Meet the DMA Awards category chairs: Matt Jeffries, Best use of moving image or audio

There are 33 DMA Awards categories and each one is presided over by a category chair. Learn who they are, what they want from the work you enter in their category - and get a taste for their predictions for the DMAs 2017.

Category: Best use of moving image or audio

Category chair: Matt Jeffries, group director of CRM, analytics and insights at Global Media and Entertainment

"With video ads so often skipped, I’m on the look-out for clever ways to get engagement or even deliver the entire message in just a few seconds."

Tell us who you are, what you do and who you do it for

You might not have heard of Global Media and Entertainment, but you’ve probably listened to one of our radio brands, sang along with one of our chart-topping artists or maybe even danced into the night at one of our festivals or gigs. We reach 30m adults in the UK each week through brands such as Capital, Heart, ClassicFM, Smooth, Radio X and PopBuzz and it’s my job to help grow this number, increasing the time people spend with Global across the week. My current focus is on enriching the audience data that powers our new targetable audio ad formats and integrating our newly acquired festivals business and data into our CRM systems.

What will you be looking for from the work in your category?

Working in a music business, I’m fascinated by how the emotional power of audio can be used to drive creative performance and ultimately people’s behaviours. I’d like to see examples of where an audio architecture spanning music, voice and brand identifiers has been thought about as much as the visuals, taking audio beyond incidental accompanying music.

Personalisation of video and audio has been technically possible for some time now, so I’d love to see an application of this technology delivering tangible outcomes.

With video ads so often skipped, I’m also on the look-out for clever ways to get engagement or even deliver the entire message in just a few seconds.

What are your predictions for the 2017 DMA Awards?

AI methodologies will be applied to all manner of data challenges, customer identity (and the associated move to understand people not devices) will be firmly on the agenda and somebody will really crack the use of push and in-app messaging.

The arrival of Amazon Echo and Google Home and the continued growth of voice to operate mobile phones presents marketers with exciting new opportunities. I’m hoping that somebody builds on recent Echo activating stunts and wins an award for driving intentional usage of voice search, opening-up voice as a new channel of response.