Brand.net Launches Digital Media’s First Social Media Measurement Suite for Brand Advertisers

by Cindy Cattey
November 8th, 2011

Brand.net today announced the launch of its Social Media Measurement Suite, the first turnkey media and measurement solution designed to give brand advertisers insight into the impact of their cross-format digital media campaigns on their social media presence and perceptions. Social Attitude™ and SocialLink™ provide integrated insights on the impact of display, video and social media on users’ brand perceptions on Facebook and other social activity.

“Our brand advertisers have told us that it is critical, but extremely difficult, to measure the impact of their digital media campaigns on their social media presence,” said Elizabeth Blair, CEO of Brand.net. “Previously, they challenged us to measure media’s impact on offline sales and we developed SalesLink®, the first and per Nielsen the most-used web-wide offline sales media and measurement solution. Our customers asked us to turn our innovation to their latest challenge, social media measurement, and today we are excited to launch for them the first two products in our Social Media Measurement Suite, Social Attitude and SocialLink.”

• Social Attitude taps into the expansive demos of the Facebook community to provide brand advertisers with understanding of the attitudinal impact of their web-wide digital campaigns. Powered by Nielsen Online Brand Effect, an ad effectiveness measurement service that provides performance metrics and qualitative insights into the impact of online ads running anywhere on the web, Social Attitude delivers rapid and detailed insight into brand KPIs through Nielsen’s polling of exposed audiences on their Facebook homepages.

“Nielsen understands how critical social measurement is to brand advertisers and, in our view, the most important thing is to have a multi-faceted understanding of audiences, including reach and frequency metrics, as well as how they interact with brands,” said Scott McKinley, EVP Ad Effectiveness at Nielsen. “That’s why we’re excited to work with Brand.net to give their clients insight into the impact of their digital campaigns – no matter how big or small – drawn from our measurement of Facebook’s expansive community of representative and highly engaged users.”

• SocialLink provides detailed insights into the impact of a brand’s digital campaign on its own Facebook presence, including Facebook fan page visitation and related search activity. SocialLink ties into comScore’s extensive brand tracking on Facebook, mapping broad-reach online campaigns to both Facebook and brand micro-site engagement. For the first time, brands can learn how their paid campaigns drive audience behavior and interactivity across owned and earned channels at the same time.

Rounding out its Social Media Measurement Suite, Brand.net also integrates comScore’s Social Essentials into its upfront partnerships. With Social Essentials, Brand.net provides detailed behavioral insights and data on the size, frequency and demographic composition of a brand’s Facebook following.

“Our advertisers asked for social media measurement that more closely ties impact to campaign and we have responded with a trifecta: proven Nielsen and comScore research capabilities, the power of the Facebook community, and the quality and scale of Brand.net media, powered by our pioneering MFP platform,” said Blair.

Filed under: Brand.net News, Measurement
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comScore Reach Rankings: Whither RTB?

by Madhu Vudali
October 27th, 2011

comScore recently released its latest rankings of “ad-focused properties” (aka ad networks). “Who’s up and who’s down” always attracts much ink in the broader industry/business press. In seriousness, many of the agencies use this ranking as a filter to decide whom to work with: the higher the ranking, the better the chance of scoring that RFP.

That “footprint filter” may well have made sense at a point in time. But RTB is completely changing that. Here’s why: (a) the Exchanges/SSPs/DSPs provide a massive, if not near complete, coverage of US internet audience and (b) most ad networks (Brand.net included) are making full use of the inventory footprint enabled by these platforms. Essentially, all of us can potentially reach the entire US internet audience. In short, comScore understates the reach of ad networks that are successfully integrating RTB. As RTB grows, this understatement becomes more profound.

Given all of the above, Agency buyers no longer have an accurate way to determine the meaningful potential reach accessible through their largest media partners. Who in the ecosystem can and/or should step in to fill that gap? And what will new planning metrics look like?

One potential outcome would be for existing big players in measurement (e.g., Nielsen, comScore) to release new metrics that resolve the gap. Alternatively, Google or QuantCast, who have measurement capabilities but less tangible footprint with buyers, could use this as an opportunity to leapfrog the more established players.

