Episode 216 / Paul Wright / Uber Advertising / Head of Uber Advertising, UK and Ireland
Podcast: Context and Attention Deliver Results
Complex marketing that has people scratching their heads is not effective, says Paul Wright, Head of Uber Advertising, UK and Ireland. Instead, his shiny new object is a combination of context and attention - capitalising on where consumers are in their journey and making it easy for them to pay attention to the brand’s content.
Uber Advertising has a simple model across the two sides of its business. For the Ride side, serving ads to consumers as they progress through the app is contextual and effective. With careful use of their data, such as where they’re going and the time of day, ads can be targeted better and capture their attention optimally.
For the Eats side, people often know they want to order a delivery but they don’t necessarily know what exactly they want to eat. This opens up possibilities for advertising for specific restaurants based on location and time of day - again, context is key here.
In the US, there is even a post checkout context where consumers are waiting for their order. They’re a captive audience and it’s an ideal time to push relevant ads to them - when they are paying attention and will welcome them, since they’re connected to their context.
So, the key takeaway here is twofold. On the one hand, context and attention are two key factors that contribute to ad effectiveness for Uber. On the other hand, Paul is raising the importance of making more relevant, more conscious advertising that doesn’t overwhelm or even irritate the consumer. This way, consumers can welcome advertising rather than seeing it as a nuisance.
A good example of a successful campaign along these lines is how Uber has targeted tourists in London. Knowing their home base allowed them to run ads for them in the app, based on their being in London on holiday.
Listen to more details about using context and attention to harness consumers’ interest and create effective ads, on the latest episode here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Paul Wright 0:00
I'm always looking back on stuff that's really worked. It's usually a fairly simple idea well executed. And it may be quite complex beneath the surface, but it's very simple in terms of its execution back to consumers. And, and, and that makes a difference. And I think sometimes we sort of lose that with, you know, we want to make it more more complicated with the back end and how we deliver things rather than necessarily just getting something that works for a consumer and works effectively.
Speaker 2 0:34
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Tom Ollerton 0:56
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, we are a creative effectiveness ad tech platform. But today we are doing a podcast and I am here in Cannes, with Paul Wright, who is head of Uber advertising in the UK. Paul, thanks so much for inviting me to your fancy villa. Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
Paul Wright 1:21
Sure. Hi, there, Tom. Thank you for inviting me onto this podcast. It's great. So a little bit about me. I have a fairly long career in advertising started at Sky when it first started years ago, and has been in digital since about late 90s. Worked with a couple of startups, including one of my own, which was sold and have worked across some interesting tech companies, including Apple and Amazon and joined Uber about six months ago.
Tom Ollerton 1:49
So in terms of your career, and your 9 million different employers, you've had I see on your LinkedIn, what has been your biggest screw up, your biggest facepalm moment that at the time you were like bright red with embarrassment and shame. But now you look back on it, you're glad it happened?
Paul Wright 2:08
Yeah, my biggest I think is there was a moment I saw I was working for a startup and we'd raised $100 million. And we went into administration rather rapidly two years later, I was a sports business. And we went bust on the first day of the World Cup, which is pretty spectacular way to go. So I think everyone was like looking going, what the hell happened there. And then the germ of an idea came out with me and a couple of us three of my team members to come up with a business which we created, which was an ad network. But an ad network focused around working with sports rights holders, who, as you can probably appreciate pretty complex because they got very complex relationships with commercial companies outside of what they do online. So we came up with a model. And then that model turned into a business, that business turned into about $7 million turnover when we sold it four years later. So yeah, really tough time with administration and, you know, being kicked out, but turned it around. And that team did really well.
Tom Ollerton 3:08
And over the years, you've worked alongside lots of different marketing operations. And what's the best thing you've learned? What's your top tip that you find yourself always sharing or passing on?
Paul Wright 3:19
Yeah, this is interesting. I think, particularly over the last few years, I think there's a sort of, there's a lot of complexity in what we do with data and all those things that I think but I've I'm always looking back on stuff that's really worked. It's easy if a simple idea well executed. And it may be quite complex beneath the surface, but it's but it's very simple in terms of its execution back to consumers. And, and that makes a difference. And I think sometimes we sort of lose that with, you know, we want to we want to make it more more complicated with the back end and how we deliver things rather than necessarily just getting something that works for a consumer and works effectively.
