TV isn’t dead, it’s in its “wisdom era.”
This was the takeaway coming out of OpenAP CMO Brittany Slattery’s candid fireside chat with RPA’s SVP, Executive Director Video Investment & Marketplace Intelligence Lisa Herdman during the OpenAP’s Audience Summit at Cannes Lions. A data-driven approach to multichannel video investment can take a lot of time and learning to scale, but the marketers that lean in reap the benefits. Particularly when it comes to unifying audiences across channels, as RPA has endeavored to do over the last broadcast year with exceptional results to show.
“Now we’ve gotten a taste of it, why would we do it any differently?”
The push towards a more data-driven approach to multichannel video investment is, in part, due to a more prominent presence of brand CFOs in media investment conversations. Agencies now answer to CFOs, and need to have a reason for every dollar spent. The more data that can be used to prove ROI, the better.
One stumbling block for many agencies and advertisers to leaning in on an audience-first approach to video investment? Data fees. For cost-minded advertisers, data fees can quickly get out of hand and become hard to justify to those CFOs in the room, which can and is impacting where dollars are spent. Collaboration with publishers on a common fee or more transparency would go a long way in scaling data-driven video investment, Herdman stated. The “future vision” of data-driven video advertising is great until it costs too much money, Hedman explained, and when it does brands fall back on buying broad demos. We can’t let the costs of progress hold progress back.