“Outcomes” is the term du jour in connected TV ad land.
Streaming platforms won’t stop pumping out new shoppable ad formats and inking new partnerships with outcomes-based measurement providers like Innovid and EDO. It’s all part of the sell side’s quest to compete for ad dollars by turning CTV into an attributable performance channel.
That ongoing quest explains why EDO keeps bragging about its recent partnerships with major streaming apps like Netflix, NBCUniversal and Disney. These programmers want to woo advertisers with EDO data suggesting their ads drive real business results beyond just reach and frequency.
Still, “it’s a huge risk” for either publishers or media buyers to treat streaming purely as a digital performance channel, according to EDO President and CEO Kevin Krim.
If marketers ignore brand advertising and focus too much on just driving sales, then the brand’s market share and revenue will suffer later, Krim said.
Instead, he said both sides should turn their attention to actions that follow impressions and precede sales.
AdExchanger sat down with Krim to dig into more of the details.
AdExchanger: How do you decide what counts as a business outcome?
KEVIN KRIM: Marketers look for outcomes they can use to predict sales based on data.
Awareness is the starting point of that goal; it doesn’t directly predict sales. Actions like search activity, web traffic and app downloads are more significant indicators a consumer is considering a purchase. It’s why a brand’s share of search grows (or shrinks) before its market share.
Which isn’t to say that purchase data isn’t valuable; it is. But it’s hard to scale. Retail media networks keep sales data locked in walled gardens, and credit data aggregators only have a view into retail data.
Why is it that just about all of EDO’s partnerships seem to involve publishers, not buyers?
We do work with advertisers and agencies. But it’s natural for publishers to adopt outcomes-based measurement first because that data helps them sell their inventory to brands.
How does EDO measure search activity and other indicators of purchase consideration?
We collect search behavior data from the Google Trends API. Other companies use this API, too, but the challenge is that it’s a noisy and busy data set.
We analyze this data for trends and spikes in search activity and pair it with other data sets to determine if certain trends are related to a particular ad campaign. For example, we also work with mobile analytics company M4, which has mobile app data we link to search patterns and web visits to measure lift.
Would EDO ever consider becoming a currency?
No. Outcomes measurement is something entirely different. We aren’t like Nielsen and its competitors, which do audience measurement.
But we do want to partner with them. And we do expect streaming platforms to use our data to help them negotiate prices.
How do you partner with video currency providers?
When Nielsen sends us an audience plan, we match that data to our own to predict the online engagement of a client’s audience target. That way, buyers can start to compare different audience plans based on reach and engagement and decide what works best for a particular campaign.
We’re also open to partnering with Nielsen’s competitors, but right now they seem too busy chasing Nielsen.
This interview was lightly edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Kevin Krim, click here.
