Ruth Mortimer 

Hello, and welcome to this Advertising Week Advance. I’m Ruth Mortimer, global president of Advertising Week, and today I’m thrilled to be talking about a subject, which is absolutely core to any marketers’ job: how to drive stronger performance from your brand spend. Now we all know that often brand and performance campaigns are developed in silos with multiple stakeholders from brands and agencies. And this leads to wasted media spend, a misalignment of campaign goals, and ultimately a disjointed customer journey. Today, my guests are going to offer you real-life practical advice across the whole brand campaign experience, right from the initial steps of checking that your audience is active on the inventory you select, right through to direct campaign feedback on what is and isn’t working. So with that in mind, first of all, I’m really pleased I’m going to welcome two Quantcast product experts. And they’re going to talk about streamline take on integrated brand advertising with automated optimization and timely measurement of impact. And what does that mean? Well, it means they’re actually going to show us live as well how to do that on the platform, so you can see for yourself, then we’re going to put that into context with some brands and a supply partner and draw on their real-life experiences. I can’t wait to get started. Let me introduce Amy Shriber – she is director of product management at Quantcast, and Annie Georgieva, who is the senior product manager at Quantcast. Welcome.

Annie Georgieva 

Thank you.

Amy Shriber 

Thank you, Ruth.

Ruth Mortimer 

So Amy and Annie, tell me a little bit about how Quantcast is trying to help customers with more of a data-driven brand marketing approach.

Amy Shriber 

So Quantcast’s goal is to provide marketers measurable outcomes that they can rely upon. We make campaign planning predictable, and we provide scale to effortlessly deliver across new sources of inventory with real-time measurement performance at the granularity that marketers need to ensure that their desired audience reach goals are met. With this new offering, we’re focusing on the needs of digital performance marketers, and can provide quantifiable ROI measurement for awareness campaigns by connecting campaign impact to performance KPIs, such as site visits and conversions.

Annie Georgieva 

And to add to that, when simplifying activation for both web and CTV, our goal is really to provide scale predictability, without sacrificing audience precision. So when adding in your audience parameters, supply, creative assets, a lot of that is usually built out in silo and might not be ready until the last moment. So being able to activate that with confidence by putting all of the pieces together, and having transparency into the delivery forecasting as well as being able to add an additional scale, if needed, is crucial in order to have confidence in your activation. And then on the measurement and optimization side, brand measurement is more of an art than a science compared to performance, just because it’s a little harder to tie the brand impact to the metrics that really matter. So we have really focused on our brand to demand insights, to provide validation that engaging your audience from brand to performance actually increases your visitor rates, converter rates, and so it’s important to do a holistic initiative. And also in order to do brand optimizations in a meaningful way, we actually built our Brand Lift Live feature that provides real-time data on how your brand campaign is making an impact on your customer perception. So you are able to see data around your frequency, creative, audiences, devices. So across the board, you’re able to rely on data to make meaningful optimization decisions while the campaign is still running.

Ruth Mortimer 

Well, I love the sound of predictability and transparency. But this sounds almost too good to be true. So Annie, could you show us how it actually works in the platform?

Annie Georgieva 

Yes, of course. I will share from the activation side as well as I’ll give you some examples from measurement as well. So we’re in the platform now. And when adding in a campaign, you can do so across the customer journey, but we’ll do a reach and frequency awareness campaign. And so now we have an ad set. And here we can utilize web, CTV. 

So I will go into CTV. And here we have our audience curation. You can do that by utilizing an audience that was built out in our planner tool, or we can build one out ourselves. And the audience tools are backed by our Ara TopicMap. So on the lookalike side, the predictive modeling that everyone knows and loves on the performance side, you can utilize for brand as well. And you have additional audience parameters, including interest. So here, you are able to utilize some of our predefined categories that we make available, or build out your own custom keywords for even further audience precision. 

Next, going into the supply side, we have made it very easy to be able to activate right away with a pre-curated package of deals that are ready to go. Or, of course, you can utilize your own custom deals here by going into the deal selection. And what’s really nice is, again, deal curation is sometimes done in silo, so being able to confirm that your deal is actually active and ready to go kind of provides additional confidence and activation, as well as ensuring that the right formats and the right channels are included in your deal. And you can explore all of your options. So I’ll just grab one of our deals here. And next, I will add in a budget. 

