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Media Mayhem: Steve O’Connor – ‘It’s frustrating for us and frustrating for advertisers’
In this week's Media Mayhem, we sit down with JCDecaux CEO, Steve O'Connor.
How is the operating environment impacting your team, clients and partners?
There’s a lot of pressure, there’s no doubt about that. I know that we’re really going to double down on psychosocial safety [which we’re] basically required to by law, anyway. So that’s something we have to do, that’s something we want to do, because we recognise that there is a lot of pressure in the business now being applied from media agencies and from advertisers directly. So, that’s something that we really need to be very conscious of.
What changes are you seeing in consumer behaviour and preferences?
In our world, consumers, I suppose it would be typically landlords, they want more money. They’re pushing very hard for more more revenue and that’s the name of the game for them. So, it’s whichever company has got more confidence in their revenue forecasts and how bullish they are in terms of their projections and their preparedness to share. A bigger and growing proportion of that is where the pressure comes from.
How are you meeting those expectations?
Well, by being a better business. We’ve got a three-year business strategy. We’ve just launched our second three-year business strategy. We have a very clear direction in terms of what we’re going to do. We’ve got a very clear list of priorities, and that gets cascaded all the way through from the executive leadership team who create the strategy all the way through to the functional functions all the way through to individuals performance development reviews. Everyone has strategy goals in their performance reviews. So, I think making sure that everyone is pointed in the right direction and knowing how they contribute to the company’s goals and successes is absolutely key to making sure you maximise performance.
How are you using technology to your advantage?
Programmatic is one example, but I think internally we’ve had a program called Project California, which is basically a review of our systems and our processes to try to improve our turnaround times and the quality of our brief responses. And we’ve invested a lot of money, a lot of time in making sure that that technology is as good as it can be. And obviously there’s new iterations of that coming out all the time and improvements being made to it.
But that is a very big piece of work and it’s a platform that operates right across the business. And it’s a great example of where we’re using technology to create efficiencies and improve customer experience.
How are you using generative artificial intelligence?
In Australia, not yet, but we have globally got a working group looking at a number of different use cases for AI and we are starting to share those with the subsidiaries now. So we will be using it. There’s plenty of applications in our business for the use of AI for obvious reasons. It’s just a question of making sure that we use it sensibly and safely and in a considered way. So yes, it’s coming.
When you lift your eyes from the screen to the media and marketing horizon, how are you planning?
We are staying the course in terms of what our strategy is and that’s increased digitisation, increased rationalisation of classic static stuff, doubling down on programmatic, new ways of selling in terms of programmatic and just staying the course on those really important tenets.
What proposals for legislative change would you prioritise, or are there areas you would like government assistance on?
Certainly at a planning level, yes, and most of the planning decisions are made at a local council level, in some cases at state government as well, but the federal government doesn’t really get involved, so there’s not a lot of interaction with the federal government. But I think that there needs to be some consistency across the states in terms of the way that they assess planning applications. For example, dwell times for digital ads that rotate at different times and stuff.
It’s frustrating for us and frustrating for advertisers. So we’ve got some sites that are only allowed to rotate us an ad every two minutes, where some can rotate every 10 seconds. So I’d like to see some more sort standardisation from a regulation point of view in that area in particular.
What opportunities do you see, and how are you positioning your organisation to exploit them?
I think there’s an opportunity, when you look at what’s happening in terms of the emergence of the small and independent agency market, they’re carving out a niche because they’re doing some things really, really well. I think where there’s mayhem and turbulence and disruption, there’s always opportunity and I think lot of that comes from doing a very thorough evaluation, but then really doubling down on where you think your point of difference is.
O’Connor will join this Friday’s episode of Mumbrella’s one-on-one podcast.
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Neil Griffiths is the Managing Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the company in October 2023.
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