MEDIA

The ad was bought from *inside* the house

Time for the industry’s sexiest topic: Programmatic media buying. Hold on, hold on, before we lose you. If you’re a marketer, you might want to pay attention. As with the rise of in-house creative agencies, some companies are starting their own media operations—specifically, programmatic buying.

• The Association of National Advertisers, ANA, drew attention to the shift in 2016, finding *major* transparency concerns between agencies and clients. In turn, marketers started saying, “Screw it, we’ll do it ourselves”— choosing to assert more control over the ad buying process. 
• Big names like Chase, Molson Coors, and Ally Financial have brought some of their media functions in-house over the past couple of years.
• According to an ANA survey from 2018, 36% of more than 200 marketers said they handled media services in-house vs. 22% in 2013; 24% had taken programmatic duties in-house.

Cutting out the middleman

According to Ana Milicevic, a digital marketing consultant and co-founder of Sparrow Advisors, there are a few reasons why brands start shifting media to in-house: it’s cheaper (they hope), more transparent, and the company’s marketing department gains new skill sets. 

Pharmaceutical giant Bayer—which manages every piece of its digital media investments—went in-house in 2018, wanting to be closer to the action. “This was by choice so we would have end-to-end ownership, from strategy to measurement and everything in between,”  wrote Jeff Rasp, head of media, digital platforms, and content at Bayer, to Marketing Brew. 

Ally Financial started the *the journey* a few years ago. By the end of 2021, all digital media will be handled completely in-house, the company’s CMO and head of PR Andrea Brimmer told us. “We were demanding more transparency into the buying process,” she said. 

• Now, Brimmer and her team get the “raw and unfettered” data in real time. In practice, that’s made her team quicker to A/B test display ads, create content at a faster clip, react in the moment, and get a deeper understanding of their customers’ journeys.

Staffing strife

Bringing media capabilities in-house can be quite the undertaking. For starters, it takes time. 

• Cullen Urbano, VP of consulting and marketing transformation at MightyHive, a firm that aids brands as they start the shift, said it can take anywhere between six months and four years.
• “The biggest misconception about in-housing is that it’s just, ‘We need to hire people and we need to teach them how to buy programmatically,’ or, ‘We need to teach them how to buy social,’” he said. “A lot of marketers don’t actually understand all of the functions that their agencies have been doing on the backend.”

Now hiring: It’s not exactly easy to find employees to fill these roles, which Milicevic said can end up being “quite monotonous” if they’re not able to drive strategy. Click here to read more about the staffing challenges marketers face when hiring for in-house programmatic roles.—RB

MARKETING

Oat milk’s moment in the

Chocolate brand Lindt is making an oat milk Santa for Christmas this year. In case you weren’t convinced that oat milk is 2021’s favorite dairy alternative.

After Oatly aired that Super Bowl commercial this year, other brands started touting their oat milks:

• In March, Chobani started plugging its zero-sugar oat milk with animated ads.
• Last month, Silk hired celebs like Alicia Silverstone and Gordon Ramsay for its “Greatest Oatmilk of All Time” campaign.
• Califia Farms rolled out its first national TV ad last week to show off all of its plant-based drinks, positioning oat milk as the new coffee creamer.

Suzanne Ginestro, CMO at Califia Farms, told Marketing Brew oat milk is “seeing high growth as a category and for our brand because people are drawn to its creamy taste and texture.”

Proof is in the plant-based pudding: US oat milk sales grew 131% between May 2020 and May 2021 to $304 million, per Nielsen figures cited by the AP. Meanwhile, soy, coconut, and rice milk saw sales slip.

As the oat milk category becomes more and more crowded, Susan Dobscha, marketing professor at Bentley University, told us brands in the space shouldn’t try appealing to everybody if they want to stand out. 

“It’s often a better strategy to get a fandom foothold and then start to branch out into other markets,” she said. “Ben & Jerry’s started out as a very niche brand because they were more expensive. And they had a social agenda, which not everybody loves. But they slowly expanded their market share through various tactics.”—MS

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CMOS

Chief moving marketing officers

The CMOs were moving and shaking last week—like, more so than usual. 

• Kate Rouch is leaving Facebook in favor of becoming Coinbase’s first CMO.
• Women’s co-working space The Wing hired Jen Cho as its lead marketer.
• Remember Kerry Sullivan, who has been marketing Neutrogena since before the brand’s Hayden Panettiere commercial days? She’s CMO of Dollar Shave Club now. Feel old yet? 
• Petco’s Tariq Hassan is en route from the dog park to the golden arches of McDonald’s as head marketer and digital customer experience officer in the US. 
• American sportball’s The MLB’s new CMO is Karin Timpone, who joined from Marriott.  

So what’s up with the musical chairs? There are two theories circulating.

The obvious answer: CMOs are well-known for having short tenures in the C-suite. In 2020, the average tenure of a CMO was 40 months, down from 41 in 2019. For comparison, the average CEO tenure is now six and a half years.

The 2021 answers: The Great Resignation, but you already know that. Ad Age recently reported that, as the definition of what “marketing” is expands, other “chief” titles—like chief experience officer and chief brand officer—are elbowing CMOs out. Even the ANA is taking notice: “During a meeting of its Global CMO Growth Council in June, the ANA put up a slide enumerating more than two dozen titles now in use among council members that either relate to, report to or replace the traditional CMO title,” Ad Age wrote.

+1: They could be taking a cue from their employees. A survey of 84 CMOs conducted by PwC earlier this year found that 100% said employee turnover rates are increasing.—PB

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Clubhouse is adding spatial audio to its platform...which sounds like the mobile equivalent to surround sound?  
• DoorDash and Grubhub are being sued by the city of Chicago for “deceptive and unfair” tactics.
• Disney’s ESPN is in talks with sportsbooks like DraftKings and Caesars Entertainment about a $3 billion brand-licensing deal. 
• TikTok has banned the “milk crate challenge,” basically 2021’s equivalent of the cinnamon challenge, over safety concerns.
• Natty Light is breaking into the spirits game with three lemonade-flavored vodkas. 

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FRENCH PRESS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Retail: Learn about “offline-to-online” marketing, which is basically DTC turned inside out and upside down, here. 

TikTok: This infographic claims to hold the keys to successful TikTok ad campaigns. 

Dating apps: Why the future of dating might be hybrid.  

SM$trategy: E-commerce sales from Black Friday and Cyber Monday are projected to surpass $10 billion. Get your SMS strategy holiday-ready and build brand loyalty with Attentive’s “How to Grow SMS Subscribers” webinar on August 31. Register today.*

AD ANTIQUES

Vintage Ad Browser

We’re happy for this dude advertising his music in 1945. Rock on, John. 

ICYMI

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Marketers are losing millions of dollars to fake ad slots on streaming platforms
• Less butter churning, more ring lights: Williamsburg, Virginia tries out influencer marketing
• Walmart’s demand-side platform will be ready by October