A rose by any name will smell as sweet, sure. But attribution by any name doesn’t work the same.
Marketers are trying to figure out how their ad budgets are actually working for them. Just don’t call it multitouch attribution (MTA). Or perhaps don’t call it attribution at all.
Madan Bharadwaj, Co-Founder and CTO of Measured, a startup offering marketing measurement and incrementality testing (just don’t call it multitouch attribution), said he uses “attribution 2.0.” But that that nomenclature is being shot down too. The company is moving more toward framing campaign measurement as “contribution reporting” rather than attribution, he said.
“Contribution reporting” helps marketers understand that the analytics chronicle an overall channel’s contribution to sales, rather than attribution reports that assign credit to individual impressions or close the loop on specific customer journeys.
Parachute, the bedding and home décor brand, began working with Measured in late 2020 largely because of the company’s jaded (or experienced, if you prefer) take on data-driven attribution, said VP of Growth Ian Yung.
“One reason why I actually went with Measured as opposed to some of the other players was that they were likewise explicit in their belief that MTA [multitouch attribution] is not the best approach,” Yung said.
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Pre-pandemic, Great Wolf Lodge devoted the majority of its media spend to programmatic. But as the family resort rebuilds after the pandemic, it’s turning to TV and making a splash with a brand-building campaign.
Upper-funnel metrics are now front-and-center for the hospitality-focused brand.
Earlier this month, Great Wolf Lodge went live with an omnichannel campaign introducing viewers to the family resort. It worked with Horizon Media on media planning and buying and Erich & Kallman on creative.
The resort, founded in 1997, started advertising on regional television in 2014. Once the company built up its brand recognition with an audience at scale, it broke into national TV in 2018 – and started spanning the purchase funnel.
“Since [2018] we’ve been really focused on understanding our [audience] targets’ media consumption behaviors, and then really mirroring our media plans [accordingly] through KPIs and creative,” said Brooke Patterson, SVP of brand experiences at Great Wolf Lodge.
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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Neej Gore, chief data officer of Zeta Global.
The potential of data-driven marketing is entering a brave new world. The explosion in consumer data availability over the last few years has only been exceeded by marketers’ aspirations to find new ways to advance customer relationships and improve value exchanges. But as complexity increases, marketers must look toward a solution that simplifies data-driven marketing: agile intelligence.
Agile intelligence is a technology-enabled approach that helps marketers visualize, explore and take action against the most pressing business questions without depending on other departments, such as IT. Sitting at the intersection of business and marketing, agile intelligence provides easy cross-pollination of market, customer and location data through a Customer Data Platform (CDP), enabling real-time decisions.
Here are four ways agile intelligence can shape not just your marketing strategy but also your overall business strategy.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
The 1% (No, Not That 1%)
Hotel and travel companies are following in the footsteps of others that have embraced advertising revenue, including buy-now-pay-later companies, retailers and delivery startups … not to mention stores that have started repurposing any old surface as a distribution channel using digital screens. (Ads on pharmacy fridge doors, anyone?)
The latest is the hotel operator Marriott, which launched an ad network on Monday to target its own inventory using first-party site and loyalty program data, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Marriott, like grocery and retailer-based ad networks, is constrained in terms of where it will serve ads or apply first-party data. It’s starting with site ads and will later roll out video ads for hotel room TVs, which is a nice edge compared with retail (until Best Buy’s new ad business starts running spots on in-store demo TVs).
Companies are tripping merrily into the ads biz because it’s low and, well, low: low-margin and low-hanging fruit. Instacart can easily scale ad revenue but also must hire more delivery people to grow the app.
“As the market gets bigger, if you can get one percentage point of the digital retail media market, that’s almost half a billion dollars in revenue,” Insider Intelligence Analyst Andrew Lipsman tells the Journal.
Sounds feasible. But let’s be honest: Most of these fledgling ad platforms will never reach 1%.
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Jay Glogovsky, vice president of revenue operations and analytics for The New York Times, will be speaking at Programmatic I/O in Las Vegas from May 23-25. Click here to register.
In the post-cookie era, many in the industry anticipate power dynamics will shift to favor publishers, as first-party data becomes indispensable for targeting and media planning.
But that changing dynamic doesn’t mean a publisher needs to create distance from its partners. The New York Times is focused on its partnerships with advertiser and agency clients, as well as creating close working relationships with a limited number of DSPs and SSPs.
Glogovsky talked to AdExchanger about how The Times relies on these direct partnerships to create a positive ad experience for its readers, why open-web programmatic is the wrong choice for a privacy-centric in-app experience and why publishers should double down on close partnerships rather than worry about who will control the keys to monetization.
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AVOD is the same thing as FAST … right?
Not so fast.
