C3 Metrics, a leader in so-called “attribution” modeling and analytics for online media, has tapped well-known TV researcher to lead the development and strategy for its move into television: John Dimling, the former CEO of Nielsen, and former head of media industry watchdog the Media Rating Council. Dimling, who stepped down from any formal role with Nielsen in April 2008, has been working behind-the-scenes as a board member of beleaguered radio audience measurement giant Arbitron and promising neuromarketing researcher Innerscope, and he says he’s most interested in helping to develop ways of correlating media exposure to media effects, which is exactly what C3 has been focused on. Dimling said he was a big champion of Nielsen’s and Aribtron’s ambitious but ill-fated Project Apollo joint-venture to create a “single-source” measurement system that would do that humongous database measuring the media and product usage of consumer households, and now believes attribution modeling and analysis may be the next best thing. That’s good timing for C3, which has been trying to extend its reach beyond online media to incorporate the entire “funnel” of consumer media and marketing exposure to explain how people are influenced by brand communications to make their purchase decisions. “As you know their whole business is full of funnel attribution analysis,” Dimling tells Online Media Daily. “The idea is that they track what led a person ultimately to an action that an advertiser is interested in. It starts with bringing a person into the funnel and leads to them doing something. The goal is to get away from crediting just the last [online] click, and to recognize that there was advertising activity beyond the last click that influenced the behavior.” Dimling says while attribution analysis has been well developed for online media, it cannot function in a vacuum and must ultimately incorporate all of the brand communications a consumer is exposed to – both online and offline – over the entire process that leads up to their purchase decision. For some products and brands that purchase cycle can be a very long time. For others, it can be almost immediate, Dimling says. “The reality is, less than 300 companies are doing anything right now but last click measurement,” says Jeff Greenfield, COO of C3, asserting that while attribution analysis is gaining momentum among advertisers and agencies using online media, the “adoption has been incredibly slow” with offline media, especially television. While C3 is far from alone in the burgeoning attribution marketplace – everyone from Visual IQ and ClearSaleing to Omniture, Turn and even DoubleClick offer some form of attribution modeling to marketers – he claims that C3 is the only one doing it with the fidelity to identify and assign credit to every step in the attribution process, from the so-called “originator” (the ad exposure that first got the consumer’s attention in the process, to the “assist” (the exposure that facilitates it) to the “converter” (the one that actually closed the deal). Greenfield says C3 does this with a unique tracking pixel in an online ad that lets C3 know when a consumer was exposed to it, and what role it played in the process that led to the ultimate conversion. He says the goal is to extend that concept to all offline media, especially television. He says the implications are huge for all media, but especially for the burgeoning “real-time bidding,” or RTB marketplace, where attribution analysis is being applied to real-time audience data and advertising impressions. While RTB is growing fast, it has mainly been a factor in the online display advertising marketplace where the majority of ad impressions were going unsold. But the momentum and increasing science behind the trading and data platforms, and more sophisticated analytics are leading some to believe that most, if not all media can be managed faster and more intelligently with machines. That intelligence, he Greenfield says, will be powered by people and systems utilizing better attribution analysis. “It’s not going to be a ‘set it/forget it’ world,” Greenfield says, referring to a popular misconception about the RTB marketplace that, once a machine learns consumer behavior, it can continue to process it on its own. That said, Greenfield says the complexity of the data that goes into attribution analysis is now too complex for individual people to process on their own, without the help of better systems. To illustrate that, it does some quick math adding up all the elements going into a typical real-time ad exposure and estimates that it could be as much as “10 million combinations.” By assigning a value to every one of those 10 million combinations, or clicks, Greenfield says systems like C3 can do a better job of determining which ones had an effect. “This allows buyers to take out the scatter-braining of 10 million combinations,” he says, adding, “Now we know that 500 of them are generating 90% of the results, and that is where you need to focus your attention.”
