Why CTV advertising should be on media plans

Connected TV (CTV) advertising, which combines the sight, sound and motion of TV advertising with the targeting of digital, has to be seriously considered as part of brands’ media plans, according to the just-released WARC Guide to Connected TV.

Why it matters

Most TV viewers are now spending substantial amounts of time watching TV on a variety of streaming platforms. This means that marketers are increasingly unlikely to reach targets using just linear TV – brands that use CTV as well can take advantage of enhanced targeting and minimize waste.

Takeaways

• In the US, CTV spending is set to reach $21bn by the end of 2022, according to research from the IAB; that figure is just short of the amount of 2022 spending expected in other forms of online video (excluding social). 
• As viewership shifts toward CTV, some brands are pursuing a “video-on-demand first” strategy. 
• Ad inventory in CTV comes from a variety of sources, including streaming services and Smart TV companies.
• CTV advertising runs primarily on first-party data – streaming platforms inherently require a log-in, as does opting in to a Smart TV or device, as does having a cable or satellite subscription. Because of first-party data, CTV also sidesteps many privacy concerns.
• CTV’s internet connectivity makes it possible for advertising to be transactional; brands can take advantage of tactics such as using a QR code to exploit second-screening behavior. 

The big idea

Brands, agencies and media owners will need to become fluent in CTV as viewing habits shift and enhanced targeting in TV becomes easier to achieve. 

Read more in The WARC Guide to Connected TV

Empathy when it’s convenient

Ad industry leaders’ fine words on empathy aren’t cutting it with staff, as new research from Australia indicates an “empathy gap” between those at the top and middle managers/junior staff.

Why it matters

Workplace wellbeing shot to prominence during the pandemic and lockdowns, as many people struggled to cope with fear, grief, isolation and burnout. Issues around diversity and inclusion have also risen up the business agenda in response to campaigns like #Black Lives Matter. But the findings of this study from the Mentally Healthy Change Group into empathy within the media, marketing and creative industry, based on a survey of more than 500 people, suggest that companies’ actions may often have been more about ticking boxes than genuinely addressing the issues. Creating a sense of disillusionment among staff is hardly the way to retain them at a time when it’s difficult to recruit people in the first place.

Study findings

• The great majority of people surveyed (86%) said empathy at work was personally important to them, but only 38% believed their employer valued empathy.
• The main barriers to empathetic workplaces were time pressures (80%), a focus on client satisfaction over employee satisfaction (68%) and lack of understanding of the role of empathy and business metrics (66%)
• Seven in ten (70%) respondents in leadership roles felt they worked in an inclusive workplace compared to only 55% of respondents on middle or junior levels.
• Half (51%) of respondents were considering leaving in the next 12 months, rising to 61% among more junior staff.

The big idea 

Empathy in the workplace is seen to bring real benefits including better collaboration between teams, improvement in job satisfaction and a more inclusive work culture.

Key quote 

“It appears respondents are not always seeing empathetic intentions modeled because often 'the business comes first'. Indeed, the stronger the belief that a business puts profit first, the stronger the likelihood for people in the company to want to leave” – Andy Wright, co-chair of the Mentally Healthy Change Group and founder of Never Not Creative.

Sourced from Ad News [Image: Getty]

The Disney+ ad offer in under a minute

Disney+, the new titan on the streaming block has explained what advertising will actually look like on the platform.

Why it matters

Home to Marvel, Star Wars, and most of your childhood viewing, the prospect of advertising on Disney+ is tantalising, especially as the service continued to post stable subscriber growth (over 6% in the Q2) in what has been a difficult market. Advertising is expected to open it out to a vast new audience of viewers.

Bottom line seems to be that Disney’s highly controlled ad product will prioritise quality over quantity.

What they’re going to do

• Show four minutes of ads per hour (versus around 18 to 23 on traditional TV)
• Offer CPMs of around $50-$60 in the US, per ad buyers speaking to the Wall Street Journal.

What they’re not going to do

• Show ads to kids (if they have their own profile on their parent’s account)
• Show ads for alcohol
• Show political ads
• Show ads for rival studios or streamers (obviously).

Across the industry

The reincorporation of ads is similar to the eventual strategy of a lot of news brands: ads and subscribers can mix, and not only that, ads shown to signed-in, verified users are far more profitable.

Nevertheless, Netflix’s upcoming ad offer has been read as the company on the ropes. Its CEO has his past anti-ads hubris to thank for that. So if you take one thing from this, it’s to never say never.

