Media Mavens: The Innovid Interview with Amy Porter

Editor’s Note: This Q&A is the latest installment in an occasional blog series where Innovid interviews industry thought leaders about their take on the future of advertising and media. 

In college, Amy Porter wanted to be an investment banker, but an internship at a small advertising agency got Amy hooked on the financial and intellectual challenges of buying media. After stints at Deutsch, OMD, Media Assembly, and Digitas, she’s currently VP/Group Director-Digital Media Strategy at RPA. She was recently named ThinkLA’s Agency Leader of the Year, which recognizes individuals who demonstrate the best combination of skills in an ad agency, including team building, leadership, business results, and client partnership. Read on to get Amy’s take on frequency management, the power of the modern ad server, the future of CTV advertising, and the effectiveness of shoppable ads this holiday season. 

Innovid: What’s the last thing you binge-watched? How would a media buyer reach you? 

Amy Porter: We recorded the Olympics, which seems stale now. But we're still watching them, because there were so many events on so many streaming channels. I have a five-year-old daughter, so we watched them as a family. She's very interested in either being an Olympic swimmer or gymnast.  As far as reaching me, it's pretty hard. I listen to a ton of podcasts; that is probably going to be the most likely way to reach me. It could be anything from ad industry podcasts to nonfiction to true crime. I dabble all around, so I get a lot of different ads. The placements are interesting, whether it’s host read or an agency-produced ad or dynamically inserted. From the ads, you can figure out the audience. It's always interesting to me to try to figure out who they're trying to reach and how they're trying to target me. 

Is frequency management a pain point for your team and clients?

When frequency management of programmatic buys first started, it was focused on these platforms where you could check a box and say, I only want to reach my audience this amount of times. That was really novel when programmatic and trading desks started popping up. It raised the question of, How could I do frequency management outside of programmatic? I definitely see that being a part of the future — how do you look at holistic frequency management? Today, there are a lot of issues with the walled gardens, which means I can’t manage my frequency across my entire buy. Video is part of that, but display complements that, too. I want to show people sight, sound, and motion in the awareness phase, but as they get lower in the funnel and closer to purchase, I might want to retarget them with some display ads. Frequency management — in that case, as a retargeting or a handoff — is also a tough nut to crack. 

Why is frequency management so important? 

You don't want to oversaturate an audience. Getting the right frequency also helps you in managing the consumer journey. If you work with some advanced analytics tools, you might know your frequency against an audience. You need to push them down the funnel. Then, you think about some people who might be entering at the bottom of the funnel. So now we need to use our advanced analytics to say, Don't treat these people like I haven’t seen them yet. I don’t want to start them off with an awareness impression if they are already close to purchase. That’s part of frequency management — understanding the right message at the right time to the right person. That is the next frontier.

How do you think about the modern ad server? How important is it to you and your clients?

The ad server has become less of a means to an end (delivering an ad), which is what a lot of people assume an ad server is. Now, it can be a powerhouse. It has capabilities within the actual serving, like the timing an ad is actually being presented to a person on the other end. And it enables things like frequency management — cross-channel, omnichannel. It has measurement — also cross channel, omnichannel. That’s valuable to a marketer who is looking at marketing holistically. We have to measure holistically and talk about our media in a way that is more than just, I ran a TV ad and this many people saw it, or I was on YouTube, and this many people saw it. There has to be the performance tied to it — and performance in a broader sense of what was the objective for that particular channel or that tactic, and did it accomplish that? Ad servers have come a long way to help widen your aperture against what performance could be and measurement could be in the future. 

Are you concerned that advertising on Connected TV (CTV) may run into the same supply chain issues that the digital ecosystem struggles with?  

For CTV, we truly need to prioritize things that we've already battled elsewhere, like transparency and brand safety controls. How do we make sure that we have brand safety but also brand suitability? There have been many things written about ad fraud in the space. And those challenges exist, because there are always bad actors. But if we learn from how we have either fixed or worked around those kinds of challenges and other spaces, I think CTV is primed to take off — because we now have a baseline of what not to do and perhaps what to do to protect ourselves as advertisers. 

Why do you believe CTV advertising has a bright future? 

The media mix that a client has is directly reflective of who they're trying to reach and target and message. And CTV is certainly part of that: people are watching. So it makes sense that we're there as marketers, and it's part of the larger media mix that we have. With CTV, you can get very targeted, just like we can do with digital media. We can measure things. You can see impact. The other thing that we're able to do is be personalized. CTV is a good testing ground for what a merging of TV and digital strategies could be. 

To what degree will streaming be the only game in town in, say, 10 years?  

It’s a focus group of one, but I don't really watch linear TV. I'm mostly streaming. I was also what we once used to call a cord never, because I couldn't afford cable when I was starting out. If you told me cookies were going away five years ago, I wouldn't believe you. Our industry is moving so fast that whatever I’d guess will happen for the next five to 10 years will probably happen in the next two or three. It's so dynamic. There definitely will be continued growth in streaming, in the CTV space. We're going to see data-driven personalization that these streaming services or connected TV can offer. No two Netflix experiences are the same. A lot of streaming services are going to be using machine learning and AI to guide viewers to more tailored experiences. With dynamic ad insertion, there are a lot of places it can go. I don't think we'll solve all of our measurement challenges by then. I think measuring all of this and aligning it with your objective will become even more complex. If someone figures out tracking and attribution — cross platform, cross channel – that person is going to make a lot of money. It is difficult to connect all of those pieces because you have walled gardens. You have disparate data sources. You have other marketing data that you have to collect and clean and process. It’s all about data science. Young kids, if you’re looking for a career, become a data scientist. 

What’s your sense of where advanced creative — dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and interactive advertising — will fit into the future of advertising on CTV? 

DCO is a great way to do simple testing. For a lot of clients that’s a great way in. I’m on CTV; how do I test different messages? How are people going to respond to that? And then shoppable interactive, there's definitely something there. But it's got to be a learned behavior, because right now TV is such a lean-back experience versus mobile video and video on social platforms. Those are actually creating actions; people are buying things that they see immediately on Instagram. That wasn't a behavior they had. It was certainly learned. And it was learned by seeing a shop now or buy now button — those really aggressive calls to action. And so I think within TV, I noticed it when QR codes started popping up. The QR could take you to something as simple as a form fill — some sort of lead gen effort. I've seen some ads where they literally were like, buy this product right now. It’s the streamlining of commerce on CTV and mobile. That behavior is certainly going somewhere. 

Do you anticipate seeing more shoppable advertising on TV this holiday season? 

Generally, older generations seem more likely to go to brick-and-mortar stores. The younger generations, though, do a lot of shopping within social. If there's a way to tap into that sort of behavior that is already established and bring that to when they're watching TV with the second screen right there, that will be effective. Maybe the creative (on CTV) should look more social in nature. That's probably going to catch their attention, and then have a QR code to direct them to an action you want them to take. You're going to get younger people who are on their phone ready to go and know how to use the technology; they are the ones who are likely going to make purchases over the holiday season via shoppable ads. And holiday season isn't just Black Friday through the New Year. It's right now. Pumpkin spice lattes have already started even though it’s still 90 degrees out. 

Learn more about the power of shoppable advertising. Download our new guide, "Holiday Shoppable Advertising Unwrapped" today.

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