The growth of CTV is providing a platform for more brands to lean into storytelling in their creative, in a shift away from performance advertising, according to Rob Edwards, Head of Media & Digital at Arla Foods, the dairy farmer-owned co-operative whose brands include Lurpak, Anchor and Castello.
In this edition of the Buy-Side View, Edwards discusses the opportunities in creative storytelling, the company’s approach to in-house marketing and agency partnerships, and the ad tech solutions delivering the most impact for the business.
What is your biggest bugbear when it comes to CTV and video advertising?
There’s probably a few, because it’s such an opportunity to engage, and because of the growth of that connection with audience, and the ability to understand performance and connection with audiences. So I think the consistency of what performance looks like is certainly one. The clarity of the audience and how that audience engages with that content, and the consistency across providers is sometimes not there.
And then from our side, the bugbear for me is, are we strong enough creatively, and what does good creative really look like now? The creative journey through AV and CTV is really expanding, and I think we’re starting to see a change in dynamic from brand advertising back into storytelling, rather than performance advertising. So a bugbear as a consumer would be, I’d like to see more interesting advertising, more creative advertising.
How much media buying – if any – are you carrying out in-house? What types of media do you handle in-house and why?
We have in-house capability, and it’s all our digital activation. We work with our media agency, Carat, in a blended partnership. Carat look after all our “traditional” advertising, so TV, BVOD, out of home, cinema etc. And then the rest of it is all done in-house. Nearly 60 percent of our working spend annually is delivered in-house, and that’s grown over the last five or six years. When I joined the business six and a half years ago, it was probably around 20 percent of working spend, so we’ve accelerated in the last few years.
Which ad tech solution has delivered the most impact for your business?
There are a few, but I’m going to go with not necessarily impacts over the recent years, but potential to impact moving forward. Where we’ve utilised the likes of The Trade Desk, for example, we’re starting to accelerate that relationship. And the reasoning behind that is because of the data, and because of their alignment to retail media partners. So the ability to ingest retail data within our above the line activation and beyond, and truly understand consumer and shopper behaviour from a content consumption side of things, is really powerful. The idea to be able to create a closed-loop marketing world with retail data – I don’t think it’s necessarily fully there yet, I’m sure the retail media world will tell me otherwise. But the reality is, it’s on a journey to being there, and I think The Trade Desk are starting to be able to shape how we go out to our above line activation using that data as well.
The other one that we’ve investigated, and haven’t really touched from our side in the UK, but I’ve introduced to our team in MENA, is LiveRamp. I think the team at LiveRamp are sensational. We just haven’t been able to facilitate that locally, but we’ve seen our partner territory use it for the Carrefour data throughout the MENA territory, and that’s great to see.
What advice would you give smaller sell-side companies to help them compete with the larger platforms?
I think real, honest clarity in what you have and what you can deliver; how you deliver it yourself, or if you’re partnering, is it an audience build partnership? Then you need to be really clear and honest on that. I think sometimes where that doesn’t happen, then there’s a duplication of inventory and campaigns, and that causes ineffective campaigns for brands. And especially as a farmer-owned cooperative, we need to make sure what we are executing has positive impact for the investment.
And I think the ability to be agile for the moment as well. CTV in theory should offer that opportunity to be a little bit more agile through the year, and maybe the smaller operations have that chance to grasp the moment now, as opposed to a bigger network that may be working at a capacity in advance and having booking deadlines of how ever many weeks or months in advance to get the campaigns away.
How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?
Massively! We are talking quite honestly with our agency partners to not look at TV but AV, because for me, TV is a device, it’s not a channel, whereas I think historically, it’s always been viewed as a channel when it’s been bought. So I think CTV has been a real lever into changing our approach to an AV stack, instead of traditional TV buying. We work in a relatively traditional business, so it takes some time to get people to understand that process as well; if they’ve been used to buying traditional linear TV, why should they move away from it? And that audience evolution, that ability for consumers to choose as and when they dip into content through the likes of CTV is really powerful. So we need to to change and be a little bit more agile ourselves within that.
What could brands do to help clean up the industry?
This is everything we work with the likes of ISBA and the IAB on. It’s about consistency of framework, measurement frameworks, creative frameworks, and how that is then delivered. So that can be the consistency of assets, the mechanical side of being able to book activity, and making sure our creative fits said platform. Or on the measurement side of things, having an alignment on what that truly means, and what does success look like within the platform, and in context across the broader CTV landscape.
Which metrics do you value the most when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
We can measure everything within an inch of its life at the moment. Everybody talks about attention and relevant attention. I think the way we’ve described it internally is “attentive engagement.” It’s about high-attention moments, and understanding those moments, and how consumption changes through the session duration, or the day or week. And it’s about attentive engagement through to attentive conversion. So if you’ve got a direct performance campaign, is it converting as well? Is there an opportunity to convert and add an action or a step out from the campaign into some kind of conversion? So attentive engagement and attentive conversion are probably the two for us.
If you had £1,000,000 to spend and were forced to choose between content marketing, influencer marketing or paid advertising, which would you choose and why?
It’s a live question that’s being debated within the business consistently at the moment. Each three of those has merit. There is a real acceleration in influencer activation, but I think that is only going to evolve into that commerce-related delivery. Rather than just, “this is great, I bought this, it’s amazing,” it will be, within my trusted network, you can buy it through me. You see it through the evolution of TikTok and TikTok Shop and commerce through those social platforms. So I think the influencer world and what we see today is going to be very different moving forward, and there’s always going to be a place for that, as an outreach, as a trusted voice and a source of trust that’s not necessarily coming for me as a brand, it’s coming from somebody that can influence their own network.
I think paid activation will always have a place as well, because I think that context of being able to show up in a way that you feel is right, with a strong creative platform, on a CTV platform is really powerful, but it’s dependent on creative. So if we’ve got a great creative, I’ll always spend quite heavily on CTV from a brand, paid-for perspective. So it’s probably not answering it in a brave way, but I think we’d probably look to use it in the right way across each of them, because each will have an opportunity to add value. And as long as you understand the purpose of the campaign – brand or to drive conversion – then all three would work.
Which person in the industry inspires you the most today?
There are a lot of people that get a lot of limelight, and not necessarily all valuable with their insight. I went to a session with Ebiquity a few weeks ago, and they had Sir John Hegarty on there, and I thought that was really powerful. He talked about something that I’m quite passionate about, which is the growth in creative storytelling, or the switch from performance back into creative storytelling. So I think when you look at the type of industry we have, it’s crying out for brands to step in not just to inspiration, but to education and humour. Humour I think has much more of an opportunity to play a place in creative than ever before because of the world we live in. It was a really simple, impactful presentation, and I took a lot from it.
Out of all the video and TV advertising campaigns you’ve been involved with, which are you most proud of?
I think it’s the Lurpak ‘Where There Are Cooks’ activity that we have. It’s such a significant brand, and the way that the creative is shot in this kind of Pre-Raphaelite, dark and light moment, within a home or a kitchen, is beautiful and highly impactful.
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