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Mindshare Canada announced last week it was shuffling its digital media team to better adapt to market conditions in real-time. One of the changes was to promote Lina Alles to the newly created position of chief trading officer, where she will be in charge of all media trading, including digital, broadcast, print and OOH. Alles has been with the company since 2001; before that she was director of broadcast for Ogilvy & Mather.
Marketing caught up with her to talk about how Mindshare’s new, more flexible structure helps it stay on top of the real-time, cross-platform media environment.
Can you tell me a bit about Mindshare’s move to consolidate all trading under one group, with you as chief trading officer? How’s that different than the setup before?
Lina Alles
Mindshare’s trading structure maps to the way consumers interact with media. In a digitized world, consumers are using multiple media channels and moving across screens in real time. To succeed for our clients, we need to be able to adapt to that behaviour and be more fluid in the way we go to market. This need for flexibility, in conjunction with the convergent media landscape where media companies have offerings across multiple channels, means a media-agnostic trading philosophy is critical for delivering the best value for clients.
What aspects of strategy remain the same across broadcast and digital, and what are the big areas where they differ?
The unifying factor is that media is an investment and not a cost. We need to find ways to affect consumer behavior to deliver clients’ commercial success regardless of medium.
The differences are the science, the speed and the message. With digital, the speed at which you can affect transactions and go to market is incredible. We increasingly transact based on performance rather than exposure. We target or retarget to very specific audiences or behaviors, and this can be live in-market within seconds.
The message is also different. In broadcast, it is typically a 15- or 30-second message. In digital, the flexibility allows for messages that could be as long or as short as needed.
How has the rise of programmatic and RTB technology affected Mindshare’s digital media strategy?
Programmatic and RTB technology helps us be more precise in audience delivery. It allows us to be faster in-market, but even more importantly, makes it possible to turn insights into action very quickly. Of course context is still hugely important, but the data allows us to make different decisions and adapt in real time.
It has also changed the makeup of our digital teams, as the need for smart, analytic “data” people, who can interpret the data, has increased.
How much of the trading you currently do is on exchanges, and how much is direct from publisher? What kinds of programmatic or non-programmatic buying methods do you think will come to dominate digital media in Canada?
The amount varies by client and objective. No two digital executions are the same.
The reality is that channels that are not currently able to deploy media in a programmatic fashion (OOH, TV, cinema, radio etc.) will do so in the future. There will be a time in the not-so-distant future that all media will be transacted in some form of programmatic – which simply means that we will apply layers of data over media and transact in real-time based on the exact audience at that point in time. This data-rich environment will allow us to understand the true value of each ad exposure.
How much mobile trading will you be doing, and how does that fit into overall media strategy?
In the Canadian market, mobile is a huge growth area. We already see that for a lot of social and search, close to 50% of delivery is mobile. Whenever we invest more than the industry norm on a campaign, we see a huge spike in performance with mobile channels.
This is a huge untapped area and potential for brands. The inclusion of mobile in an overall media strategy will increase over time as mobile gives us context: Who people are, where people are, and what they are doing.
How will the trading desk work with other arms of the agency on integrated digital and broadcast campaigns?
The only way campaigns can truly be integrated across broadcast and digital is by having one measurement, which would then allow for one trading currency. As an industry, this is a conversation that needs to be brought to the forefront.
