ad:tech brain » The Voice of ad:tech

The Evolution Of Audience Measurement. Discussion.

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:33:51 +0000

The topic of audience measurement has been hotly debated for many years. Whether it be the debate about how accurately a media property can measure its reach, how many people in Australia REALLY use the internet or how many people were touched by the message of a campaign. For equally as long, the evangelists of online marketing have sung the praises of the medium because it is so measureable. The challenge is that although as a medium, it is infinitely more measurable than any other medium, there is no consistency in that measurement. No common currency on which the media can be bought and sold and no universally agreed standard for counting eyeballs.

Sometimes it seems like we tie ourselves up in knots worrying about the exactness of the number and lose sight of the reason why we care. Is online the right channel to reach people, what is the right place to put our message and do the people who will see it even care. Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is whether or not we can measure that.

Increasingly, marketing activities demand accountability. Did it work? In order to assess this, we need some sort of yardstick. Statistics and measurement are our only tools for assessing this but just as it is difficult to compare two lengths when one is measured in imperial standards and the other in metric, the current inconsistencies in measurement make any true comparative assessment of reach or effectiveness pretty hard to do.

Our industry, as it has matured, has turned more and more focus on developing a unilateral standard around this topic. I spoke to Monique Perry from Nielson who promises that a consistent measurement currency is very close to launching in Australia so perhaps we are starting to see some light at the end of this tunnel.

The challenge however still remains that whether or not we can decide on a consistent way to measure the audience on one site, or even the web universe as a whole, how can we measure the cross platform effectiveness.

Measuring the interactions between platforms remains a problem. Although we have agreed currency around TV and radio audiences and by integrating these with a standardised online measurement tool we will get half way there, it does not solve the entire problem. When we start to consider other online channels such as social media, mobile, email and outdoor, the measurement task becomes even more complex. When we decide we want to look at how the interactions between platforms may have a multiplier effect on a consumers propensity to respond, measurement of this becomes almost impossible.

It is always an interesting area of debate and one which is a constantly evolving. The ad:tech panel have certainly got their work cut out getting to the bottom of this and I’m looking forward to hearing what they’ve got to say. Here are the panel details:

Wednesday 17th March The Evolution Of Audience Measurement

• How do we get a fixed method of measuring and reporting online audiences?
• What are the steps towards cross platform audience measurement: can we get a true view of the consumers’ activity
• Beyond reach and frequency: how do we move to measuring advertising effectiveness, not audience numbers

Session Leader: Megan Brownlow, Editor, Entertainment & Media Outlook, PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Gai Le Roy, Programmes Manager, IAB Australia
Stuart Pike, Asia Pacific Research Director, Nielsen
Gordon Towell, CEO, Audit Bureau of Circulations
Lisa Walsh, Head of Audience Research, ABC

Registration closes Friday 12th march 5.30pm. Register now.

What’s The Role Of A Digital Strategy In Today’s Marketplace? Discussion & video

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:59:01 +0000

I spoke with Yvette Mayer, National Digital Director, Starcom about the role of digital strategy. Here’s a video of our chat:

Yvette is speaking on the ad:tech panel discussion about the role of digital strategy (Tuesday 16th March, 9.45am). I wrote a post sharing my thoughts on this a few weeks back, you can read that here.

Ten days ’til ad:tech so book your tickets now.

ad:tech EXHIBITION, free to attend, includes international keynote presentations, expo seminar theatre and After Party
ad:tech CONFERENCE, the most thoroughly researched program and more brand speakers than any other event in Australia

Creative – Strategy – Data: What Should Drive Your Digital Marketing Most?

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:35:19 +0000

Marketing is ultimately about connecting with a group of people and communicating a message to them. Simple in essence; enormously challenging in execution. The myriad of information, options and opportunities at hand mean that you can approach the connection/communication task from a variety of angles.
When we think about marketing, even digital marketing specifically, all marketers have the same tools available to them, websites, social media, email, mobile etc. In addition, the average consumer is subjected to hundreds of advertising messages a day in one form or another. So in this environment, how can a marketer make sure that their message rises above the clutter?
In the old days, advertising was driven by a traditional art director/copywriter team coming up with a “big idea”…the creative. Now, with a more complex list of potential channels, the focus has shifted to less emotive and more analytical considerations such as behavioural insights, channel insights, technology insights and experience insights that enable a brand to connect and engage with the audience… the strategy. But even this is not enough and can lead to widespread wastage if it is directed to the wrong people. The real key comes in how these factors work in combination with targeting the right message at the right person at the right time … in other words, the data.
The debate remains however, what is the most important component of the mix: Creative, strategy or data?
Drayton Bird from Ogilvy once said that the success of marketing activity is 60% targeting (data), 25% offer (strategy) and 15% execution (creative). Is this still true? Is this true in the context of every campaign? Who should be driving the solution given that these three elements are typically managed by three different people within an agency?
This year we have assembled a panel of people from different perspectives to hash out the real question of who or what should be driving the bus in our future marketing landscape. In this session, you can hear from:
Session Leader:
Tom Hutton, Managing Partner, Ideagarden

