Metrics That Matter: Decoding the New Age of Media Strategies

What has been the biggest advertising media change in the last 5-6 years (i.e. since pre-COVID)?

Carys: I have to start with media fragmentation. All those different platforms still have the audiences and customers that we want to reach. Sometimes, we forget that people are consuming content on multiple platforms and that we just need to reach them in the most efficient way.

Anita: I would say seeing how consumer behaviour changed after COVID, where digital media took off and we saw shorts coming in on YouTube, Instagram, etc. We are all here to understand audiences and measurement, so these new behaviours made it a lot more complex.

Karl: For me, it is SVOD. It has grown so much that we now use it for generating incremental reach and frequency. We can’t move away from it, so we need to use it correctly.

Emily: I would say it’s MMM and the use of effectiveness. Back around COVID, nobody talked about it and now we have done this trajectory to everyone knowing what marketing mix models are. A study showed that about 75% of UK advertisers now use MMM regularly, and of those, about 46% use different partners for measurement. So, moving in this direction is very important.

How do you make sense of data to explain what works in advertising?

Emily: It is a very hard world to navigate. From a measurement level, we navigate by having great partners and great discussions. We are working very closely with AudienceProject, for example, because you are specialists in reach and frequency data. It is really important for advertisers to have these relationships to make sense of the measurement we are doing and the discussions around it.

Carys: I think it is really important that everyone is talking to each other. We have got internal analysts, measurement agencies, specialist agencies – an army of people! One thing that Confused.com does, which has always been really important, is that we interrogate our reach. The way we achieve it has changed so much that we have to make sure all our partners are talking to each other. If one person is saying one thing that contradicts what the other person is saying, it becomes even more relevant that everyone works together towards one common business objective.

Do you have a different view of what’s important in a commercial sense?

Karl: You absolutely have to bridge the gap between media and commercial outcomes. One of my managers came up with the “so what?”. When you tell him something, he would say “so what?”. “Viewability is at 46%”. “So what?”. Now, we can put that into our MMM and understand that by moving the viewability from 46% to 80% we can create a great number of conversions. “We’ve increased the incremental reach using YouTube”. “So what?”. “Well, it has saved us half a million pounds because we would otherwise have had to buy that reach through TV”. This is really key for us because, as we move into the MMM world, we need to have people looking in the right direction and apply that “so what?”. If five things are looking one way, and one thing is looking another way, we have to follow the five things and think sensibly about what we are seeing. Otherwise, it is just going to cause confusion.

Anita: MMM moves us from marketing metrics into business metrics. That is a fundamental shift when you think about advertising and its role within a business, both for the branding and performance side. Last year, “brandformance” came up as a new lexical response – a new focus on how brand and performance aren’t separate. These two things have to work together when you’re talking about performance and efficiency.

For example, if a brand sets low prices and the consumer buys the product, the consumer will demand the low prices. The only way you can increase those prices is by building brand equity, so how do those two things play together? We have to take that into the marketing world and think about building on the brand equity as well as looking at performance.

It’s fascinating how that shift has changed our team at Teads. Now my team is a data insights and creative excellence team. We are all together in this one entity because we want to take a multifaceted approach to consumer problems. We have to think about performance and brand and how those two things work together.

How do you make sense of the data available?

Emily: You need to have that brand-led, long-term media strategy and be able to quantify it. The businesses and agencies that pulled back on marketing investments now have to work a lot harder in the marketing space. The way we piece it all together is by quantifying that long-term element of the brand that comes from the previous years of advertising. Then, we make sure they are optimising and learning and that those learnings go straight into the teams that are implementing campaigns. I’m passionate about learning from mistakes – geo tests and other methods – with the goal of seeing incremental gains.

Anita: We haven’t got a silver bullet. It’s not that we have one simple rule book we can use. I’ve been in measurement for 30 years, and if I had found it, I’d be on a yacht somewhere. You need to connect all of the pieces and use a bit of gut as well. I think that’s where AI fails us. We have to understand the biases within data and understand when we need to trust our gut a bit more.

We have talked about attention, and that’s an interesting metric because it takes us out of the delivery mechanics of viewability. Was it delivered? Tick. Was it on the screen? Tick. But who cares if you’re not in the room – if you’re not actually looking at it? It is not gonna do anything! So attention tries to take advertising a step further. That’s not going to give you business results, but it starts the discussion on how all these metrics and pieces are trying to get us there.

I have a lot of respect for MMM, but we need more than MMM. It gives you an ROI, but then you ask yourself: What ingredients do we need to create that perfect blend? We still need to understand people. Neuroscience gives you fantastic signals in levels of understanding why people do what they do.

If you could give your 2019 self some advice, what would it be?

Carys: It’s probably obvious, but don’t try to predict the future because what we see now is very different from what we saw five years ago. Nobody can predict who will be the biggest player in a media plan in five years. Be agile and willing to test and learn frequently and go with the changes.

Anita: Sadly, there is no silver bullet for measurement. We talked about testing and learning. Don’t forget the human behind your consumer, behind the viewer, behind what you are doing. Don’t disregard neuroscience. Every second counts for generating that brand awareness and attention, so think about the foundations to fit your effective communication format. And everything is incremental. You are not planning in isolation. That’s one thing to really take on board.

Karl: Keep testing. Things are going to change. Try moving with the times. Prepare yourself to test and learn, and don’t be afraid to fail.

Emily: Keep asking questions. As we become adults, we get nervous and conscious about how people will respond. For me, it is about asking questions. It is not silly, it is the right way to go.

 

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