Jill Kelly, CEO of EssenceMediacom at the 2023 ANA Media Conference
Procter & Gamble's intent to bring media planning and buying in-house—and others describing why such a move isn’t practical—was among the pressing media topics and issues explored at the 2023 ANA Media Conference on Feb. 15-17 in Orlando.
The conference also highlighted how agencies are shifting their focus to new technology and better measurement, and how transparency concerns might have repercussions even if they don’t get much discussion anymore.
Here are key takeaways:
It’s hard to believe this is the same conference where eight years ago the industry’s media transparency firestorm was unleashed by former Mediacom CEO Jon Mandel alleging hidden media rebates and other shady practices by agencies. The controversy, the ANA-backed investigative report it spawned and the Justice Department investigation that followed (but never produced indictments) seem like a distant memory.
On stage this year was Jill Kelly, CEO of the agency that now includes Mandel’s former shop, EssenceMediacom. She wasn’t there to defend her agency or the industry against any allegations, or even talk much about media planning and buying. She instead discussed new tech and creative approaches—the sorts of things Procter & Gamble Co. Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said he wants his media agencies to focus on. (EssenceMediacom does handle P&G work outside the U.S.)
Read more: How P&G's media strategy changes the role of agencies
A few hours later, Kelly's GroupM colleague, Mindshare Global CEO Adam Gerhart, appeared alongside Novartis Global Head of Media & Digital Procurement Katherine Freeley for a friendly discussion of marketer-agency financial dealings.
In other words, marketer-agency relations are less fraught than eight years ago. On the other hand, there’s less being bought by agencies, at least for P&G. Transparency issues are not explicit reasons Pritchard gave, though the closely related themes of supply chain “simplification” and “reducing touches” are.
A big marketer so publicly embracing in-housing media would seem a major threat to media agency business. But several people at the conference, speaking not for attribution, later said it would be difficult for many marketers to follow outside areas such as programmatic digital buying which many already have moved in-house.
Relatively few marketers have the staff and resources to bring planning and buying in-house, they said. Even if they do, they might have to make some tradeoffs. Over recent years, big marketers have extended or tried to extend payment terms for agencies and media companies to 60, 75, 90, 180 or as long as 360 days. That’s largely been possible because media agencies have agreed to accommodate the float and pay media companies sooner, said some executives at the conference. Some media companies, notably Google, will simply stop running your ads if you don’t pay within 30 days, said one.
Read more: The outrage over 360-day agency payment terms
“We don’t have the luxury of some of the larger brands here who have a rather large team,” said D.J. Perera, head of U.S. media for Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, during a discussion of connected TV buying. “Even though I was so impressed with how you built your internal team,” Perera said in reference to P&G and Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health, both of which talked about their in-house teams at the conference, “we really have to leverage our agencies.”
One of those companies with a larger team is Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health (due to be spun off later this year as a new company named Kenvue). Adam Benaroya, director of global media capabilities and operations for the company, outlined his plans for organizing things.
They include creating a custom dashboard aggregating input from various media players and working with media companies on joint business plans that include financial incentives for helping the marketer meet its return-on-investment goals. How those incentives will be structured remains in negotiations, Benaroya said, and most likely it won’t be practical to structure such deals with more than five media companies.
Outlining a new role for agencies, Pritchard mentioned a variety of ways they could help P&G “see around corners” toward the future, including developing new algorithms.
Related: How PR agencies are using new AI tools
Kelly, for one, appears prepared. She opened her talk by looking at how algorithms helped sort through the relationships among people who died on Sept. 11 to arrange the names at the 9/11 Memorial, and how EssenceMediacom created an algorithm for client Google to help target ads based on editorial context and another to predict people’s readiness to get COVID-19 vaccines.
Starting with Pritchard, “algorithm” ranked among the biggest bubbles in the conference word cloud, emerging perhaps as a solid contender for the ANA’s word of the year.
“Really, it’s about all of us creating our own algorithm about what works in our business,” Shenan Reed, host of the conference and senior VP-head of media for L’Oréal USA, said during one Q&A session.
Investing in diverse-owned media was a frequent topic of conversation, and part of that was moving beyond good intentions toward better data to build the business case.
Mark Prince, senior VP of economic empowerment for Dentsu, said, “The days of just high mass reach and low CPM being the benchmark, and if you don’t fit into that category there wasn’t much room” are fading, in part, because some diverse-owned media can’t afford to pay for the measurement services. Finding other ways to measure impact are important, he said.
Related: How DE&I media investments may look in 2023
L’Oréal’s Reed also pointed out that simply hunting for the lowest CPMs would inevitably leave out diverse and other harder-to-reach audiences.
And Pritchard in an interview cited better measurement of the impact of using diverse-owned and targeted media as one thing P&G is looking for from agencies, and that he recognizes it might mean higher CPMs.
In his keynote speech, Pritchard cited several cases where using media that’s more “resonant” with minority audiences delivered a strong sales impact. Lumen Research analysis of P&G brand ads among Black, Hispanic and Asian-Pacific consumers “indicated a 41% increase in attention and a nearly two times increase in viewing time when relevant ads are in resonant media,” he said.
The ANA continues to develop cross-media measurement pilots with Comscore and VideoAmp—originally contracted in 2021. Discussions between the ANA and the Video Advertising Bureau representing TV-focused networks to jointly back a new household panel to help calibrate that effort and back multi-currency alternatives to Nielsen for the VAB continue after more than a year.
The panel is not expected to begin operation until next year. Bill Tucker, group VP at the ANA, pointed out that the pilot is premised on delivering measurement of unduplicated reach and frequency across TV and digital video, but not to develop a trading currency.
Related: Nielsen concerns prompt closed-door meeting
Kanishka Das, global e-business analytics and insights director for P&G, said 21 marketers are involved. “Marketers not only have skin in the game, but they’re paying for this process.” And he said marketers are “deeply engaged” in making progress.
Danielle DeLauro, exec VP of the VAB, on the panel noted that the recently established Joint Industry Council has a different mission in developing standards for streaming data sharing and among networks and measurement providers that could support multiple currencies.
Ford Motor Co. Global Head of Consumer Connections and Marketing Marla Skiko outlined her influencer-focused, all-social and digital campaign behind the launch of the Ford Maverick pickup, which is targeted to diverse, young, urban buyers. During her talk, display ads on the convention projection screen from local TV trade group TVB ironically noted that linear TV accounts for 80% of all time spent on “ad-supported platforms.”
Worth noting: A recent Nielsen Total Audience Report for the third quarter of 2022 shows linear accounted for only 65% of time spent with ad-supported TV and 49% of time spent with all ad-supported media among adults 18 and up.
Skiko said selling local dealers on the value of a campaign without TV can be challenging. “There is an audience group that, if they don’t see it on TV, it might not have happened,” she said. But she said Ford made inroads with dealers on the subject in part by emphasizing the spending efficiency that’s been necessitated by inventory shortages. “That probably helped quite a bit with the dealer conversation,” she said. “But it could change going forward.”
