Attribution Accelerator - What to Expect?

The annual Attribution Accelerator conference is gearing up for record attendance next week. What can we expect? What have been the advancements over the past twelve months? Sequent Partners who are the event organizers created the Attribution Accelerator three years ago because they realized that the industry lacked a forum that focused solely on attribution. Attribution has become a much bigger issue for cross-platform measurement. There is still a lack of transparency and, as of yet, no industry standard approach. 

“Our event helps the industry get smarter about attribution, by shedding light and providing guidance, as well as encouraging best practices and development in the necessary areas,” stated Jim Spaeth, Partner, Sequent Partners.

This year, the conference will discuss how attribution is impacting activation and helping marketers manage ROI rather than measure it.  Panels will address how brands are represented in attribution, technical innovations (such as AI), creating a unified model with marketing mix models and how attribution is impacting television optimization. 

Panels to Watch

The ARF is heading a panel called, “Innovation - What’s Next and Will We Love It?,” which will explore what they have learned on the innovation frontier and how the latest developments can drive greater business performance, with a look into the future. According to Scott McDonald, President and CEO, The ARF, “Some of the topics we will discuss include: how AI can be used effectively to solve attribution problems, how precision targeting and unified modeling can improve, and the move from the lab to broad implementation in the real world. We will also examine whether to build or buy when it comes to innovation and how to build an appetite for risky innovation in a risk-averse corporate culture.”

Leslie Wood, Chief Research Officer, Nielsen Catalina Solutions, explained that her panel will cover a recent Nielsen study titled, How to Build Brands which “is our most ambitious research project to date, generating 6 billion rows of data for 50 CPG brands. One of the key learnings is that there is often a  disconnect between the intent of the creative message and the resulting purchase behavior of the audience. Advertising to consumers who don’t respond, wastes your media dollars. Advertising to the right consumers drives sales and growth.”

The importance of attribution cannot be underestimated. David Ernst, Vice President, Advanced Television and Digital Analytics, A+E, noted, “Most advertisers know that TV is a powerful, brand-building medium.  But now, through the use of large data sets and advanced analytics, we can demonstrate its true effectiveness by having a more precise understanding of how and where it works best.”  In his session, he discusses how attribution has the potential to change the dynamics of the television marketplace and why more clients are looking to attribution to get specifics about their goals, what they’re trying to accomplish, and make sure that campaigns deliver on their promise. He will also share his perspective on where attribution is headed going into the future and how they will approach the marketplace in exciting new ways.

“Attribution is continuing to gain traction in the marketing community, with new applications available to demonstrate the productivity of Television. It’s use is evolving from providing insights to delivering very specific analyses regarding the effectiveness of Networks, Dayparts and even programs. This is enabling us to have conversations with clients about productivity and expectations for individual campaigns on our networks,” he concluded.

 “Media companies like CBS are ready, willing and able to partner with their clients on measuring outcomes,” says Radha Subramanyam, Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS.  “At the same time, we are in a time of transition when it comes to attribution.  While there are lots of options today, TV attribution still remains an emerging and evolving field with no clear leader to date.  The good news is that early efforts by multiple companies all prove the same thing.  TV advertising works incredibly well.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Accelerating Attribution

Attribution, according to the CIMM Lexicon is “The reason that a prospective customer does what they do. More specifically, why they came to the site, entered the funnel, and performed a given action. (Source: Mediamath)” Accurate attribution would enable a marketer to get the correctly measured sequencing of consumer initiated events that influenced that consumer’s behavior. It is not an easy task.

CIMM recently hosted an attribution accelerator conference where speakers from such companies as Turner, CIMM, Nielsen, comScore, Time Inc., J&J, Citibank, Sequent Partners, AOL, Rubicon, Google, TubeMogul, Verizon and Samba TV presented their views on attribution. Where is attribution research today? How can we spur development to ensure existing models can keep up with demand as attribution moves beyond digital?

I sat down with Jim Spaeth, and Alice Sylvester, both Partners at Sequent Partners and asked them the following questions:

Charlene Weisler:  Please define attribution and the best forms of attribution 

Alice Sylvester: Attribution is the study of individual media tactics’ contribution to sales. The best forms of attribution do not use a priori models that pre-suppose the solution (first click, last click, W, U etc.).  The best forms of attribution incorporate other elements besides digital, at the household level. 

Charlene Weisler:  Tell me what your company is doing to track and measure attribution. 

Alice Sylvester: We have a number of projects going on – notably the Attribution Accelerator event, which will quicken the pace of innovation, fortify the science and galvanize the industry toward new attribution solutions. We also have a CIMM study of Attribution that will assess best practices and areas of improvement in cross-platform attribution.

Charlene Weisler:  Which existing models are doing the best job of attribution? 

Jim Spaeth: We don’t know — we will be looking to identify a best practice over the course of the next few days — we do know, however, that many of the existing models are insufficient given that they need to: reflect the fact that media has diminishing returns and adstock effects, that media has short and long term effects, that the media have interactions among them, that there is an effect of the brand (baseline), different responses by consumer segments and past purchasing behavior, and that different ads generate different responses. 

Alice Sylvester: The best job of attribution will address these issues.  Oh and then there is the issue of walled gardens and a significant portion of data from Google and FB not being generally available. 

Charlene Weisler:  How can you ensure that existing models keep up and move beyond digital. 

Alice Sylvester: The marketplace will definitely determine winners and losers – skepticism is creeping in among marketers who have had some experience with attribution.  

Jim Spaeth: There is a huge issue as to how to impute non-digital events on a digital data stream.

Alice Sylvester: There are issues with validation and the veracity of A/B test that have to be addressed in order to increase confidence in attribution.  And there are significant issues in device matching at the household which can be a source of significant error and in data matching across big datasets.  

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Q&A Interview with Jim Spaeth, Sequent Partners

In this interview, Sequent Partners’ Jim Spaeth goes on record with how he views industry change, how his company addresses ROI measurement, radio engagement and the inherent silos between media and creative at agencies. His work at Y&R, ScanAmerica, the ARF and now at his own firm, has provided Jim with a unique perspective on research applications and solutions.

There are five videos below with the following topics and lengths:

Subject / Length (in minutes)
Background and Scanamerica/ (3:59)
Agency Silos, Channel Planning/ (7:44)
Sequent/ (4:24)
Engagement Radio/ (2:37)
Past and Future/ (3:18)



In this first video, Jim Spaeth discusses his background , how he started in the industry and his work with ScanAmerica:




Jim Spaeth of Sequent Partners Talks about industry change (or lack of it), innovations, channel planning and the need to review the division between creative and media at the agencies:




In this next video Jim Spaeth talks about his firm, Sequent Partners, and some of the work they do:




Jim Spaeth talks about the concept of engagement and his current project that is attempting to measure radio engagement:




In this final video, Jim Spaeth reflects on change sin the past five years as well as offers some future predicitons: