Measuring the Impact of a Covid Vaccine Campaign. An Interview with Brennan Lake, Senior Director of Research Partnerships & Data for Good at Cuebiq

How effective is the Ad Council and COVID Collaborative Vaccine Education Initiative? Cuebiq, a company that measures mobility will find out. Cuebiq and the Ad Council are partnering to ascertain how effective the ‘It’s Up To You’ campaigns are. They were created to educate Americans about the COVID-19 vaccines. 

Using foot fall and other traffic data, Cuebiq will measure the effectiveness of the campaigns in driving exposed audiences to vaccination centers. Metrics will include visit lift, the change in percentage of visitation to vaccine centers between those exposed to PSAs versus an unexposed control group, and incrementality, which represents incremental visits to frequently visited locations (such as pharmacies) above and beyond normal behavior. Results are expected by the summer. Brennan Lake, Senior Director of Research Partnerships & Data for Good, offered further details:

Charlene Weisler: Has Cuebiq done this type of research before?

Brennan Lake: Measuring the effectiveness of media campaigns in driving visits to brick and mortar locations is at the core of Cuebiq's commercial business. Alongside this, we've done extensive pro bono work through our Data for Good program in using privacy-preserving mobility data for analyzing behavior change throughout the pandemic. Therefore, it was a natural move for us to combine our work in COVID-19 research with our advertising technology to assist the Ad Council in measuring the effectiveness of their vaccine information campaign.

Weisler: What is the methodology for this study?

Lake: We utilize our sample of first-party mobility data, consisting of over 20 million anonymous and opted-in daily active users, in order to measure visitation trends to public vaccination centers, such as pharmacies and vaccine mega sites. Specifically, we created privacy-preserving segments of users who have been exposed to the Ad Council's PSAs, and compare their visitation behaviors to an unexposed control group that is demographically similar, in order to measure the visit "Uplift" resulting from campaign exposure.

We also use machine learning to compare 'normal' visitation patterns to current behavior in order to draw a causal link between exposure to a PSA and visits to vaccination centers - a metric known as "Incrementality".

Weisler: What are the challenges that you see?

Lake: As with any other campaign, we want to make sure that we can effectively verify real visits to the points of interest, differentiating them from the noise of 'passersby' within the mobility data. When attempting to infer something such as vaccination from visits data, this adds a layer of complexity, especially for multi-purpose venues such as pharmacies, where even if we can confidently point to visits, it may be the result of segments engaging in regular shopping activities rather than to get a COVID-19 shot.

In addition to applying campaign parameters - such as only looking at visitors who dwell at a location between 15 minutes and 1 hour - we can also use causal machine learning to distinguish between normal shopping behavior and true incremental visits that can be attributed to a campaign. For example, if I typically visit a pharmacy 4 times a month, but after being exposed to a campaign I make 5 or 6 visits, our neural network can pick up on these discrete changes over time, along with data from a control group, in order to reveal incremental visitation behavior.

Weisler: What is the main purpose of the study?

Lake: The main purpose of this study is to support the Ad Council in evaluating the effectiveness of their campaign in driving positive public health outcomes. While the main call to action of the Ad Council's "It's Up To You" campaign is to learn more about the COVID-19 vaccine so that you can make an informed choice to vaccinate, we also hope to see an increased vaccine uptake, especially among cautious, hesitant and skeptical segments.

Weisler: What do you hope to find?

Lake: Ultimately we hope to see a campaign that is successful in providing vital information to the general public, while also driving positive health outcomes through an increase in COVID-19 vaccine uptake. By better understanding which aspects of the campaign - such as content, creative, channel, geographic focus - are most effective at driving visits to vaccination centers, decision makers can better double down on what works, to get people the information they need to make an informed decision to get vaccinated, in order to protect them and their loved ones.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

 

Tracking the Consumer Journey. The Newest Cuebiq Location Data Study

The path to attribution is paved with location data. And that is where Cuebiq steps in. Cuebiq tracks offline consumer behavior for marketers so they can better gauge incrementality. Antonio Tomarchio, the company’s Founder and CEO, just announced the latest release of their annual study, conducted by 451 Research, covering primary research survey data from about 150 marketers. 

“The purpose of the study,” he explained, “is to understand how marketers use location data and whether they are extracting real value from this often-underutilized resource. We repeat this survey annually to see how the use cases of location data may have changed from previous years and how they might evolve over time.” 

Charlene Weisler:  What is your definition of location data - what does it encompass?

Antonio Tomarchio: Location data is first- and third-party data collected from mobile device users via a privacy-compliant opt-in process to accepting location data services within a mobile app. It shows foot traffic or visits to brick-and-mortar locations in the real world. From this, marketers can understand meaningful offline trends such as how often consumers visited their brand’s locations, for how long, peak visiting hours, if consumers also visited their competitors, and if their ads changed consumer behavior.

