"Time Out!" What Are We Really Doing?!?

Once in a while I appreciate the opportunity to step away from our business and view it from a distance.?As an observer not mired in the day to day you tend to be able to listen more closely to what is being said, by whom.?And more importantly, you begin to notice what is not being said and, even worse, who isn’t saying it.

I find the conversations within and about the advertising and media industry to have become an overly complicated, masturbatory cacophony; I deeply love this business and the intention of this piece is not to trash it; quite the opposite, I want to bring the industry back to ground level. I want people and the industry overall to understand that what we are trying to do is quite simple; it is difficult to achieve, but when you have clarity around what needs to be done, it creates more direct roadmaps and approaches for getting there. Reading blogs by different thought leaders at different holding companies, small agencies, trade groups and the like has become an arms race in jargon, like an offensively loud and ugly blanket wrapped around a conversation about capabilities.?“Capabilities”…I come back to the “why?” a lot.?What is that achieving beyond the obvious??What is its role in the big picture??A capability for the sake of capability is interesting to talk about, but unless you can tether it to the challenge which it is intended to solve, it is just describing and celebrating invention.?Invention is necessary and vital.?But invention that does not fulfill a basic need, that has no real purpose, is just decoration on a cake.

It is the big picture that is missing from discussions about our industry.?I like to ask people, young and old, “what business are we in?”?It is incredible how varied the answer is.?And if you are lucky, you’re still going to get an answer like “putting the right message for the right brand in front of the right person at the right time in the right place” hopefully tacking on “in the right mindset” (rare that you get that last one…worth discussing later) from media agencies.?From creative agencies, it is maybe more straightforward but, in my opinion, no more correct: “we create brand narratives that increase awareness, consideration and conversion for consumers” or “we are brand story tellers (ick)” or “we create communications that move consumers to action.”?I never liked how “consumer” came last in those definitions because it says we are doing things for brands, not for people; it is inherently non-consumer-centric in a world where consumers have all the power, and we vie for their time, attention and consideration.

None of those answers are flat out wrong, just in my opinion smaller missions that ladder to larger objectives.?What I find is that no one begins the process and operates from two very fundamental and essential truths about marketing communications that are interconnected and never discussed:

1.??????It is all about Frequency.?Going back to the beginning of my career, there was a constant debate about communications goals, and the prevailing sentiment even to this day is “reach maximization”.?Whether that’s ego or we are just programmed to believe more is better, reach optimization should always be a secondary goal.?Frequency drives conversion, transaction or the desired behavior affectation.?Abstractly, there are a certain number of times a person must experience a brand touchpoint or stimulus to achieve the desired outcome.?

2.??????Advertising is mostly intrusive, unwanted and unwelcomed.?Given their druthers, most consumers would prefer an ad-free environment with the exception of few instances where endemic ads are part of the “editorial” experience (e.g., enterprise technology ads in IT Trade media platforms) or people who are liberated enough to see the value in hyper relevant ads served based on their own behavior and not feel the “creep factor” (e.g., you’ve booked a vacation and you get served ads for beach wear or sunglasses).

Let’s Talk About The F Word

I am Italian, from New Jersey, and I use the F word like punctuation.?But I am not talking about my favorite noun / verb / adjective / expletive.?I am talking about Frequency.?There is a magic number of times a consumer must encounter a brand across the broadest range of stimuli (advertising, events, in-store, word of mouth and on and on) to affect a desired outcome.?Of course, that number is different for everyone.?But without a notion of a reasonable or “average” starting point around which to build a contact plan (let’s not say “media plan” and be inclusive of other channels), without an understanding of this basic starting point, you are guaranteed to have a plan that is either:

·??????Over-invested in Reach, Under-invested in Frequency:?This means you will waste potentially millions of dollars reaching droves of people and never move them through the door of transaction, or at the very best waste a lot until you start figuring out needed reach at which time you may have to pare back on geography or audience to properly invest in frequency

·??????Over-invested in Frequency, under-invested in Reach:?In this scenario, you are banging away at your audience; carpet bombing with excessive exposures, potentially wasting millions of dollars.?You’re not only being wasteful, but you’re likely turning people off to your brand.?Personal example:?there is an insurance company, I will not mention their name, but it rhymes with Schmiberty Schmutual) that will never get my business.?Ever.?The advertising is obnoxious and totally oversaturated (do you need a new media agency??Psst…the answer is yes).?Most agencies will at least start dialing back digital frequency as they hit KPIs (website hits, store traffic, actual sales or proxies for brand sentiment shifts).?But we all (hopefully) at this point know last touch attribution is archaic. And of course, give credit where credit is due:

o??Multitouch Attribution Modeling exists, but is often sold a la carte by agencies, and in my opinion should be part of the base offering of any agency; the investment in the labor and time will pay dividends in measurable business outcomes.?And when you measure this pre and post, it is likely you will see a 10-15% increase in results.?For a company that does $1bn in sales, seeing a $100,000,000-$150,000,000 increase in revenue is surely worth an investment of $250-350K.?Is there anyone on this planet who would not pay $3.50 for a clip of ten $1000 bills??There should not be.?And in fact, one could posit that the ROI from MTA is so compelling, we do not need incremental investment for MTA; it can be pared out of working media into “nonworking” (a term I HATE) investment to pay massive dividends

o??The ever-expanding programmatic ecosystem, now including explosive CTV options, digital audio, digital out of home, slowly incorporating linear TV and radio will help agencies manage more of the client investment towards the frequency tipping point and cease exposures on an individual consumer basis once “transaction” is achieved, affording reinvestment in reach.

Frequency based planning, rather than reach optimized planning, might start you on the wrong foot of over-investing in frequency, but that is quickly remedied while achieving success.?With overinvestment in reach-based planning, you could spend days, weeks, wondering “where are the results?” before retooling to additional frequency by reallocating from reach; you are fixing it while failing.

The REAL Business We are In: Making them Hate Us Less, Maybe Even Liking Us

As mentioned before, advertising is largely intrusive and unwelcomed while people are consuming their content of choice.?The longest 5 seconds of your life comes several times a day when watching a YouTube video and waiting to hit the “ok” button when you can skip the ad in 5-4-3-2-…ahhhh….I’m back.?Bathroom or snack breaks in TV??Just hit pause; your streaming service or cable box allows you do to that.

Because intrusive advertising has been a part of our culture for almost a century (the first radio commercial was aired August 22, 1922!), we have come to accept it because in many cases it is at least entertaining, if not totally useful.?But the experience is still a necessary nuisance (I will not go as far as to call it evil), disrupting what we are ACTUALLY interested in.?So, our goal is to essentially decrease frequency and increase the quality and impact of every brand touchpoint. I put it in simpler terms: we are here to cheat frequency.?And most of the capabilities we spend hours talking about are nothing more than ways that we can increase the quality and impact of exposure.?In fact, I would argue that not only is the media agency built upon the bedrock of cheating frequency, but the entire industry itself is geared towards frequency reduction and quality improvement. ?Whether they realize it or not, the collection of different companies and capabilities withing holding companies exist as an ecosystem primarily for this purpose.?Here are a few examples:

·??????Quality of Creative:?Insights that allow us to have deeper, more profound and lasting impression on the consumer psyche, largely the aegis of creative agencies, will create exposures that are more memorable, entertaining or informative and relevant to decrease needed exposures

·??????Creative Format:?Video using sight sound and motion will likely leave a more lasting impression than a message experienced through just one sense (aural / radio, visual / print and OOH).

·??????Creative Unit:?Size, duration…is longer / bigger better??Or can a story be well told with brevity and leave a more lasting mark.?For proof I offer this:?how many people have memorized or can concisely narrate a full Hemingway novel??But how many people know his shortest story ever told: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”?Oddly I would put some of the best, most widely known jokes in this category; the shorter the more memorable.?How many times as a child did you have to hear “Why did the chicken cross the road?” before you could repeat it???

·??????Brand Content:?Long form content or lasting experiences (e.g., live shopping experiences) leave more of a lasting impression.?While in some cases shorter may be better, an immersive brand experience may have impact well beyond many, many exposures.?Think of famous speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy and the like; these were in many cases single exposures that shaped the psyche of millions of people and motivated social upheaval and change and inspired man to touch foot on the moon.

·??????Attention Metrics: Technology is now allowing us to identify environments where consumers are the most attentive to both content and advertising; identifying these opportunities to avoid becoming background noise, again, gives brands greater resonance and memorability, requiring fewer exposures to achieve the same goal.

·??????Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO): using data that identifies or predicts consumer needs, interests, and receptivity, we can create exposures that are far more relevant to consumers’ needs and mindset.?If you speak directly to ME in a voice made for ME about something for ME, I am not going to need to experience communications from that brand as many times.

