Festival of Media Wrap Up: On a Mission to Mars – One Small Step for Brands, One Giant Leap for Mankind

Click to Download the Festival of Media Global Interactive Wrap Up Report and Highlights

From Microsoft working with NASA to help expanding cities deal with the future problem of meteor strikes to the Mars One venture trying to get sponsorship for its project to colonise the Red Planet, delegates heard how the adventurous can go where no brand has gone before

Science and advertising were once two very different areas, but the lines are now beginning to blur, as we discovered at this year’s Festival of Media Global in Rome.

We have already started bringing aerospace engineers into the programmatic sphere, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that the industry is exploring the potential of turning normal citizens into scientists, with brands finding plenty of opportunities to make the most of this journey.

“Brands are beginning to understand the potential of backing a human colony on Mars,” claimed Bas Lansdorp, the man behind the extraordinary Mars One venture.

Lansdorp plans an unmanned exploratory mission to the Red Planet in 2020, with the aim to subsequently establish a human colony there by 2027. The scheme is expected to cost $6bn.

But why is it causing so much controversy? The idea of people travelling into space is nothing new. Well, the “one-way trip aspect” of the project seems to be casting a lot of doubts, with the technology to launch a rocket back from Mars to Earth not yet available.

The next problem is money; but Lansdorp said that, while many large advertisers are put off by the project, the success of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in raising billions of dollars in sponsorship quadrennially gives him hope. If the IOC can make money on that sort of scale, then why can’t he?

“I started connecting the world of space to the world of media,” he said. “The IOC makes $4.5bn per event from sponsors and broadcasters; access to our eyeballs is worth that kind of money.

“I don’t think anyone doubts that when humans leave for Mars the whole world will watch. It connects to a lot of brands – it is a new society.”

Surely the world’s first TV reality show in space is enough to annihilate the ratings of Keeping Up With The Kardashians?

Lansdorp argued that a recruitment brand could also benefit from the project, to whittle down the initial 200,000 volunteers to a final crew, while automotive brands could help to develop Mars rover vehicles.

Programmatic: rocket science

Lansdorp was joined on stage by Bill Simmons, the co-founder and chief technology officer at DataXu, and himself a former aerospace engineer. Simmons discussed how he had used his rocket-building experience to create DataXu’s Decision Center technology

Comparing programmatic media to a NASA Mars mission, with a rover repeating experiments on the surface of the planet, Simmons said brands can hone their technique through rapid, global testing

“The beauty of programmatic marketing is that you can now run thousands of media experiments simultaneously around the world to work out what the ROI is,” Simmons explained to delegates.

“I enjoy advertising, I love how it affects me emotionally, but my passion is to make that even better by bringing science to the art,” he added.

Microsoft’s head of innovation, JC Oliver, took a somewhat different approach to science, beginning his keynote with a proclamation that asteroids are going to kill us all.

He explained that, as populations grow, people are more likely to die from asteroids as they are in plane crashes. To combat this, Microsoft, Nokia and NASA are teaming up to use data, devices and citizens to solve the problem.

Using tech to save mankind

“What’s interesting about Hollywood is the 1998 movie Enemy of the State. The tech they use in that movie is pretty real now,” said Oliver. “Hollywood always tends to be 20 years ahead. Fiction tends to be more accurate about predicting the future than non-fiction, because you have to be imaginative.”

Discussing how Microsoft is opening up this technology and making it usable on a worldwide level, Oliver commented that the problem is that tech is “not sexy” enough and the company has to create a story around what is essentially a “boring piece of tech”.

“We need to put humans at the centre of our tech thinking,” he said.

According to NASA, by 2020 we will be more likely to get hit by an asteroid than die in a plane crash.

Citing the Chelyabinsk meteor crash in 2013, Oliver said this happens a lot more often than we care to realise. The problem gets more significant as metropolitan areas grow and the likelihood of asteroids landing in more inhabited areas gets higher.

“We need to understand the big challenges that pose as risks to mankind. How can we get citizens around the world to work together on this problem? Unless you’re aware of it, you won’t want to do anything,” Oliver said.

Microsoft has set its sights on solving this challenge and getting the right tech across the world to aggregate what we see in the skies and then send this information back to NASA.

“We all know that a mobile has more power in it than the technology that was used to put the first man on the moon. Everyone has a phone.”

Microsoft came up with a 3D printed mini-observatory that could be sent out all over the world for people to print out themselves. The information aggregated was then collected in the product cloud and sent back to NASA.

