Webinar Recap: Uncovering business value from cross-platform audience measurement

Consumer behaviour and media platforms are evolving faster than measurement can keep up. Therefore, Ebiquity has developed a business tool, Panorama, to help advertisers better understand the metrics that matter when trying to deliver more effective advertising campaigns.

In this webinar, Martyn Radford, Director of Research & Insight at Ebiquity, Martyn Bentley, Commercial Director UK at AudienceProject and Mogens Storgaard Jakobsen, CCO at AudienceProject, discuss the challenges that arise from the ever-changing media landscape and how advertisers can be prepared for success in this new marketing era.

Is the death of third-party cookies the advertisers’ nightmare?

Yes, but it’s a wonderful nightmare!

A couple of years back, life was incredibly simple. Everyone accessed the internet through a desktop browser, and advertisers could count on cookies to determine how many people saw their ads. Measurement and frequency control was easy, just like all the other things that cookies were used for.

Fast forward just a few years, and complexity started to arrive. People began accessing the internet from desktops, smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, etc. – and from various devices at once. At our last count, on average, people in the UK access the internet from nine devices (device usage insight study).

However, though third-party cookies helped measure campaigns across devices, they were never a good long-term solution due to advancing privacy regulations. Now that we know this, new technologies and statistical models have been developed to provide a holistic overview of de-duplicated reach and frequency across platforms. Therefore, the demise of third-party cookies is a wonderful nightmare because it challenges the rules of the game but opens the door for innovation and new technologies.

Cross-media audience measurement has evolved. Have the questions you’re being asked by advertisers also changed over the last couple of years?

I think they have.

Right now, I’m quite inspired by a client meeting we had recently. This client had a target audience from 21 to 65 years old. In this case, the question was: how can I reach the most people possible?

Historically, linear TV has been a great medium to achieve massive reach. Therefore, this client allocated most of the media ad spend on linear TV. The campaign results showed a heavily skewed reach distribution, typical for linear TV. When combining this with frequency, the client got incredibly skewed campaign pressure numbers, where around 65% of the budget was spent on reaching the 65+ age group.

For that client, these results were a convincing argument for adding more digital channels to the media plan. Consequently, that decision creates the cross-media measurement challenge and poses a new set of questions:

• How do I apply various channels to a media plan?
• How do I allocate the media budget among the channels for optimal reach?
• Which channels reach my target audience most efficiently?

All these questions can be answered when advertisers embark on the measurement journey and are able to get a holistic view of de-duplicated reach and frequency across all their media channels.

You describe measurement as a journey. What do advertisers have to gain from this journey?

Well, it all starts with knowing what you are doing and understanding where you want to get to.

When an advertiser starts measuring, in order to optimise, it is crucial to start simple and build up gradually. It is like joining a gym: the first thing is usually to take a basic but important reading, like your weight, and then design and optimise the training programme for continuous improvements, towards the desired outcome.

The same goes for investing in audiences. Usually, the first and most crucial measurement to take is to understand how many people see your ads. This question is actually fairly simple to answer (with the right partners). Then with that initial understanding in hand, advertisers can optimise campaigns based on how many ad impressions truly reach the target audience across channels and how accurately each partner supplies the audience. The next question would then be: how do I allocate my marketing budget to optimise the cost of reaching the right people?

It is basically a journey of continuous improvement and optimisation through understanding campaign insights. Further steps on the ‘measurement journey’ can be looking at effects, such as brand lift and sales lift improvements – again, via measurement.

Overall the ‘gain’ is efficiency, and hopefully more sales!

What does AudienceProject bring to the table?

What we bring to the table is our support, and data, for clients looking to improve their media performance through cross-media audience measurement.

We are not the analysts in the equation (that would be Ebiquity), but we try to encourage simplicity of thinking. So, we have clients that may initially look at just two primary KPIs, for example, reach and accuracy. We have already touched on reach, but for accuracy, we bring otherwise unknown data to the table, like audience affinity/accuracy of the campaign media.

The advertiser or agency can then look at which partners are good at providing the target audience and allocate their budget to them while reducing spending with partners who index poorly for that particular audience. Over time, this will improve the value for money and, most likely, the reach too.

Learn more

Want to start your measurement journey? Learn more about AudienceProject’s cross-media audience measurement platform and sign up for a free demo here.