#MediaSnack MEETS

#MediaSnack Meets: Gerry D'Angelo, Procter & Gamble

January 15, 2019 ID Comms Episode 25
#MediaSnack MEETS
#MediaSnack Meets: Gerry D'Angelo, Procter & Gamble
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

How can you be an effective media director in a complex and fast-moving media industry? 

This is just one of the insights shared in this #MediaSnack Meets with Gerry D'Angelo the Global Media Director of P&G, the world's largest advertiser. 

We cover a lot of ground quickly in this special episode and Gerry shares a ton of his wisdom and insight learned through 20 years rising to the very top of the industry. 

  • What does a Global Media Director do?
  • How ad fraud is still a major concern for advertisers
  • You should treat a media budget like your own money
  • How to manage internal stakeholders and improve their knowledge of media
  • The importance of defining your company's operating model for media within the marketing organization
  • The challenges and opportunities that come with corporations placing increased scrutiny on how media dollars are invested
  • How marketers are approaching the threat of 'direct to consumer' brands
  • What are the skills that make a good modern media director?
  • Gerry's approach to the trend for in-housing

Finally, we discuss whether, in a world in which media will increasingly be bought in a biddable / auction process, large scale still matters to large advertisers or will they lose their competitive advantage?


Episode links:

Gerry D'Angelo LinkedIn

Gerry D'Angelo Twitter @gerrygdangelo

How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp

Interview with Gerry D'Angelo at Festival of Media - May 2017 - Media Transparency: Clean up the Supply Chain to Invest in Growth



Tom Denford:

Hello everyone. I'm Tom Denford, co-founder of ID Comms. Welcome to episode 25 of MediaSnack Meets. Recorded each week in New York, we get to meet the individuals and organizations doing great work to inspire success and drive change within the global media and marketing industry. In each episode we find out what is behind that success, what it takes to make change in the industry, and what the rest of us can learn from that experience. My guest for this episode is Gerry D'Angelo, the global media director of Procter and Gamble, also known as the world's biggest advertiser and overseeing an annual media investment in the many billions of dollars. Gerry took the role as the company's most senior media leader in January 2017 just at the moment when his boss P&G's Global Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard was beginning a series of high profile conference speeches demanding greater transparency from the media industry. You might recall some of those soundbites with Marc talking about the"murky media supply chain","the fox guarding the henhouse" and calling on other marketers to drive change and"vote with your dollars". What an exciting time to be put in charge of P&G's global media and be a leading figure in such transformative change in the industry as brands around the world are inspired by P&G to take back more control of media decision-making. But this big role comes with big challenges, not least, how to navigate a vast global marketing organization, how to decide the priorities to focus on and all the while acknowledging the influence that P&G has on marketers around the world. I think I would personally find the job quite overwhelming, but as you will hear, Gerry is a master of making the complex simple and bringing a calm and pragmatic approach to the crazy world of modern advertising. Now, I've known Gerry a while and I was delighted he took this role because I think he's just the kind of person that we all need to be an important statesman for the longterm health of the media industry worldwide. Gerry was previously media director at Mondelez based in Zurich and now he moves incessantly between family in the UK an office in Geneva and P&G's global headquarters in Cincinnati. In this episode we explore some of Gerry's secrets to being an effective media director in a complex media age, how companies can define an operating model for media, and what exactly is a'Media Johnny'? You can check the full show notes for this episode at www.mediasnackpodcast.com including a full transcript, but please enjoy this highly insightful interview with the global media director of Procter and Gamble, Gerry D'Angelo. Welcome to New York. What we're going to really focus on talking about today, which I think is fascinating, because the industry knows you as a global media director of a large organization and there are a number of you similar people in these kinds of roles. I think it would just be really interesting to really just learn about that, what it takes to be a global media director and what the job is like. What does a global media director do? That is probably the first good question.

