The Buy-Side View: Q&A with PHD’s Thomas Stimpfig

Data capabilities in CTV are moving video campaigns further down the funnel, says Thomas Stimpfig, Head of Video at PHD, but this does not mean advertisers should lose sight of the longer-term brand building that TV has always delivered.

In this edition of the Buy-Side View, Stimpfig discusses the risks of overcomplicating CTV buys, PHD’s direct-to-publisher strategy, and the changing role of the modern agency.

What’s your biggest bugbear when it comes to video and CTV advertising?

I think the most important one, and what a lot of people in my position would agree with, is not forgetting what CTV actually is. It isn’t social, it isn’t online video. CTV is TV quality content, delivered digitally. Too often it’s easy to make these apples and pears comparisons, or over-hype the technical and data capabilities, but CTV does what TV has always done, which is to show audiences high-quality and professionally produced content on the largest and most engaging screen. 

For advertisers this has always worked, as it’s a medium that primarily builds and extends broad reach of a linear buy within content that emotionally connects brands with audiences in the same way that TV always has. Using the tech and data capabilities can be relevant, and useful to enhance performance of this brilliant medium, but we mustn’t downplay the impact to cost and scale of adding additional layers of capability to a campaign.

This may not always be a bad thing or wrong for a brief, but it does lead me to my two main bugbears when considering video and CTV advertising. Firstly, apples with pears comparisons of different mediums, and what each is great at delivering; and secondly, don’t overcomplicate it. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we always should. 

How do you think the role of the agency has changed over the past 10 years?

It’s been a seismic change. Media agencies have always been experts in planning and buying media for their clients. This remains the case, but it’s become much more complex. We need to have a deep understanding of the role each media channel has on plans, and when or how it should be deployed to deliver the desired outcome for our clients. 

We need to be experts in data, measurement, tech consultants and more. It’s an exciting industry to be operating in and one that will have evolved again a decade from now. But in my opinion, the most successful agencies must be flexible in offering all or some of those expertise to clients, whether as consultants or agents.

Bringing this back to video, at PHD we try to offer simplicity within a complex ecosystem through our Unified Video proposition. This is our approach to offering a common vision, language and toolkit to how we plan, buy, optimise and measure all video media. It ensures that our approach is consistent, and enables us to overcome many of the common complexities within video such as measurement, walled gardens and role of platforms to ensure our plans are deployed to deliver the optimal client outcome for their investment.

What do you think video advertising is the most effective for, generating awareness and brand building or driving short-term sales?

Video has seen tremendous growth in terms of investment, viewing and capability, and can now truly be considered a full-funnel platform. That makes answering this question complex. 

Because it’s full-funnel, it can be effective at driving both brand awareness and short-term sales. This is also the case historically for TV, and it’s never been true to say that TV only does long-term brand building, or short-term sales. There has always been a crossover. If we buy a TV, CTV or video campaign, there is always going to be some impact on short- and long-term sales. Yes, we can optimise to one, or we may be able to isolate the impact of one medium at driving sales vs brand more than another, but there will always be an impact on both. 

What is true, is that the data that we can deploy across CTV and video blurs these lines further. It means we can reach very niche audiences that are likely to be in market, such as online behaviour signals, to optimise to shorter-term sales. Or use ACR to understand who hasn’t been exposed to a linear TV campaign, to target digitally for longer-term brand building. There are also ways we can measure the impact on both, so we can optimise future campaigns effectively. The challenge that agencies have is how we can use new digital opportunities effectively. 

Which team within your agency handles CTV, and why?

Our AV & Video team handles CTV. Remember CTV is just TV served digitally so it makes sense for it to be planned out of the same team. It ensures we have a holistic approach to planning, activation, measurement and optimisation for our AV and video activity.  

How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?

CTV has evolved because of changing consumer behaviour. At PHD we follow the consumers and how they consume content which has the biggest bearing on how we plan our AV and video campaigns. If more of our advertisers’ audiences are consuming more CTV and video at the expense of another platform, then that’s where we need to be. That’s always been the case at PHD, and we were early adopters of CTV. 

But we also need to have clear definitions of what CTV is. Is it BVOD? Is it SVOD? Is it a longer tail of CTV platforms? It’s important to have this definition so that the merits of one platform can be properly compared against the merits of another. For us, CTV can be all of the above, as long as it is professionally produced, brand-safe content delivered on a CTV device which is 100 percent viewable, and often viewed by one or more people. 

