emeaops, Author at OMD

Cristina Barranco named Managing Director of OMD SPAIN

September 19, 2019

This appointment is made in the context of the OmnicomMediaGroup Spain’ strategic transformation plan

Cristina Barranco has been named Managing Director of OMD Spain, leading both offices: Madrid and Barcelona. Cristina will be part of the Steering Committee and will report directly to Joan Jordi Vallverdú, CEO of OMG.

Joan Jordi Vallverdú, CEO of OMG, explains: “In these changing times, in an environment with new competitors, with increasing media fragmentation, with data and technology as essential variables in any strategy and, overall, in much more complex settings, is when Cristina’s passion, energy, knowledge and attitude will be relevant to help our clients grow their businesses with communication solutions to their business challenges”.

As Managing Director of OMD Spain, Cristina will be responsible for consolidating OMD Spain’s growth, managing both offices and focusing on strategy, marketing and new business, brand management, digital and creativity areas.

Commenting on her new role, Barranco says: “I am happy to return to OMD, already my home for many years, but happier to do so in a moment of full transformation in our industry that demands that we go side by side with our clients in an increasingly challenging context. I begin the project from a fantastic starting level and in the light of continuous improvement, with all my energy dedicated to making it even better”.

After a couple of years as Managing Director in agencies from Publicis Group and IPG, Cristina Barranco returns to OMD where she previously worked in different managing roles, working with advertisers from different categories in the digital and technology area.

Cristina graduated from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Directive Development Program in the IESE Business School by the Universidad de Navarra and degree by the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Three key themes from Kantar Talks 2019

September 18, 2019

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Last week, Kantar hosted an impressive new forum of industry debate and discussion focusing on unearthing growth opportunities for UK brands in the modern age. Located at the BFI Theatre on Southbank, London, the full day of seminars and live experiences bought together industry professionals and inspiring agenda-setting leaders to discuss challenges, opportunities and issues which face marketing departments, creative and media agencies, and media owners.

Key themes:

What can we learn from the 2019 Brand Z Top 75 brand?
- Growing brands and expanding their portfolio of goods and services into new ecosystems and entering new, unsuspecting categories. Amazon is now the most valued brand in 2019, and their diversification into voice and entertainment beyond their original USP of an e-commerce platform have catapulted their business results and their reach of new consumers.
- Top brands are creating interesting new B2B connections, partnering with somewhat abstract brands to create new consumer experiences or bespoke products. Key examples include McDonald’s partnership with Uber Eats, Toyota partnering with Pizza Hut, and Amazon with Nike.

Major challenges facing marketers, planners and media owners in 2019;
- Capping campaign frequency to avoid wastage was a major theme in productivity conversations. Marketers wanted to challenge agencies to provide more rigour in capturing actual frequency thresholds across channels. According to Kantar, 57% of clients aren’t confident in their current planning of frequency.
- The least understood channels for driving ROI, according to a sample of clients via the Kantar study, are sponsorships and partnerships. 44% of clients agree that sponsorship is the least trusted channel to deliver an accurate ROI. This was a hot topic as it was apparent that sponsorship needed more shared data from the marketing community to prove an ROI success indicator.
- What is the right threshold to adopt a test and learn agenda? Conversations from senior marketers had unified thoughts on a 70-20-10 approach to commit 70% of working media towards strong performing, tried and tested media channels, 20% against innovation in tested channels, and 10% against out-of-box thinking to drive earned media. All respondents agreed this approach needed a robust measurement framework, off the back of sound hypothesises.