Panellists:
David Whittle, Managing Director, Mark
Jason Davey, Managing Director, Bullseye
Brent Annells, Head of Radar DDB, DDB

How The Financial Services Industry Have Shaped And Influenced The Digital Media Space. Discussion & video

Lucy James (ad:tech) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:50:41 +0000

Jenny Williams spoke to Harry Lowes, Executive Manager - Digital Marketing, Commonwealth Bank about the campaigns that he’s admired most this year and why he thinks the financial services industry are often ‘first’ with digital media:

The financial services industry is known for testing new and innovative ideas and campaigns in the digital space. But what have they really achieved? Has there been long term effect, benefit, on the interactive media industry as a whole? And can they prove it??!

At ad:tech Harry and other marketing executives from financial services will be addressing just this and discussing more about the areas of risk, and how to manage them; and the areas of opportunity, and how to capitalise on them.

Read details of the panel discussion here. The other panellists with Harry are:

Michael Weeding, Head of Website & Online Acquisition, Citi
Monty Hamilton, Head of Online, UBank
Murray Howe, Executive Manager - Digital Marketing, Suncorp

Reputation Management In The Digital Space: Challenges & Opportunities

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:56:41 +0000

Reputation management is a critical issue in the digital space. With the advent of social media and the growth in user generated content, anyone can say anything they want about a brand and there is very little that the brand can do to control this.

Many companies shy away from any form of social media because they fear they will be opening the floodgates of consumer complaint however this isn’t really the solution. Consumers will talk anyway and it is invariably better to be part of the conversation than a helpless observer. At least if you are part of the conversation and you create the spaces in which the consumers can talk to you openly, the chances that you will be able to maintain some control is much higher.

It is true though that people with an axe to grind are often more vocal than the happy campers. Search remains one of the most important ways that consumers find information. If a brand is to retain any control and deliver relevance in an environment where they are competing against consumer comments, they must tackle any issues that they face or brand misrepresentation head on. Negative search results should not be ignored. They should be dealt with in the environment where they exist.

Proactive reputation management involves first listening to consumers, observing the issues, responding, often to the very individual who is complaining and having the ability to admit mistakes and correct them if that is necessary.

Additionally, proactively stimulating positive comments from multiple different environments is crucial to dominating SERP and, if possible, pushing negative results down the page. To do this, it is important to gain a real understanding of who ranks well. What influence do they have and how to engage them.

In this session, we will hear a couple of case studies from Canon and Cadbury to learn a little about how they have managed some of the challenges that reputation management involves. The panellists are:
Brett Wiskar, Director, Speedwell eBusiness Solutions
Myrna Van Pelt, Director, Technology, Hill & Knowlton Australia
Jeff Richardson, CEO, The Online Circle
Roger Sharp, Director of Corporate Affairs – Pacific, Cadbury

Paid vs. Free: What Are The Best Analytics Tools For Your Marketing & Advertising Requirements? Discussion and video.

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:41:15 +0000

I spoke to Christian Bartens, Managing Director, Datalicious about the debate of free v.s paid analytics tools. Here’s a video of our chat, and my thoughts below:

I mentioned in my last post the importance of data in any truly customer centric strategy. The problem we have in digital marketing however is the sheer volume of data that we can gather. It’s easy to be obsessed with the collection of it and then become overwhelmed once we have it.

While the technology enables us to get more and more sophisticated, the key to making use of data is the collection of the RIGHT data, the analytics of it and a culture of adapting based on what you learn. It’s an ongoing process. Putting proper analytics in place is not necessarily an expensive business. Google’s free analytics tools have opened up the power of analytics to a much broader audience. This has been a great thing for our industry as it has raised everyone’s awareness of what is really happening on their websites. However it also raises the debate of the benefit of free vs. paid tools.

An article I read recently claimed that Omniture’s market share of paid tools has grown from 18% to 42% in 2009 and WebTrends has dropped from 27% to 19%. It went on to claim that 80% of companies are using Google Analytics compared to 66% the year before. The conclusion they drew was that the market is rapidly polarising into two camps, with free Google Analytics at one end and tools like Omniture at the other.

The difference between paid and free tools seems to come down to the degree of personalised detail you want to be able to get and the integration you want with other systems such as data warehouses and CRM systems.

