OMD EMEA’s Marcus Johnson and Lyvia Aylward-Davies were on the ground at DMEXCO. Post-event they reflected on the key themes coming out of the conference.

Change of the human mindset in media

People remain the best assets to building, innovating and deploying ad tech solutions. That being said, we need ensure that the correct human craft is being applied, especially in an environment where media is changing but the technology isn’t. 4C insights have developed their platform to seamlessly integrate Digital and TV in an era of video eruption on social media. Technology has long been able to solve this problem, but humans remain the biggest barrier to change and default to running two separate channels in parallel.

Creative experience

Media owners and publishers at DMEXCO, reinforced their ambition to extract more creative value for advertisers. Publishers like Teads believe in their platforms and are not necessarily looking for a tech innovation to enhance their offering. Instead, Teads are focused on providing creative collaborations with clients, to help users achieve a better brand experiences within the creative units. OMD EMEA are able to support our clients with unlocking more creative support, by leveraging our holding group’s negotiating position to extract maximum value.

New contextual obsession

In a time where data driven audience targeting is seen as the best route to bringing the art and science together and achieving optimal media efficiency; a legacy approach has withstood the test of time. Contextual targeting has continuously been a crucial way to align specific user interests, with a client relevant brand proposition. However, scaling audience segments has also been a continuous challenge. DMEXCO highlighted some of the key opportunities that have emerged, mainly as a result of restricted 3^rd party audiences and limited gateways to accessing 2^nd party publisher data. As these audience segment shrink, contextual targeting has grown especially in the area of channel creators on YouTube and the wider adoption of video content.

Fearlessly protect your product

Twitch CRO, Walker Jacobs, was interviewed by Innovation expert Chris Denson, who extracted a very memorable sound bite. When pressed on why Twitch take so much pride on being a streamer first platform. Walker made the point of the most successful platforms, in terms of gaining consumer time, have stayed loyal to their principles. Netflix and Fortnite are current champions for consumer time but none of these platforms have adopted ads. Twitch has successfully integrated advertising by sticking to their streamer first principles and remain a model to imitate, as these platforms advance their commercial decisions.