Connection, Conversion, And Currency

Performance marketing experts weigh in on today’s key issues in advance of PDMI West 2023.

Author: Thomas Haire Source: Results Magazine

As the Performance-Driven Marketing Institute (PDMI) team began to build out content for October’s PDMI West event in San Diego, the must-cover trends became apparent rather quickly: media measurement and currency; attribution for performance marketing sales; the expanding role of connected TV (CTV) as an outlet of choice; and how agencies — both creative and media — are helping their clients navigate the changing landscape.

We’re excited about the educational sessions that highlight PDMI West’s calendar. So excited, in fact, that we decided to seek insights on these same topics in advance of our fall event from a group of PDMI members and PDMI West speakers.

Read on to hear feedback from 17 thought leaders, representing 15 companies — media outlets, media agencies, creative experts, and measurement pioneers — about the state of performance marketing media, technology, and the industry’s near-term future. Responses have been lightly copyedited for content, clarity, and space.

What word would you use to describe the state of media measurement and currency right now — and why?

Nancy Arnold, chief marketing officer, Diray Media: Fragmented.

Richard Bertodatti, senior vice president, multimedia and audience sales, TelevisaUnivision: Testing. Every agency, client, publisher, measurement, and currency provider is doing ongoing testing for current or alternative measurement/currency providers to evaluate what works best for the KPIs (key performance indicators) that they are working toward. This is causing a lot of great questions, dialogue, testing, deep dives, etc., that will help inform the new (and ever-evolving) state of currency and measurement in 2024 and beyond.

Chris Brombach, senior vice president, integrated media, Cannella Media: Fluid. The industry has acknowledged the need for more accurate measurement that quantifies both audience delivery and attributed performance — across linear and streaming.

Patrick Burney, performance sales lead, Samsung Ads: Complexification. This characterizes the intricate state of media measurement and currency today. With new currencies emerging, the industry debates the blurred line between transactional metrics and assessment measurements. Evolving consumer behavior renders impression-based metrics less accurate, while the pursuit of unduplicated reach faces challenges due to device proliferation.

Viewership and reach, though emphasized, are considered shallow metrics without ROI insights. The ad industry needs to continue to shift away from focusing purely on impressions to metrics aligned with campaign goals, considering transactional costs, viewer experience, creative quality, and outcomes.

In this state of complexification, there isn’t a one-sizefits-all solution for measurement. Ultimately, each advertiser needs to think beyond impressions to focus on the metrics that are most meaningful to their specific business objectives.

Brian Catterson, senior vice president of DR ad sales, A+E Networks: Words like "disruptive" and "messy" certainly come to mind when describing the current situation in our industry. We’re experiencing a fundamental shift in the way long-form video is being distributed, leading to significant audience fragmentation and more layers of complexity in measurement and attribution. There’s a major evolution taking place in the metrics and KPIs that brands now consider most valuable in evaluating the performance and effectiveness of their media investments. And we’re watching as Nielsen’s 70-plus-year iron-clad grip on measurement and currency across our industry begins to loosen considerably.

But I think the word I’d use to describe it all is "inspirational." Having worked in the performance marketing space my entire career, I’m inspired by the wider industry finally taking a page from our handbook and moving away from one-size-fits-all conversations around archaic age/gender demo delivery and toward more tailored conversations around measuring, evaluating, and optimizing against actual brand performance. We still have a ways to go in figuring it all out across every screen and device, but the future is bright.

Carey Chase, senior vice president of media, Modus Direct: Fuzzy. As an agency, the data we work with across the varied media measurement platforms is viewed as more directional rather than absolute. Different measurement platforms, and algorithms, actively alter the data we use to make buying decisions. All of this makes the media buying process trickier than the days of unique toll-free numbers and/or Nielsen books to post against.

Christine Georgakakis, senior vice president, advertising sales, Reelz: Fragmentation. Data is being gathered from various platforms in various ways, and there are many measurement providers available to analyze the data — but there is not one currency across the landscape.

Joseph Gray, senior vice president of DR solutions, iSpot.tv: Liberating. For decades past, the television industry has operated within the confines of a single currency and measurement solution. Now that new deterministic data is available from smart televisions and connected TV devices, our industry can benefit from deterministic state-of-the-art media measurement and currency methodologies. If you sum that up in a single word, it feels … liberating!

Fern Lee, CEO, THOR Associates: Transitional. Attribution fluctuates with omnichannel delivery of linear, digital, Amazon, CTV, OTT, and influencer campaign distribution.

