MIAMI-When Cambell Soup Company put its huge creative and media account into review last year, it didn’t seek the usual “spec creative” from contenders. Unlike when the company hired BBDO back in 1954, Campbell was looking for a partner to help it navigate “the pace and complexity of change.”
Last month, Publicis Groupe was awarded Campbell’s U.S. retail work, Canadian and Asia-Pacific creative, along with its digital, technology and consumer promotion business plus media planning and buying globally, as Advertising Age reports. “It was not about spec creative,” says Yin Woon Rani, VP, Integrated Marketing at Campbell. “We didn’t ask for any creative work. It was really about who can help us harness data, turn it into creative insights and deliver it with craft.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, Rani explains the benefits and challenges that “giant lakes of data” pose for multi-brand, packaged-goods marketers and how they must balance broad reach with granular targeting.
“I think the biggest hallmark of the marketplace today is the pace and complexity of change,” says Rani. “So I think most marketers are looking for true partners that can help marketers navigate that change, not be fighting it anymore.”
Campbell was looking for “the right operating model to help us compete in the future,” she adds.
CPG brands don’t always have first-party transaction data to inform their strategies, so Campbell sought to become more thoughtful about how it partners with existing data and retail partners and how it uses proxy data. To Rani, the most important thing was to be “clear about what decisions we’re driving to, not just gathering all data in the world in these giant lakes and then sort of like fishing basically, which is what sometimes the industry I think is a bit guilty of.”
When you have a portfolio of brands, you have a portfolio of audiences, according to Rani. “And frankly, in many ways we know television is still the most efficient way” of achieving brand objectives. In addition, “equally legitimately, there’s a role for much more targeted either by audiences, by product or within a big product.”
So Campbell doesn’t see mass and targeted as an either/or choice. “We see it as kind of an and proposition, based again on business goals.”
The company’s media plans “have tilted very heavily to video across screens,” says Rani, who welcomes the advancements being made in television targeting. “We’re excited to see it essentially catch up to the digital world, hopefully with less of some of the digital ecosystem issues that we’ve seen along the way.”
In the “battle for attention,” Campbell like other marketers experiments with “lots of different” copy lengths.
“We don’t over rely frankly, on the traditional thirty-second thing as our starting place. We start with what’s the most important part of the plan. The thirty-second commercial has a role, but it’s not always the most important part of every plan anymore.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
