Conversations at the recent Cannes Lions focused heavily on today’s complex media environment, but one of the most hotly debated topics was about currency and measurement. The TV industry is absolutely consumed with the emergence of new currencies.

Currency is important, however, it’s simply a starting point to transact a campaign. Marketers care about the endpoint: the ROI for media on selling products and meeting campaign KPIs. Changing the currency won’t tackle this problem. As long as the industry continues to conflate the two, it will stay locked in a vortex that does not answer the real question: Is my media spend working?

As the TV industry becomes more involved with digital, it must learn from its digital counterparts about the benefits of looking at currency and measurement as two distinct things. Yet even digital’s currency framework won’t quite fit for TV.

While there should be some correlation between the two, it’s how marketers differentiate currency and measurement that is the real challenge. If marketers use impressions to transact and value success, then they have created a new but equally bad measuring stick. 

You know what they say about assumptions…

From television’s inception, counting viewership impressions was the primary metric because that was the best you could do, but it has always been known that it was a pit stop on the road to true understanding of a campaign’s performance. Simply counting impressions is flawed because it falsely assumes that every impression delivers the desired impact.

When I first began in media, the industry used to adjust GRPs to account for differentiated attention among different dayparts. Primetime was given a value of 100 and other dayparts were discounted according to different testing methodologies. We knew not all impressions were created equal. This was used until the industry moved to reach as the primary metric for campaign success because different dayparts built reach at different rates. 

Jumping to the present day, marketers know that counting impressions is an even less accurate reflection of success due to evolving consumer behavior. Just counting impressions assumes a lot of unknowns, from viewability to attention and action. The one thing marketers know definitively about today’s TV viewers is that there are often multiple screens and devices competing for their attention. Impressions were a flawed measurement to begin with, but never more so than now.

With the TV industry stuck on using impressions, another problem arises: Unduplicated reach becomes the holy grail of measurement. But as any data scientist who has worked on this problem will tell you—and probably already has—the proliferation of devices, screens, distribution points, etc., makes it nearly impossible to measure accurately and consistently.

Besides, unduplicated reach isn’t a real-time metric. And when marketers consider the added complexity created by walled gardens every major media company is trying to erect, it becomes even more unattainable.

So, why is the industry so concentrated on trying to measure unduplicated reach when this is simply a proxy for real campaign success? It’s a flawed paradigm in which data inaccuracies are inevitable and the viewer experience never improves.

Another issue with relying on impressions as a measurement is the lack of accountability for sellers. They’re the only constituent that benefits from maintaining this old school standard because it means they don’t have to be held accountable for actual, real-time performance on their platform.

Viewership and reach are a distraction from campaign attribution

It’s not that viewership and reach don’t matter at all, but the TV industry has chased it at the expense of more meaningful measurement. It’s a vanity metric that doesn’t really mean much if buyers can’t measure ROI on their campaigns.

The TV industry does need a currency that accurately counts people as a way to transact, and it’s important to understand reach and frequency so you don’t create ad fatigue by bombarding the same viewers over and over again and missing important viewers altogether.

But the bigger priority should be accounting for KPI attribution, whether it’s sales or another key action. Linear TV has a lot to learn from digital in this area.

Campaign attribution should define currency and measurement

If the industry moved off the flawed yardstick of impressions and unduplicated reach toward campaign attribution, it could create a new paradigm where success is measured by meaningful KPIs and holds all parties in the value chain accountable. A more meaningful currency paradigm would account for the following factors:

Transactional cost should be calibrated with campaign delivery. The two metrics are not the same but have a relational value. The first puts all the liability on the advertiser; the second puts all the liability on the seller. Marketers need to find a way to make each party accountable to the other.

Viewer experience matters. Transactional costs should have a relationship to the length of the ad pod and the total minutes of non-content time per program. Additionally, how relevant the ad is to the content and the viewer should matter.

Creative matters. Creative testing should be standardized so the buyer is accountable to the seller, platform and other advertisers in the program. Bad creative should cost more if it hurts other advertisers it keeps company with.

Outcomes matter. Campaign KPIs should become the primary metric for success and the buyer and the seller both need skin in the game.

My plea to the industry is this: Yes, find a better way to count impressions across all screens, but find a better way to gauge campaign success than unduplicated reach. Create a currency, or multiple currencies for transactions, and define a measurement metric that correlates to the campaign goal.

A single metric won’t save us; it will require multiple metrics that depend on the campaign. And in the process of differentiating the two, let’s ensure mutual accountability between buyer and seller.

That is the only way the consumer will win.

The post What’s Missing in the Media Measurement vs. Currency Debate appeared first on Amobee.

