As featured in The Media Leader
The Kite Factory has launched an integrated planning and optimisation framework that aims to support campaign delivery across all video channels.
Kite Connect supports full-funnel efforts across linear TV, broadcaster VOD, connected TV, YouTube and cinema. The independent agency claims it offers a clear, data-driven approach to cross-channel video planning, focused on outcomes-based results.
Speaking to The Media Leader, chief commercial officer Jonathan Leech indicated that the tool was developed in part due to advertiser demand for more efficient cross-video planning, but also to simplify The Kite Factory’s existing tools.
“We had a suite of proprietary tools — very good tools — that all sat in different teams,” he explained. “There wasn’t a natural, holistic way of looking at all those tools and understanding how the value of those tools can work in collaboration with each other in a single palatable way that someone on the client team could explain to a client.”
Ben Foster, The Kite Factory’s chief digital officer, added that Kite Connect aims to measure business outcomes inclusive of brand metrics, sales uplift and “everything in between”.
He warned that current cross-media measurement efforts, such as Isba’s Origin project, pose challenges for advertisers given the distinct ways in which platforms measure views and impressions compared with broadcasters, as well as the relative attention ads receive in different media environments.
“If you just look at those metrics, it’s not enough,” Foster argued. “Even when you layer on attention, then great, it’s the way you should consider these things as part of your planning process — but it’s now how you should measure it.
“You’ve got to be looking at the impacts on whatever the objective of the campaign is. And make it something that the CMO can stand in front of the board and they all understand: non-marketing metrics. We’re very much focused on that.”
Kite Connect aims to assist all aspects of campaign delivery, from initial channel planning and tactics within channels to integration of creative execution, campaign optimisation and measurement.
As Foster emphasised, measurement must occur throughout the process, rather than after the fact, with plans drawn with measurement in mind from the beginning.
Moreover, while The Kite Factory is not a creative agency, the planning tool further aims to aid creative versioning by advising how to adapt and optimise creative across different AV channels.
Simplifying the proposition
The wider trend of more traditional media owners embracing AV production has more broadly prompted a reconsideration of how agencies and sales teams must organise themselves to meet client needs.
As Leech and Foster agreed, there is currently a lack of industry-wide standard for how AV is planned and bought, leading to confusion and inefficiency.
“CTV, YouTube, short-form video might sit in the AV team in some agencies and sit in the digital team at other agencies,” Leech pointed out. Foster noted that, anecdotally, media owners are therefore forced to present two entirely distinct sales decks to agencies: one for the AV team and another for the digital team.
“It’s so siloed,” Foster acknowledged.
By integrating a single tool across all AV buying, The Kite Factory is aiming to simplify its own proposition.
“What you want is consistency across the industry,” Leech continued. “It shouldn’t be different horses for different courses. It should all be very simple.
“Ultimately, what’s the campaign KPIs? What are the business goals and the objective of the campaign? And what’s a simplified way you can look at that to get the right balance of short-form and long-form media that’s going to deliver what you want?”
For him, the goal for Kite Connect is that it will help “clients take up a broader spectrum of media, ultimately”.
Whether it’s a brand that had been spending in linear but hadn’t tried CTV or a digital-first advertiser spending on short-form video but not linear TV, the idea is to communicate the benefits of broadening the media mix across more AV channels for each brand’s needs.
Without citing specifics, Foster indicated that for one test brand, Kite Connect obtained larger reach with a smaller budget by using the tool and being open to spending on a larger diversity of channels.
As Leech noted, such a strategy is not only more effective for many brands but also helps to “mitigate risk”.