Ozone’s CRO, Craig Tuck, helmed a ‘Time for a digital effectiveness reset’ debate for MediaCom’s Transformation Week 2020.
Efficiency versus effectiveness. Short-term metrics versus longer-term brand-building. Digital advertising as an afterthought versus digital advertising as an essential channel in the overall campaign mix.
Friday 6th November 2020
All hotly debated topics for agencies and marketers alike, and also the main talking point at the ‘Time for a Digital Effectiveness Reset’ session hosted by Ozone for MediaCom’s Transformation Week 2020.
With Ozone’s very own Chief Revenue Officer, Craig Tuck, at the helm, the 30-minute debate featured guests Orlando Wood, author and Chief Innovation Officer at research agency System1 and Jane Christian, Head of Systems Intelligence at MediaCom. Together, our trio of experts explored what an effectiveness reset might look like, how it might change advertiser decisions, and also what parties are needed to elicit that change.
Watch the video to find out what a digital effectiveness reset could mean for advertiser decisions and the role the various parties in our industry have to play.
Is digital advertising broken?
To begin, and as a means to contextualize the conversation, Craig asked whether Jane and Orlando agreed that - in its current form - digital advertising is broken. Craig, himself, said that in the past, digital has often been treated as a second-class channel where creative for, say outdoor, is simply resized for standard digital formats.
“I wouldn’t say it was broken,” Jane said, “but it’s not being used in the right way, and the way we’ve measured digital channels really isn’t up to scratch.” Largely driven by the overwhelming abundance of digital data available, according to Jane, this has led to a short-term view of the actual impact of campaign activity.
Flipping this is vital when factoring in the impact of COVID on digital, with consumers increasingly turning to e-commerce businesses, added Jane. “We’ve got to get it right. We’re building brands for the long term and not just generating short-term uplifts. So combined with that measurement perspective, digital is a bit broken and misfocused.”
Building upon the broken question, Orlando suggested that advertising more generally has become more chopped up as a result of the digital world that we now occupy. And while it is now easier to activate campaigns digitally, more energy has to put into brand building.
Brands have to be very strong, distinctive, and memorable, which comes through advertising. Unfortunately, advertising has become less and less like that, he said. “We've lost a great deal in the last 15 years, such as characters in advertising, things playing out in live time, music, referencing of culture more broadly in parody or pastiche. We've lost things set in the past. And what we gained is something that's pretty strange. Lots of fast cut sequences and words on the screen telling us what to think. People are used as props and there's a focus on things.”
Today’s chopped up, fragmented advertising doesn’t hold consumers’ attention, it isn’t able to connect with them emotionally, and it’s largely responsible for the drop in ad effectiveness. Orlando has explored these themes in more detail in his book ‘Lemon’ and recent research project ‘Achtung!’.
Left brain, right brain attention
The battle for attention begins with the brain - and the left and right hemispheres vie for attention in different ways. Goal-focused attention, which has a narrow focus, is broadly agreed by psychologists to be dealt with by the left brain. There are four other attention types - vigilant, alertness, sustained and divided - which are dealt with by the right brain, and the right brain is interested in living in real places and how we connect with the world.
In an advertising context, it is the right brain that connects with the who, what and where - who’s involved, what’s happening and where is it set - or character, incident and place. “It's that sort of thing that really sustains attention and generates an emotional response,” Orlando said. And because much of today’s advertising is presented to us as lots of short, sharp cuts with words on the screen, the character, incident and place that connects with the right brain is missing.
This is where Ozone can add value, Craig added. “I’m a great believer in an advertising campaign that runs in digital environments where people are engaged and paying attention. Our publishers’ content is full of character in place. It's breaking news. And it's exactly that, that appeals exactly to the right brain.”
Refocusing measurement
Refocusing campaign measurement away from short-term clicks and impressions to more long-term brand equity and brand health analysis is also vital for an effectiveness reset.
“The right measurement and technique is key and if it is done well the likes of digital display and online video advertising can work really well in the long term,” said Jane. “Whatever measures are used, all channels must drive the long-term brand equity and tie back to sales.”
At System1, Orlando added, “We measure the emotional response to advertising and combine it with an extra share of voice model to give a long-term, or a short-term prediction to our clients to give them a sense of what will happen over a longer time period.” And while relevance is fine in digital advertising, the ability to target has led us down a creative path that assumes an interest in the product. And the creative itself is no longer doing the job that it used to do to attract the attention of a broader audience to make the brand.
Great creative in a premium environment
In order for digital advertising to have a longer-term impact, the environments it appears in must be suitable, engaging and editorially governed, such as with Ozone’s network of more than 90 premium publisher websites, Craig explained. “If I'm looking to build my brand, I just want to get it out there to the right people with the right message and the right environment.”
Agreeing, Orlando explained: “If you're reading news and if you're in a particularly goal-orientated frame of mind, as you are when you’re reading news, then you know you’re in the right context. If it's in the right place, people will look at it, I suspect, for longer. But the creative really needs to be thought about.”
Collective responsibility
Rounding up, the three agreed that there is a collective responsibility on all parties to drive the effectiveness reset.
Media owners must help by providing evidence of what they can deliver for clients. Working with good research partners - such as the ‘Value of Quality’ work Jane highlighted that GroupM has carried out with Newsworks - can only support this. Advertisers must remove silos and look at digital as part of a broader mix that addresses the longer-term effects and not just short-term metrics. And agencies must act as an advisor to advertisers. There needs to be pressure from one to the other to ensure effectiveness is front and centre.
Elsewhere, the creative itself - ultimately - has to entertain to enable it to have greater relevance with consumers - “good creative principles remain good creative principles,” Orlando said. And finally, it is paramount to remember that consumers are real people and no one should lose sight of that fact.
