Roxane Magbanua, business unit director at PHD, reveals guiding principles on how to effectively navigate in a challenging climate through tools, talent and tech.

From an advertising perspective, the Covid-19 pandemic has been a real-world presentation of the effectiveness vs. efficiency discourse that has dominated industry circles in recent years. As identified by Les Binet and Sarah Carter, effectiveness is “the extent to which you’ve reached your goals,” whilst efficiency is “a measure of effort needed to reach them”.

Overwhelmingly, the theory has fallen in favour of efficiency that works in service of effectiveness. As the reality of the pandemic hit, we saw very quick decisions made towards improving efficiencies, namely through budget cuts to advertising spends. It’s an understandable move in a time of crisis, but it’s also arguable that we haven’t applied that same clinical thought to protecting the infrastructure that helps us develop great work. As our industry continues to navigate uncharted territories on shrinking budgets, what techniques can we employ to help us best invent a future where highly effective work can flourish?

2020 has been a mirror to our industry, a stress-test for agile working, digital transformation and tech capabilities. This has been the year that saw the accelerated transition of these ideas from buzzwords into tangible, working principles. Previously, it was key to talk of these ideas to stay relevant. Now it’s key to adopt them to stay in business. But we’ve only really just got going. With a fail rate of 70 per cent for digital transformation initiatives (according to McKinsey & Company), it’s clear that beyond the current acceleration we still have a long way to go.

The effectiveness vs. efficiency debate was a hot topic prior to the pandemic; it is more pertinent now than it has ever been. With falling budgets, uncertain prospects and our own adaptation to new ways of working, there are challenges everywhere for agencies and advertisers alike. Here, we identify a three-part strategy to not only protect our need to deliver effective work now, but to help it flourish in the coming years.

1. EFFECTIVE TOOLS

Investing in the right tech platform is crucial to pivot this conversation. Technology should be built in such a way that it offers both the capacity and flexibility to provide best-in-class tools and applications in a single environment, thus allowing multiple scenarios to be created in delivering the objectives. There are six pressing questions that must be answered to deliver true value:

What is my ad-generated revenue?

What are my media-driven sales?

How profitable is my media investment?

What is the optimal budget for my brand?

How much incremental spend can I add to grow my brand further?

How should the budget be allocated across the channels?

These are burning questions we obsess over. In Q1, before the pandemic peaked in the region, we took to OMNI, our proprietary data-driven planning tool, to optimise budget splits across our brand portfolios to ensure short- and long-term growth. We are fortunate that we can benefit from pre-built modelling curves to help us determine the relationship between organic base sales and media-driven sales to assist the resetting of business operations and overall marketing mix. Unlike other market mix modelling solutions that take months to build, OMNI Investment Planner has the ability to deliver proper response curves bespoke to the brand in just three weeks; a win for clients when decision making at speed is imperative.

2. EFFECTIVE TALENT

Staying agile is critical when times are tough. It is essential to mix different expertise with an eclectic group of not only data scientists, measurement specialists and technologists. Also, be inclusive of creative thinkers, strategists and analysts to grow your business in the era of effectiveness. More than ever,
in a world where connectivity is often happening behind screens and away from the office, it is necessary to gather a diversified team who together can break norms and collaborate to unlock further business potential.

3. EFFECTIVE TECH

The arguments to not invest in intelligent automation are diminishing by the day. Creating an automated dashboard that integrates media metrics and, with sales figures in a single view, boosts productivity as it saves time and effort in reviewing multiple set of reports and swiftly unlocks the areas to be improved and optimised. Automating the process to break silos and getting visibility on all business aspects is highly critical to optimising business results. Evolving the measurement framework to be based on clear attribution models provides a clear view of the path to purchase across multiple channels by assigning fair credit to each interaction. Ultimately, having clear benchmarks and actionable metrics will unlock a higher level of effectiveness in performance marketing.

In the industry predictions written at the back end of 2019 for this year, a number of high-profile publishers riffed on the idea of ‘2020 Vision.’ One year on and a multitude of unpredictable events later, it’s now apparent that the only 2020 vision is in the hindsight we have on the many lessons learned. With the welcome news from Pfizer that a highly effective vaccine may well be imminent, it’s imperative that we heed these lessons. Our societies may soon return to a sense of normality, but our obligation to deliver effective work will only continue to grow.