Gerry D'Angelo:

I've been asked that question both internally and externally and the way that I like to try and answer that is to say that there's definitely a part of the role that is to provide stewardship and governance and oversight to the media spend. I think that's the bedrock of the role really to make sure that the dollars, and they're not insubstantial dollars wherever you're working, to be spent in the best way possible. The other key component, I think particularly in a world in the way it is at the moment in terms of the pace of change is to make sure that you're continually innovating and making sure that you are reinventing the way that you take the media operating model, whether it's for P&G or for any other advertiser and making sure that it's future proofed going forward. So I think it's those two kind of key components of the role which give it its breadth and its variety.

Tom Denford:

Some say, oh this is amazing because that media role is having increasing influence through the business. You're touching many more functions like data and analytics and CRM and getting more involved in business technology and maybe feeling a bit more like a marketer and then there are others that say it's kind of like being in a vice because the role is being squeezed on all sides by different functions. Is that a true reflection, some are feeling like it's expanding out and some are feeling like it's constricting in?

Gerry D'Angelo:

So I definitely would agree that the role of being a global media director has changed fundamentally over the last 20 years or so. I talk internally a lot about adjacencies and I think that's a nice way of saying that the role of the media director as a result of the changing role of media has started to get broader and more expensive and it's beginning to touch different parts of the organization. That I think provides you with the right language internally to overcome overlaps and turf wars and competing remits if you talk in that much more conciliatory way about adjacencies I think that engenders a sense of collaboration internally. The other thing that has really made the role of a media director very, very complicated in this day and age is that the number of things that I have to think about and many of us have to think about, we just didn't have to think about 20 years ago. Very good example of that I think is ad fraud. You know, when I was buying a[TV advertising] spot on[UK channel] Tyne-Tess television 20 years ago, no one really had to worry at that point in time whether the television station was going to defraud you or whether some other third party bad actor was going to enter in and start to add a fraudulent component to the transaction. So that's something we need to really worry about. The other one is brand safety. If you were buying that spot on Tyne-Tess television and it was the middle of[soap opera] Coronation Street, you knew it, you knew everyone understood the context and everyone understood that it was professionally produced content. So brand safety didn't really come into the equation. Probably the third area I think now is in terms of the area of data, that is another dimension of change that has completely transformed the role of a global media director these days.

Tom Denford:

But those are all massive things which require specialisms in their own right. In the role of a media director in an organization, at scale, it must feel like there's pressure to be THE knowledge on all of these things. So how do you equip yourself to be the expertise internally?

Gerry D'Angelo:

Yeah. Undoubtedly that's absolutely true for an area of the business that we're operating in that is subject so much dynamic change and you are set up as the internal subject matter expert on that, then there is clearly going to be a tendency for many people in the organization to orientate towards you and say, what should I do on X platform or in Y circumstance? I think probably the best advice is to be very, very honest and say that the pace of change is terrifyingly fast. And as a result of that, there is very little established expertise and we are all learning at that point in time. What that lends itself to is a sense of iteration and learning plans and trialing things because if you've created a current best approach on something and it's taken you three months to write it and it's gone through two or three layers of approval, by the time you get that out into the marketplace, it might have changed. The way that I approach it is to say that everybody's learning in this particular space and I think that makes it much more inclusive.

Tom Denford:

There's some pressure that I've certainly heard from others where, because in that global role it is quite rare that you actually hold onto the money. You're not the budget holder. So therefore a lot of the role is to help the business understand strategy in these things, right? So you can have common global standards for stuff, where regions and markets then can raise to best practice and you can be a facilitator of shared learnings. Is that the way that you view it?

Gerry D'Angelo:

Yeah, absolutely, undoubtedly the budgets sit, whatever business that you're working in, the budgets are always going to be sitting in the business, whether that's a country level or whether it's aggregated up to a regional or global P&L that's always the case. So you have to form a trusted relationship internally in order to be able to provide subject matter expertise to be able to provide input in such a way that you're treating it like it's your own money. Quite often I use that phrase, you know, if, if this was my money or if I was running a sole proprietorship and you know, I was literally borrowing this money from the bank, this is how I would invest it. Gets you at least halfway into the relationship. One of the things that I think that I found most successful is that you need to engender and build a capability in the stakeholders that you're working with. You can't have this relationship where you're the expert about everything and then you're kind of just dictating to them how they spend the money. I think that's one of the dynamics that I'm seeing most recently, which is that there's definitely an increased understanding of the importance of media to people's businesses. So people that I know that are running businesses and running big P&Ls, they're treating media like a very important driver of their business. They're taking greater responsibility of understanding that space and they're beginning to internalize some of that work in a way that probably wasn't the case a few years ago.

