Conflating audience with advertising measurement is understandable, but wrong
Opinion
The CEO of UKOM explains why audience data should come first. Campaign planning can only be set by understanding the people landscape and how they behave.
The job of marketing isn’t just to process information, it’s to understand people.”
So wrote Simeon Adams of Goodstuff for The Media Leader recently. He’s always been smart, Simeon has.
Earlier this month, Sally Weavers, Pippa Glucklich, David Wilding, James Shoreland, Paul Gayfer, Ben Cunningham and others launched the Media Planning Group. It is an idea born out of the Advertising Who Cares? movement and it sits alongside the long-established APG, which is primarily for planners/strategists in advertising agencies.
Its launch event saw Wilding, Shoreland and Lucy Verby debate the statement “the black box is the future of media planning.” Experienced, expert and passionate planners in the room were there to re-state the importance of human smarts in media planning and the importance of good media planning itself. Looking ahead, the MPG will offer a programme of industry-wide training on the fundamental disciplines of media planning. Genuinely inspiring initiatives like these are rare these days.
Earlier the same day, there was an informative session at AdWanted’s Future of Brands. A panel hosted by Jack Benjamin included two agencies, two research businesses and an advertiser, and together they discussed the question “Can industry currencies survive the platform era?”
Jack made it clear from the outset that the discussion centred on measuring advertising campaigns, and most panellists recognised the distinction between campaign measurement and broader, content-focused audience measurement.
Overall, the panel was supportive of the JICs, though there were some significant – and justified – caveats. These included the fact that measurement is siloed by medium, platform and device. Several speakers also acknowledged the work underway at Barb, Origin, Project Lantern, C-Flight and others.
There was understandably significant focus not just on the efficiency of ad campaigns but, increasingly, on their effectiveness, with a strong desire for a clear link between campaign reach and frequency and the success or otherwise in achieving desired business outcomes. It was implied that JICs may need to measure, report or directly link to these business outcomes, and that is how they will remain embedded in agency and client tools.
There are challenges with this, of course. Not least, the different desired outcomes for each client category and the fact that different clients may require different outcomes within the same category.
Two things struck me from these two events.
‘Campaign planning’ might be a misnomer
Even ‘campaign buying’ seems off target. So much of what happens now is campaign optimisation.
That is not to say it is of limited value. Clearly, it is where the money is spent. However, even as it happens in real time, it is still only reactive to what has already happened or not. It is like driving at speed, using the rearview mirror.
The real planning comes before you even get in the driving seat
The roadmap can be set only by understanding the people landscape and how they behave.
What do they do?
Where do they go?
How often and for how long?
What interests them?
Audience measurement shines a light on all this – regardless of whether the data includes the opportunity to present an ad.
We must not forget that public service media owners like the BBC and government bodies such as Ofcom, the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) all value independent audience measurement too.
It is critical for them to understand how the UK population behaves. Regardless of whether it’s about media, shopping, leisure, banking, gambling, the NHS, HMRC and anything and everything else that people do.
Back in the world of commercial media and marketing, just because the ad campaigns are where the big money is spent, let’s not get drawn inexorably only to the conclusion of a very sophisticated process.
Let’s not get fixated with measurement and optimisation at the end of a process that starts way before a campaign is even approved, a spot is booked, or a programmatic pound is activated.
Referring to the MPG launch, Lucy Verby has since written that, along with training, thinking and building relationships, “growing human understanding is the only way forward.”
She is right. And no matter how good you are at it, you simply don’t get any of that by optimising an ad campaign.
Ian Dowds is the CEO at UK Online Measurement (UKOM)