To Serve More Than to Sell

DMEXCO is a wrap for 2019, and it ended on as active a note as it began. Two days in Cologne translated to thousands of discussions across the conference and exhibit floors, a lot of delicious beer consumed, and voice given to not only the challenges the marketing and media industries face, but also the opportunities that abound.

Perhaps the most important takeaways from the conference were:

1.      Trust needs to be reestablished between marketer and agency, as well as marketer/agency and consumer. But hopefully you read those details in my newsletter yesterday.

2.      Marketing needs to serve as much as sell these days; consumers definitely demand more commitment from brands to causes those consumers believe in.

3.      Avoid “brandsplaining”—if a brand is going to get into social activism, be authentic and back it up.

4.      If you’re not working and securing first-party data and acting in a compliant manner, you’re likely going to run into trouble soon.

Thursday’s content started on a rather alarmist note, as maverick investor Roger McNamee, author of Zucked (a book that’s severely critical of Facebook) took to the Congress stage to declare that, unless the marketing industry moves now to rein in the power of the digital giants (Facebook, Google and Amazon in particular), those giants will no longer need brands or agencies in five years. He cited their moves to control more and more economic and societal elements, from Google’s investment in transportation to Facebook’s launch into finance and Amazon’s slow but steady replacement of brand-name products with its own cheaper version. “Pretty soon they won’t need you [brands and agencies] anymore,” he declared to a somewhat stunned crowd.

McNamee implored the crowd to take action now, because in five years it will be too late: “Undertake this thought experiment: Just imagine, what if I am right? What would you wish you had done about it?”

Continuing his high-visibility tour started at Cannes, Sir Martin Sorrell immediately followed McNamee onstage, and gently contradicted some of McNamee’s assertions. For one, Sorrell’s holding company S4 Capital, is made up entirely of digital companies, so he sees the platforms as partners not enemies. “I don’t believe they’re out to replace agencies or brands,” he said, ultimately admitting they remain “frenemies.” After subtly boasting that he’s grown S4’s market value from 2 million pounds to 500 million in a year (while pointing out that WPP’s value has dropped from 16 billion to 12.6 billion), he then declared we are far from seeing the last of him: “I want to keep doing this until I drop.” No one doubts his sincerity on that point.

Speakers also raised concerns on both a planetary level as well as focused on the individual. A session at the World of Agencies stage on “How Brands Can Drive Awareness Action and Affirmation,” independent integrated agency Decoded Advertising’s creative director Laura Holmes talked of how one-way conversations from brands to consumers needs to be a thing of the past. “They just wash over people,” she explained, adding that today, brands need to “offer something that isn’t self-serving” but rather serves the public in some way. Work that Decoded did with client Visa to empower women with the “vocabulary and confidence” to talk about money matters, avoided what she called “brandsplaining.”

Holmes acknowledged the value of research and data to back up the agency’s positioning for Visa. The importance of using data correctly and in a compliant manner was center stage in a discussion on “The Changing Landscape for Brands and Agencies,” which featured Arun Kumar, chief data and tech officer, IPG and Phil Wilson, SVP of digital demand generation at American Express. Wilson, who declared cookies “dead,” noted that first-party data must be sought out whenever possible to inform campaigns, and then has to be safeguarded and not sold to other parties. Acknowledging that the consumer ultimately should be the owner of his or her data, Kumar admitted that agencies have abused that, but are finally learning the lesson, as privacy standards firm up. “As long as you have data privacy at your core, there’s never been a better time to be in this [data and analytics] space. A lot of the change from cookie-based to consent-based data will make the ecosystem cleaner and better,” he said.

Finally, Luis di Como, EVP of media for packaged goods giant Unilever, shared his company’s actions to be a more responsible marketer with Greg Stuart, CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association. Besides joining the Global Alliance for Responsible Media announced in Cannes in June (which includes direct competitor P&G as well as numerous other competing marketers), di Como argued the industry needs to restore trust in advertising, and insisted that Unilever “will invest in the platforms that take these issues [of brand safety] seriously. And we are making a commitment that we will support content that represents society in much better way. We want everyone to join this movement.”

It’s no small task Unilever faces—and indeed the rest of the marketing and media ecosystem. DMEXCO certainly offered a ripe opportunity for brands, platforms and even agencies to make public their efforts to solve many of those challenges. Hopefully once everyone gets back to their offices from Cologne, they’ll keep up the good work.

See you Sept. 23-24, 2020!