CANNES—Wavemaker’s US CEO, Amanda Richman, assumed her position in the fall of 2017 to help launch what was then GroupM’s newest agency. In this interview with Beet.TV at the 2019 Cannes Lions, she discusses how outcomes and values have risen in importance for marketers and why direct-to-consumer brands are leaning into traditional media. A condensed version of her comments follows.
How marketers engage with agencies:
“The needs of how clients engage with media agencies has started to really shift from the sense of how do we buy media more efficiently and how do we connect with the consumers but how do we act as their guide to finding the next opportunity for growth.”
From impressions to outcomes:
“Just measuring the fact that the impression was delivered is where we used to work in the space. Today it’s all focused on outcomes. So yes, there’s an expectation of how we report on delivery of media, but then how are we delivering the experience, how is that driving through to sales, how are all the channels working collectively together, what are the forms of content people are engaged with, how can we serve up more of that with sequential messaging so that we’re bringing them through the entire purchase journey and not just building brand bias but building it all the way into sales and loyalty.”
Why values matter to brands:
“Brands are shifting really from the sense of a campaign around change into how do we think about our values as an organization, how do we think about representing those values in the culture of our organization, do our partners reflect that and how collectively can we actually bring that into culture and better reflect the diverse culture in particular.”
On direct-to-consumer brands:
“They’re leaning into traditional media because they realize actually once they’ve gone through their own in-housing with search, with social, with display, with programmatic and have flooded enough of those channels and have enough performance driven from that they realize that next customer needs to come through other ways and other channels. And so they’re leaning in and helping to reinvent digital out of home, as they’re leaning into television and understanding how to bring data and actually make that more of a relevant experience as well. They’re leaning into print they’re leaning into all the channels that used to be seen as maybe not digital enough but through the last years as they have reinvented, as they have shown how they can drive outcomes, they’re driving some performance for DTC brands.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
