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This is adtech God and I command you to listen to this house ad. So if you're listening to this show, just know that you've really stumbled upon a giant network of content across advertising, marketing, media, publishing, and of course the people that work in this great advertising industry. So go to market. Check out all of our brands. We have multitude of shows from the Brand Forum, the Advertising Forum, the Monopoly Report, the Ad Tech God Pod, the Market and more. We are bringing more podcasts to our network. We are consistently and constantly bringing on new shows. So check it out. Market or search for any of those brands in the app that you use to listen to this podcast. Enjoy the show and see you all soon. Get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card with unlimited 2% cash back on all eligible purchases Unlimited 5% cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online and and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business. You'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of $1,500 cash back after you spend $50,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership terms. Apply. Learn more at Go MX Graphite welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host at Tech God. Another Friday, Another session from Architecture Live. Today we actually have Joanna o', Connell, Chief Intelligence Officer at Omnicom Media Group. Her session was titled Rethinking your brand growth framework to maximize Influence. If you have not heard Joanna o' Connell speak, I think you will genuinely like this conversation. She's incredibly intelligent. She understands the agency world so well. But beyond that she really understands the technological changes that are happening not only in the day to day operational side of things, but how media is consumed, how important the influencer market is. She covers a lot in this session that we recorded. We hope you enjoy it. Again. If you are interested in listening to more of an agency's perspective, you can come here to the Attic God Pod. If you want to hear more about technology you can listen to Ari Paparo's podcast called the Market Podcast. People like Luma Bliss, Pubmatic People and more. And then we also have a podcast called the Brand Forum. We'll be speaking to Molson Coors, the wnba, the NFL and more. Those are all sessions that we recorded at marketexture Live and we'll be releasing over the next few weeks. Please enjoy today's session from Architecture Live and see you Guys, next Tuesday for just a regular episode of my podcast. Thank you. Enjoy.
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So, I'm Joanna o'. Connell. I'm Chief Intelligence Officer for Omnicom Media North America. I'm going to take you through some research we did recently. I have a bunch of my team here. I'm very proud of this work, excited to celebrate it with them and with you. So let's just get into it, because I don't have a lot of time. And again, I know I stand between you and drinks. So we started with a question, which is how are people influenced? And I think we had to recognize that the equation used to be relatively straightforward, right? You could turn to your friends and family. You could ask your doctor. You could see an ad on television or in a newspaper. Now the picture looks really, really different. It's a lot more complicated than it used to be. What we're thinking about here is what are the sources of influence that help a consumer make a decision? We're living in a world now where it could be an influencer, it could be an AI Chatbot, it could be their best friend, it could be Reddit. These are all sources of influence. And the challenge for a brand is that they are now one of very few of their. One voice of very many. Excuse me, They're a small voice among very many sources of influence. So we were curious if consumers are evolving in the way that they're making decisions, in what ways? And then ultimately, what did that mean for brands? So that's what we were looking at here. There are six things I'm going to hit on really quickly. And by the way, I will just say the piece itself, the POV is like 30 pages long. So if you really want all the nerdy details, you got to go get the POV, because doing it in 20 minutes is really just scratching the surface. QR code. QR code. We don't have one. I know. Such a miss. Okay, next time. So we'll start with the fact that the sources of information are completely exploding. And this is really obvious. I appreciate that. But if you think about the fact that 96% of people are using the Internet, which is a gateway to any bit of information you could possibly want about anything around the world. Information is infinite. Two, information asymmetry is gone. What do I mean by information asymmetry? Have you ever gone to buy a used car and the guy tells you, no, trust me, it's perfect. And you go, sure, I totally believe you. I'm sure that that's true. Well, 30 years ago, you had to believe that person. You do not anymore. The information asymmetry relationship between the seller, in this case the brand and the buyer in this case the consumer does not exist anymore. When 92% of people will tell you then they can get all the information that they need to make any kind of decision. 3. This is a big one. Trust. A very complex subject. Very important though in the decision making process. It's variable and it's in flux. 54% of people will now say that they trust people over institutions. I think it's down to like 28% of people say they trust mass media. 