Addressable TV vs. Data-Driven Linear TV: Which Will Last? 

We kick off the conversation with Julian by clarifying the difference between Addressable TV and Data-Driven Linear TV, which often get confused with each other. Both are methods of precision-targeting, but they use different mechanics. Addressable TV allows advertisers to reach consumers at a household level via devices like a Set-Top-Box, whereas Data-Driven Linear TV allows targeting via the distributor. As more TV viewers adopt Set-Top-Boxes and similar devices, the backend infrastructure of linear TV will need to evolve along with it. Julian predicts that Addressable TV will ultimately become the dominant method of precision-targeting due to this technological evolution. 

The Biggest Challenges of Addressable TV 

The Addressable TV industry has some significant challenges to address if it wants to become the go-to method of precision targeting for advertisers, says Julian. Like every other area of the media ecosystem, Addressable TV is in the midst of a sea change as media companies adopt new measurements and currencies to transact against. New standards of measurement need to be defined, and ideally, be capable of determining impact on sales, as well as controlling for frequency and reach. While industry organizations like “Go Addressable” are working on setting new measurement standards, Julian says that advertisers need to get comfortable with leveraging a multitude of technologies to achieve a holistic view of their performance. 

Another major challenge that comes into play is creative: precision-targeting can be powerful, but if creative assets – particularly the marketing messages – aren’t tailored to the consumer they’re reaching, its impact will be limited. Producing custom creative assets at scale will require new tools and more production planning, says Julian, something that the industry is only just beginning to tackle. 

Addressable TV and Identity

Like other digital media industries, Addressable TV is subject to privacy regulations and data deprecation. We ask Julian how media companies like Paramount shape their consumer identity strategies amidst these challenges. He paints a complex picture: there are dozens of different distribution environments and different consumer touch points. When you start to layer in different privacy regulations that are currently managed on a state-by-state basis, and the fact that media companies don’t have full ownership of the data across every environment, it becomes very difficult to achieve a single view of their audience to share with potential buyers. 

Julian predicts that new regulations will push the industry toward opt-in models, which may create more complexity for walled gardens while giving typical non-registration environments more opportunity to understand who the consumer is. 
We’re grateful to Julian for taking the time to unpack some of the complexity of Addressable TV and precision-targeting with us. You can watch or listen to the full episode here. Stay tuned for more eye-opening conversations about our complex media ecosystem in the coming weeks. And as always, we invite you to join the conversation on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

The post Amobee Out Loud, Episode 8: Addressable TV & The Future of Identity appeared first on Amobee.

Will CTV Find the Right Ratio of Ads + Content?

As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, linear TV publishers corrupted the viewing experience with too many ads per hour of content and ultimately that drove consumers to embrace streaming as an alternative viewing method. We ask Marc: with CTV now mainstream, how are platforms like YouTube thinking about ad loads? An excellent viewing experience is paramount to the platform’s success, he says, so keeping the advertising-to-programming ratio lower and making the ads highly relevant to the viewers is crucial and is better for the health of the platform and its creators. 

With Netflix set to introduce an ad-supported tier, it remains to be seen how much marketers will be willing to pay for those short but highly targetable ad slots, and whether they’ll get more comfortable experimenting with higher premiums to reach their audiences. 

YouTube’s First Year at Upfront Week

Advertisers’ may be grumbling about digital premiums, but their hesitancy to invest in CTV is shifting as the industry matures, and there’s no better example than this year’s upfront, where YouTube presented for the first time. YouTube is the most popular OTT platform in the US, with 150 million adults streaming it. (UScreen) So despite some initial skepticism about YouTube’s presence at the upfront prior to the annual gathering, in the end it was received positively and bodes well for YouTube and the future of ad-supported CTV. 

Defining Premium Content in Fragmented TV Ecosystem

The emergence of digital video has changed the dynamics of ‘premium content,’ and throughout the episode we challenge Marc to define premium content in this evolving marketplace. According to Marc, user-generated content, which makes up a huge portion of YouTube’s library, qualifies. YouTube’s consumers are viewing user-generated content on a scale unmatched by SVODs. Mr. Beast, one of YouTube’s top creators, boasts nearly 100 million subscribers to his channel alone. YouTube creators have to approach their content production as professionals in order to reach that scale, and that means that the definition of “professional production” is evolving too, Marc points out. Mr. Beast’s recreation of Netflix’s hit show “Squid Game,” which has over 275 million views and cost a few million dollars to produce, is also an example of how platforms like YouTube are influencing culture. Maybe that’s the new pinnacle of premium content in a digital era: when data-rich impressions and attentive viewership propel cultural virality. 