OMD MENA’s head of strategy, Alejandro Fischer, discusses how technology and empathy should work in parallel to uncover the true desires of your consumer.

The minute we become marketers or take a marketing-adjacent role, we stop being a consumer. It is a hard pill to swallow; we are sure we still think as a consumer, but we do not. According to the 2019 ‘Empathy Delusion’ report by Reach Solutions, “There is a persistent belief in the industry that we have stronger empathy or that we are trained to overcome our biases. But it turns out we are more likely to be driven by these biases than the modern mainstream.”

Our intentions are good, but the truth is that we operate in our own echo chamber because we surround ourselves (professionally and personally) with people who share similar views and access the same information as us, and when we need to speak to consumers that don’t behave or think like us, we struggle. If we look at Global Web Index (GWI) and compare people in an advertising/marketing function with the average population of the UAE, we can see huge differences in the way people in our industry consume media, purchase goods and engage with technology, compared with the mainstream. In other words, we act and think very differently from the man on the street. We as marketers are excited by all the technological tools we have at our disposal to reach and interact with our consumers, but we don’t always stop and think whether that’s what we should be doing. We believe in a world where consumers are dying to engage with the virtual reality (VR) experience of a laundry detergent, a world where consumers go around the city scanning QR codes and would much rather spend their time watching branded content than their favourite shows. Some do, most do not. This empathy gap doesn’t only manifest itself in the way we activate, but also in the way we approach marketing-driven solutions based on our interpretation of what people value and stand for.

While it is in many ways harder to make better planning decisions on behalf of our clients, we’ve never been so equipped to challenge our assumptions and overcome our biases. Never have we had so much access to what consumers are thinking and doing, and how they truly interact with brands. But with great data comes great responsibility. This is where empathy comes in.

Empathy is a compass that helps us navigate the complex decisions between what we could do and what we should do. We tackle every brief by looking to understand the people we want to reach, by putting ourselves in their shoes and seeing the world through their eyes. Empathy alone will never be enough, and we are privileged at OMD to have access to more than 15,000 signals using our precision market and insights platform, OMNI. With an almost infinite choice of information, the role of empathy is to prioritise what we look at, based on the specific problem we are trying to solve. Mapping this is only the first stage. If you were a fly on my office wall you would find scribbles of matrices across endless whiteboards. The second is to add the hypotheses that challenge any pre-existing audience assumptions. It takes a lot of conscious effort and front-of-mind acknowledgement to avoid biases. When working on an audience exercise, I like to use Post-It notes to break down what we think we know and what we actually know about the person we are trying to reach.

Empathy is not a philosophy; it is the way in which we interpret the data and uncover the multiple truths hidden within it. But it is only once we combine empathy and signals that the magic truly happens (for us this is the marriage of our empathy-driven process and OMNI). Because, once we isolate audience opportunities and problems to solve, we can stress-test our hypothesis by modelling the consumer experience, make our findings actionable by turning insights into highly targeted and addressable audiences, and apply statistical rigour to our understanding of how consumer behaviours drive brand and business results. This audience-centric approach does not only apply to understanding and addressing consumer needs; it is at the core of how we define success.

Empathy in action

We use empathy to separate what we measure from what matters and measure long-term vs. short-term success based on real human impact vs. vanity metrics. We do this to ensure we can optimise based on how consumers truly reacted and interacted with our messages vs. how we wished we performed. We pay a lot more attention to brand health impact, the quality of our interactions and what our consumers do post-click.

When we take time to truly understand our audiences, we can create more value, and when we combine this with evidence and data-based solutions, we drive performance and growth. Compelling value creation can only happen when we merge data-based solutions with evidence to uncover deeper insights into our audiences, which in turn drives performance and growth.

 

This article was published in Campaign Middle East

Saleh Ghazal, Managing Director of OMD MENA, discusses collaboration, processes and finding the right people.

How would you define collaboration?

Collaboration is much more than teamwork or collective work; it is having the right mindset, the right culture, and it doesn’t have to be within the same discipline or the same team. We are now at a time when, more than ever, collaboration is needed with a wider audience.

