How to find ‘truth’ in the current measurement debate
Opinion
The array of measurement solutions provide an abundance of subjective information and a scarcity of actionable truth. Advertisers need to keep it simple by focusing on transparency and robust experiments.
The last few months have seen a flurry of media owners, publishers and cross-industry initiatives building different measurement solutions for clients and agencies.
Google has pushed hard on a range of tools across its stack, aiming to link spend in YouTube to its vast paid search empire. ITV AdLabs and other broadcasters are launching Lantern to measure short- and long-term impact of TV on business results. Barb is integrating streaming services and Project Origin is reaching maturity (and all the politics that come with that!).
It’s laudable that media owners are understanding the value their data has to prove the relationship between spend on their platforms and business KPIs. As more media consumption jumps from offline to online and media owners can leverage greater knowledge about their audiences, the opportunity is significant.
Project Origin can be seen as the apogee of this, with both offline and online data coming together to give a full view of reach and frequency across a range of media.
However, not all is as it seems. Barb and the broadcasters’ decision to sit out from Origin will put both limitations and methodological questions on the platform. Other measurement tools are also limited in scope to the media channels and KPIs they can measure or have significant black holes in what they understand.
Abundance of information
With increasing competition for media budgets, self-interest trumps proper cross-industry collaboration (not a complaint, but a reflection of reality) — and the situation is unlikely to change.
What this presents to advertisers and media planners is an abundance of subjective information and a scarcity of actionable truth.
Each supplier is able to give brands and buyers information about what they bought. However, with data siloed within walled gardens, for advertisers to make a broader sense of what their media has achieved is more difficult than ever.
For example, I know that both broadcaster VOD and YouTube will drive incremental audiences to my linear TV investment, but the truth of what my total AV mix delivers is elusive.
Generating “truth” from media investments is something that requires skill and expertise. Marketing mix modelling and broader econometrics can deliver invaluable insight and effectiveness for marketers, but they can be costly, struggle to read smaller channels and localised media, and take a long time to deliver actionable results.
Keep it simple
If advertisers want shorter-term “truth” from their advertising across walled gardens, they should focus on media transparency, robustness of experiment design and keeping it simple.
While geo-testing may not be the sexiest way of understanding the effectiveness of media, we can build effective experiments from across the full range of offline and online media. Clients’ first-party data, such as traffic, sales or footfall, can be converted into geo-data without data loss or breaching data-privacy rules.
By building out control and exposed groups geographically, it’s the quickest way to demonstrate media effectiveness. At Goodstuff, we’ve used geo-experiments across a range of channels, clients and data sources to understand the true media and business impacts of different media.
Truth can only emerge from measuring tangible effects through simple, robust and well-designed experiments, with a common currency across channels.
While the market offers increasingly sophisticated and complex ways to understand the impact of media, if it remains siloed to channels, it can be useful information but not an actionable truth to guide investment.
In a world where studies are thrown in for free as part of investment, advertisers still need to understand the value of truth.
Paul McGee is head of video planning at Goodstuff Communications
Lack of Origin data transparency puts broadcasters on ‘backfoot’, says Sky Media exec