11:40am
The market trend is toward placing more and more importance on outcomes, especially one-year sales lift. The traditional brand-lift measures (ad recall, brand awareness, brand consideration, purchase intent, recommendation, etc.) are to some extent being gradually replaced or augmented by sales lift. This may reflect growing suspicion of questionnaire-based methods, although they have been proven predictive of long-term sales. Many of the new people in the field do not remember all of the institutional knowledge that has been learned over the years.
There is a drift due to privacy concerns toward obfuscation of household/person-specific measures, including the idea of using Virtual IDs (VIDs) first raised by the walled gardens. This does some damage to audience measurements but is a showstopper for outcomes—a brick wall toward which the industry is accelerating as if it can’t see that wall.
In media selection and especially in media optimization, is there a way to optimize for outcomes? Yes, it can be done by using historical outcome proofs and norms by media subtypes and even by individual media vehicles (programs, websites, apps). Recently the industry has focused on attention as the potential silver bullet to use in quality weighting some impressions up and some down. However, the evidence suggests that attention is better at optimizing top-of-funnel but not all that useful for bottom funnel. There are other quality weights like attention which can also be used, including resonance, search, website visit, store visit, and historical ROAS averages; TRA even used the skew to swing purchasers as a proven way of increasing sales list/ROAS.
In this panel discussion, some of the most knowledgeable media researchers in the world will be considering what are the priority needs of the industry at this time, in terms of measurement and optimization. Is there a “good enough” that can save the industry money, or does that fall apart when outcomes demand high degrees of accuracy? If privacy-led obfuscation relaxes the need for accuracy in the minds of practitioners for audience measurement, will they demand the removal of all obfuscation on outcomes measurements? How can such a disconnect work? Panelists include:
• Bill Harvey, Chairman, RMT (Moderator)
• David Algranati, Chief Innovation Officer, Comscore
• Howard Shimmel, Head of Strategy, datafuelX
• Josh Chasin, Principal, Knot Simpler
• Pete Doe, Chief Research Officer, Nielsen
• Radha Subramanyam, Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS
