When the Association of National Advertisers reported $20B is wasted on ads in June of 2023, it did not catch Brian Chap by surprise. Having expertise on the brand, publisher, and agency side, “Chap” created Tech Recipes to help brands deepen their digital expertise and uncover more value, in less time.

One of Chap’s greatest achievements was the first to market build of L’Oreal’s in-house programmatic team which resulted in a 3x increase in ROI. Having previous experience running investment for IPG, and other major holding companies, and expert understanding of yield strategy as the SVP of Warner Bros. Discovery’s Turner Broadcasting, he created a unique way to uncover hidden marketing value for brands.

Having sat in the seat of a major CPG brand advertiser, Chap, and his team at Tech Recipes,  understands the market complexity and are able to bridge the gap through simplification, articulation and value. “We are consistently increasing media spend by 40%. The result is an increase in finding the hidden value in media dollars that have a direct correlation to ROI,” says the CEO of Tech Recipes.

“My experience, complemented by our team of experts at Tech Recipes, has consistently delivered 40% more value for brand marketers,” says the CEO of Tech Recipes. “We understand the unique challenges of the advertisers and the gap between Marketing Technology and Audience data, in order to deepen expertise that delivers more value for less budget in less time! We do this through a unique product suite of technology, strategy, and service.”

The company realized very early on that trying to replicate Chap’s experience through traditional resources would be difficult. Because of this Tech Recipes has invested in automation and artificial intelligence to replicate his expertise in media asymmetry. This is done through a unique product suite of technology, strategy, and service.

“What’s been happening is a lack of accountability among the people who are servicing and buying the ads,” said Chap. “What we’ve seen through some of our audits is a set-and-forget it mentality: ‘Let’s set up the campaign, we’ll check it out for the first couple of weeks, when the client’s asking us questions. But when the client gets busy again, we’ll just let it ride, because the algorithm will take care of itself.’ Well, that’s not how it works.”

“Marketers are very good at talking at people, but they need to leverage data better so they can use their media more efficiently and establish the kind of two-way communication that engages customers the way they want to communicate,” said Chap. Many organizations believe because they use automated buying and analyze data they are leveraging data-driven marketing. But Chap says they often don’t have a taxonomy to organize the data and analytics, or well-defined key performance indicators to truly gauge their return on investment.  Some of Tech Recipes audits have found as much as 40% in incremental value that is being left on the table, he said.

More Opportunities, Less Waste

Finding the non-working media in the plan—because it’s poorly targeted or poorly executed—is the key to unlocking that incremental value and rooting out waste. “You can move faster at a more efficient price point and provide better impact for your client by reducing that non-working (media), increasing that working media, you will increase ROI,” said Chap.

Using data at speed—getting insights in real time, instead of weeks or months—helps advertisers understand what they are buying and what results they are getting, so they can maximize the value of their media. Tech Recipes leans heavily into technology, what it calls an “AI+Human” approach that uses automation to reduce the staffing needs of media desks and free the existing staff from routine tasks. That way, media buyers are optimizing budgets not only by reducing staffing needs, but that staff is working on more important tasks, such as finding new ways to use media and discovering new opportunities.

“There’s not a lot of proactive thinking, there’s not a lot of thought leadership that’s really happening” at media desks right now, said Chap. “It’s more reactive than proactive.”

Artificial intelligence can handle the measurement and analytics, leaving the humans to take the insights and build a better strategy for a better marketing and media plan, he explained. AI offers opportunities to create conversational agents that can automate simple tasks, such as a Chat GPT-enabled interface that can guide an inexperienced junior staffer through creating the media brief for a simple, short-term campaign.

“Everybody’s afraid that AI is going to take everybody’s job. I don’t think that’s really the goal of artificial intelligence. For us it’s about becoming more productive, faster, allowing our clients to maximize profits from day one!” said Chap.

Three Steps to Maximize ROI

Media planning and buying—both among agencies and brands—has become very focused along verticals, said Chap. “You’ve got your TV people and your digital people. Within digital, you’ve got your video people and your display people. Within that, you’ve got programmatic and social people,” he said. “It creates a lot more cost to the actual client and it limits the collaboration and the conversation.”

Changing the model is a three-part process of discovery, strategizing and optimization, Chap explained.

An initial audit can discover the non-working media that’s using up budgets without producing much in the way of brand-building, as well as other inefficiencies. Standardizing unstructured data sets and normalizing data to understand what media is running, where and at what frequency can help find opportunities to reduce waste and maximize working media.

Once the audit facilitates visibility, the media team can settle on a structure that can enable ingesting and structuring data to facilitate audience insights. This could require in-housing media or hiring an outside media agency to handle the portfolio, depending on the needs of the brand.

“How do you want to choose to run the business? Who do you want to do what, and what tools do you implement within the business in order to make it run more efficiently?” Chap explained. For example, he noted, a cookie deprecation strategy could be useful for an organization that does not want to simply lose the store of information acquired through cookies over the last decade, as their use is phased out; their value could be retained by figuring out a strategy to transition to first-party data.

After establishing a working media structure, infrastructure optimization fights the set-it-and-forget-it mentality that Chap recommended before. It establishes accountability and optimizes the media spend and the advertiser’s control over that spending, establishing parameters so that the media budget can be most efficiently invested. Many marketers today don’t even have key performance indicators in place, Chap noted.

A strategic and performance focus is increasingly important. To cut waste and boost impact, media desks have to dive deep into their investments and strategy, not just where the budget is going, but how it is performing. They will have to embrace technology and automation to be fast and flexible with their data and their spending.

“Everybody’s so busy right now with everything that’s being put onto their plate,” said Chap. “How do we figure out ways to automate those tasks so that way we can have time to focus on: How do we improve performance? How do we combat cookies? How do we think about higher-level learning when we’re so bogged down in what is involved today?”