Exclusive: Mediabrands launches ‘creative friendly’ DMP, Sixth Sense

An age-old criticism of media agencies and creative agency relations is that it’s a one-way street, with creative agencies either not having access to or simply ignoring the data available to media agencies.

Part of the reason is that creatives have difficulty relating to the type of data fed to them by media math men, said Prashant Kumar, president of Asia world markets and Malaysia CEO for Mediabrands. “Most of the segmentation around DMPs are built around target attributes," he said. "For example audiences are defined by demographics, category and online consumption patterns. A typical creative guy finds this hard to connect to as it isn’t about people.”

Ullas Sahadevan, regional head of Cadreon, IPG Mediabrands’ programmatic division, commented in a statement that most DMP thinking in the market is based on the most linear and undifferentiated kind of segmentation and is too skewed toward the final stage in the buyer’s journey.

Sixth Sense, says Kumar, hopes to address this by redefining data around ‘Moments’ rather than traditional audience segments by, in part, drawing on social-media data. “We believe that people live in moments, not segments anymore," he said. "Segmentation ruled in the world of mass media. However with the fragmentation and the 24/7 presence of screens, the same segment of people can, depending on the moment, display very diverse behaviour and reactions to brand messages.”

For example, a consumer who is on a date is a different person in mindset from the same consumer out shopping with a friend, or out for lunch with colleagues.

“If you imagine a typical day and different types of moments that a prospective consumer goes through, you may have 400 different moments which may account for 80 per cent of product’s consumption,” he continued. “Similar moments can be clustered and moment hypotheses built around that, with which to tap the moment market place.”

So, theoretically, if an audience buyer could define via the new DMP that the best moment to target a consumer would be during lunch break, on a weekday, with colleagues via mobile, then the creative team could use that information to craft messages that uniquely suit the medium and the message.

The system uses a combination of proprietary, client and third-party data sources available in the market. The key difference, said Kumar, is how Mediabrands has combined those data.

Sixth Sense is the result of a collaboration between several parties, Kumar said, but its development was hubbed in Asia-Pacific. Currently it’s being piloted in several key markets, including Kuala Lumpur, and has been tested on the agency’s ECDs.

“We’re seeing good results already and over the next few months we should be scaling up to span a whole lot more categories,” said Kumar.

Mediabrands aims to have the DMP in place for all top digital marketing clients by the end of the year and in all major countries by the first quarter of next year.