comScore Reach Rankings: Whither RTB? (Part 2)

by Madhu Vudali
November 15th, 2011

Previously, I discussed how comScore’s reach rankings are not keeping up with the emergence of RTB. Agencies use these rankings for planning and to help select media partners. Hence, it is critical for them to figure out how RTB potentially affects this measurement. Until everything is nicely squared away in measurement land, here are the five key questions that agencies should ask their media partners when deciding which ones are the most RTB-fluent.

1.  Do you have your own bidder?

• Having a bidder gives the media partner control over scale (potential inventory and unique  reach) and operational efficiencies. It is also an indicator of their level of technical investment and sophistication. With the expected growth of RTB and its applicability to all ad formats, owning a bidder is “table stakes” for any media partner that wants to offer scale.

2.  Which exchange platforms are you bidding on?

 • Publishers are increasingly testing/using multiple exchange platforms for monetization. To get the broadest inventory and reach coverage with the best economics, it is best to be bidding on multiple exchange platforms. Alternatively, access to a meta DSP such as AppNexus can provide RTB access to inventory on multiple exchanges, although at somewhat less attractive economics (for both network and end customer) relative to direct exchange integration.

3.  What level of QPS (queries per second) do you have visibility to?

• QPS translates to “potential inventory.” So, higher QPS means more visibility and access to inventory and reach. Total exchange volume estimates range between 3B to 5B impressions per day in the US, which equates to 35K to 58K QPS. Exchanges enable “pre-targeting”, e.g. IAB ad-sizes, only certain sellers, domain whitelist, and other desirable constraints, which brings the total meaningful and desirable QPS range down.

4.  What are your Response Rate/Win Rate Metrics?

• Response Rate is an indicator of how much exchange inventory is “interesting” – after pre- targeting – to a bidding media partner. Higher response rates indicate a richer demand pool and thus higher likelihood that the media partner is bringing some scale advantage to the table, i.e. the scale for fine-grained audience targeting.

• Win Rate (the % of bids that you submit on that you actually win) is an interesting metric, but only meaningful when combined with response rate. If the response rate is very high, then an ad network can achieve its inventory goal with a low win-rate. Conversely, a lower  response rate would necessitate a higher win-rate to “earn” high inventory, reach, and overall ranking.

5.  Bottomline: What is your incremental reach with RTB?

• Ultimately, it’s all about the relevant additional reach RTB fluency creates for a network beyond what is measured by the increasingly outdated comScore/Nielsen metrics. The critical variables in this regard are QPS, response/win rate, and the resultant “cookie reach.”  Of course, cookies are not UUs but it’s how most networks do a basic approximation to UUs.

Let’s take a simple example to illustrate what we mean. Assume a modest 5000 QPS and a 50% response rate. This results in ~215 million impressions per day. Factoring cookies-to-UU adjustment and reach saturation over a typical month, we would estimate that this example partner has an overall potential reach of 145 million uniques per month.

For Brand.net, we had approximately 10K QPS and a 28% response rate in September. The resulting potential reach with RTB would have been 153MM uniques, increasing our reported reach of 92MM uniques by over 66%.

Of course, these numbers will vary depending on average campaign frequency, campaign breadth, and the contextual / audience focus of each partner. All further reinforcement that if “marketing is the new finance” and innovative marketers are already putting that dictum to practice, agencies and brands need to get familiar with the new math and metrics of RTB quickly.

This is yet another way RTB is altering the playing field for media providers, separating those with the technical investment and sophistication required to take full advantage on behalf of their customers. To date we have seen this trend primarily in the Direct Response world. Now it’s transforming Brand as well, so by this time next year we’ll see a very different landscape.

Filed under: Ad Networks, Display Advertising, Inventory
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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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On RTB and Brand Advertising

by Madhu Vudali
July 29th, 2011

At Brand.net, we focus on maximizing ROI for Brand advertisers.  We demonstrate day in day out that tight management of the Metrics That Matter – Reach/Frequency against the target audience, and high-quality, contextually oriented media – yields outstanding offline sales ROI.  Obviously, Brands need both high ROI and high volume sales to move their P&L needles.  We address this by broad reach buying. How broad? In 1H ‘11, our average campaign ran across over 80 publishers.

What happens when we bring RTB into this focus on maximizing ROI for Brands?