“It’s a step towards transforming citizens into scientists,” said Oliver.

GETTING CREATIVE WITH PROGRAMMATIC – THE NEW KID ON THE MEDIA BLOCK SUDDENLY GROWS UP

Programmatic trading is a “super-baby” that has progressed from infant to adult in only two years, and must be approached in a new way to reflect this rapidly achieved maturity.

That is the view of UM’s global chief executive Daryl Lee, speaking in a panel discussion entitled ‘Programmatic has to be at the heart of all marketing campaigns’.

Advertising technology, and its changing role in media, undoubtedly proved one of the hottest topics during the conference, from the extension of programmatic buying into traditional media such as TV and OOH, to the tension between automation and creativity.

Taking to the stage with Mashable chief revenue officer Seth Rogin and Cadreon global president Arun Kumar, Lee argued that the role of programmatic had moved on from its early, efficiency-driving days, and needed to be viewed in a new context. “The original intent was a way of automating some of the inventory in digital which wasn’t selling as easily. It is now about precision, about audiences and which moments are right for those audiences,” he said.

Fellow panellist Luke Kigel, director for media and connections, Americas, at Johnson & Johnson (J&J), agreed: “If you understand programmatic as the future of how a sophisticated marketer will leverage data, understand their consumer and be able to target and optimise with precision, then arguably more of what you do is programmatic.

He claimed that J&J is on the “leading edge” in its ability to define “performance”, with too many advertisers unable to articulate what a successful programmatic strategy looks like for their brand. Mashable’s Rogin agreed, urging a client who asked the panel how to start developing programmatic systems to first discover his brand’s “North Star”.

However, even the most advanced of marketers are still trying to augment those baby steps into something more sophisticated, Kigel admitted. “One of the challenges we face, focused on our programmatic strategy, is that it’s a journey. We’re just building the piping that is going to set us up for the future,” he said. “At some point there will need to be a seismic shift in workflow. Marketers used to spend 80% of their time on preparation, then the campaign goes live, and a bit of time on how it is performing. It will become the inverse.

Day two saw another gathering of programmatic heavyweights, including Xaxis EMEA chief executive Casper Schlickum, Yahoo EMEA vice president Nick Hugh and Vivaki boss Stephan Berlinger. The session, called ‘Can creativity survive without programmatic?’ and chaired by Rubicon Project’s general manager, international, Jay Stevens, explored why many consider programmatic media to be anathema to creativity.

Xaxis’ Schlickum expressed his “surprise” that some creative storytellers do not find the idea of “audience-centricity” appealing, given the rich potential for deeply personalised messages. Yet, while Yahoo’s Hugh agreed that his organisation is keen for programmatic and creativity to become “bedfellows”, Infectious Media co-founder Martin Kelly claimed the very notion of automation puts off many: “Programmatic is driven by efficiency and automation. That suggests you’re going to do the same thing over and over, so I’m not surprised creatives are not keen. But they get excited about the capability of it.”

Vivaki’s Berlinger said another issue is the “fundamental difference” between the “legacy” creative industry and the skills needed to thrive in the programmatic era. He said he believes the expertise must sit “directly with the client work”, something Vivaki’s parent Publicis Groupe is attempting to address with the migration of trading into Starcom MediaVest Group and ZenithOptimedia. Berlinger also believes the “mass volumes notion” of automation is a turn-off for those seeking to create eye-catching advertising. Instead, he joined M&C Saatchi’s EMEA managing director Libby Robinson in proclaiming that the “next level” of creativity lies in mobility. He added: “That is where we will do justice to programmatic.”

New department

If programmatic really is “Viagra” to creativity, as so eloquently described by UM boss Lee, a new model is needed to extract this potential.

In ‘Men or Machines: the False Choice’, Kellogg’s vice-president, global media and digital strategy, Jon Suarez-Davis, and Starcom’s executive vice president and managing director, Rob Davis, aimed to dispel some myths. Suarez-Davis delivered one of the quotes of the Festival with his claim that the media department has almost become the new creative department, and that “creation” and “creative” are two separate things.

“A lot of the time people think creation equals creative – but we’ve learnt that’s far from the truth. The question is not ‘am I creative?’ It’s ‘how am I creative?’” said Suarez-Davis. The two argued that Kellogg’s and Starcom’s 66-year partnership has provided the foundations to go beyond the “ones and twos” of basic data usage and inject an element of “creativity and fun” into campaign development.

