Research and Fraud: An Interview with the ARF’s CRO, Paul Donato

Research and fraud: As Data Science is increasingly adopted in media companies, research departments, especially in those areas dedicated to quality research such as focus groups, are feeling the pinch. Not only can pure data focus attention and resources on real time reporting, the margin of error in its output can be minimized with protocols such as blockchain. The two seemingly different but actually related topics of quality research and ad fraud were discussed by Paul Donato, CRO, the ARF at SXSW:

Charlene Weisler: Is there room for quality research in this age of data driven decisions? 

Paul Donato: Quality and quantitative research lie on two different dimensions. Qualitative and quantitative are two ends of a single dimension, and both are changing dramatically.
The quality of the research is essential for both qualitative and quantitative. Social listening is electronic, real time, continuous and benefits from very large samples. Sentiment algorithms have improved dramatically. Open source APIs for natural language and sentiment and the abundance of data on the social networks have changed qualitative in a way believed to have impacted the last presidential election.

Quantitative data is now drawn from online behaviors, loyalty cards and other sources of consumer and media data.  However, for many applications, panels and surveys are still needed for modeling holes in the data and demographics of the digital signals.  Because, digital data often lacks the depth of what we can collect in surveys, the quality of the models that fill in that data is essential. There is so much data available, with so little measure of accuracy. Therefore, methods of assessing quality are more important than ever.

Weisler: Will fraud ever go away and if not, can we tamp it down?  

Donato: Possibly. There are many who are testing blockchain as an immutable ledger of the digital supply chain that can eliminate most of the fraud. Maybe, the major digital companies are working on a device and person’s identity with the possibility of a universal ID after there are no cookies. However, this is looking out 3 to 5 years.

Today, many things are happening to tamp down fraud.  Digital is here to stay, so advertisers are taking control of their digital campaigns. Consortiums such as TAG required registrations that support safe and valid traffic. Standards such as those set by the MRC have supported independent firms that specialize in identifying invalid traffic. Viewability standards will help tamp down fraud. Advertising will find a way, so it is a matter of time before fraud is less important than most other challenges in marketing.

This article first appeared in www.Cynopsis.com

The Latest Trends from Nielsen’s Total Audience Report

Nielsen just released their findings from their latest quarterly Nielsen Total Audience Report (3Q18) which shows continued audience shifting and digital transformation in content preferences and streaming services. The report, according to Nielsen, contains, insights on how people are choosing the content that they’re streaming, as well as a section that examines which attributes of streaming services are the most important to consumers as well updates on traditional and digital media platform usage.

The highlights include:

Streaming Devices and Services Continue to Grow September 2017 to 2018

• Enabled smart TV penetration grew to 41% in 2018 from 32% in 2017 as users continue to replace their older television sets. Enabled smart TV ownership had the largest year-over-year growth for all races and ethnicities
• Internet enabled TV-connected devices — enabled smart TVs, internet connected devices (i.e. Apple TV, Roku, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV), and enabled game consoles—are in 68% of U.S. households, up from 63%.
• Streaming Video on Demand (SVOD) content is in 67% of television households, compared to 61% one year ago. Year over year growth is occurring among households of all races and ethnicities. Eight out of ten Asian American, seven out of ten Hispanic, and six out of ten Black households subscribe to an SVOD service.
• But there is only so much time in a day. U.S. Adults spend 10 hours and 30 minutes per day connected to media, the same amount as one year ago.

While Adoption of Newer Devices Has Increased, So Has Their Usage—Regardless of Age.

• Time spent on TV-connected devices and app/web on smartphones increased across all demographic groups. Time per day on smartphones increased by 23 minutes for adults 18-34, more than any other group or platform. And even older demographic group’s share of daily time spent with TV-connected devices and app/web on a smartphone increased from Q3 2017 to Q3 2018.
• Adults 18-34 spend over one-third of their daily media usage on smartphones while Adults 50-64 spend more time per day on media in general than any other age group.

Inundated with Choice, Streaming Video and Audio Users Are Making Their Preferences Known.

• According to the MediaTech Trender Survey, two-thirds of audio (67%) and video streaming (66%) users are influenced by recommendations from family and friends when making streaming selections. Meanwhile, 67% of video streaming users and 56% of audio streaming users refer back to existing programming they used to watch or listen to on broadcast media as that content is now more accessible.
• Users want access to a broad variety of content (57%) while using technology and an interface that is easy to navigate (56%). Niche content is also desirable, as 43% want access to local programming, 38% are looking for specific networks, and 35% want the ability to stream live sports.

This article first appeared in www.Cynopsis.com

In Digital Advertising, More of the Same and a Lot More. An Interview with Neustar’s Steven Silvers

Steve Silvers, VP, Product Management, Neustar IDMP, works in the field of identity resolution. “We work with advertisers to help them know everything they can about their customers and prospects, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and measure the impact of their marketing, with our unified marketing intelligence platform,” he explained. His company is pouncing on the opportunity created by Google’s dissolution of DoubleClick IDs by partnering with the global ad management platform Flashtalking. 

