2. Agenda
• The state of media
• The state of brand marketing
• The state of agencies
• The waves of change
• My career in marketing
• How you should get started
5. The Rise Of Programmatic Media
• Programmatic buying is the automation of media trading between media owners
& brands
• In the US, programmatic ad spend will reach $20.41Bn by 2016 , 63% of digital
display spend, eMarketer
• UK programmatic spend in 2016 will be £2Bn with Euro spend growing 25% in
2016, eMarketer
• Global will increase to 50% by 2019, Magna Global
• First display, then search, soon OOH, Radio and finally TV
• So what?
– Changes the rules of the game from buying content that people consume to buying people
consuming content
– Media owners are commoditised as data describing people is all powerful
– Enables true 1:1 marketing undermining the traditional broadcast paradigm
6. The Single Customer View
• A unique record holding demographic, behavioural, transactional and commercial
information about a single customer
• Enables understanding of full lifetime value rather than channel focussed session
value
• Requires a consistent and personal customer experience throughout the funnel
• Blurs the distinction between channels & platforms
• So what?
– This is a beguilingly simple concept but incredibly hard to service in a siloed world
– Requires technical and data mastery, customer empathy and predetermined or predictive
responses
7. The Google/Facebook Duopoly
• By 2017 Facebook and Google will control 65% to 70% of digital media
spend in the US - $160 billion worldwide by 2017
• “The best and most effective media ever is Google search. The second
best right now is Facebook. Effectively, they’re must-buys.”
• So what?
– It means every other digital media owner is now chasing a slice of the rest –
with non-digital in their sights
– Both systems are data “walled gardens” meaning that they do not allow full
user data out which makes consistent user experiences difficult
– Encourages users to choose one to manage all their personal data creating a
data food chain with just two apex predators!
8. Adblocking
• IAB UK’s Ad Blocking Report reveals that 22% of British adults online are
currently using ad blocking software – a rise from 18% in October 2015
• The phenomenon grew 41% globally in the last 12 months
• Stifling an estimated $22bn globally in lost advertising revenue in 2015
• So what?
– People are confirming what we suspected all along: people hate advertising
– Mass media, broadcast brand communication will be screened out and perpetrators
reviled
– 1:1 communication must take precedence and be generated by or earned by products
that surprise and delight
– Public brand comms must be approached with caution, skill and sincerity
9. Content & Native advertising
• People have much more control over their media consumption
• So brands (agencies) are trying to use content to woo consumer
attention (inbound, social, events)
• So what?
– Mass adoption of content marketing has minimised its effectiveness
– Native advertising (and now programmatic native) is the great new hope
– Wait till the adblockers catch up
11. Advertising vs Marketing
• At its best, advertising can
– Enable content to be produced & consumed for free
– Make valuable contributions to culture and society
– Be a hugely enjoyable public spectacle
• But, as digital media goes mobile it has become much more
intimate, personal and productive
• So what?
– There is increasingly a tension between these two styles of communication
– Digital is more about the product than advertising
12. Customer experience vs product promotion
• The SCV, media personalisation and programmatic everything puts the
customer in the centre of everything
• The product will communicate less through advertising and more through
product marketing
• So what?
– Brands should prompt conversation with themselves and between
users/consumers
– Brand partnerships that deliver enhanced combined functionality will speak
volumes
– Brand advertising will become the preserve of mass market products that cannot
be personal eg FMCG when it will still offer questionable value for money
13. Full-funnel marketing
• We have a SCV, unified content management and personalised media
targeting capabilities
• So, as marketers, we should be delivering an end-to-end, personalised
experience to people
• So what?
– Marketing campaigns should target objectives related to specific areas of the
funnel: Awareness, Engagement, Conversion and Retention
– Campaigns effectiveness should be measured against KPIs that represent these
objectives only
– Campaigns should consider tactics from all channels to meet objectives
14. Measurement & data 1st
• Successful campaigns become always on tactics
• So campaigns are refined through data-lead optimisation not
rebriefed
• So what?
– Briefing should only be used when there is no existing data available
– The gut feel response should never again be the first resort
– Measurement strategy is the strategy
– Funnel-based measurement framework
• Avinash Kaushik: See, Think, Do
15. Changes in the marketing department
• Lack of digital resource (particularly at the senior levels) is a problem
• But the blurring of data and objectives across channel, platforms and
devices is stretching even the digital specialists
• So what?