Tom Denford:

Good. So then you can then trust the internal organization and all the external partners to go and execute to some standards that you can keep an eye on.

Gerry D'Angelo:

Yeah, I think you might have used this term before, that everybody needs to have an operating model for media whether you call it an operating model or a framework or a template or an approach. For a long time I think there was a sense that you needed to create these kinds of universal principles that were applicable in every instance. I know that I've gone on the record as saying that one of the most influential books out there at the moment or in the last 10 years or so has been Byron Sharp's'How Brands Grow' and as a result of that I think people really liked the idea that there were certain immutable truths in media that you could apply in a very universal way. But I think that's over rotated a little bit to the point where there's a sense that there are three or four rules applicable in absolutely every instance and circumstance. I don't think that's actually the case. Every brand needs to find and be comfortable with its own characteristics and its own circumstances that it finds itself in. One of the ways of doing that I think is to talk about how big a brand is and the level of involvement in the category that it's competing in, so I think those are useful dimensions for that.

Tom Denford:

So you mentioned feeling like you're taking responsibility for the money and also that increasingly businesses are thinking of media as an investment in some kind of business outcome. That's a slight change in thinking I think in a lot of marketing organizations as media is not just a big budget you give to a media director to go spend, that there's perhaps increased accountability now with that and thinking of it like an investment and that's good and it empowers the media director to feel that they're responsible for a company's investment. But then that comes with the scrutiny of the CFO and the CMO and others, which is I think is probably a good thing because media seems to be higher profile within organizations. People are taking it seriously and they want to get it right and therefore that's demanding better strategy, better framework, blueprint, operating model, whatever it is. What's been your experience? If we look back over 20 years are we at peak accountability?

Gerry D'Angelo:

Absolutely. Yeah. Whilst I think there was a degree of comfort in the past, you were able to operate not on the front line of the business and you were able to operate in a highly specialized way that no one really understood well what you were doing and you were able to finesse exactly how to bring these strategies to life and extract most value. I think there was some value to that but at the same time I think that as a result of that, if you were[a media person] in an agency, you got the last five minutes of the presentation or if you're a client side[media director] you were a highly specialized person that wasn't on the kind of main fast track of career progression through an organization. I think you're absolutely right, as these budgets have grown and the demand for more accountability has grown, I think what's happened is that whether you are agency side or client side, whether you like it or not, you're being thrust into more of this commercial front line of the business. Unfortunately with that, if you're put into this spotlight you have to step forward and kind of grasp the mantle of this additional responsibility. This is absolutely the right thing to do because if you're working in a large organization that's been established for a long time, one of the main competitive threats that you're dealing with is much smaller, more nimble businesses that have a direct relationship or a direct transactional relationship with consumers. So they've got it, right. They've got that faster cycle of understanding how their investment has worked and then turning it into revisions further down the line. I think we have to adopt that and that I think is one of the biggest challenges that a lot of these big companies are facing, which is how do you create more of a closed loop, attributing a sale to a particular investment and also very importantly, doing that sufficiently fast enough to be able to influence the next investment decision. It comes with the territory.

Tom Denford:

That of course means that the role of the media director has changed hugely. Does that require a different type of person these days versus maybe where we were five or ten years ago?

