(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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Addressing that “all-important brand/premium/guaranteed marketplace”

by Elizabeth Blair
July 7th, 2011

I was delighted to see that Tumri has been acquired. M&A is great for the online advertising industry. Consolidation creates fewer, stronger players with deeper, better solutions. And liquidity gives venture capitalists the dollars and incentive to fund the next generation of technology.

Terry Kawaja’s summary of what old school ad networks say they are doing, to either truly transform their businesses, or more crassly just to reposition themselves (either way primarily with an eye to an exit), is spot on:

(i) the amalgamation of a services solution set, (ii) the application of advanced technology to improve advertiser ROI, publisher yield and consumer relevancy, and (iii) more of a focus on “upper funnel” solutions that address the all-important brand/premium/guaranteed marketplace.

That said, a casual reader could infer that Tumri is part of the solution set for (iii) brand/premium/guaranteed. It’s not. Tumri’s description of itself on its Overview page makes that clear: “Tumri’s Dynamic Response solution optimizes landing page content (or any other type of post-click response) .” Online case studies also always tell you a lot about what a company “really does”. Proof is in the performance metric. What’s positioned as a “brand” or “branding” case study is unmasked by the KPIs – most of the time they are all about DR. Let’s glance at Tumri’s case study callouts:

• “37% Cost Per Lead reduction vs. static creatives (control)”
• “Cost per acquisition reduced by 67%”
• “312% improvement in Click Through Rate vs. default promotional creatives (control)”

So what really happened: a DR ad network acquired a DR optimization feature.

We fool ourselves thinking that any of this addresses the online spend pool that’s projected to triple in size in the next four years: true upper funnel brand advertising. Agencies spending the money get that. Publishers who want the money get that. PR spin isn’t doing a thing to make the $85 billion dollars in brand advertising that still hasn’t come online come online. To do that we need to prove to brand marketers that online advertising delivers results: a material increase in ROI on a material volume of sales. That’s what we do here at Brand.net every day.

Filed under: Ad Networks, Branding, Industry News
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Caveat Emptor!

by Madhu Vudali
April 11th, 2011

Last week, Ad Exchanger highlighted a blog-post by Efficient Frontier (EF) on display CPMs.  The quick summary is that in Q1, “CPMs were trending down in March in comparison to February while impressions were doubling.”  More from Chris Jacobs of EF here.

As any self-respecting pricing geek would do, I immediately compared EF’s results to our own experience at Brand.net, even though we offer a decidedly different product.  I also looked up the websites of past purveyors of industry pricing reports here , here and here – alas, no updates for 2011.

So before a “prices are falling” wave kicks off, let’s look at our data.  The headline is that we are definitely seeing the impression volume growth, but CPMs are trending flat to upward as well – quite a different story than the 33% drop that EF reports.  Obviously inventory quality and contextual mix matter quite a bit in this analysis.  Here are our numbers (on a mix-adjusted basis indexed against Q1 2010):

At a high-level, the pricing numbers largely reflect seasonality – Q4 is the peak demand quarter of the year, while in Q1 demand is smaller.  In parallel, with increased industry demand, pricing for quality, above the fold media with strong contextual relevance is actually trending up.

That’s history.  More importantly, here are our forecasts for the next year (indexed against Q1 2011):

These forecasts are, obviously, at a very high-level.  Users of Brand.net’s MFP on Demand can see the forecasts at whatever level of granularity is required to support their media planning efforts.

With all of this data as a backdrop, there are two main points I want to get across.

First, understanding more about what did happen is only interesting.  Understanding more about what will happen is actually useful.  Let’s say for the sake of argument a certain CPM index did decline 33% Y/Y.  Should I buy now because they are so low?  Should I wait because the declines will continue?  Do the declines mean that my return has gone up proportionately?  What should my planning rate for this year’s budget be?  Better forecasting and planning leads to better outcomes.

Secondly, we should push beyond the data to information and insight.  The urge to compare is hard to resist, but let us compare and analyze.  Let’s understand the nuances of the data that’s presented to better comprehend what it’s really saying about the world and how that affects our businesses.  Here are a few thoughts:

Understand the perspective of the analyst

  • Is the underlying data representative of my business or his?
  • Is the data insightful re: pricing or does it capture something else (e.g. mix shift)?

Make sure marketplace data/insights apply to your situation.  Pricing is all about details. Understand them.

  • Inventory mix – are these the same sites/channels that I need? Am I getting long-tail sites with questionable brand-safety?
  • Seasonality – has seasonality been factored into the prices?
  • Guaranteed vs Non-guaranteed – do I risk the operational hassle of under-delivery and volatility by buying cheap?
  • Targeting – are the users I am reaching in my target? How can I be sure?
  • Ad Formats – Standard Flash vs Expandable? In-stream vs In-banner streaming?
  • Placement – is the ad above-the-fold? What percent of the time?
  • Effectiveness – Am I driving the results that really matter for this campaign?  Am I measuring these results?

I understand that this level of forethought and analysis is time-consuming.  I don’t expect everyone to do it either.  But, at the minimum, we should all remember that these factors are at play as we digest these reports.  Caveat emptor!

Filed under: Display Advertising, Industry News, Pricing
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