Weisler: How sophisticated would you say marketers are in leveraging location data?

Tomarchio: 98% of marketers cite that they use location data as part of their toolkit. However, the use cases are becoming more complex and sophisticated now, compared to years prior. The way businesses think about location data has evolved towards measurement and analysis. Examples of analytic use cases include measuring the impact of advertising campaigns by overlaying a campaign’s target audience with store visitors, or measuring changes in foot traffic as a campaign unfolds.

Where previously the use cases for location data focused on geo-fencing, couponing and proximity promotions, today’s efforts are moving higher up the value chain to derive deeper insights from customer behavior. Marketers are using the data to solve challenging problems like complex attribution and cross-channel measurement, audience creation and targeting, and analysis of trends of large groups of customers. And instead of trying to reach consumers at the moment when they cross a threshold into an advertiser’s location, modern campaigns focus on reengaging infrequent visitors, finding new customers to win market share, or rewarding loyal ones. 

Weisler: Does location data vary, generally speaking, depending on the supplier? If so, how can a marketer know which source is best for them?

Tomarchio: Location data, whether it is first or third-party, can vary by quality, granularity and scale. When evaluating which source is best for them, marketers must first consider how they will be using the data and what they expect from data partners and whether it is obtained in a privacy-compliant way.  Fifty-three percent of respondents said accuracy of data is a top concern.  Another consideration is how the data will be provided- such as within a dashboard, summary or just raw, aggregated data.  

Weisler: What are the opportunities in using location data?

Tomarchio: Marketers can understand if a campaign generated incremental visits to store, optimize performance in real time in order to increase ROI, as well as tie visits to transactions. They can also build audiences based on competitive brand behavior, target customers based on offline behaviors and use location-based insights to segment and enrich their buyer personas. Additionally, it allows marketers to analyze affinities from offline visits and cross-channel shopping, measure and predict brand loyalty and analyze variations in behavior based on geography. It helps marketers fully map the customer journey.

Weisler: What are the challenges in using location data?

Tomarchio: The main challenges are a result of internal resources and external stakeholders. For example, 41% of marketers in our study cited the lack of budget as a direct challenge to executing their overall marketing priorities and 68% cited the lack of coordination between internal stakeholders as limiting their ability to execute on data.  However, once companies coordinate internally and work to better integrate location data into their everyday flow of business processes, they are able to derive deeper insights from customer behavior and solve challenging problems like complex attribution, audience creation and targeting, and analysis of trends of large groups of customers.

Weisler: What were the study takeaways and surprises?

Tomarchio: Advertisers are most concerned about the quality of their location data and privacy compliance for all looking to adopt new tech/data (97%). Also, its usage is increasingly becoming sophisticated, marking a significant pivot in the way businesses are thinking about it. A big surprise was that a significant chunk of respondents still consider their companies beginners, from 22-32% depending on the use case. 

Weisler: What are the next steps for Cuebiq?

Tomarchio: A big focus for our industry, and therefore Cuebiq, is the concept of incrementality. As networks, publishers and agencies continue to guarantee business outcomes in ad deals, marketers will need to be able to distinguish between consumers exposed to ads who were already planning to visit vs. those who visited because of exposure to an ad – which is the incremental effect, driven by ad sensitivity. Our role is to help marketers segment consumers based on how the campaign impacted their offline behaviors and decrease the cost per incremental visit, by giving them the ability to best optimize their strategies. Additionally, as the industry looks to navigate attribution in a post-cookie world, we believe there will be a rise in the usage of location data as the offline “cookie” and are future-proofing out business to adapt to the ever changing ecosystem in a privacy compliant way. 

Weisler; How can marketers become more knowledgeable in the use of location data?

Tomarchio: Ultimately, marketers need to shift from a narrow view that takes a location data point as an indicator of ‘where’ somebody was at a point in time, to letting location data inform broader questions of why people are going to a particular location, how they get there and what they do once they are in place. In the end, businesses will see performance results once they shift from viewing location data as a tactical resource to viewing it as a key strategic asset.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Perfecting Out of Home Measurement: An Interview with Clear Channel’s Andy Stevens.

Clear Channel Outdoor Americas has improved its RADAR OOH (Out of Home) insights and analytics tool by adding Cuebiq’s real-time mobile analytics and location data. The value? Location, location, location. More technically, “location insights and footfall attribution analysis based on aggregated and anonymized mobile location data, to identify audiences exposed to CCOA’s printed and digital billboards,” per Andy Stevens, Senior Vice President Research, Insights and Analytics, Clear Channel Outdoor. Stevens has a deep background in Silicon Valley with stints at ShareThis and AOL and now, at CCOA, he is tasked with developing strategies to drive ROI growth for the company and its clients.

