For Neil Vendetti, president of investment at Zenith Media, solving for fragmentation in TV and video advertising will be the focus of the industry in the years ahead.
Talking to Jon Watts, the co-founder and managing partner of MTM London at the Beet Retreat, a half-day Beet.TV event in New York hosted by Publicis Media, Vendetti says that while the TV industry has changed largely for the better over the last 10 years, it’s also become more challenging for advertising agencies to find and understand audiences.
“Our goal is to reach the right person with the right message at the right moment, and the fragmentation and diversification of television and video overall makes that a bigger challenge,” says Vendetti. But, the opportunity there is worth investing the time and money required to solve the fragmentation problem. “The ability to serve ads through digital platforms and personalize ads gives us the opportunity to be really effective.”
Zenith’s main goal is to drive value for clients as an agency, by helping them figure out where to invest their marketing dollars, drive business results and develop a process to be able to prove out what’s working and what’s not. But that’s the most difficult part right now, according to Vendetti. For instance, if Zenith guides clients to invest 60% of their marketing budget in linear TV, 30% of it in VOD and 10% in FEP, it’s hard to prove to clients that each investment had incremental impact on the bottom line. While linear TV still has the same benefit for advertisers that it always has – mass reach – being able to capitalize on that as well as more targeted, personalized mediums at the same time is difficult because of how quickly the industry has changed in some ways, and how little it’s changed in others.
Like Zenith Media’s evp of national video activation, Nicholas Hartofilis, also told Beet.TV, finding a solution is going to require a consolidated effort from the industry as a whole.
“Our systems have not evolved quickly enough to keep up with the way consumers are accessing content, and the way we need to be nimble and flexible for clients, so that friction is real,” says Vendetti. “It will take the entire industry coming together and figuring out better ways in order to reduce it. It needs to be prioritized.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted by Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