67% of Gen Z say that they trust people more than they trust institutions. And institutions by the way, can mean a lot of different things. Big companies, big corporations versus people. Attention is fragmenting. You already know this. You know that people are using multiple devices, you know the amount of time that they're spending in digital environments. But what's really important here is not just the time that they're spending and that it's fragmenting how they're spending that time. It's that it's impacting their actual ability to pay attention. 63% of people told us that their attention span is okay or not great. I think we can all relate to that. That's the reality of the world that brands are living in. This next one, I cannot overstate. Gen AI platforms are not just information engines, they are influencers. We're going to talk more about that one because it's really, really important. 44% of people say said that they now trust product and brand recommendations from Genai platforms. That's up from 35% just a year ago. And finally underneath all of this where really the brand's primary mechanism to connect with consumers is advertising, they're contending with a lot of people who are choosing to tune them out on purpose, actively avoid them. 52% of people around the world have said they're using some kind of ad blocker or ad blocking technology. And we're not even talking about the fact that people pay subscriptions in streaming, for example, to avoid ads. So with all of that in place, you're dealing with a really complex set of forces that are now changing how people are making decisions. But it's not just those things. You also have to think about the economy. This is a really big one. Three quarters of people are telling us that they're changing their spending habits, they're buying less, they're, they're trading down or they're cutting purchases altogether amidst just a General sense of economic anxiety, tariffs, inflation, a general sense of unease. More than half of people told us in 2026 they're going to be buying the necessities, only no longer buying the nice to haves. And more than half of people told us that uncertainty around tomorrow is preventing their spending. So you've got a sea of new forces shaping consumer decision making. You have this economic backdrop that is definitely shaping the decisions they make. And you have brands competing in ecosystems that are so much more complex and dynamic and competitive than ever before. I don't have to belabor these points. I think you already know them. But DTC brands offer convenience, quality, transparency, personalization and private label brands, especially in sort of lower price categories where there's perhaps less perceived differentiation in quality. Private label brands can also eat the lunch of a traditional brand. And then if you think about the marketplaces like Amazon, they have raised the stakes for everybody. We just expect seamless, available, ubiquitous, infinite choice. This is the environment in which brands are operating. Okay, that's a lot with that though, we thought, okay, so what does it mean to be a brand? How do you connect as a brand with people so that they're likelier to choose you when all of these things are happening? So we looked at the complex state of brand. Now, to do that, you have to sort of ask yourself first, well, what is a brand anyway? Most simply it's just a product or a service. But we know fundamentally that it is so much more than that is in essence. And it's an essence that people perceive about a brand. It's tangible things like price or quality or functionality. But it's also intangible things like trust, authenticity, words I feel like you've probably heard today, reputation, value. And now, given all of the things I was just talking about, part of the essence of brand might also be things like availability, accessibility. All of these things add up to how a consumer perceives a thing called brand. This is the money slide. So really pay attention. This is very important because here's the challenge for brands with all this stuff happening. Yes, people will tell you that price matters, of course, price matters, especially right now, I think, when people are extremely price sensitive. But look at these two stats. This is what brands should really be paying attention to. Nearly 3/4 of people told us that brands are more interested in earning their money, excuse me, than their hearts or their loyalty. Three quarters of people think brands are just chasing their dollars. And more than half of people say that brands don't even try to connect with them the way that they used to does that. Like, are you like, what the fuck? That's a big deal. That's a really big deal. So then we thought, okay, what the hell's going on? Well, you'll see some interesting things that sit sort of behind those stats. One, and this is from Duke Deloitte AMA is a piece of research that looked at how CMOs were allocating budgets. Brand versus performance shocker. Unfortunately, brands are under an enormous amount of pressure and so brand investment has been trending downward. This in spite of what CMOs believe is the ideal ratio, which would be 50:50. Now I'm not saying this is causal, I'm just saying it's correlational because these things are happening concurrently. You also see this is from Interbrand. The role of brand as a factor in consumers decision making is losing power. It's going down now. This in spite of the fact that there is plenty of good research that shows that investment in brand translates to business performance in the long term. These are two which we hyperlink in the piece. One is from the MMA and one is from hbr. They're both really worthwhile to look at. There is research there. It exists. Okay, so there's some tension that was