• by Wayne Friedman , June 16, 2010

Las Vegas, NV - Which half of your advertising is working? Whatever it is, you'll want more data and more tools to figure it out. But be careful what you wish for -- it may just make it more complicated. 

In a panel at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference, a number of executives tried to answer that long-time, well-known question from John Wanamaker about which half of a marketer's advertising is working. The answer: marketers are getting closer. But determinations are tricky -- so is focusing on too niche an audience.

"We are over-complicating our target," says Rob Carstens, vice president of client consulting at Nielsen Catalina Ventures. "We all want these incredibly complex targets that may only reach 1% -- a too narrow audience."

David Poltrack, chief research officer of CBS Corp. and president of CBS Vision, says the electronic industry is a perfect example. He says many manufacturers only focus on the industry leader's consumers.

"There is Apple envy," he says. "[Marketers] are getting too narrow. They want to talk to the Apple consumers. But while everyone wants to get Apple customers, Apple is getting everyone else."

He adds that at the CBS consumer test center in Las Vegas, some marketers want to test a certain product, but they only want to target 10% of consumers -- a small part of what Poltrack believes is a bigger target, perhaps 50%. "The tendency to have a lot of data is to go to too much precision," he says.

Poltrack also says TV broadcasters want to know more about the creative that runs on their airwaves, especially since national TV networks now get paid from marketers via the C3 metric -- commercial ratings plus three days of DVR playback.

"We get paid for commercial minutes," he says. "Do we start telling our advertisers, your creative stinks? We are moving into a very aggressive way in telling marketers how well their campaigns are doing." Presenter Randall Beard, executive vice president of Global CPG for Nielsen IAG, says marketers are waiting too long to make changes to their marketing and media plans. With all the data available, the aim is for change and adjustment in "real time," not in "post" media analysis.

Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrehberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science says marketers need a broader pool of customers. She says they should ask a different sort of question: "What about the people that don't want to buy my brand?"