CANNES – While L’Oreal USA’s Nadine Karp McHugh is happy to hear lots of conversations by television networks about how to improve the viewer advertising experience, she’d like to hear more marketer voices giving their input. “I think that’s really important to solve for. But they should start with not only the consumers but also their customers, which are the marketers,” says McHugh, who is SVP, Omni Media.
“There are a lot of us that are hungry for different solutions to get it right with how we need to go to market,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “We value the consumer experience. We value our relationship with the consumer more than anything.”
Companies like L’Oreal want to “get it right moving forward,” including messaging and creating meaningful engagements with consumers, according to McHugh, who believes “there’s great learning” that can emerge from working together.
“I think that we need to be part of the piping part, not just the ‘here, we’ve got a solution for you. Isn’t it great?’ And it works for the networks and maybe it’s not so great for how we would want to go to market. I think that is huge and I think we’ll get there together.”
What she’s seeking is a true partnership with the sell-side in a test-and-learn-together mode. “We rely very heavily on our agencies and they should absolutely be at the table as well, but marketers need to more and more be at the table and we’re hungry for that.”
At last year’s Cannes Festival, L’Oreal revealed that it would experiment with Google Labs on six-second creative spots. As BusinessInsider reports, the companies would work together to examine data on what people are engaging with on YouTube so that L’Oreal could produce timely, six-second ads running prior to content on the video platform.
“We also do tutorials that run much longer,” says McHugh. “It should be about the consumer experience and what they’re looking for and the value exchange between the messaging and what you’re providing and whether or not it’s valuable to the consumer.”
While 30-second ads play a certain role, “it’s certainly not the be all and end all and we need to test and learn our way into the future.”
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.
