Alan Morrissey is Data Strategy Partner at OpenMind, a GroupM agency dedicated to Nestle. A true industry veteran, in a 25-year career he has worked at companies including ABC UK from 2005 to 2013, MEC, GfK, OMD and EssenceMediacom. He picks some solid industry legends for his My Digital Hero nomination.
Who is your digital hero?
Hard to pick one over 25 years in the industry, so I’ll do a powerful trio. Richard Foan & Guy Phillipson, both retired from the industry now.
Richard was MD of ABCe from 2006 to 2017, part of the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC – print auditors), where he started auditing of website traffic for publishers to prove traffic volumes & led JICWEBS, the body setting standards for digital metrics. He was my boss for 9 years and a personal inspiration.
Guy Phillipson, CEO of the IAB UK from 2005 to 2017, led the development of digital in the UK and you could probably throw in Bob Wootton too, Director at ISBA from 1996 to 2016, leading how brands embraced digital.
What have they done to win hero status in your eyes?
These three men fought for trust, transparency, and standards in a new, fast moving, unregulated and developing industry where there were many cowboys selling snake-oil and made-up numbers. ALL three led their Industry bodies with distinction, always putting their members first and pushing for growth.
They had morals, standards and ethics, the only way to build an industry in those times. I loved how they all spoke passionately about the channel, set up digital audience measurement services and championed other channel industry currencies too like BARB, RAJAR, PAMCO (ex NRS), ABC, ROUTE etc.
For me, these three put in place the foundation work for where we are in digital today. Without them the industry would be the wild west.
How has their heroism helped drive digital?
Richard & Andy Flint (still at ABC) got me into ‘digital’ by hiring me at ABC in 2005, this has led me to work at Industry suppliers/vendors, research firms and media agencies. It’s helped me get a full understanding of how the buy and sell side work together, plus what digital signals are available to drive media targeting & measurement.
With this level of interrogation & standardisation is engrained in me, means I approach all datasets to try and fully understand how they work under the bonnet and ensure that processes and procedures are all within industry standards.
It’s also helped me focus on measurement, but most importantly outcomes measurement. Using this as foundational approach I have managed to set-up multiple media measurement projects and driven growth for clients via multiple channels, most of which are now digital (aka biddable).
What the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
Regulation and standardisation within AI, cross channel audience measurement, retail media consolidation and I believe implementation globally of better data ethics. AI is the biggest thing in the media world as we speak, as we had the year of the mobile in 2008, Big-data, the Metaverse etc, AI is the new shiny thing.
Yes, it will fundamentally change and automate some tasks, but it will not remove humans and most importantly it can’t replace human empathy, which is the basis of our industry. Media agencies will get leaner, but proper human planning and strategy will become even more important. Now, data scientists can just create their own models, no one is necessarily peer-reviewing these, it’s a black-box culture.
This needs to change with Industry agreed standardisation and control. Regarding cross-channel measurement, Project Origin in the UK and Project Aquila in the USA, will gather momentum and I believe will become the standard across the industry, due to it being led and demanded by brands.
Local channel currencies will eventually be absorbed into these, and media agencies will lean in more. Retail Media is super fragmented now, but clean-houses, will bring these together and make this more ‘programmatic’ in terms of self-serve and centralised.
Lastly, but most importantly, industry bodies need to call out bad data practices like stitching IDs together with full consent across all platforms and also ensure that there is a clear value exchange when a customer does provide their data for use. Third-party ID-graphs should be called out more and avoided, the future is probabilistic and synthetic, safe for safety but still relevant enough.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
Rolling out a client clean-room solution from scratch to where they are now using the clean-room for all insight, activation, enrichment and measurement, applying advanced Value-based segmentation & propensity models.
Data clean-rooms are complex in nature & very hard to sell the value of these into senior CMO types who don’t fully understand the technical aspects of this and all the different use cases. It was difficult to calculate the ROI for this investment, but we convinced them and the client is now seeing a 20% improvement in both efficiency and effectiveness across their digital activations and in other channels.
The investment is more than paying off plus it’s leading to an advanced ‘media decision engine’ that collates in their data in one place powered by AI.
