Vincent Marquenie is Digital Communications Director at STROOM, the agency that De Media Maatschap recently merged into. He deals with the online part of the media business.
Marquenie started at De Media Maatschap ten years ago as a junior digital consultant. At the time, it was a traditional agency where digital was a bit more secondary. He was doing that for a few years when the owner said to him: you go and see what it takes to make this a good digital agency as well.
,,We were already advising clients like Engie and Dirk van den Broek: you do a lot of TV, but in specific target groups there is also a lot of reach to be built up online. By doing those campaigns and learning, we got better and better at integrated media advice. That was a fun time where you really had to fight to give digital a prominent place within the whole.''
It works well when online and offline work together for optimal results?
,,Certainly, you should always consider all means for optimal effect. So TV is often an effective means to reach a lot of people, but through online video you can then target a bit more. For example, Dirk had a lot of waste with a national medium like TV because they don't have stores everywhere in NL. Online was really an addition here, since we can target a region. That's how really effective plans emerge.''
So online and offline must work intensively together, but how do you work with the advertising agency?
''It's like dance and music; it has to form a whole to make something beautiful out of it. We now have about thirteen digital specialists at STROOM and together with the consultants we work hard on the plans to grow a brand.''
Do you think you can keep building the brand online as well?
,,Definitely, to an increasing extent we can build brands online. You certainly shouldn't erase traditional media in this, but you have to ask yourself carefully: what works with which target group? After all, the average age of viewers is getting higher and higher. Someone said the other day: the traditional media themselves sometimes don't seem to realize how quickly the media landscape has changed. I think online does have a different kind of impact, it's all a bit more volatile.''
Is it tempting to put the performance down to you alone?
,,I also really see online as a tool to do brand building so performance doesn't always have to be the only goal. The problem is that the availability of TV is decreasing, so the reach for brand building has to be found elsewhere. So in that sense I see it as a challenge to not only focus on performance for online but in particular to find the sweet spot between brand building and performance. And especially don't forget the streaming platforms that are also going to allow advertisers.''
Take us into the strategic part. You then sit with the offline consultants, the client and the advertising agency together. Then how do you determine the strategy?
,,Then you look at the objective; from there you build further. By capitalizing on each other's expertise, we build brick by brick on a complete strategy, where creation is supported by data and where media makes the most impactful choices in relation to the concept. It is important to listen to and understand each other; when the foundation is right, great things happen. In this, online also follows the brand strategy by creating as many associations as possible with the target group. Precisely because we are so much in the business, we know exactly which channels go with the stories. That's how you make great plans.''
Has competing for online marketing budgets diminished?
,,Certainly, there is no other way: the world is digitizing, the customer journey is often digital and often you make the plans together with the advertising agency. We then organize the media strategy and increasingly important in this is the data centralization: what data are you going to manage? We focus very much on dashboarding the data because if you deploy a lot of channels, of course you get a lot of numbers: at brand level brand awareness, image and preference for example and of course the views. If you want, you can collect endless data, but we get an increasingly large role in this to provide insight and overview. That's why we also see the budget obviously going more to online to give substance to that as well.''
As a brand, you need to get your data right
,,Definitely, which is why we are investing tremendously in it. You just can't see the forest for the trees; there are so many developments going on regarding data. Think about tooling, software, APIs, platforms that don't 'talk' to each other very well. All this can sometimes make it very complex to get a good overview of your data that you can actually use. Our role is to convert data from observations to insights in understandable language so that everyone understands it.
Does your profession end up changing significantly with the future disappearance of cookies?
,,Our profession changes every day. New apps, new techniques and also cookies. Of course we are working very hard on alternatives, we talk a lot with partners and media parties where you can see that they are working very hard to constantly improve the quality of the media landscape. In my view, these are good developments and always fascinating to see which alternatives are being developed to First Party cookies and contextual targeting. Fortunately, it remains the case that we know how to reach the target audience properly at all times. Actually, you see a shift in quality emerging, which will only make things better.''
What did you think was a good case where the online part had a lot of impact?
,,For example, we work for an energy company that wants more awareness and wants to sell more energy contracts. We apply attribution to trace effects: for example, channels that focus on awareness like TV and online channels like search and retargeting, so you can sell more. If we then deploy a radio commercial, you can see how many additional searches that generates and a lot of volume comes from that. So we can start to optimize, taking into account the saturation point and decide to move some of the total budget to search, so that you bring in those sales and that customer journey is very short for a while. However, there is then also a saturation point where you no longer bring in leads without TV, and so you can continually examine what each medium adds. After a while you know exactly which knobs to turn and the beauty of our profession is that you have to keep rediscovering that.''
Text: BBP Media | Image: Pure Image
This article previously appeared on MarketingTribune