Eden Collective

While the large agencies are keen to push their AI chops to the big brands, mid-market brands and advertisers cannot afford to get distracted by shiny objects. As Eden Collective's own Ryan Bopp notes in this thoughtful deep dive by Digiday, the scale of Perplexity - let alone the advertising pricing - does not warrant investment for many brands when there are more proven avenues for growth. At Eden, we always take an audience first approach, and for many of our clients, their customers just aren't there yet.

Fueled by VC subsidized acquisition costs, legions of newly minted performance marketing trainees, and soaring consumer demand for DTC products in the not so distant past, an entire cottage industry of Linear and Streaming TV "platforms" and agencies emerged, peddling "AI automation" and tech enabled DIY TV buying. It's a sexy pitch, but one that yields more promise in vendor's on reporting than on the business growth. Making the move into video requires more than "turning on a platform." In 2024 and beyond there a bit of arbitrage to be captured by throwing out cheap inventory and seeing what sticks? For the right brands with the right AOV and the right audience? On occasion it's possible. Is it a model with any scale potential at all? The 2021 playbook does not work in 2024. Doing TV right requires consideration of network/publisher audience composition, a cost/benefit analysis of broad reach vs. targeting, disciplined frequency, an ability to evaluate effective CPMs. In other words, it requires deliberate strategy and strict management. As a consultancy vs. an agency, we have the opportunity audit dozens of programs a quarter, across a wide range of categories, business sizes and media mixes. In a talk we gave last week, we illuminated the many ways brands (and their vendors/agencies) unwittingly get video wrong and waste their increasingly precious investments while lining the pockets of their vendors. Our dear friend and client, retail and brand executive Andrea Wasserman, shared many these insights in her recently published Forbes piece. Chris Novak Kendra Prasad

As if the election were not high stakes enough, our team at Eden Collective remains on high alert about the impact of the post election news cycle on consumer attention, sentiment and news network clearance. Eden COO Chris Novak and Head of Media Suzanne Silber share our views with Modern Retail on helping brands navigate the delicate balance between staying top of mind while respecting the current climate.

Thank you Kendra Prasad + our friends at Superbolt for co-hosting our panel on the "right" and "wrong" ways to use TV (both linear and streaming) to scale your business. We had more than one guest approach us after our talk to share a mix of cringe-worthy recognition and relief hearing our section on "most common mistakes brands make when launching TV." They reported feeling gaslit and confused when their TV/CTV vendors (service businesses masquerading as "ad tech") show them dashboards with unparalleled?CPAs and conversions that don't seem to match the trajectory of their actual business. Some of these common mistakes? 1. Chasing cheap spots. Unlike in Paid Social, where?your first dollar is your best dollar spent, the opposite is true in TV. TV is the channel you use to educate, to build mental availability beyond the immediate conversion. A frequency of 1 is almost always meaningless. So trying to arbitrage the market during short-lived periods of loose inventory?may be ok for a couple of weeks in January, but is fundamentally unscalable. It's a tactic of throwing "spaghetti against a wall," not a marketing strategy. A telltale sign of this approach is when you see 50 spots a week in networks you've never heard of, half your buy in an?inventory type called National Locals (a form of non-transparent inventory, that mostly delivers impressions in C and D counties where local inventory breaks remain unsold). 2. Conflating CTV with OTT and OLV. Do you know where your inventory is running? There is nothing inherently wrong with desktop or in-banner video inventory, but make sure you are not paying CTV CPMs and delivering 50%+ of your inventory on mobile and desktop, even low-value "made for advertising" insertions. 3. Over-reliance on individual targeting. It is true that CTV offers the ability to target, unlike the broad reach of linear which is renowned for "waste." However, many marketers don't realize that while most digital channels offer 1:1, person-level targeting, CTV targeting is at the household level. What does that mean? Let's say you choose 3 targeting variables, such as Women, 25-34, frequent purchasers of beauty products. By the time you add the third demo/psycho variable, your probability of hitting the right individual with the ad is no better than a coin toss. Again, this is not inherently bad, but it's imperative to keep it in mind when developing your plans and assessing your effective CPMs vs. other alternatives. "But if I am seeing these amazing CPAs and conversions that rival my lower funnel digital channels, why should I care," you may ask? This is where my partner, Chris Novak, got into the inherent flaws in common TV/Streaming measurement models. Media Measurement is a topic for another post, though we have a ton already written on this https://lnkd.in/eGVu7fMi. If any of this looks familiar to you and you could use a second opinion, please DM! Vincent Bourzeix Diya Varadaraj Eden Collective

