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INTERNATIONAL
MARCOMMS INSIGHTS FROM EBIQUITY
CMO RESEARCH HERALDS
‘DATA DAWN’
IN EUROPE
Inside:
Advertiser and agency partnership advice
Client interview: InterContinental Hotels Group
The digital life of a teenager in 2015 The media agency improvement plan
France: changes to the Loi Sapin Turkey: media pool update
Issue No.19: Q2 2015
“The demands
placed on today’s
CMOs are intense,
and the biggest
challenges center
on capturing,
harnessing, and
managing consumer
and customer data.”
ISSUE 19 Q2 2015 RESPONSE
RESPONSEMAGAZINE
MAGAZINEFROM
FROMEBIQUITY
EBIQUITY
RESEARCH
COVER STORY
CMO research heralds
‘data dawn’ in Europe
What keeps the modern/today’s CMOs awake at night? What
resources and skills do they need to enable them to thrive in the
always-on world of digital and social media? What talent and external
consultancy are they looking for to help their brands to grow?
Ebiquity’s Group Head of Marketing, Richard Hemming, shares the
findings of a new study of CMOs worldwide. The research shows
that, while concerns are similar the world over, CMOs in postrecession Europe are now actively tackling the issues and challenges
of harnessing and exploiting digital data and new channel choices, to
some extent following the lead of their North American counterparts.
T
he CMO of 2015 is required
to be a very different animal
from the CMO of even just five
years ago. The demands placed
on today’s CMOs are intense,
and the biggest challenges
center on capturing, harnessing, and managing
consumer and customer data. The CMO
who can become the master of Big Data to
personalize and tailor individual customer
experience – combining both logic and magic,
in the words of Marc Mathieu, Unilever’s
Global SVP of Marketing – is the CMO who
Richard Hemming
is Group Head of
Marketing
View more insights at blog.ebiquity.com
will thrive. As IBM Europe’s CMO Caroline
Taylor recently said, Big Data is “marketing
heaven,” adding that “the biggest challenge
as a marketer in the current marketplace is
trying to achieve the transformation of being
a ‘digital CMO’ with the speed at which digital
is evolving.”
3. Exploiting new consumer channel and
device choices
1. Managing the explosion in consumer data
72 percent of our global sample ranked
managing the explosion in consumer data
as one of their three leading challenges,
compared – for instance – with social
media management, which just 4 percent
ranked in their top three concerns. Indeed,
CMOs appear to be reaping the benefits of
investment of time, resources, and personnel
in social media management, an area that
has historically been a major area of concern.
Moreover, today’s focus on data and tech
contrasts strongly with a 2007 study from
Forrester that found fewer than 15 percent of
CMOs ranked tech-savviness as important to
their success.
2. Analyzing and exploiting consumer data to
automate and/or personalize marcomms
What this new research demonstrates is that
CMOs today find it difficult to deal with and
Global research findings
The Ebiquity/CMO Council study asked
CMOs to rank 12 challenges on a scale from
most to least challenging. Across the world, the
top three challenges were consistently agreed
to be centered on Big Data and multi-channel
analytics, specifically:
RESEARCH
“77 percent say they feel fairly or very
well-equipped to manage the explosion in
consumer data – 69 percent feel they are
fairly or very well-equipped to automate and
personalize marketing communications.”
CMOs’ concerns, ranked in priority order
PRIORITY
Managing the explosion in consumer data
1
Analyzing and exploiting this data to automate or personalize marcomms
2
Exploiting new channel and device choices
3
Privacy concerns around customer data
4
Generating content marketing
5
Overcoming financial constraints and demonstrating ROI
6
Decreasing brand loyalty
7
Corporate transparency and reputation management
8
Consumer collaboration and influence online
9
Realizing the potential in growth markets
10
Social media management
11
Shifting consumer demographics
12
harness the benefits from the smog of data
that digital and social media assets generate.
They’re aware that digital analytics – in
essence, understanding how their customers
experience their brand across multiple
channels and devices – offers the prospect of
automated, personalized, and highly-targeted
marketing communications, but they are also
honest enough to admit this is still relatively
uncharted territory. Our findings echo a recent
study conducted by IBM which showed that
79 percent of CMOs feel underprepared
to manage the impact of key changes in
marketing, particularly the data explosion, and
growth of channel and device choices.
Moreover, although globally CMOs are most
concerned about how to manage, analyze, and
exploit consumer data across channels and
platforms, they are nevertheless confident
that they will succeed. 77 percent say they
feel fairly or very well-equipped to manage
the explosion in consumer data – 69 percent
feel they are fairly or very well-equipped
to automate and personalize marketing
communications. But it’s clear they won’t
be doing this alone or using solely in-house
resource. One of the consequences of the
rapid drive to digital analytics is a global talent
squeeze, and seven in ten global CMOs plan
to recruit external consultancy help to manage
consumer data, and almost eight in ten plan to
work with external partners to automate and
personalize marcomms.