As TV viewing has decreased, investment has followed those eyeballs into social, or online video channels, sometimes at a rate quicker than the decrease in linear viewing. Now CTV is here at scale across many different platforms it’s important not to slice the pie further and instead focus on platforms that are going to drive highly engaged views on the biggest screen, especially considering the role that CTV can play in driving both short-term sales, and longer-term brand building. 

Which ad tech solution has delivered the most impact for your business?

With all the ad tech solutions available there is unlikely going to be a one-size-fits-all approach for one brief. The question we at PHD ask is ‘what combination of ad tech solutions will deliver the required outcome for the campaign?’

It’s likely there is going to be a solution for most challenges across linear, CTV and video which could, for example, be a combination of Adsmart to reach a niche or in-market audience, using ACR data to understand who has been underexposed to our linear campaign for digital activation, and the use of AMC to see how media drives performance. Panel-based measurement can also be used to understand the channel overlap or incremental reach of our digital investment. 

What could agencies do better to help clean up the industry?

Each part of the programmatic ecosystem has a part to play and sole responsibility doesn’t lie with agencies. While there are some issues in elements of CTV around ad fraud and viewability, it isn’t something typically associated with the partners we work with. At OMG and PHD we also have a direct-to-publisher strategy to help mitigate this which is delivered through our OMG Marketplace proposition.

This allows the agencies to be much closer to the publisher and deliver several benefits to advertisers. Firstly, mitigating some of the tech cost, ensuring it is transparent and that more investment is made directly with the publisher. Secondly, gaining additional signals directly from the publisher to activate more effective and on-target audiences. And thirdly, sourcing trusted inventory direct from the publisher exempt from viewability and ad fraud.

However, at a basic level, and something that I encourage our team to do regularly, is to ask suppliers those difficult questions. How have you come to those results? What measurement can we apply? What third-party tracking can be applied? How are you claiming these reach numbers? etc.

Which metrics do you value most when it comes to video and CTV?

It depends on the objective. Typically, we’d use CTV to extend the reach of linear so the metric would be overall reach, and incremental reach, if that is the role of the activity. Of course we’d need to consider hygiene factors, such as viewability, completion rates, sound on etc. But we need to be consistent in the metrics that are applied across a multi-channel campaign. If the objective is cost effective, viewed and viewable reach, then this is what we should be looking to measure across all platforms, not just CTV. 

Other measurement types can be useful, for example brand lift, but attribution is becoming more important, particularly with direct agency access to the data given the full-funnel nature of video. 

However, as planners and buyers, we need to remain consistent in what we measure across all channels to determine the true value and contribution that each channel delivers within a holistic AV or video campaign. PHD’s Unified Video approach helps ensure our organisational readiness to apply the correct measurement metrics, quickly and consistently across a full-funnel, multi-channel video campaign.

What could publishers, broadcasters and pay-TV companies do to compete more effectively with tech giants?

I’d like to see the broadcasters work closer and closer together to better promote the benefits of broadcast (both linear and on-demand) as a medium. We’ve seen much more of this in recent years; C-Flight and Project Lantern are both recent examples which were refreshing to see. The more initiatives that UK broadcasters can work on together to demonstrate the value they add will only help them compete. 

Which person in the industry inspires you most today?

I currently work with a lot of brilliant people at PHD and OMG UK and have done so for the past decade, so it is difficult to pinpoint a single person! But our whole industry is full of brilliant thinkers which we can see from some of the brilliant industry initiatives that are becoming available to us, with the UK being a global leader in the industry. 

Out of all the video and TV campaigns that you’ve been involved with, which are you most proud of?

Lots of brilliant AV work comes out of PHD in collaboration with our clients, but one that springs to mind is the ‘the ad break we never expected to be in’ for the British Heart Foundation. It not only showed how brilliant our industry can be in delivering positive social impact, it also showed that TV can be used to deliver fast-turnaround, dynamic campaigns that many assumed were the sole domain of pure-play digital platforms. That is just one example, there are many more I could talk about if we had the time!

The brilliance of individual campaigns aside, I’m also a real fan of clever planning and how we piece together campaigns running across multiple channels to ensure that we are keeping up with the pace of change of how audiences are consuming content. It is something that has always been a challenge, but with the advance of technical capability, data and audience measurement specifically, it is something that is becoming more and more possible. 

 

Follow VideoWeek on Twitter and LinkedIn.