Michael Lyons, chief investment officer, Juice Media: Customized. Clients have been forced to forge their own paths and seek out solutions that better fit their needs. Progressive clients have been asking for outcome-based measurement solutions for quite some time. These solutions do not currently exist in a unified fashion across mediums. This has led to a migration away from the status quo served up by Nielsen and the holding companies and have led clients to create custom solutions with innovative agencies and publishers looking to evolve their businesses.

“Opportunity! We’re seeing a trend that marketers are more focused than ever on performance — whether they have a performance background or not. CMOs are feeling the pressure to drive measurable sales. That presents an opportunity to think about the measurement of media differently and shift, in small or large ways, into performance-first strategies. Those moves will unlock learnings for brands that they didn’t know were possible.”

Delia Marshall, COO, Eicoff

Scott Morin, director, advanced advertising, Paramount: Opportunity. For reasons that have been well documented, the door has been opened for our industry to take a deep look at the way things have long been and examine if the reasons we continue to do things that way are sound, or if they are born out of factors like complacency and fear of change. Never have we seen as much disruption in this space, and disruption doesn’t occur without some level of dissatisfaction or disenchantment in the status quo.

Rich Radzik, vice president, Advocado BVS: Progress. I could have used the typical adjectives for this like fragmented, evolving, or even chaotic, but there has been progress. The industry agrees that media fragmentation and the continued erosion of linear TV viewership has made the long-standing traditional sampling techniques (Nielsen) inadequate to accurately calculate and measure the success of campaigns. There is no longer one show in town, and agencies and brands now have options to better measure meaningful outcomes across platforms. They are not just testing these new options or supplementing them but are implementing them across platforms.

David Tiberia, vice president of analytics, Bluewater: Fractured. There is literally no way to do this easily. While no one really trusted Nielsen numbers, they were consistent and universally used. TV is open. It’s a visible medium and broadcast for anyone to see and track. With the rise of streaming, there is too much hidden and proprietary data to easily measure it. Even when Nielsen stumbled, no one was able to deliver a reasonable alternative. Without some type of open standard, measuring will remain fractured and difficult to execute.

Shira Witelson, founder, RSLT: Encouraging. Despite the abundance of measurement platforms, the current state of media measurement and currency is encouraging due to the emergence of new rules and regulations that are setting the stage for more ethical measurement solutions. These regulations are helping ensure more accurate and transparent measurement practices in the industry, instilling confidence in the data-driven decisions made by advertisers and media professionals.

Direct-to-consumer and performance marketers have long used other methodologies to assess their success. What does this new universe of media currency options bring to the table that D2C marketers haven’t seen before?

Karen Kluger, founder/CEO, TouchPoint Integrated Communications: D2C marketers have always been datacentric to prove a campaign’s success, focusing on backend KPIs of sales/revenue/qualified leads. New currencies deliver deeper insights, combining backend data with frontend views/reach/engagement for a holistic view of the customer journey and identifying media touchpoints influencing their path to engagement.

These insights drive campaign optimizations, forward planning, and testing, which are essential to growth and ensuring campaigns evolve with consumer consumption habits. New currencies also confirm what we’ve known all along, which is D2C campaigns generate awareness and build brands.

Arnold: What this new universe of media currency allows us to do is better tell a complete and holistic story across all touchpoints, regardless of whether we are talking about streaming or linear. This means we can better intersect with our target audience(s) no matter where they are in their journey.

Bertodatti: Media currency is usually utilized as a secondary metric to the primary performance metrics that agencies and clients utilize. However, now that some of the new currency providers are also offering attribution methodologies, it may open additional opportunities for performance marketers to standardize across common metrics for both traditional media currency, as well as performance metrics — all by the same partner.

Brombach: The new universe of media currency options aims to unify viewership and consumption, holistically, across both traditional and streaming. Additionally, the integration of full-funnel, multitouch attribution allows for a more dynamic understanding of true audience and media impact.

Catterson: Performance brands have always tracked how their media investments impact business outcomes like CAC, web visitations, app downloads, and any number of KPIs. Now with more sophisticated measurement offerings from vendors like iSpot, VideoAmp, Comscore, and others, clients are getting access to a more robust toolset to measure the effectiveness and performance of their campaigns. From a currency standpoint, publishers are now able to step beyond demo delivery guarantees and shift to transacting and guaranteeing on the actual business metrics that really move a brand’s business forward.

Chase: It’s made the data collection and analytics part of the business as important as the media-outlet relationship part of the business. You need to have an analytics team that truly understands how the different platforms and algorithm models compare in order to optimize performance.

That said, the new methodologies overall allow us to better capture activity by "rogue" customers who don’t follow the normal marketing path but still complete transactions by searching the web after seeing a message.

Georgakakis: Performance marketers have always led the way when it comes to measurement. The new universe of media currency has brought the advanced technology to the table that allows for the ease of doing business and the dynamic optimization of advertising campaigns.