Dispelling e-commerce myths
- Panellists discussed how marketers can have an unwarranted fear or hesitation in amalgamating e-commerce channels into overarching plans. E-commerce ad spend is rising, but not at the level of adoption of consumers to its platforms. This conversation prompted us to explore new figures released from Kantar;
  - Of the online grocery universe in the UK, face wash accounts for only 3.8% of value share, however if we flip this, in terms of online retail sales, it represents 31.8%
  - 45% of e-commerce online spend contribution is from shoppers aged over 55, meaning marketers shouldn’t assume e-commerce is driven by younger consumers; don’t neglect the silver surfer!
    1. 48% of online ‘heavy’ shoppers are aged 55+
    2. It’s not only younger audiences that want convenience (40% of older consumers want shopper delivered to their door)

What does this mean for OMD clients?:

Think creatively and beyond your immediate category when considering B2B partnerships to leverage brand equity or exchange goods and services. More brands are open for value exchanges to engage with new consumers.
There are predominant and shared frustrations and unknowns in some key media planning topics such as frequency management, ROI clarity on certain channels and test and learn agendas. There is an industry-wide call to arms to share successful case studies and results with the industry to set benchmarks to help set more accurate standards.
Dispel myths of e-commerce as a channel which only connect with agile, future-facing Generation Z, as e-commerce already has the scale and spend volume of wider, older audiences.

Authored by Tobie Rhodes, executive director at OMD EMEA

Three key themes from Kantar Talks 2019

September 18, 2019

emeaops

Last week, Kantar hosted an impressive new forum of industry debate and discussion focusing on unearthing growth opportunities for UK brands in the modern age. Located at the BFI Theatre on Southbank, London, the full day of seminars and live experiences bought together industry professionals and inspiring agenda-setting leaders to discuss challenges, opportunities and issues which face marketing departments, creative and media agencies, and media owners.

Key themes:

What can we learn from the 2019 Brand Z Top 75 brand?
- Growing brands and expanding their portfolio of goods and services into new ecosystems and entering new, unsuspecting categories. Amazon is now the most valued brand in 2019, and their diversification into voice and entertainment beyond their original USP of an e-commerce platform have catapulted their business results and their reach of new consumers.
- Top brands are creating interesting new B2B connections, partnering with somewhat abstract brands to create new consumer experiences or bespoke products. Key examples include McDonald’s partnership with Uber Eats, Toyota partnering with Pizza Hut, and Amazon with Nike.

Major challenges facing marketers, planners and media owners in 2019;
- Capping campaign frequency to avoid wastage was a major theme in productivity conversations. Marketers wanted to challenge agencies to provide more rigour in capturing actual frequency thresholds across channels. According to Kantar, 57% of clients aren’t confident in their current planning of frequency.
- The least understood channels for driving ROI, according to a sample of clients via the Kantar study, are sponsorships and partnerships. 44% of clients agree that sponsorship is the least trusted channel to deliver an accurate ROI. This was a hot topic as it was apparent that sponsorship needed more shared data from the marketing community to prove an ROI success indicator.
- What is the right threshold to adopt a test and learn agenda? Conversations from senior marketers had unified thoughts on a 70-20-10 approach to commit 70% of working media towards strong performing, tried and tested media channels, 20% against innovation in tested channels, and 10% against out-of-box thinking to drive earned media. All respondents agreed this approach needed a robust measurement framework, off the back of sound hypothesises.

Dispelling e-commerce myths
- Panellists discussed how marketers can have an unwarranted fear or hesitation in amalgamating e-commerce channels into overarching plans. E-commerce ad spend is rising, but not at the level of adoption of consumers to its platforms. This conversation prompted us to explore new figures released from Kantar;
  - Of the online grocery universe in the UK, face wash accounts for only 3.8% of value share, however if we flip this, in terms of online retail sales, it represents 31.8%
  - 45% of e-commerce online spend contribution is from shoppers aged over 55, meaning marketers shouldn’t assume e-commerce is driven by younger consumers; don’t neglect the silver surfer!
    1. 48% of online ‘heavy’ shoppers are aged 55+
    2. It’s not only younger audiences that want convenience (40% of older consumers want shopper delivered to their door)

What does this mean for OMD clients?:

Think creatively and beyond your immediate category when considering B2B partnerships to leverage brand equity or exchange goods and services. More brands are open for value exchanges to engage with new consumers.
There are predominant and shared frustrations and unknowns in some key media planning topics such as frequency management, ROI clarity on certain channels and test and learn agendas. There is an industry-wide call to arms to share successful case studies and results with the industry to set benchmarks to help set more accurate standards.
Dispel myths of e-commerce as a channel which only connect with agile, future-facing Generation Z, as e-commerce already has the scale and spend volume of wider, older audiences.

