As media agencies take on more of a consultative role, WPP Media is placing agency staff directly in clients’ offices, in order to move closer to their commercial strategies. “I think it’s feeling less like a supplier arrangement, and being more of an extension of their own marketing team,” says James Weinberg, Executive Director at WPP Media (T&P).
In this edition of the Buy-Side View, Weinberg also discusses the challenges in attention measurement, the need for broadcasters to prove outcomes, and the importance of charity boxing event Media Fight Night.
What is your biggest bugbear when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
I think there are two areas to this. One is the complexity, often due to the terminology that we use. Obviously CTV still means many different things to different people. It’s just about defining it clearly, and then focusing on how it can drive client value. But my interpretation of it is basically premium TV-quality streaming video. So that might be BVOD, ad-supported streaming, FAST channels, all this similar TV-quality content, predominantly viewed on a big screen. So we need to be really clear about definitions.
Then the second bugbear is not the number of suppliers as such, but sometimes a lack of uniqueness. I think it’s in all of our interests and in our clients’ interests to make sure they understand who’s out there. So what I try to do with every partner who approaches me is always meet them, and specifically try to sharpen their proposition. What does it add to our plan? How does it complement other suppliers on the plan already? And what are they adding that is genuinely incremental? There’s a long tail of CTV partners, and I think it’s in all of our interests to help guide them along to define their own unique role on our clients’ plans.
How do you think the role of the agency has changed over the past ten years?
Obviously agencies’ main responsibilities are around planning and buying media, but in my opinion, we’ve evolved into being strategic or consultative business partners to our clients. They obviously face a load of complexity, there’s technology, data regulation, measurement, how consumers are behaving, all of those elements which we need to help them navigate.
At T&P we pioneered what we call the embedded model, which is basically placing our media teams and our creatives literally in clients’ offices. We started that many years ago, and it’s still exactly the same now. So I’ve learned from that, understanding a little bit more about being consultative, what the commercial context looks like, being present when more decisions are made, and figuring out how an agency person can feel like an extension of their marketing team. Having moved over to WPP, I’m bringing that client-first philosophy with me. So I think it’s feeling less like a supplier arrangement, and being more of an extension of their own marketing team.
Which do you think video advertising is the most effective for – generating awareness and brand-building, or driving short-term sales?
It can clearly do both, but from all the research we have from third-parties and also clients’ own econometrics, it is better at driving long-term brand and profit growth. There’s still a lot of evidence for how it can drive short-term benefits and response, particularly with certain categories like FMCG. But I think long-term, it’s more powerful. We know that video drives memory, emotion and familiarity.
At the same time, when you have that long-term brand success and all of the benefits that it drives for our clients, it actually makes our short-term performance channels work harder. If a consumer knows the brand, they’re more likely to click, to search for something, respond to social media or retail media messaging, and then ultimately convert. So I think the two things help each other.
What team within your agency handles CTV, and why?
Within T&P it’s the AV team. Our clients need one integrated video strategy. I don’t want them to see separate digital and video storytelling. We changed that a couple of years ago. The AV team owns the overall story, the audience strategy, and specifically the budget setting, so we will tell our programmatic or digital counterparts how to spend the budget. We also set the role of each video environment.
The main reason we did that is just because our AV experts are closest to the entire marketplace, so I think it makes most sense for them to take that positioning. But then when we need to hand over the activation to digital specialists, where a programmatic expert is very often needed, we would hand that over. I think in the near future that will merge even more, so AV specialists will work much more closely with those programmatic specialists.
How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?
From a linear TV perspective, it sharpens the role that linear TV needs to play within the whole video response. The main benefits of CTV are around addressability, geotargeting and incremental reach, while linear TV drives social proofing, cultural impact and shared viewing, all those things which other forms of CTV don’t drive, certainly not at the same scale. So when we know there’s so much fragmentation and growth in online video, what can we do with linear to drive more unique reach opportunities? And with the World Cup having just finished, live sport is a massive one, along with other forms of live finals or event-style TV.
But what we are investigating at WPP is how we can actually hone all of the other unique reach opportunities. Picking spots on TV is a very manual process, trying to find what drives unique reach is a bit of a guessing game. So we’ve been testing and working on a very large-scale automation project, so we can use WPP Open to guess, using a load of data sources, which spots are most likely to drive unique reach within a TV campaign. So it’s just dialing up the need to deliver that uniqueness in linear, then the incremental reach is going to be largely driven by VOD. That’s something I’m talking to our clients about a lot at the moment.
What could agencies do better to help clean up the industry?
There are a few areas; greater transparency, improved measurement, and overall stronger accountability. Transparency is about making it clear what clients are actually buying in general, and really exploring supply chains, particularly in the video space. How do those supply chains work, where does the data come from, and what does each partner contribute? When you’re trying to simplify the complexity I think transparency is really key.
