Some luxury automakers that advertise on Bloomberg Media’s properties can drive better business outcomes if they spend more on its radio and digital channels and slightly less on print.
To help advertisers best manage their media mix across its portfolio of TV, radio, digital and print channels, Bloomberg Media partnered with MarketShare, a media attribution company that measures the impact of different channels and advises marketers on the best way to allocate spend.
Although other media companies use MarketShare, including Turner, it’s primarily been a tool for CMOs. But by adding it to Bloomberg’s data arsenal, the business media giant plans to enable more consultative conversations with clients.
“Bloomberg is a data company at its heart, so this was a no-brainer,” said Zazie Lucke, Bloomberg’s head of global marketing. “Coming to a partnership with information that connects to business outcomes, not just advertiser success, is a bridge that is not ordinarily crossed.”
Media companies increasingly want more senior dialogues with marketers than they’ve had in the past, said MarketShare CEO Wes Nichols.
“The more senior you get, marketers care less about soft metrics and more about business outcomes,” Nichols said.
Though a tool that advises switching spend among channels might create problems for an organization with different salespeople assigned to each channel, that won’t be the case at Bloomberg.
Just more than a year ago, Bloomberg Media trained all its salespeople to sell every type of media, from digital to radio to TV. And in recent months, it’s made moves to consolidate editorial so content can be channel-agnostic too.
Since they’ll be rewarded for every dollar they sell across channels, salespeople are incentivized to create the right media mix and optimize thereafter.
Bloomberg is “incredibly focused on how to use data to optimize an advertiser’s media spend and be predictive in how we can drive the best outcomes,” Lucke said, “but also being nimble and being able to optimize throughout a campaign.”
Bloomberg brings its own data to the party, adding its proprietary metric, the Consumer Comfort Index, to power the attribution tool’s analytics. MarketShare already factors in other elements that affect purchases, such as oil prices, weather and seasonality, so it can better isolate the impact of a brand’s marketing efforts.
While Bloomberg feeds in unique data, it doesn’t require the marketer to share sensitive or proprietary data, like conversion information. For auto sales, MarketShare relies on publicly available data from JD Power to measure marketing impact.
When bringing in a neutral tool like MarketShare, there’s always the chance that it will prove a channel is not as effective as predicted.
“We found nothing scary in the data, which was wonderful,” Lucke said.
And because different clients have different needs – direct response vs. branding being a big one – Lucke expects that there will be a wide variation in successful media mixes, a good thing for all of Bloomberg’s channels.
Bloomberg will start to have conversations with its auto clients in the next few weeks to use MarketShare data to inform Q4 spends. Next year, it will evaluate expanding the program to encompass more advertiser verticals.
