Media Buying Briefing: Known’s data, analytics and engineering power wins over new media chief
Although she’s been around the media agency world for many years, Kasha Cacy feels like she finally found the right agency environment that balances deep-diving data science with sound media and creative strategies, as head of media at independent agency Known.
Cacy most recently was CEO of Big Village Media and EMX Digital, but oversaw its downsizing and eventual declaration of bankruptcy, which she admits was a tough time. Prior to that five year tenure, Cacy was a rising star within IPG’s media arm having risen to president of UM from a strategy role in McCann Erickson before she left in 2018.
“I am crazy passionate about data and analytics and using that to inform marketing,” explained Cacy, who’s almost two months into her role as chief media officer at Known. “I just feel like every other business function has been transformed using those capabilities, and marketing has been slower to the table.”
Rebundling sits at the core of Cacy’s vision in many ways. “I’m extremely passionate about bringing marketing back together,” she told Digiday. “The idea of not doing media in a silo, but being able to marry everything we know — with the creative, the content and culture and social, and how you really optimize that entire system on behalf of a client.”
The following conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
What makes Known different from all the other media agency jobs you’ve had before?
The first way that they’re unique is they brought together this very, very substantial and rich data and analytics capability with the content that was Stun [one of the agencies that merged to form Known in 2020], and the creative that’s also part of the agency that includes social and all channels of creative. I’ve just never seen that done in as integrated way as I have in this organization, where people from all those disciplines talk on a daily basis, work together on problems, no matter where the entry point is.
What was also really appealing to me is they really started out in the data and analytics space versus trying to add it afterwards. They’re able to do that at a scale that I’ve never seen anywhere else … and it really does have data and analytics at the core. Probably half the group is data scientists. Those people are embedded into clients, they’re actively working on client challenges and they’re innovating at this really rapid pace. But we also have the engineering capability to productize that and make it available to clients in a way that is repeatable and scalable. Traditional agencies don’t typically come at something from an engineering perspective.
How much does speed and responsiveness play into it?
There’s two components to that. One piece of it is yes, we have the people sitting right next to us. So it isn’t a ‘Let’s collect a lot of data and then analyze it and then figure out what happened.’ The other thing that Known does, …read more
Source:: Digiday
