MAD//Fest Highlights: The Quest for Cross-Media Audience Measurement – The Next Chapter

Firstly, Martyn, our UK lead talked about reaching for the audience measurement reset button.

The years 2020 and 2021 have given us all pause for thought and reflection, whether in our daily or work lives. Just as the smog-ridden crowded commute may now be seen as an option rather than the only way to get work done, in marketing, one can reflect on ‘how things were’ as well, and ask, was everything perfect before 2020?

For example, in digital marketing, you are probably familiar with statements like ‘the right ad, right time, right person’, ‘the year of mobile’ and so on – but was that all really perfect and infallibly serving the reach-building aims of marketers?

This challenge around digital audience insight is exacerbated by factors such as the demise of the cookie, the rise of privacy initiatives, increased walled gardens, fast changing media consumption habits and the ever growing number of devices used by consumers to access the internet.

The emergence of digital as an upper funnel branding option for brands has meant that marketing campaigns need to span both analog and digital channels to have a chance of optimising reach of the maximum relevant audience. But still, between all media channels there are gaps in audience measurement which continue to grow.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, we called for an Audience Measurement Reset on the stage at MAD//Fest.

So what does a reset entail? As a research and technology company, we advocate a combination of market research, large independent panels, statistics and modern day computer science which will help us fill the knowledge gaps we know exist! In fact our preferred method is to make use of the trusted and long standing ‘linear’ currencies for TV (e.g BARB), and carefully complement it with robust digital audience measurement.

The benefits of a reset? Well, it’s simple – everyone wins. Marketers can get a very accurate view of cross channel audience reach, which in turn helps agencies with budget efficiency and optimal incremental delivery on top of linear channels. Content owners can better quantify, and let’s be honest, sell, the value of the audience they bring to their advertiser clients.

So, just as when your laptop starts to work less efficiently, a good reset usually reboots to optimum performance – we strongly feel the same is possible with a new approach to cross-media audience measurement!

Then, Tom and Joe, our UK Sales leads talked about: Reach is our new language for cross-media measurement

The boundaries between TV and digital have been shrinking over the last decade, for both consumers and marketers. However, we think that a language barrier exists between both the TV & digital eco-systems amongst brands, agencies and publishers. This language barrier is beginning to hamper investment and trust in emerging media spaces where new and valuable audiences can be found.

One area where this language barrier is both particularly obvious is in video/moving images and more specifically CTV. Most CTV platforms have their roots firmly in the digital ecosystem so it is no surprise that they also speak the “language” of digital – impressions, hyper-targeting, brand safety, viewability etc. The challenge we’re observing is that those responsible for buying and understanding the value of CTV at agencies & brands are those with a firm background in linear TV. These AV specialists speak the language of TV and that language is one of GRP’s, Frequency, incrementality and perhaps most importantly, reach.

There are already some bridges being built to address this problem; both sides have already recognised the power of being able to measure, communicate and prove the incremental reach of CTV alongside linear channels. This is good progress. But the reality is that there is a known lack of a common TV-style cross-channel audience reach measurement system.

This absence of measurement creates a gap in marketer and agency planning and thus investment – as it is likely to be the case that good pockets of quality audience are going undocumented on the buy and sell-side. The potential business impact on unmeasured publishers is obvious and are advertisers missing out on sales as relevant consumers are not being reached by their messages at all?!

One very digitally rooted business that we work with has seen great business benefit in their adoption of the ‘language of TV’ in order to help market the efficacy of their CTV offering. They recently published a compelling case study demonstrating this, which focuses on the incremental households reached on top of linear TV. More info is available on SpotX’s website.

The language barrier that exists between digital and TV is not just reserved for the sell-side either, this is a (solvable) problem for brands and agencies too.

It’s hard to put an exact date on when this started to happen but the transition from digital being a performance-led, direct response channel into one that is now pursuing upper funnel branding budgets is now very much a reality, not just a trend.

This has been advanced by platforms & publishers developing compelling environments to watch video, as well as valuable audiences moving away from linear TV into these new, and therefore increasingly important spaces.

Despite the increasing importance of the growing audiences in these new digital environments, it remains challenging for brands to quantify and optimise the audience opportunity, due to a lack of comprehensive measurement. When discussing the addressable market at MadFest, Sir Martin Sorrell commented that bridging the gap between analog and digital on the agency side “…is a deep seated structural problem…” and that agencies need to move “from the traditional part of the business to the digital”.

At AudienceProject we believe the answer can be found by bringing traditional measurement and research principles into the digital world in order to make sense of the new spaces that are available to buyers. At the moment, we would say (of course!) the best opportunity to do this is to bridge the gap with a cross-media audience measurement solution. Our platform measures the unique, overlapping and incremental reach of campaigns, aiming to ensure that media budgets are spent efficiently and effectively. So the first step towards learning the ‘reach language’, is to start understanding cross-media measurement in order to be able to improve accuracy and the cost per reach point.