Wunderkind Success Story: Wavemaker
Connor Rose: My name's Connor Rose. I'm a group director at Wavemaker focusing on programmatic. I've been with GroupM for a little over eight and a half years, primarily at EssenceMediacom. Now I'm at Wavemaker for the last handful of months, specifically servicing the Danone Global business. So I think attention and sustainability are top of mind for a lot of agencies specifically, and at GroupM, we're focused on being leaders in that space. What is key for us is informing our brand partnerships and our clients as to how that can be meaningful for them, how that's going to drive their business, and why they should also care about those things. Reducing carbon footprint is top of mind for a lot of folks right now. What does that mean for their actual media performance or their business goals? I think right now that's a little bit more of a challenging question or challenging answer, but that's where the agency leaders are going to try and push that initiative forward. Cookie lists and addressability and identity has been a hot topic for years now. So in terms of preparedness, I think every advertiser is in a different place in their journey for preparing for that. So when we have these conversations with our clients, each time it's different, despite the industry or the space as a whole being at a static point, depending on whether they're gathering first party data or not, that informs a lot of how we then approach our conversations with them. Do we feel prepared? I think it varies. We've had enough time to prepare for it. There are a lot of technology partners in this space that are equipping agencies and brands for what that world is going to look like, and so I think at this point, we're fairly well- prepared, and I think that goes back to one aspect in the gaming space. You don't need to have cookies to be serving in- game advertising, making an impact in that space. So that new and creative things like that are enabling advertisers to feel confident that things will continue functioning and that we'll able to make a brand impact going forward. The way we interact with Wunderkind is a lot on the inventory curation, and creative services that give us a higher impact format for us to serve. Every client will interact with Wunderkind a little bit differently, but the service that we've received from Wunderkind has been fantastic for many years now. And the footprint that they have within the GroupM walls is substantial. While working with Wunderkind, each of our clients have different goals, whether it's branding and awareness or driving purchase and getting a little bit closer to that lower funnel business KPI, I've seen across many different clients. Wunderkind has been able to help us achieve multiple of those goals. I think, sometimes folks will put certain partners in a particular box based on what's worked in the past. So we see that across all of our clients and the partners that they're working with. They kind of get segmented. I think Wunderkind's been able to kind of transcend that a little bit just because they've been successful for multiple of our clients in multiple avenues. But I think a key for us, historically, has been driving greater brand recognition and brand lift in the upper funnel space. At GroupM, we of course deal with a wide range of clients all with very different goals. They're at very different spaces in their customer addressability journey. Some are on the rise, some are fighting for market share. So for us, it's creating a bespoke experience. We want to make sure that we have experts in the room across every discipline to let them know that they have experts on their side and actually action on their specific issues of the day. Solving those short- term problems and then giving them a long- term vision for strategic success. That's where we put a lot of our time and energy. Yeah, I think so. I think Wunderkind is able to work with all of our... Especially on the programmatic side where I'm focused, work with our teams, tailor our experiences to specific RFP's or specific conversations that we give them insight into on what our clients are trying to achieve. Across all of our clients, we have a variety of different demographics, audience groups that fit into different parts of our client targeting funnels. We're reaching all of those groups with Wunderkind Advertising as a whole. Like I've said, every client is at a different point, in terms of maybe they're not using them at all versus to maybe there's a key strategic initiative that includes those activations on every single one of their campaigns. To me, they're two things that stand out about the strategic value that Wunderkind's providing Group M clients and agency teams. One is media KPIs and brand lift. They've been very successful in that space and driven a lot of solid performance for many, many of our campaigns. And the other one is a little bit less tangible, is on the service side. We always feel that we have a very strong communication and connection with our Wunderkind team and partners that keep us coming back. It makes us feel like, okay, there's a strategic and strong partnership here where we're all aware of what our client goals are, and we can go try and solve those problems while having a friendly back and forth that's collaborative. On the agency side, we receive a lot of pitches. We get talked at or talked to by a lot of different partners. Some we've never heard of before, some we are aware of. And because of that, I think the expectations that a lot of our teams go into these conversations with is somewhat low just because there's a massive amount of volume. Everyone on the agency side is dealing with from a outreach standpoint. So for us, we're focused on fact finding and understanding what differentiates this group or what differentiates this partner and with Wunderkind, I think we've found that differentiation and we've explored the campaign success. We've seen it historically, in many metrics across many advertisers. And customer service or the customer engagement that we get with them makes us feel very comfortable about the advertiser investment we're putting through those pipes. The digital advertising space, I believe, has reached a point where it's critical we find new creative ways to reach people in a meaningful way. A lot of people talk about ad blockers. A lot of people talk about ad fatigue, ad blindness, and I think that's very real. So when we're serving ads and pouring significant a significant amount of media investment into the digital space, it's very important we find metrics that allow us to actually measure that impact that go beyond the historical, maybe metrics of success or media metrics like click- through rate. To me, something like that doesn't really indicate whether or not it succeeded. So we need to think about advertising in that lens. One, from how we're impacting the user, but two, how they're actually feeling about it as well. That brand association with advertising is super key. There has to be a positive experience with advertising or else your ads can have a negative impact. So thinking about those attention metrics and engagement metrics in a different light is going to be really big for the advertising space moving forward. Where Wunderkind has really been able to help a lot of GroupM advertiser client partners is understanding our business. So we have operated with them for a long time at this point. They know our process in terms of getting activations off the ground. They're quick to respond. They're quick to turn things around. We know we can trust that group in a bind when we need to activate something on the quicker side. So we've seen incredible service coming out of Wunderkind that allows us to breathe a little bit easier when we're short on time. And the agency space, that's kind of the MO. So there's a lot of trust between GroupM agency teams and Wunderkind.
DESCRIPTION
Connor Rose, Group Directory, Programmatic, at Wavemaker, discusses various aspects related to advertising trends, attention, sustainability, brand performance, and the role of partners like Wunderkind in the digital advertising space. Connor highlights the importance of finding new and meaningful ways to reach audiences in the digital space, given challenges like ad blockers and ad fatigue. He emphasizes the significance of positive user experiences with ads and the need to measure impact beyond traditional metrics like click-through rates.