David Poltrack, President of CBS Vision and Chief Research
Officer of CBS Corporation, is
the visionary who created the Campaign Performance Audit (CPA), an initiative
on measuring return on ad spend.
As Poltrack shared in a Media
Village article I wrote last year,
CPA was first presented at the 2014 ARF and focuses on five components:
1. Test your message, 2. Maximize your weekly reach, 3. Get the most out of
recency, 4. Precisely target your potential customers, and 5. Consider context.
After three years in the field, Poltrack and his team have
completed the fifth component of CPA helping to understand creative in context.
I met up with Poltrack at this month’s 2017 ARF to get an update about the
initiative’s progress. Three key takeaways from my recent interview with him
include:
1.
Creativity
in context holds great power for advertisers. Poltrack stated, “Can you
create a contextual aura? I believe that there is great potential there.”
2.
TV in
combination with Digital has the
greatest impact according to CPA’s Return on Ad Spend analysis. It is not
an either/or. “A digital campaign may be more effective if people have been
pre-conditioned by a television ad first,” noted Poltrack.
3.
The
industry will move away from age and
gender proxy measurements even
faster than we think. And much of the movement will be due to digital data.
“When the digital insights come together with the analytics, there will be a
move towards a new way to transact business,” Poltrack concludes.
Charlene Weisler:
What is Return on Ad Spend?
David Poltrack: It is the actual lift you get from
advertising. It is all about attribution. One of the biggest challenges we all
face today, with all the different elements going into what does or doesn’t
make a successful consumer product, is that we have to figure out what is
contributing what and what are the synergistic effects. That is what makes it
really complex. A digital campaign may be more effective if people have been
pre-conditioned by a television ad first. So I don’t want to cut the television
advertising to find that campaign. I want to be able to understand how much
that television campaign is pre-conditioning the digital campaign and vice
versa.
Charlene Weisler: Tell
me about the recent updates on your CPA study.
David Poltrack: We have been working on the five levels. Now
we have updates in all of these levels, the last of which was the impact of
context. This was presented at the most recent ARF conference in mid-March. It
shows that context does have an impact and different types of programming do
create different contextual results. However, it also shows that it is relative
to the reach of the campaign and that the creative elements of the ad itself
are not a very consequential or significant part of the equation. That being
said, this was being done on a general level; Looking at the context of a
situation comedy vs the context of a drama, the context of a highly-rated show,
the context of a low rated show.
The bigger question is what if you create the context, as
opposed to just looking at generic contextual issues? Can you create a
contextual aura? I believe that there is great potential there particularly
when you have people seeing ads while watching television and simultaneously
having a phone where they could, for example, go into a virtual reality type of
follow-up. Example: An auto ad runs on television on a sports show. Then there
is the ability to link through the phone to a virtual reality site for people
with the virtual reality equipment and experience that ad in a virtual
environment. This is very powerful. It is all about how you create that context
that enhances your advertising message.
Charlene Weisler: Can
you talk about the trends in results that you have seen in your CPA study since
it first began? Any big takeaway?
David Poltrack: The big functional elements of age/sex/demo
surrogates are, once and for all, found to be not the proper tools in directing
campaigns. Now, with usage based targeting and other elements, there are much
better ways to select media. Notably, pricing is based on these demographics
and so for these advertisers who use audience based targeting, it creates
opportunities to find shows that work better in their plan but are even cheaper
than what they have been buying. It works
with the current difference between the reality of targeting age and gender
18-49 and the reality of targeting on actual usage. Advertisers can get
significant lifts in the actual return on ad spending by buying on actual
usage. Over time as more advertisers buy on actual usage this lift may mitigate
so there is opportunity right now to take advantage of this type of buying.
Charlene Weisler:
What do you think it will take to move us away from age and gender proxy
measurement to return on ad spend?
David Poltrack: At the rate we are going right now I think
it will come very fast. You have to overcome the inertia. You have to bring
together the new data analytics workforce with the traditional insights
workforce. When the digital insights come together with the analytics, there
will be a move towards a new way to transact business.
