“This year, we have to delve into 700 pages of TV T&Cs. And the radio takes the same path for its general conditions of sale!” Anne Thetier, managing director in charge of trading at Omnicom Media Group, expresses the anguish that media agencies can feel when building advertisers’ campaigns. On the occasion of the 2022 Udecam Meetings, on October 15, the DG hammered home: “66,000 cells to be processed on Excel to build the framework of a television campaign, it’s too much ! We are faced with ever more complexity upstream.” Directly “targeted”, Sylvia Tassan Toffola, general manager of TF1 Pub, answered him, bluntly: “We are not the direct cause of this complexity, which I do not deny. It is a result of a problem of recognition of value and, that, on three levels. The first is the demand, always, on the part of the agencies, to lower prices and this, without our being consulted in the calls for tenders. The second problem which results from this is the threat of going to Google or Meta, if that doesn’t suit us. The third problem is regulatory asymmetry: the agencies and their principals, the advertisers, need to recognize thata brand safe environment, editorial content, data, measurement by third parties… it has a value.“
Radio, TV, print… “flexible” media?
So who is to blame ? How to deal with this complexity? And how, therefore, simplify and automate the processes of “historic” media such as television, radio and print so as not to be overwhelmed by new digital entrants? Within Lagardère Publicité News (Europe 1, Europe 2, Paris Match, The Sunday newspaperRFM, OÜI FM (in Ile de France), FG Radio (in Ile de France and Nice), Radio Meuh, Radio Public Santé and Replay News), the awareness is not new. “We understood, from 2009, at the beginning of a crisis, already, that the time factor was a key factor of success, explains Marie Renoir-Couteau, president of Lagardère Publicité News. We noticed that as soon as the situation got tense, the ability we had to respond present, in a quick time of mobilization and in the right way, was a priority adaptation factor on the market. In the tools deployed, we work a lot with EDI, a peer-to-peer data transmission tool, to increase the agility of radio media.”
The president of Lagardère Publicité News describes the specificities of radio. “The orders are very precise, namely schedules associated with performance, and within very short deadlines, between D-10 and D-7, with the possibility of going to tighter deadlines in an exceptional way.” The same “flexibility” is put forward by 366, the advertising agency for “territorial” media (55 daily newspapers including South West, West France, Le Télégramme, Midi Libre, La Voix du Nord, Le Progrès, L’Est Républicain): “We are in the extreme agility, thanks to a strong integration of the media purchase in the manufacturing processes. We thus allow to reserve an advertising insert until D-2 or D-3”, shares Luc Vignon, DGA in charge of digital at 366. A challenge when the regional media represent 3.5 million copies, printed at 11 p.m. and delivered before 7 a.m. Flexibility, too, claimed by the management of the TF1 group, but not only: “We must strive for the same service and transactional level as the “new” media, slice Sylvia Tassan Toffola. Since 2016, television has been working in this direction. We have created purchasing platforms with other players in the television market. On our platform, the Box, we have 140 referenced agencies, 290 daily buyers, 60,000 transactions per year.” The management of the TF1 group also works to centralize mandates and creations for “to simplify” and to adapt to new purchasing methods thanks to programmatic. Changes which have also been accompanied by a “organizational changecontinues Sylvia Tassan Toffola, and formations”.
And for tomorrow? “The feeling that I have as a media that has been established for 70 years is that we have already given everything to advertisers, slips again Marie Renoir-Couteau. The only thing we can still offer is productivity, as it is not possible to deliver more commercials without degrading the experience of listeners and/or viewers. We have arrived at a key moment, and more than automation, it is human dialogue that will allow us to be efficient”.