Making The Best Of The Messy World Of Marketing Campaign Measurement - Forbes

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Marketers preparing for a digital world without cookies are confronting many of the same challenges today they faced a few years ago.

These challenges include black holes in measurement, data inconveniently lodged in silos, incomplete views of cross platform campaign performance and a sense that the depth of performance insights falls short of what it should be.

I recently asked Jane Ostler, global head of media effectiveness at Kantar, for her perspective on marketing campaign performance issues.

Paul Talbot: What gets in the way of marketers who want a full view of campaigns?

Jane Ostler: It's simple to get a partial or siloed view of campaigns, but we know that advertisers don't really want that.  It is certainly possible to get a full view of campaigns but it's not simple.

By a large margin, advertisers far prefer trusted third party research, rather than data directly from publishers, which only gives a view of that publisher, not a comparative context.

What gets in the way?  Different data sources from online and offline channels and the deprecation of cookies.  The good news is that it is possible to measure total campaign effectiveness using a hybrid of deterministic data from direct integrations with publishers and analytics-led modeled data.

All of this can be validated using a combination of behavioral data with data from fully permissioned and privacy compliant panels.

Cross-publisher and cross-channel effectiveness measurement is clearly the way forward. With further increased spending on digital channels and more offline channels becoming digitized, it's imperative that advertisers understand effectiveness across the board.

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Only 8% of advertisers are measuring marketing performance of all their activities, so there are plenty of gaps in understanding to be filled.

Sixty-four percent of publishers/media owners are worried about the impact of a cookieless world (Media Reactions 2020).  Only 40% of marketers are prepared for the impact of a cookieless world.  And nearly half (48%) are worried their companies won't provide impactful performance in a cookieless world.

Talbot: For the digital marketer who wants to improve contextual targeting, what are the best practices to embrace and the pitfalls to avoid?

Ostler: Good practice involves tailoring the creative to the channel, while ensuring the campaign is integrated across channels, recognizably part of the same activity.  One pitfall is that assumptions about context may not be correct so testing is important.

And yet, only 4 in 10 (42%) are even testing creative executions, primarily due to perceptions of cost and speed.  Kantar's Context Lab is one of our fastest-growing offers, as advertisers, agencies and publishers want to test the impact of ads in context, fast.

Talbot: Under what circumstances can time-based targeting work well?

Ostler: Whether time-based targeting (picking particular timeslots in which to advertise) is a valid strategy will depend on the category and the product or service being promoted.

In a sense, it's nothing new. Offline broadcast media will be planned by timeslot to maximize reach to particular audiences, but in globally available digital media channels, there's more thinking required to make it work.  As in all marketing activities, a solid strategy and well thought through execution and measurement is required.

Talbot: Has anything noteworthy been taking place with measuring the effectiveness of marketing investments that have historically been difficult to gauge, such as sports sponsorships?

Ostler: There are a combination of recent developments including Kantar's Project Moonshot, direct integrations with publishers to allow cross-publisher measurement, and also the incorporation of advanced analytics techniques. 

This means that granular marketing performance across all channels can be assessed and predicted, via the use of good quality data and permissioned and privacy-compliant panels.

Sponsorship activities are increasingly being put on a level playing field with other marketing investments via 360 degree touchpoint planning research, and their return on investment is increasingly being measured via tailored long-term analytic modelling approaches.  With marketing budgets under huge scrutiny, effectiveness measurement is an even higher priority in 2021.