Gerry D'Angelo:

Great question because I can certainly see an evolution in my skillset and evolution in my capabilities and I find that I have to continually keep learning. Otherwise what will happen is that the role will evolve onwards without me. There's a sense that I feel that I almost have to keep pace with my own role in many ways. It's kind of like being the Madonna of the media world, not for me personally of course, but I think for all of us, we have to keep reinventing ourselves every 12 to 24 months because there's an additional dimension to the role that comes in or there's an additional piece of technology that we have to absorb and assimilate and understand how it's going to impact the business. It's fair to say that the people who've succeeded in the industry have been the ones who I think have been able to do that and have been happy to put their hands up and say, I don't know about this area and so therefore I have to immerse myself in it and go and find out about it. Those that haven't, I think have struggled and have maybe moved on to other things. A good example I think of that for me was Twitter. I realized three years ago that I didn't really understand how the platform worked, I thought it was a bit clunky. I didn't know how to use it. I didn't know how to engage with people. I didn't know who to follow. It was almost like diving into a foreign language and so now I'm a bit more active on that platform and as a result of that I'm able to give advice to internal stakeholders.,

Tom Denford:

We will link to Gerry's twitter so you can keep an eye on that. I think you should have way more followers, you have a respectable amount, but I thought given your profile in the industry...

Gerry D'Angelo:

It's not great, but I started late. Maybe I'll be a late bloomer on that platform.

Tom Denford:

Good. In terms of the evolving[media director] role, I think that's good, we're seeing the same. There seems to be some[people] moving out and new people moving into those kind of roles, but also in the last couple of years we're seeing, which I think is fantastic, some media experts blooming into marketers and being given VP marketing roles or going into CMO roles in organizations. I think that's really interesting, that in my view seems to be something that's opening up. I guess because that media expertise perhaps is being more highly valued as being more of a catalyst of some great marketing.

Gerry D'Angelo:

Well it hasn't happened to me yet but you know, hopefully there's still some time. I think what's driving that is, and I was never able to figure this one out when I first started in the industry, I couldn't quite figure out how in an industry where[media directors] were spending 85% of the money that ended up with 15% or less of the time and attention and resources, that's now flipping very, very rapidly to the point now where businesses as a whole are really beginning to understand the importance of media as a huge investment. So therefore there's a preparedness, I think to be able to pluck some of those people and then put them into broader roles because media is such an integral and important part of the modern marketeers role and the way that I think it's really coming to the fore now is where people are talking about a performance mindset. Internally at P&G we call it performance marketing, performance brand building, but really within that there's an implicit realization that a very large part of that is media driven because you're taking these these dollars and you're moving them around the system to where the performance is the greatest at the fastest possible rate you can do that. So I'm not surprised that it's happening at all.

Tom Denford:

That leads us nicely onto something else that we want to talk about, which was this changing role of media. You got a few questions recently on Twitter because you'd used the term'Media Johnnies', which is a kind of phrase that we know

Gerry D'Angelo:

I didn't imagine it, right? It's something we used to say?

Tom Denford:

Yeah absolutely. Anyone in UK media will know what a Media Johnny is, they are people. It's not a dismissive expression, but it was a type of person. It was a bit kind of geezer-like wasn't it? Everyone wore blue shirts and we'd had a couple of pints and we might go and buy media and it was all a bit trader like.

Gerry D'Angelo:

I think the US equivalent is the Media Guy. There's a particular caricature of this type of person.

Tom Denford:

You can imagine particularly in the days, when you and I started, it was still a full service mindset if not actually structurally. I started in a full service agency. When you had those Media Johnny types, they were like oil and water with the Creatives and so when a client was in the building the Creatives would take 95% of the time because they were probably a bit more accessible and interesting and inspiring, they took up 95% of the presentation, if you were lucky. Then the Media Johnnies would get wheeled in for five minutes at the end.

Gerry D'Angelo:

Did we used to call that the'God Slot' or did I just imagine that? It was originally, if you were in a pitch presentation it would be like 15% of the time and then over the course of the two hour presentation it shrank.

Tom Denford:

Then all the Media Johnny's would walk in or wearing grey trousers and blue shirts and short haircuts and looking a bit trader-like, flash up a spreadsheet that nobody could read and talk about some of the quality programming that they were going to buy. I remember those days fondly and we would spend our time optimizing TV spots, all that kind of fun stuff. But things have changed and the most important part of that, which is what you were talking about a little bit earlier, was that media is being placed a bit more at the center and also they're not two distinctly different disciplines. I mean there's not like creative types and media types in such an extreme now way perhaps.