Or the most intriguing option: perhaps there are startups on the horizon that will challenge existing measurement companies by innovating new methodologies and metrics to help buyers make informed decisions in our new RTB-enabled world?

In our next post on this topic, we’ll explore some related questions and alternatives that agency buyers should consider to address this issue. In the mean time, who do you think is most likely to take advantage of this opportunity?

Filed under: Ad Networks, Industry News, Measurement
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CMOs and Fanning Social Measurement: What’s Not to Like?

by Cindy Cattey
October 24th, 2011

Last week, we highlighted the recently published IBM CMO survey focusing on their #1 pain point – Data. Now what about #2 on the list: dealing with social media? CMOs cited the challenges they face to track consumer comments, capture and evaluate all the data generated by social media, and then analyze and measure it. A few specifics:

- More than half of all CMOs think social media is a key channel for engaging with customers
- 8 in 10 plan to increase their company’s use of social media
- A majority believe ROI will become the most important measure of success but fewer than half feel prepared to measure and manage it

Ouch. The message is loud and clear. And we’ve seen this movie before. Once again…the Internet has created a great brand marketing tool for CMOs that goes “beyond the click”, but has failed to sweep in quickly to help them measure and manage it smartly. If we don’t straighten this out, if brand advertisers aren’t prepared to measure all the metrics that matter …they will keep 90%+ of their multi-billion brand spending in TV and other traditional media.

To be clear – this isn’t a by-vendor issue; it’s a universal problem, and thus a universal opportunity. We’ll all be better off the faster any of us can get CMOs the measurement tools that confidently allow them to measure and manage the impact of social media on their brands’ ROI. At Brand.net we’ve launched our first solution, SocialLink™, the newest in our growing suite of on and offline measurement tools. SocialLink™ measures a brand’s presence on Facebook and a campaign’s impact on Facebook activity, providing insight into how many users visited their Facebook page on click-through or through direct navigation. It also measures the impact of that campaign on usage of a brand’s corporate brand page and/or microsites. SocialLink™ was specifically designed to combine Brand.net’s ability to connect the world’s largest brands to their audiences with the measurement capabilities of comScore’s Social Essentials™ and Action Lift™ We are partnering with our key brand clients, and will share masked results once the campaigns have finished.

CMOs, in the well-known words of an IBMer (H. James Harrington): “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.”

Let’s get measuring.

Filed under: Brand.net News, Measurement
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Online Brand Advertising’s 654% ROI

by Cindy Cattey
October 7th, 2011

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here is the lead graphic in Nielsen’s latest whitepaper:

Nielsen’s conclusion: “The random scatter of the points indicates a lack of relationship between sales lift and click-through rate.” In plain English: click-throughs have no relationship to product sales. For many years, Nielsen has provided statistically significant confirmation of this fact. We know that brands don’t advertise for fun, they advertise to generate high volume, high ROI sales. We know clicks don’t work. What does?

In September, Nielsen released the SalesLink® study results from a 1H 2011 Brand.net campaign that used panel-based measurement to quantify the campaign’s direct impact on offline sales. What did the study cover?

The advertiser: one of the five biggest CPGs in the world
The product: a new hair-care solution targeted at women 25-54
The goal: driving awareness and trial
The campaign: over 3 months reached over 16 million households, totaling 33.6 GRPs
Nielsen’s conclusion: The campaign drove over $1.7 million in incremental retail sales and achieved a 654% ROI on media investment

What drove this result?

- Audience. The campaign had high composition and high reach against the target audience. 66% of total impressions reached women, and 58% of total impressions reached women ages 25-54. The campaign exceeded its guaranteed impression delivery (100MM) and, most importantly, unique reach to target (W25-54) (30MM) goals.
- Optimization. Across dozens of SalesLink® studies, we have confirmed that campaign-wide frequency management is one of the three key levers in maximizing ROI. Not per day, per month, per ad size or per creative – any of those methods generates significant waste and materially diminishes ROI – but frequency against the target unique user on every impression at any point in time. The campaign-wide frequency for this campaign was 3.3.
- Environment. The campaign was contextually aligned to maximize relevance to the target audience (e.g. fashion, shopping, entertainment, casual games), and every page was screened for quality prior to an advertisement being served.

