Omnicom drives innovation with twin ad-tech breakthroughs

For Omnicom Media Group (OMG), the key to connecting advertisers with consumers lies in the best use of digital tools and the wealth of information brands now have about their audiences.

Saying all of that is one thing, putting it into practice another. But with the launch of two new proprietary industry ad-tech breakthroughs at its Digital Connect Forum in China in April, OMG has “built something unique in the marketplace”, says Doug Pearce, CEO of OMG China.

“We’re moving away from judgmental reasons for buying advertising to a data-led buying strategy, based on insights we can develop from looking into data,” he says. “So we’ve got a whole next generation of excitement to be part of, and what the digital landscape is enabling us to do is really-game changing.”

To that end, OMG’s Annalect Data Cloud and Accuen trading desk are new, cutting-edge platforms in programmatic buying and data that allow targeted, flexible and precise marketing for brands.

“Our data ecosystem, Annalect Data Cloud, aggregates, analyses, and activates consumer data enabling marketers to connect tocustomers and prospects at all stages of the buying journey,” explains Wen Jia, head of platform logistics at Annalect China.

“Annalect also lets you target the right consumers, personalise their experience, and measure the effectiveness of that engagement. We can even combine irregular customer experiences and preferences to grasp customer loyalty, to know how customers interact with advertisers, to optimise content and broadcast approach.”

The service has four components: data management platform (DMP), audience centre (integrated third party data), consultancy (human analytics), and activation.

“We start with a framework that focuses on business issues, not just marketing issues. We provide multidisciplinary analysts that help to inform, measure and optimise clients’ business,” says Jia.

“For marketers today, knowing ‘what’ happened to a brand is only table stakes. We take it a step further and tell clients ‘why’ it happened.”

Wen Jia

Jun Yuan

“We used to always talk about ‘cost per thousand’ being the currency in which you would trade across media,” Pearce says. “So instead of throwing a pebble into the sea and hoping we hit a fish, what we’re able to do now—because we know what people are looking at, searching for, what patterns they have—we can narrow that down to almost a ‘cost per one’. What these products provide is efficiency in getting the right target audience quicker, and overall should lead to a greater ROI.”

Jun Yuan, head of Accuen in China, explains that Accuen aggregates various platforms, including DSPs, tracking technology, DMP, programmatic creative and others.

“We integrate all of the leading programmatic buying platforms, which acts as a command centre for campaign optimisation,” he says. “We can expand audience and media analytics to include predictive models based on media consumption and client data. We use the most granular data available so that marketers can make better decisions about how to reach the right audience at the right price.”

Accuen is of particular significance in China, Yuan says, because although programmatic buying has evolved rapidly, the ecosystem remains “fragmented”, with lots of buyers and sellers.

“So we wanted to launch a 360-degree, one-stop solution to connect the pieces together and solve marketers’ challengers, and allow easy adoption at scale. Every OMG client can have their own one-stop customised trading solution.”

For Pearce, the development of Annalect and Accuen symbolises OMG’s continued commitment to innovation in the ad-tech and media space, as programmatic becomes the standard means of doing business.

“It’s just going to be the way we work. It’s almost like saying you want to keep working with pencil and paper not use a computer,” he says. “You might talk to people in China that say this type of programmatic buying will be slow to develop, people will want to hang onto their relationships and the way they work. But it’s coming like a bullet train.”