Month: February 2020

“Cross-media measurement isn’t easy to achieve but the barriers are more political and commercial than technical,” said Matt Green, global lead for media and digital at the World Federation of Advertisers. “Brands haven’t been enormously vocal on the issue but that’s changing.”

For years, the idea of being able to piece together a customer journey from offline to online channels has seemed more like a fool’s errand. When Nielsen and Facebook with Atlas tried to help advertisers minimize duplicated reach, for example, there were catches. Nielsen struggled to track in-app inventory while Atlas could not measure the Google-owned platforms being a Facebook product.

The industry’s latest attempt at cross-media measurement, however, has a few things going for it. Firstly, there’s a group of some of the largest advertisers now involved. Secondly, both Google and Facebook have said they will support the move. Third, there more examples of this being done well like in Germany where TV audience ratings including online video consumption on YouTube.

There are still a few key factors that must be resolved before the system can launch, said an exec with knowledge of the plan. The most pressing concern being how measurement data will be taken from the online platforms, said the exec.

The platforms and media owners want to share aggregated data, not user-level data, said another media executive with knowledge of the cross-media measurement plan.

In other words, marketers looking to run in-campaign frequency management will likely be disappointed as to do so they need user-level data. But for more pragmatic marketers, the stance from the platforms might not be so bad.

In place of user-level data, the platforms have proposed to share cohort-level analytics on audiences with specific attributes who have engaged with a campaign, said the media exec. The aggregated user information, alongside research data from companies like Nielsen that track TV and other offline media, would then be poured into a cloud-based clean room, said the exec.

The approach is similar to Google’s own alternative to third-party cookies that would study browsing behavior of cohorts rather than individuals. Where the two approaches differ, however, is the WFA’s one would be run by an independent body or joint industry committee.

The concept of an independent clean room with no controlling influence from either the buy or sell-sides sounds like the right idea. The problem is finding the right way to make it work.

Not only does the clean room need to give a fair representation of all the media involved, but it also has to run an aggregate analysis of all the data inside, so that advertisers can understand the reach, frequency and attribution of their ads. Otherwise, the clean room would just be a central repository for reporting on separate channels — no different to what companies like Datorama do today.

“Since there’s no common unique identifier shared across publishers to identify an individual, any solution would need enough information to match up account profiles and cookie data, Paul Kasamias, managing partner at Publicis Media agency Starcom. Without those details, the confidence in any insights is always going to be limited, said Kasamias.

Nevertheless, both Google and Facebook have told advertisers they’re willing to help smooth over any bumps on the road toward cross-media measurement.

In an emailed statement, Brad Smallwood, vp of measurement and insights at Facebook said: “We applaud the WFA for bringing the industry together to design a global, privacy-safe, cross-media measurement solution. We are committed to working with the WFA to achieve a proposal that would allow for continuous measurement of reach, frequency management and sales outcomes across all media formats. Providing advertisers with a more comprehensive understanding of their media investments, ultimately resulting in a better experience for consumers.”

That said, it’s in the interest of the platforms to be involved in how cross-media measurement is done. After all, any cross-media measurement framework would allow online video inventory to be compared against TV, and could subsequently make it easier for money to be moved from one media owner to the other.

Senior marketers like Unilever’s svp of global media Luis Di Como have demanded that online platforms like Google and Facebook do better to help advertisers measure reach, not just spend. Online platforms are great at helping advertisers measure the performance of campaigns within their own ecosystems, but tend to ignore what people do outside of their respective platforms. It’s a reality advertisers increasingly struggle with in order to reconcile with their own plans to buy more online media.

Despite those struggles, the imminent removal of cookies from the measurement equation has left advertisers with no option but to pursue better ways to see how many times a single person saw the marketer’s ads across multiple platforms.

“We’re hearing from brand marketers that they are increasingly being asked — often by their chief marketing officer — to understand the contribution and online-to-offline impact of linear TV to their digital channel efforts,” said Brian Leder, president of media consultancy Ramp97.

On ApartmentTherapy.com, the spaces will be shown in photos and will have links to purchase the items from home. The site received an average of 5.3 million monthly unique visitors in 2019, according to Comscore.

The Small/Cool Experience is not a pure commerce play, as chief revenue officer Riva Syrop said the integration of sponsorships help to cover the operational costs.

Apartment Therapy editor-in-chief Laura Schocker said that unlike a traditional interior design trade show, which “aren’t usually accessible for consumers,” accessibility is going to be a focus for this event, which is why it is free for people to attend.

The barcodes on the items take the shopper to a wish list page where all of their scanned items are housed. Then, if they decide to purchase it, they will be led to the retailer’s online shopping platform. Syrop said that there will be approximately 40 different retailers represented with products and each room will have anywhere between 20 and 30 items available for purchase.

