Highlights from Performance Marketing Playbook

The inaugural Performance Marketing Playbook heard expert insight and advice from top brands including Unilever, Kraft Heinz and Zalora; agencies including Mindshare, Dentsu, M&C Saatchi Performance and Reprise; and platforms/tech companies including Walee, Yahoo and Remerge.

Campaign Asia-Pacific's editorial team has posted highlights and takeaways from the conference.

OPTIMISM FOR BRAND-BUILDING, AND A CHANCE TO REDEEM OURSELVES
Posted at 12:45 pm

A few highlights from the fireside chat with David Porter, Unilver's VP of global media, which wrapped up the conference. 

On balancing performance and brand-building:

Especially in packaged goods, increasingly we're finding that the money that we used to spend building brand power or love or equity, now also has to do a performance job. And in a lot of our companies, it also has to help us build and explain our brands' purpose. Plus, it has to be used to acquire the first-party data that we all need to do great digital, data-driven marketing. You can take the glass-half-empty approach and say that budget’s now being stretched four ways. I prefer the glass-half-full approach, which is to say all of those new things actually help you build brand equity, brand power—if they are done right.

On stalking and spam, which are very much in the eye of the beholder:

We are very meticulously compliant with all the data regulations, whether it's GDPR or the other rules that are around market by market. But that's not enough, because if a member of the public feels like they're being stalked or spammed, even if they've handed over their information in a totally legitimate process, then they are being stalked or spammed. It's about how they feel about the deal, not what your lawyer can tell you. So I would say, as an industry, we're a long way off the curve. And I bet it's pretty rare that you get something unsolicited coming your way that you feel is really welcome, where you're really pleased this landed on your phone or in your inbox. We need to change that if we're going to win the public trust in this whole process.

On his optimism about the Sinofication of ecommerce:

Amazon and the western platforms are very much digitized versions of, take your pick, the Sears catalog or a department store. They're very orderly. You go in in a very orderly way, you find the product that you're looking for, you buy, you leave. The Chinese-origin e-commerce platforms are more like a street market or mall in terms of multiple opportunities, and even people jumping out and surprising you. It's a nonlinear journey. People have a lot of fun. There's entertainment along the way. … That makes it a destination and a source of entertainment, quite unlike the western platforms. So I've gotta believe that there's an opportunity there for brands to use that to start to build brand power, brand equity.

On the metaverse:

The one thing I really hope for is that nobody gets to own this. If you go back to the early days of the Internet, and see how that was very distributed, very open-source, very liberal. I'm really hoping we get something like that, like a distributed Internet 3.0. Whether we do, who knows?

On what he hopes to see happen after his impending retirement:

I do think we have a chance now, in a way, to redeem ourselves with what we collectively do with the second coming of the internet. Because we definitely took some wrong turns, and I've been amazed how much of my job, and people like me in the region, how much of that work is based around dealing with brand safety, viewability, bad actors. That’s not something I signed up for all those generations ago, and I hope that we can focus less on that in the future because it's self-correcting. I hope we can focus more on building great brands that the public really enjoys having a relationship with.

WHY AFFILIATES CAN PLAY A LARGER AUDIENCE ROLE THAN NETWORK SALES
Posted at 11.55 am

Simon Talvard, client partner, Dentsu International: 

The question of the audience is going to come back again and again because in two days your audience is not the persons to who whom the data is sent. It's a mix of a lot of different elements. You can have the most influential person if that person is not influential to the right people in the right moment or the right place then it doesn't really matter yet anyhow. So that's why it's important to have everything part of a global vision of what does performance mean. Affiliate is definitely growing in importance to solve a lot of clients’ problems on the bottom of the funnel but it also has more of a place to play across the entire funnel from consideration and in terms of brand building.

WHO SAYS DISCOUNTS DON'T BREED LOYALTY?
Posted at 11.55 am

Tejas Kirodiwal, Head of Growth, Southeast Asia, Zalora on the top performing type of affiliate marketing they use:

So far what we have seen is that loyalty websites work the best. They’ve outperformed every other way of marketing. They’ve beat coupon aggregator websites... People love discounts and loyalty websites are the best at giving you cash back on top of discounts so if I had to pick one I would say loyalty websites outperform most in ecommerce but it may differ from other industries.  

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WHY MORE INFLUENCERS ARE BECOMING AFFILIATES
Posted at 11.54 am

Samina Seth, Cofounder, Walee:

What’s happened is now there's some brand experience around working with influencers so they're quickly evolving. They’re [asking]: ‘Can influencers do a little bit more?  Can they sell for us as well?’ And for influencers it’s passive income. They've done their work, their primary job was to push out to their users.  And now they're getting a bonus on top.  So instead of doing a single cool app, maybe they’re going to do several pullouts because it’s already done.  That’s how I see influencers getting in.

THE HAZY FUTURE OF IDENTITY
Posted at 11.52 am  

Dan Richardson, head of data, ANZ, Yahoo:

There is a fork in the road facing marketers in 2022, as privacy legislation evolves and Google decides what they want to do, there are a couple of choices. If you’re looking at it like Apple, you can weaponise data privacy and produce products which are very-privacy centric, but siloed off in that ecosystem. Or collaborate and communicate [privacy’s] value as an industry.

The bottomline is, identity is in jeopardy—all the things we are doing over the years, targeting, frequency, cross device, measurement—are all at stake. If you look at what Apple has been doing, it's not new. We’re seeing about 30% of ad opportunities right are delivered to unknown users blindly. If you’re just brought a product, the brand doesn’t know that you did if you use a browser using cookies. We really want to avoid a [situation where we have] 75% unidentified audience by 2023.

THERE'S LIFE YET IN RETARGETING
Posted at 10.50 am

Maria Abdull Latif, regional manager INSEA, Remerge:

Most of us thought it would look at something like an apocalypse [after Apple's app tracking transparency or ATT]. As a retargeting DSP we get asked a lot if retargeting would become obsolete. If retargeting was a person, they would say the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Post-ATT, in terms of global insights, retargeting remains lucrative and is working really well. Adoption rate and available ID traffic for iOS and Android remains conducive for retargeting. We are [also] hitting all-time highs on several performance metrics. Last month alone we processed 4.8 trillion ID bid requests.

INTERACTIONS OVER IMPRESSIONS
Posted at 10.15am

Dhiren Amin, CMO Asia, Kraft Heinz:

I don’t think you can have a blanket approach to say one metric doesn’t work, but I do think that, in my personal view, we should be more obsessed with earned media versus paid media, especially when it comes to awareness. For example, impressions allow us to measure the value of our paid media, but it is not a fair representation of actual reach. Impressions only measure how many people we serve, not how many people are actually influenced—whether they see it or interact with it.
 

BACK TO BRAND
Posted at 10:00 am

Nathalie Pellegrini, chief performance officer, Mindshare:

Whilst everyone went to ecommerce [during the pandemic], what we noticed is with a lot of our clients, we started looking at the short-term gains rather than the long-term, especially in 2020. So looking at conversion rates, ROAS, CTR. But now what we’re seeing is the reemerging of brand and performance because things are stabilising, especially in markets that are opened up like in Hong Kong. Now we are looking at long-term sustainability, things like brand love.