ExchangeWire: Deep Dive - Advertising Resource Management
Published by ExchangeWire on 21/02/23
The brand perspective
To better understand the landscape that ARM will benefit, we spoke to Giovanni Brusetti, director, digital marketing and product management at Johnson & Johnson; Sabrina Rodriguez, global head of digital marketing at Ericsson; and Rajesh Sukhwani, global in-housing media, ad-tech and data COE director at Lenovo, about how their respective brands are managing resources and the challenges they are facing.
How do you control and de-risk your advertising strategy and media buying?
Giovanni Brusetti, Johnson & Johnson: There are two major challenges with media strategy controls: data and process. From a data perspective, a large advertiser consolidates metrics from multiple media channels to make smarter omnichannel decisions and media planning. From a process perspective, you need to be able to ensure smooth content creation and approvals internally and with agency partners to drive efficiency and speed of response.
Sabrina Rodriguez, Ericsson: Unfortunately there’s no single silver bullet, however we’re actively looking to evolve our Ad Verification and ownership strategy at the moment, ensuring we’re maximising reach responsibly and embedding more streamlined, efficient, and consistent verification methods. Diversification of media spend across programmatic versus direct (where strategically relevant) is also worth considering.
Rajesh Sukhwani, Lenovo: At Lenovo, we invest a lot of time in strategising our advertising and media buying to make sure we’re getting it right, especially in an increasingly complex and fragmented media and ad tech landscape. We continue to pilot new approaches, drive new partnerships, fine-tune, and optimise for better outcomes, and here are some of the best practices that we’ve learned along the way:
1. Define and set clear campaign KPIs, including figuring out which outcomes for the campaign will minimise risk.
2. Invest in thoroughly understanding your target audience and user-journey to reach the right people with your message.
3. Design a media investment strategy that is a healthy balance and spread of media partners
4. Automate with technology as much as possible.
5. Collect learnings, analyse, and compare. An example of a new approach, Lenovo partnering with a data cleanroom provider and a strategic publisher to test and learn new audiences.
What issues persist within advertising when it comes to transparency, in terms of the agency communications, campaign management/optimisation, and brand visibility?
Giovanni Brusetti, Johnson & Johnson: You want a brand manager to be consumer-obsessed and not obsessed with admin overhead. The reality is that many brand managers get drawn into admin work when it comes to building creatives, updating media planning Excel files, and emails with multiple providers (creative agency, internal product teams, media buying partners, etc). Automating and optimising the planning, content, and execution processes in media is key to unlocking amazing brand experiences.
Sabrina Rodriguez, Ericsson: The reality is the media supply chain is complex, hence the need for more ‘Swiss Cheese’ strategies, applying multiple layers of checks and verification methods to ensure brand safety and minimise ad fraud. That complexity makes transparency more tricky, but not insurmountable and something we’re continually working on.
Rajesh Sukhwani, Lenovo: Some of the recurring and more widely persistent transparency challenges I’ve seen across the marketing industry include the disclosure of agency solutions; campaign-level set-up, targeting, optimisation, and insights; media supply paths; platforms and with programmatic – the loops between budget and publisher. That said, I’m optimistic that the industry as a whole is getting better at overcoming some of these with challenges. At Lenovo, our objective is to “join the dots,” with all partners engaging with each other, from marketing teams to agency through to media and tech partners, promoting transparency and understanding of the ecosystem across all stakeholders.
What changes do you think need to be made to make the advertising ecosystem more efficient?
Giovanni Brusetti, Johnson & Johnson: On one hand, continuous iterations towards transparency in the auctioning, deliverability, and addressability processes is what will make programmatic preferable to cost-conscious and performance-focused advertisers versus walled gardens.
On the other hand, being able to manage its complexity is paramount. That's how Ad Servers were born, for example. To make it simple, we now need to optimise the processes that land a creative into the Ad Server via resource management to further boost how advertisers deal with this complexity end-to-end.
Sabrina Rodriguez, Ericsson: Agency partners need to ensure they are making it as easy as possible for their clients to not only understand the complexity of this ecosystem but to be able to keep track across each of those layers and checkpoints with integrated reporting and regular strategic recommendations.
Rajesh Sukhwani, Lenovo: In Lenovo marketing, we continue to pilot new things, tweak and fine-tune for better outcomes and greater efficiency all the time. Some of these things that have worked well include the standardisation of measurement and disclosure across the media supply chain, tighter collaboration across all key stakeholders, and stronger alignment on quality and content across the web.
Cover image Source: ExchangeWire
