Coca-Cola North America, MTV Networks, Canoe Ventures on Forrester Marketing Forum Panel

David Card, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Greg Clayman, Executive Vice President of Digital Distribution & Business Development, MTV Networks
David Verklin, Chief Executive Officer, Canoe Ventures
Annis Lyles, Vice President, Media and Interactive, Coca-Cola North America

(Notice the can in Annis’s hand and her jacket color – how on brand can you get?!)

 

Greg, MTVN: Good news: television viewing is up something like 4.6% this year. Online video viewing up too. Traffic up.

Annis, Coca-Cola: Oversees 35 brands. Over 6 billion servings/day.Today’s a great opportunity. “I look at today as the future of media.” Proliferation of media and choices and control consumers have now. For her it’s very complex but there’s a huge opportunity to build connections between their brands and consumers. She has 13 year old twins, one was just watching American Idol online. Very big on embracing technology every day as it evolves.

David V, Canoe: Bill Clinton used to say, “You’ll feel my pain.” His hope: we’ll feel his passion. His message: “TV’s getting back in the game. We think we can do it using cable’s infrastructure bringing interactivity, addressability, and data into the marketplace.” Canoe = consortium of 6 largest cable MSOs. Represent 90% of cable TV subscribers in US, 60 million households out of 103 million multichannel households. TV is about to turn into a platform where you can target, measure, and execute off of that platform. Launching 1st product in 3 weeks. It’s called Community Addressable Messaging. Will be able to target ads to where households make $100,000 or more. 1st time serving national ad to demographic slice.

Card: Is that interesting, Annis?

Annis: Focus: precision marketing, segmenting consumers because every consumer is different. More from psychographic than demographic perspective – what passions do they have? Football, NASCAR, American Idol? Big on collecting info.

Card: Can you do that with Canoe?

David V: It’s about putting dog food ads in only households that have dogs. Can use third party data, can use client supplied database,

Greg: Really excited about Canoe. And it will be even better going multichannel – TV, Web, mobile.

Annis: At the end of the day, we’re media agnostic. We look at the core idea, the brand idea. Then look at media and the role they play. Some brands are only digital, some across multiple media. It starts with the consumer, understanding the idea, and amplifying that idea. “The data is very important to us.” Any frameworks to help build a longterm sustainable relationship with consumers through the stages of their life, I think we can do that. … A great idea can come from anywhere. The more you can understand our brands, the more relevant you are, the more we’re willing to listen. It can come from anywhere – agency, publisher, anyone.

Card: It sounds like a lot of herding cats.

David V: We’re getting 6 MSOs to work together. The online medium has helped us raise our game. The benefits of search have been ascribed to the entire platform. Search: you create your own inventory, it goes to auction, there’s ROI – it’s a killer app. CTR on display: .27%. Purchase behavior tends to happen off the platform, brick and mortar… I think the TV can do a pretty good job at targeting. “We can certainly compete with a cookie.” Can tie it back to set top boxes, loyalty cards. 90% of grocery shopping happens with loyalty cards.

Card: What happens when everyone skips commercials?

David V: DVR’s here to stay. Great technology. It will be a package of things. We had ad skipping for 30 years with the remote control. If you use a trivia contest and show results in the ad pod, that slows down ad skipping. Other technologies can help too.

Card: What about branded entertainment?

Greg: There’s always tension between programmers and marketers. “Make the logo bigger!” In the world of social media, online, marketers are creating a lot of their own content.

Card: Would you want to end run these guys Annis?

Annis: Content has to be relevant and engaging but also the right context. Where’s the consumer. “We have an arsenal of riches” – American Idol, NCAA, etc. With NBA, had to figure out if it was relevant for Sprite. Consumers wanted to be more engaged. Came up with Sprite Slam Dunk contest. Built entire experience around 3-4 major players who had a great time with it on who could dunk the best. Consumers voted on who should be winner. Had over 1 million voters on the phone within 5 minutes. What we were trying to do is be relevant and real and engaging with core consumer we’re trying to reach. It goes back to David V’s comments on addressing the right consumer. Before it was about being ubiquitous. Now it’s about being relevant. … (in response to question on respecting consumer privacy/info): From our lens we expect a long term relationship with consumers. The last thing we want to do is end up in a situation where the consumer feels that they’re being infringed upon.

David V: We want to be held to the same standards as direct marketers. We’re very concerned with protecting personally identifiable information.

Audience Q: How will addressable media impact things?

David V: One reason people complain about TV is that they don’t own a dog and they’re seeing a dog food commercial. (He’s more obsessed with dogs than the PetSmart VP). We have to provide the tools for sellers and buyers.

Greg: In the short term, it brings us closer to marketers.

David V: If you’re a dog food marketer, you’re paying far more because of all the wasted ads – look at effective CPM. (I get it. Dogs.)

Annis: A few years back we blended Media and Interactive into one. There was a lot of pushback. It’s been very very exciting and a huge competitive advantage for us. We believe all creative is one and the same, so we have the seamless integration between the two and can deliver compelling content in a relevant way. Integrating media and creative has been a huge win. Interconnectivity driven by technologies has allowed us to push forward faster because of it. There’s a lot of complexity to it. From our lens, we’re in an upfront every day. The market changes so quickly. We have to be in the driver’s seat every day of the year.

Q: Will TV and Internet merge?

Annis: All media is becoming digital. Hence why we have been big proponents
of merging interactive, digital creative, media. It’s now. I would challenge ever
yone in the audience – age
ncies, publishers – to help us. The consumers are ready. Look at the mobile space, what’s going on in Korea. Any way that we can push the envelope to continue to integrate the two is a compelling proposition for our consumer who then buys our brands.

David V: When will we see the migration of the Internet to TV? I say 2011.

Greg: 3-5 years.

Card: Will YouTube deliver a lot of programming to the big screen or not? That’s the big question.

David V: Everyone will have to migrate across platforms.

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