The South African radio advertising landscape presents clients with rich and fertile ground to develop market growth. And while the medium is effectively holding hands with the digital world, radio’s primary channel is offline.
Lead data scientist at DCMN, Dr Heiko Schmidle, recently visited Cape Town to deliver a masterclass on finding hidden patterns in radio ad measurement. In a recent blog, he explained how marketers typically treat radio (and TV) like a “black box where cash goes in and very little data comes out. Long-term brand effects are similarly tricky to analyse”.
But as Schmidle pointed out, “the good news is, you can measure anything if you have the right tools – and in these cases, you won’t even have to train an AI…”
DCMN, an independent marketing/media management agency, is an ad tech company offering tracking technology and optimisation. It positions itself as a growth-marketing partner, focused on return on investment.
Worth a read: Four ways to measure marketing campaigns you probably haven’t considered by Dr Heiko Schmidle
Advertising options, said Schmidle, include a performance approach with generic adverts and live reads that allow clients to plan in detail to target their preferred audience. The branding approach, on the other hand, offers feature sponsorships and non-traditional advertising that supports a building of trust between listeners and the brand.
He emphasised the importance of measurement as a key to growth marketing and using performance KPIs as an essential tool for a sustainable business and to invest media budget wisely.
Long-term, sustainable growth occurs when clients are able to measure essential growth factors such as:
Where to invest:
- Make informed decisions on where to invest budget
- Across all industries, ~12% of revenue goes into marketing
Channel KPIs:
- Which channel has what impact on your KPIs?
- The correlation-causation dilemma: It’s crucial to understand what drives your business and what impacts the growth of your business.
Feedback loops:
- The measure-optimise-feedback loop
- Test, then learn, then scale
The two basic differences in marketing are direct and indirect measurement and both present their own set of challenges, Schmidle said.
Direct measurement is based on performance marketing and presents challenges such as click attribution that might over-estimate clicks. It also neglects the influence of other factors e.g. seasonality, weather, holidays etc, as well as cross-channel effects.
Indirect measurement, he said, is based on brand marketing through the channels of radio, out of home, TV, cinema, and print. Again, there are challenges such as the danger of drawing wrong causality conclusions. There is also difficulty in identifying patterns hidden in large fluctuations as well as a lack of detail due to the high-level view. This means it is difficult to optimise precisely, said Schmidle.
While the options available for indirect measurement have previously been limited to either nothing at all, a simple regression model or the baseline uplift model, the new DCMN model was developed to help unlock actionable insights based on seasonality (yearly, quarterly, monthly and weekly), long-term trends and special events (holidays, weather, product launches etc).
DCMN’s time series model contains over 100 parameters and makes use of advanced sampling. The Monte Carlo sampling method finds the best parameters to describe the data and best-practice models developed by Facebook and Google are adapted to fit use-cases.
Schmidle emphasised the importance of running test campaigns to establish the best time frames for advertising and to optimise precise marketing activity. He advised planning precisely ahead of the campaign to deliver the most detailed and useful results available for analysis.
Bettina Moss is an inspirational writer, motivational speaker, GlowCoach, intuitive counsellor, mentor and presenter in the field of personal growth and development. She founded GloWoman in 2010.
