The first elephant is the difference between digital consumption and digital advertisingconsumption. All the usual issues of viewability, bot fraud and, well, plain unnoticeabilty - and I'm looking squarely at you here, little banner ads ! - is why the percentage of ad exposures will remain relatively stable even as online consumption grows exponentially.(Though,obviously, the absolutes of ad exposures will grow with it)
The good thing with online video advertising where the difference is clearly quantified as the difference between ad impressions and ad views is that the elephant is easily sighted, understood and can be responded to.
The second elephant in the room is the less obvious one : TV ad avoidance.
There is simply no way of knowing whether people really watched your ads on TV. All that commercial ad break ratings tell us for certain - and this is keeping aside markets such as ours in MENA where these are not even available in the first place ! - is that people didn't switch off the TV and didn't zap channels.
Whether they walked out of the room or switched their mind off or buried their noses in their phones or , indeed, watched the TV commercials with love and adoration during those three or five or ten long minutes we do not know. And have no way of knowing.
So in effect we are penalizing online video for being transparent while not holding up TV to the same level of scrutiny and accountability. So TV ad exposures* all over the world are likely to be overstated simply because of a quantification gap (see figure)
* This post is only from the limited point of view of ad exposure. Engagement, impact, sales outcome et al are a different- though surely correlated !- matter.
While realistically speaking this gap can't be eliminated, can it be reduced ? Perhaps through syndicated sample survey-based research or,say, through more pervasive individual advertiser-level A/B experiments ? Hard to tell - but as viewer consumption boundaries blur and the market battles intensify, more attention will probably need to be paid to this TV elephant to size it up to some reasonable approximation.
"Won't be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore" - Leonard Cohen : The Future
As I listen in remembrance to one of the greatest pop poet-musicians of all time in the wake of his passing, I am also thinking of the problem of plenty in marketing data today. Namely : the more data there is the less data there is.
That paradox sounds (almost) Cohenesque but it's certainly a lot less than poetic for us practitioners out there !
Marketing data today has immense depth but very little breadth. There is a treasure trove of KPI metrics for each digital 'walled garden'* in your marketing mix but little or nothing by way of the same metrics aggregated for the entire digital mix (let alone the entire overall mix as a combination of online and offline)
(* I borrow the term in this context from an excellent piece by senior and very respected industry leader Gowthaman Ragothaman which you can read here)
Later if not sooner this is likely to place at least some constraint to business growth for these advertising dependent gardens - and which is why I am sure a solution will arrive sooner rather than later ! The recent announcement from Facebook (read here) about the launch of a 'Measurement Council' along with Third Party verification measures is a step in that direction. More will no doubt follow from more players. After all, it is some very important value delivered to their customers (viz. advertisers and agencies) - and as we all know to superior customer value goes the spoils !
Even leaving the whole third party thing to one side , improvement in existing reporting within each single platform is where it can and needs to begin. An obvious if simple example is unduplicated individual person-level reach. Sure, it is complex but something that can be solved given the right commitment and resources. Far more complex problems have been solved after all ! The question is when it will be deemed a necessity rather than an also-good-to-have. I suspect it will be sooner rather than later. One step at a time and the rest follows. This diagram illustrates very roughly how that can unfold. We await that first step !
The weekend was abuzz with the story of how the reported average time spent on Facebook videos had been inflated for the last two years. The error came from excluding views of less than three seconds from average time spent calculations thereby inflating the average.
Important as the news is, especially to content publishers, it's less so to practitioners from the marketer and agency side. On day to day operations built mostly on raw campaign data on views, pricing,etc, the metric is almost inconsequential. But even on the larger plane of,say, budget allocations on which it has the most bearing, this should matter less than may be presumed.
First, such a metric is only one among other factors that decides allocations. Second , the clear line between platform/channel consumption versus advertising consumption is as evident from daily-life observation as it is from analytics data. Something like a share of time spent doesn't necessarily equate to share of budget. Campaign analytics data provide a good enough input into what that share should be.
