The media landscape is evolving at breakneck speed so is the relationship been a consumer and an advertiser. In this dynamic environment how has the role of strategic planning changed. Mark Sinnock, global chief strategy, data and innovation officer, Havas Creative speaking about how a strategy guy go about planning in this ever changing world and what is his view on short term ticket vs long term equity building for brands. This an TV exclusive interview for Storyboard18.
How has the relationship between the advertiser and consumer changed?
In one sense it hasn’t changed at all. People still want brands, they still need brands in their life to help them assist them and empower them. But what we think has changed significantly is how brands connect with the head and the heart of the consumer. That journey has become far more complicated. More channels, more segmentation or fragmentation in terms of the audiences-so the choices that CMOs now need to make is far more complex. There is a huge amount of decisions that people need to make now, they need better advice and better data. In some senses it hasn’t changed at all in other senses it is increasingly more complex. And our role as agencies is to assist them to do right thing at a right time.
Brands are on top of ‘purpose’ when it comes to advertising but your ‘Meaningful Brand Study’ says that consumers don’t care. Consumers are in fact tired of brands pretending that they want to help society when they just want to make money. But on the other hand just speaking about the product and its features is considered as too shallow. What kind of advertising is successful?
I think we used to ask simple questions of brands, we wanted the product to be good, we wanted the product to talk about benefits and how it is changing our lives. In recent times, businesses have started to use brands to talk about more complex and more nuanced subjects such as their role in environment, such as sustainability. Whilst all of these are important, our study shows that consumers are disconnected with the promises they make and the reality that they are living in their lives today. So what our study is showing that consumers are calling it out. They are saying ‘you can’t say that you are making the world a better place while I am experiencing exactly the opposite. What I need you to do is focus your purpose on me. I need your purpose to be much more personal and much more consumer centric. There are actually two types of purpose. There is a business purpose and the business purpose should be ethical, sustainability, caring about the environment, social justice issues, diversity.
Are saying consumers don’t care about this?
Consumers care that it exists but they don’t want it to be advertised to them. What they want to be talked to is the brand purpose. They want their brands to entertain them, to bring them joy, to enhance their lives and shape their lives in some shape or form.
How has the role of strategy changed in today’s time and today’s agency set up?
Strategy used to be sitting out in a research function, learning about the consumer or sitting next to the creative trying to interpret the findings and trying to inspire them. Now strategy sits with both research and insight, data driven analytics, we look at measurement frameworks we look at AI and the role of AI in markets, etc. what we see is that strategy broadening its territory. We spoke about complexity and one of the key role of strategy is to simplify the customer journey.
Strategy was also considered as consumer’s voice at the table, does that continue?
Yes, of course. The essense of strategy is always what is the consumer’s perspective on a brand. What we also look at what is called the meaningful difference. What we need to look at is the difference between audiences that love your brand and audiences that don’t, and what we try to find out is why is that happening. We find out about the dynamics of specific audiences and specific people and draw conclusions from that.
How is the emphasis from brands and CMOs on ROI and data, changing your role or the way you approach your work? And what is your view on short term ticket vs long term equity?
I think you need to play with both. I think long term investment in brand and there are so many good papers that have written about the power of longer term brand investment. But long term brand investment needs tactical activation. So need to give the audiences the way and means to access your services as and when they require. So long term and short term operate in the same sphere. I think when we speak about CMOs they are looking at both effectiveness and efficiency. So we are trying to help them understand what are and where are the co-relations in the attribution from their activities that resulted into an ROI and they can be causal or correlative which have happened because of these specific factors or data that we have unlocked. Those are the key component parts. CMOs are also trying to understand how to drive greater efficiency and effectiveness through the choices around new channels, new activities and new platforms.
How do we test and learn, how do we innovate on behalf of our CMO’s all of this becomes a really critical part of the journey and the job that we do for them. They need to understand how do they build the choice architecture for their brand owners and we really start to think about what are the right places to play. They can’t be everywhere, they have a limited budget, we need to think and pick the right things for them.
There is a rise in creative strategists. Fancy designations given in the name of strategy, does it devalue the function?
I don’t think so. I would never deny someone the opportunity to give the designation that best fits themselves. In our head strategy has a very strong remit across a number of different aspects of business. In some respect we talk about data strategy and data analytics.
And you choose to follow this?
100%. So strategy sits across the entire realm. Calling someone a ‘creative strategist’ I think for some agencies they would do that. I guess it means the creative way in which they articulate their strategy…
All strategy is creative at some level, so that is almost a prerequisite of the staretgy. We went through a phase of calling everyone ‘digital this’ and ‘digital that’ but then when digital became everything we are falling back to more broad titles which are more useful to us.