Please start by introducing who you are, your role at Vista, and your signature dish to cook!
Guilhem Duprat: I am Guilhem, the Global Head of Media in the Global Marketing organization. I oversee the team that manages our media budget across the world. My signature dish is from my native France: Cassoulet – a hearty bean stew with duck confit and sausage, not for the faint-hearted.
Drew Forster: My name is Drew, I am the Director of Omnichannel Analytics within DnA at Vista. We deliver data, insights and support campaign strategy across Marketing and Digital Product. My signature dish is named after my son – Lewisagne!
What does full-funnel advertising mean to you?
GD: Full-funnel is about delivering a unified and consistent brand presence and effective communication across touchpoints and consumer needs states to deliver short AND long-term sustainable growth. Whether we are building brand salience through emotive TV ads or providing a simple but efficient “buy now” message in the programmatic display, we need to balance the need for our brand to be always distinctive and recognizable while adhering to channel best practices and efficiency parameters.
DF: For me, it is about delivering consistent communication on brand value propositions to customers, regardless of the location of the advertising. Too often, we are obsessed with reaching single-channel KPIs (e.g., Return on Ad Spend [ROAS] targets in Paid Search). Full-funnel advertising aims to achieve business goals through clear customer-focused strategies.
What are the biggest challenges to running full-funnel campaigns in the next three years?
GD: Full-funnel needs to combine brand building and sales activation. These two approaches are complementary and require different tactics, messages, channels, and measurements. Finding the balance between brand and activation, long and short term, so that we can efficiently drive sales and reduce our reliance on lower funnel tactics such as paid search and remarketing will be our single most significant challenge.
DF: Businesses are established in a way where communication with customers sits across several business units, often various executive sponsors or C-suite representatives. The execution of a full-funnel campaign means multiple teams, all pointing in the same direction. The challenge is the risk of creating internal competition rather than focusing on building a competitive advantage in the market.
What one publication/webinar/book people interested in media should watch?
GD: “The Long and Short of it” by Binet and Field is the one paper/book I would read as it is the foundation of much modern media effectiveness thinking.
DF: Also a massive fan of Binet and Field. I’d add Tom Roach, with whom I had the pleasure of working in Jellyfish. I’d also share Peter Fader on LTV and E-Commerce Buying Patterns .
How do you see the role of data evolving in advertising in the future?
GD: I think that as the world of media shifted from broadcast to digital, people got very excited by the possibilities offered by data, but what has happened is that the data has become too much. There is a lot of talk about data-driven marketing. Still, often, this is interpreted narrowly and misleadingly as leaving algorithms in charge of running marketing activity and automating as much of the marketing process as possible. Data alone cannot drive decisions; data is input. Once organized and made available/accessible (which we’re pretty good at already at Vista), the challenge becomes to interpret that data and turn it into strategies. Multiple data sources often contradict each other because they look from different angles. So data storytelling to bridge the gap between data analysts and marketing planners is something we’ll have to improve.
DF: Privacy changes (technology, legal, consumer preferences) and multi-device evolution will mean measurement becomes less and less tied to an individual. Modeling, technology partnerships, and causal analysis will fill some gaps, but hypothesis-based experimentation and validation will begin to drive advertising strategies around partners, audiences, creatives, and budgets. We must get “back to basics” and stop chasing 100% coverage or accuracy – particularly in digital data. Just because a marketing campaign is not immediately or wholly measurable does not mean it is not impactful or effective. We need to understand how to use multiple sources of truth to paint that picture as data professionals.
How do you believe advertising can meet the demand for personalization in an increasingly privacy-first digital world?
GD: I don’t like the word personalization as it has driven too many people down the rabbit hole of attempting to achieve 1:1 communication where the message is tailored to the individual, which is both ineffective and un-scalable for e-commerce brands like ours. I believe in segmentation, where clusters/segments of customers can get served variations of the same campaign/message depending on several factors. For example, at Vista, it can be their industry (a food truck owner and a carpenter have very different needs) or their need state (just researching how to market their future business vs. where to print the brochures they are already planning to make). People understand that to get the right service, especially from a custom printing business like ours, they need to give us some data and are happy to do so as the value exchange is clear. So for me, it’s about building first-party data (customer data owned by us) through collection mechanics where the value exchange is clearly explained, and control over the data is firmly kept with the end user.
DF: I agree with Guilhem; we need to reset our view on what personalization in advertising looks like; for years, we have seen it as chasing someone through the internet to complete a purchase. In the future, we’ll see stronger brand propositions supported by audience-based targeting of creative and messaging – similar to why we wouldn’t run a golf-based creative in a fishing magazine. It is far more effective to have a clear brand proposition and proactively shout about it than trying to react to every micro-interaction in digital platforms and media. To increase efficiency, push as many reactive optimizations as possible to both in-platform and in-house algorithms.
What is your favorite piece of advertising creative you have seen recently (Vista or not) and why?
GD: Advertising should be, first and foremost, effective. I love our “We print that” campaign. It delivers precisely what it’s supposed to do, reminding people that we are THE place to print your business cards and much more. It can be stretched to work across the brand and activation parts of the marketing mix. It can work as a long-form TV ad, a cut-down vertical on Facebook, or a still image for a programmatic retargeting banner. For me, that’s what effective creativity should be.
DF: As with many of our prospects – I watch a lot of YouTube on TV; I still remember being blown away by the Scotland is Here advert. Within Vista, I always talk about the storytelling in our Vista x Liverpool FC ad – it strongly aligns with how I want to support small businesses, personally and professionally.
What are you most excited about in Vista going into 2023?
GD: I think we have solid foundations in data and measurement, but we’ve struggled to leverage these powerful tools to their full potential. I’m looking forward to working with our DnA team on really stepping up our efforts to use Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), digital attribution, and experimentation as a single triangulated approach across our channels and funnel stages. Today too much of our marketing is looked at in silos (creating fragmented customer experiences), and we have the potential to truly break down these silos. This will take a great effort from many people, and I expect much of 2023 will be spent on cracking that code.
DF: We are making a ton of progress with our Audience, MMM (statistically connecting marketing effort to business impact), Share of Search (we use this as a fast-moving proxy for our market share), and Digital Attribution data products. I am excited to see how our media experimentation in early 2023 evolves and how we can use analysis and recommendations to support our marketing partners in Vista. Opening new communication channels and testing new brand messaging will be hugely exciting. This will be the year we start to shout about our brand values, proposition, and solutions for small businesses worldwide.
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