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International ZO dmexco reporters with Steve King, CEO of ZenithOptimedia Worldwide

During dmexco 2015, the ZO reporters got the chance to meet the CEO, Worldwide of Zenith Optimedia – Steve King. It was a very inspiring chat which gave us new insight into the history of the company.

A few words about Steve King. He is one of the most experienced global network leaders. Before becoming CEO of Zenith Media Europe, Middle East and Africa in August 1997, he was appointed director of TV buying, overseeing the largest TV group of its kind in Europe. He was made Deputy Managing Director in 1992 and Managing Director in 1993. Following the creation of ZenithOptimedia in October 2001, he was appointed Chief Executive of ZenithOptimedia EMEA and subsequently Worldwide CEO in March 2004.

Steve emphasized that people play a very important role in the company, which is why he started our discussion with the sentence, “Tell me something about yourselves”. He was curious about our roles and duties, and this gave us a great opportunity to get to know the other ZO reporters better. After our speeches Steve talked about his career path and the details of his own daily work. He mentioned that he started his career in media sales; he told us how Zenith began operating in USA, and how Zenith and its sister agency – Optimedia – became part of the ZenithOptimedia Worldwide network.

During the conversation Steve referred to panel discussion about ‘Collaborative Growth”. In this very interesting debate, he led a discussion with Lisa Utzschneider – the Chief Revenue Officer at Yahoo –and Ralf Rau – the Global Director of Marketing Communication at SCA. They tried to answer the following questions: will collaboration become the catalyst in a transformational world? And who is leading the process of helping brands to transform their business models? Conversation with Steve King was an excellent opportunity to discuss this debate and expand on the topic.

Steve gave us a lot of tips and tricks, which we found particularly helpful. He told us, “Don't be afraid to take a risk; don't be afraid of failure”. Risks come with the acceptance that you will make some mistakes along your journey, but by making mistakes you will learn valuable lessons about your business, and this will help you build your self-esteem. Every career has its share of challenges and you will constantly be tested. Steve said also that going through tough times makes you stronger. He also mentioned that working with demanding clients is the best lesson.

During the conversation with Steve we talked also about his private life and passions. One of the reporters asked which profession he would had chosen if he hadn’t worked as a Global CEO. Steve replied that maybe he would be a sportsman. We asked him also about what he likes and dislikes in his job and how his typical day looks.

ZO dmexco reporter Lucia Ilie, Digital Communications Planner Zenith Romania, interviewed Steve King, CEO of ZenithOptimedia Worldwide

Steve King really took his time talking with the reporters team, in a very inspirational meeting. Here are my key take-outs:

1. It’s always better to make a decision than not make a decision at all.

2. Being innovative and transforming your business is crucial.

3. Joint ventures never work.

4. Successful companies fail for 3 reasons:

a. They lose their top talent.

b. They underestimate the impact of technology in their business (they  overestimate in the short term and they underestimate in the long term).

c. They try to diversify too far.

5. As a media agency it’s important to remain neutral, and don’t underestimate the impact of data and technology.

6. It’s much better to work on a challenging client, you learn so much more.

7. Focus on the core business. As a media agency it’s important to focus on media strategy, consultancy and leveraging data and technology in our work, rather than on becoming a tech company.

8. No matter where you are professionally speaking, keep setting new challenges.

9. If it was easy, somebody else would do it.

10. No job is perfect but perseverance does pay off.

11. Don’t be afraid to take risks.

12. Hard times make you tough, mistakes help you learn.

Doodle is about easy scheduling. It greatly simplifies the process of planning events, meetings, brunches – almost everything that needs to be planned. No matter what you want to plan, Doodle does it for free, it saves time and doesn’t require registration. Doodle is an internationally loved brand.

Doodle was founded as a start-up by two Swiss engineers from ETH Zurich in 2007. The Swiss media owner Tamedia bought a 49% stake in Doodle in 2011, then bought the rest in 2014, by which time it had 20 million users a month. The founders left the company, because it was no long a start-up, and Michael Brecht became the new CEO. Thanks to Michael and his team, nowadays Doodle is one of the most famous scheduling tools worldwide – probably the market leader, with 24 million users a month in 25 countries and 17 languages.

Doodle is a super viral product: it is in the top 1,300 sites worldwide, and gets about 80% if its traffic direct and from email. Every additional new user brings in several more. Doodle just needed some SEO from PerformicsAKM3.

Systematic keyword research showed that Doodle was not properly capturing either brand or generic traffic. SEO was done different for different countries and languages. In general, it is not necessary in this business to perform country-oriented marketing; language-oriented marketing is sufficient. But Doodle wanted to focus on specific markets for strategic reasons. Every client is unique!

