Shift is happening, and for those who want to catch their breath after a shaky few years, think again. Captify Australia’s managing director Krish Raja hosted a panel discussion featuring PHD’s Simon Lawson, iProspect’s Marcelle Gomez and ex-Googler Paulo Maranhao (pictured above).
It’s clear that those who are worried about the current pace of change risk being left seriously behind over the coming two years. This isn’t sensationalist, this is just a hard truth. Aussie media is undergoing redesigns to deals, channels, formats & privacy all in one go. And we didn’t even mention AI. Shift is about to reach breakneck speed.
With an esteemed panel of leaders including the Managing Directors of iProspect, and PHD alongside the former head of Google ANZ platforms, ‘Shift’ was the theme of the moment at this year’s Cannes in Cairns event, and no punches were pulled!
A shift in commercials
PHD’s MD Simon Lawson commented: “The traditional media model is breaking quite significantly. There are clients walking away from all forms of mass media to move spend through [more targeted] digital channels. A couple of years ago you would not have seen a large brand do that.”
The agencies are unanimous: “The next two to three years will see the most substantial shifts in media/agency/client relationships.” A prevailing thought throughout the event, echoing many other panels throughout the week, questioned the viability of the classic media trading deal that has underpinned our media buying decisions for years.
A shift in accountability
On a third-party cookieless world, Lawson notes: “I think many marketers don’t realise with cookieless that you can gain a competitive advantage if you go early.”
Captify’s Krish Raja observed that: “some do [go early], but some still hoard cookies like they’re loo rolls in a pandemic, because they might go out of stock. It seems the bar isn’t too high to get ahead!”
Lawson thinks getting ahead is to do with accountability, noting “most clients don’t have a market mix model in place yet. Until we see more mass adoption of modelling of actual business outcomes, people aren’t making evidence-based decisions”. It’s certainly tricky to abide only by attention-level media metrics, which don’t tell you much when you have to do more with less.
Accountability is the forever challenge. Does that mean programmatic is dead? Not at all, says Paulo Maranhao, former head of Google Platforms. “I’m still bullish on programmatic. The makeup will change. We’ve all seen [the growth in] CTV, audio and digital OOH. These areas will make up for flatlining search & display [numbers].”
The new era of scalable, high impact, third-party cookie-free programmatic strategies will continue to take spend share from mass media approaches – programmatic just needs to stop being asked the same old irrelevant questions, like how many clicks it drove, perhaps?
A shift in work
Buzzword alert: Enter the dreaded A word. With around 50 per cent of white collar jobs threatening to be displaced by AI, how much should we be talking about it on the daily?
Not for the sake of it, according to Marcelle Gomez, managing director at iProspect: “With regards to AI, I’m sick of hearing it a bit. People drop the acronym like it’s a drinking game. For me it’s a part of our business and has been for ages. [The same principles have] been used in marketing since the fifties and sixties to inform pricing strategies, customer segmentation and more. New tech tools are part of business as they always are”.
Lawson added “I find it weird that everyone’s using the same AI models though. So if you want to be distinct, it’s hard; we all ask the same questions to the same AI, and we all get the same answers.” It’s ironic that being the same as everyone else goes against the very fabric of what every marketing and advertising agency wants to do for their clients.
It’s a slippery slope, suggests Lawson. “the industry needs to get better at being clear on why for example you shouldn’t really put all media briefs into the same public AI as everyone else does and ask for ideas.” If you want to truly differentiate, then it might not be wise to all ask the same tech the same questions as everyone else.
A shift in publishing
AI is also famously shifting the monetisation model of publishing. As we enter a new age of user journeys through AI tools to purchase decisions, is open web publishing doomed to be a content farm for robots to crawl?
iProspect’s Gomez says: “You do these deals and it gives you a [shot in the arm], a new revenue stream. But at what point do you lose your value in that exchange? When the machines learn enough.” It’s agreed that publishers will need to address that value exchange quickly. Paulo says on this topic “The freshness of data will keep the revenue streams rolling for now, but I don’t think anyone has really thought about what happens five years down the road”. Will it even take that long for the machines to learn ‘enough’?
A shift in media buying
To round out, we looked at the next big media sales shift. TV selling looks like the one in the jaws of AI and programmatic. With the rising number of walled gardens and potentially 20+ individual sales teams selling direct inventory packages, it is hard to imagine agencies being able to keep up – nor marketers gaining a lot of value from buying in such a way. Is that the welcome sign for Programmatic TV marketplaces? “Scale needs to be there to support disruption”, concludes Simon.
It’s clear that Shift is Happening everywhere, and about to gather even more speed. It’ll no doubt cause industry displacement, but the prevailing sentiment is that if we help one another adapt quickly, co-learn and face the Shifts head on, we’ll acclimatise and thrive – as we do every time we face a new Shift.
Krish Raja is Australia’s managing director of the search intelligence platform, Captify. You can check him out on LinkedIn.