going on and we thought, okay, so brands are in this challenging position. They're one of a sea of many, many voices and places that consumers can go to make decisions. There's economic factors, there's marketplace factors. So what the hell I just did? You see, I self censored. I was about to use a different word than the word I. What do brands do? And that's when we started thinking about brand growth frameworks. These are very traditional concepts. Hopefully you guys have heard these before. The kind of traditional laws of physical and mental availability. Physical would be like stuff on shelves. You can't buy something if it's not on the shelf. When a person shows up, mental availability, recall, salience, you need to be present in their mind at a moment of decision making. Those things felt like they needed a refresh. So that's the first thing we did. We said, okay, actually physical availability looks a lot different now in what I call the era of ubiquitous commerce. In other words, that's a fancy way of saying if a person wants to buy something, they can buy it anywhere. They expect you to have an omnichannel presence. They're going to move between digital and physical worlds very seamlessly. 78% of people expect brands to have that influencers in social commerce. Massive, massive, massive. 42% of people who have bought something from an influencer told us that they do it spontaneously. They were not going to shop, it just happened. That is physical availability because that brand was present in that moment for that consumer to buy that thing. I heard someone talk about shoppable advertising earlier today and they're like, ah, QR codes. They suck. Not a great experience today. I guarantee you. When we get to a place where someone can say to their television, put that thing in my cart and the fulfillment is in place, this will become very, very big. Very big. Finally, we're at the dawn of commerce enabled Genai. We know that a third of people tell us at the deciding phase in their consumer purchase journey, they're turning to Genai before they make that purchase. And mental availability is kind of tougher than ever, right? Because brands are competing against all of these people and other entities talking about their brand that they don't control. There's more and more noise about them that they don't control. Genai is not only an influencer, it is a dis. Intermediating layer. It sits between the brand and the consumer and decides what the brand is going to see. Making these traditional rules around mental availability also a little bit tougher. Finally, we talked about ad avoidance being a very real phenomenon. How do you think about reaching the Adavoiders? How do you build that stuff into your reach and frequency models all these people and all these moments that you can't reach in these traditional ways. Sounds hard, right? Yeah, it is. It's a challenging time to be a brand. So what we thought was, and again we saw this in the research, so I promise we didn't just make this up. And you'll see some of the stats that I think really bring it home is that something was missing in this traditional formula and the question was what? And this is what I love so much about being able to go last is all day. I heard people talking today about connection, about resonance, about being a part of a brand, showing up authentically being a part of a community. Do you know what? Consumers actually do want that and we have the data to prove it. So this third layer, this emotional availability layer becomes really, really important. Consider that 3/4 of people say that when they're making a purchase decision, it is essential for a brand to feel relatable to them. Now take that alongside this next stat, which is from Hive Science. 86% of people report that they sometimes or frequently are served ads on digital platforms that are either neutral or disconnected to who they are as people. It's almost insulting, right? It's like why this is meaningless to me. You don't know who I am. And yet 57% of people will tell us that they have high emotional availability. There's an openness to connecting. They're open to it. So I'm just going to give a couple examples of where you start to see this come to life a little bit, and then I'll give actual media examples. The first. And again, this came up a bunch today, so I was very excited to be able to show you this data. The first is that consumers actually do want brands to participate in these shared experiences. Whether it's a big cultural moment or a community that matters to them. They want brands to be there, not performatively, but in a participatory way. 62% of people told us that for a brand to grab their attention these days, they need to create and or tap into a shared cultural moment or community. 62%. That's like 2/3 of your target wants you to participate. And half of people feel more positive about brands than advertising, excuse me, advertise during big live events like the super bowl or the Grammys, because these are huge shared moments among people. They want brands to be there, but you need to be careful. And this came up earlier, and I was so glad because this is so important. People are so smart. They can stick sniff out fake in a quarter second. In the era of information asymmetry, authenticity is absolutely key. It has to be real. You have to be transparent with people. You have to be honest. If you're not, they're going to know in a second. And that can be really damaging to you as a brand. 