Articles - Marketing Strategy - December 18, 2019

Media and advertising 2020: strategies for success // Part 1

Sayyam Hafeez December 18, 2019

0 495 8 min read

Experts from across the media and advertising sectors reveal their blueprints for a prosperous year ahead. Read part two here.

Check the facts and act on them

Lindsey Clay, CEO, Thinkbox

We have just emerged, wincing, from the most disheartening and cynical election campaign since the last one.

The winners were found to have lied in 88% of their Facebook ads, according to The Coalition for Reform in Political Advertising. If that doesn’t make your skin curdle – both at the fact that it was deliberate and that it is allowed by Facebook – then, well…

But, as in life, so in our industry. We suffer with our own fake news issues, with nonsense waved through and regurgitated. And we often suffer from cynicism about actual, verifiable facts. So my advice for next year is to supercharge our healthy, informed scepticism, to rightly scrutinise the veracity of every claim, and to banish scepticism’s lazy cousin, cynicism.

That way we won’t have to endure debates on Twitter such as the one between Mark Ritson and the chap who claimed that IPA research – some of the finest we have – cannot be trusted because the IPA receives sponsorship for its research (from companies including Google and Thinkbox).

It is obviously not in the IPA’s interest to allow sponsors to fiddle with results. But Ritson’s determined interlocutor was having none of it. Default cynicism because of the association. This taints.

So, please let’s dissect but not dismiss out of hand. Check the facts and act on them. And hold those to account who are playing fast and loose. It’s the best strategy for improving our industry and its results.

Integrate

Danny Donovan, UK CEO at MullenLowe Mediahub

It might seem obvious but growing a tree isn’t the same thing as picking apples, and unless you do both you won’t have any apples next year.

Growing and cultivating a tree takes time and more skill than just digging a hole and planting it. Picking apples must be perfectly timed and involves more skill than just shaking a tree and catching what falls out.

Apple growers everywhere seem to have figured this out, but remarkably in marketing we generally haven’t. Google “brand strategy”, and once you get beyond the ads for companies you’ve never heard of (ironic), you’ll largely see the words “long-term”, reflecting many brand strategists’ obsession with ignoring the need to also actually change behaviour now.

End to end thinking and a healthy obsession with the business outcome required still seems to be a rarity. Yet there are rich pickings for those brands who embrace integration. Siloed marketing organisations and agency structures are usually blamed, but they are just a symptom of the siloed thinking which also pervades marketing. Every brand owner needs more integration from their marketing services suppliers.

So 2020 will be the year of integrated thinking and integrated agencies. But I would say that wouldn’t I.

How do you like them apples!?

Content without borders

Dan Dawson, chief creative officer, Grand Visual

Digital OOH is no longer a medium to itself, or a bolt on at the end of the chain. It has converged with other media spaces and is becoming an intrinsic part of a media plan, and an important conduit for driving content to other channels, and helping to tell a brand’s story across the wider media sphere.

As well as playing its part in holistic, omnichannel, digital-first campaigns, evolving ad tech is also enabling DOOH to be booked, managed, and delivered seamlessly, at a global scale. Entertainment clients in particular have long been at the helm of multi-territory DOOH campaigns, and this year we broke our own personal best producing and delivering DOOH copy for a theatrical release that went out across 70 global markets.

So our vision for a smart 2020 is to continue this consolidated creative focus for the entire international OOH market. Making the best use of OOH media by offering the right creative solutions for the right client, audience, format, mindset – across territories.

We’ll continue to embed Digital OOH as an intrinsic digital layer in campaigns, a central part of the conversation, driving fan engagements, as well as delivering engagement across UGC, social, and mobile.

The future is about producing content without borders, for campaigns that are reactive, intelligent and smarter as standard, that deliver brand stories at scale, or to quote a line from Good Omens: “To the World. To the Woooorld.”