Media Buying Briefing: Overheard at the Media Buying Summit

This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Media Buying Summit. More from the series →

The Fall 2024 iteration of Digiday’s Media Buying Summit, held in Palm Springs, Calif., last week, is done — and hopefully attendees walked away having made new connections and maybe even learned something new. 

One element of Digiday’s events and summits that sets us apart from our competitors’ confabs is the Town Hall. It’s made up of two sessions that are restricted to only the major constituents of a given summit — in this case, agency personnel. Held under Chatham House rules, which frees all participants to speak anonymously, participants opened up about their challenges/pain points as well as the solutions to those challenges. 

The following comments have been edited for clarity. 

Challenges/Pain Points 

Mixed messaging from the client

“Media agencies are now being forced to understand a lot more than just media. For example, price. If you’re working on a client that increased their price by 20% in two years, and they’re not seeing the category penetration they’re looking for. Is media really the problem? It’s just a really interesting space to be in of having really frank discussions on the total business, whether that be financial services, CPG, hospitality or whatever. You need to understand the entire business and how their P&L functions. It’s just an uncomfortable space for media agencies because it re scopes them a bit.”

“ROAS is not a goal! Like, it’s just not — it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not! [Laughter] How are we going to evaluate the success of a brand lift study? What are we measuring? [it’s hard] getting our client contacts at the right level of seniority to articulate what it is they want to see happen in their business. And then how can media move the needle? Where is the right and appropriate place to leverage media to accomplish that goal?”

“Having clients with multiple stakeholders who have different objectives that are counterintuitive to one another. We have procurement led accounts, for example, where they’re focused on efficiency and getting the lowest rate possible. But at the same time their CMO is focused on quality of leads. Those two things are at odds with each other.”

“Put them in a room and tell them okay to cage fight it out. Tell us what you actually want, and we’ll go do it. But otherwise, sorry — no!”

Cost containment

“How do we break ourselves from [embracing] the lowest cost? Because sometimes for the lowest CPM you tend to get more fraudulent activity, right? Can you force your way to think differently by moving away from the CPM conversation? It’s hard but if you can prove that you’re getting more real people at a higher cost, I think most clients will move away from being focused on CPMs.”

Detecting fraud

“We’ve been seeing an uptick in fraud that’s been self reported by Google, so we’re getting credits for that, which is good it’s being identified. But then sometimes we’re not in market anymore, so then we have to reallocate. That’s been a challenge.”

In-housing

“Clients want to do more in housing of analytics and services, but they don’t really know how to most of the times. But they do need your help in making that in-housing work. So coping with that and being able to kind of balance that I want to help you, but you’re also taking away business from us.”

“We added a separate in-housing contract where they’re paying us now to provide them the resources. We get that benefit and that money that is worth the time that we’re putting into it. Luckily, we have a procurement team that is very clear — this is going to require X amount of hours for your team. So that’s been a way to get extra revenue.”

Solutions

Client communication and education

“When we’re doing a quarterly business review (QBR), having the client actually build out slides for us within that. They’re building out what they saw in the last quarter from their business standpoint, and then we all try correlating it into media. It’s not being afraid to ask your clients to also do the work.”

“We’re a service based industry, and too often we’re afraid to ask those hard questions and maybe put our clients on the spot. But if we don’t challenge, then we just reach a point of complacency. Nothing will change unless we ask hard questions.”

“I’m going through something similar with clients. They sit on so much data, and they’re already doing a ton of data work on their end. So instead of providing information to them that they already know, it’s working smarter, not harder, and working with the client. Intake their data and then elevate it from the media perspective of what we know on our end.”

“Don’t wait for the QBR. We had stand ups, and the stand ups went both ways. It was like, What’s going on with you? What’s going on with us? And it would alleviate us sometimes chasing our tails and trying to explain why something happened, because, oh, by the way, the client changed a landing page and didn’t tell anybody.”

“Education is the biggest thing. We know that the client knows their business better than anyone else, but we know media better than they do, and that’s why they hire us. Ultimately, we have the understanding of how to take business goals and turn them into meaningful KPIs that are actually measurable. And I’ve had to play mediator a time or two between two different divisions of marketing. But it makes my job easier because then I actually have an understanding of how I’m going to be measured on the success of the work I do.”

