Prasad Ghag is the Global Head of Media, Digital, & Strategic Planning at Sanofi’s Consumer Healthcare Business. He is an advisor to industry bodies such as the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), and the Programmatic Pioneers Group—where, along with other industry leaders, he is working on new industry solutions such as Halo, a cross-media measurement framework. Prasad is also part of the Core Steer Committee, which aims to drive sustainability in media.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Tina Nielsen: How would you describe your role with Sanofi?
Prasad Ghag: I'm heading Global media, precision marketing and strategic planning. And as of this year, I have started to look into CRM and data. So, my scope has broadened a lot. Before this point in my career I have worked across Asia, in South Africa and Europe, so I have a very global perspective.
TN: What is your approach to precision marketing?
PG: We have designed a number of programmes to really drive digital within our organisation. Precision marketing is a technique by which we really land the whole concept of the right place, right moment, right message. How can we target consumers better? And what's the impact it brings on the business?
To that purpose we have created some playbooks in which to guide the markets in identifying audience segments. First you identify the right audience, and you create the right messages that can connect with the environment of the audience, and then you talk about your brand with them.
TN: How has the split in the advertising environment, between TV and digital shifted?
PG: In 2019, when I joined Sanofi Consumer Healthcare, we were a very TV heavy company; 95% of our spend was on TV, and 5% was on digital. But we started a transformation journey and today we have 60% of our spend on digital and 40% on TV.
In many Western markets, there has been significant growth in the heavy consumption of digital platforms. Today, this means consumers frequently watch services like Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, and Sky, or engage extensively on mobile with platforms such as Meta's Instagram and Facebook, as well as TikTok, among others.
But there are regions like Central and Eastern Europe where TV is still the main medium of entertainment consumption.
TN: And what about demographics, is that an element that influences your channels?
PG: Well, we are in health care, and it tends to be the case that as you get older, you need more healthcare support. Our core audience for most brands is upwards in terms of age. A little bit on vitamins, perhaps, but we have products for constipation or pain care, products on cough and cold and allergy products. And the older audience’s consumption habits are also different in which they still tend to consume their entertainment through TV channels, and less on platforms such as Netflix, Prime.
However, we are still in line with the market trends across markets and try to reach audiences wherever they are through our precision marketing approach.
TN: What are the opportunities for companies in advertising right now?
PG: One is the explosion of AI, which really took off last year. And within that, I think there are some opportunities, but we have to be careful because it's not going to be a sudden switch; it’ll be more like a journey for consumers. When ChatGPT came along, it was clearly cool or trendy for everyone to try it and ask questions about the system to find out how it works. It will clearly have an impact but it's not going to change consumption from one day to the next.
The biggest change I feel is going to come is on search. Consider the way people search for something on Google and just take the example of allergy, which is relevant to us. You talk about pollen season today; you go to Google and ask about remedies to treat pollen allergy.
How do I ensure that my content it's not just going to be media, but it's also connected to content.
Our whole focus was to build brand equity and awareness, so it was a full funnel activity where you first drive awareness, then you drive concentration, and then the conversion will happen.
But now, with retail media, you have the opportunity to go directly to the lower funnel, and then do the conversion campaigns and select target consumers.
TN: What do you refer to when you talk about acting responsibly in advertising?
PG: I feel like there's a huge responsibility in terms of our advertising, which we need to address. I think it got built into layers when we only had TV, print, radio and outdoor networks. Then suddenly there was this whole explosion of digital advertising with programmatic coming in and you don't know where the person is going to land – add to that the whole social media phenomenon. This just kept building and it’s like we forgot about responsibility – as advertisers today we are bombarding consumers with our ads.
It is kind of a waste of media because I'm showing the same ad to the consumer 20 different times on different media. So, from the consumer’s lens, he's seen these brands multiple times, he's getting over exposed, getting bombarded, you’re not giving him control, you’re showing him long format ads, there’s no skippable button and you are using cookies to target and retarget. That's one of the projects that I'm working on.
TN: Have companies been abusing cookies?
PG: 3rd Party data companies dominate the campaign audience design for companies to serve content & ads to the consumers. This data might be used by bad actors for harmful purposes like tracking users to steal personal info or spread malware. Because this tracking is done in a complex way, users might not even know that their online actions are being watched and manipulated for other reasons.
3rd Party data providers sell the same data to multiple companies and there is little control on how many times each of this cookie ID can be targeted or re-targeted. I'm still talking about clean data, which is first party data, but 90% of the campaigns today are built on third party data, which is very unclean.
We're trying to increase our first-party data, which refers to the direct relationship I create with you through the data you share with us. I want you to visit my website and then I know you're really interested in allergy, for example, you're really interested to know about my brand, and I create this relationship with you. That way at least you have trust, and you are interested. But today first party data collection is a long process, we have only around 5-6% of our campaigns where we can use real first party data. The truth is 1st party data is more accurate, more valuable, and more-likely to be compliant with recent regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
TN: How do you see the future in a cookieless environment?
PG: We are not worried, and we started preparing ourselves for the change, it was already delayed twice, so hopefully it will happen in 2024.
We have been running different models in preparation. Within the same campaign, we split the budget, allocating 50% of the budget on cookies, and 50% on cookieless, or contextual. And we have really shown that the impact on performance was limited, there was hardly any impact. I think we are well prepared, because there are different avenues to reach my consumers in the right way. And in this the biggest opportunity is going to be in content creation. I need to have the right content to engage with real consumers and start building my first party data.
TN: You are taking a lead in sustainability in advertising. Why does it matter?
PG: We have done a lot of work on how we can measure and reduce our carbon in Sanofi Consumer Healthcare. We started this journey two years ago to discover how even in marketing we can play a part in this very important area.
We are consuming energy, which means we are responsible for some carbon. We set out to understand the ecosystem and how we are responsible for carbon when there was no one doing this work, so we have pioneered the topic. We found two main facts.
First, 32% of end consumers’ individual carbon footprint is because of media – advertising. Second, achieving 1.5 million impressions is equal to producing one tonne of carbon and today at Sanofi Consumer Healthcare alone I do 50 billion impressions in a year, so it is very simple maths to show how much carbon we are creating on media. And if you put the industry together, then you can see it is a huge problem.
TN: What is your approach to mitigating the problem?
PG: To face this challenge, we implemented a very simple approach: first we wanted to measure the carbon footprint of all our campaigns. Step two is about reducing; with optimisation we can reduce some of the carbon footprint. The carbon we can’t reduce we will offset, for example through buying green plantations somewhere. So, this is our approach: measure, reduce and offset.
We partnered with a third party that measured our carbon footprint across all our campaigns and we know it’s more than 150,000 tonnes.
We optimise on four levels. One is to eliminate our advertising on the websites that have low performance but are carbon heavy; we simply won’t advertise on them.
Second, we eliminated MFA – made for advertising – websites. They are websites that do not contain any original content and they create small boxes of advertising just to earn money. We have found that these websites were 20% of our campaigns, which is a big number.
Third, we wanted to find smarter ways to be creative by the choices we make to plan, buy and execute media, choices we make on creative production & deployment.
I think we will manage to reduce up to 60% of our carbon footprint and the remaining 30 or 40 % we will offset. So that is our carbon journey.
TN: Is that a general trend in digital advertising, taking responsibility and focusing on a cleaner ecosystem?
PG: Yes. We are looking at how we can be a responsible advertiser where we can limit exposure, limit use of privacy data, and create brand safety for consumer strength.
We have a program called responsible media under which we plug all these different things together to ensure that we create a positive experience for our consumers and our brands.