– Digital and offline departments cause more harm than good
– Structuring by funnel objective is better than by channel or platform
– All channels platforms have something to contribute when ‘hacking’ a marketing
challenge
18. Media vs Creative
• Divided by the MadMen in the 1960s
• Now being restitched together to meet the integration demands of
digital
• So what?
– Clients have to brief media and creative separately with one side often
taking precedence
– Predictably, each side responds according to their perspective
• Creative agencies prescribe more elaborate creative
• Media agencies prescribe more (elaborate) media
– Media owners are taking work from both sides
19. The role of the big idea in an era of
scalable little ideas
• It used to be that the big idea won the day
• Post-mass media marketing big ideas are struggling with media
fragmentation
• So what?
– Small improvements to effectiveness and efficiency can make big differences
– Big ideas can come from product development, tech, business development etc
not just marketing
– Digital creative is increasingly being handled media owners familiar with their
custom formats
– Dynamic Creative Optimisation offer automated creative iterations using client
data feeds, user behaviour feedback and even automated video product
placement
20. Agencies vs In-house vs Consultancy
• What’s the difference?
• Ubiquitous programmatic is creating multi-channel campaign platforms
• Automation & self-serve leads to disintermediation
• So what?
– Clients have more choice between long-term out-sourcing to agencies or in-
housing versus short-term use of specialist consulting skills
– Agencies are preparing to deploy under a variety of remuneration models
– Where possible, performance-based remuneration is becoming increasingly
common
22. The Role Of Data & Automation
• Data has always contributed insight but now it is starting to drive
the campaign in flight
• Media planning now includes not just the strategy and the campaign
forecast but also the tagging, the collection and the routing of data
• The managing, optimisation and reporting of digital campaigns will
increasingly be automated
• Adobe, Google and others are all looking to provide multi-channel
marketing platforms
23. Personal Data Brokers
• People will look for solutions to combat the abuse of personal data
and manage communication from brands
• Major digital service providers will offer this service
– Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google
– “Siren Servers” from Who Owns The Future? By Jaron Lanier
• Adblocking services will also play a role here if they can build out
their proposition, possibly in league with mobile network providers
24. Decentralisation through P2P
• P2P (Peer to Peer) is network technology that is robust, trustless,
decentralised, virtually free and extremely disrupting
• The internet is the purest form of P2P tech liberating personal
communications with web doing the same for public information
• Cryptography and compression technology disrupted the media publishing
industries
• The blockchain took things one step further by enabling the
decentralisation of money through Bitcoin
• The next wave will be the deployment of decentralised law through smart
contracts and DAOs
25. The Democratisation Of Work
• Decentralised technologies are now starting to have a radical effect
on work
• High quality freelance skills are available globally 24/7 (Upwork)
• Work hubs and Nomad working is creating cultures of migrant and
remote but highly-skilled and highly-paid workers
• Automated corporate services such as payroll, expenses, contracts,
escrow and payment will fuel an increasingly fluid economy
• Networking and collaboration tools are making remote teams
function as smoothly as office-bound teams
27. Getting Started
• Hang out with people cleverer than yourself
• Sell yourself (but not too low)
• Come across as both hard-working and fun
• Say yes to everything
• Read everything
• Ride the waves of change
28. My career waves
• Wave 1 - Digital & the DotCom bubble
• Wave 2 - Following a passion for travel
• Wave 3 - Search and digital performance
• Wave 4 - Integrated, full-marketing marketing
• Wave 5 - Looking beyond media
30. Don't look for a job, look for a
meaningful challenge
• A job won't be relevant for long
– 50% of the most sought after job titles now didn’t exist 10 years ago
• Solving a meaningful challenge has longevity
• What are the meaningful challenges and who is tackling them?
– Prepare a business for the next waves → every client
– Marketing automation → Adobe, Oracle, IBM
– Data brokers → Google / Facebook and Adblockers
– Decentralisation → Fintech and LegalTech
– Work democratisation → Create your own agency on UpWork
31. How to keep going?
• Keep reading everything
• Go to MeetUp groups on topics you are interested in
• Sketch a five year plan
• All realistic goals are achievable within five years
• Unrealistic goals take five to ten years
• Things change beyond prediction within five years
• Be prepared to pivot!