I really like the idea of ‘casual collisions.’ Pre Covid, we had people talking to other people outside of their teams – in the lift, in the pantry, while having a tea break – and bouncing ideas with individuals or talents outside their day-to-day job or direct team. Collaboration really stems from these casual collisions between individuals to deliver better work for clients. During Covid, we missed that.

How do you foster such a culture, especially in a diverse country in terms of ethnicity, language, religion, values, etc.?

It’s very difficult to build a culture top bottom. Culture comes from the people. So, you foster the culture by listening to people, understanding exactly what they want, hearing them out, and, to a certain extent, by trial and error.

Building a culture requires a lot of time, but it also requires the right tools. During Covid, we’ve invested a lot in tools like Microsoft Teams or Zoom because it was very hard for us to have that interaction with the wider people. But it affected the culture a lot.

And how do you foster a collaborative mindset within the organization, specifically?

It’s a very difficult question. [Achieving that] is a mix of many things, including leadership – leading by example – and a proper hiring strategy. We need to see whether a talent fits within that culture and has that mindset of creativity, openness, diversity, and inclusion. Because changing someone’s mindset or helping people come up with a mindset is difficult. You can’t educate people on how to read the room or how to improve their emotional intelligence.

How can systems and processes help?

I’m not a huge fan of processes because processes limit someone’s creativity and kind of boxes them into a certain framework. If we did not have strict policies and strict processes, innovation would be much higher. Of course, there are definitely certain processes that you need to follow to help people fall into place and reach certain positions or thoughts. But even these processes, to a certain extent, limit creativity. It’s the opposite of fostering a culture of creativity and imagination. There [should always be] room for someone to move away from that straight line, to experience something that is new and experiment with something that is different. To allow someone to test and fail and learn from their mistakes is the only way we can innovate. This is something that we are trying to develop to be able to foster innovation and creativity.

So, what do you think of tools and techniques like design thinking, for example?

As an organization, we do brainstorming sessions, ignition sessions, and so on, and there is a process on how we conduct these sessions. But with time, you become used to them and you no longer are creative. This is why these processes themselves should be disrupted. This is why, as an organization, we’ve come up with different techniques that we keep trying even during a single year, because we don’t want to hamper creative thinking and innovation.

Collaboration goes beyond an organization. It also involves partners and clients. How do you approach that?

Everything that I’ve talked about so far is about collaboration not only inside the organization but also outside of the organization. Collaboration is embedded in everything that we do, from our personal lives to how we apply it to creative problem-solving at the workplace, with clients, with partners, with competitors.

If you really know how your clients operate, you should be able to nurture collaboration. There can be resistance only if the clients do not see the value. As long as you portray and illustrate the value of that collaboration, then I don’t think there is anyone who’d say no to that – unless there is ego behind it.

And that never happens, of course.

It definitely happens and this is the biggest challenge that we have in that industry. But for you to be able to overcome that ego, you need to show the value that you bring to the table.

What practical advice, tips, or tools would you share to help foster and enhance collaboration in an agency?

The more facetime and teamwork people have, the more you foster collaboration and creativity. Inspiration comes from people’s actions, words, and even how they carry themselves. When two or more team members collaborate together, joining their thoughts, it produces better results and it opens doors for arriving at more innovative solutions. This is something that we have noticed a lot during the lockdown. People did not have facetime with one another – these casual collisions I mentioned earlier. This is why after the lockdown, we started asking people to come to the office.

This interview first appeared on Communicate. 

Omnicom Media Group MENA announced the appointment of Maroun Hassoun as Regional General Manager of OMD MENA. Maroun has moved from the Group’s PHD Lebanon office over to OMD to run the business in the Lower Gulf, Iraq and supporting Wissam Najjar, COO of OMD MENA in leading the mobile telecommunications company, Zain, across the region.

Maroun offers over 15 years of regional media experience with 7 years of specialised expertise in telecoms. Prior to this move, Maroun led PHD Lebanon as regional general manager where he built a new market leader from scratch and grew the business three-fold in less than 3 years. His exuberant enthusiasm, determination and rigour have led him to achieve impressive milestones for the agency and in 2018 he was recognised as the office leader at the OMG MENA awards due to his great work in building disproportionate growth in Beirut.

