Hi David and welcome to Ascential Experts. I'm delighted to have you here with
us today. Thanks David.
So, you lead the WARC business from the
content perspective. WARC joined the Ascential
family in the summer of last
year--can you give us a quick description of
what WARC is and what you deliver for
customers? Sure, so we're primarily an
information business, and we work in the
area of marketing effectiveness, so we
give people the case studies, the
research, the kind of best practice
guidance they need to form more
effective marketing strategies. So I'd
like to particularly focus on the
Marketer's Toolkit, which you've just
launched, and can you explain for us what
it is in detail? Sure, so the Marketer's
Toolkit is something we've run every
year at WARC since 2012, and for us it's
an opportunity to look ahead to the
coming year, identify a few kind of big
themes or ideas that we think are
going to be really key in the year ahead,
 and that gives us an opportunity
to use WARC's content--the case
studies, the best practice, the research
to really help marketers navigate their
way through those themes, and form
credible effective responses. Now, over
time, that has grown from--initially
it was just an editorial-led thing. It
was us, you know, getting together in a
room and coming up with some kind
of big things that were coming out
of our content, and that still plays a
role, but what we're doing now is trying
to back that with a lot more data, and a
lot more research in the market.
So, this year's report will be based on a
survey of 800 marketers and agency
people from all over the world, and then--
that's a quant side, and then we add a
qual to that. We go out and interview a
whole bunch of CMOS and different types
of brands, in different types of markets,
and just kind of check that what we're
saying or what we think is coming
through the data resonates with them.
So, from 2019's report what have you seen
come to life from that that really blew through?
Yeah so, I think one of the big themes from
last year, and it's been bubbling away
for a few years, but last year we really
saw people talking about experience a lot.
This word experience suddenly became
a kind of buzzword, and that really came
through in the data, and the kind of
interviews we did, and we highlighted
what we call a kind of experience gap:
The experience people were offering
online, and everyone's been inspired by.
That kind of digital native, direct to
consumer brands, and how they offer
an online experience. And then what was
actually going on in the real world
The real-life experience of a brand.
And we've seen a lot of
talk around this, and the debate about
customer experience has broadened this
year into brand experience.
We've just published a big report on
that in November, and we think
this is a topic that we, kind of
touched on last year that's now
just all over the marketing world.
One of the things you picked out
last year, I know, was voice. The rise of voice.
How's that gone this year? So voice
is a really interesting one. We asked
a whole bunch of questions in the
Marketer's Toolkit survey about the
relative impact of different
technologies and what people expect
different technologies to deliver
in the coming year. And we'd seen voice
kind of grow from year to year, but I
think what we're seeing at the moment
more broadly, and voice is part of this, is
kind of a bit of a tech pause. So it's
not that people aren't, kind of investing in
in some of this new consumer tech, but
what they're doing is being much more
mindful about it. There's much less of a
sense of "I've got to chase the next
shiny gadget", you know? There was a whole
bunch of years where one year it was VR,
one year it was AR, one year was facial
recognition. There was always some crazy new
tech coming out, and the data gives us an
opportunity to sense check that. Now, what
we've seen with voice is actually not
much more take up this year than we saw
last year, and actually we asked a couple
of supplemental questions around voice
and the people who are using it feel
they're really at the start of the
journey.
They haven't mastered it yet. 
They're doing it because they feel
there's scope to it, and value to it in
the long term, but I think the use cases
of voice are still really emerging, and
so with that in mind the marketers in
our survey, anyway,
largely don't see this as a major tech
play in 2020--in the way that we're
seeing with something like AI where
there are a lot more use cases emerging,
and we know there's gonna be a lot of
investment there. So we're seeing
a lot of copy at the moment around the
changing role of the CMO, and in fact, the
removal of the CMOS from some pretty big
organizations. You've been talking to
lots of CMOS during this
research for this toolkit.
What's your take on what's happening?
Yeah so, it's interesting.
The CMOs we're talking to,
and they didn't really see this as a
problem or an issue, I mean, we've seen
have seen some brands take out the CMO
role, but really what they're replacing
it with, in many senses, is a classic
marketing role. It's about understanding
the consumer, understanding the brand, and
understanding how a business can grow in
its current environment. 
So, while we're seeing changes in the
nomenclature, if you like, in some
respects it reflects this kind of need
for marketers to come back to a growth
agenda, and the way they do that is
through strong brands allied with strong performance.
I think we see this as a trend, but I
don't think it necessarily means a death
for the CMO. I think, if anything, it
means that CMOS are getting back to what they
should have been doing. So let me cut to
the chase: what are some of the big
things that you're forecasting for 2020? So, I mean, some of them won't come as a
surprise, you know. Sustainability is a
big theme at the moment, it's coming
through the data in the research, and I
think it's interesting to see how brands
are starting to really identify ways
they can
walk the walk within their category.
Another area that's interesting is
connected TV and the way that's going to
bring a lot of quality inventory into
the kind of programmatic environment,
and the data has picked up a lot of, kind of
dissatisfaction with the way
programmatic is evolved to date.
So, the impact of connected TV on the
programmatic environment could be really
interesting. The third thing I think I'd
really pick out is--it's really coming
through from the interviews we're doing
with the CMOs--is our belief that they've
over invested in performance marketing.
Now, in the marketing space--it's a huge
generalization, but they were seeing
these kind of two types of marketing.
You've got the stuff that builds the
brand, and then the stuff that kind of
converts sales. And because all the
digital techniques that have emerged
over the last few years have allowed
many more measurable ways to convert
sales, a lot of budget has shifted into
performance marketing. But arguably to
the detriment of the brand, and brand
strength, brand health. So we're seeing a
lot of CMOs now talking about trying to
address that balance and actually
starting to put strategies in place for
doing so, and that's great news for
people like Cannes Lions, where because an
increase in brand building investment
will hopefully mean a kind of increase
in creativity. Right, I'm
really looking forward to going through
the whole report. Thank you very much, David.
Thanks David.
