The increased fragmentation of the media marketplace gives advertisers more ways to reach target audiences, though it also brings more complexity. Advertising technology is evolving to help marketers navigate the landscape amid significant shifts in media consumption habits.
“Media has become more complicated as we’ve seen more fragmentation, the shift to digital and the shift to mobile media consumption,” Ron Amram, senior director of global media at Mars, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The ROIs and effectiveness of media are more volatile than anything that we’ve seen.”
Stricter privacy laws and the eroding support for tracking cookies in web browsers add to the challenges in measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns. In some cases, market mix modeling (MMM) and 360-degree have complemented strategies to improve predictions of results.
“We’ve shifted to modeling to do what we may have outsourced or used cookie data for in the past to fill the gap,” Amram said.
‘Laying Models on Top of Models’
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze vast troves of data and help with decision-making are gaining prominence amid the more complex media market. The technology can provide insights to optimize ad creative and media investments as consumer habits change.
“What we’re finding is there’s not one model. We’re laying models on top of models to try and find the best course forward,” Amram said. “You used to hear about things like weather prediction – now, we’re applying that same science to marketing.”
OOH Resurgence
As more consumers resume their former habits of commuting to work, going to restaurants or traveling by plane, out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is showing signs of bouncing back. Mars is weighing the opportunities to raise visibility in those channels, depending on the signals it receives from consumers.
“If you can optimize quickly, and digital out-of-home placement allows you to do that, then you’ll start to see us using it more,” Amram said.
Mars also is looking at the opportunities in addressable advertising to personalize its messaging, whether it’s promoting its chocolate brands like M&M’s or pet-food products like Iams.
“It depends on the category, it depends on the product, and the amount of personalization and customization,” Amram said. “For us, addressable is a broad category of different content and for different media types.”
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