Managing Media in the Age of Complexity

The following is republished with the permission of the Association of National Advertisers. Find this and similar articles on ANA Newsstand.

By Christian Polman

Marketing and media have become complex and messy. Chief marketing officers have to contend with fragmentation, an increasing number of different players providing technology platforms and solutions, and a whole new lexicon of marketing technology terms.

The job of the CMO is surely the most disparate and all-encompassing in the C-suite. There are many different components jostling for limited attention, from creative to data to tech to analytics to customer experience to media. CMOs are at the forefront of digital transformation for brands — often leading the development of new customer experiences — yet they can feel like they’re playing an expensive game of whack-a-mole. Just when they think they’ve dealt with one, another appears.

A recent study from Gartner shows that the CMO’s IT budget is typically on the same scale as that of the average chief information officer. More than 20 percent of all marketing spend now goes toward marketing technology.

Analytics have also come of age. The latest Duke-Fuqua “CMO Survey” reveals that approximately 7 percent of global marketing budgets were dedicated to analytics at the start of 2019, and the number is predicted to rise north of 11 percent within the next three years.

With so many different domains to control and align, CMOs run the risk of being spread too thin. The challenges and complexities that CMOs face are nowhere more acute than in media. These difficulties make it hard to get out of the weeds of diverse issues — from brand safety, viewability, and contract compliance to media efficiency and effectiveness — and see the bigger picture. Pulled in dozens of different directions, by both the big idea and big data, it’s a wonder that marketing leaders are able to focus on media in the context of marketing and overall business goals. And yet it’s only by seeing media in the round that CMOs can make truly informed decisions about media planning, buying, activation, content strategy, and measurement.

In addition, while the media landscape might be messy, there are still some fundamental principles of media management that haven’t changed. These help CMOs to define and design the best operating model for their business, implement a media strategy, and manage their agencies and tech partners, ensuring that the right governance and compliance measures are in place.

The state of the modern media ecosystem means that CMOs need a comprehensive framework to master all the interconnected challenges of media — operational, technological, creative, and organizational — as an integrated whole.

To cut through the clutter and hype of the modern media landscape and run media in a way that optimizes return on investment and ensures robust governance, CMOs need to approach media using a structured framework.

One such framework, outlined below, helps CMOs elevate media and marketing to the C‑suite, enabling them to maximize their ROI at three levels:
 
Level 1: Define and Design

The first level in managing media effectively requires CMOs to define their overall approach and strategy for media. To do so, CMOs need to navigate through a structured process of introspection and investigation. This helps to determine whether, say, one views media as a driver of consumer behavior (a lever to meet sales goals) or as a strategic tool to change consumer perceptions. In essence, the define phase establishes the role of media as part of marketing and within the business overall.
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With one’s strategy determined, next comes the design phase. Here, CMOs develop the optimal organizational design for making the most of media, both in-house and through agency partnerships. This phase requires specifying which campaign elements of the model a brand needs and which of those elements the brand and partners will undertake by outlining key roles and responsibilities.

As part of the design phase, CMOs need guidance on how to join and hold the different campaign elements together. That guidance should involve bringing together all the different sources of data, intelligence, and insight that inform an advertiser’s media strategy.

CMO benefit: The define and design phase ensures the brand’s media strategy is set up as an effective and efficient strategic lever for growth and profit, focused on overall business contribution. Getting the design right means that a brand’s view of media is no longer seen through the lens of a transactional advertiser-agency relationship.

Level 2: Implement

The second level is all about making campaign activation actually happen, ensuring that the right capabilities are in place right across the value chain, from media insights to outcomes. Identifying and selecting the right partners is a blend of art and science, and this requires knowing who will deliver the intelligence a brand needs to plan, buy, and activate in a way that delivers optimal results.

Finding the right partners also involves getting the right people on board who can help to measure bottom-line business impact in the most efficient way possible. An integral part of success in this stage comes from setting the right measurable objectives for media activity, which should include outcomes and impacts in terms of return on marketing investment, and not simply media outputs or consumer outtakes.

One challenge for advertisers at this stage is to set the right objectives for how campaigns perform on different media. Those objectives need to be specific and challenging. Best practice demands that brands deploy analytics and econometrics to evaluate the hypotheses they test, often in real time. Marketers need to identify, select, and onboard partners to deliver against their media strategy.

CMO benefit: Implementing, onboarding, and embedding both internal and external resources, partners, and technology are complicated, interrelated, and risky. Taking the time and effort to get it right pays dividends in the long term.

Level 3: Manage

Finally, the best laid plans can fail if CMOs don’t put in place the right media governance and compliance processes, checks, and balances. There are new entrants to the digital media ecosystem every month, new ways of working and charging for media buys, and new terminology. Whenever changes are made to the way a brand’s agency and its tech partners transact media, this should be reflected in the contracts that marketers hold with those partners. Contracts and contract compliance deserve particular attention and focus.

At this stage, CMOs should focus attention on media governance, both internally and with external partners. Securing optimal value from agency and ad tech partners is critical, and so is getting the balance right between media governance at a global and a local level. CMOs need to balance central command and control with market-level independence, and use the right approach to address issues as diverse as data, ad verification, content strategy, measurement, and evaluation.

CMO benefit: Getting media governance right ensures that all elements are constantly tuned to deliver maximum impact and value as the media landscape changes. It also guarantees that the right checks and balances are in place to keep media investment and all partners aligned with a brand’s business objectives.

About Author
Christian Polman (@cpolman) is the chief strategy officer at Ebiquity, a partner in the ANA Thought Leadership Program.