AOP Research Forum: increasing audience value & effectiveness
AOP yesterday hosted an afternoon Research Forum, featuring presentations on how to increase audience value and effectiveness in the digital marketplace.
In the first session, David Fletcher, head of MEC MediaLab, Mediaedge:cia, explained the importance of providing good insight, adding that relevancy is key. Essentially online publishers need to be the real experts in their audience. Agencies have lots of ideas but the implementation of these ideas requires client engagement and for that they need a story and evidence to convince the budget holders.
Research can help by providing detailed knowledge about audiences, what they do, where they go, what their journey is from initial search to purchase and how offline conversions are influenced by online marketing.
Some research tools are providing good insight, for example where print is no longer delivering the reach it once was, TouchPoints can illustrate an increase in OTS by adding digital to print campaigns. Similarly, by illustrating the difference in the median ages of online/offline newspaper readers, TGInet can demonstrate how different audiences are reached by adding digital to print campaigns.
He believes UKOM will have a big impact from an integration perspective.
Harry Davies, team head for Digital Marketing, COI, then explained the current situation at COI and how they are pitching for a single buying agency that will allow them to put people, not channels at the heart of their campaigns. They want fully integrated campaigns with all channels working together for maximum effectiveness.
Harry was very pleased with the news that UKOM data is to be integrated into TouchPoints 3. He expects TouchPoints to be used in the planning process for every campaign, adding that agencies have to go beyond simple demographics when talking about audiences, explaining that lifestyle information is needed as well.
Increasingly they want to know about how people behave on sites, including dwell time and repeat visits, as this may change the nature of the message the COI will want to put on there. They also need to know what has happened as a result of their campaign – what’s the difference between groups that have/have not seen the campaign. Essentially they want to see the journey from exposure to conversion.
He explained that in order for the COI to invest in websites he expects them to be able to demonstrate pre-campaign research, e.g. what do your readers/viewers think about the war in Iraq. It could be that the site might have a perfect demographic match for advertising for soldiers, but if they hate the war then the COI will not want to be there.
Sue Gray, Head of Commercial and Corporate Research, Channel 4 then went on to talk about the channel’s online audience.
Channel 4’s 4OD service has now had such an impact on viewing figures that workers have been told to “tear up the overnights” as so much viewing is shifted. In 2008, 13 million programmes were watched through the service by 2.5 viewers, and these figures are expected to double in 2009.
A good example is Inbetweeners, which has only 50% of its viewing as live, with the rest via PC VOD, DTR, TV VOD and repeats.
Overall, Sue believes that single source data is the holy grail and until this happens, the channel will have to continue to use hybrid data and fuse single source online data to TV measurement.
Gary Roddy, research director, GfK NOP Media, ended the afternoon by saying that often traditional research is able to address concerns, explaining that not everything has to be new, so there is no need to try and reinvent the wheel. However he warned that research has to be considered as part of the whole campaign process and shouldn’t just be tagged on at the end.