Life At Nexxen with Jessie Brickner
August 30, 2024
Partner Spotlight with Kevin VanValkenburgh
We sat down with Kevin VanValkenburgh, Media Director at Guru, to learn more about the agency’s approach to successfully target consumers and his thoughts on Google’s recent announcement.
Guru describes itself as a purpose-driven agency with a mission to increase joy and reduce suffering. What does that mean for brands you work with?
We work on purpose driven brands only and that means unique products and services with very diverse audiences and sometimes smaller budgets. The joy comes from creating the red thread that ties relevant messages to these multiple unique audience segments. Suffering is reduced by encouraging consumers to try products and services that are not only good for them, but for the planet.
What is the value that Nexxen delivers that led you to select us not just as your sole ad tech partner for the Throat Coat campaign, but also Traditional Medicinals general branding campaigns?
Having in-depth audience tools to help us find not just Conscious Consumers who are the broadest targets for our purpose driven clients but also being able to refine and enrich these audiences showing interest and giving off in-market signals is a big reason we partner with Nexxen.
As a small, purpose driven agency, we needed help to plan a path for our team to take control of our media investments with a DSP that is intuitive and easy to learn. Bonus points for being connected to a real time updating audience platform and having a great set of account leads and trainers to guide the way.
Having in depth audience tools to help us find consumers and being able to refine and enrich these audiences is a big reason we partner with Nexxen.
Having in depth audience tools to help us find consumers and being able to refine and enrich these audiences is a big reason we partner with Nexxen.
Switching topics a bit here–what are your thoughts on Google’s recent rollback on their plans to eliminate cookies? Were you surprised?
Truthfully, I don’t think it matters what Google does or doesn’t do around 3rd party tracking pixels anymore. It is estimated that 70% of consumers no longer have a cookie, and within Chrome, 40% of consumers have manually disabled cookies themselves. I truly believe the best way to move forward in digital to get the best targeting and measurement is using unique ids that are 1st party data from brands and other sources that can be enriched and pushed across multiple platforms instead of just one.
I don’t think it’s back to the 3rd party cookie at all and between tech builders and government the 3rd party cookie will still be dead. It probably is now with things that consumers and tech have allowed to enhance privacy.
If you had one piece of advice to give to other media buyers/planners in the industry who want to improve programmatic performance for their clients, what would it be?
Focus on audience and inventory. These are the two most important places you make mistakes in programmatic. Create the relevancy of the message to the targets and serve them wherever they are, especially outside the walled gardens.
Our modern view of digital is that content, audience, platforms and inventory are the pillars that are one fail all fail. They sit on a strong base of measurement with a roof of AI/machine learning. Our campaigns and creative/connections internal alignment from step one with a client allows us to just do it better at connecting messages and content to drive results. This is especially true for our portfolio of purpose driven brands who can’t afford an old school batch and blast approach to targeting by traditional demography or with old 3rd party sources as they need their budgets to deliver results to the bottom line, not just a meaningless media report.
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