The Measurement of Change
By Andy Pearch | Written for IDS, 2008
The impact of digital media has brought significant change in the way that people access and interact with their media communications.
As advertisers begin to recognise the fresh and seemingly limitless opportunities that digital can offer, all media measurement companies must seek to change, expand and improve business strategies and practices to adapt to this demanding new environment.
Media Sense believes the challenge now is to develop new mechanisms and metrics to examine the quality and the efficiency of advertising campaigns across all platforms – broadcast, print, digital, word of mouth, in-store and experiential – and deliver meaningful value to marketing and the procurement teams.
The emerging media planning model
The traditional top-down media plan – to create rapid awareness using television as the primary medium – is dying out. The old way is rapidly being replaced by “seeded” campaigns, which deliberately focus on a discrete, relatively well-defined audience to establish a communications platform, achieved predominantly via use of the digital medium. From this base, the campaign idea is developed and spread to a broader base of consumers, utilising other media and frequently reaching a broader base through television. Some of the most exciting and engaging media planning work today turns the traditional model of media communications on its head. The web enables an increasing number of campaign messages to multiply almost organically, and actively encourages media channel and message testing like never before.
These ideas are not new, of course. “Media-neutral planning” gained currency around five years ago. Advertisers expect their media plans to revolve around various consumer touchpoints. Advertisers expect their messaging ideas to be adaptable and integrated with relevance into each medium. As expectations have risen, digital advertising has grown rapidly in importance within the communications framework, and the limitations of broadcast and print technology in delivering equivalent effectiveness and functionality become increasingly obvious.
The digital media are delivering a set of USPs, which their competition cannot. They create a genuine dialogue with the consumer and a greater feeling of involvement with brands, which leads to strong brand loyalty and advocacy. They deliver personalised and highly targeted communication, which eliminates wastage by mapping actual behaviour and interests. The internet is both a marketing route and a route to market, powered by search marketing which gives people exactly what they want on their terms. Then there is innovation: the digital media sector is continually creating new tools and applications to make life easier for the digital consumer and brand owner. And online is more measurable – not just clicks, indirect and direct sales but also time spent and depth of contact. The digital media enable advertisers to see how much engagement their audience has with their ad at minimum capital outlays, thereby minimising risk and delivering ROI.
No longer an adjunct to marketing communication, more and more advertisers are learning to put digital at the heart of their communications programme.
Traditional measurement under strain
Measurement firms have recognised that current methods of auditing the effectiveness and efficiency of campaigns are quickly becoming outmoded. Compelling creative can be adapted to multiple video distribution channels, and achieve far higher awareness levels than can be measured by analogue head-counting. Branded content activity tends to be bespoke each time, and therefore standard performance metrics do not apply. When an agency negotiates a sponsorship alongside paid-for airtime or space, it is no longer possible to accurately or discreetly benchmark media value, as the deals are necessarily interconnected.
The Cadburys Gorilla ad is not only an iconic piece of communication, it also comes to symbolise speed at which advertising communication is altering. The Gorilla promotion received low support on television before very quickly being migrated onto the digital platform. Once online its popularity exploded and it rapidly established a life of its own on YouTube. Consumers became actively involved in the campaign and whisked it off into yet another direction, creating their own online spoofs of the ad. Analogue media owners then became involved, as some radio stations made their own versions and published them online as a marketing tool. Gorilla is a phenomenon – there is no point in applying the standard tests to a campaign such as this because the metrics simply will not disclose any information about this sort of impact.
The more traditional methods of measuring the reach or weight of a campaign – where a set top box simply counts the number of people in a room when a television is on – are no longer fit for purpose or sufficiently sophisticated to reflect the habits of today’s mobile and sophisticated consumer.
The buying community is out of step
The Gorilla ad is a unique creative idea and a pure example of the flexibility of digital media, where a campaign can originate, change or be tweaked almost instantly. How ironic, then, it is that television advertisers are penalised for making changes. In this emerging climate where television is increasingly being challenged by digital media, this is the wrong mindset.
