Media Fragmentation – How to Navigate through Traffic?

Omar Jamil, CEO Latitude blogs for Aurora from New Delhi

Session 2 – Media Fragmentation – How to Navigate through Traffic?

Kelly Clark, Worldwide CEO, Maxus

Mainardo de Nardis, CEO, OMD Worldwide

Moderator: Bob O’Leary, Managing Director, Head of Global Marketing, Consumer Citi

Bob kicks off with some stats to demonstrate the growth and significance of digital.  He moves into stats on other media – demonstrating effectively the media proliferation and fragmentation.

So, new tech, new choices, new behaviours. 

Kelly: biggest issue faced as industry is that of talent – finding people who are comfortable with change, curious and interested in outcomes and results. Key to navigating fragmented media environment. 

Mainardo: agrees – talent, speed and fast adoption of technologies. Notes how best practices are now moving from Asia to the rest of the world cause it’s moving faster here.

Bob: how do you train staff?

Mainardo: what we always try to do is attract and retain – emphasis on latter. So create the right environment where people can deliver what they want to achieve. And of course, training, training, training.

Is changing talent pool coming into media? Kelly – yes. The important thing for media companies is to bring in people with diverse backgrounds. That’s one reason for Maxus’ success over past few years. Kelly adds: keep people challenged to retain them. Show them results of their work immediately so they can see impact and find ways to optimise and change where necessary. Also equipping people with the tools: tablets, smartphones etc. Even at entry level.

(Note: so it seems that the WiFi issues have been resolved; however, the problem of seating and acoustics in the secondary room is still very much there. Also, looking behind me, a large number of people don’t seem to be too engaged with the session; even though the topic is quite an interesting one. Perhaps this is because there’s nowhere for them to sit in the main hall?)

Back to the chat – new techs leading consumer behaviour. Kelly believes ROI is a driver of innovation. Points to partnerships with companies like Vodafone or Jetstar (airline in Australia) to create platforms on social media with ultimate goal of improving ROI on those platforms. So if you’re getting good ROI, it’s impossible not to innovate.

To be honest, while the topic is interesting – and the speakers no doubt experienced – this session has not been too engaging or interesting so far. Perhaps the moderator is not charismatic enough? I cant quite put my finger on it – but I feel my attention drifting. The moderator’s about to open the session up to questions from the audience, so perhaps it’ll get better…

(While conversation is still not that interesting, Bob just gave a great example of the transformative power of social media. Citi in India used crowd sourcing via social media to get recommendations on where to put ATMs – not rocket science, but still quite clever! That, to me, is the essence of good social media marketing. Doesn’t need to be insanely unsual to be creative and effective.)

Session is putting me to sleep, so going to step away for a moment to grab some coffee… Back soon!