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QUESTION: As the leader of the marketing center of excellence, you've created the term Dynamic Marketing Optimization. Describe how that is different from current marketing practice.
My Dynamic Media Optimization concept is one that brings the goals of speed and precision to media management. Differences in this approach are the more robust use of analytics to make data-informed, science-based decisions on media by integrating our real-time sales and tracking data with real-time media placement data. This will result in two clear benefits for our marketing program: speedier and higher quality, which is the “evolution” of our marketing program to the preferred state from the old state. In current state, we use lot of “art” to make decisions on creative assets and media placement of assets.
Current state also measures the promotional effectiveness in a very time-delayed (2 years after program dates) fashion and not at all at a granular media channel level. Our current promotional effectiveness capability can estimate ROI of gross TV + Print investment, and gross Digital investment that was placed 1-2 years ago. Only at the highest level, total TV investment, can be measured. Future decisions are made on that. Not precise.Not directional. Little help in determining which daypart and programs to buy in the future.
Let’s employ a metaphor of driving to a vacation destination (nice objective) to the objective to managing a media budget over the year to yield attractive profit. In this metaphor, I liken our current approach to driving from New York to LA, without a navigation system, and only by looking backwards in the rear view mirror (missing all the sign posts you just passed). That would be a terribly inefficient way to reach one's goal. Dynamic Media Optimization’s goal is to harness big data in a near real-time fashion to more quickly and precisely guide continuous media management – to achieve unprecedented efficiency and ROI. I want to travel from NYC to LA by looking forward through my windshield navigated by GPS!
QUESTION: Buckminister Fuller once said, "You can't change the way people think. You can give them tools, the use of which will change their thinking." What is your strategy for change management? What tools do you think will be most important in achieving a change to Dynamic Marketing Optimization?
This has been a challenging issue that we have been managing deliberately for months. Media agencies are comfortable with how planning has been done traditionally. Marketing Managers are not trained as media scientists. I think change management has to be seeded by groups who stand to gain the most by change. The first group I turned to as becoming my foundational change agents was my Marketing Research Analytics center of excellence. They are preachers of use of big data in management decision making. It was easy for me to get their buy-in for Dynamic Media Optimization vision. Together we made a test case for benefit. Next was to enroll my marketers and the Media Agency. The benefits were clear. The project is exciting. I always drove buy-in with the promise of creating a new future and being industry leading. With these core groups enrolled in the vision, a core group ran analytics to model profit benefit and a case study presented to both Commercial and Finance Management. A solidly and thought-out case always gets invested in.
QUESTION: To increase ROI, Digital uses delivery rules that run in milliseconds each time a message is served, but that only represents a minority of your marketing spend - the majority of your budget is in Television. What do you want Marketing Evolution to do to help you make that more real-time?
Much like digital, where a specific investment on any property can be tracked for effectiveness in near real-time, I would love to employ Marketing Evolution to provide my marketers with easy-to-understand reports in near real-time promotional effectiveness of all TV dayparts and perhaps even programs to enable monthly optimizations in our media schedule.
QUESTION: Television up-fronts will be here before you know it. What would you like to see media owners offer in terms of greater flexibility that could help you achieve the vision of Dynamic Marketing Optimization?
The old saying “knowledge is power” couldn’t be more true than in TV media management – especially with the Networks in the Upfront. My goal is to have the analytics to understand how my particular patient audience responds to network programming by daypart to make better decisions. Especially with the networks during and post the Up-fronts. I would love to negotiate with an analysis of what my particular patient population consumes and responds to TV advertising by network, daypart, and program. I would be able to precisely and efficiently use my media budget to optimize total response. That would not only be helpful in the Up-front negotiation where we buy Network Daypart by Quarters, but would be helpful to manage the monthly investments, where we would employ the latest Marketing Evolution reports to guide “transfers” of investments from one daypart and program to another based on near real-time analyses.
QUESTION: What is your advice to marketers that want to become more real-time? Where should they start? How will they know when they've succeeded? What early wins do you suggest they go after?
We will run pilots before going full bore. Find a willing brand to take on the pilot. Harness and enroll the entire cross functional groups needed to achieve success (IT, Brand Management, Marketing Research, Agency, etc.). Invest in up-front due diligence in planning – don’t rush it; you need to make the first pilot successful. Accept that precision comes at a price of effort. Set reasonable goals and employ KPIs to understand your trek down the path of success.
