LONDON — What do convincing men in India to share laundry duty and selling premium headphones and speakers have in common? To MediaCom, they were opportunities to leverage technology and consumer data to inform both creative executions and content creation for major brands.
In the walkup to the Cannes advertising awards celebration later this month, what excites Deirdre McGlashan, the company’s Global Chief Digital Officer, is what has been “progressively exciting” about Cannes: The intersection of technology and creativity. In an interview with Beet.TV, McGlashan discusses a gender-focused campaign for Ariel laundry detergent and one for Bose that garnered a Bronze Lion in the Media Lions awards category a year ago.
For Procter & Gamble’s Ariel, data from Nielsen indicated that 83% of women in India thought their partner could do more household work. “So that drove a creative execution around the idea of ‘sharing the load,’” Says McGlashan. The brand harnessed everything from laundry IQ quizzes for men to top designer Masaba Gupta explaining how garments can be washed by men or women.
MediaCom used data from Spotify to determine what type of music was popular in countries that were relatively unexpected—like dance hall in Japan, or Indie in Mexico. It teamed up with Vice and Facebook to publish authentic, documentary-style content aimed at Millennials. “The content was created solely through the intersection of data and it fit perfectly with the Bose brand because their brand is about better sound through research,” McGlashan says.
On the content delivery end, “the really exciting part about programmatic” is that it facilitates scalable, personalized story telling, according to McGlashan. By mining signals for audience attributes and behavior, augmented by such external data as weather or current events, brands can “better deliver a story either through dynamic creative or multiple variations of creative,” she says.
McGlashan assumes virtual reality will be a hot topic at Cannes “because it was super hot” at CES and Mobile World Congress. “Hopefully we are going to see some really great leading-edge work or potential for some new work when we look at what the vendors are bringing to bat,” she says.
This interview was taped in London as part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