42% of people told us that the number one way a brand can increase their emotional connection with them is by being transparent and honest. They don't want people chasing them just for their money. They want them to do it because they're trying to do something valuable for that person. Okay, so here's the new model, Bing. You can imagine an old model would have those two components, and those are really valuable components. That baseline of thinking is so important and so powerful. That is. We're not saying it isn't. What we're saying is that it is necessary but no longer sufficient. You need to elevate this third pillar around emotional availability because people are telling you that it is now necessary in this world. All right, so here are some. Just quick. These sound almost a little trite because they sound really obvious, but in total seriousness. Every one of these things is a kind of foundational principle to being able to do this well. Identifying new target audiences using richer inputs. I'll just quickly give another call out to the mma. They do some really interesting work around the movable middles, which is finding people not just that are in your target audience, but finding people that have a propensity to be interested in you. Building new measurement frameworks that capture brand investments, true business value. Both of those pieces that I mentioned too, the MMA and hbr. In both cases, they talked about how they built composite metrics to better capture the full understanding of the value of brand. It is possible to do that. You need to figure out what some of the appropriate leading indicators are. You need to do the hard work for looking at correlation. Even better causation, but even correlation to understand. Is this thing that I'm optimizing to today contributing to business performance? It is possible. The third one, which I'm also really excited to say is one that we're doing research on right now. We're looking at this idea of how you build a content engine that meets the needs of these modern consumers because that is the how you show up and what you say. And then the last thing which we're going to talk just a tiny bit about really quickly right now is the where you show up. Because what we did is we identified some areas in media that exist today that create an environment that almost allows you to supercharge or maximize your opportunity to capture influence. It'll make more sense in a second. But I will start by saying if you're going to build this kind of new model, you also have to appreciate that you now have two primary audiences. Audience number one is people and audience number two is machines. And building a real flywheel for growth means that you really need to effectively market to both. And I'll talk about examples of both, but I'm going to start with people because duh, people. Super important, in fact, clearly important to your to your business, as I hope I've proved to you. And I'm go real fast Live. It came up a ton today. We wrote an entire report completely redefining what live meant and what it meant to engage in live in live environments. Meaningly, I'm not going to spend time on it now, but if you want to know about it, we got a lot of research on it. In short, you want to hack into influence, participate in live in meaningful ways. Influencers is another one. Don't just go after buzz. I know this came up with Molson Coors. Like don't just chase Buzz. Chase meaning chase connection. And you can do that. Actually that came up a ton from a bunch of people today about finding points of connection with people, not just going after the biggest athletes for example, to represent your brand. People now say that influencers are in fact a one stop shop for them and the smaller ones, the niche and rising ones are seen as super authentic and meaningful. So you do not have to try and get Kylie Jenner to have an impact retail media very quickly. The reason this one feels so important right now is because people are struggling. And so if you can find ways to do data driven marketing using retail media partners to show up meaningfully for people when they're making hard decisions, wouldn't you want to do that? Like that one feels like a really a more thoughtful way to think about the power of retail media right now. And then quickly on search just appreciate that people are not just searching on Google anymore. Forget about AI chatbots, we're going to talk about them in a second. They're searching on TikTok, they're searching on Amazon, they're searching on their televisions, and if you're not in the places where they're searching, you're absent from that conversation. But finally, the machines. 25% of queries now globally are purely and truly Genai conversational. And I'm not even including Google's AI overviews in that stat, which makes the number so, so much bigger. You cannot ignore how important it is to be participating in generative AI as a disintermediating layer between you and your customers. So we have a whole framework around Generative Engine optimization. There are five Cs. You better take a picture because I'm almost done. Every single thing. I've just talked about every one of these things we have independent pieces of research on and we've done lots of cool innovation around every one of them. Again, I don't have the time for it today, but hopefully I've at least given you a taste of why it is so important to not rest on your laurels using the old rules and why there are really clear ways that you can supercharge your opportunity for influence today. And then tomorrow when they have me back, I'll talk about content. Thank you so much.
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Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates. So follow me on X instead Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG, Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.