You can watch or listen to the full discussion with Marc here. If you enjoy the recaps and full episodes, please leave us a review. As always, we’re eager to continue the conversation on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. We’ll be back next week with another great episode.

The post Amobee Out Loud, Episode 7: What Does TV Mean in 2022? appeared first on Amobee.

How Can Advertisers Leverage Consumer Data to Capture Their Attention? 

We start off by asking Kathleen the million-dollar question: how can advertisers get attention in a world where consumers are exposed to extensive ads with very little attention? Kathleen says it boils down to how well a brand understands its consumer base. Brands often make the mistake of framing the issue as “who are we going to target,” or “who are we going to buy against,” when the value of consumer data starts way before that. In conversations with clients, Kathleen reframes the conversation as: who are our consumers? What are their interests, what are their lives like, and how can a product fit into their life? The real reason to use research-based, panel-based, or behaviorally-based data is not to “find” the consumer, but to better understand them. It’s the difference between the right place and time, and the right place + right time + right message. 

If advertisers want to understand their consumers better, Kathleen recommends starting with research or panel-based data to get the broadest understanding of the opportunity, followed by contextual data to get a better sense of consumer behavior. While there’s no replacement for first-party data, Kathleen always asks her clients to clarify the role that first-party data plays in the overall strategy: why are they collecting it, and what is the value exchange with the consumer when they provide their data? What insight does that first-party data provide, and how can second and third-party data provide even more detail, because people are so much more than the action they took on a website. All of this information helps provide a well-rounded view of consumers and when, where, and how advertisers can find them. 

Measuring for Attention vs Impressions

There’s been much debate recently about media measurement and the traditional method of measuring for opportunity versus measuring consumer attention. Kathleen says it’s not one or the other, but that both offer a unique perspective. Measuring for opportunity does a good job of quantifying time spent, determining whether there was engagement with an ad, and even capturing neural network data to understand consumer reaction to advertising. Attention doesn’t replace this, and it doesn’t solve the media measurement debate; it’s just an additional facet of measurement. Attention is about evaluating quality. Audience quality: who is the ideal audience and what do we know about them? Inventory quality: when, where, how are we engaging with this consumer? And business outcome: was there a direct conversion, or equity improvement? In this paradigm, measuring engagement is based on business outcomes, not just whether a consumer interacted with an ad in a particular moment. 

The “Ick Factor” of Consumer Data

Measuring the quality of a consumer’s attention brings up issues of brand trust. As Kathleen explained, there’s a difference between privacy compliance and advertising practices that cultivate trust with consumers. Just because a practice is privacy compliant doesn’t mean that consumers will appreciate it. Kathleen offered the helpful analogy of searching for someone online before a job interview – it’s not that researching a job candidate is bad, but bringing up everything you know about them right away might come across as creepy. Is it appropriate to bring certain data about consumers into the conversation, even if you have access to it? It makes people feel awkward when brands know more than they should, and in some extreme cases, has led consumers to share their experiences on social media, where these stories can go viral and have much larger consequences for brands. 

If brands want to cultivate relationships with their consumers, they should consider what consumers are comfortable with brands knowing and then strategize how to use that information in a compliant way that garners trust. In fact, the whole concept of brand trust has evolved over time. It used to be about consistency in service or product and brand reputation. Today, brand trust is about transparency and authenticity, says Kathleen. 

The Renaissance of Contextual Targeting

As third-party data deprecation becomes an industry reality, contextual data is experiencing something of a renaissance. Kathleen believes this is a good thing because, as she says, people are so much more than a single line of code that tracks what they’re clicking on the internet. Contextual data gives color to the mindset that consumers are in as they navigate the web – are they in business mode, and therefore an ad about diapers isn’t what they want to pay attention to at that moment? Or are they in parent mode, or vacation mode, and don’t want to be reminded of work right now? Putting an ad in the proper context will garner more attention from the consumer.

Efficiency vs Effectiveness in Ad Buying

Another factor influencing consumer attention is ad frequency. We asked Kathleen how she advises clients to think about CPMs in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. It’s not just about efficiency, she said, it’s about the effectiveness and determining the best investment before they sit down at the negotiating table. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is an age-old method of measurement, but it’s still useful in analyzing different vectors and questions that marketers want to understand. She encourages marketers to think about not only the efficiency of an ad buy, but overall effectiveness. ROI on an ad buy isn’t the only way to understand effectiveness; other insights like how an ad impacted brand health data can create a clearer picture of how advertisers should be spending their money that reflects how and where consumers are spending their time. 

It was an incredible conversation with Kathleen and we’re grateful for her perspective on the complexity of consumer attention. Visit us again next week for another recap, or you can listen or watch full episodes and subscribe here. Don’t forget to leave a review and join the conversation on our LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

The post Amobee Out Loud, Episode 6: The Attention Economy appeared first on Amobee.

Two Pillars of Digital Transformation: Trust & Consumer Experience

Niraj has been working in adtech for many years, since the early days of its digital transformation. In his experience, the evolution of ad technology is defined by two interrelated categories: trust and consumer experience. Trust between the consumer and the brand, as well as trust between the supply and demand sides of the industry. When it comes to trust, there are all sorts of issues at play: privacy, fraud, and identity to name a few. Consumer experience impacts everyone in the ecosystem and depends on the relevance and richness of each interaction, as well as the outcome for the business and for the consumer. 

These two key elements shape every decision about ad technology and are a big reason the industry is so fragmented. Instead of consolidating, the number of ad tech vendors in the ecosystem is multiplying – from 6,000 to more than 9,000 over the last decade – as each attempts to address different aspects of the customer experience and keep pace with shifting consumer behaviors. The good news is that it gives marketers and publishers a wealth of options for creative problem-solving. The downside is that the plethora of ad tech vendors can make it difficult to unify consumer trust and consumer experience in one end-to-end solution.

What Makes a Great DSP? 

With Niraj’s pillars of digital transformation to help guide the conversation, we ask him about DSPs and their ability to improve the consumer experience by helping marketers control ad frequency. What’s the difference between a great DSP and a mediocre one? 

Fatigue is a question of frequency, and the frequency is a question of the data and the relevance that you can actually bring to an interaction. DSPs are the means by which marketers can manage the consumer experience with their brand, and these platforms are facing a new hurdle as third-party cookies face increasing regulations. Going forward, DSPs will need to work backward from an excellent consumer experience and trust, because privacy regulation will make it very consent-driven and first-party data reliant. The next step in the evolution is aggregation, Niraj says, not just in consumer data (which gives you tools to manage for frequency, fatigue, relevance, etc) on demand side but aggregation of supply spaces (which will address issues of fraud). Contextual data will become essential. A good DSP will help advertisers navigate all of these changes, but it won’t be DSPs alone that solve the problem, says Niraj. Multiple workflows will have to come together to solve the issue.

The Role of Contextual Targeting 

On that note, we ask Niraj to share his perspective on the evolution of contextual targeting as marketers make the pivot away from third-party data. Contextual targeting has been around for a long time, but advancements in its technology have made it possible to surface really granular data about the context in which consumers interact with an ad, from device types and geolocation to content sentiment. Advancements in processing that data have also made it possible to improve the consumer experience with ad relevancy, and therefore consumer trust. With these advancements, contextual targeting will play a crucial role in privacy-centric identity solutions going forward.

Data and Privacy vs Trust

So what is the right cocktail of data resources to create streamlined, privacy-centric identity solutions? Niraj says the pivot here is based on consumer trust, rather than mere privacy. If trust is the North Star guiding advertisers and publishers, it is the consent and permission from consumers that determines what solutions are a good fit achieving business outcomes. In this paradigm, second party data and clean rooms provide a higher degree of compliance towards the regulation, but even more importantly, they create a higher degree of trust with the consumer. 

The right cocktail of data resources will not only include identity and audiences, but also data on entities such as supply and currency, and solutions that bring together multiple sources – multi-identity, multi-supply, or multi-currency – to achieve a more holistic view. The goal should be to create a solution that is built for the long-term and not subject to the whims of something that is outside of marketers or publishers’ control, like data regulation. 

Amobee’s Vision for a Sustainable Ad-Supported Ecosystem

With so many challenges of data, identity, and fragmentation, the industry is in desperate need of technology solutions that can help create a healthy balance between all players and all major supply spaces: linear tv, digital direct, and programmatic. At Amobee, we’re passionate about providing sophisticated technology with a strong backbone of data-driven, data-enabled strategy that addresses complex experiences like media planning.

Our conversation with Niraj highlighted the incredible potential of the industry to come together to build creative, sustainable solutions that enhance the consumer experience. You can listen to or watch the full episode here. Be sure to leave a review and join the conversation on our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Check back with us next week for another great episode of Amobee Out Loud.

The post Amobee Out Loud, Episode 5: Next Generation Ad Technology appeared first on Amobee.

A prevailing narrative from marketers today is the lament about the rising cost of media. They make statements like:

• “I pay too much for media.”
• “My year-on-year CPM increases are way too high.”
• “My greatest concern for this year’s upfront is about how to measure unduplicated reach.”
• “It’s great that all media is becoming data enabled, but it costs more money to execute and takes away from my bottom-line impressions.”
• “There is not enough transparency in the media supply chain.”