The effectiveness of television advertising is not in question – it has not been lessened – but as an advertising medium it is increasingly being put under pressure by other media which offer a clear set of benefits, and TV companies must therefore adapt and work hard to keep their share of advertising revenue. The TV purchasing chain now looks very outdated and very clunky in this context.
But this example is not the only cause for concern. A bigger worry is the excessive concentration on “implementation” in the industry, which has increased the distance between people creating content and those negotiating the advertising deals and choosing the spots. Media buyers and media owners have become dislocated from the marketing decision-makers and concomitantly much closer to the financial and purchasing sector. In contrast, digital agencies ensure that they have a strong relationship with both the marketing community, the creative community and the technicians. Clients are engaged by the opportunities afforded by the digital sector, and bored by the commoditised approach of the analogue media.
The media owners, the agencies and the media auditors have a shared responsibility for reversing this self-inflicted rift. The real danger here is that increasingly the performance of an agency is judged and remunerated on cost parameters rather than the actual contribution to a client’s business. With fees pushed hard by clients armed with auditing and procurement tools, agencies look inevitably towards the media owners to support their profitability. If agencies and media owners become increasingly inter-dependent financially, they will become increasingly isolated from the client community.
The concentration on pricing among advertisers and agencies is becoming increasingly pervasive to the point where the debate on quality of communication has become dangerously sidelined. Discussions between buyers and sellers regarding the qualitative objectives of a campaign have become facile, concentrating on hygiene factors like dayparts, centre breaks and positions in break. Very few advertisers are receiving exceptional qualitative performance. Instead there is a narrower concentration around the average, which is only natural when advertisers are setting their agencies benchmark targets which correspond to their competitors’ delivery. Right now, there does not seem to be a media agency or a media owner that is defining quality – surely a missed opportunity.
The appetite for change in the analogue media trading community is evident, but the ability to change seems absent. The stakes are perhaps just too high – media owners are unlikely to challenge the status quo because of the power of the media buying groups and the pervasiveness of government regulation, while the big media buying agencies are happy to continue to play the volume game which has served them so well for the past 10 years.
But Media Sense does not see this lasting. The successful organisations in the future will be those which blend speed and agility with the capability to ride with change. The assets of muscle and volume are often allied with excessive control systems and micro-management processes – a losing combination in a changing world.
Media Sense and media management
All measurement companies stand at a crossroads. There are two directions in which they could go, given the changes and pressures described here. One way would be to become more efficient at using the existing measurement systems to benchmark performance, and to adopt a more forensic approach to identify the media value which cannot be easily measured by the measurement currencies. An alternative route is to go upstream, accepting that the world has become more complex and sophisticated, and to look at ways of generating more value and productivity out of clients’ communications budgets, embracing the digital media and striving to measure things differently. This latter direction is the course Media Sense is navigating.
In the future, it will become less important to get the lower end of pricing within a media owner’s inventory because the smarter advertisers will be driving value by spending their money more flexibly across the myriad of channels available to them. It will become crucial to get the optimum blend of cost and access across the most effective media mix to deliver cost effectively against your objectives. This means advertisers, agencies and the media auditors will need to adopt and adjust to more complex models and data sets, in order to reveal the effectiveness and efficiency of a particular campaign.
At Media Sense, one of our major tasks is to expose and highlight the myriad opportunities that the market can offer to an advertiser, to demonstrate how the widening range of price points within the market might be best exploited for better value. Rather than focussing on relative price (performance vs the pool rate) we encourage our clients to look at absolute value, communication quality and consumer response.
So, media advisors must continually adapt and develop their products to meet the new and rapidly evolving challenges that digital media presents. This means introducing more tailored metrics to replace standardised approaches to campaign evaluation – a standard set of generic metrics will no longer do. We have to become more sensitive to what has been planned, what the campaign aims and objectives are before we start to evaluate campaign quality, cost and efficiency.
Embracing change
The digital media are a great force for change in the industry. They are enabling a completely new approach to media planning. They are exciting clients around new applications and engagement models. They are joining up creativity with execution once again. All this serves to expose the limitations of the traditional media, their trading systems and their evaluation metrics – and will force them to change.
The message is that digital must be at the heart of all company strategies – media owners, agencies and measurement companies – if they are to fully understand and exploit the digital revolution.