Amid these changes, brands want to see more indications that their campaigns are producing results. That means looking beyond digital outcomes like cost per click, cost per landing page view and cost per completed view.

“When we talk about outcomes, we talk about real-world outcomes,” Simon Stone, general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa for ad-tech startup LoopMe, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Those outcomes include brand awareness, purchase intent, store visits and physical, offline sales.”

Measuring Brand Lift

LoopMe last week introduced PurchaseLoop Measurement to provide real-time measurement of consumer brand lift and other analytics. The tool is aimed at ad agencies, brands and publishers to measure media effectiveness and to help make quicker adjustments to campaigns while they’re in flight.

“We’re giving the ability for clients to look at all the partners on their plan and assess how they’re performing,” Stone said. “We’re able to measure across multiple screens. That includes mobile, desktop, audio and now connected TV. We’re also looking at multiformat as well, that could be video, rich media or display.”

LoopMe is working with major agency groups and brads to adopt its artificial intelligene (AI) technology with the goal of becoming the industry standard in brand measurement.

“In digital, it’s shifting away from being predominantly performance, and we’re finding a lot more dollars are being invested into brand advertising,” Stone said. “Now, there’s that full-funnel approach where it’s not just purely for the lower-funnel conversions. You can actually build a brand online with the formats of video and rich media.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

“Media has become more complicated as we’ve seen more fragmentation, the shift to digital and the shift to mobile media consumption,” Ron Amram, senior director of global media at Mars, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The ROIs and effectiveness of media are more volatile than anything that we’ve seen.”

Stricter privacy laws and the eroding support for tracking cookies in web browsers add to the challenges in measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns. In some cases, market mix modeling (MMM) and 360-degree have complemented strategies to improve predictions of results.

“We’ve shifted to modeling to do what we may have outsourced or used cookie data for in the past to fill the gap,” Amram said.

‘Laying Models on Top of Models’

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze vast troves of data and help with decision-making are gaining prominence amid the more complex media market. The technology can provide insights to optimize ad creative and media investments as consumer habits change.

“What we’re finding is there’s not one model. We’re laying models on top of models to try and find the best course forward,” Amram said. “You used to hear about things like weather prediction – now, we’re applying that same science to marketing.”

OOH Resurgence

As more consumers resume their former habits of commuting to work, going to restaurants or traveling by plane, out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is showing signs of bouncing back. Mars is weighing the opportunities to raise visibility in those channels, depending on the signals it receives from consumers.

“If you can optimize quickly, and digital out-of-home placement allows you to do that, then you’ll start to see us using it more,” Amram said.

Mars also is looking at the opportunities in addressable advertising to personalize its messaging, whether it’s promoting its chocolate brands like M&M’s or pet-food products like Iams.

“It depends on the category, it depends on the product, and the amount of personalization and customization,” Amram said. “For us, addressable is a broad category of different content and for different media types.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

“Even before the pandemic, there’s been more attention on understanding the impact of media, and there’s more pressure on the CMO to be able to show accountability around performance,” Peter Vandre, chief analytics officer at Dentsu Media US, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

Replacing Tracking Cookies

Amid the demand to find greater efficiencies in media spending, Vandre sees three developments that will replace current measurement methods such as tracking cookies. First, advertisers will measure digital ad performance in terms of “qualified clicks” – or consumer engagements that result in a specified outcome. Second, media sellers including search engines, social networks and publishers are developing solutions to measure ad performance. Third, audience modeling is becoming more sophisticated.

“I see modeling becoming more and more granular to try to understand not only how are we driving high-level impacts across media, but modeling more specific actions – downstream engagement,” Vandre said.

Identity and Privacy

The heightened awareness about consumer privacy is the major impetus for developing an alternative to tracking cookies. Those efforts include Unified ID 2.0 backed by demand-side platform The Trade Desk, and proprietary solutions that ask consumers for consent to be tracked.

“We’re focused on person-based identity overall,” Vandre said. “The big question is: how do you scale that? How do you build the connections between that identity and publishers? That’s an area we’re spending a lot of time on.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

“The expectations right now is that vendors are bringing us opportunities to break through the clutter,” Doug Zarkin, vice president and chief marketing officer of Pearle Vision, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We are not going to be a brand that outspends the competition. We are a brand that continually out-thinks the competition.”

He said Pearle Vision is seeking marketing partners that understand its business and how they can add value to its marketing infrastructure.

“Frankly, I don’t care if you have a bunch of ex-Google people that work for you,” Zarkin said. “I don’t care if you worked for Procter & Gamble or Johnson & Johnson, and I certainly don’t care if you worked for one of our competitors. What I’m really interested in is a vendor who comes to us with really strong insights driven from their investigation into our business, and very clear reasons to believe they’re a solution we currently don’t have in the portfolio.”

‘Human Truth’ Overrides FOMO

Zarkin said marketers need to recognize qualities of “human truth” that are enduring, such as the need for relationships with others.

“When you finally decide to go out of your home, and enjoy a meal at a restaurant or shop in your favorite brick-and-mortar outlet, there is a sense of joy and a bit of nostalgia for how great it is when there’s somebody there to care for you,” he said. “Personal relationships are something people are longing for as they look for goods and services.”

Brands also should focus on the fundamentals of consumer needs, rather than current trends, he said.

“Fear of missing out is not a marketing strategy,” Zarkin said. “There are so many things that you could do. There are less things that you should do. There are even less things that you need to do, and a much smaller set of things that you must do…We have to make that sure we’re nailing ‘the must.’”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

“We’re looking more at first-party data to ensure we’re prepared as we can be, as it relates to this cookieless future that is on the horizon,” Jennifer Kohl, senior vice president and executive director of integrated media at WPP’s VMLY&R, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’re chasing quality engagements for our clients to the best extent possible.”

AI Tools for Targeting

Marketers and their agencies are adopting more advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze vast amounts of data and automate some decisions about media placements more quickly. Those adjustments are possible while ad campaigns are in flight.

“AI can help in real-time optimization and predictive models, helping to drive positive outcomes that we’re working for,” Kohl said. “We have had success with partners like a LoopMe that specialize in AI real-time optimization, and we continue to explore other AI partners.”

Streaming Video’s Growing Role

As consumers spend more time with connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) video services, advertisers are shifting media budgets to reach them on a wider variety of devices including smart TVs and mobile phones. Awareness campaigns aimed at the top of the purchase funnel have an effect on lower-funnel activity like conversions and sales.

“When we incorporate things like CTV or OTT into our media plans, the role is very similar to linear. It’s higher-level, awareness-generating role,” Kohl said. “What we know directionally, though, is when we put these higher-funnel media channels into the mix that are a little bit more awareness-focused, we do see a good, positive impact on lower-funnel tactics.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.

“We are moving from outputs to outcomes,” Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), said in this interview with Beet.TV. “There is an increased focus to understand what is being delivered, and if you look at the last year and a half, we’ve had such an acceleration particularly on the performance side and with e-commerce.”

Advertisers face additional hurdles in improving their measurement methods as more regions enact privacy laws that give consumers greater control over how their personal data are gathered, shared and used for ad targeting. Technology companies have responded by gradually limiting the use of tracking cookies that help to measure online ad performance.

“It’s going to require everyone to come together to really think about what does attribution look like moving forward,” Kaplowtiz said. “We need tools, and we need access to be able to look across the ecosystem, not just have this group of walled gardens where we look at this in isolation, but how do we understand holistically what’s going on with a campaign.”

Advertisers are seeking ways to get a more comprehensive view of consumers as they spend time among different media platforms. They’re also looking for data that help to compare ad performance throughout those channels.

“There are so many business use cases out there, and one tool or one piece of technology may only apply to one piece of that,” Kaplowitz said “You may need to leverage different approaches, and that’s going to be a little bit more complex and challenging.”

Agency Compensation

The 4A’s collaborated with Google and Forrester Research to study how outcomes-based measurement affects the way agencies are compensated. Kaplowitz said performance-based pricing is better than full-time equivalent (FTE) models, but requires additional metrics.

“It’s a positive move, but it also relies on having good data in order to connect it back and ensure that you can accurately define what the performance was based on the activity that was put in place,” she said.

Ad-ID Adoption

The 4A’s has undertaken several initiatives to transform the media ecosystem, such as urging marketers to support diversity and inclusion in their ad spending. The organization also is working to drive adoption of Ad-ID, an identity solution for creative assets on any platform or in any format. NBCUniversal last month became the first major media company to adopt Ad-ID as a standard across its One Platform portfolio.

“We are now investing in new technology and capabilities for these, but we need everyone to adopt this,” Kaplowitz said. “It’s primarily been used for linear television, and we want that to be the ubiquitous code on every single … creative asset moving forward.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Clients are getting a lot savvier in terms of being able to ask the right questions, to be able to measurable business results to some of the programs that we run,” Michelle Capasso, director of media services at ad agency Connelly Partners, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you think back, we did a lot of reporting on digital statistics and impressions and clicks and things that really didn’t have an impact on a client’s business.”

She said her company works with a variety of partners to help clients measure the return on investment (ROI), including outcomes-based ad platform LoopMe.