Tom Ollerton 4:06
So we're now going to move on to your shiny new object, which is context and attention in marketing in 15 minutes. So context of attention doesn't sound like that much of a shiny new object. But why are you passionate about that now and why have you chosen that?
Paul Wright 4:23
I mean, yeah, Tom, I could have come in here and talked about AI. But we're not going to do that today. I think, again, it goes back to this thing about complexity. I think, if you think about consumer experience now in a digital environment and a non digital variable, we are showing ads to them in many, many ways. But the thing that really matters and I've seen this throughout my career actually with a lot of companies I've worked with where ads work effectively when the context is really spot on. So one of the things I remember years ago Sky we were debating whether we would ever put us in to break into sky movies. So you break up a movie by by putting an ad break in there. And we decided that was the wrong thing, because that would have created relatively the wrong thing to do from a consumer perspective, because their context was that they were buying sky movies, it's a pay channel. And the idea of us breaking it up with advertising sort of went against that. We did place advertising and Sky still does at the beginning and end of movies. So that was one thing. And then I again, other places I've seen, you know, the greater the, the better the context, the better it works. And I think you know, so we've seen some, some stuff all the way through to what we do at Uber in terms of getting the right time, right place. And then that comes with attention, I think the big challenge with a lot of digital businesses now is, you know, the desire for revenue, sometimes overlooks the consumer experience. And then you end up with multiple ads on the same page or the same app, and it just gets in the way, and then the consumer is going to switch off. But if you can come up with something that says right, here's some simple solutions, or a simple way of playing it out. People will spend the time there. But if the context is right, then that's even better. So if you're going to serve an ad to someone, you know where they're going, that's helpful. It's better than just serving ads randomly across the internet. So we've got to get back to a little bit about what the original, I think a lot of the original advertising work that was done when media stuff became a thing was always about getting the context right. And that creates attention, and that creates benefit to the brand.
Tom Ollerton 6:44
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Tom Ollerton 7:21
So how are you guys doing it? How are you using Uber's data Uber's technology to serve ads with the right context?
Paul Wright 7:31
So what we do with the so we've got two parts to our business I talked about in this case about both both actually have relevance. So the first one is in the Ride side of the business, we serve ads to people in the app, as they're progressing through, they're connecting with the driver and all the way through to the end of the journey. And with that, we're very careful with what data we use, but simple data like where someone's going, what time of day it is, that type of thing is very, very powerful. So we've run campaigns with music labels, where they've been targeting people who've been, we've dropped off at a music venue in the last three months. And that proved incredibly effective, very high engagement rates, over two minutes, engagement rates and very high click rates, which would suggest a good engagement from the consumer. But it's a very, it's also a clean environment. On the Eats side, there's a different model, but it works the same principle. is that most people come into UberEATS, knowing they want the delivery, but they don't know what they want. So therefore, again, context is the context is the user needs to be thinking about that, you know the user, you want to make sure that you can make a right offering to them so that the restaurant partners or the deliver convenience partners can go, hey, here we are, would you like to go with this brand or that brand. And that works again, very well. So, we know, you know where you are. So that's a location thing. So which restaurants should be there that you can see that you get delivery from that type of thing. So again, again, both of those work in very different ways, but are really quite simple, similar. But also in the US environment, we have a thing called post checkout, as which went the moment where you've made the order and you're waiting for the order to arrive. And that's contextually very important time because you're probably sitting there going, right? I've got my food coming, or my other order coming, what am I going to do when it arrives? Therefore we've had lots of success with brands who want to you know, push people to watch a movie or video clip or whatever else happens to be from that to kill that time or to fill the time after the right with the delivery comes.
Tom Ollerton 9:46
So odd kind of sales question here I guess like what are the objections to this that you get because it makes a lot of sense to me right? So as you say you got time of day you've got location for direction or you destination sorry. And the fact they've been to a music venue, they probably like music. So let's give them a music ad. What, where's the kind of sticking point, when does it not land?
Paul Wright 10:11
Well, I think there's two things. One is I think we just have to, we're very early stages. So we don't know what probably doesn't, you know, what works and what doesn't work in this purest way, because we've got lots of people testing stuff. And we're learning all the time. I think the challenge will be, you know, as we grow. And the question is always one of what happens as you run more of these things on the platform, we haven't seen any drop off in performance. So that can often happen. And so I've seen that happen in other platforms before where in early stage, you get very high engagement, but not afterwards. And then I think we obviously from a measurement and delivery perspective, we have to make sure that we're working effectively with the relevant parties in the industry to make sure we're doing all the right things there, because we want to do that. And then the final thing is, we're always very careful with our data usage. So we want to make sure that we do always the right thing. And we've taken some decisions, you know, data policies on our website, but we've taken decisions about what we will allow what we won't allow. And I think the great thing about being a business like us is we're not an ad business and pure science, obviously, we are delivery mobility company. And therefore we can make this decision to press a bit easier, but we've made it very clear, this is how we're going to do stuff. We're not very from that.
