Truth or bust? Review of the second session of the MRG conference
MediaTel’s Seema Karia reports on Thursday afternoon’s debates at the MRG conference in Monte Carlo.
After a busy 24 hours in Monte Carlo, so far I have learnt the following at the MRG conference: that Social Media isn’t actually the most desirable media metric, that Google are human after all, that targeted online campaigns need to be better targeted, that you must employ your best Miss Marple skills when looking at your respondent level data, and that the Fairmont Hotel do a lovely selection of very crispy crisps and a very moreish nut spice mix too.
Panellists were very loyal to this year’s theme, ‘Are we gambling with the truth?’
The afternoon kicked off with a keynote from Georges Mao, Google’s head of market insight for Southern Europe who delivered insight into Google’s take on cross media measurement. Rather than feeling intimidated by the great powerhouse that is Google, I was heartened to hear that Google don’t actually have all the answers and that they really are quite keen to work within our industry to ensure that we continue to build the best tools and that we strive to improve our targeting and planning processes.
Mao urged delegates to remember that we don’t yet have all the desired ‘silver bullet measurements’ but that through sharing and collaboration we will be able to achieve best practices. Mao reported that good cross media measurement can only result in good advertiser confidence and that with this as our goal, we will surely be able to make better advertising decisions.
Google’s head of market insight recognises that as a growing online audience we will continue to adopt new technologies such as tablets and smartphones and that we are continually multi-screening, that our media consumption is now ‘simultaneous, complementary and substitutive’. Mao continued: “But we must face this challenge head on because only then will we learn and really get better.”
Next up was Simon Bolus from BARB, who was there to talk to us about the challenges now facing TV measurement and the steps that BARB have taken to widen their approach. He said: “The boundaries of TV have changed. We are adapting our measurement to embrace these changes.” Armed with interesting facts and figures, such as BARB’s virtual meters show less than 1% of TV viewing is via computers and time shifted viewing has grown from 1% to 10% over the last 10 years.
Bolus talked us through current tests and plans to implement new methodologies for the people meter to ensure that out connected consumers are being counted. An example of this is the virtual meter that has been tested over the last two years, with respondents registering themselves when watching online content.
Although at the minute this only measures 200 panel homes, there are plans to increase this number to 600 next year. It was good to see that robust figures and measurement methods remain at the top of BARB’s list. Although still in very early stages, we look forward to seeing the fruits of their labour over the coming year and the results of their efforts to fuse panel and server data together.
After this it was time for the biggest revelation of the conference (so far) and probably one of the coolest presentations I’ve seen – from Postar to Avatar: How gaming technology has brought truth to Outdoor’. Chris Hall from JCDecaux and Russell Smither from Posterscope reported that new Postar data is coming! Hurrah! It’s expected around February 2013, we look forward to seeing the new data which looks at GPS data and a series of self-completion surveys to help us better understand the consumer’s journey.
They also talked about the launch of ‘Virtuocity’, the new service which is now available that is designed to enhance and influence out of home planning practices. As one tweeter described: “it is sort of like a grand theft auto of the outdoor media planning world.” Driving through the virtual streets of London, Virtuocity allows you to measure the effectiveness of orientation, frequency and motion by using eye tracking.
Using its own formula of engagement derived from ‘fixated’ consumers and those who could ‘recall’ the ads they’d seen and together with new in-gaming-like technologies, Virtuocity is able to prove that animation in posters matters. They we’re able to show too that size does matter after all, with the larger animated poster sites exposing higher rates of engagement.
After a coffee and sugar fix in the form of macaroons and ginger biscuits, it was the turn of GFK and the BBC to help us to detect the truth when using empirical data. Carmen Aitken (BBC) and Guy Wates (GfK NOP) urged us to ‘concentrate on what cannot lie – the evidence.’
With respondents growing ever more accustomed to our surveys and online questionnaires, it becomes more important than ever before to inspect our data with fine-tooth comb proficiency. They talked to us about the research they took to try and sort the wheat from the chaff, the honest folk from the not so, the Dot Cottons from the Phil Mitchells! They showed how they were able to apply a ‘truth index’ to all of their panel respondents, something that is really important to try to achieve in a time when it’s all too easy to make an uninformed clicks here and there. Very clever stuff.
And that all led us to the final session of the day, research in to clever and not-so clever online targeting. Kantar Media – TGI’s Daniel Flynn and Rob Laurence talked about the importance of relevant targeted ads. Just because we have the technology to serve ads on websites, we shouldn’t go blindly ahead and that we really do need to be sure that content is still king.
Laurence pondered whether the ads he is served whilst online would appear in printed titles and why it is that he is still targeted with ads for products that he’s no longer interested in or has already bought. We should think about appropriate times to serve ads and about the engagement levels of our consumers.
We don’t want to be bothered by ads when we’re in a ‘leaned-in’ phase but perhaps whilst in broadcast mode we might be more receptive to ads? In this new connected world we should be exploiting the internet to deliver better content. Modes of usage are so crucial and we need to be cleverer about when and how we try to get those clicks. With TGI’s Clickstream service we will be able to do this better. It’s a time when we can link print to outdoor to our screens and we need to remember that people live their lives offline too.
That took us to the bar and more of those crisps.