“More often than not, we are working with our partner companies [and] media vendors to be able to quantify what we’re getting from a return,” Capasso said. “LoopMe has a purchase loop attribution model we can use as well, or anything that ties to foot traffic.”

One of the biggest challenges for marketers is determining which measurements of foot traffic are most meaningful.

“There are a lot of foot traffic attribution vendors in the space, but more often than not, we use a lot of different vendors as part of a buy, and ultimately, they all have their own methodology and model,” Capasso said. “We end up in a situation where we don’t have a really core, solid source of truth.”

Measuring Incremental Reach

Her agency also performed other kinds of incrementality studies to determine when clients are reaching and converting new customers, though these measurements also present challenges for marketers.

“We’ve worked with some vendors on some match-back studies when we’ve had clients that have a core database of consumers that they know, and then they’re looking to see what that incrementality is,” Capasso said. “I don’t think we’ve totally cracked the nut on incrementality, but it comes up more and more often with clients. The pressure on business outcomes is rapidly evolving.”

The pandemic led to a dramatic shift in people’s viewing habits when they were stuck at home during lockdowns. In many cases, marketers had more ways to reach consumers through digital platforms including social media.

“We’re excited about the shift in habits. There are more ways to get to somebody,” Capasso said. “There are more opportunities for cross-channel engagement. The social space for us is hugely exciting.”

Advertisers also are evaluating their media investments in the context of protecting people’s privacy and promoting diversity and inclusion.

“These are things that media buyers have never had to think about,” Capasso said. “We now need to think about all of these things, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s a great place for a media buyer to be, and it’s a pretty exciting time.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.

That is what IRI, a consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) purchase data provider, is helping ad-tech companies and their ad buyers do.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jennifer Pelino, EVP of omni-channel media at IRI, explains how it works – and how an IRI partnership with ad-tech firm LoopMe helped a beverage brand hit big results.

The source of sales data

Founded to capitalise on the advent of point-of-sale (POS) terminal scanners, IRI grew to ingest purchase data from consumer-packaged-goods retailers across the US.

“Because of the data set, the loyalty card data, the scale that we have, which is the largest of this kind in the world, we’re able to understand what a consumer purchased off of habitual products, like a beverage, or a toothpaste, or fruit roll-ups, whatever you may think of,” Pelino says.

“We send that information on a weekly basis to LoopMe, in this particular case, in a data-compliant way that allows them to use that information and their technology from an AI perspective to help inform which consumers should get their advertisements.”

Pelion says that allows users to ascertain, for example, whether they should find lookalike audiences of consumers who recently bought a particular product.

Outcomes and speed

It is one more example of two trends that are becoming more commonplace in advertising:

1. Closing the loop with actual purchase data, to help ad buyers figure out outcomes and true campaign effectiveness, rather than traditional proxies.
2. Speeding-up the provision of such data, so that campaign changes can be made before the campaign has even ended, in pursuit of better results.

That is what IRI’s data has enabled for a beverage company, which Pelino did not name, together with LoopMe.

Thirsty for results

“They were able to understand the in-store sales performance by the tactic, and then use that for their own AI technology advances to enable that corporate conversion and data into those in-flight decisions, helping them to make better outcomes,” Pelino says.

“What we found was that, when we delivered the mobile in-app and web inventory across display, rich media, mobile (and) video – using this very tactic of what we call IRI’s ‘campaign conversion fee’ – we were able to see extraordinary results.

“We saw increased dollar-per-household sales lift by 40% and an increase in the delivered return on advertisement of $1.28, which is pretty incredible during that timeframe when we see that the category average benchmark is about 12%.

“We increased that benchmark by 12% versus the overall carbonated beverage category sales lift. So, (they are) really incredible results because we’re able to optimise on sales versus vanity metrics.”

Want to replicate that success? IRI’s Pelino says having and smartly leveraging first-party customer data is crucial for brands.

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

Now technology has helped iron out kinks in where ads get placed – but the man leading the charge says “brand safety” concerns are still around, they have just morphed.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Montgomery, GroupM’s EVP and advisor on brand safety, discusses how brand safety is changing into something else.

From ‘safety’ to ‘suitability’

Montgomery says brand safety is no longer just about protecting the image of a brand – now it also contributes to the effectiveness of an ad.

Montgomery says the “safety” concerns are being “elevated” to dwell on “suitability” – more broadly examining the rights and wrongs of a particular piece of inventory for an advertiser.

“Your brand may run in a safe environment but, if it’s not contextually suitable, it’s not going to work nearly as hard,” Montgomery says.

“So the 4A’s, GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) and other groups are  hard at work with identifying suitability categories and standards that everybody will agree to and build into their technology to allow us to run in suitable areas – not just safe areas, but suitable areas as well,” he explains.

