No 39 - June 2012

AGM38 - Opening topical panel session

Identifying the winning formula that creates a win-win situation for all partners of the industry

The first day opened with a joint TV and radio session in which senior actors from the industry were asked to react to the equation below and to map out how they envisage their role in the current media landscape, as well as their strategy to face the major challenges brought by digitalisation and fragmentation.

Please log on to REPLAY, to listen to the entire panel discussion. (n.b. videos on Replay will be available from July 9th)
All PowerPoint presentations are available to download on the egtanet.

Laurent Bliaut Deputy General Director Marketing/Study/ Strategy TF1 Publicité

Tomas Bacoccoli Vice Commercial Director MTG Media

Dominic Guba Global Head of Trading MediaCom

Dominique Musset Worldwide Advertising Director Renault

Benoit Cassaigne Executive Director Médiamétrie

Damien Marchi Vice President of Production FremantleMedia

Richard Beattie Vice-President EMEA Vitrue

Laurent's Bliaut's interpretation of the equation:

In his presentation, Laurent highlighted the fact that TF1 is making continuous efforts to measure efficiency, so as to be sure that what TF1 Publicité is doing for its clients enables them to indeed increase their sales. “Having a strong TV brand today is only the tip of the iceberg," he said, "because most brands are not only TV brands but audio-visual brands. Therefore, at TF1 we developed a multi-screen strategy to allow us to maximise all touch points.“

Answering David Brennan’s question about who should lead “the big media orchestra”, he voiced the opinion that the agency must be the conductor but that of course there must be a conversation between agency, advertiser and sales house. “The agency probably does know the brand better than we do. But the media world is so complicated that we, as a sales house, know probably more about the media than the agency”, he concluded.

Other quotes from Laurent :

"We are not able to measure what the benefits of engagement are, but we can measure the fact that some GRPs contributes more or less to your brand equity or your sales. In this contribution, part of the effectiveness is due to engagement but there are also other key elements in the GRP that make them more efficient. However, the currency is really a key issue.

"TF1 Publicité launched not so long ago a new type of GRP, called the GRP PQ (purchases quantities), which does not give a result in percentage of the target you are reaching with a break but the percentage of purchased quantity on your market that this brand is covering. But this is not very much used by agencies, because often agencies are asked to buy cheap net post per point; but we need to point out that there is often a confusion (not always) between cheapness and effectiveness. Sometimes it’s cheap and effective, but that is rare, and sometimes it is indeed expensive and not highly effective. But the rule is still that it gets much more effective when you spend a bit more.

"This ratio often causes trouble for agencies, because (at least in France) their fees are relative to the net cost per point and the way they will be able to reduce it versus the previous year. On the long term this is not a sustainable model. (Maybe in 10 years we will have to pay them money for them to buy a spot on our channels!) The confusion comes from the fact that very often clients talk about 'a good ROI', they actually mean a cheap net GRP. Therefore, the question we have to ask media auditors, advertisers and agencies is how we can really measure ROI. I believe that broadcasters are involved a lot in developing new tools, but it would be better if it was used in the industry."

Dominic Gouba’s interpretation of the equation:

Here are extracts of his presentation, to see the entire speech, please go to REPLAY:

"I was wondering why we need to put these elements into an equation, as it seems more to me that equations are for unanimated things and I believe that we are working in a people’s business, which is more of a complex ecosystem.
But, if for the exercise’s sake we are looking at the equation, we can split it up like this:

TV/radio brands:
I think that there are no specific TV or Radio brands. This is not the way clients look at brands, they do not separate radio, TV or Internet.

Compelling programs and innovation:
Compelling programs and innovation are real challenges. There is an overkill of media supply and innovation is getting rare. There is only so much of your inventory you can be innovative with.

Transparency:
To me, transparency is subdivided in different levels. There is financial or cost transparency but also transparency in data and in the ROI that clients get out of their campaign. And more and more with digitalisation, there is an emergence of transparency in the brand’s safety, which often gets forgotten.

All of this is supposed to bring happy clients:
My remark is that today we are dealing with a great variety of clients, not only with marketing clients but more and more often even with procurement clients, who sometimes see media as a commodity. Therefore there are various interests within a client’s organisation and those interests are often conflicting, whether we like it or not. Marketing clients must drive brand awareness and sales, whereas procurement clients must drive down costs.  “Happiness for all” would require significant and sustained GDP growth, which in Western Europe at least is not currently the case. Yes, in 2011, media expenditures have been growing, but if you look at the long-term trends since 2007, in real terms inflation on an adjusted basis we are not in a growing situation. I think it is wishful thinking to believe that all parties involved can be happy and profitable. It would already be good if we could obtain a stable ecosystem.

Another quote from the discussion: "There is no proper engagement currency/metric in broadcasting currently on the market. For now there is no currency that can divide a premium from a commodity type of exposure."

Dominique Musset - a few extracts from his presentation:

"We are building together a new path for media, with the media agencies and with you. For some countries, this means more TV (Brazil, Russia), for others more digital (Europe) or for others more international (India). Everywhere it is clearly “more engagement” that is needed and this is more and more challenging. We believe that mass media remains key in every media strategy. For instance in Renault worldwide, half of the investments are made in TV. The “desire” that you find in the purchase funnel is clearly being created by the mass media. But of course we need to manage the introduction of digital too and integrate radio, as it remains important for call to action. To touch new multitasking audiences, the media activity in Renault is really seen as a 360° brand story telling approach with four parts: content (stories), context (adapted media plan), connectivity (the will to engage the costumer with the brand and story) and secure continuity and constancy.

"What we expect from our agency are insights, big ideas and creativity and to maximise business results everywhere. We like to act on the idea of “be global on the tools, be local on ideas. [...]

"For us, the formula in the future will be a better global consumer and market insight, for more effective brand storytelling in order to deliver a better performance understanding."

Damien Marchi’s interpretation of the equation:

Here are extracts of his presentation, to see the entire speech, please go to REPLAY:

"It seems to me that we are all trying to solve the equation of engagement. We want to reach the highest possible level of engagement because it’s only once we have reached that level of engagement that we are able to sell this audience on to an advertiser. With this in mind, I think that measuring the size of the audience will not necessarily matter, when actually the engagement will matter.

"New platforms have created as many different types of audiences as there are viewers. We move from mass content to one-to-one content."

People like interacting with a show. By embracing social media we increase our audience retention, and the key is to see if we can transform this into an actual viewer."

"With social media we acquire audiences."

"Clearly, content is still king: the TV content and shows that we produce for you are what people talk about on social media and are at the centre of conversations on social platforms."