The easy mistake on the road to truly personalised, creative marketing is to view programmatic as a fully rounded “strategy”, rather than a “tactic”, said Davis. He added: “It’s more than just hitting a button – it’s a team sport.”

THE NEW NORMAL FOR MEDIA OWNERS – WHY SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON INNOVATION AND QUALITY

The continued success of traditional media owners alongside newer ones proves the value of innovation and not resting on your laurels in the battle to keep apace of technological and consumer behavioural change. But there are further challenges, and opportunities, ahead

For some, the Festival of Media Global is an opportunity to introduce themselves and their business to the industry. For others, the job is to reaffirm the role of their medium and brand, and explain to innovation-hungry delegates how they can survive. This was the challenge facing major media owners such as Fox, TF1 Publicité, The Guardian, Time Inc and Bloomberg Media.

Proclaiming a continuing “golden age of TV”, Fox International Channels president and chief executive Hernan Lopez argued that television has delivered a “golden goose” for advertisers and offers a superior impact and more powerful emotional connection than online advertising.

TF1 Publicité chairman Laurent-Eric Le Lay was more conciliatory, acknowledging that broadcasters must constantly innovate while staying true to their core values. “Over the past few years TV has been pronounced dead,” said Le Lay. “But I’m not worried – a similar death was forecast for cinema when TV arrived.”

However, he agreed with Lopez that, when it comes to delivering emotion, TV is yet to be surpassed. To complement this advantage, TF1 is investing heavily in the technology side of the business, said Le Lay: “Our job isn’t to promote a great series like House of Cards every year – it’s every day.

“Creativity and innovation make television more impactful every day. We spend over €900m on programmes every year. We are also working hard on technical innovation Guardian in order to be more creative. ‘Big data’ will enable us to quantify the content and help us to sell,” he said.

Shifting sands

If TV companies must adapt to evolving consumer behaviour, then the sands are shifting at an even faster rate for publishers. The Festival’s final panel debate – ‘Have we lost control of our inventory?’ – gathered some of the world’s leading

Guardian’s deputy chief executive David Pemsel, Time Inc UK boss Marcus Rich, Bloomberg EMEA commercial director Matt Teeman and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

For one panellist the pace of change was palpably close – Jimmy Maymann, chief executive of The Huffington Post, took to the stage only an hour after it was announced the title’s owner AOL was to be acquired by US telecoms giant Verizon.

All five were adamant that providers of quality, user-oriented content can thrive, whether nearly 200 years old, like The Guardian, or new to the market. “I’m bullish,” said Maymann. “We are in this big paradigm shift. If you understand and embrace those changes, there is a golden age of content on the other side.”

Pemsel said that, though the “burden of a 194-year-old brand” weighs heavily both editorially and commercially, quality and trust have been instrumental in the title’s international growth. However, for Reddit’s Ohanian, the past can prove a distraction: “Some of these legacy publishers think about all the Pulitzer Prizes they have won, and believe that what mattered more was the brands and not the individuals. The journalists, the individuals, are the ones people care about.

“The brands that assumed their homepage would always be the page people visit are still living in a world where we had limited choice. Your content, whoever you are, competes with a 12-year-old’s photo of a cat.”

Church and state

Time Inc’s Rich said it is far from straight-forward monetising new channels. Take mobile, which accounts for up to 80% of The Guardian’s traffic on some days. “It’s OK to say we’re all learning. Those ad formats can make you weep as they become so intrusive,” said Pemsel.

With consumers increasingly sharing content on social media, the smart approach for publishers is to have the best agreement in place with the platforms to ensure they are not “losing” from a brand and monetisation perspective.

Native advertising similarly offers a myriad of opportunities and challenges. Reflecting on recent scandals at The Daily Telegraph and BuzzFeed over the influence of advertisers, the panellists agreed the industry must maintain a clear separation between editorial and commercial operations.

“If you want to be a trusted source then you need church and state,” argued Maymann. “You can’t have editors writing for advertisers, and at the same time criticising them. The Chinese wall is important.” Bloomberg’s Teeman added: “The audience isn’t stupid… you will lose all that trust you have built up.”

Change may be the key theme for digitally aware publishers but, as remarked by Ohanian, anyone abandoning a focus on quality will have a “really not pleasant time” over the next decade. Innovate in the right way, or die, it would seem.