Gerry D'Angelo:

I haven't worked in an agency for a long time so I'm not sure if I can speak to the culture of how those things are changing. But I mean clearly looking from the outside in, that's clearly changing a lot. I think I'm better placed to talk about how that's happening inside large organizations because there are creative experts I think in a lot of these large organizations as there are media experts as well. One of the things I'm seeing is there was clearly differentiation between the two, but that is coming together slowly but surely. I'm putting my faith in the younger people starting in the business because I think one of the things that I'm finding is that when you started in a junior creative position and then you evolved and progressed throughout your career, the younger people who are[now] starting in those positions are already more media literate and technology literate in a way that their more senior peers were not and similarly I think if you look at media people that come into the industry, they have more of a creative sensibility and one of the things that I talk about internally, it's a drum that I absolutely keep banging internally, is how the separation of content and context is a completely artificial edifice in a consumer's minds. Those two things and that distinction is not the case. It's not there. They just see advertising. I'm making a very, very concerted effort, spending a lot of time with people internally who are responsible for brand fundamentals or for the briefing process or preproduction or creative development and making sure that they are exposed as much as possible and there's a desire, there's a pull factor, they do want to know about this stuff, but I'm over indexing on those guys because I think that's going to be one of the biggest things that's going to be the difference between winners and losers in this space. If you think about a lot of these new platforms, and they are not so new now anymore, many of them weren't designed from the ground up with advertising in mind. Advertising has become, I wouldn't say it's an afterthought particularly, but it's the way that they realized that they could monetize the platforms and so therefore they've had to reverse engineer advertising and its formats back into these contexts. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. One of the most powerful things that I think I've seen recently is, and I'm sure it crops up in many Facebook presentations and others, is this idea that every time there's a new technology or a new media platform or pulling inventory that's available, that becomes almost available overnight and it takes a little period of time for the people who are responsible for the content that sits on this platform, there's a lag factor and they need to go through this process of replicating what happened before, which is why you ended up with 30-second TV ads on Facebook and then they begin to understand how to optimize in the platform. But then, you know, it takes them a little bit of time to really begin to realize the full potential of those platforms. So I am spending a lot of time internally with those guys to make sure that happens as quickly as possible.

Tom Denford:

That's where it's got to start, right? I mean if we observe the global advertising industry, there is common understanding or acceptance that closer integration of that thinking is going to be better for everybody, but it doesn't happen on its own because they've been siloed off through different business models and different lines of business and charging models, whatever their business structures, but removing the silo thinking internally within marketing organizations so you don't have[separate] advertising people and media people and breeding a new generation or encouraging a new generation that doesn't think in that kind of siloed way that will then have a knock on effect right to the industry because those marketers will come through who force agencies, external partners, vendors publishes to talk in a different way and not to be siloed specialisms.

Gerry D'Angelo:

Absolutely. I think there's a couple of things happening at the same time. I mean, the sense check that I always put in place is if I'm thinking about these long drawn out briefing response evaluation cycles that we have, relatively speaking, and we are competing with a much smaller, dynamic, direct to consumer startup, if it takes us four weeks to think about something and it's taken them four hours to think about it, decide on it and actually do it, that's not a competitively advantaged comparison. I don't think so. I keep going back to this idea of having large organizations with all these different people and hand offs and external partners, and then these small organizations who, because of their scarcity mindset have to do it all themselves, but they end up with this amazing advantage of doing it faster and there's greater agility and greater responsiveness. So we're trying to build a lot of that internally at P&G and I'm sure many other companies are doing it. I think what happens is that if you bring some of that work in-house, as we and many others are doing or thinking of doing, then not only do move it from one part of the supply chain to another, you move it from outsource to insource. You minimize the handoffs. So by moving it from outsource to insource you are in a de facto way beginning to break down that silo. Because there's greater singularity of the people that are doing it.

