Editor’s note: Jeri Smith is president and CEO of Communicus Inc., a Tucson, Ariz., research firm.
As advertisers struggle with the challenges of cross-platform advertising measurement, the focus for many is on how to quantify exposures across various media platforms. Nielsen and others are working feverishly to solve for metrics that address the need. These initiatives are another – albeit increasingly complex – step on the path that attempts to quantify the value of advertising, while ignoring the most important dimension of how advertising actually works.
Advertising doesn’t work because a marketer buys a lot of exposures, no matter how efficiently they are bought. Advertising mainly works when a creative concept manages to break through the cacophony of ad voices a consumer is exposed, and an exposure turns into an engagement. Exposures are just the price of entry. Clearly, there are more efficient and less efficient media buys, and a relevant unit of measure to assess the media buy is, in fact, the exposure opportunity. And for advertisers who strive to implement cross-platform media plans, the types of initiatives that will enable cross-platform measurement of exposures will be helpful. The exposure-level data that advertisers use today, and the new initiatives that will expand the depth of data available, are advantageous when it comes to building the most efficient media buy possible.
But this is where it ends. Advertisers who use exposures or opportunities to see as a means to assess the persuasive power of an ad or a campaign, are ignoring the most important piece of the puzzle; the creative execution. It is clear that what you run (the creative unit) provides far stronger leverage in terms of advertising ROI than where the ad runs (the media buy).
Sure, you can compare the outcomes in terms of brand KPI’s among those who were exposed to ads vs. those who weren’t. And, if the magnitude of the difference between the test and control groups is larger for Ad A than for Ad B, an assumption could be made that Ad A was more engaging and/or more persuasive. But which was better? The engagement or the persuasion? And why assume when you can measure?
We know that not all exposures result in an engagement. Sometimes the percent who are engaged will be boosted by the specific media environment (if an ad for a cooking utensil appears when the target is in a cooking frame of mind, or if it’s not buried in the middle of a too-long commercial pod). But, in fact, it’s the creative itself that is mostly predictive of whether an ad will engage. And an ad that doesn’t engage won’t persuade.
It’s vital that we continue to remind those who are increasingly focusing on exposures, and those who are using that metric as the primary means by which to assess advertising’s ability to perform, that there’s a huge gap between buying an exposure and earning an engagement.
Only by focusing on whether consumers actually engage with ads, can we provide the best possible feedback; solid insights on the power of a particular ad campaign; and how the executions in and across all media venues contribute. Imagine a campaign in which the media was bought to optimize exposure opportunities but the in-market results, based on the MMA or more granular exposure-driven models, were disappointing. If we could assess engagement, and determine that particular ads within the campaign are very persuasive but weak on engagement, the fix would be very different than if we learned that the ads do a good job of gaining engagement among those with exposure opportunities but were relatively unpersuasive.
A media buy that optimizes against exposure opportunities is a good idea. An ad campaign that is evaluated based on the extent to which its exposure opportunities translate into behavioral outcomes runs a serious chance of confusing efficiency (or lack thereof) with an above (or below) ability for a particular creative unit to engage.
Those who reside in the media world believe that once we can attain solid cross-platform exposure data, all that remains will be to optimize buys on this basis. However, this is just the beginning; measuring how consumers actually engage with, and are persuaded by ads that appear across platforms is where the real leverage for building better ROI resides.
Since every campaign is different creatively, the cross-platform effectiveness results will differ for every campaign. We’ll never be able to tell exactly how your next campaign will perform on the basis of numbers plugged into a media model, because the media models assume average performance within a given set of exposure opportunities and across media platforms. But if we use research approaches that measure, and help to explain consumer engagements with ads, we’ll be much closer to providing true insights that help advertisers optimize advertising effectiveness in today’s cross-platform campaign environment.
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