How that will impact the digital advertising field is his story to tell:

Charlene Weisler: What is Flashtalking?

Steve Silvers: Flashtalking is a global platform for ad management, data activation and insights that help marketers use data to personalize advertising, analyze its effectiveness and optimize performance across channels and formats. It is powered by proprietary cookieless tracking, data unification and algorithmic attribution. 

Charlene Weisler: Describe the partnership between Flashtalking and Neustar.

Steve Silvers: In the wake of Google’s recent announcement that it will restrict and ultimately eliminate the use of DoubleClick IDs, marketers were at risk of being left without a way to measure the impact of their marketing. This partnership was established to address that gap. 

Charlene Weisler: Why do you think Google retired DoubleClick?

Steve Silvers: The sun-setting of the DoubleClick name is not a new phenomenon in the ad- and mar-tech industry. Google wants to consolidate and streamline their stack, simplifying their product offering to their clients and prospects. They are pushing the ecosystem to think of Google as an integrated offering – analytics and ads working together as one. And they are not wrong with this assumption. 

The larger change that Google has made, however, is the elimination of the USERID and PARTNERID fields in their data transfer (log) files. This is data that brands have been leveraging to match users to their third-party platform identities. As an alternative, Google will be pushing all clients to their Ads Data Hub product. This will restrict clients to Google-only identity, creating further fragmentation and detachment from a single and holistic customer view.

Charlene Weisler: Describe the void that your partnership fills.

Steve Silvers: The implications of Google’s action are significant, as this change directly impacts data linkage and alignment. Advertisers will now need to decide how much control and transparency they want from their media partnerships and whether to untether from the Google ecosystem entirely or work with other neutral measurement partners to provide an independent view across their media. Our partnership is giving marketers an alternative way to maintain a single unified view of their impression data, enabling analytics and accountability.

Charlene Weisler: Who is your competition?

Steve Silvers: Neustar's portfolio has three solution categories - Customer Intelligence, Customer Experience, and Customer Analytics.

• Customer Intelligence helps clients manage and improve their own data while providing additional intelligence to maximize their marketing, sharpen their analytics, and optimize their organizational processes. We compete with those who link offline identity management and CRM services, audience scoring and segmentation as well as channel centric services, such as call center, direct mail, and lead intelligence. 

• Customer Experience helps clients build and deliver better customer experiences at scale. Built on a framework of authoritative identity, we connect offline identity with website behavior, and addressable media engagement to build a sustainable legacy of the customer that grows and optimizes as they move along their journey. Competitors include those who offer data onboarding, data management, audience and media planning, cross-channel measurement, data science services, omnichannel remarketing, as well as customer data and identity management. 

• Customer Analytics provides insight into what is working and guidance into how to drive more effective and efficient marketing. Unified analytics enables holistic measurement and optimization across addressable and non-addressable business drivers to fuel marketing that makes a measureable difference. Competitors include those in Marketing Mix Modeling, Multi-touch Attribution, as well as both unified and channel centric measurement services like TV.

We are unique in that we have an end-to-end system of identity that enables everything from upstream segmentation and enrichment of first-party data, to onboarding and activation, to analytics. 

Charlene Weisler: What does the end of Doubleclick mean for the marketplace?

Steve Silvers: Due to the removal of the DoubleClick ID, advertisers may encounter limitations as they use independent third parties for a number of critical functions, including:

•             Verification of user-level delivery, reach, and frequency

•             Analysis of cross-channel and cross-device engagement

•             Multi-touch attribution outside of Google’s own measurement tools

•             Measurement and optimization of ad creative, beyond click-through rates or last-touch KPIs

•             Attributing store visits and offline transactions to online media engagement

•             Analysis of user-level data to understand customer interests, behavior, and preferences

This is why Flashtalking and Neustar created an open, integrated alternative to Google’s marketing platform. This provides a foundation for a connected ecosystem based on ad management and identity management for a better integration between the DMP, ID graph, ad serving/cookieless tracking, personalization and data unification. And it is a cross platform solution.

Charlene Weisler: What data are you using and how will it be presented?

Steve Silvers: Neustar builds identity graphs of both online pseudonymous identifiers, such as cookies, Mobile Ad IDs, publisher account IDs, set top box IDs, as well as graphs of offline identifiers, such as name, postal address, phone and email, etc. We have pioneered the use of Converged Graph techniques using all possible data points to resolve and create consumer identities and the extended associated identities of the device they used and the locations they inhabit and visit (people, places and things). We construct this identity using all the identity points that are available from all the sources commonly accessible to the market, but also from unique Neustar service exhaust data and relationships in Marketing Solutions, Risk Solutions, Security Solutions and Telecommunication Solutions. 

 

This is done while retaining user privacy and controls on mixing of PII with pseudonymous identifier data with places and devices. We also have the capability to incorporate customer data into private identity graphs which allow tailored versions of identity resolution on a per client basis.

Charlene Weisler: Where do you see digital advertising going in the next three years?