Tom Denford:

The in-housing bit. Some people in the industry have said, well then you risk reducing the quality of the thinking or the quality of the output because you just don't tap into all this best practice, but you do increase the speed to market and that's the trade off. Then you're faced as a marketer with the challenge which is"do I try to get my external partners who can give me quality, is it easier to get them to work faster or is it easier to take control so we get speed but maybe forgo some quality but look, perhaps over the long term to improve that?"

Gerry D'Angelo:

I can't remember who said this, some mathematician I think, but I think he said"no models are perfect but some models are useful" and there are clearly trade offs. So I don't think there's a binary right and wrong between bringing stuff in-house being better than delegating out to specialist external resources. There are different choices that you can make a different point in time. I think there is a broad acknowledgement that across the entire industry that may be what we've done is that we've outsourced too much and there are certain disadvantages that have come along with that and maybe now is the right time, and there are some very notable examples of this, I think Deutsche Telekom is a very good example of this where they are very intentionally spreading out the work on a continuum and then saying"what makes sense to put where?" It may be that some of that work comes internally, some of that work goes to one type of specialist and maybe some of that work goes to another type of specialist. In any and all of these cases, you need to have an open and honest discussion about pros and cons because it's never going to be perfect. So one of the things is this in terms of the area of creativity, that's a very, very, very special and refined talent and wherever that is, you need to go and find it. When it happens, and you've seen it enough times, when it does actually happen, you realize how special that is. I think you need to go and find it wherever it is.

Tom Denford:

Okay. So the last bit of this puzzle of being a media director is the change in the way that media is being bought. It has implication, if we say the media function should influence further up in the chain, and start to influence the content a little bit more so we understand the context, media is going to be increasingly bought in a biddable, auction based way, which we've talked to a lot about on#MediaSnack and you and I have talked about quite a lot. For a large advertiser that's an interesting challenge. You've got big agencies doing big negotiations with big publishers and big TV networks. It's all about big and big and if you are very big you can buy things cheaper than other people. And that's been very good for growing these giant CPG businesses or giant motor businesses. Anyone with a giant budget can get competitive advantage from their scale. But when more media is bought at an auction, how does that impact a business that's relied on its muscle? So how do you find competitive advantage?

Gerry D'Angelo:

So we are keenly aware of that. The first thing to do is have the self awareness that that is happening and not to continually cling onto the competitive advantage you've had and try and squeeze as much as you possibly can out that exclusively. I mean, clearly continue to do that, but don't forget that scale can express itself in different ways. One of the things that large companies like P&G are slowly beginning to realize is that simply by manufacturing and supplying and selling products to billions of people around the world, that's another expression of scale that can result in data that's collected in an entirely appropriate way that then can begin to feed back into your model that that starts to recreate that competitive advantage. I think that's one of the things that we're finding, and some other big advertisers are finding, is that the scale part of your competitive advantage doesn't necessarily just disappear. It just reappears in a slightly different form. I think that you need to be sufficiently aware of the dynamics of the marketplaces that you are operating in to realize that, so you can begin to shift from leveraging your scale in one particular way to leveraging it in another.

Tom Denford:

You've been been in Cincinnati?

Gerry D'Angelo:

I've been in Cincinnati for a couple of days and I think I'm just about on US time now.

Tom Denford:

So it's probably, it's dinner time in Geneva. We'll go and grab some dinner. Gerry thank you so much.

Gerry D'Angelo:

No problem. It was my pleasure.

Tom Denford:

Who would you like to meet on future episodes? Please let us know at www.mediasnackpodcast.com where you will also find previous guests, including leading media executives from companies like P&G, L'Oreal and Mars, and many more. Plus some of the industry's most provocative thought leaders, people like Professor Mark Ritson and Gary Vaynerchuk. You can subscribe to get new episodes each week, and if you liked this episode and you think somebody else would, then please do share it. Thank you so much for listening.

Introduction
Welcome Gerry
What does a Global Media Director do?
Ad fraud is a concern
Treat budget like your own money
Managing internal stakeholders
An operating model for media
Increased scrutiny on media dollars
Threat of 'direct to consumer' brands
What makes a good modern media director?
Media seen as an investment
What is a Media Johnny?
Approach to in-housing
Does scale still matter?