‘The idea of robots buying media is fundamentally wrong’ warns Mediacom UK boss
The idea that robots will play a significant role in the future of media buying is wrong, the head of Mediacom UK, Karen Blackett has predicted.
And she warned that the more advertisers relied on robots to plan and buy advertising, the more consumers would strike back employing robots of their own in the form of ad blockers.
Speaking at Australian Association of National Advertisers’ Reset Conference in Sydney, Blackett said that the future was now impossible to predict for many businesses, but it did not lie in programmatic buying.
“When we try to predict the future we tend to get things ever so slightly wrong,” said Blackett.
“The idea of robots buying media is fundamentally wrong.”
Echoing the warning of Mars’ global head of marketing, Bruce McColl earlier in the day, she said that consumers were increasingly disinterested in advertising and would be using the programmatic specialists’ own robotic tools to avoid it.
“(In the UK) ad blocking installations have increased 69 per cent in the last 12 months,” she said.
“Consumers are going programmatic, consumers will have their own array of robots to block ads. 28 per cent of consumers (in the UK) have ad blocking. Programmatic buying is a fantastic new tool, however (it) is not the key to competitive advantage.”
Blackett said that there were opportunities for brands that altered consumer behaviour that disprupts and enhances, highlighting the plummeting audiences for print and TV in the UK.
Ultimately she said we could develop a world without clicks where people became reliant on a handful of apps that delivered what they needed intuitively.
She said that the keys to future-proofing media agencies lay in moving from paid advertising to a more balanced mix of paid, owned, earned and shared.
Media agencies also need to collaborate more with other agencies on the brand roster and she also said they needed to staff for the future, hiring more diversely.
Mediacom had addressed this through setting up apprenticeships to attract people who did not want to go to university or could not afford it. The agency had also set up “grey” apprenticeships to give it a full mix of staff at every level, but ensuring it was also hiring digital natives.
“We make sure we have people in the agency actually born in the era of the internet,” she said.
Simon Canning
I don’t think consumers can tell whether an ad is served to them programmatically or directly via the publisher for them to make a decision on deploying an ad blocker. Consumers’ decision to block ads has to do with general over exposure (across all media) whether that be because of irrelevance, intrusiveness or just general annoyance.
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The future of advertising effectiveness is in algorithms. The entire billion dollar search market is built around convincing googles search algorithm that their brand/product/service is the best result and also this relevancy also effects the bid weighting for SEM.
Now… imagine a future where people are algorithms and we need to convince the algorithm that a brand/product/service is best. Sound far-fetched? Just ask Siri what is the best restaurant near you. We carry our phones with us 24/7, use them to answer questions we have and act on these suggestions. Digitally.. we are essentially the algorithms in our phones.
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Anything that can be automated will be automated and should be automated. It’s not a robot planning, it’s data. Humans can’t process the volume of data required.
There is no causal relationship between ad blocking and programmatic.
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Agree with Karen that a “more balanced mix of paid, owned, earned and shared” is required but we shouldn’t forget ad blockers have been around for years – the on/off switch, channel change or walk away are all effective ways to avoid advertising let alone PVR’s
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This article is discriminatory towards robots. They have feeling simulations too.
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Most of my Twitter followers are robots. The problem is that not a single one has ever offered to vacum my floor.
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Perhaps, Karen may have been trying to say something to the affect of; “the current programmatic environment has lead to a high level of wastage and ill-considered media planning”, rather than blaming ‘robots’ which, after all, humans are responsible for programming. And who exactly is to blame for poorly considered media planning? But it isn’t as simple as that, Robots aren’t to blame for bland websites, ordinary creative, and fraudulent inventory. Robots don’t clip the tickets, take kickbacks and use vendors owned by parent companies. – We’ve written a response article here – http://realprogrammatic.com/th.....lly-wrong/
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