Martin Cass is taking planning to the next level

Martin Cass

Martin Cass is Head of Communications Planning for Carat Americas and Head of the Procter & Gamble Account Worldwide for Carat. He ran the communications department in London (the birthplace of communications planning) for five years with clients such as Diageo and AMEX. Now he’s based in NYC. While he isn’t able to speak on P&G directly, he gave us a wealth of knowledge about how planning is evolving with new media and the latest tools in understanding and predicting the Holy Grail of consumer-driven communications planning.

What are clients most concerned about as of late?

Integration. Everything is measured in silos. All the vested interests at play have no interest whatsoever in joining the constituent parts together. So because of the way the business has grown up you have massive vested interests at play that are very interested in their own channel or medium and no one else is. Quite rightly, because that is where their money is. They are interested in generating as much money for their space as possible. That’s true around the world, it’s not something that is unusual to this market. We’re beginning to realize that a TV-dominated market is out of kilter with reality, as consumers do so many other things as well. Here’s a figure for you—looking at 28 countries around the world, in 2005 Jeffrey Cole in his book Surveying The Digital Future, found 37% of ad spend was on TV and only 5% was online. Yet, across all age groups other than 55+, more leisure time was spent online than watching TV.

What else should we do and how does it compare? Market mix modeling is one way of doing it but you’re looking backwards and this world is changing so fast now that three years’ multivariant data is great but it doesn’t necessarily give you much of a science of some of the things that are coming up. If you want first-mover advantage in things that are coming up you need to understand consumers and what they are doing, not necessarily what worked in the past because it is increasingly becoming less reliable.

How do agencies and clients truly embrace integration in a way that is accountable?

That, to me, is going to be the big challenge—certainly in this market where so much money is at risk. Because it’s so easy to do what you did last year. If you have tenure on a brand for say four or five years, if you want you could probably get away with doing what you did last year for the next two or three years. But the reality is if you’re a CEO or a Finance Director or Marketing Director who’s got a slightly longer term of view then you should be very, very interested about integration. You should really be fascinated about how channels are coming together. To me it’s critical for clients, especially senior clients, to take a very great interest in this area because what they have for the last however many years based their business on is beginning to decay and decay quite quickly. And if you want to look to the long term you need to start really trying and testing and understanding what works and what doesn’t work. Also, how to build a different paradigm to the way you’re going to market because as sure as eggs are eggs, if you’re not ready and you continue to be that guy that continues to do what he did last year (which has worked for the last 20 years) my only guarantee is in five years time you’re probably going to be a company that is not doing quite so well.

What tools are you working with to help clients in this area?

We have a project called ICE; which is Integrated Communications Evaluation. It starts on the basis of understanding how consumers see brands and it does that with a pretty simple psychological construct called a network of association. It is the things that people see about brands. It stops us from being marketers and saying well we think this is what people think, therefore let’s go with it, to very much more-consumer centric.
How do people talk about my business and my brand? Now do they say it rocks, it’s cool? If cool is something that drives my business, I want to make my brand more cool. It really gives you a complete view of the brand. What’s the cool quotient—did it go up or down? Then you can see what makes up the cool quotient.

The launch of, for example, this Apple Mobile Phone. What does that do? Does that make the cool quotient go up? So you start to understand what are the drivers behind the things, the attributes that you want your brand to have to truly understand them. Then you can model through some clever bits of modeling how those drivers will affect the things you want in the future. Apple Stores might be a good example. Apple Stores disproportionately make people go to them. It truly represents what the brand stands for.

Should it be an experience and how much of an experience should it be? It starts to guide exactly how your investment should be made. Stores that didn’t have it versus stores that did. You know, those stores that didn’t have it you start to see driving down some of the cool quotients.

It starts to look at the things holistically and starts to use all touch points, all places that consumers come into contact with the brand. At the end of the day that’s what communications planning is. It’s understanding how a brand and consumers interact with each other in all the touch points they come up with.

What are the latest ROI and planning tools at your disposal?

Forward-thinking market mix modeling is definitely the way to go—MMA which is an Aegis Company. The challenge is going to be not can you measure ROI, but can you measure it quick enough to make any decisions? Can you make those choices and those decisions much more real time rather than six months after the event?
With a lot of market mix modeling you tend to get a lot of data, plunge it into a market mix model, do a lot of regression analysis and then write a huge report at the end of it. What you really want is a dashboard that’s powered with regular real time data. So as the data arrives you don’t have to wait six months for it. You take that week if you want it, plug it in and that adds another week to the data that you’ve already got and recalibrate. You can recalibrate things in real time and that means that you can start to scenario plan with the very latest information that you’ve got. You can do something with it quite quick because if something is not working you can see it quickly. There are projects like MMA’s Avista on the market right now that are real time analytics that allow you to do just that.

The MRC has approved Arbitron’s PPM system for radio in Houston, which could imply they that they are going to approve it for all markets. Does that change anything for you?

It depends on what that data says. I mean that’s always been the issue for example with TV and the cable boxes. Today you can find out what people had on in their rooms. It’s just a fear that that will tell you something that people don’t want to hear. I think the interesting thing about radio becoming more sophisticated and giving you a greater degree of transparency about what’s actually happening rather than a diary survey can only be a good thing for them. They should be applauded, I think that’s great. It’s a good thing. Arbitron is involved with Project Apollo and if they can start tying all those things together then that could really get interesting because Project Apollo will make a very large difference to packaged goods anyway.

What are the top conflicts in your opinion planning has with buying and how are they often resolved?
Well I think the world of segmentation and the ability to truly segment brands’ users in a way that allows you to really understand why different consumers do what they do. Not surprisingly a group of BMW drivers may well be about power and status and so forth, but then maybe another group actually is about safety and how could you talk to them differently? Would they behave very differently? Most of the tools that we have to buy are so blunt that you can’t do anything with them. The buyer has the misfortune of having to buy 18-35 year old men when really what you want are men motivated by status and power. How do you do that? Because where a marketplace is so desperate for help we end up measuring what we can measure, not trying to measure what we want to achieve. Therefore you can have the most sophisticated plan but when the rubber hits the road and it comes to market well I’m sorry but I can only buy you 18-35 year old men so that’s what you get. You have to buy all of them. I think planning is moving increasingly away from just a numbers game to a much more sophisticated place that’s about true understanding. How do we catch up within the execution of what you do and the activation of what you do?

Any out of the box ideas you’ve come up with?

There are some things I would describe as pretty stunty that people get very excited about. Let me give you an example. Honeywell, a major defense manufacturer, spent a lot of money doing direct marketing to Capitol Hill—senators and all those kind of people. They’ve gotten very little response to get Honeywell salespeople in front them. So what we did was create through Carat Brand Experience the Honeywell experience in Washington, D.C. They created an environment in a big space in Washington and then invited Senators and committee members along there to come and play and come and see what Honeywell actually does so you can go and say test drive an airplane, touch, feel, see—experience is absolutely unbelievable.

They’ve had everyone that counts on Capitol Hill through the Honeywell experience who have spent from 30-40 minutes seeing things, touching them and giving the sales team an opportunity to sit down and talk to these
people in an environment that’s not a hard sell. It’s been significantly more effective at driving the people they wanted to have a conversation with them than any direct mail piece ever did. It’s just taking the same money and doing it completely, utterly different.

Editor’s note: This is archived from 3/07.