Our finding that managing and exploiting
consumer data is a pain point for CMOs
specifically and not for marketing executives
in general is backed up by a recent article in
DM News. This showed that while 64 percent
of CMOs have marketing analytics as a
responsibility, by contrast only 31 percent
of marketing executives say that harnessing
insights from Big Data is a pain point. The onus
of data-into-insights rests with the top women
and men in the marketing world.
The European ‘data dawn’
It is generally agreed that North American
businesses lead the world in the application
of digital analytics to grow their businesses,
tailoring marcomms at the individual
customer level. During the recessionary years
around the end of the first decade of the new
millennium, many European businesses stalled
investment here just as customer data was
exploding and new opportunities for more
effective and measurable targeting became
possible.
The responses in the CMO Council’s research
for Ebiquity from CMOs based in Europe
ISSUE 19 Q2 2015 RESPONSE MAGAZINE FROM EBIQUITY
RESEARCH
Managing the explosion in consumer
data is in top 3 challenges
All CMOs
Euro CMOs
72%
79%
Will recruit external partner to
address this challenge
All CMOs
Euro CMOs
70%
82%
“Like their North American counterparts,
European CMOs say they are confident
they will be able to address this challenge,
with 78 percent saying they are fairly or
very well-equipped to tackle it.”
suggest that the continent’s marketers are
at a critical inflection point in the history of
commerce managing digital customer data
to automate and personalize marketing.
Europe’s pause in developing solutions in
this space means that European CMOs see
managing the explosion in consumer data
as even more of a priority than their peers
in North America or elsewhere (79 percent
rank this concern as among their top three
challenges against 72 percent globally).
Morag Blazey, CEO of Ebiquity UK,
commented: “Consumer data analytics
features in more and more of our client
briefs. It is clear that marketers across
Europe have realized that embracing multichannel analytics – a new skillset for many
– is critical to the future success of their
business.”
Like their North American counterparts,
European CMOs say they are confident
they will be able to address this challenge,
with 78 percent saying they are fairly or
very well-equipped to tackle it, but they
will be even more dependent on external
consultancy help in managing the explosion
of consumer data. 82 percent in Europe –
compared with just 58 percent of CMOs
in the USA/Canada, and 70 percent
worldwide – will turn to external help,
suggesting that the talent crunch is even
more pronounced in Europe.
Dietmar Kruse, CEO Continental Europe
at Ebiquity, added: “Our experience helping
US brands in this area (see sidebar) is
leading to deeper conversations with their
European counterparts. What is clear is
that Europe’s ‘data dawn’ is very definitely
upon us, and we’re ready for the challenge.”
*Ebiquity/CMO Council research 2014/15
View more insights at blog.ebiquity.com
Transforming business through
digital analytics
Stratigent, Ebiquity’s North American
Multi-Channel Analytics subsidiary, has an
established track record in helping businesses
to manage, analyze, and harness the power of
digital data from across the customer journey
to commercial advantage.
For InterContinental Hotels Group – operating
4,800 hotels across 100 countries and nine
brands – Stratigent has helped the hotel
operator innovate at scale, from effective tag
management to global web analytics. See the
interview with IHG’s Garrod Gibb also in this
issue (page 10).
For a major FMCG player, Stratigent
implemented an evidence- and behaviorbased redesign of the client’s webpage,
enhanced the shopping cart experience and
functionality, and maximized cross-sell and
upsell opportunities.
And for a leading airline, Stratigent has
improved the customer journey at every
step to deliver an additional $30m in annual
revenue.
About our research
The CMO Council is a knowledge-sharing,
by-invitation network of thousands of seniorlevel marketers from across the world. In early
2015, Ebiquity commissioned the Council
to poll a representative sample of 224 of
its members to help us understand CMOs’
biggest concerns and challenges. While
four in ten of the sample polled are based in
North America, three in ten work in Europe,
and two in ten in Asia. Their most common
job titles were SVP/EVP Marketing, Head of
Marketing, CMO, Marketing Director, and VP
of Marketing.
Respondents came equally from B2C, B2B,
and B2C-B2B hybrid businesses, with a third
in each group. They work in a broad crosssection of categories, with entertainment
and leisure (18 percent), retail (17), and
consumer electronics (12) the bestrepresented. Respondents ranged from Adidas
to Mondelez, Burberry to Samsung, Yum! to
Jaguar Land Rover, with 60 percent of their
companies having revenues in excess of $1bn.
A third of those polled have media budgets
greater than $50m.
ADVERTISER / AGENCY RELATIONSHIPS
FEATURE
Like marriage, great clientagency relationships need
constant vigilance
Two years ago, we published an article1 on the secrets of great
partnerships between advertisers and media agencies. Since then,
plenty has changed in the dynamics of this critical relationship,
so now is a good time for Stephen Broderick – Global CEO of
FirmDecisions, Ebiquity’s compliance auditing business – to
update our advice.