Having moved past the buzzword stage, RTB is taking a rapidly growing slice of the spot market avails.  There’s been nonstop discussion of its benefits for DR advertisers.  But does it help further Brand advertisers’ goals? And, what about Publishers – how good is RTB for them?

The discussion of RTB’s impact has centered almost exclusively on the undeniable benefits of a more efficient marketplace.  Increased liquidity in the market creates a virtuous economic cycle.  Advertisers benefit from more and more diverse supply and publishers benefit from increased demand and competition for the inventory.  Since Brand advertising, like DR advertising, requires broad reach to maximize financial return, an efficient marketplace is a benefit.

But is the positive impact of RTB on brand advertising limited to just a more efficient market? No. RTB also facilitates greater focus on those Metrics That Matter to Brand advertisers:

-          Reach / Frequency: A key principle in branding is to maximize reach against the target audience while controlling frequency.  We can maximize reach more efficiently with RTB by bidding only when it results in incremental reach.  That is, bid smartly for reach – winning a new user for a campaign outweighs winning an additional exposure/increased frequency to an existing user.

-          Targeting: With audience data integration, RTB allows targeting at the user-level.  This allows Brands to win the trifecta: at the same time audience composition is optimized, reach is increased and frequency is managed.

-          Context: Exchanges or other data providers can score the various contexts that are applicable to the page – NOT the domain/site – from which the bid is originating.  We can bid only when the page-level context matches a campaign’s requirement.

-          Quality: For transparent inventory, Exchanges provide the URL of the page from which the bid originates.  We can screen for brand-safety and appropriateness of the content at the page-level before we bid, thus ensuring a quality environment for the brand. (We can do the same for anonymous inventory in a private marketplace – more on that in a separate blog.)

Again, dozens of offline sales studies prove that tight management of these levers drives highest actual offline sales ROI for brands.

How did we manage all of this before RTB, i.e., when inventory could only be bought directly from publishers?  At Brand.net, we built ad-serving technology – supplemented with operations – in anticipation of the Exchanges and are excited to plug in to the Exchange-oriented “tech stack”.  For example, with SafeScreen™, we apply quality at the page-level and discard impressions when they are not safe for brand advertisers.  (In 1H’11, we discarded 4.4% of the impressions for brand-safety reasons, even with buys across top comScore 50 “premium” publishers.)  However, with RTB, we will bid only if it is safe – no wasted impressions.  Similarly, for R/F management or targeting, our ad server is built to make user-level and impression-level decisions.  With RTB, we just move this upstream into bidding to minimize waste.  Our buying algorithms have always focused on the right inventory, the right amount, and at the right price – with feedback to refine & improve. With RTB, the feedback is more fine-grained (better) and in real-time (faster) resulting in smarter decisions.  Better, Faster, Smarter – that’s a good tagline for RTB!

So, RTB makes “achieving brand advertising goals” a better, faster, smarter possibility.  BUT (always a but)…the technical challenges to achieve those benefits using RTB are a lot greater than with publisher-direct buying, and even greater for Brand advertising than for DR advertising. For example, while there is more inventory with RTB, coordination across 10x more inventory and more publishers smartly requires significantly more technology, predictive modeling, and analytics.  Since there is a greater possibility of unsafe inventory, filtering and quality management become more challenging.  Since there is greater volatility in inventory availability and pricing, guaranteed delivery and smooth delivery – basic needs of Brands – also become more challenging to engineer.  If an ad technology company can’t manage against that volatility, the problems outweigh the benefits.  Want another challenge? At a purely infrastructural level, factoring all these considerations and returning a bid before the server times out is in itself a critical challenge and is, essentially, table-stakes for RTB.

Large numbers of DSPs have sprung up to help media buyers achieve the maximum benefit RTB can provide to direct response campaigns. Predictably, they are eager to access the huge brand budgets as well.  Media buyers beware:  success in DR does not ensure success in achieving Brand campaign KPIs. Make sure that your vendors understand and can prove that they achieve these Brand KPIs.  At that point, the benefits of RTB are realized for Brand advertisers.

So, what could market players – exchanges, IAB, publishers – do to move this brand opportunity even bigger?  A lot.  In my next blog, I’ll call out the key levers.

Filed under: Branding, Display Advertising
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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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