Author|Bill Harvey
Source: www.mediavillage.com, July 2022
The marketing business resists change. Yet the force of change has recently been irresistible. Digital changed everything, and so will the mediatech to come.* Marketers react when they have to, and the entire industry is now able to function through the latest mediatech. During the past 20 years, marketers have adapted swiftly and well. Nice to know we can do that when we have to. But there is still a huge albatross hanging around the neck of the industry, which appears to be immovable: The over-concentration on efficiency metrics rather than effectiveness metrics. The ungodly fixation on CPM without a built-in impact weight.
No one can say that marketers have been slow to embrace every manner of using big data and household matching to find targetable audiences and to measure ROAS in a more evidentiary way than in marketing mix modeling (MMM). “My” own company TRA (2005; now part of TiVo) was part of the cause of these forms of analytics taking over as swiftly as they have.
Even the currency has been gradually changing away from efficiency to effectiveness measures, as seen for example in the way that A&E is guaranteeing based on outcomes (they are not the only one) and everyone is at least talking about doing it.
The hardest part to change is still the CPM impressions, which is the currency for 99% of the buying. That figure may be slipping lower year to year, if not recently, than in the future.
CPM without an impact weight is such an inadequate measure. It’s totally oriented to the ideal of “buy cheap.” The right measure is the cost per outcome, and did we make money, or at least lift brand goodwill.
However, the sellers have every right to say, “We can’t be held responsible for your creative.” Which means that every ARF Model level above the impression (opportunity to see, OTS) — such as the next one up, attentiveness, today broadly measured by eyes on screen, ignoring audio effects — is going to be driven much more by the creative than by the place you placed your ad creative, and “We the Media” would say, “So we can’t be held responsible for what happens after the OTS.” And rightly so. There will always be the need to be counting impressions as the default currency. OTS is the only objective currency whose value you can separate from the creative.
Media context effects are additive to the creative — if you match the ad to the right contexts.
That’s where the next marketing revolution is going to come from: The degree of proper matching between the ad and the context. Reweighting the CPM by the Resonance between the ad and the context. This is the pivot of the next marketing revolution.
Resonance was invented, incidentally, by Howard Shimmel. He was the first to ask for the “Resonance use case” of the NCM/RMT tech. He defined the field.
Resonance is the term of art at “my” company RMT. The ’90s Next Century Media tech still had parts that no one else had invented yet. RMT acquired that part of the tech in 2014. Since then, Nielsen NCS, Neustar, 605 and Simmons have shown that the resulting Resonance of properly matching ads to programs increases ROAS double digits. Clients are seeing the effects every day.
This method adds to the ROAS by starting from the specific ad, and then finding both audiences and contexts that overlap maximally with the ad across a battery of 265 variables. The variables, “DriverTags” as they are called, were distilled empirically from every word in the English language. In the final field trial, 1562 variables were reduced to 265 by a machine-learning algorithm and the world’s first set-top-box data. (The latter 1990s achievement won an Emmy for NCM in 2022.)
When the marketing industry at large has proven to itself that matching to contexts and audiences makes sense and it works, the amplification of the efficacy of advertising will make advertising an even more powerful stimulus, because (1) the ad will fall on un-deaf ears (people who consume content which is psychologically like the specific ad in terms of DriverTags), and (2) who on top of that will be experiencing the ad in the context of a program mood that is like that of the ad.
In practice, the factoring of CPMs by an index number is a mature methodology, integrated already into the fabric of the marketecture. It’s just not being used all that often. When it is used, it tends to be related to targeting rather than to impact per ad impression. The targeting tends to be more related to past purchase/shopping behavior or questionnaire items rather than psychological data collected passively based on content consumption behavior, which is the way RMT does it.
The first year of this revolution, whenever that may be, will be marked by big wins for linear TV, whose environments tend to provide more emotional immersion. Too often that valuable mood is being broken by the ad. Instead, if the ads are put in the Resonant programs, the mood of the program will not be broken, but instead the program’s mood will be sailed upon by the ad.
This article will be concluded next week.
*Plug for my new sci-fi novel, which includes heaping doses of the mediatech ’round the next bend.
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