iProspect Seeks to Balance Being a Full-Service Agency With Performance Marketing

Agencies have been promising to dismantle the silos among the endless arrays of advertising and marketing services. With Dentsu agency iProspect’s switch to being a full-service shop, executives are conscious of maintaining its identity in the world of performance marketing. In early October, iProspect signaled that it had found the person to maintain its original focus, while steering it in a broader direction. The hiring of Publicis Groupe veteran Danielle Gonzales as iProspect’s first North American CEO sent a clear message that the agency was changing. “There is a tremendous opportunity to unleash the new end-to-end media mindset, delivering on our brand and demand promise,” Gonzales told Adweek at the time. “I want to enable our experts to play the field and engage consumers throughout their journey, no matter where they start. Applying our deep performance thinking now end-to-end, the new iProspect ensures no dollar gets a free pass and all dollars drive bigger outcomes for our clients. It’s all about being the most responsible and accountable for results.” How to Successfully Fill the Shoes of a Larger-Than-Life Founder We followed up with Gonzales and iProspect chief media officer Duncan Smith to get a sense of where the agency is headed—and why. How have iProspect’s own brand initiatives progressed since the refresh in March? How has iProspect redefined itself? Danielle Gonzales: It’s been a transformative moment for iProspect—we evolved our organization to offer clients a competitive advantage by bringing a performance mindset to all media decisions. In addition, we’ve cross-trained our teams, brought together expert skillsets, [and] better enabled tools and technology to be used for end-to-end connectivity. We’ve already seen a considerable amount of progress with the positioning and output of iProspect over the last year. The vision of iProspect enabled significant wins, such as Cox Communications and LinkedIn, as a true full-service, performance-driven media agency. We have been accelerating the delivery of those services not only for Cox Communications and LinkedIn but across our client portfolio every day. Not only has the balance of the work shifted, building on our world-class performance foundations to offer more strategic and omnichannel activation, we have also evolved the internal organization and services to form a cultural mindset. Over the past year, we have built a larger, stronger and more consolidated strategy team to work across our entire portfolio, continuing to drive market-leading thought leadership around all things performance while balancing that with award-winning brand strategy and personnel. We have also doubled down on communications planning expertise and are currently raising the bar for those disciplines across the entire body of our account management and planning teams. As we continue to evolve and accelerate growth, we want to ensure that our mission to close the gap between brand and demand is well heard, understood and embraced by our clients and the industry. In addition, we will continue to develop thought leadership around the intersection of all things performance. How has the company’s approach to performance marketing evolved? How has the definition sharpened or been refocused in terms of the work iProspect has been doing? Duncan Smith: iProspect has always been at the vanguard of performance marketing. Our belief that no dollar should be left unaccounted for can now be applied across every interaction with a consumer, driving communications and commerce up and down the marketing funnel. To achieve this means taking the lens of performance to all of the media and marketing decisions activated by our clients—evolving our product to be more strategic and consultative, more outcomes-focused across every touchpoint, and more dynamic and addressable in execution. There is often a disconnect between brand marketing and performance. The former is considered more artful, whereas the latter is more science. How does iProspect thread those two areas together? DG: iProspect has a unique understanding of art and science through the intersection of brand and performance. It’s this blend that we deliver exponential outcomes for our clients. We use data to uncover insights and ideas by looking at real human behaviors, journeys and sales to unlock growth strategies. Our teams consider what new experiments to build into our performance plans, so we do not optimize to smaller outcomes but are constantly feeding in new artful experiments that reveal understanding and new audiences (the scientist using art). We then expose our consumer strategists to data and outcomes that help them formulate their audiences and plans (the artist using science). We deliver more robust marketing plans by bringing that performance mindset to even the artful aspects of marketing. Our customers do not divide the world between online shopping and offline shopping or video viewer vs. Google searcher—their world is seamless, yet many marketers have split connections with consumers. The industry has allowed operations and workflow to govern how we see and connect with consumers, dividing between brand and demand. We bring these aspects together for our clients to follow the consumer journey and apply a performance mindset. Spring brought a euphoria when vaccine rollouts led to more business reopenings and broader consumer activity. What are the challenges retail faces at this moment and how do performance marketing practices help address those issues? DS: The retail industry faces the same challenges it has faced over the last 20 years, and it accelerated because of the pandemic. We’ve seen a gradual but transparent migration of shoppers toward a more consolidated experience over that time, from the main street to the mall and then from the mall to online. The desire of consumers to get exactly what they want, when they want it (or at least with as little effort as possible) has driven this, and technology has played a significant role in this evolution. It’s also true to say that technology and performance marketing will continue to play a vital part in the next era of retail. Because while the online giants grew throughout the pandemic, there also has been a realization among consumers that they can get the parts of the shopping experience they have always valued—same-day fulfillment, direct reassurance and support from the brand as well as person-to-person communication—without compromising on the parts they haven’t—crowds, lack of inventory and inconsistent experience. Through the work that iProspect has done to support our retail clients over the last 18 months, it’s clear that performance marketing plays a vital role more than ever in their marketing mix, helping to create a personalized experience from the very first search result to helping to optimize that journey to conversion—whether that’s a curbside pick-up or a virtual shopping cart. In approaching media this way, we saw our work stabilize our clients’ businesses and help them return to growth in the last year. Bringing fresh new performance thinking and techniques by providing agile teams and full-service capabilities allows clients to get there faster. They are also seeing more marketing dollars shifting towards more outcome-focused channels, something squarely in our minds when we reposition the agency. As you look to the fall and the holiday shopping season, how will performance marketing techniques and tools be deployed by ecommerce as well as traditional retail marketers? DG: We’re going to see an increased race between those two as the tools, techniques and expertise traditionally housed within the big ecommerce platforms are more widely available for all retailers. Whether that’s using Shopify or others to create and unlock the potential of your online store, leveraging direct-to-consumer behaviors such as Discovery Commerce within the marketing mix and employing services we provide, [retailers] can deliver commerce and performance capabilities across every step of the customer journey. To Understand the Future of Ecommerce, Look at How Kids Behave