However, instead of focusing on innovation and new business models to capitalize on the digitization of video, many marketers continue to use old scales to measure a new marketplace, creating a prevailing narrative of fear.

A visual representation of that fear might look like a Venn diagram with the overlapping conversation points being cost, measurement, and targeting, leading to fretful conversations around transparency, data-enablement and understanding unduplicated reach. The outcome of these conversations is often industry paralysis.

Reframe conversations about value

It’s time to flip the narrative and develop a business model that promotes a new mind meld. This new working model would use the new platforms and ad models to reshape how the industry thinks about costs, measurement, and targeting so that marketers can take advantage of new opportunities.

On the issue of cost and deconstructing the value of an impression, the commonly held belief has been that different impressions placed in different circumstances have different values, and marketers were willing to pay more for an impression that generates a larger audience or is more targeted. In today’s increasingly complex marketplace, determining the value of an ad in different contexts will require stress-testing different models, understanding that there isn’t an exact relational value between old and new.

Blowing up old rule books to test new models is not a commitment to a new benchmark, it’s a commitment to learning. To succeed in this complex marketplace, you have to be willing to test different price points in media.

Shift focus from impressions to attention

Another common refrain from marketers is the fear that targeted media, such as programmatic, is less transparent and reduces marketers’ spend value. But data-enabled reserved media is still in a nascent form and the industry is still in the process of determining whether it’s a better use of media and improves the viewing experience.

If you reframe the conversation from one of impressions to one of attention, then it doesn’t matter how many people have the opportunity to see an ad, it matters how many people actually view an ad. Sure, it may cost more, much more, on a unit or impression basis, but if reduced ad loads can attract greater consumer attention and reduce ad fatigue, then isn’t it ultimately a win-win for both the marketer and the viewer?

Viewership and solving for reach

The average viewer encounters between 6,000-10,000 ads per day—that’s a lot. When consumers were asked what factors would make them pay more attention to ads during a show, most and all the top responses were about creating a better experience by reducing ad loads, better targeting, or rewards for watching ads.

A data and technology-empowered narrative

Based on where the industry is and where it wants to go, everyone needs to work on creating a new narrative. The conversation needs to move beyond cost as the benchmark for our discussions and shift to attention, frequency management, understanding reach overlap and opportunity areas across media companies, and looking holistically across all screens.

 It’s time to move away from a fear-based narrative to data-based proof points. The way to generate data-based decisions in a fragmented, walled-garden marketplace is to replace fear with knowledge and insights.

Technology exists to make this possible. These solutions can unify audiences and optimize impressions across all screens and supply pools in a supply-constrained marketplace to provide the knowledge and insights that buyers need to make better decisions. The right technology solution can break the cycle of industry paralysis and replace fear as a motivation.

That means along with purchasing data, brands and agencies must also spend a portion of their media budgets on technology to secure their brands’ place in a future dominated by consumer choice and more fragmentation. The new narrative may look similar to the current one—but the difference is that it is solution-oriented.

This new narrative accounts for cost, measurement, and targeting as well as its natural watchouts and by-products—transparency, data enablement, and unduplicated reach. But it becomes a solvable puzzle through technology.

Ultimately, in this narrative, the industry can rely on technology to move forward to guide everyone through an uncharted, fragmented landscape with more choices and opportunities than ever before.

The post The Media Buying Narrative Is Broken—But It Can Be Fixed appeared first on Amobee.

The Power of Alliances to Drive Industry Change

As our colleague Volker Helm noted, one recurring topic was the power and importance of alliances and partnerships between companies. Looking to the European marketplace, many publishers are coming together to share information in a holistic and accessible way with their marketing partners. There is a shared desire, even among competitors, to make the experience of accessing inventory and publishers easier for marketers, because it will ultimately improve the viewing experience for consumers. They see it as a shared mission, so they find areas of compatibility and collaboration. 

With major players like Meta, Google and Amazon growing ever more powerful, alliances between smaller companies are necessary to staying competitive and agile in the marketplace. 

The Evolving Definition of “Premium Content” 

Another hot topic of conversation was the question: what is premium content? As the shared definition of premium content evolves with consumer behavior, what are the implications for advertisers? 

