During the development of the Attribution Buyers Guide we heard from marketing professionals at companies large and small. Without exception, they share a very similar frustration. Measuring the effectiveness of marketing and finding the right-time insights to improve the ROI of your marketing spend has never been easy 鈥� even when most of our marketing was limited to a few television networks, radio and newspapers. For most, the problem has only gotten more challenging with the explosion of television networks, satellite radio, digital advertising, email, social networks, and the other millions of modern day distractions competing for customer鈥檚 attention.
It鈥檚 become clear over the past few years that the old ways of measuring the performance of single channels just don鈥檛 cut the mustard anymore. Today鈥檚 marketing pros are looking to optimize their entire marketing mix and need to understand how each component part may magnify or hinder the impact of others.
黑料社入口 Mix Model鈥檚 (MMM) ability to measure all channels, despite its shortcomings, is in fact its primary reason for (still) being. If you鈥檝e read the preceding articles in this series, you鈥檙e familiar with the deficiencies of MMM to deliver timely, granular and accurate insights. It鈥檚 easier to measure a single channel. Examples include MTAs themselves, which do a good job providing granular insights within digital (albeit some are victim to serious biases). There is an entire category of lift studies providers who measure results from a single channel.
We know, however, that consumers do not consume advertising in a single channel. Measuring a single medium in isolation will miss the ways in which different messages in different media interact. A vendor can miscount the effectiveness of the media they are measuring when the media succeeds only in combination with another media which they might not measure. This has been proven to be a flaw. Specifically, there are documented cases where the digital messages only succeeded in conjunction with a TV message. In this case, the digital media reinforced the TV message. However, looked at from the vantage point of digital only measurement, the marketer would erroneously conclude that cutting TV significantly while increasing digital significantly would have positive results. However, sales would actually go down.
鈥淎s our marketing mix expanded we needed a way to see the collective role of different media. Decision-making shouldn鈥檛 be political, but all parts of the plan can鈥檛 always go up. We found that the only way to make the right decision was with a holistic view of our marketing to understand where to put the next dollar."
- Larry Gamache, Carfax
With a proper omni-channel measurement, the marketer can see how to slightly reduce frequency while maintaining reach to fuel more spending with digital. A marketer only responsible for a specific media channel may consider a channel specific attribution helpful, but in fact, the nature of consumers interacting with multiple media channels makes it risky. Marketers have expressed frustration because some vendors sell attribution by channel, and do not have truly integrated results. Marketers are frustrated by the costs and confusion resulting from using multiple studies across different channels. Marketers should aspire to implement a common platform across all media channels that applies an apples-to-apples methodology and recognizes the interdependencies of multiple media touching a consumer.
For channel-level budget planning and optimization, it has been clear to most marketers that they need to understand the relative strengths of media channels using a common yard stick. Using a common methodology to understand digital鈥檚 impact on the business as TV鈥檚 impact, for instance, avoids subjective and political decision-making regarding performance and budget allocations. It stands to reason that a common methodology allows companies to be data-driven rather than making decisions based on instinct or who has the most influence in the board room. Omni-channel attribution is about more than a common yard-stick. It is about a consumer centric understanding that people are influenced by a combination of messages across multiple media. Without measuring the full picture, marketers can get the wrong answers.
Additional impact is unlocked when optimizations within each channel are made within context of activity in other channels 鈥� for example, optimal frequency within mobile might be 4x for a given audience when there鈥檚 no TV running, but it might be 2x when there鈥檚 a parallel TV campaign running. Industry leaders will have the ability to optimize to those interdependencies and relationships in the years ahead.
We hope you鈥檙e finding this series of articles about attribution helpful and informative. If you have any questions, or want to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us. We鈥檙e hard at work on the next installment of the Attribution Buyers Guide in which we鈥檒l be discussing the need to find a partner who is independent and not beholden to the performance of any media channel.