By Michael Bürgi and Marty Swant • October 16, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Media Buying Summit. More from the series →
The Fall 2024 Digiday Media Buying Summit kicked off on Tuesday in Palm Springs, Calif., with a leading independent media agency CEO heralding the need for reintegration across many facets of the industry, followed by some guidance on how to better understand CMOs, to a serious discussion on the challenges for advertisers during these last three weeks before the most important presidential election of our lifetime.
The fact is, reintegration is happening across so many parts of the industry, as media options proliferate and creative abilities enable the matching of more personalized content to those options. But re-integration also comes in the form of brand and performance media working more effectively together rather than separately.
In an opening keynote conversation, Kamran Asghar, CEO and co-founder of independent media agency Crossmedia, pointed out that media and creative were separated in the first place for the wrong reasons — financial motivation in the face of diminishing commissions from clients. Although he agrees media agencies should be allowed to make a profit, it needs to happen transparently — not through opaque tactics like principal-based buying.
“There’s nothing wrong with an agency making money. What needs to be scrutinized is the business models that are behind that,” said Asghar. “When the economics drive your business toward favorable positions in the marketplace, that’s where there is a conflict of interest. We say we can’t be both the doctor and the pharmacist.”
All of these changes come in service of helping clients reach their best customers, whoever they may be. But that’s becoming harder not only because of that proliferation of media channels, but due to tensions between clients’ CEOs and their CMOs, the latter who are charged with making their advertising work as effectively as possible.
That’s what John Connors, CEO and co-founder of independent agency Boathouse, found out during the three years his agency spent studying the needs of the CMO to better understand what they need for agencies to help them succeed.
Among other findings, the most recent “CEO Study on Marketing and the CMO” from Boathouse found that a CEO’s trust and shared vision with the CMO has dropped considerably from 2022 to this year. Specifically, where 56% of CEOs used to think the CMO “supports me in driving my long-term vision” in 2022, that number dropped to 31% this year. Likewise, where 32% of CEOs said the CMO “is on my side, I trust them” in 2022, it dropped to 20% this year.
For Connors, those findings can be used in such a way to get CMOs the information and data points he or she needs to align successfully with the CEO — and keep his or her job. By extension, if the media agency is doing their job for the CMO, they’re more likely to keep the client.
A later discussion on day one addressed political advertising, given the presidential election and several important congressional races up in the air. Panelists Erik Huberman, founder and CEO of Hawke Media and Sherine Patrick, media strategy director at Jellyfish, addressed the challenges for agencies to find opportunities when clients want to stay away from political content or advertising.
Huberman said too many decisions by clients around political are emotionally-based, leading them to pause all ads until the elections are over. Adjacency to hard news isn’t as dangerous as conventional wisdom suggests, but it’s the cost of other ad inventory due to the glut of political ads that’s jumped up as much as 30%.
Patrick, who handles a lot of retail clients, noted that it’s not easy talking the client into staying in market during election season. “A retail brand needs to sell product, right? [But] election season is going to cut our retail season by five to seven days,” said Patrick. “We have to stay in market and become more contextually aligned if you’re nervous, or [turn to] custom content because it keeps you in this gated area. But you have to get agile with how you show up.”
One lingering issue with political advertising is the diminished audience and appetite for news and political content, noted Lou Paskalis, chief content officer with Ad Fontes Media, in the final conversation of the day. He noted that 11% of the public identifies as a news junkie, and pointed out just how desirable an audience that is.
“News junkies are the most desirable from a social and economic status,” explained Paskalis. “They take vacations abroad. They have multiple degrees. They have more they have a higher propensity of multiple graduate degrees in a household. They use iPhones. They drive foreign luxury cars that are less than two years old. And yet we backed away from that.”
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