The conclusion: driving offline sales requires optimization of multiple brand metrics. Analogizing to sports, it is not a one-event competition; it is a triatholon. And the best-known online metric of all – CTR – is not even one of the events. The advertiser who competes successfully on all three – Audience, Optimization and Environment – is the winner. As shown above, that victory produced a 654% ROI for this advertiser.

Filed under: Branding, Measurement
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(Finally) We’re Talking About the Metrics That Matter to Brands

by Elizabeth Blair
July 21st, 2011

As the CEO of the first and only company focused exclusively on online brand advertising (I chose the name Brand.net for a reason), I was delighted to see AdExchanger’s “What Are the Key Metrics for Brand Awareness Campaigns Today in an Automated Buying Environment” roundup.

It’s the right question. How do we prove to brand advertisers that online advertising delivers real, measureable value?

I thought the commentary was smart and on track, though with a few glaring omissions.

ON TRACK: Maximizing Reach against your Target Audience with managed Frequency is step one. Necessary, but not sufficient (more below). In 2011, doing it by vendor is table stakes, doing it campaign-wide is A-List.

The takeaway: Agencies and Brands: force all vendors to provide meticulous, detailed metrics for Reach, Frequency, and Audience Composition for every campaign. And consolidate those results across the whole campaign. Every Single Time. (P.S.: In my next bullet, on measurement, I’ll talk about a key, money in your pocket reason brand advertisers should only work with vendors who can manage reach and frequency campaign wide, across dozens or hundreds of publishers.)

RIGHT POINT, BUT LEFT A LOT OUT: All 9 commented on measurement being critical. A couple noted “just” measuring reach/frequency is necessary, but not sufficient.So what is sufficient? In 2011, sufficient is proof that the target audience actually saw your media and it had an impact on them. “Impact on them” can be measured in three key ways: (a) brand awareness/preference/intent lift – the most common option identified by all 9. (b) actual quality engagement with the advertising, measured by online activity (increased activity to website, microsite, time spent, algo searches, share of voice). 3 (arguably 4) of the 9 commentators didn’t mention this. Hm. A few of the 5 or 6 who did mention it fell into the Trap Du Jour that the best/only way to figure out the level of engagement is share of voice/social buzz. That’s one, but the classic brand manager strategy of driving and measuring each of paid, earned and owned is still the value maximizing choice. (c) did the ads actually sell anything? Amazingly not a single one of the 9 mentioned that. Huh? Brands don’t advertise for fun, they advertise to generate high volume, high ROI sales. So the ultimate KPI for branding: the target audience went out and bought a lot of the thing you advertised. If that is measurable, wouldn’t you at least have it in the set of measurement options? For CPGs – the biggest category in the AdAge 100 by # (19) and spend ($18B) – Nielsen and Yahoo! started doing this ten years ago. And for that second biggest AdAge 100 category, retailers (17 advertisers spending $15B), 2010/11 has seen solid solutions arrive for them, too.

The takeaway: Agencies and Clients: Measure whether or not the campaigns actually sold stuff. Step 1: demand that any potential vendor (publisher, network, any) show you detailed proof that their prior campaigns for similar brands actually generated high volume high ROI sales. If they can’t, or they won’t – don’t use them. (Interesting, true fact: both to maximize and to measure high volume, high ROI sales, vendors have to be able to manage reach and frequency campaign wide, across dozens or hundreds of publishers, in a single campaign. So – any vendor who failed to clear the “reach, frequency” hurdle in ”On Track” up above – is a guaranteed loser here. Run, don’t walk, away from them.) Step 2: think hard about measuring the offline sales ROI for your products – whether the study is managed directly by you, by your agency, or by a vendor. For online engagement – measure and weight each of paid, earned and owned appropriately. And yes, absolutely run awareness/intent lift studies, and take full advantage of the optimization opportunities, including real-time, they provide.

