MarTech Interview with Cary Tilds, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Frameplay

Cary Tilds, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Frameplay comments on what will shape the B2B marketing ecosystem through 2023 in this Q&A:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Cary, tell us more about Frameplay and your role there…

Frameplay is an award-winning leader in intrinsic in-game advertising and measurement. Our technology allows game developers to place ad units within virtual environments, as a natural part of game design and storytelling. Frameplay’s ad-server works with game engine mechanics to serve and measure ad delivery and viewability when gamers are playing the game.

I am the Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Frameplay. My role is to lead company and industry strategic alignment, with special focus on marketing, ad operations, business intelligence and analytics. My superpower is that I am a systems thinker with the passion to work across and align disparate teams, building cohesion and actionable outcomes.

What inspires you most about today’s state of marketing and advertising? A few thoughts on some key trends that you feel will shape the market in 2023?

I previously worked with GroupM as their Chief Innovation Officer. In 2015, I had the opportunity to try on Hololens when it was still in prototype and tethered to the wall for power. I was so inspired by the experience that I presented, “The World is No Longer Flat,” a talk about virtual and augmented reality and its real-world implications, at a 2015 WPP Conference. That was seven years ago, and although the technology has since advanced, it is still in its infancy in terms of scale.

What is at scale today is gaming. Helping to lead an intrinsic in-game startup, with the goal of enabling advertising and measurement in virtual worlds, I am even more excited about the concept of content being “immersive” and “interactive” in a world that is no longer flat. I believe that the power of immersive and interactive content will drive more significant engagement for all brands, big and small. There is certainly a lot to unpack on this topic, and it’s not all about gaming and the Metaverse either—this concept applies to all content and media channels.

Measurement will still be challenging in 2023 due to the significant industry disruption of continued depreciation of 3rd party cookies, as well as the complexity of the industry surrounding the conflicting desire to have cross-media measurement. We will see pockets of innovation in measurement come from this disruption, with more growth in this area in 2024.

AI and machine learning are not a new topic, but the buzz around these topics and some later 2022 newsworthy headlines have fueled a resurgence of interest and application that will provide measurable results.

Finally, the single biggest driver that will shape the market in 2023 will be the economic outlook. In many ways, advertising is a futures market (if you look beyond direct sales/ecommerce channels). We have to make educated bets on how and where to invest in telling our stories to the consumer. Economic factors are always at the forefront.

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For marketers and advertisers who want to look at optimizing their entire measurement and metrics game; what do you feel can help in terms of tips and best practices. What kind of metrics should B2C marketers and advertisers especially be looking at more in today’s ecosystem?

Marketers need to be comfortable understanding each channel’s capabilities and the obstacles to measuring for that specific channel. Instead of starting out with metrics, I recommend starting out with the capabilities for each channel to produce deterministic or probabilistic measurement capabilities for each of the following areas: audience reach, contextual relevance, attention value, engagement of content, and purchase or purchase intent. All must consider the privacy requirement of the region or state.

From there, I recommend building a KPI framework that aligns with each channel. Within this framework, there will be consistency and therefore ability to compare across channels. Finding a common metric before understanding the uniqueness of each channel will be a fool’s errand.

How do you feel B2C tech marketing needs to evolve to create more ROI to businesses? What can marketers/advertisers do better to contribute more to the growth of their brands?

Strategies for creating more ROI for business (which is typically a short term goal) versus contribution to the growth of a brand (which is typically a longer term goal) can be conflicting. There are elements of every B2C marketing strategy that apply to both. The top elements include authentic messaging, creative, and experience for the channel and its content, which produces relevance for the brand. It’s this authentic relevance that serves short term ROI goals, as well as building brand value within the context of immersive and engaging content.

What do you feel about the future of the B2C martech/adtech industry, some key predictions for 2023?   

The martech/adtech industry has been designed to be very tech-centered and transactional over the past 10 years. There are incredible opportunities to solve some tough industry challenges for marketers, but we’ve approached the problem solving from a developer point-of-view. If the B2C martech/adtech industry is to grow, we need to put human centric design at the heart of problem solving. After all, it’s still humans managing the machines (at least for now).

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