Syrop said the commission rates Apartment Therapy has with each of its retail partners varies, however, she said they’re all pretty in-line with its affiliate business, the average commission of which is around 20%.

The Small/Cool Experience will also be monetized through sponsorships. Currently, Apartment Therapy has eight sponsors on board, six of which are sponsoring six out of the 20 rooms at the venue. In those spaces, the sponsors will have only their own products available for purchase, however they will still have a designer help curate the set up. Sponsors who will be showing off their products include Amazon Handmade, Tuft and Needle and Urban Outfitters, while Behr Paint and Chasing Paper will be supplying paint and wall coverings, respectively, throughout the rooms.

“The whole goal for this event was to be able to do it,” said Syrop. “We priced the sponsorships as low as we could and we worked hard to reach out to the brands that we thought would have a good presence in the space. Of all the places [we’re investing and growing], this is not where we [expected] to make a big profit in year one.”

While Syrop wouldn’t disclose the revenue made from this event, she said they have broken even on sponsorships alone.

Apartment Therapy’s overall revenue pie is currently divided up as 40% coming from custom content, 20% from direct sold advertisements, 20% from programmatic ad sales, 15% from its commerce and licensing business and the final 5% coming from experiential, which until this year was made up of custom events and dinners. Syrop wouldn’t disclose the company’s overall revenue, however, she said the goal for this coming year is to look for other opportunities to grow its experiential business with consumer-facing events, barring the success of this first one.

From 2018 to 2019, the company’s revenue grew by 30% year over year and is projected to have the same percentage growth from 2019 to 2020. Within that, Syrop said that the commerce and licensing revenue equally increased by 30% year over year from 2018 to 2019.

The idea for the publisher’s first consumer event came from its old decade-long franchise called Small/Cool that went dormant back in 2016, according to Schocker. The concept initially included a contest; the contest is also coming back, with entries opening up the first day of the event.

Derek Shore, account supervisor at AMP Agency who works in the advertising agency’s experiential division, said giving sponsors the ability to showcase their own products in real time at the event gives them the advantage of the “time sensitive nature of the interaction.” This means the sponsor has the ability to see how the attendees are responding to the products in the moment and learn from those reactions right then.

This added value, along with the guaranteed foot traffic, he said, enables the publisher to offer a more holistic evaluation of the partnership they’re looking to sell.

“Ultimately, sponsors are hungry for as much data as they can get,” said Eric Fleming, co-founder of experiential agency Makeout NYC, so including transactional data in the moment will enable partners to collect even more data than not having that opportunity for closing sales.

Do we need another holding company?
We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t think so. But, again, I don’t like the term holding company. This is a solution for clients to meet the needs of the modern marketer. We’re a category of one, that’s a good place to be.

Will you end up with one department in charge of accounting?
The idea is to move toward centralized services on the back end but over time because the first and most important thing is culture and the needs of a founder.

How many shops do you think you’ll end up with under Plan A?
We’ll be announcing some new additions to the federation [at Cannes] as we continue to round out the services. But there will be a cap because at a certain point we will have a full bench. I don’t think of it numerically. I think of it as services. If you’re a marketer and you’re looking to check off the boxes, I would say we have 80% of the boxes a modern marketer would need checked if they’re looking for top of the funnel expertise. But there’s still more. I don’t want to give away the playbook. We have a pretty full bench at this point: We have experiential, social, brand strategy, design, PR, crisis communications, gaming.

What happened with Badgers & Winters?
Did you ever have a relationship that didn’t work out? It just wasn’t a fit. It was early days and I think we both misunderstood each other’s intentions. I have nothing but respect for what they do. They wanted to maintain a lifestyle business and we are engineering this for an outcome [for clients].

Do you want to bring in media services?
I’d rather focus on the top of the funnel at this point, creative, strategy and relationships — the services that cannot be automated. We want to bake the bread, not necessarily slice it or distribute it.

In-housing has been on the rise. How will you compete with that? 
With regard to the in-sourcing of agency services, it’s smart and efficient but creative people get bored working on one thing 24/7 and you lose objectivity. I would imagine that much of the day-to-day performance marketing expertise, the media expertise, can be brought in-house but you still need a consultative, objective point-of-view to re-position your thinking, to inspire and to drive change. That will always be welcome. Even as clients in-source, they will look to external thinkers.

Consolidation has been rocking the industry. Do you think that will continue?
On the holding company level, the costs are insurmountable and there will be much more consolidation and retooling but they’re fighting an uphill battle, especially as public companies. [Consolidation will] happen internally [at holding companies]. They will continue to hyphenate once separate entities and then they will look to larger, more massive consolidation.