This exclusive interview with Stevens provided details on this ground-breaking initiative:

Charlene Weisler: Please give us an overview of Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR.

Andy Stevens: Here’s the elevator pitch: Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR uses mobile location data to identify the audiences that have been exposed to billboards. There is complexity in how we translate anonymous aggregated location data that comes from various sources like mobile ad exchanges or directly from apps, but fundamentally the goal is to understand the viewing audience, which then allows us to offer better targeting for advertisers because we know which billboards best reach your target customer. It also allows us to deliver measureable results so we can show you what user behaviors the campaign actually generated.

Charlene Weisler: Is Clear Channel the sole partner of Cuebiq’s OOH data?

Andy Stevens: Yes. They work in other sectors but we are their exclusive partner using data for Out of Home.

Charlene Weisler: What is footfall attribution? How does it work and why is it important?

Andy Stevens: It’s measuring the impact that the campaign has on store visits; people physically going into stores. It’s important because, despite the huge transformative growth of online commerce, 85% of what is bought is still bought offline. That’s a stat from the National Retail Federation. So for marketers, being able to measure the impact their campaign has on real world store visits is incredibly important. It’s particularly transformative for businesses where the location is the key signal of intent. Think about a gym; the measure is that people go there. Same for a QSR; for the most part, people visit the restaurant to buy something. We can measure that foot traffic and show if it has been driven by exposure to an OOH ad.

Charlene Weisler: What has been the benefit of adding Cuebiq?

Andy Stevens: When we rolled out Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR early last year, we knew the location data landscape would continue to grow. We designed CCO RADAR to be sure that we could continue to evolve as new data sources became available and Cuebiq represents the next generation of location data. They not only have large scale data – about 60 million devices – but the data is persistent. They continually measure location data so they know where those devices are. That’s really important for OOH because we need to be able to understand if someone definitely went past a billboard to be able to measure the performance of the ad against them. 

So let’s say you are driving from Manhattan to Jersey City and you didn’t open an app on your phone. Traditional location data sources relied on the ad calls from apps, so we wouldn’t have known that that person made that journey if they didn’t open up an app when they got there. With Cuebiq we now have a persistent anonymized data source at much greater scale than we ever had before. And we now offer more martkets, more detailed metrics - cutting the results by demographics, time of day, day of week and we receivethe results more quickly. In the past we worked on a two to three week turnaround. Now it is two to three days. And we have lower costs.

Charlene Weisler: Can you give an example with an advertiser?

Andy Stevens: Let’s take that gym example: 24 Hour Fitness campaign used location data in two different ways – for planning purposes and for attribution. For planning, they had two target audiences – current 24 Hour Fitness customers and competitive gym customers. We used RADAR data to identify which locations best reached those targets and then identifed the best billboard locations in LA and San Francisco for a highly targeted campaign. The measure of success was whether we could drive more visits to the gym for both target groups. After the 8 week period of the campaign, we measured footfall attribution comparing those who were exposed to the ad and those who were not. We saw a 248% lift in visits. That is really impressive!

Charlene Weisler: Will this help facilitate cross platform measurement and if so, how?

Andy Stevens: We absolutely have our eye on that. Marketers need to better understand not just each channel in a silo but how the entire marketing mix impacts performance. The Cuebiq data is a big part of that because it gives us sufficient scale to be able to sync anonymous mobile ad ids with third party data sets. That’s how digital advertising is measured. We are putting OOH on the same playing field.

Charlene Weisler: What are some areas that still need to be added to your system?

Andy Stevens: We’re contunally adding more metrics and more behaviors into CCO RADAR. But we don’t identify people as specific individuals. We  use the anonymous mobile ad id which brings us into the digital data ecosystem. This is how digital advertising has been so successful because it uses anonymous ids. The first behaviors we looked at with CCO RADAR were offline behaviors. Going beyond footfall, we can now measure tune-in or understand what apps they may use by interfacing with third party data sets to enhance our targeting capabilites.

Charlene Weisler: How many markets do you reach?

Andy Stevens: We’re in 43 of the 50 largest markets in the United States and 140 airports, and that includes street furniture and roadside inventory. But we can’t measure moving ads, such as on a bus, because they change location.

Charlene Weisler:  Where do you see OOH measurement three years from now?

Andy Stevens: We know we have great OOH locations and we know we can provide excellent targeting with the largest creative formats, it’s unskippable – all of the inherenet benefits of out of home.What has held us back in the past is that people couldn’t measure outcomes and lacked the sophisticated analytics and behavioral intelligence to establish where to buy. Today we can connect all of the technologies that are being used to measure advertising performance across the board. The more we can do that in the future the closer OOH will be to the level of digital adverising. And we already have a programmatic component  for our digital inventory. We will continue to do that to make advertising easier and easier to buy.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com