The decision of whether to go free or paid however extends beyond pure cost and integration requirements. One of the most critical components in an effective data strategy is the resources capable of interpreting the massive quantities of data available. It takes a special kind of skill to be able to unearth the real secrets that data holds and there is often an assumption that you will know what you are looking for once they find it. Perhaps the question that an organisation should be asking itself before they worry about what tool is who will be using it.

Christian Bartens will be moderating a panel discussion on this issue at ad:tech Sydney, other panellists sharing their view on the paid vs. free debate are:

Matt Langie, Director Product Marketing, Omniture (Global)
Alex Crompton, Senior Manager, Web Marketing, Aussie
Jonathan Kerr, Associate Director eCommerce, Budget Direct
Rod Jacka, Managing Director, Panalysis

You can share your thoughts and feedback on this issue right here, and keep checking in to see what others have to say and how the debate is shaping up.

What Are The Possibilities That An Holistic Data Strategy Brings To Your Business?

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:11:27 +0000

Lots of organisations talk about delivering a “customer centric experience” but how can you do this if you don’t really know who your customer is? By this, I am not talking about broad demographic segmentation models but quite personalised, specific information on the individual customer.

Data is at the heart of delivering this kind of experience. If you know who they are, what they buy, what content they are interested in, what their preferences are and how often they want to interact to you, it is possible to tailor the experience they have with your brand to meet these needs, deliver offers that are most relevant and increase your chances of conversion.

But how achievable is this nirvana of a singular customer view? CRM companies have been promising this for years and businesses have invested millions of dollars and thousands of head hours attempting to achieve it. Still, few companies can, hand on heart say they have a holistic data solution in place as part of their digital strategy.

The challenges that most companies face in developing a single customer view seems to be driven by the volume of legacy data systems that need to be integrated and whether or not this integration needs to be in real time or not.

But having the systems that enable data to be consolidated in one place is only the first step in a holistic data strategy. No matter how much information you have on an individual is useless unless you have the business logic in place to connect the data elements together, understanding of relationships between these elements and determine outcomes in terms of the customer experience.

Because data is often collected from a wide range of areas within an organisation, including the digital and interactive mediums, and the return on the knowledge may be recognised in a different part of the organisation to where the data collection needs to take place, motivating people to maintain good data practices and managing the expectations of ROI can sometimes be difficult. If the call centre is measured by how many calls they can process and the CRM system slows them down, were is the incentive to use it properly?

Additionally, perhaps the most important thing that a data strategy has to include is the ability to learn and evolve. People change, trends evolve and consumer demand shifts. Analytics need to not only measure the effectiveness of communications, content or offers but also identify changes that are occurring and how an organisation might need to adapt and evolve to meet these shifts.

Data is the key to truly understanding your customers. It is easy to become overwhelmed with the data that is available and lazy about how you collect and look at it but the future of our industry will no doubt begin to rely more and more heavily on the insights it delivers to improve our businesses and the relationships we have with our customers.

There’ll be some good debate around this in the panel session at ad:tech: What Are The Possibilities That An Holistic Data Strategy Brings To Your Business? The panellists for that session are:

Kevin Mackin, General Manager, Coremetrics
Sean Smith, Head of Brand and Communications, HotelClub.com, Orbitz Worldwide
Leila Seith Hassan, Senior Marketing Analyst, Datalicious
Michael Kustreba, VP Australia and New Zealand, Epsilon International

They’ll be sharing their points of view. You can pose some questions or share your thoughts here.

A Truly Practical And Realistic ‘How To’ On Social Media - discussion and video

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:46:23 +0000

I spoke with Magda Walczak, Head of eCommerce for Real Insurance about some of the challenges that she faces in her organisation and how they manage them. Here’s a video of my chat with her.

The interesting thing about social media is the breadth of areas within an organisation that it can touch. Unlike some marketing initiatives, which are all about a campaign, social media tends to be more about the relationship and the dialogue that customers (and potential customers) have with a company and each other in relation to a company.
These touch points might be in the corporate communications department, the call centre, sales, customer support, the list goes on. Social media is a two way channel of communication … like the phone. It requires both a proactive approach and the ability to respond rapidly to events as they unfold. It requires the ability to listen to conversations that you might not previously been aware of and it involves empowering but managing the voice of your employees in the social media space.
For many organisations this is scary and the last thing that they want is to engage in a conversation with a customer who might say something bad about them. In many cases, it seems easier to do nothing at all rather than navigate their way through a series of complex decisions that make the legal department turn blue. The truth is however, whether you are part of the conversation or not, people are talking. Whether you want to participate is really about just how deeply you want to bury your head in the sand.
Assuming you are ready to start the conversation, the next step is to figure out a strategy and what tools you should use to do it. This can be extremely confusing and frequently, the ROI is difficult or impossible to directly measure.