O
ver recent years, it is clear that
trust between media agencies
and advertisers has eroded.
Across the world, the onward
march of programmatic
buying and decreased
transparency have done nothing to help.
Recent examples of the causes behind the
erosion in trust include:
•
•
The current controversies in Australia
(see commentary over) and media
rebates in the US have kept the topic
of accountability high on advertisers’
concerns.
A former senior agency finance executive
has suggested that, despite the common
view that the market is relatively
transparent, kick-backs have been an
established part of the market for many
years. Following further, very recent
revelations, it is expected that this will be a
hotly-debated subject at the ANA Financial
Management Conference at the end of
April 2015.
The advent and growing dominance of
Automated Trading Desks (ATDs) had made
agency paper trails more opaque than ever,
and, with Ebiquity CEOs estimating2 that
between 12 and 15 percent of all advertising
inventory will be traded programmatically
by the end of 2015, the odds are stacked
increasingly against harmonious clientagency relationships.
On one level, clients only have themselves to
blame, as agencies enticed them into signing
up for apparently keenly-priced digital deals
on the proviso that the clients signed away
their audit rights, excluding specified media
from audit. True transparency requires a full
audit of the composition of media pricing and
the rebate chain at agency and group level,
yet Ebiquity data suggests that today as much
as 50 percent of digital revenue remains in
agency groups as revenue and/or via markups during the purchase. While some of this is
necessary – for adserving and technical costs
– a lack of insight into the purchasing trail has
meant many advertisers are fundamentally
unclear how their money is being spent and
managed by agencies; agencies are doing little
to clear muddy waters.
Consolidation in the agency world into fewer,
bigger, and – critically – listed groups has
created an oligarchy of media agency powerplayers who have their own shareholders to
satisfy
and targets to meet. The net
result of consolidation is that even major
advertisers like multi-brand FMCGs are only
a small part of a GroupM or Vivaki portfolio.
So at a time when agency margins have
increased as much as they have as a result of
non-transparent media trading and agency
rebates, it’s time advertisers asserted
themselves.
Here’s our six-point plan for better clientagency relationships:
•
•
•
Have a fair and clear contract – based on
your own and not your agency’s template –
and enforce it, with regular checks
Work with industry bodies including the
WFA and ISBA to write better contracts
Insist on 100 percent visibility of an audit
Stephen Broderick
is Global CEO of
FirmDecisions
ISSUE
RESPONSE MAGAZINE
MAGAZINE FROM
FROM EBIQUITY
EBIQUITY
ISSUE 19
19 Q2
Q2 2015
2015 RESPONSE
The view from Australia
Eric Faulkner, Chairman of Ebiquity Asia Pacific, gives his
perspective on the value pots issue in Australia. I loved the line in a recent blog article4 from a hypothetical
CMO, when talking about agency pitches: “Meanwhile,
for anyone wondering about the race to the bottom, I
reckon you hit it about three years ago. Not that anyone
seemed to notice.”
“The advent and growing dominance
of Automated Trading Desks (ATDs)
had made agency paper trails more
opaque than ever.”
• Pay your agency a fair fee, with clear KPIs
• Don’t make your relationship about the cheapest media
• Consider doing deals direct with media owners, as well as
with the major platforms such as Google or Facebook
In 2012, we talked about client-agency relationships as arranged marriages
needing a good marriage contract. As negotiations have got tougher in the
intervening period, it’s become increasingly important for advertisers and
agencies to sign and enforce the equivalent of pre-nuptial agreements, and
indeed that exact language is starting to be used in pitches; clients are now
routinely encouraged to get agency agreement on legal and commercial terms
as a precondition of agencies getting on the pitch list.
And while what’s happening in Asia, Australia, and the Americas is top of mind
right now, it’s important to remember that these issues aren’t new – they’re
just manifesting themselves in new ways because of the emerging trading
ecosystem that programmatic brings with it. There were similar issues around
IPG as long ago as 2005, as reported in Advertising Age.3 In the intervening
time, global advertisers who have invested the time and effort to craft, sign,
and have agencies stick to fair, clear, and binding contracts – often working in
partnership with third parties such as FirmDecisions – are those that have not
been affected.
Our hypothetical CMO might have added that “… this
year’s media buy is 20 percent cheaper than last year’s,
and that was 20 percent cheaper than the year before. So
next year’s will be free. And the agency has dropped their
fee to nothing already, so they’ll be paying us to handle the
business next year. Not that there’s much to handle, as all
the ads have appeared after midnight, and no one knows
our brands or buys our products anymore. Which is just
as well because the retailers take 110 percent of what we
earn anyway. I wonder what the surf’s like today?”
Clients don’t want to distrust or hate their media
agencies. They entrust them with much confidential
information about their business. They want a
constructive, collaborative, and professional working
relationship.
