This year’s Upfront/ Newfront season did not disappoint with numerous exciting new announcements about renewed and brand new TV shows that will keep Canadians glued to their TVs (or other viewing devices) for hours. Several broadcasters, social networks, and technology companies have launched new products and services to help you better connect with Canadians for your upcoming campaigns.
Once again Profectio had a front-row seat and provided coverage of several of the announcements, and this year we took some time to interview several senior media buyers, and this year we had a conversation or two with people on the brand and publishers.
In this edition of our 2024 Upfront/ Newfront Interview Series, we sat down with Lynne Clark-Drew for a conversation about the changing advertising and media buying landscape and the new offerings announced at their Microsoft Advertising Accelerate Roadshow.
Highlights:
- What was announced at Microsoft Accelerate
- The role AI will play with media buyers
- What are marketers focused on in 2024
- What keep Lynne excited about the ad industry?
Who are you and what problem do you solve?
Hi, my name is Lynne Clark Drew. I lead the Microsoft Advertising Business for Canada and, we are providing solutions for marketers and agencies alike to reach their customers wherever they are across the web.
How did you get your start in the industry?
I am an old-time media person. I’ve been in the industry for shockingly about 24 years and started in the UK in magazines and TV and then went into digital. This is a funny one. I first went into digital with Microsoft in 2006 and I was a product manager for Hotmail.
So back in the day, old school. I’ve been around a long time and I’ve been at Microsoft. I left for a while and then I rejoined in around 2016.
In June, Microsoft Canada hosted its Microsoft Accelerate event here in Toronto. What was the event for and what type of people attended the event?
The event was an end our fiscal year celebration of all the announcements that Microsoft had made over the past sort of six months. It was for both media agencies and direct clients, probably around the mid-level Manager, and director kind of level and the majority of our audience are probably in the search space, given that Microsoft traditionally has been mainly known in the market for Bing and search. So there’s probably a skew towards some search buying audiences, but equally there was a lot of direct clients there as well.
Can you share maybe two or three highlights from that event?
I would say that the biggest point of the event and the takeaways were that Microsoft has been kind of known that other search engine for quite a while and is a bit of a sleeping giant in terms of the tech industry versus some of the competition, but we’ve got more than a billion global users coming from Windows, Edge, Microsoft Start, not to mention the gamers that we have in our ecosystem, our operating system, you know, Windows is 73% of PCs and, so we’re not just that other search engine.
We’ve been kind of quietly building that capability. We’ve got the business social network of LinkedIn. While LinkedIn operates separately, we have all that data and all the audience signals that LinkedIn has. We’ve got gaming with Xbox, as I said, but also Microsoft casual games.
There’s a huge casual gaming audience that. The game on the PC, there’s the activation Blizzard King acquisition that’s coming in, content publishing on MSN that you know about, obviously, and all of this kind of brings together an end to end, solution for audience and marketers. Across both native display video, CTV and search.
So you know you’re talking full funnel and I think Microsoft hasn’t been known for that in the past, so it’s kind of it was a reset. I suppose in terms of what we were discussing with with the audience.
Can you talk a little bit about that buying process?
There are two sides to the answer. One is all of those different audiences what they bring is. huge a amount of audience intelligence and data signals, so that’s the key there.
It’s not just about all of these different sites and buying, interdependent brands. It’s about leveraging billions of first party permission data that we have access to, which is really pretty impressive in terms of an audience proposition. But, to your point, it’s not a single buying point today across everything.
So we’re not there yet in terms of where we are for buying everything. But in terms of audience and that opportunity, yes, you can buy that all directly through my team and the Microsoft advertising team. But for example, for gaming, that’s, that’s a little bit independent right now. And as I said, LinkedIn is completely independent. But the data signals from all of those platforms is within Microsoft in one place.
What would you say are the top three things that marketers are really focused on or concerned about when it comes to media for this year and next year?
I would say measurement, accountability, incrementality testing, we’re seeing that with a lot of brands as well, so, you know, it’s really popular for clients to use their own data platforms, their own internal kind of proprietary tools and tech stack that maybe they measure things with, and they’re really looking to measure attribution, not relying so much maybe that as they did in the past on single source of truth that were maybe external sources like sort of GA or SE 360 from Google, for example. That kind of omni channel approach that obviously has been talked about for a long, long time now is still ultimately about measure map.
Are you noticing any trends that marketers are looking for this year compared to last year?
I think it is very much about, data as you said, first party data, what happens with the future when we go cookie-less, and then obviously AI, and how do they get on the front foot with AI rather than kind of feeling like they’re on the back foot, and so how does that integrate within their entire marketing ecosystem, rather than it just being like a media placement.
