Creativity and Data-Driven Strategies | Mike Pocci

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Mike Pocci, Executive Director/Connections at AfterMath. Mike has been with Aftermath for about nine years, working with various clients in healthcare, entertainment, and home and living categories. Mike oversees all paid, owned, and earned media activity at the agency with a heavy focus on measurement and analytics, and he has a wealth of experience driving success for clients through integrated insight-driven marketing programs. Mike, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Mike Pocci: I appreciate the invite. Happy to be here. David McBee: I'm so glad you're here. Thank you, Mike. With the media landscape being so cluttered and fragmented, I'd like to ask you to share with our audience, how is it that you guys help brands make a genuine and meaningful lasting connection with their audiences. Mike Pocci: Well, I think to give yourself the best chance of really connecting, you need to have a couple things and maybe the most obvious have to have a compelling product and compelling message. Originality certainly helps, but I do think it's important to have authenticity in your brand communications, which isn't always thought about and maybe doesn't apply to every brand, but it can help because today's consumer is savvy and sees through what is artificial or insincere. And on top of that, people don't really want to be advertised to. So I think they're likely to respond more positively if it's authentic and if it's more of a conversation delivered through media channels that resonate. Marketing is all about standing out, obviously, and that's why I think the blending of art and creativity and ingenuity and that whole side of things with the science side has never been more important. We can use all the data we want to find our audiences, but if what we deliver to them doesn't have impact, or some kind of unique value to them, then you might be ignored. And it's difficult to do, even if you do everything right, it's difficult. There's more marketing in general than ever before. People's time is distributed across so many different touch points. You've got multiple social platforms, at least a few streaming services, even more recent channels like AI chatbots, answer engines, but to break through and make that connection, think about what is on your audience's minds, listen to them, understand what they need. That all comes from research, however you can get it. We always prefer combining primary and secondary research, but that'll help craft the right story to tell them creatively. And doing all that in tandem with a strong strategic plan for how to connect with them using today's media technologies, I think will give you a good chance of success. David McBee: Can you share any specific examples of that? Mike Pocci: Yeah, I think a couple examples of how to break through that I can share. One thing that's been top of mind, even though it's been around for a long time, is automatic content recognition, which as the name implies, recognizes the content that's on the TV screen by listening to, or even seeing what's playing. So smart TVs have this functionality and it can listen to snippets of content, either audio, or visual and match it up to a library of content to identify it so that technology is used by streaming services to recommend content to users and to track TV viewership, but it can also be used to target advertising. So that's one thought. And then also we've been really leaning into social media, not as an advertising platform, but as a source for initiating other types of marketing. So we use social listening to understand conversations that are happening about our brands or related topics to understand the sentiment and to find opportunities to try to integrate our message into those types of conversations where it makes sense. We also use our brands social media content in different ways by taking their social posts out of the social media environment and using them in different contexts. So we've used kind of a programmatic social approach with Spaceback actually, which Simpli.fi has partnered with to turn our social posts into targeted ads that are still very social in terms of the look and feel and the functionality. But we take them off of social media because you won't reach all your target customers on the social media platforms themselves. There's definitely a limit to that. So you can do this method to target them across a variety of different digital environments, which kind of opens up the door to a larger audience base, and that performs really well for us. So we have a lot of other ways to break through, but those would be a couple that are top of mind. David McBee: I got to say, I love that Spaceback example. They're one of our favorites. Mike, as someone who prioritizes measurement and analytics, how do you deal with the overload of data that's out there? Mike Pocci: Well, here's a little secret. I use less of it, and I only use the data that matters, and that does require, you have to know upfront who your audiences are. You have to understand them as intimately as you can, and it also requires sifting through the irrelevant data to find and uncover the data that's going to help us get to those audiences. And I think with the phasing out of third-party cookies, which we all thought was happening a year ago, sounds like 2024 could be the year finally, at least for Chrome is what we're hearing. But Mike, at some point, all the major browsers will get rid of third-party cookies. It might take a little while, but that will happen. Not to mention the rising use of ad blockers, there's a lot of barriers in the way. So that's a whole set of data that we won't even have access to anymore once those browsers pull the trigger and start disabling those cookies. So that's why I'm