The devil is in the details, as they say, and for most marketers, the details of measurement are hellish indeed these days.
As marketers, we’ve spent years collecting data on consumers to understand how best to advertise to them. Marketers imagine a world where we know what consumers want before they want it, they click everything we serve them and they follow a beautiful hero’s journey: They have a problem, we save them from drudgery, they transform their lives and then they come back for more. The reality is much more prosaic: We track where they’ve been, we stalk them around the Web, we then hound them to buy and they do everything they can to evade giving us their information.
The truth is, we have created a vast industrial complex devoted to tracking consumer attention and what shoppers and buyers do when exposed to marketing messages. And yet, measuring that very thing has never been more convoluted, elusive or diabolically hard. And exhausting — for all parties involved.
Consumers are devouring more digital content than ever, but they’ve also gotten savvier. On the internet they’re skipping ads, installing ad blockers, denying third-party cookies and generally clamping down their privacy settings (whether intentionally or not). Suddenly, advertisers are flying blind on the internet as they lose targeting. And it’s worse in lean-back environments like connected TV where over-frequency, audience deduplication and viewability problems abound and ad fraud and audience identification issues are the norm.
It’s a Mess, But It Doesn’t Have To Be
Measurement is in a massive upheaval and the race for alternative measurement is on. While behavioral targeting gave us insights into consumers like never before, it's not effective anymore and won't stand the test of time when it comes to emerging environments and platforms or future privacy regulations. We can do so much better.
It’s time to get back to basics and put consumers first. Instead of trying to measure low-fidelity signals like impressions and clicks, technology is already smart enough to truly understand the context of a digital environment. It can read words, video, audio, metadata and more to understand the full context — and pair that environment with dynamic and engaging ad creative. Making those work together will change the face of digital advertising, no matter where it appears, making it something people find useful and delightful (without worrying about crossing the line on users’ personal data).
For now, the digital measurement market is fractured and tortured. And it will continue to be as we try to understand the best ways to measure.”
— Phil Schraeder, CEO, GumGum
But context is just one part of it. Advanced attention solutions validate whether the ad creative is resonating or not in that environment (by way of increased or decreased attention). And then real-time optimization engines programmatically deliver the campaign accordingly.
Context, creative and attention combined is what I call the Mindset Matrix. Having these three things working in tandem allows advertisers to captivate a person’s mindset in current and emerging digital environments — without using any personally identifiable information. An analogy I like to use for this combination is the perfect hamburger: The bun is the context, the burger is the creative and the secret sauce is attention.
Individually They’re Good. Together They’re Magic
For now, the digital measurement market is fractured and tortured. And it will continue to be as we try to understand the best ways to measure. Digital environments are coming online at lightning speed and a one-point solution like Nielsen is just not viable (and neither are third-party cookies). It used to be we just had Web and mobile to think about. Today we have myriad environments including in-game display, connected TV, your fridge screen and beyond, with more environments arriving every day (hello, AR and metaverse). But standards will emerge (they always do). And when they do, these principles of context, creative and attention need to be part of the solution. In fact, they already are today.
As a CEO with a passion to make advertising experiences better, my team and I have been advocating with the industry to shift us to a mindset-first mentality for measuring digital ads. We want to productize and leverage machine learning techniques within the ecosystem to get into the mindset of consumers.
We are also being very vocal to and supporting all the governing bodies in our space, including the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). And we’re initiating, investing in and leveraging case studies to help the industry see the value in mindset-first, privacy-forward solutions and to support them on their journeys.
Measurement is broken, full stop, and collectively we have our work cut out for us to get out of this infernal death spiral. But we also have some of the most innovative and smart people in the world working on advertising technology and the future of media and we can do this. Now let’s make it happen. ■