Stepping up

It’s a step onward from the 2017 outcry about YouTube placements, when many brands became upset at lack of control over placements bought in automated systems.

“I think the platforms have stepped up with technology and AI to make it much safer for brands,” Montgomery says.

“The chances of a brand being positioned adjacent to harmful content are now much diminished, compared to four years ago.”

GroupM and Montgomery even developed their own in-agency tool, Brand Safety Risk Assessment, to help clients determine the brand safety of inventory.

Risk analysis helps guide clients in the brand safety process https://t.co/Lmxum3jSpb#loopme #brandsafety

— John Montgomery (@taxidodger) December 14, 2020

Four new considerations

Montgomery says brand suitability concerns are taking on four new shapes.

1. Applying a brand suitability model to align messaging with the most appropriate brand-safe environments.
2. Advertisers balancing audience delivery and performance against creating health in the wider ecosystem by denying fraudsters, pirates and purveyors of misinformation.
3. Brands are asking themselves: “Is avoiding direct adjacency to distasteful or negative news enough to satisfy my communication needs whilst preserving brand values?”
4. Brands having to consider safety of audiences.

On that last point, Montgomery says they are asking themselves: “Do I want to use my media schedule to send a signal to potential partners that protecting brands is not enough… ?

“… that consumer safety is paramount and that bias against protected groups, digital privacy, graphically obscene content and irresponsible treatment of debated social issues must be elevated to the status of priority, beyond revenue generation?”

Closing the loop

That set of concerns is far wider than that which first reared its head around 2017, when outcries by brands over widely-reported placement next to controversial content prompted a wave of demand for greater control.

In an automated ad world, advertisers want to be sure they can guard against mess-ups.

Montgomery is also working outside of GroupM to implement such solutions. In December, he joined the data advisory board of LoopMe, a company whose software closes the loop from ad exposure to outcome attribution.

LoopMe Welcomes MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard and GroupM’s John Montgomery to Data Advisory Board

“Companies like LoopMe are putting a huge effort into brand suitability and a targeting engine to help clients put their advertising in front of the right people, in the right context, at the right time,” Montgomery says.

“What LoopMe’s in-flight optimization does to help this is to measure and adjust the flight whilst the campaign is running, versus waiting until the end of the flight, to know if your campaign moved the needle.

“This not only saves large chunks of revenue that would have been wasted on non-optimal impressions, but it makes the advertised brand more agile and more responsive.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

In a “more old-fashioned digital world, it’s all about following the click through to the store, to the conversion,” Freddie Godfrey, cofounder and CEO of Origin Media, a media and advertising company focused on connected TV, said in this interview with Beet.TV. In the ‘lean-back’ world of connected TV, that doesn’t happen.”

Part of his company’s work is in educating marketers and their ad agencies about the key performance indicators (KPIs) for CTV, especially since metrics video completions and viewability also are traditionally expected. Origin Media is more proactive in its approach to measurement.

“We survey the folks whom we run our campaigns against, and ask very specific questions that are designed to elicit responses that prove we are delivering the campaign in a way that is being recognized and noticed,” he said. “Surveying people is about as direct as it gets.”

Source: eMarketer

Brand recall, intent and conversion to a final sale are among the KPIs that marketers can measure in their CTV campaigns.

“We’re able to survey folks through solutions such as LoopMe to find out whether we elevated the brand’s existence with that home,” he said. Website traffic and location data about store visits also help to provide more insights.

Origin Media’s philosophy on advertising is shaped by Godfrey’s experience as a viewer, and not wanting to watch commercials in succession. His company’s approach is to make advertising more contextual with its surround programming.

“I’ve had a problem my whole life with ads just going back-to-back. For me, it doesn’t necessarily work,” he said. “What we’re about at Origin is turning an ad break into an experience — a contextually sensitive, native setting within which an advertiser can plant their brand. We forge a mental connection with a viewer directly ahead of a brand’s ad that is designed to put them effectively into the funnel, but really into a specific mental or emotional frame of mind ahead of an ad.”

The company works with most of the major streaming services that carry advertising, which have become more popular as consumers max out their budgets for subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms. Ad agencies are taking notice of the ad-supported platforms as their audiences grow.

“They’re looking to explore connected TV, and they’re looking to do it with not only people they trust, but people with who are innovating,” Godfrey said.

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

Fortunately, a growing range of advertising software vendor agrees, as we see an emerging crop of tools allow publishers to connect ad exposure and end results into an outcome attribution, which many media organizations are now selling against.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Christina Park of LoopMe, an outcomes-based advertising platform, explains what is changing.

Accountability drive

“Marketers are looking to make their media partners more and more accountable,” Park says.

