MIAMI – The year 2018 and, in particular, the Upfront television market will see a “tipping point” in achieving greater audience targeting precision. This should resonate well with direct-mail catalogers who should be looking beyond the mailbox to the set-top box.
Thus says Tracey Scheppach, the former Publicis executive who spent upward of 15 years charting the future of more one-to-one targeted TV before forming Matter More Media. “At this event, what I have heard over the last three days is lots of talk about collaboration. And that is really encouraging because the infrastructure is getting there,” Scheppach says during a break at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have the tools to make media more efficient, more precise and now it takes the ecosystem to work together.”
One of her business goals is to bring more money to the TV space. She suggests catalogers take a page from marketers that have long known the power of the medium.
“They’re taking a list, they’re sending an asset which happens to be paper and putting it in a mailbox. Here we’re taking a list, we’re taking an asset that happens to be video and putting it into a set-top box or over the top in some IP-delivered way,” Scheppach says.
The 2018 TV Upfront “is going to be I think a watershed moment because the data is available and the programmers are starting to cooperate,” she adds. “We all know that TV works but they’re going to be able to prove it in a way that the Facebooks and Googles have been able to prove it to clients. Now TV is at that place.”
Looking back at the naming of her company just over a year ago, Scheppach recalls a meeting with Maurice Levy and other Publicis executives in which she presented “the future of addressable and data-driven television and what creatively Publicis needed to do.” When she made “waste less” one of her talking points, Levy chided her by advising “don’t ever say waste. That makes our clients feel like we were wasting their investment before.”
So she tried to make a positive out of it with Matter More. “We’re moving to a more precise one-to-one conversation that’s a progression. That’s the more part. You can’t just matter now. The world didn’t just change over night. It’s a progression to be able to matter more,” says Scheppach.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