This appointment comes at a time when OMG MENA is fast-expanding its role and services in the Gulf and particularly in Saudi Arabia. Today, the group has offices based in Riyadh and Jeddah managing business operations across KSA.

Chairman and CEO of OMG MENA, Elie Khouri states: ‘Saudi is increasingly becoming a key player for media and communications in the Gulf. They are rapidly equipping themselves and laying down the right foundations with future-leading tech and innovation for transformational growth. We are solidifying and up-skilling our talent and leadership in KSA to guide and optimize their vision in response to the Kingdom’s own acceleration and development.’

Maroun will be assuming this new role effective immediately, reporting directly to Wissam Najjar and will be based in Riyadh. Najjar comments, ‘We look forward to welcoming Maroun to OMD and witnessing how he leads the team and Zain into the next chapter of its advancement in the region and beyond.’

 

This article was originally published in Campaign Middle East.

Omnicom Media Group MENA’s General Manager, E-commerce, Stefanie Cunningham offers eight tips for how your brand can elevate its online sales strategy during the most opportunistic period of the year.

Middle East e-commerce is on track to deliver $42bn in online sales in 2020, according to Emarketer, and this growth is set to continue this November with Cyber Month. This event can account for a substantial portion of your annual e-commerce sales applies to all verticals and is a great opportunity to acquire new consumers.

So what exactly is Cyber Month?
Cyber Month is synonymous with offering the deepest deals for a limited time and is made up of three key events:

• Singles Day: Originating in China and celebrated on November 11, Singles Day is the highest-grossing e-commerce event globally. Alibaba in 2019 alone saw sales of $38bn during this one-day event, and the demand is picking up pace locally.
• Black Friday: Occurs on November 27, 2020. Strategically aligned to just after payday, this retail event focuses on deep discounts both offline and online. Black Friday in MENA has been localised and rebranded by retailers to a rainbow of colours such as White, Yellow or Green Friday.
• Cyber Monday: Exclusively for your online channel, Monday, November 30 marks the end of Cyber Month, encouraging consumers to purchase these deals now or never.

So, how can you ensure your brand maximises the potential of this commercial event? We have mapped out our top eight recommendations:

1 It’s a 10-week event: The search intent and excitement begin in October as shoppers seek to research the best deals. Harness this interest and build hype by creating a specific landing page on your website, enabling you to develop audience pools and collect customer emails to inform first when your deals go live

2 Value proposition: Shoppers are seeking value so it’s essential to offer the best deals of the year or risk losing out to your competitors. Develop a strategic series of offers, all inspired to convert consumers online, and increase basket spend and frequency across the month of November.

3 Awareness and retargeting: In this saturated and competitive event, you need to ensure your existing and potential shoppers know about your offers through campaigns that deliver increased traffic to your website or mobile app. Activate across the essential channels – paid search, social, display and eCRM – alongside reviewing strategic opportunities with influencers, radio and PR. Build dynamic retargeting frameworks to re-engage and convert users across your sales funnel. Ensure a performance-minded approach by monitoring media KPIs daily, reallocating and reinvesting budget into the top-performing channels and campaigns by reviewing CPO (cost per order) and ROAS (return on ad spend).

4 Activating on e-retail partners: If you are live on marketplaces and e-retailers, it’s essential to understand their Cyber Month strategy as early as possible. Invest in their on- and offsite media options, negotiating share of voice in the event vs. your category competitors and ensure this is partnered with attractive trade discounts across your portfolio.

5 Digital shelf excellence: Digital availability is an essential pillar of e-commerce success. This includes best-practice e-commerce images, copy and stock availability to enable shoppers to find your products, engage and transact. Poor digital shelf experiences lead to lack of findability and lower conversion rate.

6 Performance management: Setting KPIs and targets in advance of Cyber Month is vital to ensure you have built the right stock forecast and have media investments capable of driving the required levels of increased traffic. Set up specific Cyber Month reporting, which tracks commercial, media and operational metrics such as fulfilment success and out-of-stocks. If you only sell via indirect e-retailers, ensure you have requested a forecast target based on your activation plans and have negotiated access to daily sales reports.