"Since brands live and die by business scoreboards — not media dashboards — it’s critical to widen media vision and extend reach, so marketing can create a bigger difference and stronger future," writes Eden Collective's Alison Monk.

Long live dogs! A new resonant spot by creative team at The Farmer's Dog led by head of brand, Marshall Ball. Our team at Eden Collective remains consistently inspired by our clients Kendra Prasad, ?? Ed Staples Paula Bernal Katie Iles and honored to play just one small role in bringing their brand story to market through video media over the past 4.5 years. https://lnkd.in/eraN9TGr

Those of you who know me won't be surprised that among the 6 Takeaways from the Ad Age Leading Women Awards panels, I'm first quoted under the "Be Honest" subhead. For those who know me less well, I'll let you in on a little secret - I'm a pathological truth-teller. During our panel on "leading through personal challenges" with Jeanine Poggi Stacey Ryan Cornelius and Ruth Bernstein, I shared a few personal perspectives acquired from my own trials by fire. 1. Asking for help does not make you a "less than" working mom. Many a time I felt guilt about missing dinner or asking my nanny to handle the doctor appointments. While my 5 and 7 year old kids may have whined, their 19 and 21 incarnations view me as an inspiration and life mentor. I've been gifted innumerable "bad ass bitch," "girl boss," and "resilience" key chains, birthday cards and mugs to prove it. 2. Own your own destiny. When asked what gave me the courage to leave the "safety and security of the large, "hold-co" agency world to start my own business" I chuckled (smirked?) before responding that, "anyone, especially a senior woman over 40, who still believes that a large agency or corporate job, provides a greater measure of security in 2024 is deluding themselves. I have been able to provide myself and my family greater stability in the past 5.5 years since founding Eden Collective than at any other time in the past 20." 3. The challenge is not just about the challenge of navigating societal expectations for women as caregivers. It is fundamentally about society's expectations, or rather gender stereotypes, for how a woman should "behave" in a professional context. Direct, passionate, confident, outspoken (fill in the blank). There is a lot of research on this double bind. On the one hand, incorporating this feedback and modulating your style to fit the circumstance is an important part of personal and professional growth. On the other hand, when the context requires you to compromise your core being or demands you be a thing that is alien to you, it's time to get the hell out as fast as you can. If they don't get you first... https://lnkd.in/dkrScQTH

When meeting with start ups and mid-market CMOs who scrutinize the impact of every dollar spent (or more notably, the vendors who serve them), we often find that measurement tools or digital publisher-reported metrics, rather than business goals and strategy, are driving investment allocation decisions. In this CMO Perspectives interview with Authority Magazine, my partner and Eden Collective COO, Chris Novak, speaks with Kieran Powell about how media allocations should be made instead in "Where to Assign Your Media Budget and Why." It isn't a short read, but does dive deep into elaborations and examples drawn from our own client work. If this is a challenge for you and your business, it's a worthwhile review. https://lnkd.in/eaDtTKuX

Thank you to MediaPost for featuring my most recent piece "D2C Brands: Design For Impact, Not Attribution" in its Marketing Insider newsletter. This Op Ed shares Eden Collective's perspective on reducing marketers' over-reliance on "attribution" and shifting focus to measurement strategies that drive meaningful impact. #MediaPost #MarketingInsider #D2C #EdenCollective #Attribution