Simply put, adaptability is the standout skill the last two years has forced us to harness. The advertising world is no stranger to unplanned changes, yet we still haven’t seemed to realise the full extent of what this means for ensuring consistent results, supported by a resilient yet flexible approach.
The media industry is notoriously plagued by a lack of transparency and trust. Marketers rely on agencies and media buying platforms to report on campaign performance, with no other option but to accept results calculated by “black box” attribution vendors.
Reluctant acceptance of compromised reporting accuracy is something none of us should continue to blame on technology restrictions and/or privacy-driven policy changes – popular scapegoats often accompanied by a shrugged “it is what it is”.
The next assumed quick-solve would be shifting ad budgets from the likes of Google and Facebook, a change equivalent to “shooting the messenger”. Issues impeding tracking and measuring effectiveness aren’t platform specific at all. All platforms will eventually succumb to policy changes – that’s the point.
So. What is the solution?
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) was the appealing promise – and the industry spent years trying to make it work. Tracking customers and assigning appropriate credit to each touchpoint on their path to conversion made sense, right?
Unfortunately, without user-level tracking, MTA isn’t just flawed, it’s impossible. A system of measurement, independent of any platform bias and incrementality measurement, is the answer.
Media incrementality represents the true incremental contribution of a media channel and campaign/tactic to business results. This approach delivers where methods like last-touch and multi-touch attribution fail.
Geo-matched market testing or first-party audience split testing, for example, can connect advertising tactics to business metrics in a statistically sound way. Mapping media’s influence on data gives advertisers a clean read on the true incremental contribution of media without the need to track users.
Transparent measurement delivered by a neutral party will ultimately help marketers protect themselves while working towards a future-proofed measurement model.
~ Joe Steyn-Begley is the MD of Carbon1, a Martech and Adtech advisory, partners to Measured, a global leader in media measurement.
