Sarah Mansfield was the vice president of global media at Unilever for almost a decade before she left the FMCG company at the end of 2024 to start her own consultancy, Barcarolle.
At Unilever, Mansfield was in charge of global media operations, which meant she was responsible for everything that formed the backbone of media — agency relationships, trading, the tech stack, and so on — as well as implementing best practices across the company for full-funnel planning and retail media. She was also in charge of the global ice cream team’s media operations.
Now, Mansfield draws on her two decades of marketing experience to help agency and platform clients to shape their businesses to appeal to advertisers, and to help brands with their global media planning.
After clarifying that the name of her consultancy was not a nod to Unilever’s Just One Cornetto jingle — a barcarolle is a folk song traditionally performed by Venetian gondoliers — Mansfield spoke to MediaCat about what she thinks are the biggest media challenges facing brands, the state of media agencies, and the dominance of platforms.
What are the biggest issues with media for marketers at the moment?
I think number one is continuing to plan a full funnel in what is a very fragmented world, and the various fragmented data signals you get due to walled gardens. Obviously, that’s related to effective data targeting, and making sure that your media is always relevant and that you’re minimising wastage.
AI is obviously a big topic at the moment. Everybody sees the opportunity, and everybody wants to drive improvements and efficiency with AI, but how do they deliver on that?
A lot of advertisers are focused on how they use AI to generate content more efficiently and effectively but, more and more, they’ll look to connect that with the media ecosystem as well. You can create better, more hardworking content by analysing the media signals and then optimising it in one continual loop. AI can assist in that in terms of the targeting aspects of the media, but also the content creation as well.
It’s a super exciting time, but I don’t think any advertisers have really worked through what that means for them yet and made it a reality.
Have the improvements in targeting made up for the fact that it’s harder to reach mass audiences because of media fragmentation?
You can still get to audiences in volume. TV does it, although in reality it’s more and more just for a certain audience — 45-50+ and ageing.
But you can still reach mass audiences in volume. That’s why brands are buying into lots of sporting events and must-view live opportunities where you can build reach quickly with big volume audiences. You can still do that consistently. But it is a continual challenge, and all of the platforms want to push you down more targeted routes because that’s where they can charge a higher CPM.
It’s always a balance because you still need to be targeting broadly, to ensure you’re reaching your audience and driving top-of-mind saliency. But you need to follow that up with more targeted media, to ensure you’re building relevance with your audiences.
There are still broadcast media out there that, in combination with digital and retail media platforms, can deliver that, but it’s evermore complex, and you don’t want lots of wastage. That’s why cross-media measurement’s so important.
Is there any practical difference in how you reach a mass audience, whether it’s through social media or a live sporting event?
Fundamentally, if you’re a brand, you want to build reach quickly. So, you could grow that reach through the social media platforms — although, whether it’s quality reach or not is a separate question — but you’d do that over probably a four-to-six week period. Whereas, with big live events, you can reach your audience around passion-based content that’s highly relevant to them with a great message that they’re super engaged in. Take the Super Bowl last weekend; that’s the reason brands pay so much money for a spot. It’s become an advertising event where people dial in as much for the adverts as they do for the sport.
But do you see a difference in the effects produced by advertising within say, a big sporting event that everyone watches at the same time, and social media, which reaches just as many people but isn’t a communal event?
Trying to build brand fame through social media is difficult. It’s more for tailored content. And trying to actually build strong emotional connections through social media is really hard because of viewability and people’s attention spans. We used to refer to Facebook and Instagram and feed based social media platforms as a moving billboard because you’ve probably got to place a brand in front of a consumer four or five times before you get any brand recall there. And you can’t communicate complicated messages because they don’t watch enough of the content.
What sort of state do you think media agencies are in right now?
I wouldn’t be in one.
Fair enough.
I think it’s challenging. They’re working out how best to deliver value back to clients in a changing environment and they’re having to invest ahead of the curve in AI systems and platforms, ahead of creating the demand, and I think they’re worried that advertisers will just see these services as a hygiene factor.
I think it’s harder and harder for them to actually work out what they can charge for, and what advertisers see as incremental value.
What could a media agency do to stand out when you were at Unilever?
It’s about being a partner. I think a lot of advertisers don’t actually treat media agencies like partners and treat them as transactional arms of their business, like any other supplier, and that’s a foolish way to work in my view.
Media agencies have a big role to play as a trusted advisor; there’s a lot of value they can deliver by not being wrapped up in the day-to-day business and being a team of experts. In most advertisers, there aren’t that many media experts around. If used correctly, they do deliver a lot of value back to you as an advertiser in areas such as digital and data expertise to navigate brands through the world of privacy and brand safety, commercial trading expertise and strategic planning frameworks, to name a few.
Is the open web becoming less relevant as a medium for advertisers because of the dominance of online platforms?
It shouldn’t be but I think it is because brands worry about whether they have the right brand safety measures in place, and a good agency that’s going to buy quality inventory for them, and it’s easy for them to avoid it.
As I’ve said a number of times to a number of people, no one gets fired these days for putting Meta or Google on their plans. I think it’s the easy option and they make it easy for brands to spend money with them. But it’s not necessarily the right thing. I think there’s a lot of good quality reach and passion-based content on the open web. It’s just a matter of being selective about where you place your brands and making sure you’ve got safeguards in place.
What’s an example of a great campaign, from a media perspective?
If you look at any of the Magnum [ice cream] content, what you’ve got is a great brand that delivers consistency — big fame-building advertising supported by content that appeals to people’s passion points, as well focusing on its DBAs [distinctive brand assets]. So, having a look at what they do year after year is probably a good place to start.
Main image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash