Festival of Media Global 2018 – My 5 top takeaways

Festival of Media review

A hectic 48 hours in Rome – the presenters did a brilliant job covering the biggest questions facing our industry at the moment.  Below are the 5 things that will stay with me.

Diversity and inclusion, people and talent

The amazing Caroline Casey opened the event with a brave* challenge to the industry to engage with her on bringing people with a mix of abilities into business.  But through the course of the two days, this topic came up repeatedly, with Simon Peel, Global Media Director at Adidas suggesting advertisers challenge your agency on what the people working on your account are paid, and Michele Oliver, Global Corporate Brand and Purpose Director at Mars and Gemma Greaves of the Marketing Society, discussing their progress on neurodiversity.  Neil Harbisson, Cyborg & Artist, provided a compelling vision of the future, talking about how he’d used his frustration at his colour-blindness to springboard to his augmented self.  Not only, that but Jeremy King and the FOM team had done a brilliant job getting even gender representation on stage – showing the CES team how it’s done! #WomenPresent

Vanity Metrics / Trading Metrics

CPM bashing was constant: both the buy side and the sell side and everyone in between all agreed that using CPM as a metric is a problem – focusing only on price and not on outcomes is a recipe for disaster.  The conversation between Graham Brown, Co-Founder of Mediasense and Simon Peel calling out explicitly that, “vanity KPI’s” are actually the trading KPIs.

Nick Manning, SVP of MediaLink put it succinctly: “CPM is just a base currency, it doesn’t tell you anything other than what you’ve paid.”  He made the case for the resurgence of Comms Planning, going back to the basics on what is the best environment for the brand to be placed in, and pointing out that quality is a function of the objectives you want to achieve. He also suggested that the combination of human and advanced technology will deliver what brands want and need.

The rise of the consultancies, in housing and other challenges to the agency model…

Julia Goldin, CMO at LEGO, made the case for in-housing, sharing how LEGO’s in-house creative team enables them to move fast, to capture a trend and act on it immediately.  However, other brands were advised against in-housing creative, with Chris Hayek, Global Head of Media, Shell, flagging very honestly that this might work better at LEGO than at a brand such as Shell. 

Doug Wood, Partner at Reed Smith, spoke about the ‘3d’s’ driving brands to look at new models. Agencies’ movement through denial, delay and disguise has eroded trust with their clients. However, he suggested that mass in-housing was still a myth.  Derek Luddem of Mondelez reiterated that, “you can’t replicate all of the skills that you need, in-house. Agencies are not going anywhere.”

However, Kieron Matthews of Flock Associates flagged four areas where he sees brands most often looking at some level of in-housing: Brand & Marketing strategy, Digital strategy, Social Content deployment and Brand creative all got called out as areas of interest. 

And on the mainstage, Nikki Mendonça of Accenture, argued that marketing is at a pivotal point... Each CMO must prove they are marketing for growth and (they) can’t risk being blindsided by the next Billion Dollar Shave Club.

Data Data Data

Emi Gal of Teads left the stage with the recommendation to start to invest in your data today: you’ll need it to train the AI soon enough.  Julia Goldin echoed this sentiment flagging data as the biggest opportunity for marketing – and pointing out that marketers have better access to more data than anyone else in a business.  It’s in your hands to make marketing more effective.

Nikki Mendonça, also identified data amongst the three game-changers that Accenture are helping clients with, together with marketing coordination and AI.  And Theo Theodorou, Sven de Smet, Ben Maher and myself discussed the ways that data is transforming Out of Home. 

With GDPR only days away and the Cambridge Analytica scandal still fresh in people’s minds, it was great to hear everyone speaking so positively on the opportunity around data.

Being brave*

Finally, 2018 is the year of being brave – almost every session included a reference to bravery. Iotec’s CEO, Paul Wright, spoke about the need to be brave, bringing ethics into the ad tech space.  He challenged marketers to be brave, to ask difficult questions and to challenge your partners.  What is your business model? Where are you buying your inventory from? He suggested that they think of how, as a brand, you might verify these answers. 

Michele Oliver, Global Corporate Brand and Purpose Director at Mars, talked about the bravest moment in her career: standing up to run the Maltesers’ Unstereotype campaign. If you haven’t seen it, take 30 seconds and give yourself a treat!  She recommends that brands split their marketing investment to spend two thirds of the budget on proven effective media and the other third on new, unproven channels.  And that experimental budget is the budget to ring-fence. You have to take risks if you want to make a difference.

This piece was by Cadi Jones, Commercial Innovation Director, Clear Channel International.  Follow her @cadielisejones

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