The old paradigm of premium content depended on front/back of camera talent, plus the time of day that it aired. Marketers were easily able to identify premium content and build their brands off of associations with it. But in today’s marketplace of linear and digital content, that old paradigm becomes irrelevant if you can target audiences accurately, and premium content becomes much more personal to the viewer. There is no “prime” time of day in a digital world, and different audiences value different types of content – for a 45 year old, their definition of premium may be closer to the old paradigm of professionally developed content, but for an 18 year old, that premium content may be user-generated on a platform like YouTube. The new paradigm seems to be that premium content is in the eye of the beholder, so long as you can append data to it to target the viewers and serve content and advertising that matters to them. The environment or circumstances in which content is viewed is an added layer of significance for advertisers – what screen are they viewing it on, and who are they viewing it with? Is it a shared experience, sent from one viewer to another via individual devices, or viewed together on one device at the same time? If you factor these details in, viral content can be considered premium, no matter who creates it. The challenge for advertisers is whether they can find a way to be part of that cultural zeitgeist in a fragmented media landscape with so many niche audiences. 

Adopting New Currencies

Measurement and currency were another big discussion point at Cannes. In the past few years, these terms have often been used interchangeably, but today there’s more clarity and distinction being made between the two. 

Among the many panels and conversations, it was clear that publishers are out of the test phase and are activating against new currencies coming out of this year’s upfronts. Given this development, “alternative currencies” is no longer an accurate phrase, and Kelly Abacarian, EVP of Measurement and Impact for NBCUniversal made the call in a panel discussion for people to start using the phrase “new currencies” as they become part of mainstream media transacting. 

The Future of Work

Being together in person at Cannes for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began was an incredible experience, and prompted discussion around the future of work. It reaffirmed what is valuable about in-person gatherings – it provides an opportunity for new connections and deeper discussions in a way that virtual gatherings do not. But as Kara put it, asking people to return to in-person work just for the sake of it isn’t good for team morale; a clear purpose for meeting is what makes it meaningful. The new workplace paradigm should be quality over quantity – the quality of the engagement with colleagues should matter more than the number of days people show up to the office. 

For more discussion about the Cannes Festival and the future of media and advertising, listen to the full episode here. Be sure to leave a review and join the conversation on our LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

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We’re still navigating significant uncertainty and change as the COVID-19 pandemic becomes endemic and we collectively adjust to the changing times. One of the great challenges for executives and people managers right now is leading our teams in a remote or hybrid work environment. More than two years into this health crisis, some companies still struggle to connect with and motivate their people. Those who struggle seem to lead with their bottom line rather than their values; they’re engaged in a power struggle to bring people back to the office without any consensus on why they need to be there or respect for the way the pandemic reoriented people’s routines and shifted their priorities. The companies that are thriving with new workforce dynamics are led by people who seem to have a few qualities in common: clarity of vision for where the business is headed and the ability to communicate it well across the organization and one-to-one with their team members, as well as authenticity, flexibility, and most important of all, empathy. 

Within the media industry another significant transformation is happening as well, driven in part by the evolving post-COVID workforce and the fluctuating macroeconomics that are affecting everyone right now. Then there’s the evolving consumer preferences and the proliferation of new market entrants, from new streaming platforms to walled garden environments, which are accelerating that evolution. In the past few years, brands have also had to confront the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the industry and learn to articulate their values and put their money where their mouth is. 

On my recent trip to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, I observed incredible industry leadership in action. The leaders who are paving the way through this moment of transformation have two things in common: an innovation mindset and a willingness to collaborate, even when it means doing something audacious, like partnering with ‘frenemies.’ Some of our industry’s most complex challenges won’t get resolved until we do this, like achieving standardized measurements across walled gardens. Advertising efficiency and a better consumer experience won’t be fully realized until the industry buckles up and comes together to cooperate. The leaders who are uniquely suited to this moment are those who can embrace a bold, collaborative vision that puts the good of the industry ahead of their personal gain. 

As the industry evolves and we continue to face uncertainty on a national and global scale, from economic upheaval to political turmoil and social change, I believe that we need to lead both internally and externally. We’re emerging from an era when brands and corporations were used to staying ‘above the fray’ of whatever was happening politically, but employees and customers alike rightly won’t take silence as an answer anymore. After all, companies aren’t disembodied entities that exist in a vacuum; companies are comprised of leaders who make choices that have social, economic, and political impacts. And companies are comprised of people who experience those impacts, who have mental health needs, and who are looking to their leaders for empathy and vision to navigate this moment. Employees and customers are desperate for leaders who guide with their humanity and their values. 

This might be why so many are captivated by Vladimir Zelensky’s leadership in the war between Ukraine and Russia. Many predicted that once Russia instigated a full attack on Ukraine that defeat would be swift – a matter of weeks, if not days. Nearly four months later, Ukraine is still in the fight because of Zelensky. He was dealt what felt like an impossible situation, but he embodies values-based leadership and is a gifted communicator who wields media very effectively. 