But from an advertising perspective, this is a way into previously unavailable premium media. It will also be a fascinating snapshot into the kinds of effect that ads on streaming platforms can offer.

Sourced from WSJ, Variety, AdExchanger

Frequency capping in a post-cookie media ecosystem

The withdrawal of third-party cookies poses a serious challenge to frequency capping, risking increased user fatigue from repeated ad exposures, and potentially compromising advertiser ROI.

Instead, advertisers must explore alternatives including frequency management on a publisher-by-publisher basis, estimating capping on probabilistic signals, and browser-level capping via initiatives like Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

Why it matters

The goals of frequency capping do not necessarily clash with the principles of user privacy. While not as straightforward as working with third-party cookies, frequency can continue to be managed in a privacy-preserving way.

Current alternatives and their limitations

1. First-party approaches: In essence, frequency capping controls on a single publisher. However, ‘partitioned by domain’ first-party cookies involve significant operational complexity, and scale is limited by the fact that not all users log in.
2. Third-party alternatives: Deriving unique user IDs from data points such as log-in data and emails, similar in principle to third-party cookies. It’s also possible to use unique user identifiers based on probabilistic signals (e.g. device IP address, installed fonts, screen resolution), but all major browsers are actively working on reducing this type of ‘fingerprinting’.
3. Proposals for future approaches: FLEDGE, part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox aims to provide interest-based advertising in a privacy-preserving way, prohibiting cross-site tracking. This might be used for frequency capping by using browser data on previous ad views to optimise campaigns, without any data leaving the user’s device.

Asia’s travel marketers switch focus

Tourism and international travel is picking up across Asia as borders reopen and COVID testing requirements are lifted – welcome developments for a sector that now has to reassess its marketing approach.

Why it matters

During lockdowns when no one was travelling, tourism brands had little option but to focus their continued marketing efforts on brand-building and other upper-funnel activities. Now that travel is a realistic option once again, they need to switch attention to lower-funnel activity to capitalise on what they can expect to be a lot of pent-up demand. 

The industry is stirring

• Tourism bodies across the region are ramping up their promotional efforts, Campaign Asia reports – an important step in giving confidence to travel brands and operators.
• Travel ministers from ASEAN countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia and Brunei, have pledged to work together to rebuild air travel in the region post-COVID.
• Japan has announced it will trial package tours of foreign tourists to see how well travel agencies can “manage behaviour”, the Straits Times reports.

Tourists have changed

Returning tourists are likely to have a subtly changed outlook – still conscious of things like hygiene but also more conscious of issues around sustainability. Travel brands will need to find a balance between safety and inspiration.

Tone is important 

“Tourists want to feel welcome at these places and not be reminded of the difficulties of the past two years. They want campaigns that are optimistic and upbeat” Anish Daryani, president of M&C Saatchi Indonesia. 

Sourced from Campaign Asia, Straits Times [Image: Getty]

Inflation hits pack size and adspend in India

Rising raw material prices and high inflation are pushing India’s fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands to shrink pack sizes in order to maintain crucial price points at the same time as they are cutting back on advertising.

Why it matters

Keeping a product’s price constant but reducing pack sizes – so-called shrinkflation – is a frequent response by manufacturers at such times. Dabur India’s CEO recently spoke of the need to “protect sacred price points like Re 1, Rs 5 and Rs 10", especially in rural markets. 

Takeaways 

• Urban markets, with higher incomes and spending power, are more likely to see price increases on large pack sizes.
• Businesses are also adopting “bridge-pack” strategies, which offer the consumer slightly more volume but at a higher price.
• As profit margins are squeezed, FMCG companies are also becoming more cautious about advertising expenditure, with observers suggesting many are cutting spend by up to 15%.

Key quote

"Most FMCG categories have lower unit packs of Re 1 to Rs 10 accounting for 25 to 35 percent of their sales. Even when downtrading happens, the consumer remains with the brands” – Abneesh Roy, ECP Edelweiss Financial Services, speaking to Economic Times. 

Sourced from Economic Times, e4m, Financial Express [Image: Getty]

RTB goes under the spotlight again

“RTB is the biggest data breach ever recorded,” argues a new study that compounds the growing accusations toward the high-frequency media trading technique that relies on the extensive use of customer data.

Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) data indicates that real-time bidding (RTB) “tracks and shares what people view online and their real-world location 294 billion times in the U.S. and 197 billion times in Europe every day.”

