(posts_in_the_category): Media Effectiveness

Many passionate fans viewed streaming content of their favorite sport this past June and July on WatchESPN.  No, I’m not talking about World Cup futbol.  I’m talking about Wimbledon tennis.  The ATP and WTA tours play all year long, but right now is a great time of the year as Wimbledon is just behind us, and the North American hard court season leads up to the US Open.

Data now informs almost all aspects of digital media. Data management platforms (DMP) have emerged to help marketers, publishers and other businesses make sense of it all. A DMP is a data warehouse. It’s a piece of software that sucks up, sorts and houses information, then spits it out in a way that’s useful for marketers, publishers and other businesses. It’s more than a database in that it ties all activity, resulting campaign and audience data together in one, centralized location and uses it to help optimize future media buys and ad creative. It’s all about better understanding customer information. Unlike a DSP which is used to actually buy advertising based on that information, a DMP is used to store and analyze data. Information is fed from a marketer’s DMP to its DSP (Demand-Side Platform) to help inform ad buying decisions. 

• Increasingly large audiences, especially tablet audiences, make scale a positive factor
• High advertising costs, especially for tablet video ads, have a moderating effect 
• Increasing flexibility in pricing models – although CPM is the dominant model, Cost per View (CPV), Cost per Engagement (CPE) and Cost per Completed View (CPCV) are making inroads
• Flexibility of mobile video ads to be used for both branding and direct response advertising 

Perhaps I have been party to a lot of conversations in the last few weeks, where the ONLY thing being discussed is the metrics. The numbers. And perhaps my last 10 days in the USA has amplified this sense that we are becoming obsessed by things that can be measured. 

As a golfer I love the game for a LOT of reasons. The numbers and statistics are a tiny part of that. Yet the upcoming coverage of the US Masters seems to be focussed only on the numbers - who has the best sand-save %, the person with the best green in regulation or fairways hit. It is as if this magnificent game can be cut and dissected and predicted if we can only look at more and more statistics.

Media effectiveness in today’s multi-screen, multi-channel, always-on world implies that advertisers need to be highly focused on what media they buy and how this media is used to offer useful and relevant content at moments that matter most to consumers. Effective media drive engagement actions along the consumers’ paths to interacting with brands (discovery, exploration, purchase, engagement, loyalty, advocacy).  It has been shown that memorable brand interactions today (including non-purchase activities) tend to drive more interactions tomorrow. Additionally, a rewarding buying experience today tends to lead to repeat purchases in the future. Currently, most advanced cross-channel attribution solutions ignore (or incorporate after the fact) those two effects and as a result underestimate the effects of those dynamic interactions.