So to me the misreporting itself (inadvertent or otherwise) is secondary. Facebook with its 1.7 bn. monthly active user base - and psychographics revealed (almost literally !) for all the world to see is - is obviously one of the largest and richest ever one-stop Target shop in mass marketing history. Any improvement on channel or product - video, in this case- is at worst a tweak or two away. Where's the case against ?
The beef I take out from the story, instead, is the roles both of third party validation AND second party vigilance in using first party data.
Third party validation is the obvious one and doesn't need elaboration. The entire ecosystem , digital giants included, should only welcome something that'd grow the pie by removing doubt and uncertainty.
The Second Party stuff though ? Much overlooked. And very important !
This senior, very experienced and unabashedly old school data specialist who I have learned a lot from once used a phrase to describe a bunch of enthusiasts who were so impressed with a website's new metric that they not only didn't notice its obvious flaws but also immediately began advocating its use. Digital Bunnies, he called them.I thought that both funny and pretty much on the money.
As click-of-the-mouse analytics packages and the like proliferate with their masses of first party data , it's tempting to leave everything to them. In fairness , when there's so much data placed out there so transparently (give or take !) that's reasonable enough.
Up to a point.
What still remains are the interpretation of those numbers in context - e.g. how big are those views ? How good is that VTR ? - and thinking about the questions which are outside the scope of the data - e.g., how likely is a claim based on it. That's where second party vigilance comes in with its evaluation of the numbers and assessment of the pros and the cons. And that's where we probably could do more.
The good old Think For Yourself is part of the toolkit too - even if the 'too much too fast' digital marketplace can overwhelm one into forgetting that !
First things first. Good ad copy is more likely to sell products than bad copy. Duh number one.
For all its intuitive logic, though, there's isn't too much data on it when you go looking. So this piece on HBR is a welcome find. (Read here). I especially like the analysis of the 'stylistic' elements. (From the 'creativity can't be measured' school ? Feel free to call it anything else you like then)
That the connection isn't a straight one, however, is my duh number two.
There's plenty of good copy that don't necessarily produce sales results. Back in India in the nineties, for example, there was the One Black Coffee' spot from Ericsson mobile phones that did everything else - entertained, got talked about, won awards - but didn't move product, apparently because people couldn't recall which brand it was for !
More interesting (because unusual) , though, is the converse possibility of indifferent copy producing decent results.
Around ten years ago , this Indian grocery store - call it X - in Dubai was airing their TV spot a million times a day during cricket matches. The message was simple : X had the best quality Indian spices specially imported from India. The production ? Horrible is putting it politely. (Rumor had it that it was shot on home camera and featured the owner's daughter) It was an assault on sense and sensibility. But - and here's the thing - it was an assault at scale (relative to their business) and that seems to have paid off despite everything.
That was the first most of us had heard of X. Today many of us shop there for Indian spices (and other grocery items) that one doesn't easily find in other stores. In the intervening period, X has expanded to several new locations .By all accounts, X - and by extension, that horrible copy - has been a success.
In hindsight it makes sense : have good product, make it known, sell. On the cheap.
This goes back to the age old message-vs-media question. Do you spend more on creative or airing ? Unlike big established advertisers for whom production costs are so much lower than media costs, X would have had to take the call to invest their little pot on airtime rather than on pleasing copy. That it worked ticks off the established norms about how effectiveness depends on the product category,market and target audience. Such shoddy copy couldn't have worked with hipper , fancier, bigger brands.
Or, dare I ask it, could it ?
Because it also opens up questions. First is about how exactly advertising works. How do people process ads ,especially subconsciously ? While great copy will be remembered and bad copy disliked , do sales reflect that ? What's the role of brand-name versus reason-to-buy ? Taking one side to its provocative extreme : can bad copy work by being so terrible that it sticks ? It's obviously no one's case to go out and produce bad copy - duh number three - but the point is that the creative strength (or weakness) of any copy cannot be taken for granted when planning.
