JAMES FORBES: What does an advertiser need to do within their company, or at least within their media department, to be able to say, “We are ready to move forward with a local publisher because it will deliver x,y or z result for us?”
JEAN-FRANÇOIS RENAUD: One of the challenges is that at any given time, you can’t manage 28 networks when you’re making a media buy. Unless you’re launching a mega campaign, you might want to manage two, three, four channels, otherwise it’s too complex. Often Google and Facebook are kind of obligatory up to a certain point for many, many types of products anyway, or services. So, there’s space left for one of two publishers. That’s a challenge, too, an extra one.
But the point is that I think an advertiser, if they wanted to try it out, if they wanted to try to focusing on this aspect a little, might say, “I need to see, at the end of the year, that a certain percentage of all my media buys have been reserved for the properties of local brands.” I think that might be the easy way to do it. Maybe not for every campaign. Because, say they said, “I want 20% of my media buys to be done locally.” One campaign could be at 10% and another at 30%, and it doesn’t matter, but at the end of the year, it’s a guideline that’s set and respected, I think that’s something that might make a difference. And we might be surprised by the potential. Once again, it’s possible that if you took the time to sit down with a publisher and create content that is genuinely exciting, if you trusted the publisher who in turn knows their audience really well, you’d have a way to achieve something that might also even perform better than Google and Facebook, and that would also be good for your local footprint.
JAMES FORBES: A good summary of all this would be: meet with publishers directly, ask what they can do for you, look, first of all, at whether their audience lines up with the audience you’re trying to target and then, it’s true you might be surprised.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS RENAUD: There’s always the pressure to perform, you know. Today, we live in a world where results, at the end of the month, the quarter, are so important. To bring in raw sales, there’s no question that remarketing, for example, and without getting too deep into tactics, but you can’t deny that remarketing on Google and Facebook works really well. But you aren’t building new audiences by doing that, you’re just milking your existing audience. But the impulse to do it is always there – the remarketing button is always close at hand because it drives the sales you need to meet monthly quotas.
But the end of the month isn’t what will drive next year’s earnings. I think that’s where you have to think a bit more long term. I think buying local will eventually have an important place in media plans. But another challenge is the very short-term vision we tend to have when it comes to return on investment that, I think, is threatening in many other regards, at least for advertisers.
FRANCIS DEVOY: In your opinion, what’s the greatest threat, or threats, publishers face in the long term? Is it that more and more, advertisers don’t want to buy locally?
JEAN-FRANÇOIS RENAUD: The main threat, as I mentioned, is that prices are going down, competition is going up, their market shares are dropping, content creation costs are going up, and they have the tendency to perceive Google and Facebook as friends rather than seeing how they could pose a threat. There are lots of signs that there’s danger ahead for them, but ultimately what’s the greatest threat? Well, it’s that they will no longer by able to supply the content they need to supply.
The signs are everywhere! Publishers are closing, publishers are selling at discounted rates, publishers are becoming non-profit organizations and starting to ask for donations on their platforms. These are actually elegant examples that demonstrate the pressure that exists in the market right now.
FRANCIS DEVOY: In terms of advertisers, Jean-François, what would the risks be in, for example, really putting all your eggs in one basket – sticking with the duopoly of Google and Facebook?
JEAN-FRANÇOIS RENAUD: In economics, any duopoly creates a price increase. So that’s one. Secondly, it creates a dependence on those two channels and, the moment they decide to give you less for your money tomorrow morning, well, you’ve got a problem.
I was looking at Google, recently, and they often replace the services offered by certain publishers. With movies, for example, if you search for the name of a movie, all of a sudden now you see show times directly in the Google search results page, so you never have to visit the site that makes its money off advertising when people visit it. Google has done the same thing to lots of industries: weather, movies, sports, lots of informational sites, news sites. It’s the type of thing that, when you put your eggs all in the same basket, you depend on. Depending too heavily on any one thing is always a problem. Being in an economy where there isn’t enough supply is always a problem. It’s as simple as that! These are the basic economic rules they’re faced with.
Otherwise, from a performance perspective, because Google and Facebook are where people are, they will, on the other hand, reach their target audiences. It’s more from an economic perspective, I think, that there’s an eventual danger. On top of the economic threat, I think there’s a threat of data dependency. We said it at the beginning, a little earlier, that Google and Facebook were fundamentally data companies that sell ad space, but that the main reason we buy the space is due to the data. Advertisers, we know, have a huge amount of data that belongs to them, and it’s not always easy for them to organize it, structure it and deploy it in their campaigns. Whether it’s for email campaigns, media campaigns, or anything else. But they have to do it! Because as soon as you don’t, you have to depend on data that doesn’t belong to you, like Google’s and Facebook’s. If advertisers have really well structured data, they’ll be able to advertise on local properties with confidence.
Here’s the bottom line: before, when you wanted to reach people for a vacation, for example, to sell a vacation, you would buy space in the “Voyage” section of La Presse. But there was a ton of waste when you did that. Now, we’re able to say, “Let’s target people who are actively looking to book a vacation, and no one else.” Which is obviously interesting for advertisers. It’s like asking people to pretend that Uber doesn’t exist, and go back to taking taxis – they smell, they only take cash… No one wants that. Advertisers won’t go back. They need to be able to get control of their own data, and then they will be far better equipped to go with any publisher and get good results. Their data is their future. It’s their customer data. If they don’t get their data organized, advertisers will be looking at a whole other slew of problems. So yes, I think that’s another facet of the problem, the dependency on data that doesn’t belong to them.