BIMA's Second Annual Cross Media Forum
Headed over to the Four Seasons yesterday morning to meet up with our Media & Trafficking team for the Boston Interactive Marketing Association's 2nd Annual "Cross Media Forum", essentially a great breakfast and two presentations around the convergence of media and its greater implications for interactive marketers.
After a few introductions, the first session, Measuring Media Effectiveness: Is Engagement Our Universal Metric?, kicked off with an opener from the moderator Nick Nyhan, President & Founder of online branding and survey specialist Dynamic Logic, who briefly discussed the "swampy" ground we're heading into in the cross-media marketing landscape, and introduced each of the session's panelists:
- Colleen Fahey Rush, EVP, Research, MTV Networks
- Jerry Rocha, Account Director Mobile Content, Telephia
- Dom Rossi, Senior Advisor, Advertising/Marketing to MPA
- John Snyder, VP, PPM Sales, Arbitron
- Jim Spanfeller, President, IAB
After a quick overview of backgrounds and interests, Nick proceded to discuss what "engagement" means now to the audience, and how 2001 metrics such as clickthrough and impression counts can no longer stand on their own without a better measurement of how engaged consumers actually are with the media.
Of particular interest was the concept that pure measurement of sales alone is good but not enough, and that three steps are necessary for fully successful campaign measurement:
1. Reach and frequency, or knowledge of exactly how many individuals are being reached and often often each receives an impression -- across all channels. This sounds inherently easy to do, and across just Search or Display properties actually is, but when offline channels are added -- or even simply additional online channels such as email or directories -- the process can become extremely complicated, particularly given how IP address information is usually limited and not shared across properties.
2. Brand perception and awareness, as measured by companies such as Dynamic Logic, which seek to offer statistical measurement of the lift in attitudes toward a particular brand or product from before and after a campaign is in market. According to Nick, this is a critical part of the process, as the influence positive attitudes toward a brand can have on long-term company growth is strong, yet very hard to quantify via just short-term measurement of clicks or sales.
3. Sales metrics, particularly at a CPA or ROI level. Due to the availability of data across online channels, this is something that's clearly far more doable for a firm specializing in only online media, but the challenge discussed at the event was to extend measurement beyond the camparatively easy online space, and actually begin to integrate data from your offline campaigns as well.
Compared to previous BIMA events, discussion from the speakers took up a far lower proportion of the time, which wasn't a terrible thing as Nick seemed to have far more to offer to the conversation than the group did on their own, though each did provide a few additional insights.
John Snyder of Arbitron, a Neilsen competitor of the past, showed off the "media meter" device hanging from his neck, which was described as something roughly equivalent to a portable version of a Nielsen Box. Apparently its use was to measure the presence of media across all channels, wherever the user goes, to help quantify the number of impressions a wearer consumes not just from television, but also signage, radio, and the internet. It wasn't very clear how the device functions, nor how it would be aware of a billboard impression -- does the wearer have to somehow type in the fact that she received a GAP flier? -- but it did make sense at least for television measurement, as at least the data would reflect the household member who's actually watching the TV.
Nick led the above discussion into the idea that rather than having to carry a portable meter, such technology could easily be embedded in cell phones, and with a show of hands most of the audience seemed to agree that more mobile marketing was definitely in the industry's future. This in turn curiously generated a lot of talk about how great the idea of media measurement via mobile meters was, but surprisingly no discussion around how the public would feel when they found out their every ad viewing was being quantified.
While attitudes are definitely shifting, the public in general still seems to consider every type of electronic tracking as being more or less equivalent to being tailed by the Gestapo for purposes of killing their loved ones, and before phones are going to be allowed to come equipped with Arbitron meters, a certain value proposition is going to need to be presented by the marketing industry to the general public in the form of an implied vow that no personal information is ever going to be used to make consumers' lives less pleasurable -- i.e., to increase the volume of marketing -- but that such information will only be used to improve the relevancy of the average marketing impression.
After a brief discussion from Colleen about how great it is to work for MTV, where her target audience is into every new form of media, Nick opened the session up to questions. As no one else raised their hand, I threw out the set of questions any regular readers of this blog will be familiar with:
- Given that this is a cross-media forum, and that we know that individual tactics like banner ads or television seem to help lift results of other tactics such as paid search or email, does anyone have a clear idea of how we might measure the lift each separate tactic provides to an overall campaign?
- Is the panel aware of tools in existence or development which might assist in this measurement?
- Whose responsibility should it be to get this done right?
The question was a result of constantly trying to tease out the individual effect of each segment of the campaign, but given that tools such as Atlas OnePoint (Paid Search) and Atlas Display don't currently share data (see "Atlas Solutions, Wake The Hell Up"), there's no real way to pinpoint the effect of each tactic indepently, especially with low-volume campaigns where sequential measurement would be confounded by seasonality.
Jim Spanfeller, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau -- which seems to set standard banner ad sizes, etc. -- volunteered to take the question, and came up with the very amusing answer that it's the job of we, the agencies to do this right, and that he imagines that we'd do it by, for example, running one campaign with only Search, and then running another campaign afterward with both Search and Display, and quantifying the difference between the two. Thanks Jim, apparently when the IAB rolls, they roll hard.
The discussion continued for some time after this without much really being said, and again it became unfortunately clear that cross-channel measurement is something that currently still isn't being done -- yet all agreed it needs to happen and at some point will. The discussion wrapped up afterward. Had to head back to the office at that point but the next piece, Navigating The Fragmented Video Landscape, did sound interesting, and would welcome any comments on it.
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