MeasureUp has a long track record for bringing together marketers, advertising professionals, industry experts and measurement specialists to be inspired, debate the hot topics and share best practices for digital advertising measurement. On 25th October, MeasureUp was back in-person and attendees experienced a day filled with networking, insights into marketing outcomes and new thinking on the science of advertising effectiveness measurement.
A big thanks to our sponsors Azerion, Flashtalking, Google, Integral Ad Science, Meta and Samba TV for enabling us to hold this event. Sincere thanks also to our 23 amazing speakers, who shared their measurement journeys and ground-breaking work.
Throughout the day we asked our audience to weigh in on some of the hot topics of the day in a series of polls sponsored by Azerion. Here is a summary of the poll results and overview of the day. Presentation and video content can be found here.
Sustainability is the next wave of business transformation
MeasureUp 2022 opened with a robust discussion on sustainability and the path to decarbonising advertising. Our panel of experts from Scope 3, PWC, GroupM and SeenThis discussed how the industry is developing carbon metrics and supply chain analysis tools to understand our footprint in a bid to decarbonise.
The panel discussed how the Australian advertising industry is entering a new marketplace where having a sustainability plan is no longer feel-good, virtue signalling but critical business strategy. We need a whole systems approach to get this right - but we shouldn't let perfection be the enemy of good. Caroline Cosgrove, Partner at PwC, says “We need to think about scope 3 in a systems way. While the focus is on carbon, we need to be aware of other sustainable development goals such as nature, health and other societal impacts. And it’s important that we just get on with it; we can’t afford to wait for the perfect data or solutions. Almost every estimate is better than zero. It’s a starting point which you can continue to iterate.”
Marketers should adjust expectations for tough economic times ahead but that doesn’t mean media can’t work
Henry Innis, Chief Executive at Mutinex, presented why it’s important for marketers to be modelling the macro-economy. Henry presented data from Mutinex’s large, market mix aggregated data that builds in factors across external effects, internal effects, seasonality, pricing, advertising and events to reflect dynamics of the business. COVID had a significant impact in 2020 that has begun to ease off in 2022 as lockdowns were phased out, with inflation replacing it as the key impactful factor. Inflation is increasingly placing pressure on sales, with the effect size beginning to approach 2021 COVID levels in size and scale across the market. ROI has early indicators of correlated downturns across channels, meaning finance and marketing should re-adjust expectations in 2022.
Paul Sinkinson, Managing Director at Analytic Partners, provided insights from aggregated results from testing 100s of billions in spend. In his presentation on ‘Driving Omnichannel Success for Commerce’, Paul presented findings that show increasing physical or digital presence can lead to higher returns for retailers and that media is 3x more important for driving ecommerce revenue than it is for driving bricks and mortar. Holistic measurement shows that brand campaigns will drive the biggest win (brands with the highest ROIs have at least 30% share of brand spend), but he advises don’t do just brand, as a mix of performance and equity using multiple creatives and channels is most effective.
The industry is aggressively pursuing successful measurement beyond the cookie
Our MeasureUp speakers demonstrated how marketers are adjusting measurement techniques to continue successful measurement post cookie retirement. In our conference poll sponsored by Azerion, 34% of our audience of measurement experts voted that a combination of strategies will be the way forward for successful ad measurement, while a further 24% voted that the use of first-party identity data will be the most important strategy.
Tiffany Foxwell, Head of Client Services at Flashtalking by Mediaocean, demonstrated how the ad server is emerging as a solution for advertisers to safeguard their campaign measurement and optimisations. Tiffany outlined that cookie deprecation is not a problem for the future with evidence from current client case studies showing high rates of cookie rejection, skewed reach and frequency results and understated attributed revenue. A panel of experts from Mindshare, Streamotion, Merkle and Adobe discussed how the buy-side ad server is a central connection point and piece of the tech stack that works across multiple platforms and helps integrate an advertisers’ ID graph.
Nico Neumann, Assistant Professor at Melbourne Business School says no marketer should miss third-party cookies. Nico presented new research examining the accuracy of audience data from leading data providers for targeting to niche audiences. The study examined deterministic versus probabilistic segments as well as benchmarking off-the-shelf audience results compared to 1st party data targeting from publishers. Key findings of the study indicated that using the legacy cookie-based model provided a fragment of the desired audience and underreported the contributed performance, while contextual alignment proved successful and scalable and working with partners who have a direct, permissioned relationships with target audiences was effective.
Andy Ford, Head of Marketing Science at Meta, presented how investment in data is unlocking growth for clients who are adjusting techniques to enter the next phase of measurement in privacy compliant ways. Andy had an insightful interview with Moe Kiss, Marketing Data Lead at Canva, where Moe shared how Canva are transitioning measurement techniques. On the future use of multi-touch attribution at Canva, Moe said “I have been involved in building many attribution models and helped build Canva’s in-house multi-touch attribution model and it’s taken me many years of trying to claw against what’s going on the industry to realise it was kind of broken in the first place. The doesn’t mean it doesn’t potentially have some uses.” Moe went on to say that the combination of techniques Canva are using now (brand measurement, experimentation, MMM) are the key to their future measurement success, rather than the purported silver bullet of MTA, which may not have ever been fit for purpose. Moe also shared some useful tips for setting up a measurement framework.
Pulling our socks up on digital ad creative
In our conference poll sponsored by Azerion, 30% of our audience of measurement experts voted that tailoring advertising for the format or screen was the creative best practice that needs the most improvement, following by ad testing for 21%.
Nicole Jones, Senior Vice President of Growth and Strategy at Kantar shared recent consumer research that showed Australia is not seeing the same growth in consumer advertising equity as seen in many other markets. Australian consumer attitudes to advertising in regard to elements such as trust, entertainment, quality, usefulness and innovation are more muted than in other markets and online formats need to work hard to become less intrusive. Nicole highlighted the critical importance of both creative content and media context and showed examples of winning creative that has cut through.
Opportunities in ad attention measurement, but not the silver bullet
Developments in the attention economy are providing marketers with additional insights on their advertising investments. In our conference poll sponsored by Azerion, 39% of the audience voted that the biggest opportunity for the use of ad attention data is in optimising creative, followed by 26% voting that media planning decisions were the biggest opportunity.
In a panel discussion moderated by Yasmin Sanders, Managing Director at Samba TV, our panel of experts from KPMG, ThinkTV, Playground xyz and Amplified Intelligence represented a range of industry perspectives on whether focusing on ad attention really does solve marketing effectiveness. Karen Halligan, Partner at KPMG, provided a reality check on the industry hype surrounding ad attention measurement, sharing her experience that CMO’s and CFO’s are not talking about ad attention and are far more concerned with indicators aligned to growing their business. Karen said that moving away from traditional terminology centred on tangible business outcomes could be doing a disservice to the industry. The panel agreed that a global currency for ad attention is not viable right now, but local standardisation might be possible in the future. The panel discussed the range of insights available from ad attention measurement and that agencies and media owners would be better to experiment with the technique at the moment, rather than focus on creating a currency.
Building strong brands requires more than just attention. Dr Shannon Bosshard Research and Neuroscience Specialist at ARN, presented primary brain research he has conducted in ARN’s Neurolab. Shannon reinforced that advertising effectiveness requires brands going beyond attention. He demonstrated how memory encoding and influencing consumer attitudes are needed to drive purchase intent and that understanding consumers and the effectiveness of messaging requires multiple metrics.
Content from MeasureUp 2022 can be found here.
We'll be back in 2023! Hold the date of 20th September for MeasureUp 2023.