“What we saw was that marketers were looking for ways to kind of minimize the risk when it comes to, you know, investing their media dollars or working with new media partners.

“One of the reasons that we’ve created the solution is it reduces that risk where clients are guaranteed a specific, incremental uplift against specific brand survey results. They can rest assured that their media dollars are being used to really help the bottom line.”

Guaranteed outcomes

A+E Networks was amongst the first TV publishers to begin offering ad sales with outcomes guarantees, back in 2018.

But the tech required to make the offering is considerable.

Park’s LoopMe in December launched a solution supporting ad guarantees against brand uplift.

Very uplifting

“It was trialled by Dentsu out of the UK for a retail client called The Very Group that campaign performed extremely well,” Park says.

“We exceeded their expectations by driving a 50% increase against certain incremental uplift KPI.”

Specifically, the campaign achieved a 15% incremental AI uplift on consideration to shop.

“And now this outcome guarantee is available globally across all of our clients,” Park adds.

Bridging the gap

LoopMe, an eight-year-old company with offices around the world, recently unveiled a product upgrade aimed at using real, observed data points about consumer outcomes that flow from ad exposure to course-correct connected TV ad campaigns mid-flight.

LoopMe’s PurchaseLoop aims to go beyond “proxy” ad metrics like views and click-throughs by using a massive audience data pool and AI algorithms to identify real uplift outcomes like awareness, consideration, favorability, intent, foot traffic and offline sales.

The economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic are widely believed to be stimulating a shift in focus amongst many brands, from top-of-funnel awareness-raising campaigns to bottom-of-funnel performance outcomes.

But there are also many voices illustrating how sustained brand advertising can help a company achieve awareness while rivals may shut up shop.

By applying guarantees even to metrics like brand uplift and purchase intent, such technology may help bridge the divide further.

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

But, to do that to best effect, they are going to need to start acting before the campaign has ended.

That is the view of Wenda Harris Millard, the industry veteran who is now vice chairman at strategic advisory MediaLink.

Toward certainty

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Millard says the move toward outcomes as a focus is understandable.

“Given a lot of the uncertainties in our world now – socially and politically, business-wise – really focusing marketing dollars on business outcomes I think is more important than ever before,” she says.

“I think brands are still looking for the classics – driving awareness, consideration, intent to purchase – all those classic metrics.

“But now they’re really looking to see and measure engagement, online action, conversion to online and offline sales.”

Outcomes throughout the funnel

Millard – previously co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Chief Sales Officer at Yahoo! – says it is now just about moving from the top to the bottom of the marketing funnel – not just about foregoing brand building in pursuit of measured sales.

Rather, she thinks brands need to have the capability to bring certainty to the top and middle of the funnel, too.

“One of the challenges that marketers have had is they’re still getting post-campaign reports,” she says.

“What a company like LoopMe does is right while that campaign is happening, leverage the data insights that they have through their partnerships, add the AI, and they can adjust that campaign in real time and bring in better targets and net new customers. It’s really literally closing the loop.”

Rebuilding relationships

Millard is referring to LoopMe, an outcomes-based advertising platform of which she is an advisor and that this year unveiled tools to optimize mid-flight campaigns in pursuit of attributed goals.

Going forward, she expects to see brands have a new focus on relationship-building.

The deprecation of third-party cookies and withering of mobile identifiers driving a new focus on gaining consented audience buy-in.

But Millard also says the times we live in are calling for a “respectful” tone that calls for emotion.

“That to me is the most exciting thing that I see on the horizon,” she says.

Millard recently joined LoopMe as member of the  company’s data advisory board

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

And that is exactly what ad agencies are promising them, thanks to new technology which aims to make their marketing more efficient by joining the dots between ad spending and outcomes.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Nancy Hall Matterkind, EVP, Outcome-Based Marketing, Matterkind, says another trend has arrived on ad campaign briefs – using efficiencies to show savings.

Saving graces

“One of the biggest and one we that are always asked to measure calculated savings,” Hall says.

“Brands have outcomes of sales or bookings or leads but they also always have an outcome or a goal of savings. They want to know that, utilising these marketing methods, they’re able to deliver back savings to their organisation.

“Now that we can do marketing in a more precise manner and de-dupe conversion events … we’re only going to be paying out conversions to one channel, one screen, one party, or we’re going to reinvest our dollars into the actual screens and channels that are delivering those outcomes – rather than broad investment into many marketing channels that are not all accountable.”

Outcomes are critical

Matterkind is the new name for Cadreon, the Interpublic Group addressable media unit that was aimed at making better use of data.

It leverages assets from IPG data company Acxiom, which the agency holding group previously acquired.

