Innovate 1st Interview Part 2 – Real Time Measurement Challenges in Advertising & Media Effectiveness

I was recently interviewed by Innovate 1st for an upcoming edition of Innovate eZine’s “Conversations on the Cutting Edge” series. This is the 2nd set of excerpts from the interview, which was conducted by Doug Berger, Managing Director, The INNOVATE Company.

To read the full interview series, start with my earlier blog post: “Challenges in Advertising & Media Effectiveness.” 

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Real Time Advertising Measurement

Doug:        How do you do that (measure your TV ad performance literally the next day and know how you’re doing) ?

Randall:     There are syndicated services; Nielsen has one with 5,000 to 7,000 panelists a day going to a panel website (disclosure: I work for Nielsen).  After they log in, they are asked what TV shows they watched the previous day.

Because Nielsen knows what ads were running in those programs, they can not only ask questions about the programming and how engaging it was, but they can also ask questions about the ads that were in those programs.  Then they generate a report on how your ad of the previous day was performing.

TV Viewing Data: What Shows People Watch & What Ads They See

Doug:        In that particular case, the pre-selected panels already have the demographic and the profiling information to slice responses any which way an advertiser would want.

Randall:     That’s exactly right.  This is setting the stage for where things are going in the future.  Another big macro trend is that consumers are increasing overall media consumption.  There’s a commonly held belief that TV is dying.  This is not true.

Actually, people watch more TV today than they did a year ago, and they watch a lot more TV today than they did ten years ago.  What is happening is a proliferation of channels, more TVs per household, a better viewing experience with large, hi-def TV, and you’ve got blockbuster content like ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and ‘American Idol.’

The bigger issue as social media and digital expand is how you bring these things together in a very smart way, because TV is not going away.  It’s changing, but it is not going away.

Doug:       You are looking at predictive models, as well as the variables that drive brand equity.   What are some of the other key drivers that you are discovering about brand building?

Randall:     We just did a study of 30,000 ads. The analysis shows that there are three big drivers.  One is the creative quality itself, which is not really a surprise.

The second driver, also not too surprising, is media weight … the more media you put behind your ad the higher the general recall.

What is surprising is the impact of programming.  In the modeling work we’ve done, the impact of the content within which your ad sits is just as impactful as the creative quality itself.

There are three ways in which programming affects the performance of your ad in-market: program engagement, program genre, and program synergy.  We’ve already discussed program engagement, or attentiveness.

TV Programming Impacts Ad Recall

Beyond this, we see that certain brands or products perform better in certain genres than others.  For example, alcoholic beverage ads score much better in sports vs. non-sports programming; over-the-counter drugs tend to not score well in sitcoms.  A client once asked me, “Why is that?”  I said, “Well, being sick is not funny.”

An example of program synergy would be putting an ad for Slim Fast in ‘The Biggest Loser.’ A lot of this is intuitive and not surprising.  The difference is that today all of this is measurable.

Doug:        What have been some of the key insights and learnings around linking brand to profitability?

Randall:     We are still in the infancy of knowing how to do that.  One of the learnings is the need for different equity measurements.  Single source measurement enables advertisers to see at the household level, with permission of course, exactly what people are watching on TV; what they’re doing online; and then it allows you to look at what those same people are actually buying.  You can literally create an exposed/non-exposed set of households to your advertising and see exactly how the consumption changes.

This is really powerful, and as these systems scale up they will allow for much more granularity.  Instead of looking at women 18-34 years old, you’ll be able to drill down to view a lapsed soda user, or a Coke user, or even a lapsed Coke user.  You’ll be able to find those people and measure how advertising impacts them versus a group that didn’t see the advertising.

Next:  Social Media Myths and Truths

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Innovate 1st Interview: Challenges in Advertising and Media Effectiveness

I was recently interviewed by Innovate 1st for an upcoming edition of Innovate eZine’s “Conversations on the Cutting Edge” series. Following are excerpts from the interview, which was conducted by Doug Berger, Managing Director, The INNOVATE Company.

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Doug:  What have been the critical challenges around advertising and media effectiveness?

Randall: You can simplify it to the two most basic and important objectives of most advertisers: they want to build their brand and they want to build profitability linked to their advertising.  Everything else they’re doing through advertising is ultimately to contribute to those two end goals.

Companies have been pretty good at measuring brand equity … what consumers think of when they think about your brand.   If you are Bounty paper towels, you want to own ‘getting spills up faster.’ 

Unfortunately, even though brand equity has been measured well, it’s been a scorecard statistic.  No connection has been made to the causes of brand equity increase or decrease, and then to business results. On both of these high level metrics, brand equity and ROI, the measurement systems historically have just not been that effective.

 

Marketing Measurement

The issue on the front-end has been a lack of good understanding of the factors that drive brand equity….there has been no way to look at advertising and media exposure and say, ‘Okay, this advertising or these media choices drove a bigger change in brand equity than these other ones.’  On the back end, it’s rare that Marketers can actually link changes in brand equity scores to changes in business results.

Doug:  Let’s dive deeper into this …what have been some of the new trends and developments in advertising and media effectiveness over the last 10 – 15 years?

Randall: The state of the art in measuring advertising and media effectiveness has come a long way.  The more sophisticated companies are now using market mix modeling to understand the relative impact of different parts of their advertising and media allocation. 

It’s being able to look at the individual variables in your marketing plan, like TV versus print, versus digital, versus radio, versus couponing, and then measuring the impact of each of those on an individual basis, on overall sales outcomes.  Big advertisers have really moved the ball forward in their ability to do this, and it helps them apportion their marketing expense.

 

Cross Media Fusion

Doug:   So, you have really been able to look at individual media choices within your portfolio and measure the effectiveness on brand and profitability of the different media choices.