·??????“Endorsement” (Sports Marketing, brand co-marketing, sponsorship, celebrity spokespeople, influencer marketing)

·??????Communications Planning: insight driven work that helps marry message to mindset again augments impact and resonance.?Insights that give us a clearer picture of that mindset mined from data identify opportunities and challenges stemming from:

o??Culture

o??Category & Competitors

o??Brand history and equity

o??Audiences / “Tribes”

·??????Audience Refinement tactics to identify hand raisers or those predisposed to the brand, mitigating frequency needs:

o??1st Party Data segment targeting

o??Look-alike target segments based on 1st party audiences

o??Search, browsing, and other trackable engagement behavior.?And as a wonderful by-product, we can reduce the number of people needing to be reached, with an expected higher conversion rate… “Cheating Reach”…the one area solely owned (at the moment) by Media Agencies (but that is perhaps a different blog)

It is worth noting that nearly every entity in the holding company has a role to play here, whether it is PR, Creative, Media, Cause marketing, CRM, experiential marketing, partnerships, retail / in-store shopper marketing…they all exist to create the most resonance for any given touchpoint to reduce the number of touchpoints needed.?Do they all work together??No. They can.?They should.?And given the sophistication of Attribution Modeling, they COULD (note for future blog: the evil of operating company P&Ls for clients requiring integrated solutions).

It is also worth noting that Media Agencies own most of the above strategies for frequency mitigation, and increasingly influence the other agencies’ roles in this endeavor.?So when people tell me “the agency model is dead”, I disagree violently; it’s not dead, it’s just often not led by people who understand the true mission of the media agency in 2022 and it’s not configured to deliver on that mission.

Consumers Will Hate Us Less

Frequency is the name of the game.?But to be clear, it is not just about minimizing frequency; it is equally about BETTER exposure occasions.?Brands, and we as their stewards, must recognize that with an exposure a transaction has occurred; a consumer has given the brand pieces of their most valuable assets; time and attention, and the brand needs to recognize that, respect that, and give back creating a true value exchange.?It is not merely enough to elicit a chuckle through talking animals or tell someone there is a less expensive alternative to their usual laundry detergent.?Brands must be truly empathetic to consumers, putting them at the center and creating brand experiences that are hyper targeted, hyper timely, and hyper relevant and, ideally, leave them more empowered, informed, entertained, and inspired; it is not enough to tell consumers to go to Starbucks for their afternoon pick me up.?It is the Agency’s responsibility to understand which consumer is a coffee drinker and which prefers a fruit smoothie and present that message at that moment to inspire purchase.?

The agency has to understand that that message is best delivered at the point in time where someone is thinking about an afternoon “pick me up”.?The message has to tell them where to go, how to reduce friction in the buying process (order ahead via the app), and it is understanding that certain consumers respond well to discounts, some are far more socially driven and would want to share the experience with someone via BOGO offers, or that other consumers want more than just their coffee or smoothie, they want their purchase to be rewarded in the future via a loyalty program.?And perhaps it is combinations of those incentives.?The behavioral data is there, it just needs to be intelligently mined, organized and applied.?

Looking at the range of tools available to us (above) and the availability of data driven insights and attribution modeling, there really does not appear to be anyone who truly conducts that orchestra; the reality and irony is, the agencies that are the most ad-tech and data forward tend to be the largest and most siloed agencies.?There rarely anyone formally tasked with bringing this all together using all of the data and tactics available to architect the consumer’s experience with the brand.?

Make it Happen: Design for Consumers, not Brands

There is no title or remit more ill-defined, vague and misunderstood than “strategist”.?The word strategy itself has become so over-used that it has become meaningless.?Yes, a strategy is a roadmap to a goal, identifying and leveraging tactics along the way.?But agencies have come to re-label their media planners and planning teams as “strategists” or “strategy”.?And they may also have “strategy” as a department / capability.?And at the end of the day, clients want to know that everyone in the organization is strategically driven and not executional.?Calling something discretely “Strategy” or someone “Strategist” implies that everyone who is not that person, is not strategic, not employing strategy.?For this reason (again, perhaps there is a whole new blog there!) I would like to propose we moth-ball the label “strategy” as a capability, or as a title and recalibrate towards the role the orchestra conductor should really play:?Consumer Experience Design.?Because that is really the end game of all of this.?“How do we design a consumer experience with a brand that adds the most value to their lives, is the least intrusive and speaks to them in the ways, places and times that they are the most receptive and maybe even appreciative?”

So, let’s keep it simple, people.?Let us approach our jobs with a few basic principles, which we appear to have forgotten, in mind for the brands we represent:

1.??????Frequency drives action.?Communications goals, budgets, channel plans should all extend from frequency-based planning

2.??????Advertising is largely an intrusive, unwelcomed necessary nuisance when consuming content; recognizing and respecting the value exchange between consumers and advertisers should spark a consumer experience rooted in human empathy

3.??????We need to stop thinking in silos within agencies and even silos of disciplines between operating companies and think in terms of Designing Experiences for Consumers, not Brands. And we need people to do that; we cannot merely go about assembling our respective pieces and let them try to float together in some kind of inefficient, sub-optimal Frankenstein solution.?We have the data, we have the tools. We just need the silos to come down and allow the people who can do it to actually do it, or start training people with the natural proclivity to do it.