Commentary

Audience Based Strategies Deliver

by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, July 4, 2018

According to a new report by 4C, a global data science and marketing technology company, and Advertiser Perceptions, providing data-driven business intelligence for the advertising industry, 89% of global marketers agree that advertisers who build their strategies around audiences, rather than individual media platforms, create more impactful campaigns.

The report, Making Audiences Actionable: Envisioning A Frictionless Cross-Channel Advertising Future, based on a survey of 300 advertising decision makers from brands and agencies across the U.S. and the U.K., says that marketers have started to adopt a cross-channel approach to planning and buying in response to new multi-screen consumer behaviors. 75% of respondents indicate that they are already executing campaigns that include more than one type of media.

Survey respondents, however, say that marketing challenges persist despite their efforts to tie channels together, with the biggest issues being:

Measurement (52%)
Reach and frequency optimization (45%)
Targeting precision (37%)

The challenges are particularly heightened when integrating TV and digital campaigns, says the report, as 84% of advertisers report that they would increase their TV budgets if it offered the same level of accountability, transparency, and understanding about the consumer that is afforded by digital media.

According to the report, the solution to these challenges is an audience-based approach, according to those surveyed, which greatly improves several outcomes such as:

Increased brand awareness (45%)
Purchase consideration metrics such as website or store visits (43%)
Better targeting and frequency optimization (39%)
Directly attributable actions such as logins or downloads (39%)
Better brand loyalty (39%)

Lance Neuhauser, CEO, 4C, says “…marketers have started to adopt cross-channel campaigns… to truly market the way that consumers consume… seamlessly across screens, at the time and place of their choosing… they must… put audiences at the center of planning and buying…”

To achieve audience-based marketing in a fragmented media landscape, 85% of advertisers say they require a new marketing structure that enables seamless operation between publishers and platforms, including digital and TV.

To download the report, and learn more about the benefits of audience-centric marketing, please visit here.

data, research

2 comments about "Audience Based Strategies Deliver".

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Peter Rosenwald from Consult Partners, July 4, 2018 at 11:59 a.m.

It really is wonderful how we continue to chase the ultimate metric, reliably assigning values across media, platforms, creative executions and hoping to find the secret algorithm which will make our decisions for us.

Happily, it is not likely to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future if only because despite nice articulations like 'audience-based marketing' there are just too many variables. The only fixed metric is the ultimate relative cost of accomplishing the marketing objective.

Did making the sale or acquiring the customer or raising the brand awareness by a few points cost more or less than the marketer could afford?

How to apportion which elements of the mix contribute to how much of this final value keeps us busy but is unlikely to produce the magic bullet.
Reply

Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, July 4, 2018 at 1:19 p.m.

Couldnt agree more, Peter. All of this fuss about finding a magical common audience "metric" across platforms confuses the media buying function---which generates something akin to ad "exposures" ---with advertising impact, which is an infinitely more complicated matter and one that is not resolvable on a formula basis where one approach applies to all. There is no comparable audience metric that provides an equal measure of ad exposure, let alone impact, for TV, digital, radio, magazines, newspapers, OOH, etc. But even if there was, the focus is on direct response which is so prevalent in digital media, and assumes that you can determine the sales results generated by each ad placement----even those attained by TV style branding efforts. You can't---which is why one gets such befuddling responses in studies of this nature. The answers across respondents, themselves, just aren't comparable. Some people are thinking digital, others are not. People are answering questions they don't really understand. They are claiming to be doing things that they don't do.