and help reach profitability, Mic laid off 25 people.
“We started focusing on taking our voice and turning it into what we found most successful with audience,” Altchek said on the Digiday Podcast. “For us, it’s not doom and gloom because the audience wants this kind of journalism.”
Site traffic has plunged
But in and outside the company, there’s a counter-narrative brewing that Mic waited too long to pivot away from clickbait and won’t be able to support the high cost of the high-quality journalism it says it wants to do. Three sources who were privy to the numbers directly or from employees told Digiday that, as of earlier this year, Mic was on track to run out of funding by late 2018. In a shuffle at the top, the company’s president, Jonathan Carson, is leaving the company after a year on the job and hasn’t been replaced.
Altchek wouldn’t comment on the record for this article, but a spokesperson for the company said: “Mic is in a strong cash position and on track to break even in 2019. Our business is on very solid ground and anything to the contrary is false.”
Mic isn’t alone in trying to survive the changing distributed media landscape, but other publishers have been further ahead in increasing traffic to their own sites through things like newsletters and targeted Facebook posts. Mic’s traffic to its own site has plunged in the past year, though, to 5 million uniques from 17 million a year ago, per comScore.
The decline in site traffic might be OK if it were offset by big increases in views elsewhere. But the vast majority of Mic’s social followers remain on Facebook. Its Facebook views declined to 16 million in March from 51 million in January, and it hasn’t been able to replace those views. Mic’s YouTube views doubled in that time, but were still less than 1 million, according to Tubular Labs.
Mic has enthusiastically embraced platform initiatives like Apple News as well as Facebook’s Instant Articles and its live video product, even trying a BuzzFeed-exploding-watermelon type of experiment at one point. But none of these products have become material or ongoing sources of revenue to publishers. Mic has developed a documentary series for Hulu and has said it has other video partnerships that are just waiting to be announced. But profits for non-syndicated video are usually low.
Mic faces a crowded news market
Declining site audience and social reach on Facebook raise questions for Mic’s business model, which is predicated on making branded content that matches Mic’s editorial style. That kind of advertising is labor-intensive and hard to make highly profitable, though, and the less owned traffic Mic has, the more it has to pay Facebook to meet the advertiser’s distribution requirements, which cuts into profit margins.
Mic has repeatedly said comScore’s numbers don’t take into account its social distribution and that it actually reaches an average of 50 million monthly uniques, as measured by Nielsen. (That’s still down from 76 million monthly uniques that it claimed last summer.)
Ad buyers still use comScore to gauge a site’s health, though. People who come directly to a site on average stay longer and visit more pages.
“ComScore, you can quibble about how accurate it is, but as a comparative standpoint, it’s helpful,” Mallin said. “Having traffic to your own site is becoming more, not less important.”
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Confessions of a marketer: Agencies forced brands to in-house more marketing
The trend of global advertisers taking more marketing in-house is gaining momentum, reviving the oft-debated topic of the future of the agency model. For the latest installment of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for honesty, we talked to a senior marketer at a global advertiser who feels no other alternative exists but to take more control from agencies when they can’t be trusted to make the right calls.
Here are excerpts from the conversation, edited for clarity.
You’re taking parts of your programmatic and media-buying efforts in-house. Why are you doing that when you could pay an agency to provide that service?
The agencies have caused marketers like myself and others to bring more knowledge in-house. Yes, in-housing that expertise is beneficial for us because we control and track the data, and so can have a more transparent supply chain with internal media specialists, who will also care about and understand the brand better. But I prefer working with agencies because while we might spend loads of money recruiting the best media expertise, we have to find the resources to sustain that expertise. Things move so quickly that we as marketers need agencies who know more about these technologies than us. Because agencies are in such a competitive market, they thrive off the need to innovate, whereas things can get stagnant with in-house expertise because businesses have internal politics and processes preventing decisions from being made fast.
Despite your misgivings, do you still think there’s a role for agencies?
I think it’s better to have more agile agencies rather than try and in-house all programmatic skills. The processing of in-housing skills and technologies on the client side can be long because you’re bound by certain policies or restricted by internal politics as to how reactive you can be to issues and trends. For us, it’s more about trying to build a hybrid model that you’re seeing other brands adopt at the moment, where you have the knowledge in-house, but the execution is more on the agency side.
You’re in-housing parts of your media management despite knowing the pitfalls. Why?
I know people say the agency model is broken and that clients should pay more to fix it, but it’s hard to think that will solve things when you see how petty things can get when working with multiple agencies. Agencies know they need to collaborate — some even want to — but they don’t. And that’s because those businesses all have different agendas which aren’t aligned to mine, so they’re all just focused — understandably — on winning the biggest part of my budget, but in a way that sabotages other agencies on the account or campaign. I think it starts with looking at the business model of those businesses and how they adapt for the future.
So, while competition among agencies can be good for driving innovation, you’re saying that competitive streak is having a negative impact?
