In the evolving privacy landscape, companies are continuing to look for solutions that offer cookieless targeting. Advertisers seek cross-platform targeting options enabling scale and KPIs to drive campaign performance. However, potential solutions have weaknesses:
A multi-billion dollar pet food manufacturer analyzed its audience targeting strategy with the goal of ensuring efficient online ad spending, according to Souptik Datta and Zulema Doiny-Cabre of GroupM. The analysis with GroupM evaluated the performance of existing audience segments, pinpointed profiles of high-performing audience segments for additional opportunities and determined the optimal ad impression frequency.
Capping off the final day of sessions, Kantar’s Michelle Eule led a lively commentary on whether the generation consumers are born into really matters as an influence for marketing and if other psychographics or demographics are more important.
This panel, moderated by Scott McDonald, led a discussion in response to the presentations on the generational implications in marketing and advertising. Topics of discussion included the notion of labels and challenges that can be associated with them, using generational attributes as a starting point or a “lens,” and the idea that while generations may be an indicator, values and certain behaviors can “transcend age.”
J. Walker thanked Bobby Duffy for his insights and perspectives and offered a somewhat different take: He stressed that generations are an important way to study social change. They are a useful construct, but they are not perfect. According to J. Walker, generations are best understood as an aggregation of life trajectories, shared circumstances and events as generational members come of age. Graduating during a recession or growing up in a pandemic will shape those generations. Cohorts who grow up at the same time and share common experiences, expectations and values matter for brands and culture. The shared starting point is the critical factor. Comparing Boomers at 20 years old with Millennials at 20 is the relevant point. A general comparison of Boomers vs. Millennials is not relevant.
Highlighting key points from his book, The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think, Bobby Duffy presented his research on generational thinking as a powerful idea corrupted by stereotypes, myths, and cliches. As he tracked today’s generations over time (Pre-War, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z) to see what is truly generational, Bobby looked for gaps between young and old on attitudes to everything from drinking, smoking, and loneliness to race, gender equality and climate change. He found that many analyses and forecasts about consumer behavior ignore the complexity of change, that is, they only look at one of the three mechanisms that cause changes: Cohort Effects—Behaviors, attitudes and beliefs that are more common among members of a generation; Period Effects—Changes resulting from events and circumstances that affect everybody, all generations, from war and disasters to periods of economic boom; Life-Cycle Effects—Members of all generations change as they grow older and experience getting married, having children, etc. The key to using generational analyses in consumer behavior forecasts, therefore, is to untangle these three mechanisms and recognize the importance of period and life-cycle effects to avoid overstating cohort effects.
IRI’s Michael Tscherwinski addressed the challenges marketers are facing due to supply-constraints and provided a best-practices playbook for unlocking opportunities. IRI’s 2022 outlook on product availability predicts continued challenges. Inflation, supply chain issues, as well as the war in the Ukraine, impact the operations of CPG companies. Category out-of-stock conditions are widespread, and many CPGs are pausing media. However, Procter & Gamble, one of the largest advertisers in the world, stated that it would continue to invest in marketing.
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.