But pressure is created from the beginning of the
relationship. Tough and competitive price negotiations
take place. Both the fee price and the media cost price
are pushed to the limit, and sometimes beyond. And this
creates the opportunity for the events that occurred
at MediaCom Australia during the past two years. The
behavior in the Australian market was not picked up
earlier because of the assumption of apparent honesty.
Nobody wants to assume that a key supplier will not tell
you the truth. But most of us carry out spot checks to
reassure ourselves.
So, it might help to clarify the difference between what
Ebiquity’s media consultants and what FirmDecisions’
experts do. The principal role for Ebiquity’s media
consultants is to help clients and their agencies drive
continual improvement. It is based on benchmarking
and comparisons, not auditing. The principal role of
FirmDecisions is to ensure that contractual agreements,
particularly as to the financial terms, have been honored.
I offer you a three-point plan for continual improvement:
1. Take an active interest in the benchmarking sessions.
If they don’t cover what you need, or they are not clear
enough, please say so.
References
1. Nick Manning & Stephen Broderick (2012). A matter of trust. Response. http://blog.
ebiquity.com/2012/09/a-matter-of-trust-3
2. Ebiquity CEOs on 2014 and 2015. Response, 18, pp.4-5. http://blog.ebiquity.com/
2. Ask tough questions – of your agency, of your
consultant, and of your marketing team.
3. If in doubt, ask a genuinely independent media
consultant any advertising or media-related question.
wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Ebq_CEOs_on_2014-15.pdf
3. Bradley Johnson (2005). IPG Offers Details Behind $550 Million Restatement.
Advertising Age, 4 October 2005. http://adage.com/article/news/interpublic-offersdetails-550-million-restatement/46973/
4. Nic Christensen (2015). What your client might not be telling you. mUmBRELLA.
http://mumbrella.com.au/client-might-telling-256300
View more insights at blog.ebiquity.com
Eric Faulkner
is Chairman of Ebiquity
Asia Pacific
MEDIA AGENCY MANAGEMENT
FEATURE
The media agency
improvement plan
Media agencies have long-held aspirations to be more present in
the C-suite, to become their clients’ trusted advisors and strategic
partners. If they are to achieve this, they need to invest in technology
and analytics, enhance their ROI and effectiveness practice, and
fundamentally change their approach to transparency in the media
buying chain. Here Nick Manning summarizes how media agencies
must evolve for the omni-channel media age.
P
art 1. Becoming
technology and data
partners
Media agencies and their
groups are not top of mind in
the C-suite; they don’t receive the recognition
they crave and are often seen as serviceproviders rather than trusted advisors. This
limits the influence they can exert and the
direct and overt fees they can command.
One of the main reasons for this is that
agencies have tended to under-invest in the
software and analytics tools they need to
harness the power of Big Data. Not just data
generated by advertising and marketing, but
all of the trackable and targetable steps along
the customer journey.
Nick Manning
is Chief Strategy
Officer at Ebiquity
Ebiquity recently asked the CMO Council
to determine CMOs’ concerns. The survey
showed that capturing, harnessing, and using
Big Data is what keeps senior marketers
awake. And analyzing and exploiting data to
automate and personalize marcomms is the
number one as-yet-unsolved priority.
Media agencies have the opportunity to be
serious players here, but they are currently
not high on the consideration list. Big systems
integration houses, providers of cloudbased marketing suites, and management
consultancies with strong analytics
capabilities are all edging media agencies out,
and may push them out altogether if agencies
fail to evolve.
To get back into the consideration set, media
agencies need to up their tech game, broaden
the definition of ‘advertising’ to cover all
aspects of PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared, and
Owned) media, and – indeed – get back to
the future. Media agencies used to be all
about delivering the right message in the right
channel to the right customer at the right time.
Big Data analytics allows this to happen like
never before, but, in a multi-channel, multidevice world, agencies need to build analytics
and programmatic targeting into their core
suite of services – or risk remaining undervalued.
Part 2. Becoming effectiveness and
ROI partners
Today’s media agencies are not sufficiently
focused on business outcomes, nor do they
speak the language of the C-suite. Cost
savings and engagement are necessary but
not sufficient, and, if they’re all that agencies
are valued for, CMOs will look elsewhere for
support in top-table discussions.
The C-suite deals in sales, turnover, margin,
EPS, and EBITDA. The purpose of marketing
is to have a positive impact on hard financial
metrics, and media agencies need to embrace
the disruptive power of emerging technology
to map channel and content strategies
to business outcomes. Econometrics,
modeling, and testing are important, but
modeling that demonstrates causation and
not mere correlation is what will attract
attention and credibility from the C-suite.
To thrive, agencies need to become a client’s
effectiveness and ROI partner, first and
foremost.
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“If media agencies are
to become serious
C-suite trusted advisors,
they need to become
accountable and
transparent.”
Part 3. Accountability,
transparency, and trust
If media agencies are to become serious
C-suite trusted advisors, they need to become
accountable and transparent. The drive to
programmatic media buying has done little to
help the media agencies’ reputation for lack
of transparency. Black boxes are appearing
everywhere.