Tom Ollerton 11:43
What's been the most creative use of the platform that you're most proud of? Or what's your like, killer case study where you're like, look, look how great this is?
Paul Wright 11:52
I think we've got in in the Europe, we've got a couple of really good examples. I think we're running one at the moment where we're targeting tourists in London. And because we can, we can identify where people's destination base is. And that's proven very effective, very simple. But it's very difficult to break out tourists within any other environment, because obviously, there's lots of people in London. So how do you know who's tourists or not, but we do. I think also we had, well, there's a couple of things about where their account was set up, is an indicator. And also, we use a principle called primary city. So most people have a city where they do most of their Uber drive usage, which is also an indicator of the place that they might well live. So we've got, we use that type of setup to make it work. And then we've got another campaign we did with Warner Music for Ed Sheeran. And that one was a very interesting model because it was targeted at people who went to music venues. And it was around the weekend of the launch of the new album. very effective, very high click rate, just under 3%, click rates, I believe, and very high engagement time. Both of those are very good, simple examples of how we can use, you know, effective data, and context to really drive success.
Tom Ollerton 11:52
So who do you look up to outside of your business that you think is commandeering context in a successful way? Who, who, who, who do you think is serving you ads? Were you like, Oh, they've made a really good example of that? Or is it a case of that context really, is is ignored. And it's just a case of volume and hit and hope?
Paul Wright 13:36
I think I personally, my personal experiences, I always like moments where there's something there that it comes through, and you're like, Oh, that's good. I'm, I'm sort of into that. It doesn't happen very often, maybe because, you know, I've been doing this a long time. So I do think, you know, this, the simplicity thing, I think, is the thing that I'm always most appealed by when I see a single ad just nicely presented in a format I mean, the one I mean there's it's a bit of context because of the British Airways one that won the Cannes Lion, which was really uncommon, that was quite an interesting approach of context as well. So good locations, but also the choices, why are you flying with British Airways? That was quite an interesting one that appealed to me for some reason. Because I think it recognized that it's not just about this gloss of flying somewhere, but what was your reason for your journey, which I thought was quite a, that sort of, you know, there's a human context rather than a brand context.
Tom Ollerton 14:48
Because my view on this is this: years ago, I did a stand up comedy course. Right? And I wasn't very funny, unfortunately. Apart from that, it went really well but There's a line in the training that says, if they're thinking, they're not laughing. So if someone's on stage and they're saying a joke, and you're having to process it as opposed to just involuntarily laughing, and I think that's what advertising should be like, if, and I know we're a bit, we're a bit scarred because we work in the industry. So we, you know, we see the thing that surrounds it, but I think from a consumer think they shouldn't see an Ed Sheeran ad, they should think I like Ed Sheeran I'm going to click on that thing. And as soon as you think about the ad that you're looking at, then then it's toast. But you should just respond to it. If it's an awareness thing, it should just go in and build that memory structure, if it's a consideration thing, work it in a basket or buy it or whatever it is, but...
Paul Wright 15:41
I agree, I think that's what we saw, I mean, the right time, right place, so critical with no thinking, Oh, that's good. I like music, I'm gonna click here, I'm gonna listen or, you know, I'm interested in this new show on streaming platform X or Y. You know, I want to go and test it out, those types of things make a huge difference.
Tom Ollerton 15:59
So unfortunately, we're at the end of the podcast now. So if someone wants to get in touch with you to talk about context, and attention and advertising, how, where's the best place to get in touch and what makes a good outreach message to you?
Paul Wright 16:12
Well, email, email, and LinkedIn, for me, a good outreach email is generally not a sales pitch. Because I get quite a few of those, as you might expect. But someone being interested in having a conversation about stuff and then taking it from there. Because there's always, there's some great ideas, but they often get, particularly on LinkedIn, they get lost in translation when someone's trying to do a sales pitch.
Tom Ollerton 16:41
But thank you so much for your time and enjoy the rest of the festival.
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