Publicis Media’s Stephan Beringer on the race for relevance in an age of personalisation

How do you think brands are adapting to technologies to provide more personalised consumer experiences?

One of the biggest assets a brand can have is its relationship with customers, consumers, individuals in general. To get there, you need a level of sophistication and understanding of what I would call the people space, which in turn, creates the realisation that you need an engine to then enable all these relationships. The multitude of data signals brands need to process are vastly different, be that customer, transactional, behavioral, or competitive. Bringing it all together, relative to each brand’s atrributes, business performance etc is key, as is the activation. Every moment a customer has an interaction with a brand is a an engagement point, a relationship opportunity and a source of insight. Understanding and operating this is the art that technology enables.

Do brands and agencies need a new set of skills to adapt to this increasingly personalised world?

Yes they do. This is such a fundamental shift in terms of what we need to do, on both the client and agency side, that we all need to transform through training and recruitment. Everyone is in the same situation simultaneously.

We are extremely focused on talent at Publicis Groupe. We are the first communications group that has taken the challenge of training talent towards new skills very seriously. We have launched a new platform called IQ academy that can be accessed from your tablet or phone. It allows you to be trained on key topics such as programmatic or data analytics. You get trained online through this system, get certified and then you ultimately advance your skillset. We are training all our internal teams as well as offering this to our clients as a tool. It's about getting everyone to the same level of understanding.

Has any brand stood out for you in creating personalised experiences? What should brands be doing more of?

The general consensus is that everyone is advancing quite rapidly in this area. It’s difficult however, to make comparisons as it depends on the nature of the brand and industry it operates in.

If you work in healthcare, for instance, you’re confronted with extremely confidential information, which creates a natural barrier in terms of what you can and should do with personalisation. Whereas in another industry, say automotive or travel, you might be operating with more freedom.

And even within industries, it is difficult to name the outstanding, as it will always be relative to the intended person experiences each brand is trying to create. The strategy of Amazon is different to Walmart's. There’s no one way of doing personalisation well. Brands should always be building their own strategies, especially in a world where every person wants to be treated as an individual. That’s the race for relevance and how you execute against this continuously and progressively is where it becomes really interesting. That’s where the real battleground is.

What role is data playing in creating personalised experiences?

Data allows you to put the person at the centre, connected to all the data related to him or her. Brands can then use this data to create content, experiences, and design journeys in the most sophisticated fashion in order to be most relevant to that individual

But you get what you put in, so if brands all used the same data in the same way, no one really creates a personalised experience. If a brand is able to utilise a different set of data or use more advanced intelligence in order to come up with a strategy or an approach that will outperform the rest, then they will ultimately win.

What sorts of challenges are clients facing in using technology to create personalised consumer experiences?

One big challenge is trying to unify the technology and data around the consumer. A client might have different sets of data that have not necessarily been harmonised at the individual level. The challenge is in bringing the previously siloed data to one common level.

There are also incremental problems arising in the ecosystem where for example you might only get back data on an aggregate level making your person-based play more difficult. We need to resolve these issues with solutions that can cross these fences.

Are there any platforms that you see playing a pivotal role in this personalisation space?

Virtual Reality (VR) opens up new opportunities from an experiential standpoint. It's just a matter of time now in terms of how quickly we see adoption by consumers. The same is true for the world of bots. Bots will have a very drastic impact on our use of search, our unified relationships and interactions with brands, on commerce. In fact we are moving from an era of e-commerce, where you would still go to a platform to, for example, buy something, to the age of ‘me-commerce’, where everything surrounds you in anticipation of your needs. At this level of predictive personalisation, we eventually won’t need search engines to provide us with that many answers.