For months, I've been reading about "engagement" in various publications that report on advertising and marketing. Much of the discussion focuses on how audiences engage and respond to programming
content - always a useful insight. But, you could have highly engaging content matched with ads that generate little audience participation - or, ads that highly engage but which do not reside in
equally compelling contextual environments.
At the end of the day, engagement is a function of how successfully the advertising message and experience appropriately involve the audience a
marketer wishes to target. As digital media proliferates, successful advertising initiatives are going to require rather dramatic shifts in how we think about - and execute against - media research
and measurement data.
And a big part of optimizing ad engagement - outside of having a good communications strategy and creative execution - is to focus on putting that message in front of
people who will be receptive to it.
The next frontier in advertising will be making audiences truly actionable in a dynamic media market based on real-time, census-level data. This is already
the case in search advertising. What's next is its application for upper-funnel advertisers who are trying to reach consumers still in the awareness and consideration phase.
Let's take a step
back. For decades, advertising placement and the media planning and buying process were built on a foundation of "before and after." Billions of ad dollars have been spent based on point-in-time or
place and historical audience data (often relying on the ability of consumers to remember if they consumed the media or not), which was then used to estimate who might consume that same media in the
future (before they actually did). And then, validation of audience delivery was attempted after the fact.
In a simple, linear media landscape, this model was good enough.
When you bought ad units that could potentially reach everyone seeing a show or reading a publication, there was a manageable downside to the methodology.
However, in today's highly dynamic
digital world, this approach provides diminishing value and misses the tremendous opportunity of comprehensively addressable advertising.
The eventuality of addressability - knowing when,
where and perhaps even why someone engages with an ad - means the data currently used to value advertising inventory and drive media buying and targeting must evolve.
Audience measurement,
targeting approaches, and systems that have developed in corners of the online world provide a glimpse for where the media market is headed. I say "corners" because, in many ways, the online
marketplace continues to be an extension of the old "before and after" hypocrisy. Using projected data specific to a show or a periodical (property-level) rather to an individual audience member
(census-level) to inform what in effect should be real-time investment and allocation decisions fails in one key aspect: It does not unlock the full potential value of audiences.
Search,
optimized performance networks, retargeting and behavioral solutions are great examples of how "connected decisioning" has driven value in the online world. Every impression is valued and realized in
real time.
Think about these solutions and how they've evolved: First search, which was focused on the bottom of the funnel; then performance, retargeting and behavioral solutions - which
begin to deliver ads to consumers further "up the funnel," when they are at the consideration level. It's only a matter of time before the upper funnel (the awareness stage) - where most marketing
dollars are spent today - moves to an addressable model as well.
But what's required to make that transition? Quite a lot, if you start thinking about how our industry works today.
We
must recognize that census-level measurement will serve as the foundation of the future digital media economy. We can continue with red-herring debates about panel expansion and recruitment
improvements, more automated monitoring, whose predictive methodology is more precise than the next guy's, and the like. But those issues have nothing to do with the requirements for achieving true,
real-time addressability. To accomplish that, you need directly measured data at the segment, household or consumer level available continuously so real-time ad decisions can be made.
The new
mantra is: Data has to be fresh, real and actionable. Audience measurement must become an active and actionable part of the content and ad delivery process. It can't be an afterthought. In a digital
world, real-time audience counts will replace "overnight" estimates.
Industry targeting approaches also must change. Like in the search space, marketers must establish a fluid model that
allows them to define specific segments based on their own definitions. That will benefit sellers since it will create a more liquid marketplace.
Even if you have access to census-level data
and next-generation segmentation, building the inventory management, forecasting and allocation systems to manage highly dynamic advertising is a tremendous challenge.
It's not going to
happen overnight. Think Google - the most developed addressable platform today. It operates the largest computer infrastructure in the world and its solutions accommodate only a fraction of today's
total advertising spend across all media. Publishers and advertisers will have to completely rethink how they manage inventory and allocate advertising budgets.
Audiences already fragmented by
the shift away from traditional media consumption have become a moving target online as they spend time toggling back and forth between established content sites, bouncing between news and
interest-related vertical sites to social media to blogs. To accurately target the proverbial right person with the right message at the right time requires data that is fresh, real and
accountable.
There is clearly a tremendous opportunity ahead to make real-time data and addressability a central component of the media delivery process.
To do that, however, we must
focus on what happens in real time, during the consumer's media consumption experience, and not be satisfied with limited snapshots or predictions or estimates of behavior which, at the end of the
day, tell us nothing about real-time experience.
Agencies and marketers should push for more accountability, publishers should build addressable models to unlock their audience potential and
the industry as a whole should embrace the challenges we are about to experience.
It's an exciting time to be in the media business. Let's not allow ourselves to be held back by legacy models
that no longer support the business opportunities that lie ahead.
Adam Gerber is CMO of Quantcast Corporation.
(agerber@quantcast.com)