Breakfast briefing round-up
Campaign’s inaugural event was on The Future of Ad Tech. See what the industry is talking about and what comes next.
Campaign’s first breakfast briefing saw debate and conversation from industry leaders about what ongoing changes in ad tech mean for marketers and their agencies.
Handling consumer data: “Doing this is important but it’s not easy,” said Kunul Badiani, sales manager for Oracle Marketing Cloud. He was delivering the keynote at Campaign’s inaugural Breakfast Briefing. The topic of the event was The Future of Ad Tech, and Badiani summed up why it was essential brand managers keep on top of developments as much as their agencies and technology suppliers. The event was designed to be acronym light and accessible to all.
“Data is really the biggest opportunity,” Badiani said. “When you think about ad tech today it’s … about what are we going to do with this big opportunity that’s presenting itself and how do we ensure that our brand stays relevant using that opportunity.”
Following the keynote, there were two panel discussions – on The Next Big Trend in Ad Tech, and In-house or Agency: Where Should Ad Tech Sit?
Panelists included: Imad Sarrouf, commercial and technology director at DMS; Waseem Afzal, general manager of Transact, the e-commerce arm of OMD; Boye Balogun, managing director of Future Tech Media; Puja Pannum, managing director of Blis MENA; Rayan Karaky, head of DoubleClick MENA & Turkey at Google; Rob Beswick, vice-president of brand at Virgin Mobile MEA; Hussein Dajani, general manager of digital marketing for Africa, the Middle East, India and Turkey at Nissan; and Preeti Mundhra, head of marketing and parnerships at Liv, Emirates NBD’s digital bank. Moderators were Austyn Allison, editor of Campaign Middle East, and Fadi Khater, the founder and managing partner of Netizency.
The first on-stage panel was a wide-ranging discussion of what the field holds for the coming year or so.
Puja Pannum from Blis predicted that GDPR will be at the heart of everything digital in 2018, as the media and advertising industry comes to terms with the far-reaching implications of the new European Union data regulations that will be introduced in May.
Boye Balogun predicted a shift in power towards content producers, saying: “If the future of media is essentially digital, we are going to see a lot of that TV money moving into digital media and the gatekeepers are not going to be Facebook and Google; the gatekeepers are going to be Amazon and Netflix and Disney.”
OMD’s Waseem Afzal described how the industry is transforming as the industry embraces e-commerce, spurred on by the arrival of Amazon last year, and the launch of local rival Noon, while DMS’s Imad Sarrouf agreed with Badiani that dealing with ad tech and data was harder than it might appear. He argued that it was essential to have “pipes between ecosystems” to allow different sources of data to be used together. “Marketers need a single view of consumers,” he said.
This was a point of view echoed by Virgin Mobile’s Rob Beswick in the second panel, which asked whether ad tech fits best within an agency or a client. It was moderated by Fadi Khater of Netizency.
“It all comes down to and back to customer experience and making sure that all of this fancy technology that everyone is interested in and wants to use and utilise actually delivers a customer experience,” said Beswick.
One issue that arose was the time it takes to get feedback from agencies. In the first panel, Afzal had spoken about the econometric modelling that OMD undertakes on behalf of its clients, but admitted that to feed the richest
“It all comes down and back to customer experience and making sure that all of this fancy technology that everyone is interested in and wants to use and utilise actually delivers a customer experience.”
data back to marketing managers can take a couple of months.
Nissan’s Hussein Dajani said the automotive manufacturer is experimenting with how best to measure results.
“Eight weeks is a lot of time,” he said. “So we are putting a lot of pressure on the agencies as well to come back to us with findings.”
Beswick summed up the ongoing quest for effective attribution modelling: “In order to move towards what we call real-time optimisation, which I think is some sort of Nirvana vision, it really is very challenging to be able to drive your teams to make decisions daily on how they optimise and how they improve the customer experience, but that is where we want to be.”
When Khater asked Preeti Mundhra from Liv what she misses about working with agencies, she joked: “I have no one else to blame other than myself and my team.” Liv handles all of its ad tech in house, but Mundhra is not rejecting agencies. She said that they are now becoming much more than mere executors of clients’ digital requirements.
Google’s Rayan Karaky, who spent more than a decade within media agencies, agreed that agencies can offer more than traditional management consultants, even though there is more crossover now. They have more experience in the media field, and they have been built on efficiencies. It is much harder for clients to be as efficient as agencies.
So there is hope yet for agencies in the brave new world of ad tech. They have a crucial role to play in a world where clients might choose to take aspects of their advertising technology and data handling in-house. But that role is changing, and they must be consultants to their clients as much as suppliers. The future is there for anyone to grab. If they can steer through the acronyms.