7 Cyber Month taskforce: E-commerce spans many teams: sales, marketing, finance, supply chain and customer services, all of whom should be on-hand, fully informed and prepared to support throughout the Cyber Month period. Common issues such as out-of-stocks, warehouse capacity, checkout issues and customer service agents who have not been fully trained lead to huge missed potential and wasted media spends.

8 Repurchase strategy: Cyber Month is a great period to attract and convert new consumers to your brand. To extract further value, ensure you have a re-purchase strategy in place. In December, ensure you launch new product lines such as gifting for the holiday season and retarget Cyber Month shoppers with value propositions that drive conversion, such as free shipping.

With these eight key steps in place, we know you will unlock a successful Cyber Month this year. Best of luck!

 

This article was first published in Campaign Middle East

PHD’s Chandni Varma, Director of Biddable Media, explains how the world of programmatic OOH is rapidly going to revolutionise the way brands engage with their consumers.

Just as consumer behaviour is constantly evolving, the way we plan and buy media, especially offline media such as OOH, is also changing. All traditional media – be it TV, radio or the mighty OOH – is moving towards digital. But if we closely examine the reality of programmatic digital OOH in this region, it is still only in its infancy. Even in the most progressive markets such as the US, DOOH only makes up 5 per cent of the total OOH inventory. However, it is also worth noting that it constitutes 33 per cent of the total out-of-home ad spend. This speaks volumes about the untapped potential of this medium both for suppliers and for advertisers.

Digital OOH does not only refer to billboards. It also includes digital screens in malls, elevators, gyms, airports, fuel stations, taxis, bus stations, etc.

When we get to a point in this region where we have a significant number of digital screens, then we can evolve to an automated buying model.

Despite the UAE being so technologically advanced, there are several reasons why the shift to digital OOH has been slower than in other markets. One of the main reasons is resistance to change. Media planners love traditional billboards so much that they are the go-to medium whenever there is a big brand launch or we need 100 per cent visibility. For many outdoor suppliers, there isn’t an incentive to digitise screens because the costs of digitising a billboard currently outweigh the benefits.

Other reasons include slow creative approval by suppliers ahead of launch. There are multiple DOOH ecosystems here in the region, with a select number of suppliers offering the experience, system and technology needed to make headway. But it’s all about the mindset, and the mindset for programmatic OOH remains undeveloped. As an agency, we believe programmatic OOH can grow the OOH market as it brings more accountability and measurability, which is key to growth.

Consider the YouTube masthead. It is one of the most essential digital formats that exists to create “visibility” online. Since it hit key MENA markets in 2011-12, it behaved like the longest billboard on Sheikh Zayed Road. It could only be purchased directly through Google on a cost-per-day basis and at a very high premium. This is how it operated for the last eight years. Look at the same format today. As the landscape has evolved, Google has made the masthead available on both a CPM and a CPD basis, where CPD is so premium, CPM seems like the obvious choice. The biggest shift is that the CPM masthead allows for the option to use advanced audience targeting solutions that the CPD cannot.

Both have a role to play, but if this format can be customised, and more targeted, it only makes it that much more functional.

Programmatic DOOH will provide unique marketing capabilities because of its use of real-world triggers. Remember the award-winning British Airways #lookup campaign that used digital screens to track planes flying above it, displaying their flight number and departure point? Closer to home, we have seen the Louvre Abu Dhabi Highway Gallery, which cleverly combines an outdoor display ad with a connected indoor audio sensory experience. Programmatic DOOH can use a combination of location intelligence and audience targeting to be relevant while still not being intrusive. If the screen is close enough to the point of sale, for example, it can drive people into stores. This ‘sale’ can be activated in seconds inside a mall, encouraging people to grab last stocks or pointing them in the direction of their favourite coffee shop. A weather update could drive up sales of ice cream, water or cough syrup instantaneously.

The mobile phone in every consumer’s palm constantly gives off data that indicates what kind of person is in which location. This revolutionises DOOH planning as it means buyers can now pick locations they know are most relevant to their target audience. They can now begin to place their DOOH ads in the locations where their audience is present. They can even go so far as to determine how many people have been exposed to their OOH ads and then gone on to visit the desired locations, finally bringing measurability and accountability to OOH media.