And as you’ll see here, this is our interactive forecasting tool to act as a pre-campaign health check. So you’ll see by the color that the deal we’ve selected might not actually provide us enough scale in order to deliver. And that can be a startling discovery to find the deal that your team has been working on creating is not potentially enough. And in order to help out with that, we have added additional package offerings that you can explore here as well. So you can utilize packages that are built out based on contextual as well as just channel-based and geo-based in order to be able to add an additional supplies scale as needed. So I’ll add these packages in. And as you’ll see, now we have enough scale, so we’re able to activate with confidence. 

So we also have frequency, as well as some bidding, dayparting, pacing, all the parameters you may want to adjust. But, of course, our model dynamically optimizes across all of that. Next, adding in your creative, you can do so here and even preview it to ensure everything looks good. And then lastly, some additional parameters that you’re free to optimize and adjust as needed. So we are good to go. I’ll just save that here. And that was it from an activation perspective. 

So now I would love to share some measurement examples. So here is a reach and frequency campaign that we have been running. And going into our insights lab, we provide a lot of different insights. But I wanted to share one of our examples that helps with brand to demand attribution. So here you’ll see we’re comparing an upper funnel campaign with a lower funnel campaign. And you can see the scale of the two as well as the audience that has been exposed to both, so we’ve engaged the audience kind of throughout their customer journey, and what we find quite often is that being able to engage your audience throughout their journey ultimately results in higher visitor rates, as well as higher converter rates compared to just engaging them on the lower funnel side. So this is a great way to have data to justify your brand impact, and be able to have meaningful conversations around the metrics that ultimately matter for your business. 

Next, I wanted to share our Brand Lift Live capability. So first, I will show you how simple the setup is. So we’ll add Brand Lift Live here. And first step is selecting your survey template. This is obviously based on the objectives you’re looking to drive. So you can explore the different options. And as you’ll see, there’s levels of customization. And there’s a preview here directly built out, based on the selections you’re making. You can interact with it; you can see across all of the different sizes. So it’s a great way of very quickly building out your Brand Lift Live study. And then next, you would just configure your dates, delivery, all of that. 

But I actually want to hop on to an actual example. So here we have a campaign that we’ve run a study for. And right away, we provide a very clear understanding of the performance of the study, and some top line metrics. And my favorite part is that, as results and responses are coming in, you’re actually able to see that coming in, directly in here, for both the control and exposed groups. So it provides transparency of all of the data that is going into the results that we’re sharing. And it provides a really good understanding of distribution that your responses are coming in. And then going back up here, we do provide several different breakdowns in order to get deeper into understanding the results. So from a demographics perspective, being able to look at different breakdowns to see how different audiences are responding to your messaging. We also offer breakdown by time, by device, as well as ad frequency and creative. So across all of these breakdowns, it’s a great way to see how there’s different cohorts of your audience that might be resonating with your messaging better or different creative variations that are actually giving a bigger and better impact. So you’re able to see all of this data in real time and actually have impact with optimizations to your campaigns as they’re still running.

Ruth Mortimer 

Thanks so much, Annie. I really love it when we dive into the data. Now I know you’ve already been working with a handful of clients and you’ve had some positive results. Is there anything you could share with us here today?

Annie Georgieva  

Yeah, there are a couple of examples that come to mind. We have a telecom company that launched a new hardware category. And while they are a well-known company, this was a new space for them. So they wanted to do a big awareness push. We had already done several successful branding initiatives that we had justified and validated with our Brand Lift Live feature. And this time, they actually wanted to utilize CTV and measure the success there. So we ran an ad recall study and saw positive lift across that, which was a great way to validate that their ads were actually memorable. And as next steps, they’re looking to move down the customer journey and focus on product interest. So we have launched a familiarity study in order to measure the success there. 

And then another example is a luxury auto company, and they utilize our measurement capabilities to get a better understanding of the impact their messaging had on getting awareness for their new SUV. So through the study, we were actually able to verify that their core persona for the SUV was actually resonating the most with their messaging, across the different demographic parameters that we offer that go kind of beyond just age and gender. And we did see overall positive lift, which is great. But something that was very exciting is that we were able to pinpoint the optimal frequency for them, and optimizing that actually resulted in a higher reach for the rest of the study duration. And one more thing that we were able to help out that team on the measurement side is that our brand to demand insights were able to show that utilizing both brands and performance initiatives increased their conversion rates 3.5 times, compared to the audience that was only exposed to the performance campaign that they were running.

Ruth Mortimer 

Okay, wow. So with those kinds of strong results straight out the gate, Amy, how do you see these products continuing to evolve in future?