Each case of international and multilingual SEO has its own “best practice” for long-term success. Sites can address different countries and languages with different country code top-level domains (ccTLDs, e.g. doodle.fr), subdomains (fr.doodle.com) or subfolders (doodle.com/fr). The choice depends on the time-frame and individual circumstances. Doodle chose to use subfolders, because many of the ccTLDs were already taken and would cost a lot to acquire, and it preferred to use subdomains for partners, such as exmpl.doodle.com. Subfolders already existed and were easy and quick to implement.

ZenithOptimedia Germany has done great work with programmatic marketing, using the internal trading desk, AOD. We are now using our German experience to develop and grow programmatic marketing for Russian clients, based on the AOD suite. I was really impressed and inspired by what the German team has done. As one of the dmexco reporters, I decided to look deeply into what new technologies are available for programmatic today, and what will be available tomorrow.

First, I talked to Nugg.Ad.

Nugg.ad is a smart audience platform, founded in Berlin in 2006. They now offer a great variety of targeting options suitable for any marketing purpose. Looking at their capabilities from the top, I would identify three big groups of targeting options, with different levels of importance to us as a media agency. The first group – which is in general less interesting since it is pretty similar to what is available from its competitors – is their pack of consumer-related targets, based on demographic profiles, online behaviours, product interests and affinities. I specifically liked a proposed set of online behaviour targets linked to consumption of specific product categories. But overall this is a substitute for what can be done well by other vendors.

The second group of targeting options is very interesting. Nugg.ad can target users depending on how quickly they accept brand messages. In particular you may optimise your campaign towards specific communication objectives like Brand Awareness or Purchase Intent, using those people who already reacted to your campaign as the basis for further targeting. I loved it since in my market we use programmatic technology to target mass audiences as well, and this kind of approach helps to optimise the results you need from the campaign. That’s helpful when you are not able to track any digital metric as a success indicator.

The third group of targets opens a bright new future. Nugg.ad offers panel-based targets that enables cross-media solutions for your campaigns. A case study that VivaKi and Nugg.ad prepared for PayPal in Germany is a great illustration of this. Having access to GfK Media Efficiency panel, VivaKi and Nugg.ad created a single source technology called X-Cross, which enabled a fully integrated distribution of moving image campaigns on TV and online, to optimise the ad exposure across the different channels and to maximise the campaign’s net reach. Nugg.ad’s role here was to analyse the online behaviour of the target groups of the respective TV campaigns. Based on intelligent algorithms and machine learning, X-Cross creates a target group based on the TV audience, which it then addresses online. This kind of targeting isolates online contacts and minimises contact with people who have already seen the TV ad – the share of online video only contacts grew by 38% compared to the standard distribution. Aided ad recall grew by 17%, and brand trustworthiness grew by an incredible 18%. This case study is a perfect example of technology collaboration between agencies and one of the leading targeting technologies on the market. The fact that it enables a close link between online and TV ads makes it even more attractive, since it promises even deeper cross-media integration in the future.

dmexco – the digital marketing exposition & conference – is the best way to meet the greatest specialists from all over Europe. In the ZenithOptimedia lounge I was lucky to meet Guy Abrahams, one of ZenithOptimedia’s top experts. Guy sat on the sofa with his personal laptop and worked on a presentation: maybe for the world advertising summit or for his next visit to one of ZenithOptimedia’s offices around the world, who knows?

Guy has a wide role in ZenithOptimedia’s operational life: he leads the communication planners and is also in charge of the agency’s positioning in the market. It was no surprise that many people were crowded around him. I decided to ask this media veteran for his forecast of the development of the advertising market over the next few years.

“The development of the advertising market is based on the idea of brand communications,” said Guy.

“All of us should start to think about the advertising process not as media planners, or buyers, or strategists, but as advertisers. Agencies should give brand-focused service, concentrating on the needs of each separate brand.

“But it is not a good idea just to tell consumers what brands want. There will no longer be pure advertising as we knew it before, there will be ecosystems full of experiences, and we will tell consumers what they want to hear, what will be useful and interesting for them, across media channels.

“The advertising market is becoming more adaptive and flexible without any standard models of communications. We should think how can we orchestrate the delivery of experiences across the consumer journey – it’s not about being a creative agency, it is about being a curative agency.”

ZO dmexco reporter Lucia Ilie, Digital Communications Planner Zenith Romania, interviewed Michael Kahn, CEO Performics Worldwide at the #dmexco2015

1. What did you like most at dmexco this year?

I’m amazed by the amount of energy here at dmexco, the attendance only seems to go up and up. I've been coming here for three years, and there are more people here than ever before, there’s more dialogue going on, the conversations seems to have more energy than ever before, and it seems like really serious business is going on here.

So it’s great to see all these digital marketers coming together with so much enthusiasm. Also, alongside businesses like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Performics, AKM3 and ZenithOptimedia, there are so many other types of businesses that come here, like Mediamath – emerging businesses trying to make a difference in programmatic, video or content. It’s an entrepreneurial environment, one that's great for big business.