In a complex digital world, advertisers have been hungry for immediate, transparent, controlled solutions. With publishers digitally adapting their screens to start using programmatic technology, they have taught the hungry how to fish. At the most basic level, it will enable quicker switching on/off of campaigns, while at its most advanced we may see the ability to contextually target in real-time. It is a win-win for advertisers, who benefit from the transparency and efficiencies of this buying method while driving more revenue for screen owners who are able to run more ads.

The future is perhaps a different question. When OOH ads are bought from the same interface as display, YouTube, audio and TV, it will put a new kind of power in the hands of the buyer, creating fresh possibilities. It took most of the 20th century for prestige OOH locations like Times Square and Piccadilly Circus to transition to digital screens. But, as is always the case in digital media, expect the next transition to come at lightspeed.

This article was first published in Campaign Middle East.

PHD’s SEO Lead, Ron Sarweh and Head of Strategy, Daniel Shepherd explore the complex yet mind-blowingly effective impact of an SEO strategy on building brand’s exposure online. Without revealing too much of Ron’s secret sauce, the two media experts discuss how small tweaks to your website can have huge, long-lasting results.

Their 5^th episode takes  a look under the bonnet and at the  truth engine that is  search. Curious about  how your  brand can win and  make the algorithm  work for you? We all know that it is a battle between bots  and humans when it comes to achieving  optimum search engine rankings. So how exactly can SEO & SEM be synergized?  Listen to Ron and Dan in this new episode as they reveal the ‘need- to-knows’ to win at your SEO & SEM strategy.

Find out more by listening to the episode here.
Also available on Spotify, Anghami, Audioboom, Deezer and Apple Podcasts.

Take a quick glimpse at what you can expect to hear on the episode by viewing this short soundbite below.

Ahmed Khaled, Integrated Planner at OMD Egypt, explores the competitive opportunities that lie within branded entertainment and the gaming industry in Egypt.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, smartphone ownership has grown to 97% in Egypt, increasing its market share by 2.2% quarter on quarter (QoQ) in Q2 2020 to a total of 2.88 million units states IDC MEA. In addition, time spent on mobile activities is accounting for 4 hours, 7 minutes in Cairo per day according to eMarketer. From these progressive figures, we can see the digital landscape is developing in the region and is omnipresent, growing over time and is on the go; battling it out to hold the attention of its users.

As a result, we’ve witnessed the increase of on-demand services such as YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon Prime as well as the number of hours spent on games and the impressive rise of prominent user-generated content providers such as TikTok. Advertisers were quick to capitalize on this opportunity which subsequently led to an ad-cluttered digital space. Which leads us to question if it is time for brands to capitalize on branded entertainment to differentiate themselves from the digital noise?

Branded entertainment is defined as fusing product, service or experience into the story or the flow of the content without imposing as an ad. One of the best-known types of branded entertainment is product placement which can be traced back to the 1800s. It exists all around us in movies, songs and TV. This kind of advertising influenced the rise of brands and solidified their position in pop culture, to name a few examples: Nike in Back to the Future, RayBan sunglasses in Top Gun, FedEx in Cast Away and the Mini Cooper in The Italian Job.

With all the changes that are happening and the safety guidelines related to Covid-19, it’s becoming more difficult establish an ad-partnership and achieve product-placement content simply because fewer films/TV shows are being produced at this time. And so, we move our attention to an alternative medium, one that is highly successful yet often forgotten – video games. Video games have managed to achieve what media has been trying to do for decades, which is effectively engaging the user. Video games are interactive which provokes physical and psychological responses from players, which could ultimately have a more efficient effect on the process of both brand perception and purchase cycle. Research indicates that gamers typically harbour good impressions of in-game advertisements and do not mind seeing billboards or products in their games if they complement the game’s realism and are not enforced upon them in any intrusive manner.

Branded entertainment is versatile enough to be used in small brand-centric games or large triple-A titles. You can find various real-life products in video games; studies reveal that product placement in video games adds more authenticity to the game and enhances the user experience. For example, sports video games are an excellent field for in-game advertising, since the world of sports is usually sponsored in real life, which provides an opportunity for their real-life sponsors to extend their sponsorship to their emulated versions in their respective video games, a method that has come into practice by games produced by Electronic Arts.