Gray: The direct-response industry, where consumer response and business outcomes can be measured and tracked back to individual TV network/dayparts, has long struggled with the fact that traditional impressions are hard to prove against a return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS).

Said another way, traditional audience-based measurement can struggle at the task of informing direct response TV media strategies. These experiences have caused many of us to feel that legacy audience measurement methodology is flawed. In contrast, smart TV and connected devices allow us to measure commercial exposures in addition to actions taken at the household level. So, TV advertising can now have the same level of accountability as digital.

We can see the correlation between commercial exposures over time and measure downstream actions like household web visits and/or app downloads. This means more branded direct-to-consumer advertisers can measure ROAS, and/or media efficiency ratios, back to specific media placements — all without having to use custom URLs or 800 numbers. This technology turns brand advertisers into direct response advertisers with key new synergies between the methodologies associated with each. The result is a new type of multitouch, deterministic attribution that is far more accurate than the probabilistic solutions of the past, paving the way for a new era of audience measurement.

Lee: It brings new customer acquisition. The new universe of options allows for marketing leadership to test new models for messaging and, in turn, customer loyalty, which leads to growth revenue. A prediction: DTC and performance marketing will soon be referred to as "Growth Revenue."

Lyons: Frankly, it is a bit of the first point. D2C clients were some of the first advertisers to rebuke the status quo of impression-based measurement in scale. They looked for accountable attribution solutions with tighter windows by channel and — for the first time — included linear as part of that measurement suite.

That was a great start and a new beginning for the way networks and publishers were held accountable for their share of marketing spend. Make no mistake: this was a massive improvement over impression-based models.

Now, we are in a world of pushing the envelope even further. Clients have seen that there are times when the individual channel silos do not equal the whole of the business. The next step in understanding the total impact of a marketing portfolio is incorporating multitouch attribution into the tech stack. This gives clients a true look at how their entire portfolio performs and gives them a greater understanding of the customer journey.

Marshall: New media currency options should unlock opportunities for D2C and performance marketers to push into audience-first strategies where they haven’t before: leveraging ACR data; pulling first-party data sets into universes with media currency; building custom audience profiles. This all represents the kind of shift forward that is necessary to truly get brands into audience-first thinking.

Morin: The size and scale of the new currency data sets — coupled with their ability to drive attribution measurement through scaled identity and exposure data — provide a better way to analyze, target, and measure campaigns. From a currency perspective, aligning currency with these new activation strategies creates total alignment of interests between all parties — the ultimate expression of partnership.

Radzik: The D2C marketers are in a much better position to adapt to the new media currencies than any other group. While basic reach-and-frequency measurements were part of their KPI metrics, they were not the most important. Since day one, DTC and performance marketers optimized and attributed based on more granular, accurate, and meaningful metrics like CPC, CPO, and — most importantly — sales conversions in real time. Many more general advertisers are deploying better KPIs that mirror what the D2C marketplace has been doing for 40 years — but it’s much harder for them to adapt. I have said this for the past 10 years: a D2C agency/brand is fully prepared and trained for any of these changes.

Tiberia: Not much yet. The de-emphasis on ratings and GRPs helps D2C agencies because we’ve always been great at delivering cost-effective impressions, but the way media is purchased never optimizes for GRPs. As more brands lean into impression loads, it will make more advertisers comfortable with response-driven and optimized TV buying methods. If in the long run, the lack of "centralized" currency creates inroads to an open standard for data sharing, then there will be real advantages for D2C marketers as response measurement could become easier and more connected.

Witelson: In recent years, the assessment of advertising effectiveness, particularly on television, has predominantly relied on two methods: using 800 numbers and tracking viewers’ IP addresses. However, both approaches have significant limitations. Relying solely on 800 numbers provides only a partial view of the effectiveness, failing to account for online engagement and conversions. This led to the adoption of the second approach, which involves tracking viewers by leveraging their home IP addresses. However, this method carries substantial risks as IP addresses can be linked to personal information, jeopardizing a brand’s reputation and consumer trust.

But there is a new, groundbreaking methodology available that harnesses the power of machine learning and first-party data. This approach offers distinct advantages that were previously unavailable to direct-to-consumer (D2C) marketers. Unlike traditional IP address tracking, this method prioritizes viewer privacy, a critical concern in today’s data-sensitive landscape. D2C marketers can now gain valuable insights without intruding into individuals’ personal information. This precision can be achieved by leveraging machine learning algorithms, enabling D2C marketers to accurately measure the impact of their TV commercials, identifying which advertisements resonate with their target audience and which ones fall short.

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