Amy Shriber 

Great question, Ruth. With all of our products at Quantcast, we put our clients’ priorities and needs at the forefront of all of our new offerings. Laser focus on measurement and accountability are here to stay and are only going to become more important as clients are tasked with doing more with less and continue to face increased competition. As the marketplace continues to evolve, and we receive feedback from our clients, I feel confident saying that we will continue to pioneer innovation and change in our industry.

Ruth Mortimer 

Great. And thank you both so much. Now we’ve heard from Annie and Amy just there about brands and agencies using the platform for their campaign planning and performance in real time. But now let’s hear direct from some of the brands and a publisher that are using it themselves about some of the challenges they face, what they’re doing about them, and how others can learn from them. We have a wide range of companies here because we know concerns about brand performance and campaigns are true for every sector. So I have some very special guests here with me. Please welcome Grace Bailey. She is the senior digital marketing manager for Auto Trader UK. I have Veronica de Campos, who is the director of digital marketing at Jack’s Family Restaurants. And I have Ken Ripley, VP of sales at Scripps Networks. Hello, everybody. So it’d be great if you guys could share a little bit about your background, your role, and what you’re responsible for. Maybe I could start with you, Grace.

Grace Bailey 

Hi, I’m Grace. I’m a senior digital marketing manager at Auto Trader UK. I’m responsible for the planning and buying of all of our programmatic activity across both BAU and brand activity. I actually started my media career agency side. And then I moved to Auto Trader, originally in the agency sales team, where I looked after all of our on-site advertising and sold that to agencies. And then in 2020, I was actually given the opportunity to work in a hybrid role across both the agency sales team still but also the marketing team, where I take on the responsibility for all of our programmatic activity.

Ruth Mortimer 

Perfect. I think hybrid is the theme of the moment anyway, Grace. So you’re right on point. Veronica, tell us about you.

Veronica de Campos 

Hi, I am the director of digital marketing at Jack’s, which is a quick service restaurant with over 215 locations based in the South. I handle our owned and paid media, including our loyalty app and online ordering channels. I’ve been working in digital marketing specific to the QSR space for over a decade now. So I’ve really been able to see the transformation and evolution of this channel and it’s really growing importance for brands.

Ruth Mortimer 

Yeah, it’s been a really exciting time. And Ken, tell us about you.

Ken Ripley 

Hey everyone. I’m Ken Ripley. I’m the head of sales for CTV for Scripps Networks. Scripps Networks include brands like Newsy, ION, Court, and Bounce TV. I guess my background is: I’m bilingual in that I come from the linear world with stints both at Sony Pictures Television and Discovery Networks, while also on the CTV side with companies like Current TV and Newsy, which is part of Scripps, and in between I have experience in what we used to call the advanced advertising space. I’m running sales for TV and for TiVo.

Ruth Mortimer 

Perfect. Well, I think you might be at least trilingual there, Ken. But what I’d love to hear more about right now is maybe, Grace and Veronica, what do you think are the top brand advertising challenges that face your companies today? Maybe Veronica, we could start with you.

Veronica de Campos 

Well, we weren’t any different. Like many other QSR brands, we saw a decline in traffic caused by the pandemic. And it was during this time that we actually launched new channels, our online ordering channel in our loyalty app to try to increase visits from our current customers and to reach new audiences. But as a smaller brand, we have a smaller budget. But we also have a diverse audience. So we needed to make sure that our campaigns were connected and really focused on retargeting our existing guests so that we were always in their consideration set. But we also needed to start leveraging our insights to reach new audiences, especially in new markets as we expand in areas where we don’t really have a lot of brand awareness. And we do that in shifting budget to awareness ads, and through those ads, we saw a halo effect to our lower funnel ads.

Ruth Mortimer 

Okay, Grace, what about you?

Grace Bailey 

It’s an exciting, but definitely challenging time in the world of automotive at the moment. There’s a lot of noise and confusion from brands around how a consumer could or should buy a car. And it’s definitely tough to kind of shift that consumer mindset, especially when there’s so many external factors at the moment. We definitely feel like, it feels as if there’s a new competitor coming into the market every other week, it seems. The kind of cost of living crisis that we’re dealing with at the moment, brands are asking for a consumer to do more of their buying or selling process online. But also, the stock shortages: I feel like we can’t have a conversation about Auto Trader without mentioning those. So it’s tough; there are all kinds of situations that we’re having to deal with at the moment. And also, getting that cut through in a really saturated market, especially, like I said, where the competitors that we have seemed to have so much budget to do these big brands executions. So we really need to have our media spend to have the biggest impact that we can have as possible. I think the other thing that we’re having to deal with is that Auto Trader has a really broad audience, which means that when we run our big brand campaigns, we’re trying to market to the mass market and mass reach. And it means that we can’t always drill down to those bespoke audiences or those niche segments that we’d like to look at as well.

Ruth Mortimer 

So you mentioned there, Grace, how important it is to make your budget work. In fact, both of you did – really, really hard. So how would you measure them, the effectiveness of that brand marketing investment, Grace?

Grace Bailey 

So we measure effectiveness through our brand tracking, which looks at the awareness and consideration of the brand overall. And obviously, you know, this changes on a campaign to campaign basis, depending on what we’re looking at in that campaign, and specifically, what products we’re looking at. The other thing that’s really, really important to us is platform-specific reporting. So obviously, that just gives us so much more insight into the channel by channel basis. Sometimes, our brand tracking is a little bit top line and doesn’t really drill into even digital that much and definitely doesn’t look into the individual channels all the time. So having the platform-specific reporting is really, really beneficial. It means that we can make those kind of sharp, snappy optimizations throughout the campaign, but also, it kind of fills in that bit of a time lag. Because when the campaign finishes, we still have a few weeks after, before we receive the brand tracking results, and therefore we’re kind of in this no man’s land, trying to figure out what we’re doing with our platforms. And that means that we can go into those brands studies and have a look at specific things that we can take on board for the next campaign on a channel by channel basis. It really, really helps. And it really helps us, especially from a creative standpoint, where it’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all ad, we can definitely see links between the different channels. But when we drill into that specific brand study that we see across programmatic or when we run with any other kind of channels like YouTube or Instagram, we can kind of see, bespoke to us, how well a creative works and take those insights back to our creative team on a channel by channel basis.

Ruth Mortimer 

I think that’s a really important point. What about for you, Veronica?

Veronica de Campos 

For us, everything comes down to sales. Of course, I think that’s every business. But we’re also looking at our digital KPIs. That’s part of it. But we’re also measuring the results, the business itself. So we have some markets that need more attention than others. And one of the ways that we do that is through heavy-up buys. And we’ve been doing this regularly, because when we compare these markets to the rest of the system, we see sometimes they’re actually outperforming the system. And what’s great about Quantcast is that we can report on the actual store traffic. So how we’re driving people to the brick and mortar stores. And then with KPIs like that, and behavioral lift, we can actually tie the results and the revenue from our digital channels directly to the sales that we’re seeing.

Ruth Mortimer 

That makes sense. Ken, tell me how can publishers help brand marketers measure the effectiveness of their brand marketing investment?

Ken Ripley 

Well, publishers are in the customer service business. And we’re servicing our clients. So we work with clients on whatever their KPIs are. So whether it’s things like upper funnel brand awareness and lift studies, or whatever they’re using in terms of the multiple currencies that are all being examined by various advertisers and the holding companies, we need to be flexible, and we need to respond to that. A company like Quantcast can help them harness the tools, whether it be forecasting, or optimizing the campaign in real time. We want to be able to surface that and respond to it. So really, I think it’s in the hands of the advertiser themselves as to what they’re trying to accomplish, and our ability to support that and react to it.

Ruth Mortimer 

Well, I think, Ken, you make a good point: we’re all in the customer service business, all of the time. But it would be good to know from Grace and Veronica, which performance outcomes you really value the most? And how does having those insights in hand help influence your brand spend, Veronica?

Veronica de Campos 

So there’s always a constant shift depending on what the business goal is at the time. So having that real-time data is always important in the very various data that we can look at. So we really like to look at what the different audiences are doing. So we do that through the Quantcast Audience Planner, where we look at: we’ve built different audience groups, so we have the persona of our lookalike audience to retarget, our top performing customers, we have an audience dedicated to our loyalists, another audience dedicated to our online users. And then from that, we kind of see what results are coming through that full funnel. So you really have that omni approach to whether it’s display, native, video, CTV, and then we look from there. What are the cost per store traffic costs for per online order? What is the behavioral, if that’s really important to us, and we look at trying to get that weekly. But then sometimes we need to drive breakfast orders. So then we really shift everything to make sure that we’re targeting that group at that daypart. And we just do it real time as the data comes in.

Ruth Mortimer 

What about for you, Grace?