From the beginning, Zelensky was able to focus the global community on who is really responsible for the violence. In a televised speech just days before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Zelensky made a clear distinction between the Russian government and its people. He spoke directly to Russians in their own language, debunking Putin’s lies that the incursion was an effort to free Ukrainians and pleading for peace between the two nations. The compassion he showed to Russian citizens mobilized thousands of them to protest in the streets, and around the globe, people raised the Ukrainian flag in support of their fight for freedom. 

When other leaders might have fled their own nation in the face of danger, Zelensky chose to stay in Kyiv to demonstrate how much he values his homeland and his citizens. In a self-recorded video just days after Russia launched its invasion, Zelensky showed the Ukrainian people that he and his fellow Ukrainian leaders were still there with them, working tirelessly to get the resources and support they needed to fight. He has been very adept at garnering that support from the global community by balancing gratitude for what they’ve been given with the unflinching reality of their situation on the ground. The conflict in Ukraine remains dire, but somehow Zelensky has been able to maintain hope and resolve by leading with remarkable integrity.

As leaders, we’re at the intersection of several pivotal moments in political, economic, social, and commercial change. This moment will shape us as much as we shape it. Now is the time to ask ourselves what kind of leaders we want to be, what skills and qualities we need to cultivate to effectively motivate people, and how we can do so with our humanity and our values intact. 

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Data Usage vs Data Ownership within Walled Gardens 

The benefit of walled gardens is that media companies can curate the experience for their customers with both content and ads. This is highly valuable to marketers because of the rich data gathered within walled gardens via IP, from user location, to device type, context, and more. The downside is that the user doesn’t control their data within these walled gardens and media companies are able to monetize it in ways that consumers don’t always trust. 

This has led to ongoing debates within the industry about data ownership. Wherever data flows and someone has the ability to collect it, they have the ability to own it, explains Adam, but the question becomes how they are allowed to use it. In closed ecosystems like Google and Facebook, they offer very little visibility into their own data, and at the same time use marketers’ data for their own benefit. 

Are Marketers Getting Their Value in Walled Gardens? 

According to Insider Intelligence, the largest walled gardens (Google, Meta, and Amazon) are receiving nearly 75% of digital advertising dollars, yet consumers are only spending about a third of their time in these spaces. Many wonder whether this is a smart spend strategy, but Adam reframed it this way: investment should depend on content experiences where consumers are engaged, where advertising makes sense within the user experience, and where it can drive business results. So while consumers may not spend the majority of their time in walled gardens, the richly curated experiences make them effective advertising environments and that’s why advertisers are eager to invest there. 

From Garden Walls to Picket Fences

Walled gardens may offer richer data in the current ecosystem, but as more legacy media companies make the strategic pivot to direct-to-consumer environments, it is further fragmenting the marketplace. The lack of visibility across channels and standardized measurement makes media planning and buying a challenge and hems overall efficiency. Advertisers waste billions each year in redundant marketing, and consumers become frustrated, by seeing the same ad in too many different environments, too often. 

While it’s understandable that media companies want to protect their consumer data against leaks and misuse, innovations need to be made to reduce ad waste and improve the consumer experience. 

“What we don’t need are solid walls. We need picket fences that can be seen through, in standardized, legitimate, privacy-compliant ways – so that all of these environments can connect to support the base level of needs marketers have,” explains Adam. 

Data clean rooms, in which walled gardens share aggregated data with advertisers and advertisers add their first-party data to compare the two data sets to determine whether they’re over-serving ads to the same audiences, are one solution but they aren’t the whole answer, Adam explains. If every media company and advertiser has their own clean room, then where is THE clean room of clean rooms? The industry’s big challenge is to bring those clean rooms together in one holistic view, with standardized, consistent data and parameters that each clean room collects, reports, and makes available. If those things aren’t consistent, connecting the clean rooms won’t work, Adam says. 

The Future of Measurement in Walled Gardens 

Another hurdle to industry progress is determining the right metrics to measure success in an evolving marketplace. Advertisers are still focused on measuring by CPM, which essentially treats all impressions as if they have the same value, explained Adam. In a fragmented digital universe, a distributed value model, in which different audiences have higher or lower value than others at a given point in time, is a more accurate and meaningful measurement for marketers and advertisers. In that model, the marketplace and biddable environment become an opportunity for media companies to capture that value and for advertisers to optimize against it. 

This, again, is where a picket-fence connected ecosystem of different “gardens” would be hugely beneficial to the industry, because it would give advertisers a macro-level view of campaign performance and value created from enabling different tactics. Until the industry has that connectivity and the ability to develop attribution models, advertising efficiency in the digital era will not be fully realized, and the consumer experience will continue to suffer.  