Authored by Tobie Rhodes, executive director at OMD EMEA

What we learnt at DMEXCO 2019

September 16, 2019

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OMD EMEA’s Marcus Johnson and Lyvia Aylward-Davies were on the ground at DMEXCO. Following their predictions pre-event, post-event they reflected on the key themes coming out of the conference.

Change of the human mindset in media

People remain the best assets to building, innovating and deploying ad tech solutions. That being said, we need to ensure that the correct human craft is being applied, especially in an environment where media is changing but the technology isn’t. 4C insights have developed their platform to seamlessly integrate Digital and TV in an era of video eruption on social media. Technology has long been able to solve this problem, but humans remain the biggest barrier to change and default to running two separate channels in parallel.

Creative Experience

Media owners and publishers at DMEXCO, reinforced their ambition to extract more creative value for advertisers. Publishers like Teads believe in their platforms and are not necessarily looking for a tech innovation to enhance their offering. Instead, Teads are focused on providing creative collaborations with clients, to help users achieve a better brand experience within the creative units. OMD EMEA is able to support our clients with unlocking more creative support, by leveraging our holding group’s negotiating position to extract maximum value.

New contextual obsession

In a time where data-driven audience targeting is seen as the best route to bringing the art and science together and achieving optimal media efficiency; a legacy approach has withstood the test of time. Contextual targeting has continuously been a crucial way to align specific user interests, with a client relevant brand proposition. However, scaling audience segments has also been a continuous challenge. DMEXCO highlighted some of the key opportunities that have emerged, mainly as a result of restricted 3^rd party audiences and limited gateways to accessing 2^nd party publisher data. As these audience segment shrink, contextual targeting has grown especially in the area of channel creators on YouTube and the wider adoption of video content.

Fearlessly protect your product

Twitch CRO, Walker Jacobs, was interviewed by Omnicom’s very own Innovation expert Chris Denson, who extracted a very memorable sound bite. When pressed on why Twitch takes so much pride in being a streamer first platform, Walker made the point of the most successful platforms, in terms of gaining consumer time, have stayed loyal to their principles. Netflix and Fortnite are current champions for consumer time but none of these platforms have adopted ads. Twitch has successfully integrated advertising by sticking to their streamer first principles and remain a model to imitate, as these platforms advance their commercial decisions.

Marcus Johnson is executive director and Lyvia Aylward-Davies is digital director at OMD EMEA

OMD’s Point of View on Programmatic at DMEXCO 2019

September 16, 2019

emeaops

This being my first visit to DMEXCO I had been warned of the scale of it and the volume of information available so I was prepared to leave feeling overwhelmed and with my head buzzing full of new information.

I was excited to learn as much as I could in the 2 days that I was there and I wanted to make the most out of it; the ad tech industry is vast and ever-changing and I was relishing the thought of seeing all the companies I was due a catch up with in one place and leave with new information, new ideas and new areas to explore. I was on a mission to delve into as much of what was on offer as possible and I wanted to leave with some serious stats relating to how many stages I visited, how many tech companies I engaged with, how many talks, seminars and panels I attended; I covered 5 stages, 8 panels, 2 seminars and countless circuits of the multiple halls housing representatives from DSPs, SSPs, DMPS, CMPS and on and on and on, making my most impressive stat the 40,000 steps I walked over the 2 days.

It’s easy to hone in on the areas that come up most frequently in my day to day role, the themes that I was drawn towards related to ad quality and consumer perceptions of advertising, data usage in a privacy focused world and ultimately how much is programmatic going to change as tracking capabilities reduce across browsers. There was a lot of focus on publishers and how significantly their ad revenue is affected when precise user targeting is diminished – calling on the industry that it is our job to educate consumers on the importance of advertising for funding the free internet.

I left with the message that tech companies were reminding us of the importance of engaging consumers with a value exchange. It’s funny because some people fear conferences like DMEXCO because they consider it one big sales pitch after another and the last session of day one by YEXT was a polished presentation demonstrating their on-site search technology. The product looked great, using the DMEXCO site itself to demonstrate just how well their tech could improve the search results and user experience when navigating the site. It was a sales pitch but following the presentation they offered something back to the audience, a full 30 minute original musical, with catchy songs, a dramatic story-line and a Broadway cast including Nick Choksi who performed in Jersey Boys. It was highly entertaining and a welcome relief after a long day of serious subjects like GDPR, ad fraud and the never-ending brand safety saga. We had sat through their sales pitch and were rewarded with a great show at the end – a very fair value exchange in my opinion and the most memorable sales pitch of the day and my lasting thought of the conference.

Amongst all the doom and gloom of the problems we are facing in the digital marketing space, many of these issues are related to regaining consumer trust. Yes we need to get better at gaining explicit consent to use consumers data for advertising and we need to get internet users on board by providing them with a rich internet experience without ads that frustrate them, and a value exchange can be a nice way to do that. Not everyone has something tangible to exchange but we can all be a little bit more creative in finding ways to offer the user something enjoyable; and what better way than lifting someone’s spirits is there to gain trust?

Lina Angelides is head of programmatic at OMD UK.

“When our differences are our biggest strength”

September 13, 2019

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“Talk is cheap!” What are companies tangibly actioning to ensure a workplace culture of diversity, inclusion and safety?

Diversity is a hot topic. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about diversity and how it impacts the bottom line. But how many companies are talking about it because they feel they should? Because RFIs are now asking for diversity figures? Because they don’t want to be left behind? According to Mark Oben-Pepra, Managing Partner at OMD EMEA, the number one reason you should be cultivating a culture of inclusion in the workplace is because it’s the right thing to do.

Speaking to DMEXCO TV following an appearance on the Congress Stage at the global digital marketing expo & conference which took place in Cologne this week, Oben-Pepra said; “I think a lot of companies at the moment are talking about this because they feel it should be spoken about, it’s a fashionable topic right now and I think there are quite a lot of superficial motivations that lead a lot of companies to talk about this topic.” Awareness is leading to action though he added; “Encouragingly you are seeing a lot more conversations around concrete actions. Talk is cheap, it’s great that you can talk about it and have a vision and a perspective, but more importantly, so what. What are the key steps you are taking to turn this into action?”

Earlier in the day, Open-Pepra joined Virginia Bastian, Group Manager HR at Nestlé, Sarah Bernuit, European Leader at IBM iX and Lisa Utzschneider, CEO at IAS in a panel moderated by the power-house that is CEO and Founder of The Female Quotient, Shelley Zalis, to discuss gender equality in the technological world, but it soon became clear the panel felt equality encompassed more than gender alone.

Speaking about diversity as a whole, Bernuit explained: “Diversity is bringing a different set of people to the party, inclusion is making sure everyone dances”. The panel was in unanimous agreement that the culture of inclusion needs to be led from the top down “It is not a tick-box, everyone needs to be held accountable” said Bernuit with Bastian adding “You have to build the process from many places, you have to start at the top and have clear guidelines and values. Once you have a framework, you can build upon it. We have diverse consumers we are talking to, so we need to have diversity in the workplace to address that”. Oben-Pepra added from a media standpoint, “Seeing yourself reflected in the media is so important. Seeing different age profiles and seeing that all sectors are accessible is crucial”.

Oben-Pepra went on to talk about being mindful of tokenism and ensuring you don’t start to steer towards positive discrimination. At OMD EMEA, a steering group has been formed to ensure this doesn’t happen. RED, an acronym for Recruitment, Engagement and Development, ensures inclusion is felt from the moment someone applies to join OMD EMEA, through using software to ensure job specs use inclusive and unbiased language, through to celebrating different cultures and international days of celebration, through to ongoing training in bias management and beyond.

Oben-Pepra was clear though “As OMD EMEA we are doing some fantastic work, but we by no means have all of the answers”.

Everyone is clear though, the more the topic of equality, inclusion and workplace safety is discussed and the more education there is around diversity for good in the workplace, the more we will see positive changes each and every day.

You can watch Mark Oben-Pepra’s interview in full on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o4OffK5PyQ