In what it claims is a first for a service of its kind, online video tracking and measurement firm Visible Measures this morning announced it has been accredited by media industry ratings watchdog the Media Rating Council for a range of its core video metrics products. The accreditation, which follows an extensive audit of Visible Measures systems by the MRC, took nearly a year to complete, and is an important stamp of approval in what is becoming an increasingly crowded field of video and social media metrics and analytics firms. While MRC accreditation doesn’t guarantee that ratings service will be used as a “marketplace currency” the way Nielsen’s ratings are used for buying TV advertising, it at least gives the users of the data the peace of mind that the service is doing what it says it can do. “It’s not any kind of approval for being used in the market,” acknowledges Brian Shin, the founder and CEO of Visible Measures, noting: “It’s really just saying our metrics have been audited and accredited. It’s really up to us, working with major marketers and brand publishers, to decide what to do with it.” What Shin plans to do with it is use it to generate awareness that Visible Measure’s methods for tracking brand exposure across the entire spectrum of online video – including so-called “owned, earned and paid” impressions – actually work. Among other things, the MRC accredited Visible Measures’ True Reach platform, which tracks, measures and assigns values for the exposure a brand reaps regardless of what part of the online video spectrum it comes from, including conventional advertising (pre-roll and in-banner video), branded content, or even user-generated content about the brand. Shin acknowledges that those lines sometimes get blurry, such as consumers remixing a brand’s original content into a user-generated mash-up version, which could actually have a higher or a lower value for a brand depending on how it is executed and distributed. “If you’re a Procter & Gamble, you’re not just trying to measure that one video that you uploaded. It’s really all of the above,” says Shin, noting that marketers may be able to trigger online viewing behavior – and even sharing – with their own content, but they cannot control it. They can only measure its effects, how it gets passed along, shared, changed, and consumed in the process. “The original mandate was to measure and track all video,” Shin explains. “What we were seeing was the lines between what is branded entertainment and user-generated content is blurred, and increasingly so. We’re pretty close close partners with YouTube, and even they struggle to define the barriers between, essentially, everything. “What we have learned is consumers are in control of this distributed content, and marketers need to understand and measure that.” In fact, Shin notes that new genres of blurring brand content are emerging online, such as the so-called “unpacking and hauling” behavior in which consumers are so in love with the brands and products they buy that they film themselves unpacking the haul of goods they bought while shopping and post it on YouTube or Facebook. At the same time, Shin says the volume of brand-generated video content has “exploded” and that most of the biggest marketers now have “entire divisions” responsible for creating and distributing video online. “In the last year alone, the viewership of social video or branded entertainment from marketers has gone up over 300%. In 2011, there were 5.6 billion video views of branded entertainment,” Shin says citing a Visible Measures stat that isn’t just a big number, it’s now also an accredited one.
In anticipation of the imminent passing of my current jalopy, I recently test-drove a few cars. While I relished the consequence-free fiddling with seats and mirrors and the opportunity to register my disgust with heated seats - in my book, as much an over-luxe scourge as platinum-rimmed toilets - there's only so much one can learn about a car by piloting it through suburbia on a sunny day. Upon returning to the dealership, I asked if it would be okay to return on a snowy, rainy or otherwise weather-impaired afternoon. The sales guy scoffed: "No, that would be dangerous." To this I responded, "My middle name is Danger." He glanced down at my driver's license and said, "No, your middle name is Michael." I didn't buy the car. Thus I love the thinking behind "Ride the Storm," a campaign in which Mitsubishi tasks the ruggedly be-scarf'd storm chasers at Weather Underground - the thinking person's weather site - with roadtripping from California to Kansas during what the constitutionally timid might call a "winter weather event." By documenting what its minions encountered along the way, Weather Underground would show the world that Mitsubishi cars (or at least the ones equipped with "All-Wheel Control" and some kind of new road-whisperer computer dealie) rank among the safest on the highway. The branding kick is long overdue. When I asked my wife about her Mitsubishi brand associations, first she looked at me blankly and then she said, hesitatingly, "Airport rentals?" Since Volvo no longer owns safety, Mitsubishi is smart to make a play for the safest-auto-brand title belt. (Separately, Volvo has cemented its grip on the crucial "best car in which to transport soccer balls from one traveling-team match to the next" trophy.) My problem is with the execution. Simply put, the road-trip weather isn't harrowing enough, despite Mitsubishi's attempts to hype it in the site copy. The video from the third day of the trip is teased with the following blurb: "Avalanche warnings. Trucks sliding off the road. How's that for ominous?" I got myself all revved up for some serious car-on-car pinball action, only to be treated to 50 seconds of a dude yapping about how "the computer is reading the conditions as you drive, in real time." Be still, my beating heart. Similarly, copy for the second-day video reads like subterranean-grade Hemingway ("we're finally starting to hit some serious white stuff north of Flagstaff") and the footage belies the text. It depicts - and I'll try to make this sound somewhere near as exciting as it is - a Mitsubishi model safely and respectfully passing a snowplow on a road that, to the untrained eye, looks a bit slick. After witnessing this Faces of Death-level encounter, my only hope was that Weather Underground only assigned single men without wives/partners or children to a task of this level of brutality, and that those men didn't sign any kind of we-know-what-we're-getting- ourselves-into waiver. Admittedly, it's a tough call. On one hand, if you're going to commit to a campaign of this ilk, you can't do it half-assed. At the same time, to get the footage that would prove the safety and bad-weather bona fides of Mitsubishi cars beyond a reasonable doubt, the marketing team would have had to send drivers and cameramen and grips and heaven knows who else into a storm so vicious and unpredictable that it legitimately threatened their well-being. Mercifully, nobody crossed that line. That's why the last video in the campaign feels the most honest. Against a blue-sky backdrop, a Mitsubishi ad manager dryly describes the trek as a success ("we got rain, we got snow - and five days later, here we are"). In terms of preservation of human life, sure, mazel tovs all around. But few viewers will come away from "Ride the Storm" believing that Mitsubishi vehicles are any safer or road-warrior-y than Fords or Toyotas or Mazdas. More evidence, please.
