The Chief Marketing Officer Award
The CMO Award honors a C-suite marketing leader who has embraced research, insights and data analytics to drive growth, brand value and better consumer experience. Gregg Lindner, President of Americas at GfK MRI Simmons, congratulated 2022’s recipient, Martin Renaud, EVP & Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at Mondelēz International, on his successful data-driven approach, focusing on shopper data and a greater digital and online commerce investment. Martin oversaw an increased investment in MMM that enabled an always-on strategy to measure ROI and strengthened the connections between insights and analytics, and media and marketing. Under his leadership, Martin’s team delivered a 25% improvement in their working media ROI over the last three years, creating top tier CPG benchmarks and unlocking sustained media investment.
Lucia Moses, Deputy Editor at Business Insider, asked Martin about the challenges and the advantages of marketing for one of the biggest CPG companies with some of the most loved brands, how their approach to data changed, the big push to e-commerce, the loss of third-party cookies and lasting consumer behaviors from the pandemic.
Here are edited highlights from their conversation:
- The company changed their strategy four years ago by placing the consumer at the center. Martin outlined four pillars of the transformation that dramatically accelerated the connection between Mondelēz and its consumers and achieved a balance between art and science with data, insights and actions:
- Leading with purpose in terms of strong portfolio positioning and growth strategy,
- Innovating the best quality products,
- Crafting the right creative assets for digital personalized advertising,
- “Humanizing” better on two levels—elevating and leveraging insights and analytics through more data, and developing more one-on-one relationships with consumers in e-commerce.
- E-commerce has been a key priority, and the pandemic has accelerated it to 7% of their sales now, with the goal to grow to 20% by making e-commerce more central to everything they do with their consumers. They integrate ecommerce much earlier in advertising and marketing plans across all brands’ products and packaging.
- Insights are so important to get to the granularity of an action plan. Mondelēz tries to adapt their offers in function of where consumers buy within the e-commerce journey, along with understanding shopper motivations in order to show them the right message at the right time.
- Mondelēz has taken the loss of targeting cookies into account in the way they currently plan their paid media and is accelerating their first-party data collection to increase their connection to the consumer. The personalization abilities increases ROI of media by 30% when done well and opens more opportunities for CRM.
- Discipline is critical. Test and learn before going too big—align vocabulary, define nomenclature and organization, and be very clear on use case goals. Speed is important, but rigor is even more important.
The 2022 Erwin Ephron Demystification Award
The Erwin Ephron Demystification Award pays tribute to a beloved figure in the advertising research space, Erwin Ephron, a pioneer and legendary influencer in media planning. Known for simplifying the complexities of advertising in his writings, Erwin not only made advertising research easier to understand, but also easier to act upon. Alice K. Sylvester, partner at Sequent Partners and 2021’s Erwin Ephron Demystification Award winner, equated his translator abilities to Michelangelo’s, who “saw the angel in the marble,” by cutting to the very essence of complex media concepts with a human touch.
In presenting the award, The ARF’s President & CEO Scott McDonald commended Duane Varan’s rare combination of science and art that embodied these “Ephronesque” qualities. By challenging the industry to embrace measurement innovation without forgetting science’s basic tenets and the need for transparency, replicability, peer review and validation, Duane’s scientific rigor complements his gift for communicating ideas and connecting them to practical business applications. Duane’s accomplishments in applying neuroscience tools for development and evaluation of TV content, in addition to his many contributions to the industry, including ARF presentations, the Journal of Advertising Research and other academic and general publications, characterize the unique nature of the Erwin Ephron Demystification Award.
Brian Steinberg, Sr. TV Editor at Variety, invited Duane to reflect on the state of innovation and ad formats, attention as a new currency, media environments and context, addressability and the next big challenge to “sitting still.”
Here are edited highlights from their conversation:
- The pace of innovation is perpetual, with major shifts in landscape every year. The name of the game is efficiency. Innovation has to be at the core of what you do and the industry has an obligation to keep up with that pace.
- The beauty of new formats is the variety of choice—you can pick the format that best suits your communication objectives. All formats have unique mechanics and DNA, and research around them is vital and important.
- The telescopic ad format does best for clicking to long-term content and holds the greatest potential. Shorter ads are the convention now but the opportunity is to use the short ad as an invitation to longer content. It actually persuades consumers to engage and purchase.
- Attention is the new “pink,” but the discourse around it is what suppliers want to bring to the market – it is not grounded in the science of attention. Duane posits that advertisers should be more concerned about inattention based on research that studied several kinds of attention. Attention is a threshold among many other hoops advertisers have to jump through, and proof and validation are crucial. Attention as a currency now is too premature.
- The mechanics of media environment contexts, be it news or sports, are very different from one another, with varying cognitive and emotional results that can affect brand objectives.
- It’s critical that we measure for emotion directly rather than indirectly as we use neuro marketing tools in the marketplace. Like attention, there is still a need for proper science to make these tools effective.
- There’s a lot of nuance in getting addressability right. Category relevance only accounts for 10% of the effect of the ad, where 66% effectiveness is ad creative. The obsession should be on the ad creative where the lion’s share of the effectiveness resides. Addressability needs to go beyond category relevance—its power lies in frequency capping.