 2. What is the main opportunity for Performics AKM3 on the market?

So much of media and marketing is becoming machine-based and machine-driven. We need to design systems to leverage the data we have, to make smarter buys and investments in optimization and connecting with the consumer. So programmatic is huge to Performics. They say that search was the original programmatic media, because it was all biddable, so I think that is got to be at the core of what we do. But Performics is not about optimizing to eyeballs, it’s not about being programmatic against clicks, it’s about being programmatic to meaningful actions on behalf of the brand.

We are moving in a world where advertisers expect that marketing of all kinds, including content marketing, will be programmatic driven, so we are using tools to connect with the consumer in the right way, in the right moment, at the right time.

 3. And what are the main things to look out for?

We can never be good enough. If you are a performance marketing agency, the client’s expectations are that you will deliver better results today than you did yesterday, and better results tomorrow, that you have roadmaps that will help them innovate and lead the market.

So we can never sit still, we have got to get better and expand what we do. We also have to be aware that we face direct competition – consultancies that want to get into the advertising marketplace, clients that can take work in-house – so we have to be very good at what we do to compete.

 4. Is this a real threat, clients taking work in-house from agencies?

Yes, it’s always been there, I think it ebbs and flows. Sometimes clients take more in-house, sometimes less. There’s a hell of a lot of business that’s under review right now in the world, and that business is under review because clients are saying: should I host that in-house, should I work with an outside agency, who’s the right agency to work with? I think in-house is always an option and a threat.

 5. Please give us short guidelines on how to launch Performics AKM3 locally:

You got to say to yourself,

- What platform, technology or partners am I going to use for this going forward?

- How am I going to build up, with what DSP? Do I have capability in-house, within my agency, do I have to work outside with a DSP?

- What kind of data can I get access to, and what DMP can I use to inform the demand-side platform?

- What kind of talent do I need to drive all that?

So I think you need to discuss technology, capability and talent. We ultimately set up a model where, even though you start small, you’ve got the right people leveraging the right data against the right platforms to make it all work.

 6. SEO influence in Performics AKM3 business:

I look at SEO differently. Programmatic is today about paid media and optimizing your search, social, mobile and display campaigns. SEO is about leveraging content and owned assets and search discoverability.

SEO is really in demand right now, because brands are realizing that, “great, I can do all this stuff with my paid media, but what I can really have impact on is my owned and earned media”.

SEO is different from the media business, you can build a foundation quickly and get some pretty amazing results.

7. Recommend us a book:

ZO dmexco reporter Elena Artemova, Head of Business and Marketing Analytics, ZenithOptimedia Russia

#dmexco has come to an end almost as soon as it started, and its seeds are already spreading across more than 100 different countries. One of the biggest challenges at the conference was not to get lost in the huge amount of information available. Because the conference is getting bigger every year I would like to provide several tips on how to make the most of it.

1. Self-organization, or how to plan everything in advance.

a. Check the dmexco website – dmexco.de – and mobile app, since they are extremely useful for planning your stay at the conference. You can print the timetable and have it on your mobile. Note that there are not just seminars, but also the speakers’ corner, debates, and many other interesting things that are well worth seeing. Check the variety of exhibitors – it will pleasantly surprise you!

b. Book a hotel in Dusseldorf if everything is full in Cologne. The RE local train will get you to Cologne in 30 minutes.

c. Come to the conference earlier and leave it late – otherwise you will have to stay in a huge queue for a shuttle bus.

d. Check the information displays hanging all over the walls at dmexco – the timetable is often subject to change, so if you’re hoping to visit something very important to you, it’s best to make sure that it is still on the list.

2. Make the most of your stay at dmexco – time runs out so quickly.

a. More than 75,000 square feet of area can make it almost impossible for you to get to the right place at the right time. We were lucky to have a booth where it was very convenient to meet people. It was also easy to meet at the key points of the exposition – near the Congress Hall or the Debates Hall.

b. If you go to a seminar, make sure you have enough time to get into the right hall and find a seat in the room. The hottest topics always gathered a lot of people in advance.

c. Your timetable, even if properly planned, can be very tough to stick to. Don’t try to be everywhere, it’s much better to have some “empty hours” to be able to meet new people. The value of these conversations can’t be underestimated! Be sure you have some free time to speak to the leading professionals from different companies.

d. Take copies of the trade publications the organisers have placed in the main hall, as well as the dmexco brochure, and note the most important events and people listed within them.

3. Know exactly what you can postpone to save you precious time at the conference.

a. Try to have a break from your day-to-day job – dmexco is just for two days, so it’s a shame to miss important people and events. I know this is almost impossible because some questions seem too urgent, but we should at least should try.

b. Take the brochures which exhibitors are happy to give you. You may read them at home.

c. Make notes and pictures during the seminars – you will fix the most important things for you forever.

ZenithOptimedia panels and seminars at dmexco 2015