Steve Silvers: Digital advertising is only going to increase as more and more media becomes available digitally – look at the shift of linear TV to OTT and streaming, or the rise of Spotify vs. terrestrial radio, and the growth of digital out-of-home. The key trends to look for in the next three years are whether anyone can challenge the dominance of the walled gardens, the impact of GDPR and the CA legislation on the use of different data categories and rise of consent, and the development of greater tools and intelligence to help marketers measure and build accountability. In other words, more of the same. A lot more!

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Age and Gender Measurement is So Over. David Poltrack at the ARF

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.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Marketing Data Companies. Q&A with Ethan Rapp

Ethan Rapp recently joined Simulmedia as SVP Program Management, bringing “deep experience in marketing effectiveness as well as developing insights and analysis that help define new media paradigms,” according to Mainak Mazumdar, Simulmedia’s Chief Science Officer.

Rapp was an early innovator in digital research at DoubleClick in its formative years and has held senior research roles at AOL, Conde Nast and Knowledge Networks. He also co-founded Marketing Evolution a leading cross media measurement firm.   

Currently, Rapp is responsible for the Simulmedia’s Business Outcomes measurement programs which combine TV viewership data from set top box data with behavioral data including transactions and online activity from various sources. These sources can include credit card data, "First Party" CRM databases and online data management providers like Oracle’s Marketing Cloud.

I sat down with Rapp and asked him the following questions:

CW: Ethan, what do your “Business Outcomes” capabilities enable Simulmedia to do?

ER: We now have the ability to look at client specific "Business Outcomes" relative to Simulmedia television buys AND other television and online components of the client's campaign. Examples of these outcomes can include: offline sales, online sales, basket sizes, transactions by customer segment, online behaviors, etc. It’s really an effort to look at media’s direct impact on a client’s goals in a very transparent way and at the same time demonstrate the value of Simulmedia’s audience targeting.

It should be noted that because we do a lot of “data matching”; we take great precautions to protect privacy, and in fact never ever touch personally identifiable data ourselves; we always use trusted third parties

CW: How does this work with clients?

ER: This has become a critical part of the Simulmedia offering as we are now guaranteeing that our media will produce better business outcomes than traditional television buying and planning. We provide money back if we don’t improve overall business outcomes relative to the TV buy made without us. This is a huge step in the industry and takes any perceived risk out of audience buying for the client.

This measurement is provided at no additional charge with a minimum media buy. While we have no intention to become a research company, a lot of what we do is unavailable elsewhere, especially because we can see all TV consumed, including our buy, the other buys of our clients, and even their competitors buys. So as you can imagine, there is a lot of analysis we have the capability to do that doesn’t exist elsewhere. Our analysis can and should inform future planning and buying (that is what makes it truly closed loop).

  

CW: Where is television measurement heading? Will it become more digitally based with connected TVs?

ER: The interesting thing that has happened to TV in the last couple of years is that digital has provided pressure on the CMO and CFO to provide ROI across more media. Until recently, TV has not been able to deliver the same level of visibility that digital can provide. Recently however we have gained access to this great treasure trove of set top box data, which allows us to do far better targeting and measurement.

CW: What do you think the common metrics will be to facilitate cross platform measurement?

ER: I think the “must have” in the industry requires that the metrics for digital media, and the metrics for TV need to eventually align. I don’t think that the result should be the GRP, regardless of how entrenched it is currently. I think it needs to be at a person level, or at least a household level because that is what will enable the understanding of efficiency in media planning. Eventually it needs to be business outcomes. That’s our job. Improve the ability for companies to grow their bottom line with their ad spending.

CW: Is ROI only about the client’s immediate return on a specific campaign or is it broader than that?

ER: The metric has to be at a level where we can measure individuals and markets. Buyers will want to know where they can specifically place efficient media to influence people and move market share, both in the short term and long term. They want to know where they are gaining share from and where they are losing it. ROI needs to be framed by the specific goals of the marketer. That’s why we work so hard to make our targeting so robust and our measurement tailored to each client.

I can’t think of a single marketer whose goal is anything other than profitable growth. They crave information to make media decisions on how to optimize their budgets against profitable growth. They want to be able to measure the behaviors and the performance of their spending. The pressure to show ROI or any metric that directly correlates to ROI is what is driving the evolution of media planning. That evolution is now picking up speed and digital has had a lot to do with that. Simulmedia is bringing that online accountability to TV.

CW: What are the greatest differences between digital and TV?

ER: The differences are substantial right now. Objectively there are probably more differences than there are similarities. From a creative standpoint TV gives you emotion. TV gives you reach. TV gives you a brand identity over the short -and long term. Digital has never really proven to do those things in a scalable, lasting way. On the other hand, digital is great for highly targeted buys, to be able to drive short term sales, the ability to optimize and activate in real-time, based on how audiences behave, and to a certain extent create targeted awareness. It is very flexible as a medium. It is a lot harder to create a new campaign in TV in a couple of days where in digital you can create one in a couple of hours. Of course the goal is the same – to drive sales. With all that said, TV is still the most dominant medium against almost any metric you can think of, especially consumption and influence. The imminent death of TV is highly overstated and we are innovating in ways that make it more targeted and more measurable.

This article first appeared in www.Mediabizbloggers.com