The financial services and insurance industries are amongst the most sophisticated digital marketers in the industry however they also face some of the greatest challenges in social media. First because they are the big targets for complaints and secondly because they are traditionally some of the most conservative in terms of risk aversion.

Magda will be leading a really practical session at ad:tech on how to use all the tools that social media has to offer. It promises to be a really interesting session.

The Impact Of Social Content On e-Commerce - discussion and video

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:45:04 +0000

Consumer recommendations are one of the most credible forms of advertising because people trust people. Peer to peer recommendations and word of mouth have long been recognised as powerful marketing tools. While online, most companies rely heavily on search ranking to drive traffic and awareness, social content in e-commerce is the merger of these two ideas and represents an incredibly important area for any online retailer to consider.

According to a Forrester study, 71% of online shoppers read reviews, (http://www.ratepoint.com/resources/industrystats.html) making it the most widely read form of consumer-generated content. Additionally, a separate study by Coremetrics (http://www.bazaarvoice.com/resources/stats) found that people who read a review were 30% more likely to purchase a product and visitors who wrote a review were 80% more likely to convert.

Likewise, recommendation engines like Amazon (‘people who bought this product also bought that product’) go a long way to mirroring the retail experience and assisting in driving cross sell and upsell behaviour. When recommendation engines go social however, like LastFM (‘people who like similar things to you also like this’) it really starts to feel even more relevant and personalised bringing an offline experience truly online.

When Google announced their transition to real-time search this catapulted the importance of social media in the search game too. Real-time data is now placed above traditional web search results and as a result, it makes it even easier for a consumer who is purchasing a product to review social content that they may previously have had to work a lot harder to find.

The impact of the social content on sales is undeniable.

Social media has rapidly become one of the most powerful ways to raise awareness, build brands, drive customer loyalty and attract audiences to sites. Building a loyal community who are engaged and willing to contribute social content is potentially one of the most critical components of sales conversion in e-commerce and essential to the digital strategy of any marketer or retailer who is trying to sell their products online.

This is an area that any online retailer should be looking into seriously, and we’ll be discussing the key issues in the session at ad:tech ‘What Is The Impact Of Social Content On e-Commerce?’. The panellists will be reviewing the key issues. They are:

Myself and the ad:tech panel would welcome your comments and thoughts here.

And you can see the video of Tim Hughes sharing his thoughts on the subject here:

The Real Marketing And Advertising Opportunities That Video Presents

Jenny Williams (Ideagarden) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:57:48 +0000

Online video advertising has been around for almost a decade, but in the last few years, we have seen it rise in importance as a marketing medium. The astronomical growth in youtube traffic tells us that consumers are actively partaking in online video content, but how best should marketers use it.?

There are a multitude of streaming ad formats around. It can be all too tempting to just throw your 30-sec TVC up into a banner and get double the reach for the same production cost, however I do question if this is the most beneficial approach for the brand. Forcing someone to watch your ad before they can see the content they really want is basically the same model as the commercial TV stations have been using for decades and while this model still has some strength from a publisher perspective, it does not really take into consideration the fact that most people who watch online video, are operating in a pull mentality, not push.

There are a lot of more innovative ways that companies can use video which seem to me to offer both more creative options and more opportunities for engagement. Long form video content has increased dramatically in recent years with Nielson estimating an increase of 129% last year alone. Some even predict that this will be the driving factor in the growth of digital video advertising over the next five years.

Online video is very close to the television experience and gives brands an opportunity to add real value to viewers. Whether it be through entertainment, ‘how to’ instructional information or experiential content that really gives a consumer a deeper sense of a brand, the really exciting thing about this is that you are no longer limited by the time frames that restricted commercial TV spots.
The challenge however, is cost. Quality video production can be expensive. How brands can justify the ROI comes down to how efficiently they can measure the quality of the interaction and the conversions that they receive.

There are a plethora of metrics that one can observe, but how many advertisers are approaching this medium in an analytical way? Where you embed your videos, how you channel consumers through a conversion path and how you monitor and optimise your content based on observed viewer behavior needs to become part and parcel of the equation.

I might not have all the answers here but the issues will be discussed in this panel discussion at ad:tech: Reviewing The Real Marketing And Advertising Opportunities That Video Presents
How do you commercialise video? (Tuesday 16th March, 4.05pm). The panellists are:
Kerry Field, Mindshare
Matt Hunt, RedLever
Karen Stocks, YouTube Australia & New Zealand
Ian Gardiner, Viocorp

And they’ll be talking specifically about:
What formats of video are most beneficial for your brand
Where can you not live without video?
How can video help merge the on and off line brand experience?
What is the publishers’ vision for video?