Lately, we’ve seen major brands and artists taking this initiative into action with the popular online game, Fortnite that has leveraged virtual events to increase engagement with its audience beyond the game through music, movies, and pop culture. It made headlines with its Party Royale mode, where players can virtually rave in a music festival atmosphere featuring live performances by iconic DJs such as Marshmello, Diplo, Major Lazer, and most recently, Travis Scott. When looking at the success of such events, simply looking at the 10.7 million attendees for Marshmello’s set is enough to make you see the lucrative opportunity of such entertainment. Another effective crossover is through blockbuster movie launches such as John Wick and the Marvel Universe where they release special characters that players can select to play as within the game.

Given that the numbers of players are going to surge, it is worth exploring this medium as it is new and fresh with minimal clutter. Sportswear can be seamlessly promoted in sport-centric game titles, automotive clients in racing games, FMCGs in simulators, and role-playing games; the opportunities to innovate are boundless.

With an audience itching for new experiences and who are still semi-confined to their homes, marketers have a highly receptive audience looking for the next big thing. Online platforms have proven that the ideas are limitless and whoever is bold enough to embrace the change and capitalize on an already successful format will yield the best results, an efficient ROI and will have the early bird advantage.

This article was first published on Campaign Middle East.

 

We work in a complex agency landscape, increasingly populated by boutiques with a narrow focus and the promise of deep specialisation. In theory, a blended model of generalist and specialist agencies should have all bases covered in addressing the ever-increasing range of client needs, driven chiefly by the complex digital and tech space. In reality, devising, matching and managing the right models has become an at-times overwhelming challenge for our industry and, in the search for efficiencies, has become a deeply inefficient beast with implications on us and our clients.

We see agencies tangling themselves in a world obsessed with matching the right structure to the needs of today’s shape, be it matrix, circular or triangular. Clearly, the answer is not black and white and the nature of our industry means that a best-practice standard is unlikely ever to be devised. If our landscape is complex then we owe it to ourselves and our clients to find workable solutions. While we know our promise of deep specialisation has its allure, the real power comes in cross-functional collaboration, integration and a true understanding of the client’s problem.

This is a natural reaction to the increasing complexity of the landscape and tech ecosystem; after all, managing a customer-relationship-management (CRM) and customer-data platform (CDP) is a vastly different skill set to understanding search algorithms or social listening. In this environment, deep specialisation no doubt has its allure, but there is a hidden cost – the power of cross-functional collaboration, integration, and a true understanding of the client’s problem. Instead, our response to the complex landscape needs to be a similarly complex solution, but one contained within a single, accountable, future-focused agency partner.

As we enter a new decade, more businesses are making this shift. At a macro level, we see better integration and collaboration between creative and media as a must-have. At a micro level, niche specialisations are disappearing – pureplay search- engine-optimisation (SEO), retargeting and similar agencies are needing to take a wider view or become obsolete. We are collectively beginning to recognise – or recognise again – the power of an integrated approach, with all the moving pieces in advertising under one roof and working towards a single goal. After all, before the unbundling of the 1980s, this was the approach that worked.

Take the rise of the digital agency. The value proposition 20 years ago was simple – digital is the future, so split out your investment and put it in the hands of an agency that lives and breathes this new reality. As digital normalised and digital buying became just another aspect of media buying, we saw this value proposition pivot – performance agencies or growth agencies became the new kid in town. The message shouted from the rooftops was that if you need a better return on advertising spend, or cost per lead, or cost per acquisition, then hire a specialist. It’s a simple, attractive message that hides a concerning subtext – they will maximise your performance investment, with no accountability for long-term brand building. This is exactly the thinking that Field and Binet warned against in The Long and the Short of It. It’s what Mark Ritson has rallied against in his keynotes on ‘Bothism’. It’s the driver behind Simon Peel’s transformation of Adidas. Yet the implications go beyond the simple either/or, or long-term vs short-term. When we normalise specialisation and give each agency its own remit and KPIs, we no longer have a single agency partner that is accountable for holistic, sustainable business growth.