Hall says it is increasingly possible to show the ROI of an ad campaignby linking ad exposure data to outcome data.

“It’s critical to tie together business outcomes and marketing efforts especially in an economic climate like this one,” she says. “This is truly the only way to show the efficacy of marketing efforts to a CFO and to show that marketing is an investment rather than just a cost centre”

Measuring effectiveness

That means an agency like Matterkind is rebooting what it measures across the traditional marketing funnel.

Hall says Matterkind measures for clients by goal, by channel and by funnel position:

• Upper-funnel: “We measure brand favorability, brand recall. And we do that by utilising partners that have integrated into the DSP platform so that we can actually connect a messaged user with a response about brand recall and brand favorability. We also measure things like incremental reach and targeted reach.”
• Mid-funnel: “For mid-funnel we measure things like time spent interacting and CTV, landing page visits to a website and talking about a brand in social which is measurable based upon volume of brand hashtags or Twitter mentions or Instagram mentions.”
• Lower-funnel: “(This is) where we see a real divergence from the past. Now we actually look at the number of new and qualified leads delivered into a brand’s database, volume of sales or bookings and basket size based upon an objective third party like a third-party ad server … which is measurable by tying together actually exposed users from logged files back to actual transactions. And then other things like cost per in-store sales measurable by many different parties.”

That is the life of Nick Graham, VP, Insights & Analytics at PepsiCo.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Graham says the beverage company has game-planned several different consumer-economy scenarios as far ahead as 2023 – but advanced consumer analytics may help the organization get scientific about sustaining business.

Graham says PepsiCo has built two big data engines:

• A “foresights” system to spot patterns in large quantities of consumer and advertising data.
• Canvas, a suite for combining digital and performance marketing data.

Foresights: Predicting Pepsi’s future

Graham describes some of the things the foresights engine can do:

• Listening: “Brings together all of the hundreds of thousands of millions of social conversations that are going on.”
• Meaning: “(Topics include) what ingredients people look for, what benefits people are looking for in food and beverage.”
• Sales: “It brings together e-comm search data, sales data particularly from some of the more emergent retail channels.”
• Predictions: “It mashes all of that together to predict what are all of those things that consumers are looking for today and in future, and helps us really fuel our innovation pipeline to meet the needs of tomorrow.”

“What’s so powerful about a lot of that observational data is … you don’t even know to ask some of those questions,” Graham says. “It allows you to see beyond the obvious to find some of those hidden patterns.

“We’ve found ingredients and connections between ingredients and categories that you wouldn’t know to look for.”

Proud of @PureLeaf @bublywater @Tropicana & @Gatorade teams for winning 3 Gold, 3 Silver and 1 Bronze at @the_ARF David Ogilvy Awards. Congrats to @CCGlobalFounda_ and @GSP for winning the Grand Ogilvy Prize for their moving Not A Gun campaign #ARFOgilvys https://t.co/hggAyDU67j

— Nick Graham (@nickpgraham) October 9, 2020

Canvas: Connecting marketing data

PepsiCo isn’t just listening to consumers, it is acting on what it hears. Its Canvas tool brings together its performance marketing data, with features like:

• Lookalikes: “Through proxy data, we can target lookalike people. We can find people who look like those people who shop in a certain way, who buy in a certain way and reach those people directly.”
• White space: Graham can use the data to find buyers of products in adjacent categories – for example, buyers of diet soft drinks or juices, to reach with ads about sparkling water.
• A/B testing: “Putting multiple different iterations of content out into the marketplace and then we can see in real-time what’s performing well in the proxy metrics.”

“Particularly for some of our online partners like Amazon, you can then see a full cycle through into then what drives search, what drives choice,” Graham adds. “So that’s massively advanced our ability to understand how to connect with consumers and shoppers I’d say, across the marketing cycle.”

This #SmallBusinessSaturday, remember your local restaurants. We’re proud to be a sponsor of @NRAEF’s #ChangeIsOnTheMenu program, to help restaurant workers on their road to recovery. If you would like to join us, learn more here: https://t.co/7lHysd9XjE pic.twitter.com/m6CwzyS6GR

— PepsiCo (@PepsiCo) November 28, 2020

Drinking to an uncertain future

Many in the industry say the shifting consumer behaviors of 2020, driving an uptcik in ecommerce sales, have swelled the consumer data reserves that retailers and brands can rely on.

But PepsiCo’s Graham nevertheless thinks the foreseeable future is about managing uncertainty.

“Even looking forward to 2022 and 2023, we’re having to game plan lots of different potential scenarios based on where we are with COVID, where we are with the economy, how consumers are feeling,” he says.

“(There is) a big increase of people are looking for stress relief in all this different forms, looking for nutrition and a way to create preventative health like that protection zone around yourself.