And then from a measurement perspective, I think the key things are being more consistent – so comparing reach, frequency, attention and outcomes across platforms, but in the same way, so we can compare things like for like. But rather than just hygiene metrics, such as reach, frequency or video completion rates, it’s focusing on outcomes, like sales, acquisition, how video and TV drive search, and ultimately how they drive long-term value.
Then tying it together with accountability, I think we need to put our money where our mouth is a little bit more from an agency perspective. That could mean outcome-based models or outcome-linked remuneration when it comes to clients. And also being responsible when it comes to media investment in general, and being inclusive. Within WPP we focus on inclusive investment strategies, making sure we’re working with smaller media partners who reach more representative audiences across the country. When I’ve done a lot of deep dives, particularly in linear TV, for example, I’m finding many brands are not doing that. So it’s making sure that we are educating clients and improving the way that we deliver in that regard.
Which ad tech solution has delivered the most impact for your business?
The one that I would focus on, and I’ve had a lot of involvement with it over the last 10 years, is a WPP solution called Advanced TV, formerly known as Finecast. I know that there are lots of agency solutions out there, but we’ve spent a decade or so developing this capability, so I think we’ve got an early mover advantage there.
The way we talk to our clients about it is it provides a genuinely broad single point of access across the entire video ecosystem, and it’s quite an easy one to talk about because it includes everything; it’s all BVOD, all SVOD, YouTube, and we recently introduced social video. So the massive benefit is that it takes out a load of duplication in terms of reach, it can manage frequency, we work with AudienceProject so we can understand each partner’s contribution on the plan, and it helps us to optimise the next campaign.
Which metrics do you value the most when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
The ones that matter to me are the metrics that focus on the quality and effect of an actual ad exposure, not just the metrics that tell us how it was delivered necessarily. Viewability or completion metrics are good to have, and we need to score those, audit those, make sure that our teams are looking at them. But one of the metrics I’m focusing more on is attention. We’ve recently done some deep dive projects with the likes of Adelaide and Lumen. But this area is still evolving.
I think the barrier we have is that doing a proper bespoke analysis for an actual campaign is very expensive. The efficiency and scale isn’t there yet. Finding an aggregated attention score for linear TV and another for CTV is clearly quite limited. I’d love to get it down to supplier level, audience level, and that’s ultimately where we will get to. But I think the best way to do that is being able to plug it into our planning tools, and where possible, having bespoke client measurement for that.
What could publishers, broadcasters and pay-TV companies do to compete more effectively with the tech giants?
I think the broadcasters already have a huge advantage because they’ve got this amazing content. So in my eyes, it’s trying to make that content as easy to discover as possible for audiences. The best way to deliver this is having one front door for consumers. Sky are great at this, you click onto your Sky Stream box, for example, and they showcase all of the content across all of their partners. And with the ITV acquisition I think we’ll see that evolve further.
And then we need all of them helping to build shared measurement. What does combined reach, frequency, attention and outcomes look like? I think outcome-based evidence is going to be key here. They’ve got the amazing content, so they don’t need to try to take what the tech giants have in content, because I think the broadcasters absolutely win in that environment. It’s just building the infrastructure and the measurement to make it easy to access.
Which person in the industry inspires you the most today?
John Maloney [former Global Chief Investment Officer at T&P] was my boss until very recently. We know that with more partners than ever, relationships and community are really important, and he created Media Fight Night, which I think is a great example of how to bring the industry together. It brings agencies, media owners and tech partners around a properly shared experience, and for me it’s a good reminder of media being a community, not just us all competing against each other. It’s also raised millions of pounds for charity. He’s spearheaded that, and as my former boss, he’s the person who’s inspired me the most.
Out of all the video and TV advertising campaigns you’ve been involved with, which are you most proud of?
I’m going to cheat slightly and choose an old classic and a new one. If I think back to the days where linear TV was particularly commercial, I worked on the launch of a Nokia phone about 15 years ago, the Nokia N8. This was in the days when Channel 5 were extremely commercial, and they had their own sales team. We did full takeovers, idents, teasers and launch nights, rather than just spots. We created a seven-minute film which was filmed using the phone, and it had Dev Patel, Pamela Anderson and Charles Dance. It was a bit random! We debuted it on the channel as well, so it was a really connected campaign. I just remember switching on Channel 5 and in retrospect it was completely in your face, maybe over-commercialised. But I thought it was a great example of television creativity and advertising using every touchpoint. So that’s probably my favourite looking back.
A much more recent one that showcases the power of TV effectiveness is EasyJet Holidays. Everyone knows EasyJet as an airline, but over the last few years we’ve worked with them to build out EasyJet Holidays. They will say openly that this is a much more profitable driver for their business than just selling plane seats, and we needed to turn that holiday brand into a big brand in its own right. So we worked super closely with their team and their econometrics partners. We use linear TV for scale and fame, and online video for extended or incremental reach. And while we can’t claim that we were entirely responsible for their success, we know from looking at their econometrics that linear TV and streaming video are very heavy contributors to their overall advertising-led profitability. It’s just nice to see such a rapidly growing part of an existing business.
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