Américo Campos Silva
Trendsetters: Shell's Américo Campos Silva Explains How a Change in Global Digital Infrastructure Can Result in Strong “Collateral Results”
Américo Campos Silva, Global Marketing Manager of Shell Brands International, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell plc-- the world's 2nd largest company in terms of revenue, readily admits that this is one of the most exciting times to be in marketing. And while he jokes that following the latest “cool” media development like Snapchat may be intriguing, he has a new-found passion for some of the “less sexy” aspects of the business. In fact, his journey over the past 18 months has focused on the global synchronization of the sprawling Shell brand—rich in heritage and with diverse stakeholders—through a new digital infrastructure. The benefits, particularly in today's Big Data environment, have proved greater than all initial expectations. In fact, Mr. Silva may have a coined a new marketing phrase in describing those benefits as collateral results.
A Shell veteran, a long-term marketing executive, and a consummate European, Américo Campos Silva started his career at Shell Portugal's Advertising and Media Department 20 years ago after serving as a young account director at Publicis Lisbon. His roles within Shell have ranged from local brand management to global marketing communications as he moved with each assignment from his native Portugal to Brazil to the UK to Switzerland and now back to London. During that time, he launched in over 50 countries Shell Retail's most successful global promotion called the Velocita project, led a new Media Audit methodology, consolidated all lines of business with a single global media agency, developed a 360 model to outsource retail promotions while creating the first-ever self-liquidating promotion with zero cost to implement, and during his years in Brazil, he found new ways to work with procurement, which are now considered best practice at Shell.
Today, Mr. Silva manages the Shell overall global Media budget across all businesses globally, and is responsible for the agency contract and the development of media strategies and media consumption habits across all Shell audiences and geographies. He also developed the vision and strategy that allowed the implementation of a global digital infrastructure for Shell digital buys.
According to Américo Campos Silva, “It all started in early 2010 when we realized that besides the natural and complex fragmentation of our businesses across different audiences, the management of our digital media buys was also quite fragmented-- specifically the number of ad servers that we were using globally (13). This was mainly due to legacy reasons and different preferences in different geographies. Despite the fact that we were using one single media agency globally, the solutions for ad serving remained varied.”
Eventually, after much questioning, a conclusion became apparent. To have global, homogenous, consistent and like4like data management of Shell's digital media buys, the company needed to migrate to one global Adserver provider.
He continues, “The decision was made, and together with our Agency, we looked at the pros and cons of different possible solutions, and we have made a final decision and choose one provider. This was followed by virtual training, control mechanisms and insuring the right talent was in place to drive this change successfully. We concluded this process in 2013 with great success. We have now direct access to data of all digital campaigns globally. In addition we were also able to achieve a structural cost reduction with this change of more than 45% in Adserving costs.”
Interestingly, this decision created other opportunities for Shell. One involves digital creative. “We now have a streamlined process to develop, build, and deploy digital assets on a global basis,” says Américo Campos Silva. We will be activating this way of working in 2014, however we are only able to exploit this at its full potential due to our previous decision to aggregate the ad server.”
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This new process will help us improve the speed in which we go live in market, while reducing the time agencies need to adapt digital assets. It also equates to a significant cost and structural reduction allocated for production. At the same time, it improves the control and visibility of the implementation.
We are confident that we are on the right path to have a frictionless and very efficient way to manage, deploy and evaluate our digital media globally.”
And given Américo Campos Silva's long history of building efficiency, cost savings and best practice into his work at Shell, we have no doubt in that confidence either.