Grace Bailey 

So all campaigns vary, especially on a campaign by campaign basis. And when we run our brand campaigns, we really look at what’s happening at the market at the time, what’s the consumer behavior at the time, what products are we launching, and then we base our campaigns around this information. So definitely, we see that sometimes, our brand campaigns can be really top of the funnel, and actually really broad audiences and board metrics. But sometimes, we need to drill that down a little bit further to be a little bit more DR-focused. And so therefore, the metrics that we’ll be looking at, and the KPIs we look at, are going to be quite different. And they’re going to be more outcome driven. In general, we look at reach, impressions, click through rate, and particularly the video-led metrics; we look at cost per completed view and completed views. Because our brand activity tends to be very video heavy. If we look at this current campaign, again, it’s video heavy that we’re running, and therefore completed views is important, but even more important is actually cost per completed view. So we look at that as a kind of overall metric, especially across digital because it’s kind of that one metric that puts all channels on an even stead. And it means it’s actually something that we can take an actionable insight from and compare the channels. And the reason why this is super important, especially when we look at where our brand spend goes, we have to be pretty particular and pretty on-the-nose of where that needs to be spent. There’s not that much room for leakage or crossover. So when we look at this one metric that we compare everyone by, that’s then where we take on the decision where the budget goes for the next quarter. And where the performance is, is where the budget goes, especially if we’re running similar creative and similar strategy. I would say that definitely cost per completed view or completed views isn’t always a viable option, especially when we’re running non-skippable or even like non-clickable formats. We saw that recently, actually, when we ran connected TV with Quantcast. Like I said, that’s a non-skippable, non-clickable format. So cost per completed view just wasn’t a metric we can look at. Luckily, though, Quantcast helped us out there and actually showed us a kind of crossover reporting. So we looked at the amount of users that saw the connected TV ad, and then we found those users when they went onto the Auto Trader site as well. So at least we’re kind of matching things up and looking at, okay, well, this piece of activity, we know a user couldn’t interact with it at the time, but they’ve obviously taken it on board, and gone through to the site at a later date. So that kind of thing is really, really important to us, if we can’t measure everything, on the same level, at least finding a way that works for the different activity that we’re running, really. And yet all of this, like I said, it really just helps us to kind of understand our brand campaigns a little bit more, and to put those measures in place for the next campaign. 

Ruth Mortimer 

That’s really interesting. And Ken, we heard there kind of the different things that Grace and Veronica are both measuring as marketers. Do you see a difference in how you end up working with brand and performance marketers?

Ken Ripley 

Well, yes, but we also have a lot of experience in what Grace was saying in that in our linear business, the national advertiser versus direct response advertiser has been in existence for 40 years. So sometimes the performance marketer or direct response marketers [is] looking for immediacy, flexibility, the ability to get on the air and get off the air if the message isn’t resonating, whereas the brand marketer is looking for guarantees–guarantees on the pricing, guarantees on the fact that the ad will be seen by X number of people within a given time. And so again, those are two different ways of thinking about how you’re marketing or selling your product. And we have responses to each of them based on what is more important to the marketer at that time. So it’s a very familiar place for us. And I think as we think about CTV as it relates to linear, the corollaries are there, and the easier we can make it for marketers to plan for it, the more successful we’ll all be.

Ruth Mortimer 

Okay, great. And I wanted to ask you a follow-up question there, Ken, because you mentioned CTV a lot there. And obviously, the video landscape, especially CTV and OTT, it really continues to evolve at a fast rate. What do you think makes CTV, connected TV, so special for brands to reach audiences?

Ken Ripley 

I think it’s the best of both worlds, right? So it’s 100% on the glass, lean-back viewing in your living room; it’s a very familiar place for all of us. Anyone who watches television doesn’t make the distinction between I’m watching broadcast, I’m watching cable, or I’m watching CTV; they’re just watching TV. And that’s an important note, because there’s a lot of value to that. But add to what digital brings to this, or CTV, which is addressability, mitigation of waste, the ability to change a copy on the fly, even the programmatic element, to do this in milliseconds. And that is the best of both worlds. So when you add what Quantcast does with the intelligence that the marketers have, and you bring it to the glass on the wall, this is where we’ve been trying to get for 20 years. I can remember my early days in TiVo: some advertisers looked at it as a commercial avoidance device; now they’re really smart people looked at it as, yeah, I can get my message to the right person in the right moment. It’s taken us a long time to get there on the television as an industry. But CTV, I think, it’s the cleanest and most effective way to do it, finally.

Ruth Mortimer 

You mentioned there, Ken, some of the advantages of Quantcast, and I’d love to know from you, Grace and Veronica, what you think makes, particularly the platform that Annie showed us, really relevant for you guys.