The industry has consolidated into a few
big groups, each of which has enormous
purchasing power. Most are publicly-owned
and under pressure to improve margin and
profit. Many have used the rapid growth
of digital media transactions to throw a
smokescreen over how they transact media,
and contracts for programmatic buying
frequently require clients to waive audit
rights. It is ironic that it is the most measurable
– the digital – media channels that are actually
the most opaque and unaccountable.
Not only do clients have little idea how
their budgets are being spent; half of online
advertising is not viewable. In addition,
many ads are only viewed by non-human
(bot) traffic, and there are frequent cases
View more insights at blog.ebiquity.com
of fraud emerging, with many ads never
actually served to real people. None of
the justifications for the prevailing lack of
transparency are acceptable – it’s a complex
eco-system, the pressures exerted by
procurement, or the fact that Automated
Trading Desks enrich data.
Part 4. A different model and a new
name
The media environment has fundamentally
changed and digitalized, and it’s certain that
commercial communication will move everfurther online. Media agencies have changed
how they do business –particularly how they
transact media – but these changes have
done nothing to enhance the C-suite’s trust
in and partnership with agencies. Quite the
opposite. And if media agencies don’t invest
in data and analytics, ROI and effectiveness,
accountability and transparency, they run the
risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Tech companies, marketing suite providers,
and independent consultancies such as
Ebiquity are better placed than today’s
agency groups to deliver the impartiality
and independence that clients crave. For
their part, advertisers are likely to increase
the scope and reach of the deals they do
direct with platforms including Google and
Facebook.
The agency model is not dead, and if media
agencies recast themselves – perhaps as
Channel Optimization Agencies – they can
play their trump card: insight. Technology
cannot deliver insights – skilled and
knowledgeable humans do. And those who
can analyze data to demonstrate bottom-line
effectiveness, transparently and accountably,
will be highly-prized by those who serve
clients best.
Nick Manning has expanded on the four
themes summarized in this article – data
and technology, effectiveness and ROI,
accountability and transparency, and different
models and names – in a series of blog articles
at http://blog.ebiquity.com. Visit the site to
discover more.
INTERVIEW
CLIENT INSIGHTS
How multi-channel analytics
helps IHG understand its
customers
InterContinental Hotels Group is one of the world’s largest leisure
businesses* managing 4,800 hotels and 710,000 guest rooms in
nearly 100 countries. Over 350,000 people work across IHG’s hotels
and corporate offices worldwide. Over the past four years, IHG has
invested significantly in multi-channel digital analytics, turning what was a
Cinderella discipline into the beating heart of the global business.
B
ased out of the company’s Atlanta
HQ, Garrod Gibb leads a global
digital analytics group of 16, with
teams in Atlanta – Georgia, Salt
Lake City – Utah, Charleston
– South Carolina, and Manila –
Philippines. He is responsible for the online
voice of the customer, AB testing, digital
analytics, and call center analytics. Here,
Garrod explains how intelligent and timely
interrogation of digital data has transformed
IHG’s ability to understand and serve its
customers better.
What challenges did you face when
you took on this role?
When I arrived at IHG in 2011, the company
was using an older software implementation
managed by a pretty small team. The
management were understandably cautious as
they were not sure how much, or if, they could
trust apparent trends in the data. We saw a
great opportunity to help create a new way of
thinking.
In the past four years, our use and application
of digital media analytics has shifted in some
pretty significant ways. We have made smart
structural decisions, are confident in the
insights and implications we get from our
data, and are now a digital-first business that’s
got new and powerful reach into its digital
properties.
and after their stay. The way we develop a
relationship with customers – online as much
as in person – is a key driver of satisfaction,
repeat business, and creating preference for
our brands. So we use digital analytics to gain
insights into who our customers are, what they
want, and what they prefer.
“We need the analytics
talent pool to catch
up… it’s a challenge
for all businesses and
organizations across
the world.”
For example, we analyze the text of all calls we
receive at our call centers to understand what
may be missing or confusing about the web
experience, and then use this information to
take the right actions to solve it. Also, our call
center staff can see what a customer has seen
online immediately before calling, so we can
serve them better. In both cases, we’ve created
a feedback loop between our digital and
voice channels, and this has enhanced overall
customer experience.
What are the particular challenges
in the hotel sector that you look to
solve with digital analytics?
We’re in the hospitality business, which
continues to evolve and shift with our
customers’ expectations before, during,
And how about the challenges of
trying to institute multi-channel
analytics across multiple brands,
markets, and languages?
It’s true that each brand within each market
behaves differently, and we do have a very
large number of market/brand/language
combinations, as our 9 brands are present in
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audiences – such as the impact of messages
about urgency of available hotel rooms for
people traveling tomorrow – and tailor more
impactful promotions accordingly. Like
everything our team does, AB testing allows us
to understand different customers better and
segment our targeting with more impact.
