Rob Griffin, EVP, Global Head of Digital, Havas Media
Rob Griffin has been at Havas for almost 14 years, and for the last two he’s been in charge of all digital capabilities of the agency’s global media network. That means he’s been on the front lines of the most dramatic change the marketing industry has ever seen.
Marketing got a chance to catch up with Griffin to talk about his recent appearance at IAB Engage 2015 in Toronto. We asked him about his perspective on where media needs to go from here – how marketers can catch consumers’ attention amidst all the noise, and how to make sure your brand isn’t falling behind in the race for digital/social/data/everything.
Marketing: At IAB Engage, you focused a lot on “organic marketing” and the importance of customer experience. Can you share more about your perspective on that?
Griffin: What we’re talking about with organic marketing is focusing on your owned and shared media first and foremost.
The traditional paradigm is paid [versus] owned, shared and earned media. If advertisers are not hitting their business goals, the solution is to buy more media.
On that old model it’s like the client has a leaky bucket. But instead of fixing the leaky bucket, I’m just putting more water on top. If the bucket leaks more, I buy more and cheaper water.
With organic marketing we’re really talking about fixing the bucket first, so we can keep more of the water we put in. [It’s] getting your house in order, if you will; driving more earned media and then using paid to amplify those positive experiences that consumers are sharing.
Can you give an example of a brand that’s using that strategy?
Nike is doing it. They’re selling me on my goal of living a healthier life, by being a better runner. To do that they’re providing me technology and a community. Their wearable tech is collecting a lot of different data – my heart rate, how well I’m running – and outputting it to a community where I can share my run, and I can get tips to run better from friends. I get to be a much better runner. And I buy more Nike products along the way.
With their paid media, they take it a step further. They’re less reliant on the big Super Bowl spot than they used to be. When you do see them advertising, it’s much more contextually relevant. It’s a soccer ad during the soccer game. And overall, they just seem to be a lot less heavily invested in paid advertising.
Do you think big brands are still focusing on paid media because it’s safe? It seems like if you do something big and innovative, you face a much bigger risk than with a campaign where you put up a bad ad that no one pays attention to.
I remember being in college two decades ago and doing case studies about how nobody got fired for hiring IBM. It’s a lot like that.
If you’re a CMO and you decide you’re going to shake up the media plan and walk away from TV but then sales go down because the economy went flat – you’re going to get scapegoated, right? Whereas if you bought the same media mix and something happened that wasn’t under your control, you’re safe. I’m oversimplifying, but that sort of dynamic is at play.
So innovation has to come in a digestible format. Instead of just walking away from TV, how can I better take advantage of it? Maybe if I have cool music in my ad, they can Shazam the music in the commercial to get entered into a sweepstake or earn a reward. Or if it’s a new brand, I know people are going to go search more because they haven’t heard of it before, so I run a search spot.
Innovation has to be iterative. It’s baby steps, over time.
The same thing is true when clients try to start using big data. You shouldn’t wait for the holy grail big data solution. Don’t wait for the perfect, all-in-one data management platform. Go to a small, isolated business test, one that might improve your call centre’s capability to keep a customer longer, or get that customer that came in on the $19.95 cheapo offer to upgrade to the more expensive premium package.
You keep hearing a lot about the “10% rule” where brands set aside 10% of their media budget for experimentation. Is that something you’re a fan of?
Yeah. It doesn’t necessarily have to be 10% – it can be 5% or 15%, it’s different for everybody. But generally you have 70% making up the core of your campaign and you spend 20% on innovations that you know are probably going to work. Then you have this other 10% that might go into stuff that may or may not see an immediate success in your business, but a year from now it’ll be really important so you need to test and learn and see how it fits into your strategy now. Things like virtual reality, augmented reality or mobile beacons.
Whatever the budget breakdown is, the important thing is to have those innovations set aside in a bucket separate from the core campaign, because the brand manager has to be accountable to the CMO, the CFO and the CEO. If all of a sudden my cost-per-acquisition metrics get really, really bad, they’re not going to approve any more testing. But if I partition off the testing, I’m not going to drag down the ROI and the efficiencies of my core campaign.
But if you’re putting your innovations in a separate bucket, isn’t there a risk that that it will become siloed, and cut off from the rest of the media plan?
Well, that’s on the team. They have to ensure that things are fully integrated. While I’m talking about budgeting for it over here in the silo, the execution of it can be anything but siloed.
Do you see analytics as one way to break down silos and bridge together all the different channels?
Absolutely. I think marketers now are not doing more digital marketing; they’re just doing more marketing that happens to be digital. More media every day is becoming digitized.
As a result of that, data has gotten to the core of media. Data’s the new oil, right? If you can extract insights and refine strategy, that’s really how you win.
Because, at the end of the day, all of us big agencies are going to clients with pretty much the same pitch, technology-wise. I have a mix of proprietary technologies and syndicated research that we’re all using – DMPs, DSPs, retargeting, ComScore, etc. The analogy I like to use is Formula One racing. Everybody’s got a crew, everybody’s got a driver, right? Everybody’s got a pit captain and a coach. And you have roughly the same car and the same gas.
So how do you really win a race? It’s who’s got a better strategy. Who’s got a faster pit crew and who’s got a better tactical driver to execute. It’s strategy, insights, analytics and excellence of execution.