Let’s say I have a million dollars to drop on a campaign that will then get shared across my global agencies. What has happened in the past is the media agency, for example, is pushing to take as much of that budget as they can, so they’ve sabotaged parts of the campaign they think they could take from creative agencies. I’ve seen things like agencies using the wrong assets on a Facebook campaign to make out like the creative agency has provided the wrong format, while other times I’ve seen agencies fail to share deadlines with others working on a campaign to make them look bad. This is what it’s like when it comes to trying to get agencies to work together — it’s like babysitting kids.
How do you get your agencies to work together?
It sounds basic to say, but I find running workshops, where I’m in the room, is the best way to get them to work together. … Agencies needed to be open to collaboration, which effectively means agreeing on processes and strategies upfront as well as agreeing on the reporting, which they work together on. That’s not about me telling my agencies what to do. It’s a team effort because all parties in that workshop have to see the value in it.
The issue with those workshops is I have to be there; otherwise, they won’t always work. If they still can’t play nice with others, then I change the agency. There’s a first warning, and a second one, and then if nothing has improved after that, then I’ve had to tell them that we’re looking for another agency. That’s happened at every company I’ve worked in on the brand side. It doesn’t matter how big you are [as an agency]. If you have a bad attitude, then that’s one of the biggest killers for me.
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Big media is crashing the NewFronts
The Digital Content NewFronts were designed to create an upfront marketplace for digital video, where media companies could present upcoming programming to advertisers — just like the TV upfronts. But the NewFronts have become less about securing immediate upfront ad commitments — which is harder to do when digital can be transacted year-round — and more of a place for presenters to lay out their overall positioning to marketers.
In such an environment, it’s no surprise that big media companies such as ESPN and Viacom — both of which are making big investments in original digital video, and want marketers and other industry professionals to know about it — are presenting at this year’s event.
“There is going to be an aspect of our show where it’s going to be about the content, which, frankly, the IAB wants. The IAB has positioned the NewFronts to talk about compelling programming designed and built for digital, and we want to be respectful of that,” said Travis Howe, svp of digital ad product sales and strategy at ESPN. “But in the digital space, it’s difficult to talk only about content. We’re taking this opportunity to talk about our scale, size and the ways we can support advertisers in reaching sports fans.”
This will be ESPN’s and Viacom’s first NewFronts presentations. In addition, ESPN’s parent company Disney is hosting its second NewFronts presentation for its Disney Digital Network unit.
ESPN still plans to host its annual upfront presentation at the Minskoff Theatre in Manhattan on May 15. More than 1,800 guests are expected, while roughly 300 are expected at its NewFront at the Cedar Lake venue in New York City.
Howe said ESPN is treating both presentations as two parts of one big show. While ESPN plans to include digital programming and initiatives at its upfront presentation, the company thought that given its big investment in digital, it should have a separate event to showcase those activities, which include a new subscription streaming service, ESPN+, and original content deals with Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.
As for their presentations, expect ESPN and Viacom to showcase original digital shows that extend existing TV franchises, as they do with “SportsCenter” and “MTV Cribs,” respectively, on Snapchat.
Viacom, meanwhile, is also using its first NewFront to market its digital investments — specifically, it’s the coming-out party for Viacom Digital Studios, a 300-person division responsible for digital video programming across the Viacom media portfolio. Kelly Day, a veteran of AwesomenessTV and Discovery, leads the division.
Day didn’t say what programming or partnerships Viacom Digital Studios would reveal during its presentation on April 30 at The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers in New York City, pointing to existing partnerships such as Viacom’s show production deal with Snapchat as an example of what to expect.
“We have been building to this point, where we feel like there is a new story for us to tell [with Viacom Digital Studios],” said Day. “And this is the right time and right venue and the right way to pull everything together and deliver that message to our constituents.”
Unlike ESPN, Viacom is not hosting an upfront, but instead has been hosting private dinners with senior advertising and marketing execs plus Day and Viacom leaders including CEO Bob Bakish. Viacom Digital Studios has been brought up during these dinners, but similar to ESPN’s argument, there isn’t enough time during these settings to cover all of the messaging and announcements across the Viacom portfolio, Day said.
“In future years, we might take a different route, but this year, it’s such a big message and a new message that we couldn’t do it justice in just a dinner setting,” Day said.
ESPN, Disney and Viacom are not the first big media companies to host NewFronts presentations. In the past, NBCUniversal and Turner have hosted NewFronts events. Neither have returned for this year’s show.
A source at a big media company that has previously presented at the NewFronts said the company decided to beef up its upfront presentation this year instead of having separate digital and TV events. “Because a lot of our portfolio is brand-focused, it does not make sense for us to continue siloing new and emerging platforms,” this source said.
This source also said deal-making still begins after the upfronts end, which minimizes the need to host a lavish NewFronts party. In terms of ad dollars that could be attributed to the upfronts versus the NewFronts, it’s “like the NBA versus junior varsity,” this source said.
Others push back and argue that the NewFronts can be valuable, especially as big media companies continue to make investments in digital content and advertising.
“To some extent, part of the reason why you’re seeing more traditional media companies this year [at the NewFronts] is because we’re finally at an inflection point where traditional media companies are really taking digital more seriously,” said Day. “There’s real investment in terms of both resources and dollars toward it.”
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