How do you balance in-house
resource with external support?
Garrod Gibb - Director, Digital Analytics & Site
Optimization at InterContinental Hotels Group
almost 100 countries. While it can be difficult
to understand all of the local nuances, with our
team and structure in place, over the past four
years we’ve demonstrated that it can be done,
successfully.
What is the scale of return on
investment you get from digital
analytics?
Multi-channel analytics significantly reduces
the guesswork from design, waste in process
and time, and better enables our commercial
teams to focus on the right things. We’ve
learned, for example, through urgency
message testing “Book now – just four rooms
left at this price!” has little impact on people
traveling tonight or tomorrow, but a major
influence on those traveling a week from
today. These insights allow us to understand
our customers’ motivations like never before.
Generally speaking, we can see returns in
the order of 600-800 percent for single tests
in terms of ROI. And we can tell we’re doing
things right when our annual results reports
are full of digital success stories about the
outcomes of our campaigns.
Tell us about how you use AB and
multivariate testing to optimize
the performance of your digital
properties.
AB testing is probably the most valuable and
powerful tool we have. While knowing what
has happened historically allows us to predict
the future based on historical customer
behavior, AB testing allows us to isolate and
control for particular variables among specific
View more insights at blog.ebiquity.com
Over the past four years, our team has grown
from four to sixteen, and now reaches across
four sites and three time zones so we function
around the clock. We’ve grown our capabilities
and capacity to enable us to innovate and
serve our multiple brands and geographies
at scale. In addition, we’ve partnered with
Stratigent – Ebiquity’s US-based
multi-channel analytics
company – since
2011. Because they’re
solution-agnostic, they
give us unbiased advice
about the tools we
should recruit and deploy.
They’ve evolved to become a
strategic partner for us due to their
understanding of both technology
and the digital analytics space. This
combination of in-house and consultancy
expertise means we continue to advance
on our strategic goals.
“Multi-channel analytics
significantly reduces the
guesswork from design,
waste in process
and time, and better
enables our commercial
teams to focus on the
right things.”
And finally, what do you see as the
biggest challenges in the coming
years?
If I had to choose, I would say two: data
and people. With the explosion of data
sources and data types – particularly
from mobile – we need to apply the
same rigor to the new data we’re
acquiring as a business, and integrate
it with what we’ve already got. But to
do that, we need to expand to include
more high-quality analysts across our business. This is not just a
challenge for IHG or the hospitality industry; it’s a challenge for
all businesses and organizations across the world.
*IHG’s (InterContinental Hotels Group) portfolio of hotel
brands includes InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts,
HUALUXE® Hotels and Resorts, Crowne Plaza® Hotels &
Resorts, Hotel Indigo®, EVEN™ Hotels, Holiday Inn® Hotels
& Resorts, Holiday Inn Express®, Staybridge Suites®, and
Candlewood Suites®. In January 2015, IHG acquired Kimpton
Hotels & Restaurants, the world’s leading boutique hotel
business.
COMMUNICATIONS INSIGHT
ADVERTISING TRENDS
The digital life of
teens in 2015
Today’s teenagers have never lived a purely analog existence.
Ebiquity’s Senior Insight Analyst Martin Broad explores the
consequences of their always-on, hyper-connected lives and how
brands should approach and interact with them.
B
rands often talk about the
need to target digital natives:
the generation of youngsters
who have grown up always
surrounded by digital
technologies. However, the
lack of common ground between marketers
and young people makes targeting this
demographic effectively particularly difficult.
So what is life like for an adolescent today
and what trends should marketers follow and
avoid?
It would be tempting when considering this
issue to romanticize the past, but in many
ways the world before the rise of digital was
a ‘golden age’ of childhood play. School days
were shorter, children had less homework, and
– perhaps critically in terms of play and early
development – the sense of innocence that
comes with less access to media still existed.
Anyone with children will tell you it’s different
today. Children are under intense pressure to
perform well at school – indeed, the stress of
government inspections and ratings has led
many teachers to train students for exams,
rather than allow them to explore the love of
learning – and this emphasis on work can stifle
creativity.
Most importantly, children have a very
different understanding of ‘play’ today. The
days of being turned out to play in the streets
until dinner are over. Moreover, the figure of an
adult is never far away. Scores of parents drop
their kids off at playdates and pick them up
with military precision, with the child always
under the watchful eye of a guardian.
Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears would
have headed the charts, but the top five
celebrities named were exclusively YouTube
stars like PewDiePie (an online comedian, for
those readers older than 14) and cross-media
sitcom creators, The Fine Bros.
“76 percent of
millennials have their
own smartphone, and
US youths spend on
average 7.5 hours a
day consuming media.”
The power of the smartphone also means
how teens actively engage with the world is
different, too. Any parent with a teenage child
knows that they are effectively addicted to
their mobiles. In fact, a recent study from CTIA
Harris and Interactive found that 47 percent of
US teens say their social lives “would end or be
dramatically worsened” without their mobile
phone. For this generation, the mobile phone
goes hand-in-hand with the selfie.
