ORLANDO — Bank Of America is switching more advertising investment back to traditional channels and away from “walled-garden” digital environments, as it grows concerned about the inability to measure and capitalise on the big digital opportunities.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, BoA SVP for customer engagement and investment officer Lou Paskalis explains the change the company has made.
“We have taken a hard look at how our investment lays out,” Paskalis says. “We have engineered a return to a little bit more reliance on traditional.
We are in a lifelong relationship with our customers, and we have many more touchpoints in the digital world than we do in other forms of media, so we are never going to move away from it.
“But, as walled gardens become more and more central in people’s lives, we are going to have make choices between going where the audience is, and doing things that are really accountable toward our investment, and for our shareholders.”
In the last year, advertisers and publishers alike have grown concerned about the dominance of two internet’s two biggest platforms, and the way that some ad-tech vendors withhold vital data for campaign assessment.
At the ANA Masters Of Marketing event, P&G chief marketer Marc Pritchard, who arguably kick-started advertisers’ fight-back in a seminal speech in January, spoke about providing consumers with more useful, valuable ad messages.
And Paskalis explained the rationale behind Bank Of America’s strategy shift.
“As a lifelong media person, we have principles that we actually live by -,” he said
- “Go where your audience is.”
- “Don’t expect what you don’t inspect”
“If I lived by just those two principles, I would be in massive conflict right now, because the audience is clearly on these walled garden platforms like Facebook and Google, but I’m not in a clean, well-lit (advertising) environment.
“I am not able to really see if the media is performing the way that I need to understand it. I am not able to understand those data signals that are coming off, so that I can curate more relevant experiences, not just within the confines of Facebook and Google, but across the digital world.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