Second are the new questions in today's ad-avoiding digital landscape. What holds a person's attention well enough to keep that Skip Ad button at bay , what copy lengths are best (or, 'what is the shortest you can go' ?) , how does it fit into a phone screen ...etc. Also some less obvious ones : like , say, about how you should evaluate a static banner ad. Sure, it's almost conventional by now to downweight banners for their low CTRs but could they be contributing as pure, non-response display communication ? That can't be answered by web analytics. Nor is it easy to run sales effectiveness analyses. In practice, many questions are simply unanswerable. You just need to take the judgement call. `
Another aspect of this is the democratization of business today. Entry costs of marketing have never been lower as small businesses get on to digital. While search and static display remain the predominant channels, the share of video will grow fast and the X sort of examples will be heartening. The implications also extend to the agency ecosystem : competition could well go beyond rival agencies to under-the-radar freelancers and the like ... but that's another story !
But to the owner of X goes the final word in my piece. One can picture him / her being dismissed , even laughed at outright, by agencies - but I guess you'd know better than to underestimate the guy who's put his own money on the line !
That's a Zen proverb to shock-illustrate Zen Buddhism's core tenet that life should be lived in the moment and separate from words and concepts about reality. 'Buddha' the word is not the same as the Buddha himself - and even the Buddha himself is irrelevant to your own life's realization or nirvana.
Jargon is jargon only when it is used as jargon. Nine times out of ten, the language itself usefully conveys the meaning. It's only how we then abuse it that makes it jargon - that killer of clarity and the grand wig on the bald head of non-clarity.
Man, there ought to be a law !
Or at least a university course or an office training module or something like that. Titles anyone ? 'Basic Jargon Buster' , 'Advanced Jargon Buster', 'JarGONE : Jargon-Free in Five Days', etc etc ?
(You may have guessed where this post is coming from. Yep, I was subjected to some recently . In buckets. Ugh. ;) )
And fittingly concluding this post with a link to its Zen referencing opening, here's a very interesting piece about how origami is driving cutting edge technology (read here)
(The header image is my own photograph of rural Assam,the Indian state I am from)
We are often blind sighted enough by the heat and light of our own work to miss that fundamental truth. The consumer is a flesh and blood person.
Who in our agency world has not had the experience of having the excitement of running a special campaign watered down by an indifferent outside world - including, yes, the spouse ! - that's either not seen it or is considerably less enthused about it ?!
The consumer is your wife. She hasn't seen that great special execution you spent all of the budget on within a single week.Could some of that money have been used for a less costly if less sexy option to reach over over the following weeks ?
Who knows ?
It is , however , so important not to lose sight of the obvious : the consumer in us and the consumers that are our families and (non-industry) friends
BUT , and here's the thing , only to an extent. Because this game also runs the other way !
While the consumer is not a moron , she is also NOT your wife ! That is the corollary David - a big and early proponent of research as a fuel for creativity - would have agreed with. The fact is that we as practitioners can often also end up extrapolating our own lives onto the consumer universe. The Madison Avenue-isation syndrome , if you will , or closer home , the Dubai Media City syndrome !
Yes, the young Saudi woman is on the Latest Social Platform all the time these days. But has she seen your ad there ? And does she remember it ?
In the end , it's all about striking the right balance between having a pulse of the 'real world' - the consumer as your wife - and understanding the limits of that pulse and the need to understand more through objective outside sources - the consumer as your not-wife.
Easier said than done, yes, but not so difficult either !
The common underlying strand behind both poles is that old conceptual framework of advertising as a weak (or, indeed, strong) force. Anybody remember that one ? Here's an old piece by John Philip Jones on the topic (read here). While these things have been all but shoved to the back of the warehouse, I think it is more relevant today than ever before as technology provides people with the means to do what they have always wanted to do : avoid ads.
IMHO , the starting point to any planning should be the presumption that you are up against the challenge of everybody wanting to avoid your ad and so - what are you going to do about it ? Prepare for the worst to work for the best, Understand the limits inside out in order to breach them.
