CANNES — In an age when clients demand hard business outcomes from their ad spending, it is incumbent on agencies to harness the right data for optimizing and restructuring media buys.
But that is a challenge which relies on having the right data relationships in place throughout the process, as well as deploying the latest AI algorithms.
“Our clients are expecting business results, and as an agency partner, we have to have the right data in order to determine how well the media is working,” says Mike Bregman, Chief Activation Officer at Havas Media Network, in this video interview with Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein.
Data Supply Chain
That is why Havas Media Network has spent the last couple of years building Converged, a platform which harmonizes identity for users from research to purchase to loyalty.
The platform ingests data from more than 500 partners. “Sometimes those are in-market signals, as in how well did the media perform to drive a sale of a product,” Bregman says. “Sometimes it’s more how well did the user click? How well did they visit a website?”
Specifically, Havas built Havas ID, which Bregman calls “an integrated framework that allows us to determine exactly who the consumer is or user is that’s activated within a specific media platform”.
Clean Room ‘Gold Mines’
Clean rooms, the technology which allows media buyers and media owners to match their consumer data without directly sharing it, are also proving invaluable.
“In data science, in analytics, they’re the secret,” Bregman enthuses. “They’re the gold mine. That’s the laboratory that we can actually go into and slice and dice the data in a way that we can discover how to create treatments and how to create experiments.”
Bregman is particularly excited that “the really interesting transformation of the clean room is becoming, is more of an AI clean room”: “That’s where you can design different types of hierarchies of experimentation.”
AI Algorithms
In fact, the Havas man sees artificial intelligence more broadly accelerating the media buying process.
“I think the algorithms are starting to give us more of the insights to make the process smarter and faster,” he says. “There’s a lot of an inefficiency in how we buy media today. There’s still a trader that has to go in, look at the data process, the data push the go button.
“What we’re trying to do in our Converged platform and really across our entire programmatic media buying, addressable media buying practice, is to have AI built in that does those processes and steps automatically. The faster the processes can go, the faster the system can learn.”
