attribution

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

Marketing Performance Measurement – Where are We Now?

• by Meredith Zhang, TikTok (Young Pros Officer)

On July 12, 2023, the ARF Cross-Platform Measurement Council’s Attribution Working Group brought together a panel of performance marketing experts to discuss where we are now in marketing performance measurement. Panelists from both the service provider and the user side of performance measurement shared their thoughts on the new and remaining challenges and the tools we have today to address them. Alice Sylvester (Partner, Sequent Partners) and John Young (SVP, Audience Analytics Solutions, MediaHub) moderated 3 insightful discussions with a group of industry experts Allyson Dietz (Senior Director, Marketing Solutions, Neustar), Vijoy Gopalakrishnan (Chief Research Officer, iSpotTV), Stephen Williams (CEO, Marketing Evolution), Karen Chisholm (Director, Analytics Transformation, Pernod Ricard), Sophie McIntyre (Ads Research Lead, Meta), Sunil Soman (VP, Campaign Effectiveness, Warner Brothers Discovery, Chair of the Attribution Working Group), and Emily Weishaupt (Communications Insights manager, Nestle Purina NA).  

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Leveraging A/B Testing to Understand Consumer Behavior

• Posted: July 10, 2023

Vidyotham Reddi shared insights from Mars’ approach to A/B testing as their gold standard of learning. Framing it within the timely “virus” context, Vidyotham reinforced A/B testing’s dependability, versatility, and precision for marketing and understanding consumer behavior as part of Mars’ overall strategy.

Cookieless Audience Targeting and Attribution: A Pharma Case Study

• Posted: July 6, 2023

While attribution has been around two decades, a great breakthrough for digital, the deprecation of third party cookies is likely to have a significant impact. Options to MTA include: walled gardens, focused on one channel only, and data clean rooms such as those operated by the identity companies. Cleanrooms are data intensive but much better than single channel walled gardens.

MODERATED TRACK DISCUSSIONS: Attribution & Approaches

• Posted: July 5, 2023

In this discussion for the track, Attribution & Approaches, session chair, Paul Donato (ARF) asked the speakers for their key insights on the drivers of short-term and long-term sales, the role of match control, and whether testing control should be part of attribution and ROI.

Fast(er) Causal Attribution

• Posted: July 5, 2023

The presenters analyzed the past attribution challenges for Chipotle and proposed new measurement solutions. Chipotle wanted proof that its TV commercials drove sales. Chipotle and WarnerMedia developed an outcome-guaranteed deal based on sales lift, rather than impressions. For Chipotle, incremental transactions are most important. These transactions were also measured for the competitors. The goal was to provide purposeful, visible, and accountable results.

MODERATED TRACK DISCUSSIONS: Television Disrupted

• Posted: July 5, 2023

Helen Katz (Publicis Media) moderated this track discussion for Television Disrupted. She asked the speakers about practical, actionable takeaways for TV advertisers as well as emerging trends and opportunities.

Concurrent Track Panel Discussions: NEW METHODS TO VALIDATE AUDIENCE ESTIMATES

• Posted: June 21, 2023

This live panel featured the presenters from the New Methods to Validate Audience Estimates track, with moderator Megan Margraff of Oracle following up on key points involving alternate data currencies, data harmonization and normalization, fragmentation challenges and advanced targeting in TV and CPG.

Bridging the Gap Between Linear and Digital Measurement

• Posted: June 20, 2023

Integrating linear TV in cross-platform measurement was a challenge undertaken in a partnership between Lucid and Samba TV utilizing ACR (automatic content recognition) and STB (set-top box) data matched to survey responses. Stephanie Gall (Lucid) and Karen Biedermann (Samba) shared details on the inherent problems, potential solutions and biggest learnings from this integration.

Concurrent Track Panel Discussions: ATTENTION MEASURES

• Posted: June 15, 2023

These presenters were all true believers in the value of attention. Their key takeaways from the presentations in this track were:

• Attention is “ready for prime time,” as Marc Guldimann (Adelaide) put it. It has risen to prominence in the industry’s agenda and expects it to spread into media mix modeling and programmatic. Attention, he believes, should free the industry from “invasive” attribution practices by giving advertisers confidence in the quality of the media they are buying.
• Jon Waite (Havas) was encouraged to see attention move from theory to practice for optimizing campaigns. He believes that the focus on attention would encourage publishers to improve experiences on the web, which, in turn, would lead to better results for brands.
• Mike Follett (Lumen) cautioned that there was still much to learn about attention in different contexts, flighting, frequency, differences between B-to-B and B-to-C, the role of creative and long-term effects. What he found interesting in Joanne Leong’s presentation (to which he contributed) is the possibility of developing models that can predict attention for any campaign.
• Publishers have come up with innovative formats to optimize for attention on television, according to Kelsey Hanlon (TVision).

 

There was some disagreement among the panelists about the prospects for an attention currency.  Marc saw it as an “obvious next step.”  Mike regarded attention as more of a buy-side “trading tool.” Jon said that it will become a key planning metric for Havas.

FORECASTING 2022: How Can Scenario Planning Improve Agility in Adjusting to Change?

• Posted: June 14, 2023

On July 12, 2022, forecasting, and product experts shared frameworks and strategies for participants to consider as they plan amid disruptions in the industry. Presenters discussed techniques marketers could use to drive consumer action and advocacy — as well as econometric models for search trends, insights on holistic analytics programs, reflections on gold standard probability methods — and new forecasting techniques in the wake of the pandemic and more.