How interconnectivity is unlocking enhanced cross-channel performance

In this Q&A with Ferreira, the conversation focused on how media planning is evolving and the value of connecting channels for more holistic insights.

Media orchestration has become a popular industry term, but what does it actually mean in practice? 

Jose Ferreira: Orchestration, like omnichannel in the life sciences industry, has become a fraught term, loaded with different meanings depending on the context and even the technological area of focus.

Media orchestration in this context is the act of delivering a consistent message to a customer across all (omni) addressable channels at the same time. The message delivered is based on a combination of signals and media response that are triaged through an organizing platform and turned into activations across publishers. It unlocks the power of data to manage a customer’s experience of a brand at scale. There is significant value in changing the advertising relationship with a brand from purely transactional to experiential.  

What are the specific problems with today’s fragmented media ecosystem that Ad Astra hopes to solve?

Ferreira: Marketers, especially in life sciences, need to both deliver complex messages and maintain perpetual awareness. It’s not possible to do that in siloed channels or individual one-off messages. Instead, this needs to be built over time, across a wide swath of touchpoints working in concert. Media needs to be reactive — in the moment — to customer needs and opportunities, as well as omnipresent for focused audiences.

As the technology arm of CMI Media Group and Compas, Ad Astra has been the unsung driving force behind the success of those two healthcare media organizations for most of their existence, and is now positioned to provide direct solutions to a host of organizations and marketers across many different industries. 

We intentionally named our first solution Orchestrator because it describes what it does for paid media, and I think it wades into the discussion about orchestration to crystallize a definitive meaning for the term within media teams. The Orchestrator delivers media in narrative sequences, with each journey step acting like a chapter in a story, and all addressable media working together to deliver a consistent omnichannel experience. It also enables the integration of any market signal to triage and automate a series of best actions against those triggers. 

Orchestrator has unlocked the potential of paid media to deliver on those needs by scaling paid media omnichannel orchestration and connecting it to owned and earned experiences and insights with a single modular technology. That, in turn, connects to every relevant life sciences media supplier. We’ve observed significant ROI in using the power of story to deliver orchestrated media. 

We believe the technology we’ve built and nurtured inside the agency can be a force multiplier for many organizations. Ad Astra is the conduit for that connection.

How were you able to identify that there was a need for this type of media orchestration technology?

Ferreira: All great innovations are the product of iterating, testing and learning. We’ve been fortunate to work closely with great clients, internal planners, strategists and technologists who’ve challenged us with provocative ideas.

In the early days, we were solving for scalable media interaction: observed media actions across addressable media and immediate reactions with appropriate next messages. In other words, a more limited set of automated media actions across channels and activation methodologies. That evolved into a more holistic and strategic approach, balancing observed market signals — beyond brand and media — to deliver data-driven stories and personalized customer experiences. 

We have evaluated every leading and lagging metric with our CMI Media Group and Compas client base and have seen statistically significant increases in engagement and sales outcomes. Our goal is to put this technology in the hands of as many marketers as possible who need to deliver complex messaging balanced with targeted omnipresence.

What changes for media teams once orchestration becomes more automated and adaptive?

Ferreira: Orchestration creates a paradigm shift for how marketers think about their customers’ experiences and how media should operate to engage them. It enables teams to build and evolve a never-ending story that is delivered in snippets across channels. It means each video spot, banner, email or audio placement is a quick chapter in a much larger story controlled by the marketer. I like to think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure book the marketer builds for their audience.

Partner insights from CMI Media Group