CANNES — GroupM is reconfiguring its agency businesses for a new advertising world in which advertisers expect to measure and pay for ads that bring real, identifiable business results.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM north America CEO Brian Lesser explains the group is responding a world in which the agency business model is fast-changing, now that brands can increasingly see consumers’ purchase events and link them to ad exposure.
“We’ve been able to measure the effects of online advertising directly to sales for a very long time – it’s just been expensive in the past,” Lesser says. “Ten years ago, we could take one digital impression and match it to a product bought in-store. The data has become ubiquitous. Today, we’re closer to being able to do that at massive scale.”
Agencies were already coming under pressure from clients to introduce a more transparent charging structure.
The emergence of this attribution technology is another reason why agencies are coming under pressure to change.
“We in the marketing services business can start to change our business model,”Lesser says. “We can move more closely to a performance-based model… generating actual sales or test drives based on awareness we drive online and in linear advertising.
“We’re aggressively changing our organisation structure, how we service clients,”
“We are replatforming our agencies so that all them are planning and activating based on real-time audience data that we have in [m]Platform. We’re combining MEC and Maxus in to one global network… that makes us more efficient … it broadens our network and makes that individual company have the scale.”
This video is from The Mastercard Automated Advertising Panel at Cannes Lions 2017. Where Lesser was a panelist. For more from the series, please visit this page.