LONDON – The growing number of media channels, especially over-the-top platforms that are gaining viewers, has helped to drive demand for data about media spending. Meanwhile, more advertisers are buying media through programmatic platforms despite concerns about transparency.
“The biggest challenge is the rapid morphing of all media into the programmatic ecosystem, whether it’s traditional broadcast, print or out-of-home,” Nicolas Grand, senior vice president of transformation, global investment at Omnicom Media Group, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s very important, and sometimes challenging, to attribute all the dollars from the media vendor to the right media channels in order to properly understand the demand in market, and the shifts in spend by media type.”
Adding to that complexity are regional differences in the way media spending is recorded. Omnicom works with Standard Media Index (SMI) to gain greater insights into media spending patterns across geographies and media channels.
“What makes SMI really unique, in my view, is that they’re using real media spend, not reporting estimates or forecasts,” Grand said. “We often have to deal with fragmented and localized legacy booking systems or reporting tools. SMI really helps us bring this consistency that we need in reporting data and media spend across all geographies.”
Advanced TV Landscape
The insights include breakdowns on media spending by industry category, without revealing the spending by an individual advertiser or agency. The SMI data feed into Omnicom’s Fast Start dashboard, its client-facing analytics platform that was started last year as the pandemic disrupted media plans.
“The data that SMI provides inform some of our planning and media investment decisions,” Grand said. “It helps to understand the evolution of the advanced TV landscape, and where money is being invested by platform.”
Omnicom aims to offer greater peace of mind to advertisers by ensuring their spending data are not shared with competitors.
“We always look for data and tech partners share our uncompromising approach to data safety and to client confidentiality,” Grand said. “Any data that leave our Omnicom server and gets pushed to SMI has already been anonymized and aggregated by our agencies. There’s no possibility for SMI to identify individual advertisers or individual agencies within our network.”
You are watching “Seeing Around Corners: Media Decisions During a Period of Disruption,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Standard Media Index. For more videos, please visit this page.
