TMRE Day One Recap
By: Jeff Kirchner, Vice-president Kantar Added Value
I never had attended a conference on a Sunday, so it felt a bit off waking up early and getting to the airport as the sun was rising in the middle of my weekend. However, as my Lyft driver pulled up to the Rosen Creek Shingle resort in Orlando I was geared up and ready to go. I was excited to get there on time given the first tracks were split up by categories and I was particularly intrigued about the media/entertainment one.
Viacom was up first, and Christie Kawada and Tom Grayman showed off a really cool portal dubbed CIA (Content Innovation Analytics) that allowed the Insights team to help predict TV audience behavior and fuse data across Nielsen Ratings and traditional survey methods. By digging into audiences, shows, and how they delivered on each of the Viacom’s brands value prop, the portal was a strong demonstration of breaking down data siloes. Margo Arton was up next from Buzzfeed, talking about moving into the 21st century and getting beyond accountability in the ad space. A former MEC/GroupM’er, she hit on several of the themes we keep hearing about how fragmented our media landscape is, and the running joke that no one has ever seen a bad digital ad effectiveness score.
My big takeaway from her was to think beyond standard measurements, which seemed to be echoed by the next two speakers, Roberto Ruiz (Univision) and Eric Dolan (Johnson & Johnson). Yes I skipped out of the media to the CPG track J. Both alluded to the fact that if you were doing the same thing you were 5 years ago, then you are probably not innovating fast enough. Roberto, who is using CivicScience, is leveraging their single question online polling to generate rapid insights. Eric is infusing System 1 (implicit) and System 2 (explicit) to drive distinction and activation across brand assets.
Going into the key note speeches, I was left inspired by Soon Yu, former global chief of innovation at VF. A gifted speaker, he hit on several themes about what makes brands iconic that echoed Kantar Millward Brown’s Meaningful Different Framework and Kantar Added Value’s Brand Navigator. As he spoke of a brand’s iconography, he used an analogy of a company’s signature. What is your company’s signature element?
Looking around at the state of our industry and several of our competitors - I began thinking what is Kantar’s signature element? It struck me that I just sat through six presentations and all was just the client presenting, no supplier partner standing up with them co-presenting. I noted that every presentation I sat through, I was able to recognize that the capability showcased a Kantar company could also do, and often one we could do a little to a lot better.
By bringing our 12 operating brands together under the Kantar name, we have treasure trove of thought leadership and best-in-class offers that when put together can add up to something more. That to me is our signature element. But those offers need to stay current; they need to evolve with new technologies and innovation. It’s up to all of us to make that happen. We need to be bringing new thinking to our clients, and make sure when we do, we are truly partnering with them and helping them to make smart and informed decisions based off our data and insights. If we do that, we should have countless examples to be going to conferences like TMRE and telling our Kantar story for next year. It’s good to see Kantar here as a group. I’m excited for our client dinner tomorrow. ore to come.