Over the course of this series, we’ve examined the case for localizing ad campaigns, explored the merits of focusing a localized ad spend on both streaming and broadcast platforms, and explained the impact that new technologies have had on targeting specific audiences in specific markets in specific ways.

What we’ve found is an increased appetite among both brands and consumers for a local approach to advertising, whether those ads are accompanying sports, news, or entertainment programming. While it’s clear that different markets behave differently, we’ve seen that the precision targeting of streaming video combined with the wide reach of broadcast provides effective coverage in those markets. This has become especially true in recent years as streaming’s unmatched growth has shifted viewership dramatically, further fragmenting the way consumers access their favorite video content.

However, as we’ve reported, what determines the success of a localized campaign is the ability to pull together behavioral, contextual, and demographic insights in order to understand—and act upon—local consumer preferences and their video consumption patterns.

And this, of course, has become more complicated as the media landscape has become more fragmented. As Hanna Gryncwajg, senior vice president, Commercial, at Comscore , a leading cross-platform measurement provider, points out, consumers are constantly changing, and advertisers need to meet them where and how they are consuming content. “Fragmentation has caused massive disruption. Pre-pandemic, advertisers were able to attain a strong reach number with their linear campaigns. But today that is difficult to achieve,” In the face of that, she notes, what companies like Comscore are doing, is “stitching those impressions back together so that buyers can achieve the reach they were used to six or seven years ago.” Doing this, she adds, means “using a unified measurement approach”— that calibrates streaming, linear, digital, and mobile impressions all together from one source—and provides advertisers with the “opportunity to extend their reach, measure it, and improve campaign performance in a deduplicated manner.”

And this makes it increasingly important that brands are able to accurately and quickly measure the impact of their campaigns, “knowing how one platform performs versus another and illustrating the incrementality of those platforms over linear helps us better direct spending and allows us to optimize within specific platforms,” Gryncwajg says.

In the past, says Keith Kazerman, president of Streaming at Locality, a provider of local video advertising services, the fragmentation of measurement amounted to “a thumb in the air.” What’s necessary—and possible—now is greater transparency and “a comprehensive view of local video ad campaigns.”

Getting and acting upon this comprehensive view involves four interconnected steps, says Kazerman:

1)    Taking a unified measurement approach, which “allows advertisers to make informed decisions, understanding how each channel contributes to the overall media mix at the local level.”

2)    Granular data analysis, which allows advertisers to dive deep into specific audience metrics in specific locations.

3)    Sales attribution tools, which track conversions by target markets.

4)    Real-time adjustments, which allow for course corrections after data from the other steps is taken into consideration. 

Unified Measurement Approach

As Kazerman describes it, unified measurement “brings together data from multiple channels, both streaming and broadcast, into a single framework that provides the comprehensive view of a brand’s campaign performance across all platforms.” The integration of data, he says, “avoids silos,” allowing advertisers to “track cross-platform performance and measure an overall campaign’s effectiveness—across multiple markets— in one cohesive view.”

Comscore’s process, Gryncwajg notes, “measures the impressions from both linear and digital, including streaming. Comscore’s proprietary personification approach then takes household counts down to a person level, allowing for a demographic view into all the co-viewers exposed to a campaign on TV and CTV. PC and mobile assignments are powered by insights from Comscore’s digital panel and demographic partners. From there Comscore’s cross-platform solution (Comscore Campaign Ratings) deduplicates across platforms providing a single overall reach value.” The ability to “view all sorts of metrics and dimensions,” she adds, “can give both the buy-side and the sell-side tremendous opportunity to create their own narrative, to collect insights, and to optimize campaigns in real time.”

This unified approach, Kazerman says, serves as “an insurance policy, making sure that all aspects of that campaign are working together in a harmonious way to optimize the return on ad spend.”

Granular Data Analysis

In terms of acceptance, Kazerman says, cross-platform analysis has become commonplace. “It is mirroring what user behavior is,” he says, adding that “unified measurement is now essential for any brand looking to understand the true impact of their ad spend—especially their local spend in multiple markets.”

What makes the measurement useful, however, is an advertiser’s ability to do granular data analysis, “to break down the data by demographics, location, time of day, and then understanding what that behavior is in terms of campaign performance.” That means, Kazerman says, “utilizing analytic tools that can capture all of the information about how ads are performing in different contexts on specific platforms in specific local markets as well as with that specific audience target segment.”

Gryncwajg notes that with Comscore’s granular dashboard, for example, “you can see age, gender, sex, and also extended demographics, household income, ethnicity, and who’s watching on each platform.”

The data can also point to some trends that would otherwise seem counterintuitive. For example, Gryncwajg says, while news viewership tends to “skew a bit older,” Comscore has found instances where news viewership on mobile is younger. That means, she says, “there is this brand-new audience that a brand could capture on mobile watching its news programming” that might otherwise not have been reached.

Having so much granularity “in a dashboard,” Gryncwajg adds, “provides a complete look at how the campaign is performing, as well as the audiences that are viewing the campaign across the different platforms. Knowledge is power.”

Sales Attribution Tools

And what makes the granular data especially powerful, according to Kazerman, is pairing it with sales attribution tools. “This enables us in real-time to understand how web conversions are happening,” he says. “Are we utilizing the right audience targeting? Are we in the right context? Is the medium mix appropriate?” The answers to those questions are “based on how we’re evolving, how we’re using specific attribution data coupled with, for example, ACR [automatic content recognition] data to see what the media consumption is at the local level.”

And while, he admits, it’s complicated, Locality’s role is to “simplify all these complications, to track the customer journey from different platforms and touchpoints, to assign credit to the ads that have directly influenced a consumer’s purchase or engagement, and to understand not only how those different deliverables are being driven by specific channels across, streaming, digital, and broadcast, but also how different creative is performing against those locally targeted audience segments.”

As brands have moved from simply worrying about “impressions” to focusing on “last-click attribution” to expecting “multitouch attribution models,” they have, Kazerman points out, “become much more focused on ROI.” What sales attribution tools provide, he notes, are a means for “determining effectiveness, for really understanding how every dollar spent is smarter in performing against your brand goals." 

Real-Time Adjustments

As valuable as this information is in terms of knowing how well a localized ad campaign strategy has worked, what may be more critical is what a brand can do with that information—not just in terms of planning future campaigns, but in terms of real-time adjustments to the campaign underway. “It’s all driven by data and insights and technology,” Kazerman says. “Utilizing the measurement and the granular data, you can make a shift during the campaign through which higher performing channels can be doubled down on to extract the most value.”

Despite the ability that advertisers now have to employ unified measurement, granular data analysis, sales attribution tools, and real-time adjustments to understand how well their campaigns are performing—and to take action to improve that performance, “the industry is still on the ground floor in terms of cross-platform adoption,” says Gryncwajg. “That is why it’s important to utilize tools like Locality’s Reach+, and enable clients to measure streaming alongside linear.  Comscore’s cross-platform solution measures campaign performance in every single local market. Through our partnership with Locality we're able to continue to innovate in local media, one of the most impactful ways of reaching consumers. The industry still has progress to make, but working with leaders in local cross-platform advertising and measurement that offer these capabilities—partnering to improve the fragmented ecosystem overall—helps simplify the process of executing successful local campaigns and proving ROI for brands.”

How do consumers respond to the localized, cross-platform approach? Have they come to expect it? Do they see it as authentic? Armed with this information, what can brands do to better target their audiences?  In the final installment of this series, we’ll present the findings of Locality’s new proprietary research study, “The Local Lift: How Local Video Campaigns Increase Consumer Action,” conducted by The Harris Poll.