Why it matters

From an industry perspective, it’s one of the sketchier areas of advertising that contributes to its bad name among the public. In some jurisdictions it creates a compliance nightmare. For most companies, the opaque market that results from programmatic advertising causes big problems for traceability.

But this report also asks big questions about what GDPR has actually done to reign any of this bad behaviour in. Not only is there a consent problem but increasingly one of security, especially following the draft US Supreme Court decision to ban abortion, and the risk that online searches for such services could now suppose for users.

What’s this about?

Reported by TechCrunch here, the full report, available here, is based on data from confidential sources and estimates that web user data (online activity, location, etc) is exposed hundreds of times a day depending on geography:

• The average American has their data exposed 747 times each day.
• The average European has their data exposed 376 times a day.

The report also suggests that some of these figures are relatively conservative estimates, given that its sources cover Google and Microsoft (which owns Xandr), but don’t include Facebook or new advertising giant Amazon.

Of course, Google says it doesn’t share personally identifiable information with partners and limits targeting capabilities based on sensitive information. Still, its work on the privacy sandbox that will help move past the cookie implies that there are better ways of managing online advertising.

What’s RTB again?

Real-time bidding is a form of programmatic media buying on a per-impression basis. When a user arrives at a publisher website, a bid request (including information about the user’s interests or profile) will then flow through the system to an ad exchange where advertisers bid for the chance to show that user an ad. It’s an old technology, by digital standards – WARC covered it back in 2012 – and was intended to improve pricing efficiency.

You probably knew this, but it is both complicated and boring, so it’s fair enough if you didn’t.

The problem

It has come under sustained criticism for a long time, especially from officials in Europe. In 2019, the UK’s data protection regulator warned about the adtech world’s “immature” understanding of data protection requirements.

More recently, the Belgian data protection regulator said that the IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework, an off-the-peg solution to gain GDPR compliance for real time bidding, was itself found to not be GDPR compliant.

But in the US, where there is no overarching data protection control, examples of malevolent uses of RTB data are widespread – and mentioned in the report. Black Lives Matter protesters were profiled, US security services have tracked people’s phones without a warrant.

Sourced from TechCrunch, ICCL, WARC

The Honest Company taps shopper marketing as digital costs rise

The Honest Company, which makes a range of beauty and baby products, is shifting its focus more towards shopper marketing because of rising costs in the digital space.

Why it matters

Increasing digital costs will require marketers to carefully assess where they can achieve the strongest return on investment. Finding the right mix of brand-building and activation will be a critical task.

The Honest Company’s approach

In its last quarter, The Honey Company’s marketing outlay stood at 20% of sales. During an earnings call, Nick Vlahos, the firm’s CEO, outlined its “commitment to supporting our brand” as follows:

• Rising digital costs, he noted, are “leading us to shift traditional marketing investment more toward shopper marketing and other vehicles to reach consumers in-store.”
• This strategy, Vlahos explained, is a “good example of our return-based approach to directing brand investment to where it will drive growth most cost-effectively.”
• Additionally, efforts to boost in-store demand support “the strong growth we see with key retail partners and aligns with our retail distribution expansion in the second half of the year,” he said.

The role of data

• The Honest Company works with a “limited amount” of retail partners, a list including Kroger, Walgreens, Target and Whole Foods.
• Many retailers selling the brand’s products have one-to-one relationships with shoppers, and the resultant insights can help inform The Honest Company’s strategy.
• “Their card data, their loyalty programs is a precursor to where we invest our shopper marketing dollars,” Vlahos said.
• Shopper marketing is also connected to “marketing that’s being done with those partners on the digital side,” he added, to fuel acquisition, trading up and incremental sales.
• The Honest Company’s communications also seek to encourage shoppers to buy other beauty or baby products, and to become cross-category shoppers for the brand.

Sourced from Motley Fool 

Reliance aims to become a house of brands 

India’s Reliance conglomerate is reported to be poised to move aggressively into the FMCG space, with plans to build a portfolio of up to 60 grocery, household and personal care brands within six months.

That’s according to Reuters, as reported in The Hindu, which cites a source saying “Reliance will become a house of brands. This is an inorganic play.”

What we know 

• Reliance already operates a network of grocery outlets and is expanding its JioMart e-commerce operations. 
• Reuters’ sources explain that a new business unit, Reliance Retail Consumer Brands, will house the various niche and regional consumer brands the company is currently negotiating to acquire or form joint ventures with. 
• An “army” of distributors is being recruited to take those brands to both kirana stores and modern retail outlets.
• Reliance is said to be targeting Rs 500bn ($6.5bn) of annual sales within five years.

