IAB Engage 2018: Four Themes from The Day

Yesterday I was lucky enough to go along to this year's IAB Engage Event at the Barbican. As always, there were a ton of interesting and insightful ideas being thrown around and so, rather than give a blow-by-blow account of the day's speakers, I wanted to summarise what I thought were the key themes of the day:

1. Responsibility and Sustainability

If the last 12 months have taught us anything, it's that digital advertising is still in the process of earning trust in the eyes of consumers. The events that we've experienced haven't just been concerning on a professional level; they've also been extremely high-profile in a way that our industry just isn't used to. It is superbly fortunate that GDPR came into effect only months after Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the news, but there's still a palpable sense that our luck won't last forever.

Fittingly, Unilever's Keith Weed was one of the first speakers of the day and kicked off the discussion, invoking the spirit of Lord Reith with the three 'V's of digital marketing: "viewability, verification and value". These aren't just important for the user experience; adhering to these standards gives more effective advertising. When probed in the question of self-regulation, Weed was in favour, stating that the speed of legislation and the speed of digital development simply are not compatible with each other.

Claire Enders continued the theme with the assertion that a medium is only sustainable if it's responsible. She cited the speed at which Sky was regulated back in their early days as a counterpoint to the relative lethargy with which digital giants like Facebook and YouTube have been pulled into line, arguing that this will need to change in order for both to survive.

Neither Facebook nor Google made reference to their respective scandals when they took the stage. I have mixed feelings about this - on one hand, it would have been a great stage on which to acknowledge their mistakes and provide some humble reassurance to advertisers. On the other hand, what more is there to actually say at this point? Atonement is one thing, self-flagellation is another. 

It's also worth mentioning IAB's gold standard scheme, which is aimed at certifying media vendors who combat ad fraud, offer brand safe environments and implement user-friendly advertising experiences. It's a great initiative and I can't wait to see how it develops, but it will need to differentiate itself from similar programmes like JICWEBS.

2. The Old Ways vs. The New Ways

Traditional media seems to be high on people's agenda in 2018, but no-one can agree exactly how they feel about it. Enders was quite clear: television is still the "locus of brand", regularly still attracting older and more affluent audiences. In spite of all of the developments we've seen in recent years, the language implies a fixed point on the typical media schedule; a gold standard for brand building. 

Tom Goodwin took to the stage to argue that we're in a 'mid-digital' world; one where a lot of what we see is a digital facsimile of something that's existed offline for years. He placed an Amazon search page next to a classified print ad for baseball gloves to demonstrate that, even if the method of delivery has changed, the content itself still tends to adhere to familiar forms that were established decades ago.

Tom gave us his vision of a 'post-digital' world, one where we create forms of content that are brand new and entirely native to digital. He argued that there's almost limitless possibility once we detach ourselves from the forms that have existed previous. It's odd that he omitted video games from this vision; to me this is the first mature medium that has always only existed in digital form.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it to the Bitposter's panel on the digital opportunities in out-of-home, but again it's exciting to see digital marketers starting to examine what they can bring to the table.

3. The Role of the Agency

It's no secret that the role of the agency (creative, media or otherwise) has been a hotly-discussed topic over the last couple of years. It would be overstating it to say that this discussion came to a head today - but it was certainly on people's minds. Keith Weed argued that agencies "haven't moved fast enough" in responding to the needs of advertisers in 2018, singling out pricing as being a particularly significant factor in clients taking such services in-house. 

If there was any doubt about the role of agencies in modern marketing, this certainly wasn't evident from Frances Ralston-Good's talk on unconscious behaviour. The CEO of Hearts and Science was justifiably confident in setting down her vision of agencies as data sherpas; people who are uniquely gifted at understanding not just human behaviour, but how best to act upon this behaviour.

There were also calls for agencies to become more fluid in their structure. Ralston-Good advocated a departure from compartmentalised thinking, encouraging us to remove the sharp delineations between brand and response, emotional and rational etc. Tom Goodwin questioned the industry's propensity to set up new agencies for each emerging medium, proposing instead that we upskill existing agencies to prevent bloat.

Lots of major agencies have appointed Transformation Officers in order to marshal in the new age of the agency model, and I don't think advertisers would be so vocal in their (constructive) criticism of agencies if they didn't want agencies to succeed in the long term. I think this adds up to an optimistic outlook for agencies, provided that they are willing to endure painful but productive change.

4. Optimism

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, the entire day was shot through with a noticeable spirit of optimism for the future of digital advertising. 

John Stoneman of TripeLift stepped up to bat on the unenviable subject of GDPR, and delivered a genuinely funny and insightful look the inner workings of a programmatic service before, during and after the 25th May. It was impressively candid, with Stoneman giving a fairly detailed insight into the ways in which things went pretty much fine following the introduction of the new EU data handling laws. The whole saga turned out like a localised 'Millennium Bug scare', inspiring a renewed confidence in the resilience of digital marketing.

Claire Enders pointed out that the UK has the largest proportionate spend into digital advertising in the world, making up 0.7% of our GDP - again, higher than any other country in the world. Digital adspend is still forecast to go up, reaching 58% by 2020. Based on this rosy outlook, Enders put forth a sentiment that was heard time and time again throughout the day: "there has never been a better time to work in digital marketing."

A few stray thoughts

• Outside of John Stoneman's talk, GDPR was surprisingly absent from the discussion. Most of the times it was mentioned it with a nudge and a wink, as if there's some sort of collective trauma around the whole thing, and this is just our way of coping with it.
• Though it probably didn't come up enough to be a 'theme' of the day, there were plenty of references to the long tail, of advertisers and of media suppliers. Enders pointed out that 280,000 businesses advertise on Amazon, only 3,000 of which as ISBA members. Social Chain's Steven Bartlett pointed to the thousands of micro-influencers that exist in the UK in 2018 as being 'thousands of tiny media companies'.
• There is still a problem with marketers being out-of-touch with the reality of living in the UK in 2018. When discussing online shopping Unruly's Simon Gosling talked about how people are prepared to buy things online without ever trialling them first citing the example of purchasing a £5,000 road bike online without ever having been in the saddle. This is fine for people who can afford to be a few grand in the hole for a week or two; but the majority of the UK don't have any such luxury. Whether it's a road bike or something more functional, bricks and mortar retail will persist as long as there are people who cannot afford not to trial and test a product before buying it.