GoDaddy's Fischer: Forget Attribution, Think 'Contribution'
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, June 9, 2016
GoDaddy is well known for its extravagant use of TV media buys, having bought time in every Super Bowl every year of its existence, except last year. And tellingly, that may
have something to do with Eric Fischer joining as director of global brand media a couple of years ago. While Fischer did not explicitly make a connection between GoDaddy bowing out of the last Super
Bowl, he did make a case for utilizing TV with much more of a scientific precision than most marketers have utilized it to date. Speaking during the opening keynote at MediaPost’s TV Insider Summit on Amelia Island, FL, Fischer called on the marketing community to throw away “preconceived notions” about using television -- especially old school metrics like GRPs and CPMs.
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“I don’t care about the CPM, if I’m not reaching the right people,” he said, making a case for some much more refined metrics tied explicitly to the ROI a brand can generate by leveraging TV ad buys scientifically.
Instead of utilizing historical media inputs to evaluate TV, he recommended that brands begin utilizing “business outcomes.”
In the case of GoDaddy, the outcome it benchmarks its TV performance on is “acquisitions” or new consumers buying GoDaddy’s Web domain registration services.
He said GoDaddy goes a step further than a simple CPA -- or cost per acquisition-- model and actually calculates the “incremental” acquisitions generated by TV, or customers it would not have gotten if it had not used TV advertising. And even more precisely, the “marginal” incremental gains it has realized from new customers are from TV advertising.
While that seems like a much higher order than TV advertising is accustomed to, Fischer said it’s feasible, but through utilizing models estimating the “contribution” that media buys make to generate those returns.
“We need to think about contribution,” he said -- as opposed to things like attribution -- in other words, the direct, explicit impact of buying media on a company’s business goals.
This subtle difference between attribution and contribution is interesting - although this post doesn't explain what he's thinking. But here's my go.
Attribution implies that giving each entire acquisition to one medium. In truth, the whole mix influences the market. The question we'd really prefer to know is how much each medium contributes to the customer acquisition. What %/role is TV? What %/role is digital banner? Etc...
Then we can estimate whether the spending is as effective as it should be.
As Doug points out, it's very difficult to give any one medium let alone a single ad exposure complete credit for making a sale or fully motivating a consumer. Too many factors are involved such as the effects of other media exposures, prior ad exposures in the same medium, word -of-mouth endorsements, product availability, promotional activity, brand reputation, etc. There have been many attempts in TV to try to determine the ROI of primetime TV versus daytime TV or broadcast versus cable and even whether individual program placements effects can be isolated. So far, these have not been very productive enterprises. Also, there is the critical distinction between branding campaigns, which include a myriad of variables and direct marketing, where attribution makes much more sense.