Generation smartphone
When they’re not busy with school or with
play, teens and tweens are busy with media.
76 percent of millennials have their own
smartphone, and US youths spend on average
7.5 hours a day consuming media. No other
generation has been exposed to information
so continuously, and it’s changing their
worldview. In 2014, Variety magazine asked
13-18-year-olds who they rated as the most
influential contemporary celebrities. Only
a few years ago, mainstream figures such as
Today’s children spend more time online being
rated by their peers than any other generation
in history, through likes, retweets, shares, pins,
fans, and followers. The selfie invites opinions
to be registered and for the child posting to be
positively evaluated, and therefore ‘popular.’
Yet wherever there is a popular child, there is
one who is equally unpopular, and it is here that
the pressures of digital life for young people
can have profound consequences.
Cyberbullying is a well-publicized
phenomenon, and no demographic feels this
more acutely than teenagers. Ask.FM is a
‘Q&A’ social network with around 150 million
monthly users (particularly young people)
who are able to send questions and answers
ISSUE 19 Q2 2015 RESPONSE MAGAZINE FROM EBIQUITY
to each other. The relatively unfiltered nature
of the site led to several extreme cases of
cyberbullying in 2013, ending in the suicides
of a number of teenagers. Despite being under
immense pressure from parents to shut down,
Ask.FM remained live and instead focused on
trying to provide a safer and more responsible
forum for people to communicate. Laudable as
that may be, the clear lesson here is that young
people are invested in their digital lives to such
a degree that criticism from their peers can
have tragic outcomes.
Finding a voice on social and digital
media
So given the particular and often intense
dynamics of teenagers’ digital existence,
how should brands and marketers speak
to them in digital and social media? The
starting point must be to recognize that life
for young people is pressured and stressful.
The democratization and independence that
come with the internet and access to content
are double-edged swords, and brands that
can alleviate some of the strains of the digital
life – and even tackle the issues that lurk in the
underbelly of the internet – will prosper.
Brands may also need to think about the
ambassadors they choose to speak to young
people. One of the key takeaways from
the Variety poll is that, as new technologies
View more insights at blog.ebiquity.com
emerge and youngsters continue to live in
online arenas of which adults are relatively
ignorant, newer and more influential figures
will continue to take over. The new wave of
YouTube stars have a pre-packaged audience
of engaged young people, and although they
will soon come under restrictions regarding
brand promotions – YouTube stars Dan
Howell and Phil Lester have already had an ad
with Oreos banned under new legislation –
transparent partnerships will inevitably reap
valuable dividends for brands.
There may also be something to be said
about the nature of ‘play’ for today’s children.
Brands should take note that the notion of
play has in some ways perhaps become too
structured and authoritarian for children
today. Undoubtedly parents are a key gateway
to younger children and should certainly be
included to a degree. But brands that can offer
fun, exciting, and safe arenas for children to
play and interact with each other in meaningful
ways will undoubtedly strike a chord with the
next generation.
What happens when today’s teenage
consumers become tomorrow’s marketers is
another question altogether.
Martin Broad
is a Senior Insight
Analyst at Ebiquity
“The new wave of YouTube stars have a prepackaged audience of engaged young people,
and although they will soon come under
restrictions regarding brand promotions…
transparent partnerships will inevitably reap
valuable dividends for brands.”
MEDIA
Gaelle Simon-Drocourt
is Digital Manager at
Ebiquity France
SPOTLIGHT ON
French Loi Sapin
extended to digital media
In 1993, the French government introduced a new anti-corruption law,
the Loi Sapin, designed to introduce transparency into media buying.
I
t required rate card prices to be
published and invoices sent to the
advertiser, even if payment was made
by the agency. Media agencies also lost
their status as central media buyers
with the right to buy in bulk and resell to
advertisers.
In January 2015, the French government
proposed that the phrase ‘any medium
whatsoever’ should be added to the regulation,
extending its application to cover online
transactions.
This is likely to become formally ratified in law
this summer. Gaelle Simon-Drocourt, Digital
Manager at Ebiquity France, considers the
arguments for and against.
The French digital advertising market was
worth €2.9bn in 2014, a quarter of total
advertising spend. Display represents €813m,
a quarter of which is bought programmatically.
This means €10-15m was received by
intermediaries in the programmatic chain,
a figure which will grow as digital grows.
Moreover, programmatic already covers
display, mobile, and so-called ‘private deals,’
and will soon incorporate traditional media
too.
The proposal to apply the Loi Sapin to all forms
of digital media buying has split the industry
down the middle in terms of how the law will
be applied and to whom, centered on the issue
of real-time bidding (RTB).
On one side are the media agencies,
represented by their trade body, UDECAM.