THE FUTURE OF MEDIA AGENCIES -EMBRACE CHANGE, BE BRAVE TO STAY FIT FOR PURPOSE

Modern media agencies must guide their clients through not only an ever-changing media world, but also an increasingly complex marketing landscape. This means those players that do survive and thrive will be required to reinvent how they work and the solutions they deliver

At this year’s Festival of Media Global in Rome, the world’s leading agency chief executives gathered to discuss how they are attempting to stand out from the crowd.

MediaCom’s Stephen Allan, PHD’s Mike Cooper, Initiative’s Jim Elms, ZenithOptimedia’s John Taylor and Maxus’ Lindsay Pattison all took to the stage to share their views on the hot topic.

“In today’s connected world, we need to look at the interdependent relationships between channels, and how they affect the whole system,” said MediaCom worldwide chairman and chief executive Allan.

“These are really changing times. The dialogue we’ve had in the past 20 years has been a lot about focusing on scale. We ourselves at GroupM have a saying about ‘the intelligent application of scale.’ But I don’t think that’s relevant any more – it’s more about scaling the application of intelligence.”

The bigger picture

There is a growing need to identify and understand connected audiences and consumers across this increasingly fragmented media system, explained Allan.

Clients are demanding a view of the bigger picture to understand what drives their communications.

He explained that MediaCom has stopped calling itself a media agency and has rebranded itself as a “content and connections” business in order to keep up with its clients’ demands.

The company is also repurposing all parts of its business to stay relevant, including the training of staff to understand how each channel impacts the communications system.Last year it teamed up with Google to produce a training programme for the agency’s planners and strategists for all media-centric opportunities, including wearable tech.

Keeping in theme with the idea of change, PHD Worldwide chief executive Cooper brought some strong opinions to the table on how agencies should be adapting: “Traditional media planning is dead – in agencies we need to think like marketing strategists and make full use of assets at our disposal.”

Technology inevitably played a big part in the discussion, with Cooper putting the changing market heavily down to this.

“In order to stay ahead, we need to be at the forefront of tech. We need to be employing people who are at the forefront of tech. We need to be employing people who are creative technologists,” he said.

Media planning “is not dead”, concluded Cooper, but it must “adapt and evolve”.

Be brave

Initiative global chief executive Elms then took the reins during the session by discussing the value of bravery for contemporary agencies, explaining that Initiative got rid of its own tagline and replaced it with a set of principles: to be ‘Fast, Brave, Decisive and Simple.’

“Fast and responsive to the changing world of business,” said Elms. “Brave in tackling serious issues. Decisive with our insights, opinions and recommendations, and committed to making complex marketing simple.”

An unrecognisable industry

In part two of the ‘What does the future media agency look like?’ session, Maxus chief executive Pattison and ZenithOptimedia global chairman Taylor argued that the media agency leader of the future must be collaborative, diverse and able to keep focus on the “big picture” amidst the growing need for specialisation.

Taylor said the industry was “unrecognisable” from his early career, but this was a reason for enthusiasm: “When I started in media, we were buyers, negotiators – described as 19-year-old gorillas with calculators.

“We now have jobs that are unrecognisable. You need to learn really fast. You wake up and you feel like you know less than you did before, but if you have a focus on how it will add value then it’s great. I know people staying in media because it is more interesting than it was before.”

Pattison observed the lack of female leaders taking to the Festival of Media Global stage, and implored the industry to properly embrace diversity, stating: “I may be female, but I’m white, so where is the rest of the diversity?”

She added that, in this increasingly volatile commercial environment, media agency leaders must become “comfortable” with what they do not fully understand and bring together the right team.

“Having a strategic leader in the centre is critical,” said Pattison. “If you have ineffective people, you can have the best technology in the world and your advertising will still be ineffective. I would say surround yourself with the right people. You have to assimilate huge amounts of information in incredibly short spaces of time.”

She added: “The job of a leader is to put together the right team.”

But how do you go about finding the right talent? Pattison says that agencies must give “strategic advice” and that the industry must find those specialists in different places, as well as developing people in the “right way”.

If media agencies want to stay relevant in this ever-changing industry, they must concentrate on repurposing not just some, but all parts of their business, especially when it comes to talent, diversity and technology. .