What does it look like for their entire e commerce strategy, for example, their website, their stores and so on? So I think it’s still early days and there’s not one answer there. And we’re kind of all figuring that out. But I would say, to data and AI are
What are some of the qualities that you feel are most in demand for media buyers?
I would say I don’t know if I’d have the exact answers, but from my perspective, just in terms of anyone in this industry right now, the skills and qualities would be, agility, problem solving skills, the ability to analyze data from multiple sources and be sort of have a ability to zoom out strategically and see a story coming before them, rather than kind of one single set of qualities. Definitely. And that kind of agility, I almost see it as kind of kayaking rough water, like being able to handle the sort of rough times and the choppy seas. That’s what keeps people successful in the industry right now.
How do you think AI, or do you see AI will play a role with media buyers at all?
It’s going to play a role in everything. It’s not just the media buying space obviously it’s impacting, it’s going to impact every consumer in the world.
Right.. And one of the things I was listening to, Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, talking at a kind of kickoff event and he said right now is a platform shift. We had the PC server shift PCs weren’t a thing back in the day. Suddenly everyone has one. Then we had the Internet browser shift when we actually surfed the Internet.
Before that, there wasn’t an internet then we had the mobile web. You can access everything on your phone. That’s crazy. And now we’ve got this AI shift. So it’s almost like there’s been four huge shifts in technology. And so he sees AI as like as big as the first thing we all had PCs or the first thing we ever had the Internet for his first time anyone could do something all within the mobile phone.
This is going to impact every single aspect of our lives. And it’s about not yet knowing what that will look like. But in five years, we’ll all go, yeah, of course , just as we do with mobile phones now. And so it’s certainly, I think for, for me and media buyers specifically, AI is going to simplify, hopefully, and make sense of some of the fragmentation that exists.
As you said, you don’t know where to go. Hundreds of different platforms users are getting their information, not just from the big sites, but the really niche sites now, and that fragmentation is really tough for media buyers, right? Hopefully, AI can simplify and bring some sense to that fragmentation and make measurement and incrementality work for them, so that kind of the data’s in their hands and they’re in more control rather than feeling, right now when we speak to a lot of media buyers they’re so time poor. They’ve got , no time to do anything. They’re being asked to do a million things. There’s not enough staff. They’re looking for ways to simplify.
Do you have a message for marketers on how they can prepare for a cookie-less day when it finally comes?
First of all, again it’s about that first party permissioned data or known users. And that’s the key component to future proof their business. It’s about getting access to first party quality audiences. That’s the key. Microsoft has invested in building those capabilities as with anyone else.
We have leading technologies that enable us to have all of that permission data, as we said, from MSN, from Outlook, from Xbox, from LinkedIn, from Edge, from Windows, all of that data. And, it’s first party data, it’s curated, and using that universal tracking ID that Microsoft has, you can very easily access that.
Those audiences and I would say both Google’s protected audience API and Microsoft’s ad selection API rely on JavaScript and those sorts of things. And that’s what will happen in the future. But what I would say Microsoft does believe is that competition is good. And Google isn’t controlling this future space like we’re all part of that. And we just hope to be able to provide a solution for advertisers that works for them.
What are you excited about when you think of the future of the advertising industry? What excites Lynne?
I would say, the unknown is exciting right now. I think you could be scared of AI and be a bit terrified of what’s to come and is it going to take our jobs? What’s going to happen? But I think if we see it as a wave that we’ve all got to ride and get on our surfboards and go for it. I think that is exciting working in the industry right now at the cusp of something major, like a huge platform shift like this is really exciting. And so I hope to see a I change some of the kind of mind numbing or. Boring stuff that we all do and allow us to be more creative and kind of free us up to do more of the strategic thinking, the fun stuff, the really innovative stuff that human power of our own brains and our own minds can bring.
And I think hopefully everyone is gonna be excited when they see what’s to come.
Media & Publishers mentioned:
Learn more about each vendor in our Media Marketplace.
Other 2024 Upfront/ Newfront Announcements & Interviews:
2024 Upfront Interview Series with Horizon Media’s Jenny Croswell
2024 Upfront Interview Series with M&K Media’s Jill MacDonald And Jennifer Young
2024 Upfront Interview Series with True Media Canada’s Bruce Neve (Updated)
2024 Upfront Interview Series with RBC’s Gary Edgar
2024 Upfront Interview Series with Microsoft Advertising Canada’s Lynne Clarke-Drew
2024 Upfront Interview Series with TikTok Canada’s Joshua Bloom
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