{"id":63292,"date":"2021-03-29T08:57:44","date_gmt":"2021-03-29T15:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=63292"},"modified":"2022-08-24T20:32:12","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T03:32:12","slug":"insights-from-the-buy-side-jessica-lough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/insights-from-the-buy-side-jessica-lough\/","title":{"rendered":"Insights from the Buy-Side: Jessica Lough at Digitas NA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As digital media prepares for a world without cookies, many brands are turning to their agencies to help them navigate this shift. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this edition of <\/span>Insights from the Buy Side<\/i> we spoke with Jessica Lough, a VP of Precision Media at Digitas NA, and got her thoughts on the future of digital advertising and how she and her team are helping their clients in this fast changing landscape. Check out Jessica\u2019s thoughts on new and emerging identity solutions, recovering from the pandemic and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Lough
VP Precision Media at Digitas NA<\/h3>\n\n\n
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Jessica is a VP of Precision Media at Digitas NA, where she currently oversees the programmatic strategy and activation for Sephora. Jessica has been with Publicis Media for 9 years driving digital & programmatic best practices for brands across a wide spectrum of categories including Retail, CPG, Financial Services, and more. Jessica lives in Denver and during her free time likes to take advantage of all Colorado has to offer – hiking, snowboarding, backpacking and of course, the breweries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OpenX: How are you anticipating recovery\/growth for 2021 across the brands you oversee?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Lough: No doubt every brand has been impacted over the past year, and for some brands and categories, the impact has been greater than others. While many of the brands we work with have started to see degrees of return to normalcy, we\u2019re also anticipating – and cautioning – that the expectation can\u2019t be a full return to what \u2018normal\u2019 was pre-pandemic. Consumer behaviors have shifted over the last year, and in some ways we have to assume that these shifts will be permanent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, where there\u2019s challenges, there\u2019s also opportunities for new approaches and new ways of connecting with our brand\u2019s audience. Our recommendation is to take the learnings from the past year to focus on the areas where we\u2019ve seen growth and opportunity, and to be as nimble as possible amidst the evolving landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OpenX: Has 2020 taught you anything you didn’t know, good or bad, about programmatic’s capabilities? <\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Lough: 2020 was a whirlwind of a year for a lot of reasons. Continued changes to customer privacy, evolving expectations from consumers of how they interact & engage with brands, and then throw in a global pandemic to top it off and you have a year filled with disruptions and a clear need for evolution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve learned that the programmatic ecosystem can be resilient, but we have to leave behind our expectations for how things have worked in the past, to form a new future forward approach to how we partner together as publishers, brands, agencies and ad tech. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news is that the industry supports change, as seen by the regularity with which we embrace the opportunity to invest & incorporate new channels (audio, OOH, CTV, DTS), new methods of buying (PG, PMP, OX), and new partners in the space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve embraced the opportunities to expand the definition of \u2018programmatic\u2019 and have evolved our understanding of how programmatic can and should be used to drive growth for our brands. The bad news is that we\u2019ve spent too long being reliant on unstable and inherently challenged identifiers, and it\u2019s taken years to come to the full realization that the death of the cookie (and IDFA along with it) is here and now, and with it comes a need for alternative approaches to addressability and reaching our brand\u2019s consumers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OpenX: How are you approaching audience and identity targeting, and are you thinking about the death of the cookie? <\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Lough: Not a week goes by where we don\u2019t have an internal, partner-based, or client facing discussion regarding the death of the cookie and upcoming challenges to identity resolution with the loss of IDFA! This topic is hot on everyone\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first step for us is to understand and identify the impact to our brands, which will vary greatly depending on factors like a brand\u2019s reliance on third party data, availability and richness of 1<\/span>st party customer data, and current adoption of more persistent tactics like contextual targeting and partnerships with publishers. We\u2019ve been working to develop impact assessments on behalf of our clients and level-set on expectations for how the loss of third party cookies and upcoming changes to IDFA will impact our ability to both target and measure conversions on a brand-by-brand basis. This sets up the framework for some challenging but necessary conversations with our client teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From there we\u2019re taking the approach that there\u2019s no single solution to replace cookies or IDFA, so we need to establish a process that includes continually vetting, testing and analyzing the impact of the various identity resolution & targeting opportunities within the marketplace. We know that emerging solutions will not fully replicate or replace the expected loss in addressability from cookies\/IDFAs, so it is just as important to continue to establish partnerships with key publishers and look for ways that contextual targeting can help to provide new outlets for reaching our customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OpenX: What emerging trend or piece of technology are you most excited about today?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Lough: New open source & emerging identity solutions! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m excited to hear more on how solutions like UID 2.0, LiveRamp’s IDL\/ATS, and Google\u2019s proposal for FloC will continue to evolve and provide new opportunities for reaching our brand\u2019s customers. Additionally I\u2019m excited about new opportunities with contextual solutions that can read for sentiment\/true context to give us a better understanding of the content before determining if it\u2019s the right place to reach our audiences. Again, knowing that we will lose some of our ability to reach addressable audiences in the coming year, new contextual based solutions that can help fill the gaps will be of interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As digital media prepares for a world without cookies, many brands are turning to their agencies to help them navigate this shift.  In this edition of Insights from the Buy Side we spoke with Jessica Lough, a VP of Precision Media at Digitas NA, and got her thoughts on the future of digital advertising and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":63253,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63292"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}