MISSED COMPLETELY: Nine experts, long quotes, not a single mention of “Quality Media Environment”. Huh. For 150+ years, megabrands have focused on both the message and the ENVIRONMENT in which it appears. For those of you muttering this quality obsession is just an old fashioned wives’ tale: WRONG. We’ve done dozens of campaigns where Nielsen measured actual offline sales ROI – did the campaign sell more razors, pet food, hair color in stores – and the results are clear: quality contextually aligned media is the #1 driver of maximum offline sales ROI. (#2, by the way, is frequency management. Seems like those brand managers are not so silly after all.) And as we’ve often discussed, this super valuable online quality is a page level, not a publisher level, issue. Good news brands: in 2011, cutting edge vendors proactively filter every display impression

The takeaway: The % of ads that run in high quality media is a critical brand KPI. Agencies and Brands must proactively page level filter every impression. And hello Agencies and Brands – stop overpaying for it. (a) Even with leading brand verification companies that say they can proactively page level filter – demand a report on what % of the media in your specific campaign was page level filtered. Dirty little secret: due to technical inadequacies, their proactive filtering products are being blocked by a lot of exchanges and publishers. The result: the percentage of your impressions being proactively filtered is a lot less than they lead you to believe. (b) Why are you paying at all? Today, the cutting edge media sellers proactively page-level filter for free. (Yes, including us.) And they have architected their solutions correctly such that exchanges and publishers don’t block their filters. And their filters really work. So starting today, demand that your proactive page level filtering solution be both really good and really free.

It’s exciting to see we’re finally talking about real Brand KPIs – the true Metrics That Matter. When advertisers start demanding real, meaningful brand KPIs and then vote with their feet (and dollars), pretenders fall out, the strong grow stronger, and the big guys move in for the big prizes.

Filed under: Branding, Measurement
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How did they know to search for that brand?

by Andy Atherton
July 14th, 2011

Just a quick post to highlight a recent piece of research by attribution modeling company C3 Metrics (thanks AdExchanger!).

There’s more interesting detail at the link, but the headline is that in 37% of all online transactions analyzed, search on a branded term was the very last action before purchase.

That’s obviously bad news for the (too) commonly used “last click / last view” attribution approach.  As C3 CEO Mark Hughes put it, “If an advertiser is still using last click analytics, they would mistakenly think that brand search was responsible for a third of their results.”

This research underscores the fact that attribution is important, difficult stuff and requires a lot more horsepower than last click / last view.  I think folks like C3 have a great opportunity ahead of them.

C3’s findings echo a great piece of Microsoft research from a couple years back.   As I mentioned in my commentary when the Microsoft research came out, it’s clear that a lot of the money that brand marketers are spending on other media (online and offline) is having an impact – whether or not we can measure it precisely today.

Worth some thought.

Filed under: Industry News, Measurement
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Where’s the “LUMA slide” for branding?

by Andy Atherton
June 22nd, 2011

Very interesting article today from Brian Morrissey at Digiday, channeling Jeff Levick of AOL.

As Brian put it:

“The truth of the matter is much of the machinery of the programmatic buying landscape, captured in the Luma Partners slide, is dedicated to non-guaranteed inventory used for direct response advertising. Where’s the Luma slide for guaranteed ad space for brands?”

Now, that’s a great question and Jeff has obviously done some great thinking on the matter.

After you give the article a read, check out our results in connecting online ads to offline sales here.

Filed under: Branding, Display Advertising, Industry News, Measurement
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Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

by Andy Atherton
June 8th, 2011

Today, I wanted to highlight and echo some recent commentary from two very smart online ad veterans, Dave Morgan and Doug Weaver.

Their thesis in a nutshell is that the online advertising ecosystem has pursued an arms race of targeting upon targeting to the point that it has confused brand marketers and backed itself into a DR-only corner.  When it comes to hyper-targeting, as Dave Morgan put it, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

I completely agree and would encourage readers to visit the linked articles – there’s a lot more there to think about.

The market’s apparent addiction to overtargeting is especially puzzling given the performance data.  I have obviously written on this topic myself quite extensively over the years and just last week a new piece of research came out of MIT, with yet more evidence for the prosecution.

The MIT study, using data from agency giant Havas, found that highly personalized creative underperformed generic creative except for users who were already well down the funnel.  I understand that creative (this study) is different than media targeting (commentary above), but the two are opposite sides of the same coin and this result is another point on the same line; i.e., overtargeting is just that.

Or, as MIT researcher Catherine Tucker put it, “just because you have the data to personalize, it doesn’t mean you always should”.

Filed under: Display Advertising, Industry News, Measurement
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Measuring Reach

by Madhu Vudali
May 6th, 2011

eMarketer has an article on measuring Reach properly – a topic near & dear to our hearts – citing research from MediaMind.  The takeaway is that cookies tend to overstate Reach (Unique Users or UU) by a factor of 3.0, due to cookie deletion.  Readers may recall that comScore had also done a similar study in 2007, where they found that the inflation factor to be 2.5.  It is good to see that these factors are in the same neighborhood. (Sidebar:  These are separate studies…but notice the 20% increase in the inflation factor?  Might users be deleting cookies more often because of privacy concerns?)

Media planners can get a rough sense of Reach using these adjustment factors.  However, when it comes to campaign measurement, you need something that accounts for the uniqueness of the campaign.  For example, comScore’s factor is based on an analysis of “cookies from one prominent Web property and one third party ad server” over the course of one month.  Your campaign might be spread out over many websites big & small and for a longer/shorter period.  Just taking a haircut of 60% on your cookie count may not be accurate.

At Brand.net, we have always been aware of cookies inflating Reach in general and the differences in this inflation factor for each particular campaign.  Rather than applying a gross adjustment factor to our cookie count, we have created a patent-pending technology code-named Lazenby, which combines cookie data, campaign delivery by site, site-visit distributions and other data to produce a Reach (UU) estimate for each campaign.  Lazenby UU counts have been validated by a variety of campaign-level 3rd party counts.

So, next time you see a campaign Reach report from a media partner, please ask for a breakout of cookies vs. UUs.  If the report already has the breakout, be sure to ask how the media partner is estimating the UUs from the cookie counts.

You might be surprised what you hear.

Filed under: Measurement
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A fishing fleet without nets

by Andy Atherton
March 8th, 2011

ComScore released another solid piece of work yesterday.

As readers of this page will remember, comScore has been outspoken on the failings of the ubiquitous click as a metric. Some of that in this report, but much more as well.  From my perspective, the most interesting thread in the report ties together a couple of their numbered points.

First, as comScore correctly points out, cookie-deletion creates real problems for cookie-based targeting and measurement approaches. comScore data shows that 30% of all US internet users delete their cookies monthly or more often. Furthermore, many computers see routine use by multiple users. These factors create “noise” in targeting that often results in much lower true composition against the target than is claimed or described. Consumers’ ever-growing concern about privacy will only make this worse. Probably much worse. More evidence (if any was needed) that measurement of campaign impacts against meaningful metrics is critical – especially when a targeting approach sounds like magic.

Secondly, comScore highlights the tradeoff between targeting and scale. This tradeoff is intuitively obvious, but often overlooked. Equally often, credulous buyers willingly suspend disbelief in favor of a nice-sounding pitch.

Consider the example of one of our clients, with a large online footprint of some 25 million accounts.  Of these 25M, this client has actionable cookies on <5M, with data of varying depths and value (and all of these cookies, of course, are subject to the churn challenge presented above). So this client can (and does) employ the most sophisticated targeting and re-targeting approaches on all of these 5M customers. But what about the other 20M customers they can’t talk to this way?  What about the 100M adults that aren’t customers yet? 30-spots?

For the online advertising to grow to its full potential (and necessary size as “offline” media erodes), we must more fully develop a broader approach to complement our myriad fine targeting approaches.

Sometimes it is best to fish with a hook, other times with a net. As an industry we need a good supply of both.

Look for more on this topic in subsequent posts, but wanted to make sure to call out comScore’s work while it was fresh.  Worth a read.

Filed under: Display Advertising, Industry News, Measurement
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