Starcom’s Michael Epstein on brand-building and the tyranny of relentless optimization

The tyranny of relentless optimization.

That’s how Michael Epstein refers to the industry’s tendency to focus on short-term returns over long-term brand-building. As the global CEO of Starcom, Epstein doesn’t want to get lost in a sea of numbers instead of prioritizing the big-picture value that brands bring.

Epstein dove deeper into that thinking, plus how performance marketing connects with brand awareness, with The Current’s Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik.

What is your most unpopular opinion about the advertising industry?

I have many. There’s two that I would share. One, it seems of late we’re a little antagonistic toward each other. As an industry, [we’re] sort of coming after each other a bit more than in recent memory. I think maybe because things are a bit more competitive. So that’s something that has been on my mind. How do we elevate the conversation?

But the thing that we spent a lot of time thinking about is the focus on short-term return versus thinking about medium- or longer-term return from a client perspective. One of our employees called it the “tyranny of relentless optimization.”

Brands are meant to be built. And when you're just living in short-term return on investment, you wind up focusing on metrics that aren’t going to drive business. Things like ROI, which are important, but we have a lot of clients that are somewhat singularly focused on that. And with that, you’re not building brands, and brands are meant to be built.

On that note, I’m curious what your view is on brand-building and performance marketing? Sometimes they’re positioned as an either/or.

Whether you call it full funnel, whether you call it omni. At Publicis we believe there should be no dead ends and that’s why we’ve made some of the investments of late that we’ve made.

But they shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

I don’t know why we think that performance media can’t be building a brand. It is creating awareness, it’s just closer to the point of conversion. And likewise, I don’t know why typical brand-type things are the domain of brand-building versus also performance.

Speaking of clients, what do you wish every marketer knew?

We actually genuinely care about their businesses and them as people, by and large. If they approached it like that, that would make it easier for us to do our best work.

If we stopped the constant negotiation — and this is not a one-size-fits-all — where we’re trying to sometimes race to the bottom on things like fees. Better brands charge a premium, so to speak, and sometimes we get stuck in conversations about how pricing needs to be cheaper. But if you come from a place of good — that actually, what we’re trying to do is just help you to grow your business and that we really care — I think we would all be in a better place.

How do you get brands off this idea of cheap reach?

I think what we’re starting to figure out is you have to reverse engineer from the destination you’re trying to get to. If you start and say, “What are the metrics that are really going to matter to me?” it’s easier to have that conversation.

From your view, what does the future model of agencies look like?

There isn’t a future agency model because no agency has all the capabilities that they need to
be successful and make their client successful.

So to me, the agency of the future is one where we are giving strategic guidance to our clients and we’re tapping in to the capabilities that the group — in this case, Publicis — has acquired, and operating seamlessly so that we’re taking friction out of that.

An old client of mine, Mark Pritchard, once said, “Your complexity is not my problem.” So, making sure that we can align those capabilities together in a way to deliver for our clients is important. Starcom does not have all of those capabilities, the group does. And it’s how we are the aperture to access those things that make us successful on behalf of our clients.

Where do you see the most promise in advertising right now and how are you messaging that to your clients?

I do think the impact of AI — if used to its explosive potential — is going to be really important.

How we continue to leverage data to develop better insights and understand consumers probably has a lot of promise. We made an investment in Epsilon to help us do that. How we partner outside of the U.S. with other data providers to do that.

That’s the promise, creating better experiences. We’re trying to figure out how to harness the power of influencer as a channel. The acquisition we made for Influential, to quote Arthur Sadoun, “What people are saying about your brand may be more important than what you’re saying about your brand.’

That’s a pretty potent insight. There’s a lot of promise in there. And there's also a lot of risk, but there’s a lot of promise. To me, those are the three things.

I also think — and I’ll say this as a media person — we seem to be moving more forward in the strategic conversations with our clients than we ever have. That used to be the role of a brand agency. We’re being brought in much earlier in the conversation, much further forward in the conversation, to help figure out how to design the experiences potentially before the content.