Grace Bailey 

I think it’s Quantcast’s products and insights that really make us keen to continue using them all the time. From us, from our point of view, we really are always looking to bridge that gap between our performance activity and our brand activity. We really want to make sure that they’re working together and they’re not completely separate. We want to make sure that our brand is continuous across all elements. And what we found really helpful is the funnel impact reports on Quantcast Platform, because that can look at the crossover between the two audiences. We find it really interesting, particularly because we’re not always looking for in-market car buyers, although you probably think we would be. So it really helps us to see whether any of our brand actually is in market or not, and whether we’re reaching them on our campaigns, from a performance point of view, which are more DR, in market, and it’s really great to see that crossover really, because it’s difficult to see that anywhere else. The other thing that we’ve been using a lot for our brand campaigns is the Brand Lift Live reports. I love them; I think they give us a whole new idea on our programmatic activity, especially in an area that we struggle to see insight in, which is demographics. For us at the moment, we’re looking at what our demographic is, I mentioned before that we have a really broad, broad audience, but we want to understand what audiences perform really well and where there’s a bit of a gap, and Brand Lift Live has really helped us to do that. We’re starting to be able to see the gaps of the different creatives that work a bit better with, say, a younger audience, where the messaging appears in the creative and where that is working better in which demographic, so that has been really, really vital, really. And it’s a reason why we continue to run Brand Lift Live for all of our brand campaigns coming up. I think I’m also really looking forward to the future of Quantcast, and the different products that they’re going to continue to bring out – you know, they seem to be evolving all the time. And we’ve tested connected TV, previously. And I’m really looking forward to the next campaign, where we can expand on what we’ve already done.

Ruth Mortimer 

I think that’s really a good point, Grace. And we all like looking to the future. So how would you guys recommend advertisers, like yourselves, gain a competitive advantage today? And what about the future? Maybe we could start with you, Veronica and Grace, and then come to Ken.

Veronica de Campos 

I think one of the things that’s really important is to first team up with someone who does give you all those digital KPIs, something that you can act upon, and make sure that you’re using your media dollars appropriately. But I think that what makes you more competitive also is making sure that you are aware of those numbers. So we work directly with Quantcast. So we have weekly meetings, where we’re looking at the numbers; we’re shifting dollars as needed; we’re moving budget to the upper funnel, or maybe the lower funnel, whatever is necessary. So it’s great to have all that knowledge as long as you’re acting upon it and reviewing it. And it’s not just a report that comes into your inbox every week.

Ruth Mortimer 

And Grace…

Grace Bailey 

I think they just need to understand their consumer to the fullest, you know, understand what resonates with them, be at the right place at the right time in the right environment, all those jazz words, I think we need to be smarter with our activity, especially where our activity runs. And I think we need to stop looking at those short-term gains, and look at those long-term wins, especially, I’ve mentioned it a few times, but the automotive market being the way it is, at the moment – so much confusion, being so saturated – we need to make sure we’re in the right place with the right language for our consumers. I think, you know, the future is a bit scary at the moment when we look at stock shortages and things, so as much as we can understand the people that we know best, that’s the best way forward. Really I think also, brands need to understand that just because their competitor is doing something – whether that be a big sports partnership or having their name everywhere on London buses and things like that – we need to understand that that isn’t necessarily going to work for us as well. Brand isn’t a one-size-fits-all campaign. And really brands need to look at this as a way to be bespoke and unique to themselves and get their own kind of identity across rather than just trying to replicate.

Ruth Mortimer 

I think that’s a really important point. So Ken, over to you.

Ken Ripley 

I guess I would just add: look, you’re never gonna go wrong following the consumer. So to gain a competitive advantage, you should already be active in the space, whether it be testing or acting on it. But being there is the important thing, and consumers are voting with their remote control. So acknowledging that and keeping up with it is the best way to future-proof your business.

Ruth Mortimer 

Perfect, and I thank you all so much. I think we’re just about out of time here. I’ve learned a lot today about how to plan and create your strategies around brand marketing campaigns, and also then ensure that that work is carried through to execution, too. And I think pretty much everyone has highlighted that, in this day and age, you need to be able to do this all in real time, all the time. And I hope you, the audience, I’m sure you have the same challenge of learning just as much as me. So all that remains for me is to thank Amy, Annie, Ken, Grace, and Veronica for sharing their time today and your insights. Remember, you can watch this AWAdvance anytime on-demand. So do share with any colleagues who also need to plan their brand campaigns, and thank you so much for watching.