Benjamin Blank:Yes. Janet, you said something about obviously we had three pipes a while ago, right. That was like all of our information came through those pipes, and in some ways, it was dictated by people that weren't really us. They were looking at data and various things and figuring out what audience was. As we think about audience, we think about data, and we think about not only the data that's available right now, but also the world that we want to create. Stories in so many ways dictate the structure of how we think about society, how we think about ourselves. How does audience come into play when you think about data specifically and storytelling? And I think it would also be helpful in your work if you could maybe just talk a little bit about what you do in terms of data specifically and how that guides some of your storytelling.
Janet Balis: Sure. Well, look, from a marketing and advertising standpoint, obviously, at its core, we look at a lot. Everyone is building media and putting creative in those media opportunities, and there's now more data than ever before. That's informing the creative itself in many ways. It's not making the creative, although we can get into that whole, actually, I knew you were going there, but there's obviously a lot of data and technology that is fueling that side, and it's fueling the media side. I would say it's very important, though, with all the data and technology that we can pipe, very intelligently, and that almost every CMO that I'm working with is doing an incredible job to really build the right audiences, to really understand the segments of audience that they need to use to drive their business, to drive their growth and to be profitable.
And it is very carefully choreographed at a macro level, at a micro level, strategically operationally, not only within their companies, but also with their agencies. It is a very careful orchestration, and those that are doing it well, are wiring it very carefully, both within their own companies and with their partners that they're working with, because it really takes a lot of precision to do it well.
That being said, I think it's very important that we not over obsess with the word audience.
Because as data and technology have continued to advance, I think we've almost we get into these "hype cycles", and so we'll talk about, like, one to one personalization. I can't tell you there are very few clients that I see that actually have the right data, the right technology, and the right operating model to actually be able to do one to one personalization of data, technology and creative at scale. It's not a reality.
So being able to think about personalized messages, being able to understand cohorts of audience. Yes, absolutely. Being able to think very strategically about the audiences that matter and to bring resonating messages to those humans. Absolutely.
And by the way, I like to use the word humans as opposed to audience, because as soon as you get into consumers and segments, you forget that they are humans.
I think a more important word is "relevance". And I'll use some W's to walk through it. But for me, relevance is a more important concept because, yes, it does have the who. It has audience, but it also has what which is context. It also has where which is geographically or spatially where we are. And it also has when. It also is why.
We have to think about what's the mindset that we're connecting with the human and can we create ”relevance”?I think that's as important as audience. And I almost feel like we've become over obsessed with the notion of audience targeting both for media and creative, and we've lost sight of and we'll get into all the technical reasons and privacy reasons why it'll get harder or easier over time. But I think it's really important just to focus on relevance.
Benjamin Blank: There's also a real challenge in Data in that it can be very binary. Am I talking to a man or a woman? Am I talking to this segment, that segment, et cetera? And it seems like as storytellers, our job in some ways is to break some of those molds, right? And not just in some ways pander to a group that data is telling us that is extremely binary that we need to be talking to.
Ryan, can you talk a little bit about how you think about Data? And you mentioned earlier that you had this desire to bring hip hop to an audience in a way that was meaningful to them. Did you feel like you knew exactly who you were talking to? Were you trying to expose that to more than one group? How do you think about that?
Ryan Ford: Well, it connects all of my answers so far. then that's where we start to sometimes trip and stumble and saying, this is a TV show for black people, or this is going to be the shining star of during Pride month for the LGBTQIA Plus community. This story, and then it becomes almost pandering, it becomes exploitative. But it's informed, right? So you can have informed content, informed stories that just don't land, right? So sometimes the best analytics and insights happen on the back side of it, right? How many comments did that have? How much engagement did it have? How many people watched it? How many people give a shit?
Ryan Ford: Exactly, right? And so we trying to do that at Cashmere at Media Monks. I think all of us in this room are trying to do that. How do you unpack that? Right? How do you deconstruct culture? How do you deconstruct "relevance"? Right? And sometimes it's this "humanity" that able that's able to shine through despite all of that. And in best case scenarios, you're able to extract that "humanity" using all these tools and these analytics.