Noting that there now are hundreds of metrics for measuring and defining the behavior of consumers sharing brand-related content online – 90 from Facebook alone – Seraj Bharwani, Chief Analytics Officer, Visible Measures says Madison Avenue has entered a “metrics arms race.” Bharwani, made this observation during his opening keynote at today’s OMMA Metrics & Research conference in New York, said that “at least some brands and agencies are joining the race.” By that he means they are helping to fuel the proliferation – not to mention the hyper-fragmentation that comes along with it – out of something he described as “metrics envy.” Bharwani said some brands are “blindly chasing” metrics like likes, fans and friends, just because they consider some new form of bragging rights that are essential to their brand’s dominance, but without knowing what it really means for their brand’s performance. “If Coke has 30 million likes, apparently Pepsi marketers want a respectable number to match the results,” he said, adding that the logic is being driven not necessarily by a new consumer behavior, but by a new marketing executive behavior: “not missing out on the likes party.”
According to statistics from online ad server YuMe, the CPG (consumer packaged goods) category was the top online spender of 2011, making up 24% of dollars spent. Health/Pharmaceutical advertising made up 16%, a 400% year-over-year increase from 2010. Top Video Advertising Spenders in 2011Category% of Video Ad Spending CPG 24% Health/Pharmaceutical 16 Telecom 13 Financial services 7 Entertainment 6 Retail 5 Travel 4 Autos 4 Consumer electronics 4 Other 4 Source: YuMe, Inc., February 2012 Persons 25-54 was the most requested age demographic in 2011, representing 15% of total requests for proposals. Females 25-54 and Persons 18-49 were also highly requested. Top Demographic Audiences Requested By MarketersAudience Demographic% of 2011 RFPs Persons 25-64 15% Females 25-54 13 Persons 18-49 9 Females 18-49 6 Females 25-49 4 Source: YuMe, Inc., February 2012 Requests for female demo-targeted campaigns represented 25.7% of all requests during 2011, roughly triple the 8.4% of requests aimed at a male demo. Females 25-54 was the most requested female demographic, with 39% of requested RFPs, down 7% from 42% in 2010. Males 25-54 were the most requested male target at 22%, holding steady from 2010. Top Female And Male Age Demographics Requested By MarketersGender% Marketers Requesting Female 25-54 39% 18-49 19 25-49 13 19-34 7 35-64 6 Male 25-54 22 18-34 18 18-49 16 25-49 9 18-24 8 Source: YuMe, Inc., February 2012 Shorter pre-roll video ads had a higher completion rate in 2011. 15-second pre-rolls had the highest completion rate of 76%, and rose from 69% in Q1 to 77% in Q4. 30-second pre-rolls followed with a 62% completion rate overall, falling from 66% in Q1 to 58% in Q4. And 30-second-plus pre-rolls only had a 54% completion rate, fluctuating from 42% to 66% throughout the year. Average Video Length And Performance By Length, 2011Ad Length (sec)Video Length MixVideo Completion Rate :15 pre-roll 45.5% 76% :30 pre-roll 54.4 62 > :30 pre-roll 0.1 54 Source: YuMe, Inc., February 2012 Comparing video ad completion rates (regardless of length) in 2011 by age demographic, the study finds that rates were highest among persons aged 12 to 24 (73% in 2011 overall), rising from 64% in Q1 to 76% in Q4. The completion rate among persons of all other age groups dropped from Q1 to Q4, with an overall average of 65-68%. Ad Completion Rates (2011) Audience Demographic2011 Ad Completion Rate Persons: 18-34 66% 35-54 66 25-54 68 25-49 65 12-24 73 Source: YuMe, Inc., February 2012 N.B. About the Data: The statistics are solely representative of YuMe’s network and may not be a reflection of the overall online video marketplace. For additional information, please visit MarketingCharts here, or for the complete PDF file, go to YuMe here.