In the early 2000s, when Jorge Ruiz was director of media analytics at Ogilvy, he had a nickname at the office: “No Co.”
Ruiz, now TikTok’s global head of marketing science, got the moniker because whenever his colleagues would bring him their work to assess its impact, he would say, “No correlation.”
Understanding the relationship between spending and performance is what marketers dream about when they put their head down on their pillow at night. But marketing measurement remains as much an art as it is a science.
“Marketing science is about building trust that can help lead to good decisions,” Ruiz says, speaking on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “There is a lot of choice and a lot of things that can be done. The question is: What’s the most pragmatic way of doing really good work?”
Ruiz’s job (other than telling people “No correlation”) is to prove that TikTok can work as a vehicle for driving an advertiser’s business outcomes.
To support that goal, TikTok began transitioning itself to being a self-attributing network (SAN) in September. A SAN is exactly what it sounds like: a platform that measures its own results internally.
Biggie platforms like Meta, Google Ads, Apple Search Ads and Snapchat are all SANs. But with self-attribution comes, if not great responsibility, at least some skepticism that the attribution being provided isn’t biased toward the party that’s providing it.
TikTok takes a “neutral approach,” Ruiz says. “We’re very much accountable to our clients. We’re trying to be good partners in the industry [so advertisers have] trust, confidence and reproducibility.”
Also in this episode: More on the eternal question of why advertisers should trust platforms that provide their own measurement solutions (as in, grade their own homework), how TikTok dealt with Apple’s ATT privacy changes, why all of the big ad platforms (including TikTok) are embracing MMM (cue the “Everything Old Is New Again” song) and measurement-themed dad jokes.
