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.
Matt Weinman – Senior Director of Product Management, Advanced Advertising Product, TelevisaUnivision
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.
Forecasting incorporated a programming schedule imputation process which was then fed into a mixed model estimation (MME), and then optimized with linear granular data.
Their model revealed gaps that they addressed with a variety of tactics including a ratings adjustment approach that updated network viewership trends, a proportional weight method for advanced audiences, recency weighting to avoid stale rate cards and relying less on forecasting viewers rather than scheduled content. The MME drove strong predictive forecasts and increased the use of long-tail inventory.
Key Takeaways
Forecasting should always be done based on content.
In reviewing the accuracy of predicting exact programming, the forecast to actuals had a 71% program match. In predicting programming type, there was 94% accuracy.
Results for the long-term audience forecasts had 42% MAPE (mean absolute percentage error) improvements overall using big data sources.
The ARF hosted its annual flagship conference, AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2023, on April 25-26, 2023. The industry’s biggest names and brightest minds came together to share new insights on the impact of changing consumer behavior on brands, insights into TV consumption, campaign measurement and effectiveness, whether all impressions are equal, join-up solutions across multiple media, the validity, reliability and predictive power of Attention measures, targeting diverse audiences, privacy’s effect on advertising and the impact of advertising in new formats. Keynotes were presented by Tim Hwang, author of Subprime Attention Crisis, Robert L. Santos of the U.S. Census Bureau, Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, LLC and Andrea Zapata of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Mike Bloxham – EVP, Global Media & Entertainment, Magid
Tony Cardinale – SVP, Data Science, Magid
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.
Key Takeaways
As SVOD has become mainstream, subscriber growth does not come from non-streamers anymore, but largely from churn between services. This makes churn an important issue that requires careful analysis to inform providers’ strategy.
Churn is not simply a reflection of the quality of the service. The analyses show that there are viewer segments with different predispositions to churn. As a result, it is important to look at the churn rates among each segment to get a full understanding of consumer sentiment.
Not all churn is negative. Some churn, driven by engaged viewers, is indicative of a healthy service. Subscribers with higher churn rates are likely among the most important to the content subscription platforms, as they are deeply involved in the content and are most active on social about that content.
To manage churn and resubscription, we need to recognize the different motivations of viewer segments. This is important for the health of a streaming business.