You wouldn’t accept paying for a Big Mac (le Big Mac?) and getting a single chicken nugget.
But that’s essentially what a lot of marketers are doing with their digital ad budgets, says Sameer Amin, VP of data-driven marketing and media at consumer goods giant Reckitt, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks, recorded live on a yacht during Cannes Lions.
Media buyers have been conditioned to assume that there’s less waste in digital, to trust that the targeting is sharper and the performance is better, even when a big chunk of impressions are missing the mark.
But digital targeting is only “better” than more traditional channels, like TV, for example, when the underlying data is accurate and trustworthy, and when buyers stop thinking they can get cheap reach without making any trade-offs, Amin says.
At least on TV the “wastage kind of comes free, right?” he says. “Anyone outside your target audience you don’t really pay for, while on digital you pay for every single impression, even if it isn’t on target.”
In other words, a value meal is only a value if you’re getting what you ordered. So Reckitt set out to get its money’s worth.
Around 2018, Amin and his team kicked off Reckitt’s digital transformation in earnest, a process he describes as “very humbling” given that his background was TV, not tech. Amin had spent more than 15 years at UK-based media agencies mostly doing TV planning and buying before joining Reckitt in 2012.
Reckitt brought in the Boston Consulting Group at the time to benchmark its digital capabilities, which BCG characterized as “nascent.” Within two years, Reckitt had climbed to above average, which was gratifying, Amin says, but didn’t mean the job was – or is ever – done.
The goalposts keep moving, he says, which means Reckitt has to keep running, too. “The smarter we get, the smarter other people get,” Amin says.
Today, TV is still a big part of Reckitt’s media mix, but now the split is roughly 60/40 digital to TV rather than the roughly 85% TV-dominant mix Amin inherited when he came on board.
“We might have been slow to the transformation party,” Amin says, “but once we identified that this was the route we wanted to go down, the whole company mobilized toward achieving that goal.”
Also in this episode: aligning the world’s biggest advertisers on shared media standards, why some grunt work shouldn’t be automated and what it takes to make Cannes worth the sweat (literally). Plus: running with the bulls in Pamplona.
For more articles featuring Sameer Amin, click here.
