STOP PREDICTING THE DEATH OF ANYTHING

Marketers need to exploit, not fear, the proliferation of channels – this Cannes panel, hosted by Campaign and Turner, says no media is a write-off, it’s all opportunity

Susan Canavari is chief brand officer at financial-services company Jpmorgan Chase. She believes the ever-expanding array of media channels is here to stay and will only increase further in the next few years – not that that’s helping her planning.

Speaking at a ‘Life Beyond 30’ panel at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Canavari said: “I’m almost certain there will be new platforms we will have to be on, and I’m pretty certain that nothing our customers are on is going to die. Pinterest, Snapchat and Facebook will continue to evolve and we will continue to have customers there, and we will have to work out the best thing for us.”

She added: “We have to find the right balance to reach people and our creative has to be appropriate for the channel.”

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

The sheer number of platforms at a marketer’s fingertips is now overwhelming. Anomaly joint global chief executive Jason Deland, who was also on the panel, said that the ad industry has reached “peak media”. Canavari argued that the rapidity at which the media landscape is changing means “there is no playbook any more”.

“All these platforms are changing on a weekly and monthly basis, and so brands are doing a tonne of testing. We are testing different things on Snapchat, Pinterest

[and] Facebook, and we are constantly evolving,” she added. “The way we look at it is: what is the business challenge we are trying to solve and what are the appropriate media platforms to reach those customers?”

Turner president of ad sales Donna Speciale conceded that the traditional 30-second TV spot “is not the only answer” and proposed that advertisers need to do more to push the envelope.

“The creative community has not come along with what we in media are trying to do,” said Speciale. “This is why we [Turner] now have content studios that are tied to our networks and we are aligning all creative so we can make the marriage that much better.”

Chris Linn, president of Turner-owned TRUTV, suggested the industry needs to “stop thinking about advertising and content as two separate things”.

He said: “Young audiences are connoisseurs of talent – they have access to more content than any generation before [them], so they know what is good and what isn’t, and they have the autonomy to lean in only to the good stuff. The more the advertising enhances the environment, the more it is a win-win for everyone.”

Linn cited the ad campaign for Trutv’s

Impractical Jokers show as an example of how advertising can focus on the overall experience for consumers. Alongside traditional forms of advertising, there was a cruise, live tour and a Comic-con presence to promote the show.

Despite the increasing number of media channels, it is still of the utmost importance for companies to have a strong product around which to build their advertising.

“First you need a great product, then a purpose, and great customer service and customers who love and talk about you,” Canavari said. “You build your brand to a certain point and then you have a business challenge where you need to scale it. You need to look at the size of the business and the challenges to determine the right media.”

Deland said it is key for advertisers to understand the “context of human beings and consumers” when targeting consumers.

“The role of segmentation to get to scale in media has ignored a lot of the personal context and where people are,” he said. “The way we do things is largely predicated on principles written 25 years ago.

“The consumer and media landscape has changed so significantly I don’t think anyone has truly grasped the enormity of that change. Scale can not be an excuse for lazy. There are a lot of media plans that look like last year’s, even though media has shifted.”

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have helped to drive the elevation of premium content and in doing so have changed consumer attitudes toward advertising due to their ad-free streaming-service models. Turner has reacted to this by reducing the number of commercials it runs on its channels.

Despite consumers’ shifting attitudes toward ads on TV, the power of TV advertising can not be ruled out.

REINVENTING TV ADVERTISING

Jpmorgan Chase has had to reassess its advertising strategy after it decided to go digital-only and pull TV advertising for its card business.

Canavari said: “We are rethinking that because we were not able to get the reach we needed to hit our business objectives.”

Turner, Fox and Viacom are in the process of reinventing TV advertising in the US through the Openap ad-sales partnership, which enables advertisers to target specific customer segmentations through TV advertising.

Speciale predicts that this will make broadcasting companies an “unstoppable” force, capable of taking on Google and Facebook at their own game.

“Clients have been so behind this because there needs to be more competition against what Google and Facebook are doing,” Speciale said. “We’ve always had the content and Google and Facebook don’t, but they have the data. Now we are bringing in the data and are a force to be reckoned with. When we crack that code we will be unstoppable.”

Deland agreed that data is a key factor in the media battle being waged.

“When you think of the stratification of media and consumer behaviour, as it stratifies, the whole system becomes more complex and the only way to grab hold of that is with intelligence and data,” he said.

“The only way to compete with Amazon, Google and Facebook is with advanced data and understanding that language and world.”

The panel concluded that nothing in media has died – the landscape has simply become a whole lot more crowded, and it’s going to take a creative and savvy use of data to be heard over the noise.

“I don’t think the 30-second TV spot is going to die. But it would be nice if one thing died so you could put all your brand dollars toward the thing that is working” SUSAN CANAVARI chief brand officer, Jpmorgan Chase