“(There is an) acceleration in consumers and shoppers wanting to give back, wanting to help communities and wanting brands and companies to help communities as well given everything that’s happened in 2020.”

Healthy soil is crucial to a sustainable food system. It can help capture carbon + mitigate climate change, purify + protect water, and reduce the need for fertilizers. Learn how we’re working with farmers to help protect + regenerate it #WorldSoilDay https://t.co/hV16AzRaUE pic.twitter.com/oIQTrW3y4Q

— PepsiCo (@PepsiCo) December 5, 2020

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

Time and again, out of the pandemic, we have been hearing executives talk about the importance of guaranteed results and return on investment, in a year when investment in the absence of proven results may seem like folly.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kerry Bianchi, Global President of APEX within Publicis Groupe’s PMX, says COVID-19 is re-shaping the economics of ad outcomes.

The pandemic reboot

Bianchi has identified three main trends spurred by the coronavirus:

1. Consumer behavior has been reset: “Everything’s changed in terms of how you commute, the way you shop, the way that you go about your daily activities has completely changed.”
2. Buyer agility: “I think that flexibility, agility, to be able to go in and out of markets start and stop media when they needed to was really something they had to think about a lot more discreetly over the course of this year.”
3. Heightened focus on measurability: “(You) really need to know that your marketing dollars are performing well and which things are performing well in this whole new environment.”

Relocating geo-targeting

Bianchi says the profound change to consumer behaviour is forcing ad buyers to think differently about geo-targeting.

“If you were targeting a zip code where a bunch of office buildings were and that’s how you were targeting your key audiences, now they’re diffuse,” she says. “Now they’re all over. They’re back at their homes. They’re like me in an apartment somewhere out in the suburbs. The traffic patterns have been completely disrupted. The purchasing habits have been completely disrupted.

“So to be able to still find me, you might’ve been doing it through a geographic net or maybe some kind of zip code net maybe before from where I work.

“Now you have to find me in a whole different way. I think that idea of knowing me at a personal level, at an individual level, and then being able to market to me with any of my new behaviours however I’m going about those, has become really, really important. So that first-party data, knowing your customer, I think is really of critical importance.”

Outcomes across the funnel

The industry trend toward outcomes in advertising is not new, of course.

Before COVID-19 reared started spreading, many ad buyers were started to get excited about the idea of buying only ads that can demonstrate measurable, attributed results.

But the pandemic has acted as an accelerant. Bianchi says clients are now more likely to want to de-risk their spending by targeting to known audiences or buying with performance guarantees.

“That could be not just lower-funnel outcomes,” however, she says. “It could be something in terms of reaching a certain target audience, having them come in and interact with you on a landing page.

“Knowing your audiences, having that analytics suite to be able to close that loop and give you true performance data at the end of the day to know if your media’s really performing.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

That is the emerging viewpoint when it comes to the new trend in marketing – outcome-based advertising.

And end has a start

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Peter Sedlarcik of Havas Media Group says brands no longer have to write off the top of the marketing funnel, brand awareness, as an unmeasurable expense.

Thanks to software that can link purchase to initial ad exposure, they can now follow initial ad views all the way through to check-out.

But Sedlarcik says the best results start with clear goals.

“Upfront assessment and prioritisation of audiences and targets is really a big part of the equation in order to ensure that the strategy is on point and is going to most effectively deliver the business outcomes that the brands are looking for,” he says.

Outcomes take center-stage

In the emerging world of outcome-based marketing, traditional ad metrics like media delivery, engagement and viewability are coming to be seen as mere proxies for the true goal of a campaign – business results.

Sedlarcik says those metrics are now starting to get seen as “peripheral” for many brands.

“They’re mostly interested in understanding how that’s all converting to sales and the growth of their business,” he explains.

The quest for sales

Business outcomes are being seen in sharper relief in 2020 as COVID-19 has put many companies at risk. Making money has rarely been as important.

“We had many clients who had to pull their media activity,” says Havas’ Sedlarcik. “They pulled back on those investments.

“As they’ve slowly started to come back into the market, as they started to seek some type of normalcy in terms of the way they’re marketing their brands and connecting with their customers, there’s an increased focus on directly connecting that to outcomes, to sales, to volume growth.”

In-house software

Stitching together all those data points, from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom, is no mean feat.

A plethora of software provider is issuing tools to do so. Sedlarcik’s Havas has made some of its own.

