“Can you tell me which hour of the day is most profitable for us?”
It’s a familiar scenario: You’re meeting with your client to review their latest campaign dashboard, and your client asks for a custom metric that goes just beyond the dashboard you’re sharing with them. You say you’ll check with the team and get right back to them.
That’s when the insight doom loop begins.
In your head, you know that, to get an accurate answer, you’ll have to persuade your analyst to connect several separate solutions, go through all the insights and run an ad hoc report. This might take weeks, and at the end of it you might not even get a satisfactory answer.
Meanwhile, your client is waiting.
Marketers need reliable, repeatable measurement to drive results
This frustrating cycle is a big part of why 1 in 2 marketers no longer perform any type of holistic measurement. This is despite “connecting media to outcomes” being a top priority for the C-suite, according to a commissioned survey of global marketers conducted by Forrester Consulting and Amazon Ads. With signal loss and media fragmentation (250+ new streaming services and retail media networks arriving in the last decade) on the rise, breaking free from the doom loop becomes an even greater challenge.
Against the backdrop of marketers struggling with fragmented signals and an inability to connect media to outcomes, the Forrester survey revealed that ‘improved use and analytics of customer insights’ was the top priority for eight in 10 marketers. This likely reflects the growing demand from brands to use their first-party signals to drive more efficient strategies and better understand the customer experience, a key step in evolving their approach to measurement and insights.
Three steps better measurement
To exit the doom loop, technology partners and agencies can work together to evolve their approach to measurement and insights by building and scaling integrated solutions. This takes the shape of three simple steps:
- Lower the barriers to unifying siloed data sets across media, commerce and first-party signals while raising the bar on privacy.
- Turn data scientists into agents of scale, rather than organizational bottlenecks, by empowering them to build scalable products that prioritize key use cases.
- Empower business teams to innovate on top of point-and-click solutions to deliver fast insights to customers.
How one agency broke out of the insight doom loop
One agency that has been leading on this front is IPG’s Kinesso, an agency partner with Amazon Ads. Like many agencies today, Kinesso wanted to make it faster and easier for its teams to ask key measurement questions and get high-fidelity answers it could count on for decision-making. Moreover, the agency needed to evolve measurement strategies beyond traditional identifiers to prepare for an increasingly ID-less world.
Kinesso’s measurement transformation closely followed the three key steps outlined above. But a critical catalyst was its investment in data clean rooms. The agency used Amazon’s APIs to build out tailored dashboards on top of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) that give their teams intuitive visualizations of actionable insights around audience analysis, channel mix, reach and frequency.
Perhaps most importantly, Kinesso has developed a repeatable, scalable framework for creating and expanding measurement and analytics products on top of AMC clean rooms and dashboards.
Better, faster measurement answers can define competitive advantage
As brands grow more wary of wasted ad spend and marketers feel more pressure to prove ROI, agencies cannot afford to fall into the insight doom loop. They must evolve and advance their measurement strategies to deliver the insights their clients demand – the insights they need to drive smarter campaigns and better results.
By breaking down data silos, empowering data scientists and enabling business teams with innovative, scalable tools and dashboards, agencies can create a more efficient, accurate and actionable measurement framework. Kinesso’s success shows that investing in next-gen solutions like data clean rooms and integrating robust analytics platforms is a critical step in this measurement evolution. Agencies that follow this example and capture first-mover advantage will rapidly stand out, exceeding client expectations and driving more effective and insightful marketing campaigns.
