How traditional & digital media can work better together
The shift towards automated media buying is one of the key themes in the digital sector, but it’s arguable that the next challenge is better orchestrating this activity with ‘traditional’ media executions, to better understand how they better work together. Earlier this week, TubeMogul amassed a part of almost a hundred brands and media buyers to outline its vision of how this can be done. The Drum was on hand to report.
Ad tech outfit TubeMogul is making a play for TV ad dollars with the dual launch of cross-screen advertising products aimed at helping marketers better streamline their media spend across channels, as brands aim for more holistic storytelling techniques.
The publicly-listed outift made the revelations at its third annual TubeMogul University event hosted in Lisbon this week, where chief executive Brett Wilson outlined the proposition to brands and media buyers, with the TubeMogul Cross-Screen Planning Tool, plus planned updates to chief marketing officers Dashboard, both poised for a full UK rollout next year.
Cross-screen planning
TubeMogul's Cross-Screen Planning Tool lets advertisers de-duplicate their media buys across TV, desktop and mobile devices, with the service scheduled for a first quarter launch next year, following its debut in the US last week.
The service works by allowing advertisers to upload their TV media plan, and the advertising platform's Cross-Screen Planning feature can then recommend where the brand can engage with similar audience types with desktop and mobile video advertising inventory.
Speaking with The Drum, TubeMogul chief executive Brett Wilson, explained that helping advertisers to both think about, and execute their media campaigns in a holistic manner is now key to the ad tech outfit's strategy.
"All this anchors around TV, with most TV planning you see GRPs and TRPs, but you actually see little else, but with thise [both of the new products] you can merge the frequency across TV and digital," he added.
Digital adding reach
Addressing attendees at the event, Wilson further explained the rationale to using desktop and video to help brands achieve additional reach and frequency with their TV advertising campaigns.
"When you look at at typical TV reach curve you'll see that TV continues to be just a great way to quickly build reach with your target audience," he said. "But after the initial burst while the TV line is still spending, you're primarily not reaching any new people... So you're still spending, but reaching fewer, and fewer people."
In addition, TubeMogul is also planning a 2016 roll out of business development tool CMO Dashboard - an executive dashboard specifically aimed at helping brand-side marketers (although it is also available to agencies) aggregate their media spend across different channels to spot further efficiencies.
Further explaining the planned Q1 updates to its CMO Dashboard offering, Wilson said the dashboard gives advertisers a snapshot of their spend by media type, and agency to give granular campaign-level reporting.
"What we'll do next is that we're going to bring in your TV spend, and going to bring in the data sets that we have and give you the ability to ingest data in the same dashboard that you see your media, TV and digital media spend, and then you can also see your offline sales," he said.
"Essentially you can then input this into your various attribution models," he added.
Speaking with The Drum on the sidelines of the event, Ben Phillips, MediaCom's global head of mobile, said the GroupM outfit’s media planning teams were now working towards better cohesing their campaign execution, whereas in the past they had worked on a more siloed basis.
A key theme in Wilson’s keynote address was how the shift towards more effective cross-screen media implementations would necessitate more open media trading environments. However, in an era noted for the rise of ‘walled gardens’ (notably by Google according to TubeMogul’s assessment) this is increasingly difficult.
However, what to do in the face of such a dominant player such as Google? As one conference attendee was overheard to say: “If you’re in digital, you can’t exactly buy around Google.”
Wilson went on to offer his opinion that the current mood in the market favoured more ‘open ecosystems’.
He went on to say: “There’s just no single publisher that’s big enough to force a closed ecosystem on the market. There’s too much fragmentation of audience and media right now. The truth is that innovation in advertising thrives amidst openness.”
He went on to implore those in attendance to “stand with us” in its stance against such walled gardens, adding that a united front will result in a “strong buy-side.”
Speaking to The Drum, fellow conference attendee, Paul Dalton, DigitasLBi’s chief media officer, said it was incumbent on the buy-side of the industry to be smart over how it scales data in order to provide insights to clients.
He added: “I would advocate a more open marketplace, as we could provide some real good results for clients, and it would be much easier without have to create two-or-three different inventory pools [around the walled gardens].”
In such a scenario, you enter these different inventory pools “blind”, according to Dalton, this then makes it much harder to de-duplicate buys.