With digital technology helping to advance the goal of more precisely targeted television ads, the traditional marketing mix of art and science has become more balanced with regard to the scientific element.
For Yin Woon Rani, VP of U.S. Marketing for Campbell’s, the advent of digital advertising has raised marketers’ expectations of what is measurable, what is possible and what is accountable. She believes that TV in particular is becoming more like digital, as more data-targeting solutions become available, because like digital TV can now do more than just one thing.
“I can still buy big mass reach as I always have, but when necessary I can add addressable, I can add regional, I can add agility,” Rani says during an interview with Beet.TV at the 2016 PeopleFront event conducted by Simulmedia. Technological changes and the data those changes produce are “forcing you to be more thoughtful and more strategic about the role of TV.”
This requires a balance of addressable TV ads and traditional broad-reach campaigns. “It’s always about fitting the tool to the task,” Rani says, “when you have big businesses and big audiences and multiple challenges.”
Like all marketing executives, Rani is mindful of the desire to bring attribution between advertising spend and sales results to ever more granular levels. Prior to Campbell’s, she worked at advertising and media agencies like Grey and Universal McCann.
“I think for us, attribution is just having a better sense that the right message is reaching the right person and getting that person down to maybe the smallest unit feasible,” Rani says. The current environment is yet another iteration of progress on proving return on investment on media spending.
“I think it’s all the messy middle and maybe at the end we’re going to realize it’s not going to be one to be one measurement answer but rather a combination of data points. Marketers have to use judgment and expertise.”
We interviewed her in New York at the Simulmedia PeopleFront conference where she was a speaker. Please find more video interviews from the PeopleFront event right here.