The fragmented TV ecosystem uses a crush of confusing acronyms to describe itself. Their meanings are bleeding into each other, but it’s important for buyers to understand the nuance in these definitions.
Two of the most important acronyms to get right are AVOD and FAST.
Despite dozens of streamers, programmers and publishers crowding the space, AVOD and FAST are the only two ways to watch ad-supported TV beyond the set-top box.
The core difference between them comes down to content distribution. Streaming content can either be served on a one-to-many basis (as in live) or one-to-one basis (as in when you want it).
Free ad-supported TV (FAST) apps host linear channels that deliver scheduled programming to a mass audience through connected devices, while ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) is at the behest of the user, who initiates individual viewing sessions that generate inventory in which to serve personalized advertising.
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“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Nicole Whitesel, EVP of advanced TV at Publicis Media, will be speaking at Programmatic I/O, taking place in Las Vegas from May 23-25. You don’t want to miss it. Click here to register.
The TV ad industry has 99 problems, and almost all of them have to do with making sense of programmatic buying on the big screen.
Programmatic is a mainstay of digital advertising, but its role in the TV ecosystem is relatively new – and very different.
TV introduces a whole new set of trade-offs that need consideration, said Nicole Whitesel, EVP of advanced TV at Publicis Media.
Video content and creative is much more expensive and harder to build and scale than a mobile display ad, for example, and on TV, that limitation is compounded by a scarcity of inventory.
“Everyone wants everything – including me – but the longer the laundry list we bring with less prioritization, the harder it is for us to help our clients build their business,” Whitesel said.
To make programmatic buying work on TV, digital native marketers need to build a much broader media strategy that can achieve scale and ROI through the big screen, she said, which means programmatic alone isn’t enough to scale the growth of a business.
Whitesel spoke with AdExchanger.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Pub Crawl
Some ad tech and publisher software companies operate their own media outlets, sometimes as a useful data collection pipeline or as a facade of respectability, so to speak.
Minute Media is one hybrid example with digital-native brands, but there’s also the Blackstone-backed B2B media company IBT as well as The Arena Group (formerly The Maven), which owns Sports Illustrated, TheStreet and a collection of other some might say random publications. System1 is a performance marketing engine backed by data and fronted by consumer properties like MapQuest, CarsGenius and HowStuffWorks.
But on the flip side, publishers are trading on their news brands to sell subscription software. The Washington Post is an early mover with its Zeus business; Vox has publisher software of its own called Concert.
The newest entrant to this pub-focused pantheon could be The Atlantic, which is hiring for an “ad tech/SaaS sr. product manager” (h/t @corndog for the spot) to commercialize its in-house tech.
Using its homegrown technology, The Atlantic saw its CPMs improve by 50%, and so it expects other publishers will be interested, per the listing.
“As the third-longest-running magazine in America,” The Atlantic writes in its listing, “we find ourselves at a remarkable moment: one of both continuation and transformation, of upholding our legacy while continuously reinventing ourselves for the future.”
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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Nancy Marzouk, CEO of MediaWallah. Marzouk will be speaking at Programmatic I/O, taking place in Las Vegas from May 23-25. You don’t want to miss it. Click here to register.
Several years ago, a host of brands decided to “in-house” their programmatic media buying in order to reduce middleman fees and increase transparency and control. But many soon realized they needed support managing technology and execution. So, rather than truly “in-housing” programmatic, what they really did was restructure their contracts.
The same thing is now happening with advertising data. As brands build out their first-party data strategies and work to assemble post-cookie capabilities, many are “in-housing” to remain in control of their data. A common strategy is for brands to create their own ID, which unifies their data and insights per unique profile.
To ensure success, brands need to accomplish a few important tasks. They need to develop a usable in-house ID, evaluate the data feeding into their ID, then fill in the blanks so their ID is usable in the real world.
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Chasing ad performance is a never-ending process.
“There’s no chill in the performance world,” said John Sheldon, CMO of SmileDirectClub, a DTC startup and recently public company that sells customized transparent teeth aligners as an alternative to braces.
“You’re always … trying to push your business,” Sheldon said, “because if you can find more efficiency, you can scale.”
But brand awareness is also a key growth lever. In April, SmileDirectClub launched a campaign featuring testimonials by dentists and orthodontists to try and normalize the concept of teledentistry. Licensed doctors review every patient’s 3D scans and medical history before prescribing an aligner treatment plan, then they monitor the patient’s progress virtually.
Although telehealth took off during the pandemic, dentistry has been “a little behind the curve,” Sheldon said.
“We’re trying to destigmatize the concept of using remote dentistry as a way to improve your smile,” he said. “And so we’re constantly looking for places where we can tell that story.”
Sheldon spoke with AdExchanger.
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