After the consolidation, do you think there will just be fewer shops?
The analog is probably digital media. Vice ingests Refinery, Vox ingests New York. Similar things will happen [in the agency space]. It’s the only way to compete for an industry that’s facing secular decline. Then it will become less commodified as a result, which is a good thing. Maybe all of this is just a necessary correction. There were too many players. There was a pretty low barrier to entry and this is a Darwinian reset. Publishing was in decline before Madison Avenue was in decline and the consolidation we see in publishing will be reflected in advertising agencies and their holding company overlords.

In recent years, the threat of consultancies has worried agencies but that chatter seems to have died down. Is that because the threat isn’t as present?
Management consultancies in-sourcing marketing services is a pretty formidable proposition. It’s a logical cross-sell. They’ve already established themselves at the top of the food chain. To me, it’s far more compelling than agencies trying to become management consultancies. So, it may be a little less buzzy as a subject of conversation but it’s a very real thing and there’s more to come.

So you would say the threat of say Accenture or Deloitte isn’t over.
Hell no! It’s just getting started and I’m a big fan of it. It’s an extension of an existing dominant position and it just makes a lot of sense since they’re already embedded in a lot of businesses at the CEO level.

Do you think we’ll see a lot more deals like Accenture and Droga5’s?
I do. Yes. It’s easier for them to buy than build.

The disruption in the industry isn’t only at agencies but also inside brands. Why do you think that is?
There’s a lot of tension right now between performance marketing and brand marketing. That’s starting to go away as people become more sophisticated about the ecosystem. It’ll always be about growth at the end of the day. We went through a period of chaos and things are starting to become a bit clearer.

Do you think the CMO position will go away?
It might change in terms of semantics. Some would say chief growth officer is probably a more apropos term. But I don’t think it will go away. It’s still a critical role in the enterprise.

TransUnion uses its proprietary credit database (which it says is aggregated and anonymized when used for marketing purposes) and data from other third-parties to offer services to marketers. Those services include audience segmentation, data onboarding, identity resolution and “prescreen campaigns” that only target people whose credit ratings are high enough to qualify for certain finance products.

In 2018, TransUnion hired former MediaLink managing director Matt Spiegel to led its digital marketing solutions business. Alongside that role, Spiegel now also heads TransUnion’s media vertical, working to forge partnerships and deals with companies in the publishing, broadcasting, ad tech and marketing tech sectors.

“We recognize that the media vertical and players in it over the past several years would not have seen TransUnion show up in a way that suggests that these are the capabilities we are bringing to the market at scale,” Spiegel said. “2020 is about making it clear that we are meaningfully invested in this category of solutions.”

TransUnion made a signal of that intent in May last year by acquiring the marketing tech platform TruSignal, to help expand its lookalike audience and predictive audience modeling capabilities. Earlier that year, TransUnion also announced a partnership with Tru Optik, which offers a data-management and measurement platform for over-the-top television.

Organic U.S. revenue within TransUnion’s “emerging verticals” segment — which includes Spiegel’s department — grew to $193 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, up 6% on the same quarter last year. The company noted on its earnings call this was a slight decline in growth from the last several quarters. TransUnion CFO Tod Cello noted that over the course of 2019, the company had reshaped the media vertical to further develop its “people-based marketing technology.”

Spiegel said the current triumvirate of the ad industry’s hot topics — the death of third-party cookies, data regulation and user privacy — “plays to our advantage.”

“We are building solutions that start from that people-based approach because we touch the data and we have an ability to handle those regulations and requirements,” given TransUnion’s heritage in the highly regulated credit reporting space, he said.

One challenge TransUnion might face as it steps up its outreach to the marketing community is making a case that it has enough direct connections with publishers in order for its identity solutions to stand out from its competitors, said Paul Cimino, global head of data strategy at Prohaska Consulting. Companies including LiveRamp and ID5 have been heavily investing in building out their identity graphs, for example.

“It’s a very tough assignment,” Cimono said, but in TransUnion’s favor, he added, “I think the purchase of TruSignal was a major move; up until that point I didn’t think they were getting anywhere and were beholden to other intermediaries to sell their product [because] they had no view of the internet at scale.”

To that end, Spiegel describes TransUnion as more of a “data originator” that partners with different companies to help link disparate identity signals together — starting with the approximately 500 million business and credit histories it stores in its database.

Still, another challenge might simply be that TransUnion arriving too late to the party in what is now a mature market, according to a marketer at a consumer-packaged goods company who did not want to be identified for this article.

“Is the juice worth the squeeze?,” the marketer said. “Once you build in one of these [data] partners, it’s really hard to rip out. To test TransUnion versus Experian, that’s a lot of unsexy work.”