Randall: Yes.  Although, we consistently hear from clients that as good as market mix modeling is, it does break down in certain areas.  About a year ago we partnered with a major consulting company and interviewed C-suite executives at advertisers, media companies, agencies, and technology disruption companies.  These were the issues we that heard:

First, we are still largely targeting based on demographics. Yet, we know that we need to be targeting based on either attitudinal profiles or behaviors, but it is really hard to do that, particularly in the world of TV, where demographic buys still rule.

Secondly, people know intuitively that eyeballs aren’t all created the same in media.  They want more than reach and frequency.  They want to know, are consumers actually engaged with the programming within which ads fit, and does that actually impact the ad performance?  For example, we know from our data that the more attentive a viewer is to a TV program, the more likely they are to recall an ad in that program, all things being equal.  You can place the ad in a very highly engaging program like ‘Lost’, or a low engagement program, and you’ll see that the recall is hugely different.

Another area that is very challenging is cross platform.  We often hear from clients that they believe the impact of their advertising on consumers who have seen the advertising across different platforms, like TV, print, digital and so forth, are more effective than if the consumer sees them individually.  However, there are not good ways to measure that.

Granularity is another issue … understanding within digital media how each of my eight different banner ads performed across 12 different websites.  Advertisers want to know not only was their digital effort effective, but where are the opportunities to optimize by creative unit, by website, and so forth.

 

Online Ads

One of the biggest trends is the move from after-campaign-measurement to measuring in real-time.  In after the campaign measurement, you run a campaign for nine months, collect the data, build the model and then say, ‘Okay, here’s how your TV performed versus digital, versus radio, versus couponing, versus print, etc.’  That’s great, except it’s too slow.

Advertisers increasingly want to measure the advertising performance in close to real-time so that they can make on-the-fly optimization decisions.  They want predictive models so that within the first two weeks of their campaign, they can measure granulated effectiveness and make creative or media mix optimization decisions. 

Ten years ago, when I left Procter & Gamble, it took three months to measure your ad’s performance in-market.  Today, you can measure your TV ad performance literally the next day and know how you’re doing.

Next:  Measuring in Real Time

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Driving Desirable Digital Behaviors with TV Advertising

Things are not always what they seem. Two TV ads score the same—in copy testing or in market—so they’re equally effective, right? Not always.

TV: Driver of Consumer Digital Experiences

TV ads don’t just deliver awareness, message recall, etc. They drive behaviors—some of which are digital–and good for your brand.

Cross Platform Ad Effectiveness

Marketers increasingly want to understand how advertising works across mediums—particularly TV and Digital. Some of the more frequent questions I hear from CMO’s are the following:

• What’s the value of a Facebook fan?
• What’s the role of search in the customer journey?
• How I use the web to drive greater engagement with consumers?
• How can I drive more word of mouth and buzz for my brand?

These are all great digital questions. And lots of people have tried to answer them with digitally focused analysis—some effectively, some not.

Building Brands & Online Buzz

Another Way to Think About TV Ad Effectiveness

Here’s a different tack:  what if we analyzed these questions, not from a digital only perspective, but from a TV advertising perspective? Or, to say it differently, what if we were to ask the question as follows:

“What role does TV advertising play in driving desirable digital behaviors?”

TV & Digital Viewing Behavior

This has been a tough question to answer. Who’s going to keep a diary of what they watch on TV and then the myriad of things they do on-line? The fact is that our understanding of TV and Digital viewing behavior has been mostly limited to knowing how many people did what.

Just as important is understanding not only what people are doing, but in what sequence. And after viewing what ads? New single source viewing data opens up new possibilities for understanding media behavior:  it’s now possible to observe (with viewers permission) both what they watch on TV and what they then do on-line.

Next Generation TV Ad Effectiveness

So, back to the opening question. Two TV ads score the same—in copy testing or in market—so they’re equally effective, right? The answer: not always. Why?

Here are 4 new ways that TV advertising can drive positive digital behaviors.

1.  Drive Consumers to Your Facebook Fan Page – Many brands have embraced Facebook and are building Fan pages as opposed to their own branded websites. They see the advantage of “social” currency and a key objective is building the number of Facebook fans.

TV advertising has a role to play here:  more effective ads can drive more consumers to your brands fan page than less effective (or no) ads. Seen in this light, TV can play an essential role in your digital plans–even when the messaging doesn’t explicitly have a call to web action.

Facebook Fan Pages & Brands

2.  Drive Consumers to Search for Your Brand – Companies across all industries have embraced search, even in CPG, and for good reason. It works. Of course, paid search costs real money. So, how to drive more organic search for your brand? Well, one way is with your TV advertising. What portion of consumers seeing your TV ad go on-line and search for your brand?

3.  Drive Consumers to Your Brand Web Site – Like Facebook Fan Pages, many brands have their own website to engage and deepen the relationship with consumers. Question: is your TV advertising driving consumers to your website? Which ads are more versus less effective in doing so?

4.  Drive Consumers to Talk About Your Brand – Research from Keller-Fay has shown that approximately 1/3 of word of mouth is about TV advertising. How effective is your TV ad at driving word of mouth? Are two TV ads which score equally well on traditional ad effectiveness metrics driving different conversation levels about your brand? If so, one is clearly more valuable than the other (assuming the conversations are positive).

Capital One Mascot Challenge: Driving Consumers to Website

Driving Desirable Digital Behaviors

All of the above represent new ways of thinking about TV ad effectiveness. Traditional measures of TV advertising performance around breakthrough and branding will continue to be important.

But increasingly, Marketers need to think about how TV advertising drives other behaviors—particularly digital ones—that benefit their brands.

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