“We’ve created a number of tools and platforms and analytics frameworks that help us tie those things together,” he says:

• Full funnel metric modelling: “Understanding the connection between media activity, driving those upper funnel brand metrics, how that converts to actual behaviours and market in terms of sales.”
• Converged analytics engine. “Focused on not only tying back to what we’re delivering in market from a media perspective and reporting on just the delivery metrics but really tying back to sales outcomes.”
• Converged audience platform: “Really helps us to partner with our clients to understand what their business objectives are, their marketing objectives are, who are their current customers, who are the opportunity segments that they’re looking to connect with in order to grow the business?”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

But, even before COVID-19 threw a spanner in 2020’s works, marketers were already becoming more likely to ask for proof of the effectiveness of every marketing dollar spent.

That is a change from the days when they were content to let some brand awareness-building spend go without having an ROI recorded against it, given the challenge in measuring awareness through to outcome.

But, in the new age of attribution, marketers are more likely to seek out the new ability to do just that.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ram Singh, Chief Analytics Officer at Performics, Publicis’ performance-focused agency, explains how, for modern advertisers, the classical marketing funnel has been flattened out.

Performance across the funnel

“In the last five years, we have definitely seen a consistent increase in the ask for what every dollar should do,” Singh says.

“We no longer have situations where marketing dollars are set aside in silos and they do one thing. Every dollar going into any marketing activity is expected to perform not only on the primary goal but also on secondary and tertiary goals.

“Today what we see consistently across every single client is every dollar at every stage is being asked to do more.

“Branding dollars, obviously their goal still continues to be raising awareness, but at the same time brand managers are being asked is your dollar helping move people from upper funnel to mid funnel? What does it do to help conversion? What lift does it generate?”

COVID accelerant

Performics is the Publicis-wide advertising division that spans the group’s agencies in pursuit of the new craft of “performance”, the tactic through which advertisers want to link spend to actual outcomes like purchase or sign-ups.

Marketers have always regarded television as the big box that can reach a mass audience, the medium at the top of the funnel that fuels initial consumer awareness.

But times are a-changing. New technology means targeted television can serve advertisers just like laser-guided online ads can, and that activity can be measured, with correlation between ad exposure and outcome.

“COVID has accelerated that ask (from advertiers),” Singh says. “Because of COVID, performance marketing has come to the forefront for every client that we work with, so it’s only accelerated the need for getting more out of every marketing investment.”

New Study Shows Potential ROI Benefits of Leveraging Performics “Darwin” Paid Search Marketing Optimization Suite | Business Wire https://t.co/tRtSwA9xNy

— Performics (@performics) November 17, 2020

Multi-pronged approach

Singh says Performics employs “a series of analytical methods, both deterministic as well as a lot of correlational analyses, probability-based analyses” to figure out performance for advertisers.

“We use a combination of deterministic measures and inferential measures to then solve for problems like beyond your standard KPIs, clicks, cost impression, or trackable sales, what is the net impact of this dollar on the business outcome?,” he says.

“Whether it’s offline sales, whether it’s foot traffic, whether it’s online conversions and how well they can work at the back end.

“There’s a whole series of KPIs that we append to your standard media metrics that line up with business goals.”

In this video interview, Doug Rozen, 360i Chief Media Officer, says that video no longer has to be used as a top-of-funnel, brand-building channel.

Rather, he says, it can be measured accurately and support performance and outcome goals.

Accountable video

“No dollar gets a free pass,” Rozen says. “Video dollars should be held to the same level of accountability as your search dollars.

“Today you can do that. It just requires a different orientation, a different way of thinking about planning.

“A lot of times people get caught up in the technical aspects of how you do this and don’t think about the strategic elements.

“You have to plan differently for an outcome-based approach versus a more traditional reach-based or impression-driven approach.”

Evolving modelling

How does 360i do that? Rozen says his teams still employ media mixed modelling.

Whilst the practice was not necessarily devised to measure outcomes per se, Rozen says he either works with a third party or carries out in-house media mixed modelling that is created to accommodate both awareness and outcomes.

On top of that, 360i has created scenario planning tools, using artificial intelligence, that allow clients to imagine dialling up or down certain channels in their marketing mix.

Full-funnel

360i was founded back in 1998 as a search engine marketing agency and has since branched out into social, strategy, media and creative. It is the agency Oreo’s “Dunk In The Dark” Super Bowl campaign.

Rozen says the company is increasingly looking at multi-channel campaigns.

“One of the things we’re doing more and more is connecting at full-funnel,” he says. “So just because somebody has been exposed to a video unit, especially online, how do we then start to see what the downstream activity is?

“So, obviously we see a lot of search signals, we see a lot of other digital signals as well. We can start to stitch that together and then be able to understand, is this somebody that’s been in a repetitive process before?

“You just have to almost flip your mindset. Instead of thinking about how do you embed or infuse digital into traditional, why can’t every channel or every media decision be done in a way that is digital first?”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.