They believe that media agencies are already
sufficiently transparent, and argue that RTB
– which includes additional services that
transform the advertising space, including
injecting audience targeting – should not
be subject to the same regulations as other
media. This new buying mode is also sold by
retargeters, ad networks, and independent
trading desks, none of which are subject to
the Loi Sapin. Hence, the agencies claim, RTB
should have a different status: a status created
and technically defined by UDECAM as “space
transformer” (transformateur d’espaces).
“In January 2015,
the government
proposed that the
phrase ‘any medium
whatsoever’ should
be added to the
regulation, extending
its application to cover
online transactions.”
And on the other side are the advertisers, led
by the UDA (the French affiliate of the World
Federation of Advertisers (WFA)), who make
it a priority to ensure maximum possible
transparency; advertisers want to know where
spend goes within the transaction funnel.
They reject UDECAM’s claims of special
status, arguing that RTB transactions include
advertising space, and so the Loi Sapin should
apply.
Compromise appears unlikely, especially as
advertisers are looking to secure substantial
savings across all market segments, including
retargeting and programmatic. Advertisers are
not willing to pay the requested 20-30 percent
agency commission, particularly because
of the almost total lack of transparency. To
enhance transparency, the UDA is encouraging
detailed reporting to measure actual
performance and quality of media buying, as
well as detailed human and technology costs.
Ebiquity opinion
In order to improve transparency for RTB, it
is recommended that advertisers ensure that
the following clauses, rights, and abilities are
included in agency contracts:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Check all invoices at all stages of the chain
Have access to a consultative account
management platform and not just the
client interface
Split the budget dedicated to media buying
with the purchase of third-party data, cost
of tools, and trading desk fees
Distinguish budgets for acquisition and
those for retargeting and their respective
results
Monitor campaign results by network, site,
or ad exchange
Institute systematic implementation of
a brand safety/fraud tool to check the
broadcast environment for all campaigns
Apply a visibility tool routinely for branding
campaigns, to check the quality of the
inventory
ISSUE 19 Q2 2015 RESPONSE MAGAZINE FROM EBIQUITY
MEDIA
ASK AN EXPERT
Threat to media pooling
in Turkey
Since media auditing was first developed in the UK in 1976, there
have been periodic debates between clients, auditors, and the
media industry regarding media auditors’ data pools. Ebiquity’s
Martin Sambrook, International Practice Leader in Media Audit &
Effectiveness, explores the current issue in Turkey.
I
n 2013, German TV sales owners sought
to restrict the pooling of client data
by media auditors. This was met by a
robust response from advertisers and
competition authorities alike, leading to
agreement that audit data pools could
stay.
“The practice of media
auditing has been
reviewed in recent
years by several
national competition
regulators within the
EU. Regulators have
consistently found
that media auditors
bring transparency
to otherwise opaque
markets and so
are beneficial to
competition and free
trade.”
View more insights at blog.ebiquity.com
2014 also saw an attack on data pooling in
Turkey, when the local association of TV
broadcasters alleged yurddas + partners and
its clients were violating competition laws.
yurddas immediately contacted the Turkish
Competition Authority to protest and the
Turkish association of advertisers to establish
a framework in this rapidly-developing media
market. Soon afterwards, a WFA conference in
Istanbul stressed advertisers’ right to audit.
Interim decision
The Competition Authority opened a
preliminary investigation and gave an
interim decision to the Association. With
no justification for its decision expected for
several months, this leaves the Turkish market
in significant uncertainty.
The decision states that yurddas and its clients
have not committed any offence or breach
of Turkish competition law, and so there is
no need for formal investigation. What is
remarkable, however, is that it goes on to say
there could be future breaches, given that
yurddas’ price data pool could expand. On that
basis, the Authority recommended cessation
of yurddas’ price data pool activity. In January
2015, yurddas received notification requiring
them to stop their service immediately.
Ebiquity opinion
We must be cautious in commenting on this
matter as legal proceedings are ongoing,
including yurddas challenging the decision and
cessation order.
The practice of media auditing has been
reviewed in recent years by several national
competition regulators within the EU.
Regulators have consistently found that media
auditors bring transparency to otherwise
opaque markets and so are beneficial to
competition and free trade. The interim
decision in Turkey runs counter to existing
thinking within the EU. Ebiquity believes that
all markets should operate freely and openly.
In the global media market, those disciplines
are enhanced – not threatened – by media
auditing.
The future
To provide a continuous media audit service
to advertisers, yurddas has developed a price
benchmarking methodology anticipating the
requirements of the Competition Authority,
while in no way acknowledging that the
current practice is unlawful. Regardless of
whether advertisers currently use a price data
pool service in Turkey, Ebiquity urges them to
lobby local Turkish companies/subsidiaries
to put the case for transparency and good
business practice.
Martin Sambrook is
International Practice
Leader in Media Audit
& Effectiveness
Ebiquity is a leading independent
marketing analytics specialist. Brands
worldwide use our expertise and
objective data insights to exploit an
evolving marketing landscape and
achieve business success.
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