It is a really informative conversation with Adam and we’re energized by the potential for the industry to come together to create a better experience for everyone, most of all the consumer. 

We hope you’ll return next week for our episode on The Attention Economy. You can follow the blog for another recap or listen to full episodes and subscribe here. Be sure to leave a review and join the conversation on our LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook!

The post Amobee Out Loud, Episode 3: Walled Gardens appeared first on Amobee.

We live in a complex world with many competing arguments for how to create a better society. Brands play an important role in forming and redefining cultural norms and values.

As Jean Kilbourne (writer, filmmaker, and activist known for her work on the image of women in advertising) said, “Ads do sell products, but they also sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images, concepts of love and sexuality, of romance, success, popularity, and perhaps most important, of normalcy. To a very great extent, they tell us who we are and who we should be.”

Think about some of those most iconic brands of the last half century: Coca Cola, Apple, Nike. Brands have long used their marketing messaging strategies to make a cultural impact.

One of the best examples of purpose-driven marketing is Doves’ Campaign for Real Beauty that helped women appreciate their own beauty no matter their shape or size. The campaign put a critical lens up to the fashion world that glorified a kind of unrealistic beauty. Another groundbreaking campaign was Procter & Gamble’s “The Talk” for their platform My Black is Beautiful that illuminated how society unfairly treats and misdefines Black people. Both are examples of a brand taking a stance to reshape a cultural discussion.

And the buy-one-give-one model of brands like TOMS, and the trend toward eco-friendly companies that plant a tree for every purchase made, are other examples of values-driven branding.

Use media to promote values

Today, many corporations use their clout to promote values that they hold. A recent example is the companies who have pledged to assist employees with women’s healthcare if Roe v. Wade is overturned. These companies include Amazon, Bloomberg, Apple, Citigroup, Levi’s, Uber, Mastercard and many more. Other corporations have taken a pledge to become net-zero emission producers; these companies include Coca Cola and General Motors.

In light of this trend towards values-based marketing, I want to ask a new question: Why don’t marketers use their largest marketing expenditure, media, to help promote the values that they have been talking about for years, but have made little progress on?

These issues include spending on minority-owned media to help support content that targets underserved communities, as well as media companies that actively support LBGTQ+ rights or promote strategies that combat climate change.

Other issues could include supporting media companies that do not promote misinformation or disinformation, or media companies that strive to protect consumers’ data. There are many issues that could become a scorecard for how brands choose to evaluate media companies other than the traditional metrics of audience, price, data and technology solutions.

Spend media dollars with purpose

Ads can be powerful tools for reframing cultural conversations about different issues, but when brands make beautiful ads without shifting their dollars to support the values they tout in their marketing, it can confuse and frustrate consumers.

Media plays such an important role in society that brands should begin ‘values-based buying’ and hold media companies accountable for the values they promote.

Let’s say a brand creates an ad that promotes a positive message about racial equity, but that ad is aired on a media network that is actively promoting disinformation. Consumers may be left wondering: “Was the ad just a cynical marketing ploy?”

Media plays such an important role in society that brands should begin “values-based buying” and hold media companies accountable for the values they promote. If a brand truly cares about limiting the spread of misinformation/disinformation, then they should not spend their money on properties that promote it. Likewise, if a brand cares about diversity and equality, then it should use its clout to support content that has women and minorities in front of and behind the camera.

Using a brand’s media dollars to promote the values that they hold most dear is not an easy pivot when brands are fighting for market share and growth. But brands have the individual and collective power to hold media companies accountable by being mindful about where they spend their advertising dollars.

It’s an opportunity to demonstrate in actions, not just ads, what your brand actually values. And furthermore, today’s consumer will value this stance, if promoted, and reward those brands with their loyalty.

Align with values-conscious consumers

We know that Millennials and Gen Zers are very values-conscious and care about a brand’s role in society as much (and sometimes more) than the efficacy of that product.

A McKinsey Report noted, “U.S. consumer sentiment and behaviors during the coronavirus crisis (December 2021) found that 42% of millennials and Gen Z consumers cited purpose as the primary factor in changing brands. For example, they based their decision on whether a company shared their values and if employees are treated well. … A company with a clear purpose signals to both internal and external stakeholders who you are and what you stand for.”

Values-based buying can not only have a cultural impact by holding media companies accountable to socially responsible content and practices, but it can also build trust with consumers and position companies for a marketplace where Millennials and Gen Zers are the primary consumers. It’s just good business.

Consumers will remember which brands played a positive role in shaping a future where diversity is valued, wages are fair, misinformation/disinformation is in decline and our planet is safe for the coming generations.

The post Why Values-Based Buying Is the Next Generation of Media appeared first on Amobee.