CANNES – Like many industry executives, Amanda Richman applauds the “shared sense of purpose” among parties looking to advance measurement capabilities and experiment with new ad formats instead of “letting those conversations sit at a committee level.”
When she eyes the video landscape, Richman sees it evolving toward the opportunity for more precision targeting without taking away from the scale “that all the big players and certainly the television networks bring to the party.
“So it’s starting to shift from the conversations that used to happen that really separated the two worlds of digital and linear,” the U.S. CEO of the agency Wavemaker adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Guided by data and a better understanding of where audiences are and how they’re consuming video, Wavemaker’s focus on the purchase journey and where people are consuming video within the journey “creates just much more fluidity in how we can think about budgets, how we think about planning and connecting at the right time.”
These insights also fuel conversations with creative agencies “to make sure it’s not just about where we’re connecting with the consumer, but what’s the right messaging that’s really going to draw them in.”
Looking at learnings from, say, feed consumption of video or OTT viewing can be scaled across other platforms and “it gets much more interesting from a sense of how do you plan for that engagement and plan the right message,” Richman says.
Asked about Wavemaker’s interactions with creative agencies, she says the main goal is to get insights faster and integrate them into story and message development. “That is fueled by often the media agency’s data inputs and for Wavemaker, it’s thinking through momentum and our purchase journey understanding and the database of data points that we have that can then fuel more insights into how to connect and what message to deliver.”
Providing its data assets to a creative agency “gives them a deeper understanding of the consumer than they might have typically gotten on a brief from a client and that’s where the magic starts to happen.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
