“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 and founder of MediaWallah.
The heady digital growth brought on by the pandemic has faded. A recession seems imminent. In tough times, marketers see budgets slashed and turn their focus from spending to saving. But I am not here to deliver another diatribe about how spending in a recession can drive growth.
Instead, I want brands to think about how doing more with less will actually be a good thing for their long-term prospects. Like cleaning out an overstuffed closet, prioritizing what matters and stripping away things that are no longer useful will give companies space to innovate and expand.
A recent McKinsey report notes that companies should be “thinking about more structural solutions that not only manage costs but also build resilience and can drive long-term value creation.” In short, brands should focus on fundamental changes that save money and drive efficiency. They need to seek ways to get more out of their data, technology, and ad spend.
Breaking old, bad habits
Channel the philosophy of home organizer Marie Kondo. Using her techniques, millions of people have freed themselves of clutter. By getting rid of old baggage, they make better use of what they keep and have room for something new.
Let’s apply this to the typical digital advertising setup for a major brand advertiser. Many brands today rely on inaccurate targeting tactics, bad metrics and tangled technology. Toss them out!
Targeting: Take third-party cookies, the wire hangers of the proverbial advertising closet, as one example. According to Advertiser Perceptions, 88% of brands still use third-party cookies, even though their effectiveness has eroded sharply. Apple doesn’t allow them, and soon Google won’t either. And even if they are allowed, they are not stable, reliable or connected to a brand’s larger marketing strategy.
Metrics: Brands should also consider trashing basic metrics like viewability and last-click attribution, which can inaccurately misdirect millions in ad spend.
Technology: Brands often have an overcomplicated tech stack that’s built for yesterday’s digital advertising. There’s likely a CDP, integrations with data partners, DSPs, SSPs, DMPs, and dashboards all set up to target with third-party data. There is a huge amount of redundancy that has built up in the name of reaching third-party audiences at scale. Often brands work with multiple programmatic platforms that do virtually the same thing.
Fewer, better things
It can be scary to purge things that used to be valuable. And what is the alternative?
The answer lies in new, more accurate, efficient, and sustainable approaches. For example, using zero- and first-party data and identity-based advertising provides a pathway to higher fidelity targeting, higher accuracy, and higher efficiency than third-party cookies.
New metrics provide more opportunities, too. Without any change in cost, brands can level up to richer metrics like attention instead of viewability and multitouch attribution instead of last-touch attribution. With first-party data, frequency management also becomes significantly more accurate. By measuring the right things, brands can dramatically reduce waste.
There are also emerging data types that unlock efficiencies. For example, brands can now access creative data that will provide insight about what elements of a creative drive higher performance.
Cleaner tech
With a unified customer profile repository, an identity spine and a secure way to manage data, brands can achieve quite a lot. With clear metrics and a clean tech approach, they can measure less while gaining a clearer picture across their entire media spend.
If more brands focus on accurate data and measurement – and streamlined technology – our entire industry becomes more efficient and effective as a result.
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