preparing and getting used to using less data, which is strange to say, but it's still about finding the data that works, like the coveted first-party data or zero-party data, and combining it with other elements like content and demographics and geographic information, things that aren't necessarily tied to any kind of third party cookie-based tracking. That's the future in my opinion. But there's still good reliable data out there, and there are viable alternatives to third-party tracking. So as I mentioned, first-party data is really valuable. It can be a little bit limited, and it's never going to get us anywhere near the scale or the volume of the unique audiences we would reach with third-party data sets, but it's a smart way to go to prepare for that loss of cookie tracking. So one form of that would be User-ID tracking where you're assigning unique identifiers to people to track them across devices, and that's all based on their logins and user sessions. So it's not dependent on any third-party tracking. And another area of focus is content, not behaviors, but content. So lots of programmatic platforms, including Simpli.fi, and still offer things like content-based targeting and keyword-based targeting that's specific to articles and posts and webpages that contain information relevant to what the brand is trying to communicate. We've talked about Google's Topic Targeting or their API selects topics based on the user browsing history, and it shares a few at a time with their sites and their network. And then those topics are stored for a three-week period or so, and there's no external tracking involved at all. So it doesn't really break the privacy rules that we typically would run into. So I think we'll see more of that. And lastly, I'd say influencer marketing actually comes into play here. It's much less data-dependent. It's just leveraging the credibility of influencers in their many forms to help convey your brand message and even share their experiences with the brands. So that's still a really powerful way to connect with people, and it brings forward that authenticity that I was talking about earlier. And again, it doesn't really depend on third-party tracking typically. David McBee: Yeah, I love your focus on basically being able to offer campaigns that are future-proof, right? But there's also a little part of me that's like, "Hey, let's use all this third-party cookie data while we got it." Mike Pocci: Yep, yep. Absolutely. And there's still ways to do that. It's just you have to be selective and very discerning with the data that you select. David McBee: Right. There's lots of rules around it. You got to be cautious about it. Mike Pocci: Yeah. David McBee: So let's talk real quick about AI. Where do you see that going in the future? Mike Pocci: So at Aftermath, we do use AI across a few different platforms that we partner with, mostly in digital advertising, I think that's a big part of the future. But we can use systems that interpret text, and photos, and videos on different websites or social media to understand the relevance to our brands and then serve tailored creative messaging to those users. And that's a true AI because the system has been taught to identify specific objects in photos and videos and to interpret text and website articles, or social media posts, or comment sections. And then it learns and responds and it gets smarter and more accurate, which is the whole point of AI. So doing that, we can get to the meaning and the sentiment behind what people are posting. And it gets pretty advanced and it'll get more advanced as we go on. Right now, AI can easily understand context, how words are used and figure out the intent behind the words. So I think that'll only get stronger. We also use AI in paid search. We've used systems like ChatGPT to help us with some of the repetitive tasks and give us more time for strategy and just to create more efficiency overall with those campaigns. And then I think just social media in general when we use Meta, we use lots of AI. Facebook, although it's had its share of data privacy issues, has systems in place that interpret content that's against the community guidelines and removes it using AI. So there's a lot of areas in our marketing programs where we've already been using AI for a while, but we've found really good effective uses of it from a marketing standpoint. I do think we're just scratching the surface. We're pretty excited about things like GPT-4 and the next iterations of that. And the next iterations of some of the AI powered search platforms, like the new Bing, that can bring in more visual features and provide a really natural conversational approach to search and just to digital interactions. That again, I think is the future. David McBee: You are a plethora of great information. I really appreciate it. Before I let you go, I'd like to ask every guest if they have a podcast they'd like to recommend, or a book that they feel has been instrumental to their success. Mike Pocci: Yeah. More recently it would be a podcast, I'd say the HBR IdeaCast. That's the Harvard Business Review, and I think it depends on the episode, but there have been several episodes of that that I've taken away some good insights from related to branding and company culture and even AI and some of the things that we talked about today. David McBee: Awesome. Perfect. And what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Mike Pocci: Teamaftermath.com, that has a lot of our work and our case studies and tons of articles on industry trends and insights, which we call the rumblings all about what's happening in the industry, so you can learn more there. David McBee: Perfect. Thank you so much for being my guest today. Mike Pocci: Had a good time. Thanks, Dave. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee, be awesome, and we'll see you next time.