The multiplicity of goals and KPIs in the advertising industry distracts us all from what matters most, says Waseem Afzal
You receive a client brief. Your multi-disciplinary teams collaborate to produce an integrated media recommendation that transcends screens with bespoke content at the crux, along with a channel-specific measurement plan. You believe you have followed best practice to the last detail, yet you may well have just missed a trick.
If there is one thing technology is doing, it is complicating our landscape and raising challenging questions on how we measure results across platforms and screens. The absence of a single-metric measurement framework is certainly keeping marketers awake at night.
The problem is more deeply rooted into our industry culture than we think. Media measurement is broken from one channel to the next, each one with its own suite of metrics. And few are those combining digital key performance indicators with other media metrics to define a direct link to business growth.
We appear to have forgotten the old adage of ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. In doing so and maintaining a silo approach to measurement, we are potentially limiting our ability to assess and deliver a holistic performance and, therefore, success to our clients.
Media performance metrics have long been a moving goal post and an area where publishers have often been creative. Our industry should aim higher and prioritise metrics that compel publishers to deliver on business or brand success. The problem doesn’t just rest with them though, it has also a lot to do with how early agencies involve them in the process.
If digital video was the fastest-growing media property last year, it was also where there was the least investment in proprietary research. As an industry, we are ignoring the holistic impact of video across multiple device screens by not taking steps to quantify it. We know digital video delivers incremental reach but the more pressing questions about length by device, emotions to a video or frequency remain woefully unanswered.
For example, when a regular 30-second television commercial with no added interactivity is used online as well, a viewer will only be able to spend a maximum of 30 seconds with it. However, by collaborating with a media partner and better understanding objectives beyond reach, we can create deeper engagement and entice consumers to spend more time with this video thanks to the added interactivity. More and more, digital video performance is measured beyond views to include engagement, shareability and favourability – all brand KPIs.
There have been plenty of innovations in the way we deliver messages to consumers, with multiple layers of data to drive targeting. Yet, we are still relying on traditional approaches when it comes to measuring digital investments. We must learn from e-commerce businesses or brands that have digitised their sales channels, as they have already established a single-metric measurement model focused on revenue to inform their marketing investments.
So what’s the alternative? For starters, we need to establish a standardised methodology for channel-agnostic measurement focuses on measuring and optimising outputs. The approach should combine web analytics with paid digital media but we can go further. Rather than focusing on measuring traffic on owned platforms, we should measure uplift in one of the brand matrices. Monitoring engagement is certainly important but not as much as tracking positive sentiment and intent. Lastly, how much is a large share of voice worth to a client compared with a larger market share? Wouldn’t a positive uplift in business growth be a better descriptor of success?
Agencies have relied on media performance measures to define their contribution to clients’ performance for long enough. The market has evolved to a point where this is no longer enough. Not only would this new approach allow for the more accurate benchmarking of success, it would also enable us to negotiate true media value and establish a proper buying currency.
This is no pipe dream and we’re already making moves in this direction. We have established several partnerships with key media owners to address measurement issues by creating bespoke research. This has helped shift our perspective from ‘budget allocation to business benefits’ when receiving that brief.
By strengthening our efforts to streamline measurement, we are leveraging our proprietary data management platform to combine data sets across all touchpoints. This is making our trading desks even more powerful, with predictive modelling as the driving force for ongoing optimisation. This, in turn, positively drives investment efficiencies and impacts our clients’ business growth, the success measure we should all ultimately value the most.
Because of its slow adoption, our industry has been guilty of treating digital media as an add-on, isolating it from the main media act of television and print. This compartmentalised thinking is not only outdated and blinkered, it is also limiting our ability to achieve our clients’ ambitions. Today, technology has placed a raft of platforms at the centre of people’s media lives and brand ecosystems. It’s high time we bring our measurement model, and thinking, in line with this reality.
Waseem Afzal is the executive director-integrated digital solutions at OMD UAE