Page 54 - The EDIT | Q1 2017

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My take on Australia
When you think about 2017 so far, what were the most exciting things that have happened in your market till date?
It’s still early in the year, but the thing that has been creating the most news and attention is the Facebook misreporting/3rd party oversight. This started last year
and whilst most of the media frenzy around it is badly researched puff pieces for the traditional media players, it has meant that Facebook has had to radically change their stance on 3rd party oversight. As we know — anything that has the influence to change the stance of a behemoth like Facebook is major.
What factor is most driving change in your market at the moment?
Currently we are seeing major figures in our industry pushing the agenda around accountability and third party measurement. Senior clients like Marc Pritchard, the GMO of Proctor & Gamble, are calling for unified third party measurement and standards for digital.
Professor Mark Ritson, a highly-respected industry expert in Australia, is jumping on every digital story to further his agenda on what he perceives as a rush towards new and shiny digital at the expense of more traditional and to his mind proven media.
The well documented Facebook issues around measurement errors and lack of third party oversight has created a media swell on the subject. This is not something that is likely to go away anytime soon.
How is the industry responding to it?
Realistically, we know as an industry that we will never get across the board agreement here until we can rely on a common form of measurement. Recently, we have seen some real movement on this — not just on viewability, but overall accountability of digital media and the importance of aligning to the same standards across the whole industry. There is collaboration happening now. The MFA, IAB and AANA are all working together on a viewability solution which would not have happened 6 months ago.
What do you think will be the biggest Comms challenge speci cally for your market in the next 12 months — and what will you do to overcome it?
Well I’m going to get a bit ‘heavy’ with this answer! For as long as any of us can remember, we have spoken about
the continuous fragmentation of the media market being an increasing challenge from a Comms perspective. More recently however, we have faced a newer challenge, namely the proliferation of consumers as publishers. Across multiple categories, the place where people look for information they need is overwhelmingly not from traditional sources.
Here is a great example from Australia showcasing this:
Hearing advice from “people like me” now carries as much — if not more weight — than hearing from traditional news sources.
This poses ongoing Comms challenges. The first and
most immediate one being how do we as custodians of
our clients’ brands seek to leverage this breed of news makers without lessening the source of their influence, their perceived impartiality.
However, there is a more fundamental issue that comes when aligning with people who have influence based on popularity; how do brands know where the truth lies?
How do we know for example that if we align our brand with a Health and Nutrition in uencer that the advice they give is sound?
In my opinion, this is a real issue.
As the leader of the free world throws around the term #FakeNews to simply damage the reputation of entire continents of journalists, we are entering a period where
THE EDIT ISSUE 054 | Q14 201176