Why it matters

If confirmed, Reliance would be throwing down the gauntlet to the multinationals that currently dominate this space. Its private-label products already compete for space with big-name brands in its supermarkets. 

Key quote

“If inorganic is the route for Reliance, they will be able to scale up much faster. But they’ll need to get the pricing and distribution right to compete with bigger rivals” – Alok Shah, consumer analyst at Ambit Capital.

Sourced from The Hindu BusinessLine

Mastercard’s three pillars of marketing effectiveness

Mastercard, the payments company, judges marketing effectiveness through the lenses of building and protecting its brand, driving business growth, and obtaining competitive advantage through differentiation.

Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer, discussed this subject in a LIONS Marketers Series event held by LIONS, which, like WARC, is owned by Ascential.

Why it matters

Effectiveness often lacks a shared definition, as marketers adopt their own criteria surrounding what this term means. It is, however, vital for brand teams to have a clear, shared perspective of this notion to guide their strategies and help track performance.

Mastercard’s effectiveness model

In aiming to “forget all the fluffy stuff” relating to effectiveness, Rajamannar explained that Mastercard has focused on three parameters:

• The first is “how do we build, nurture and protect the brand, because marketing folks are the brand stewards,” he said.
• “Second, how do you fuel the business? How do you become a real driver of the business or an enabler of the business, depending on the organization?”
• “The third is: How do you set up platforms that will differentiate and distinguish your company and your brand ahead of competition, so you're creating some kind of competitive advantage?”

The big idea

“If you look at these three [pillars], and anything that you're doing, and you're trying to measure the effectiveness of, against these three pillars, that's when you'll start making a lot of sense.” – Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer, Mastercard.

Sourced from LIONS

Mediabrands taps automation to advantage

Mediabrands Australia has launched an automation program it claims is a first within the media agency sector and one it hopes will deliver it a competitive advantage in the coming months.

What’s it doing? 

Over the past 20 months Mediabrands has worked with partners UI Path and Cognizant to automate repetitive internal tasks in its media agencies, from inputting data to campaign tracking. 

Why it matters

The media industry hasn’t altered the way it works for 20 years or more, points out Mediabrands’ CEO Mark Coad, but the world has utterly changed in that time. He sees two primary benefits from automation: i) better media performance as staff are able to spend more time discussing strategy with media owners and clients; and ii) better staff retention as new recruits are relieved of the need to “spend two or three years doing some kind of administrative apprenticeship”. 

Takeaways

• Since launching, the network has automated almost 13,000 tasks and saved over 3,300 hours.
• Over the next 12 months the program is set to save more than 25,000 hours in total.

Key quote

“(This) transformation unburdens our people of the time-consuming and tedious tasks of day-to-day operations and frees them up to do intelligent, creative work that drives growth” – Mark Coad, CEO, IPG Mediabrands Australia, as reported by Campaign Asia.

Sourced from Campaign Asia, Australian Financial Review [Image: Getty]

WeWork and Greggs sketch emerging long-term work trends

Office life is back, but less than before, more flexible than before, and providing less of a lunch occasion than before even if people are getting snacks for their commutes – results from shared workspace provider WeWork and British bakery chain Greggs sketch the complicated reality of the return to ‘normality’.

Why it matters

Travelling to work five times a week versus just once, twice, or sometimes not at all constitutes a radical shift in people’s habits, not only as workers but as consumers of travel, inner-city lunches, and media.

In the UK, hot food sales reflect more travel and more out-of-home consumption, but inner-city consumption struggles to recover.

Globally, in-person office work appears to be normalising, according to the new-look, post-Adam-Neumann WeWork. But increased co-working doesn’t necessarily equate to a return to 2019 levels.

We’re Working! But it’s shifting to flex

Now publicly traded, the US-headquartered global co-working company WeWork announced revenue growth of 28% versus the same quarter last year, more than it had anticipated.

Speaking to investors last week CEO Sandeep Mathrani said memberships had grown 30% compared to the same quarter last year.

More interesting to marketers is the rates of physical occupancy the company is reporting:

• US and Canada: 64% occupancy
• International: 75% occupancy

London, interestingly, came in for a specific mention as a bellwether city as WeWork’s gross sales in the British capital equate to 39% of all London’s traditional office leasing (it manages around 1% of all the office space in London), as the market leads “the shift to flex” in WeWork’s telling.

You are what you eat

Greggs, the beloved UK bakery chain, is seeing strong growth in transport-hub based buying, even as city-centre locations lag the rest of the estate, according to the latest Greggs trading update.

Sales were up 27% in the first 19 weeks of the year versus the same period in 2021. As this point in 2021 saw just a partial easing of lockdowns, the firm notes that growth figures are likely to normalise in the coming months. It warns not only of cost increases weighing on the company but also on consumers’ wallets.

The company has continued to open new shops, as it refines its retail strategy.

In case you were curious as to the shifting tastes of the nation: “Sales of hot food and snacks are showing particularly strong growth, with chicken goujons and potato wedges proving popular.”

Sourced from Seeking Alpha, Greggs

Reimagining Gillette for the modern man

Gillette, the P&G-owned male grooming brand, was built on the clean-shaven look, but today more than half of men worldwide sport beards, including two-thirds of millennial men – it has had to rethink what it does and how it does it.

Why it matters

For many years, Gillette famously discouraged employees from having beards (and suppliers and agencies). Its initial assumption that the facially hirsute look was merely a passing fad, popular among hipsters but not among the male population at large, started to look awry when sportsmen it was paying to advertise its razors grew beards.

The company effectively made the mistake of believing its own marketing (“the best a man can be”) rather than understanding the shift that was taking place – and one that has been accelerated over the past two years by lockdowns.

A new focus 

For twenty years or more, the marketing of male grooming products seemed to revolve largely around the number of blades one could successfully fit on a razor, rising from two to five. But the products were expensive and post-2010 a new breed of business appeared, in the form of Dollar Shave Club and other new DTC brands, offering multiple-blade products more cheaply and conveniently via a subscription service. Gillette also ventured into this territory in 2015 but, as Bloomberg notes, failed to attract many sign-ups. 

It wasn’t until 2018, when Gary Coombe took over as chief executive officer of P&G’s grooming arm, that the strategy changed to embrace the beard and to develop suitable new grooming products – combs, waxes, oils. At the same time, a key insight that emerged from research was that men with facial hair still shave, leading to a razor engineered to target the neckline.

Leading from the top

Top (male) executives grew beards to try out the new King C. Gillette line of products themselves. “It turned out to be one of the most powerful communications of a new strategy that I’d ever done,” Coombe said. “You can stand up there with a PowerPoint slide and talk about it. But walk through the world shaving headquarters with a beard, and you’re the CEO? People notice.”

Reversing decline 

King C. Gillette helped P&G’s grooming division increase revenue by 6% in 2021, to $6.4bn and end almost a decade of annual declines.

Sourced from Bloomberg [Image: Getty]

China's community buying hits the buffers

Many community buying start-ups have gone bust in China while investors stand to lose billions as a result of COVID-19 restrictions and a regulatory crackdown on tech platforms, Bloomberg reports.

Background

Community buying originally grew out of farmers joining together to purchase supplies in volume. In recent years, however, it has become an urban phenomenon, as smartphones enabled city neighbourhoods to do the same with groceries via platforms like Pinduoduo, Meituan and JD.com.

Early in the pandemic, community-buying start-ups seemed to offer the answer to the needs of residents locked down in cities across the country, and significant investment followed. But of about 1,500 community-buying companies in business in September 2020, more than 80% had closed six months later as the big tech companies effectively bought their users. Big tech companies were subsequently fined for those promotional efforts which the regulator regarded as excessive giveaways and anticompetitive discounts.

What’s happening now

• COVID-19 lockdowns have disrupted logistics networks and hit platforms’ ability to meet demand. Last month, for example, Meituan stopped its community-buying operations in Beijing and closed hundreds of pickup points.
• Since January there have been significant staff reductions – between 10% and 20% – at the community-buying units of JD.com and Didi.
• Tuan zhang, neighbourhood representatives who gather orders and help distribute goods when they’re delivered, are quitting in large numbers as orders drop off and the commission they earn plummets.

An alternative take

Wang Shouren, founder of community-buying startup Youjing Youtian in Zhengzhou in Henan province, suggests that spending by big tech companies actually helped the category. “They are the ‘air force and rocket army’ using money as bombs to open the market while we follow up with more sophisticated operation,” he told Bloomberg.

Sourced from Bloomberg [Image: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg]