Event report: Real time advertising and brands

Following an ISBA and MediaTel debate involving 50 advertisers about real time advertising, Brian Jacobs, founder of BJ&A Ltd, gives us his top four take-outs that every agency should take note of.

Last Friday I took part in an ISBA event: ‘Real Time Advertising in a Data Driven World‘ hosted by MediaTel. This took place under Chatham House Rule, which means that what follows cannot go into too much detail on what was said and by whom, but certain broad themes emerged that are well worth noting.

1. The event was well attended by an audience made up entirely of advertisers. In the past I’ve been critical of events in which the speakers spend the whole agenda talking to themselves.

The media industry is good (or bad) at this; and ad tech businesses are amongst the worst offenders, with panels of specialists talking to other specialists about a specialist topic of no possible interest to anyone else.

This wouldn’t be so bad if these events weren’t billed as being for ‘advertisers’ or ‘agency CEOs’ who then don’t think it’s worth their while turning up (presumably because they’ve been caught like this before).

This was emphatically not one of those. The speakers were specialists (and me); the audience were advertisers keen to learn and to share their experiences with their peers from other organisations. The mood was refreshingly open and honest, too.

2. It was clear that advertisers are concerned about some of the well-discussed trends in the business – including who owns what data, and trading transparency. Concerned enough to show up and to take part in some lively discussion. It would be quite wrong to assume that there’s no interest and no concern.

3. There has always been a danger of placing media forms into self-contained silos. This is nothing new; people selling TV airtime spend very little time thinking about anything except TV, and so on. Agencies of course do this too up to a point, but the planners have to look across channels and communication forms.

Advertisers need to be a bit wary of not falling in to the silo trap. Certainly the sheer scale, and the potential insights thrown up by online data and available through the various businesses adept at collecting and analysing it has changed the nature of many markets.

But it is still the case that even for data-driven digital businesses, media like TV still has a huge role to play.

It would be wrong to separate these two things, to ignore questions like how many visitors to a website find their way there as a result of activity in another medium; and what role is played by which medium in driving visitors and indeed sales.

There is a mass of data and experience of what works and how, in what digital people rather condescendingly refer to as the legacy media; and it would be a shame to ignore it in the mass of the current excitement over CTRs and CPAs.

In a nutshell, combinations of channels almost always work best; advertisers should press for data that helps them decide on the best mix of channels and forms.

4. Finally, I suspect that agency ears were burning on Friday. None were there (this was an advertiser-only event) but it was very clear that the lack of trust that major advertisers currently have with their agency partners is real, and serious. Although it’s also worth noting that the event was mainly about RTA and data and that transparency was a thread that naturally emerged.

Many articles, and blogs (including mine, thanks for asking) have covered this so suffice to say that if I was still doing what I used to do (running media agencies) I would be very concerned at what my digital brethren are doing to the reputation of my broader business.

Furthermore, I would be thinking that no amount of short-term monetary gain can make up for the lack of a long-term, mutually beneficial partnership, and acting accordingly.