In-housing

“We had a client literally say, ‘We don’t really know that we’re going to have this be part of the scope, but can you show us exactly how you would do this? Because we’re thinking of getting a contractor to come in to do that.’ We were like, ‘Interesting.’  But in the spirit of partnership, we took a strategic approach. We’re not going to give them the secret sauce of everything we’re going to do. But we’re going to do an audit of where they’re at right now and show them, ‘OK, this is what we’ve identified as areas of improvement, but you need to work with us for it to be improved.’ We’re not going to tell you exactly how to improve it. That’s how you can can really show the benefit of the partnership, vs. either just saying yes or no.”

Cost containment

“A more authentic way of having that conversation is having a really honest reflection of what isn’t working and what is currently built into the contract that could potentially be removed. ‘Hey, this is wasted bandwidth — we’re spending a lot of time on these kind of measurements, these kinds of things they don’t really work for your business.’ And also just not drinking our own Kool Aid and being honest about the things that we have put forth that are not working for them, and being willing to say we’re going to cut this out.”

“It helps to close the loop and by receiving back data from the client. Because yes, we can get front-end metrics from Google or all these platforms, and we can see how they performing. But then we need to actually see the business results and not just media results. So I feel like it’s just as important to get back data from the client and see if it drove their business, or you just had high impressions and low CPMs.”

Color by numbers

From shifts like YouTube moving to the big screen to Instagram Reels continuing to dominate, digital advertising is evolving faster than ever. Platforms are also keeping watch on political ad dollars flowing into social media, as well as how AI can impact campaigns. Performance marketing agency Tinuiti’s Digital Ads Benchmark Report for Q3 2024 covers these digital ad findings across Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok and elsewhere. — Antoinette Siu

Some highlights:

Political ad dollars aren’t majorly impacting Meta pricing yet. Meta CPMs dipped 3% year over year, compared to 5% increase in Q2. But the two-year CPM growth is nearly identical in Q2 and Q3 in 2023.

One-fifth of all Instagram ad impressions were attributed to Instagram Reels ads in Q3 – nearly doubling the 10% share observed in Q3 2023. This Q3 was also the biggest quarter-to-quarter increase in Reels impression share tracked by Tinuiti advertisers.

Brands are turning to more AI-generated content on Meta and Google: AI-powered Advantage+ shopping campaigns in Q3 accounted for 34% of all Meta retail/e-commerce spend for Tinuiti advertisers – up from the 23% share observed in Q3 2023 and Q2 2024.

Streaming video average CPM grew with Amazon Prime Video ad adoption, with CPMs running some 2.5 times that of traditional streaming video ad average. This was higher than Max and Disney+, but still behind Netflix.

TV screens accounted for 34% of YouTube spending this quarter – up 30% from the previous year. Spending on YouTube ads was also up 24% year over year, more than double the rate of growth of other devices.

Takeoff & landing

IPG launched Interact, which it’s calling its core technology platform infrastructure, underpinned by Kinesso. The unit blends data, media, creative and production and aims to unify resources, partnerships and the full supply chain into one operation.

Account moves: Independent Mediaplus won global media strategy, buying and planning duties for various Bosch business units … T-Mobile is putting its social media accounts into review, which are currently handled by VML and Dentsu Creative … Involved Media was named linear TV media AOR for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

Personnel moves: AKQA founder and chair Ajaz Ahmed resigned and WPP announced that CTO Stephen Pretorius will be interim chair … Horizon Media promoted Gene Turner to president and global chief client officer, from president of Horizon Next, while David Campanelli was promoted to president, global investment.

Direct quote

“From a marketing capacity, we’re not experimenting much with [AI] yet … Is the result something better than you can get in the current state? That’s always the litmus test I have.”

— Kevin Rettig, senior director, marketing platforms & privacy, Marriott International, speaking at Digiday’s Media Buying Summit last week.

Speed reading

If you weren’t able to attend the Media Buying Summit, here’s your chance to read up on what was discussed on Day 1, Day 2, and on DEI and AI. 

Ronan Shields covered the Prebid Summit last week, keeping his ear to the ground on the changes needed in the ad tech space.

Give a listen to Tim Peterson’s podcast conversation with UM’s Marcy Greenberger who offered a post-mortem on the 2024 upfront season. 

Media Buying Briefing: Overheard at the Media Buying Summit

During the two Town Halls at DMBS, agency folk of all roles and stripes opened up about their challenges/pain points as well as the solutions to those challenges.