WHAT COMES NEXT FOR MARKETING – ‘THE SKIN OF A LOBSTER AND THE BRAINS OF A MONKFISH’

As the media industry undergoes a revolution of the like not seen in generations, the challenge facing brand marketers grows ever more complex, and they are under pressure to understand how the future might look for their brands – as well as what they will look like themselves

In the Festival session on location, MasterCard group head of global media Ben Jankowski described the proliferation of mobile devices as “scary”, while TUI Travel general manager of digital marketing Christian Armond confessed: “Life used to be a lot simpler for us.”

But, fortunately for delegates, several speakers attempted to predict what marketing might look like in five or 10 years’ time – and data was at the heart of this vision. In panel debate ‘Mobile and location: The future is local’, GSK global head of digital media Khurram Hamid said he was driven by discovering moments when the consumer can “write you in”.

He described the development of a mobile app for GSK’s toothpaste brand Aquafresh, after identifying the need to entertain children while they brush their teeth, claiming the app helped foster loyalty to the brand. “Marketing is all about moments, and mobile marketing is a totally different way of engaging with the consumer. What are the friction points in the process?” he said.

This desire to identify the opportune moment for brand communications was captured perfectly in another session, ‘Attribution – Saviour or slayer of advertising?’ Experts including James Aitken, co-founder of The Exchange Lab, Seth Richardson, chief technology officer at Rakuten Marketing, and Ed Stevenson, vice-president of sales and customer success at Abakus, lined up to debate the role of attribution in improving marketing effectivenes.

MarketShare executive vice-president Lucien van der Hoeven claimed the days of blithely planning marketing strategies months and years in advance are over. “Your competition is doing different things every day – that is affecting attribution. Also the economy, or even simply the weather, if you are selling ice cream. That is why day-to-day, or even real-time, attribution is vital,” he said.

Moving on from ‘last event’

However, speakers acknowledged that too much digital marketing has focused on ‘last event’ activity, without understanding how brand-led communications can be effectively targeted today.

“You need to challenge your business to think about something other than last event. Bringing creativity and storytelling back is going to be a big part of this, and I do think that attribution will become a standard applied to everything,” commented Rakuten’s Richardson.

One route to creative excellence, according to Affectv founder and chief executive Glen Calvert, is knowing what a consumer is looking for before they know it themselves. It may sound a bit Minority Report, but ‘pre-targeting’ is the way forward.

In the session ‘Pre-targeting, pre-awareness – the dawn of true predictive, personalised marketing’, Calvert said the coming together of disparate client “siloes” such as CRM and eCommerce allows a “single view” of users that can be harnessed to produce tailored messages. “This is a coming together of media optimisation with creative optimisation, combining the ‘who’ and the ‘what’,” he said.

Taking to the stage with TUI Travel’s Armond, Calvert outlined how personalisation can make quick gains with consumers: “If you know a user is heavily into holiday reviews, why aren’t you bringing those reviews into the marketing content? You get broad signals from users that they are looking to travel. If you see any signals around a location, it can be matched instantly to a product. The storytelling potential is exponential.”

The marketer of tomorrow

So what does the new marketer look like? This was the very question debated by RocketFuel Europe managing director Dominic Trigg, Liz Earle head of digital Victor Gibson, and Compare The Market associate director Gareth Jones.

For RocketFuel’s Trigg, the marketer of the future is a “statistician” who understands data and uses it to improve effectiveness. “Marketers have traditionally been creative people, but a whole different breed is coming to the fore,” he added.

Liz Earle’s Gibson was more outlandish: “The new marketer is almost a mythological beast which has to be made of multiple parts to get the job done. They have the thick skin of a lobster, the intelligence of a monkfish. You have to be a T-shaped marketer, with a broad and deep understanding of what you need to get good campaigns running.”

Conversely, Compare The Market’s Jones said he believes we can be blinded by the “white light” of technology, and predicted a rather more old-fashioned vision of the brand marketer

“I’m getting old and increasingly of the view that the successful marketer of yesterday, and some of the principles they subscribed to, will be no different from the principles the marketer of tomorrow will adopt.”

It is unrealistic to expect a “Leonardo da Vinci character” with artistic flair and mathematical genius running brands, said Jones. Instead, the marketer of tomorrow will be adept at identifying “big, bold ideas”.

As speakers debated the future of marketing, one thing was clear: the task for clients is to use the complex technology at their disposal to deliver something utterly straightforward – the right message to the right consumer at the right moment.

Click to Download the Festival of Media Global Interactive Wrap Up Report and Highlights