Changes in privacy legislation, the deprecation of the third-party cookie, and new rules on Google and Apple platforms have set the stage for the impending data disruption in the advertising industry, as outlined in IAB’s State of Data 2022 report and OptiMine’s overview on Google Topics. Both presentations and the subsequent panel discussion in this Insights Studio session emphasized the unavoidable impact the loss of individual tracking will have on measurement and attribution and urged marketers to act quickly to prepare for the effects on revenues.
Tony Marlow at LG Ad Solutions unveiled findings from The Big Shift Study, an online survey conducted in September 2022 of 733 adults from the general U.S. population. CTV in the living room is near saturation, with 93% having access to a CTV there. One-third of streaming content discovery also takes place there. But not all streaming remains ubiquitous. In the last twelve months, one-third of respondents removed a subscription from their CTV service and a quarter have added an AVOD or FAST service. The study found a similar trend taking place over the next twelve months. Fears of economic inflation and a looming recession are pushing people to opt for free, ad-supported streaming services.
Maggie Zhang of NBC Universal invited all the presenters back to a wrap-up session called “Attribution Pivot,” where she asked what challenges marketers are facing and how they are meeting them. Each provided insight into important attribution challenges that they as a marketer or their client is facing. Limitations include lacking the ability to do A/B testing, privacy issues and the looming issue of cookie depreciation. It is also difficult to determine long-term lift, such as lifetime value.
Rex Du (University of Texas at Austin) explained that targeting addressable TV ads over the customer lifecycle enables the brand to benefit from long-term customer profitability. This methodology provides stronger outcomes than targeting to maximize same-day incremental conversion.
Lindsey Woodland (605) and Jes Santoro (Cadent) presented a case study of a big box retailer to demonstrate their standardized, scalable process for cross-platform measurement and reporting. The retailer’s 2020 holiday campaign benefitted from the identification, scaling and targeting of a selected custom-curated audience. Activation within premium inventory involved broadcast, cable and CTV ads served to targeted households. Including CTV in the media plan added many medium and light linear viewers.
Matt Weinman (TelevisaUnivision) and Spencer Lambert (datafuelX) shared the methodology and results from testing TelevisaUnivision’s initiative that, with datafuelX’s technology, enabled their advertising partners to choose their preferred currency in forecasting both long- and short-term audiences for their programming. Implementation involved adjusting the business flow for multi-measurement sources but with each source ingested, validated and normalized to the tech standard separately.
Marketers are faced with many challenges such as smaller budgets, targeting decisions and the quantification of media effectiveness, but Harvey Goldhersz of Circana explained that in-flight measurement and optimization provides opportunities to overcome these challenges. Knowledge gained from in-flight measurement can strengthen the optimization of campaign media by enabling maximum impact with lower cost.
Media use has been changing rapidly and that requires paying constant attention to how viewers use services, for example, which streaming services they subscribe to and which they cancel. Churn among streaming service subscribers is typically seen as a negative: Providers try to minimize churn, maximize retention. Based on analyses of their Subscriber Science Monitor data, Magid researchers Mike Bloxham and Tony Cardinale offered a fresh perspective on the drivers of churn as well as on the implications of churn for content providers. They conclude that churn is inevitable—and that some churn is correlated to growth and cultural relevance. The key to their insights was a segmentation analysis that focused on viewers’ propensity to churn.
The ARF participated in an “All Things Insights Media Insights” survey of media professionals about the state of media research, as well as their investments in research and data sciences. A report is now available.
Lindsey Woodland, Ph.D. – Group VP of Data Science, 605
Jes Santoro – EVP, Advanced TV & Video, Cadent
Lindsey Woodland (605) and Jes Santoro (Cadent) presented a case study of a big box retailer to demonstrate their standardized, scalable process for cross-platform measurement and reporting. The retailer’s 2020 holiday campaign benefitted from the identification, scaling and targeting of a selected custom-curated audience. Activation within premium inventory involved broadcast, cable and CTV ads served to targeted households. Including CTV in the media plan added many medium and light linear viewers.
Measurement and analysis of the campaign indicated that the retailer achieved their campaign objectives, which included acquiring new customers and competitive shoppers, while defending their base of loyal customers. The campaign’s incremental ROAS was $5. Additionally, peak performance for total visits and unique visitors occurred at four exposures. The highest volume of unique visitors occurred within a week after first campaign exposure.
Key Takeaways
It is essential for advertisers to measure the reach and effectiveness across multiple avenues of ad exposure rather than consider exposures in platform silos. The importance of this approach will increase as media consumption continues to evolve and cross-platform consumption grows.
Understanding which targets can not only be reached but also activated by various platforms results in more effective campaign planning.
Based on this knowledge clients can shift dollars between channels to better optimize their campaigns in real time and prior results can be used to inform future work.
Marketers can sub-target their campaigns by creating multiple targets, based not only on media consumption, but also media responsiveness to improve each targets’ projected ad effectiveness.
An effective causal multi-touch attribution (MTA) approach should provide stable, reliable results that have been researched and tested across hundreds of real campaigns and simulated data to ensure that the approach is yielding accurate results.
