The media industry has become so fond of its smart tools that it may have accidentally buried one of the most important elements -- content.
Mediacom, which has been soft launching in Australia a new global service, Creative Systems, has identified a crisis of relevance and wants to challenge how media agencies work.
“When we look at media, and what’s been going on such as the rise and rise of connected TV and programmatic out-of-home, we have identified what we would call a crisis of relevance,” says Willie Pang, the CEO of Mediacom in Australia and soon to take up a bigger role at GroupM.
“As the technology in the platforms that we use, or marketers use to plan, buy, optimise, report on, gets smarter and allows us to get better with the way we're targeting and finding audiences, the issue that we fundamentally see is that there's just not enough good content there.
“We've been lamenting this for a long time.”
Mediacom wants to challenge the positioning that a media agency has had in the eyes of the marketer, and also the relationship with creative agencies.
Tom Robinson, partner at MediaCom Creative Systems in Australia, wants to support creative agency partners but not takeover.
“We're certainly not saying that we're a creative agency,” he told AdNews.
“I think that kind of schism and divide that happened between creative and media two decades and more ago, worked well and served its purpose."
But since then there has been an explosion of technology and platforms.
“The current model just simply isn't set up to service that properly,” he says.
“And we, as a media agency with our proximity to the data and to the campaigns that we're working on, see a hell of a lot of wastage because we're working with assets that simply aren't fit for purpose.”
Creative Systems wants to use that closeness to data to better inform the creative and production workflow.
“Australia was used as a test bed for this globally because of our ability to be nimble in a market, working with some of our global clients, but also progressive brands as well.
“It's worked quite effectively and we've had a lot of success and it's great to see that ambition and capability now roll out to our other markets.”
Creative Systems talks about cultural, personal and platform relevance.
“The cultural relevance piece is about how we're embedding brands into culture,” he says.
“We're no longer reliant on the TVC anymore to create that kind of reach on its own, which obviously still serves quite a significant purpose. But now we're embedding brands into culture through greater partnerships.
“We've seen success with brands like KFC and Dell where we decided that there was growth opportunity there if we could embed them into cultural properties and cultural moments that generate conversation.”
Another example is Uber at the Australian Open and the ambush campaign, using a traditional media channel but finding new ways to leverage data to build a surprise and delight experience.
And that’s where cultural relevance, personal relevance and platform relevance work together.
“The three have to work in tandem,” says Robinson.
“We were seeing a lot of money behind ads that were actually under-delivering against the objectives of the campaign.
“About three-quarters is wastage in spend. That insight started to inform the needs for culturally relevant content ... to get that cut-through, to increase that relevance and make use of the attention we were gathering.”
With Uber, a 24-year-old male might respond better to a Nick Kyrgios or a Rafael Nadal but with a woman the same age it might be Kim Kardashian or Magda Szubanski.
Willie Pang: “The ability to reassemble that creative on the fly based on who's watching or walking past a billboard, or sitting on a bus watching YouTube, is largely at scale never been done before.
“And so that is one of the core aspirations of how we utilise the new data streams that are coming back to us.”
And consumers expect a level of personalisation. Ads now follow readers from social platform to social platform to news sites.
Everyone expects Netflix to make recommendations based on past viewing, and Spotify to curate a list of music.
“There's no free pass for marketers, whether you're selling a credit card, a laptop, a piece of chicken or a ride share service,” says Pang.
“The expectation from the consumers is exactly the same. So we're just trying to drag the industry to a point where we can meet that consumer need.”
Tom Robinson: “This huge opportunity, that next stage of growth for us and our clients … using these broadcast mediums in a smarter way to help grow brands across large segments.
Willie Pang: “I think the real game changer here is we're deploying a lot of new technology. It's not just humans trying to make advertising in different ways.
“There's not that many CMOs who wake up and go, 'Oh, here's an extra quarter million bucks for you to go and build out this whole new program of content.’
“What we can do is utilise our capability to basically remix what you already have and take something that might be four or six pieces of creative and literally recreate hundreds of different permutations from that.”
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