“Everybody – whether it’s a Netflix or an Ozone or a Hulu or a Roku – all want to market their own measurement and outcomes product. My argument is always that you shouldn’t be marking your own homework,” said Jo Kinsella, President of Innovid XP, Innovid, while speaking at the Future of Media conference in London last month. She continued: “You should trust in global software technology platforms that are built for scale and do this stuff all day long.”
She believes service providers and publishers should focus on what they excel at – delivering content and helping brands reach new audiences. Kinsella said: “If you’ve got the right platform that serves up the right metrics that services the right KPIs, you shouldn’t need to hire data scientists. You need to work with people that can interpret that data, sit down with the client and say ‘spend more here spend less there’”.
She was joined on a panel about measurement and effectiveness by Emma Cranston, Client Services Director, Ozone, and Gordon Black, Director, Paid Media Measurement, adidas. Black believes brands should not wait for standardisation of cross-platform and cross-media measurement but must test and learn for themselves based on their own campaign objectives.
Given his belief that the industry is not close to converging around a universal [cross-platform measurement] metric, Black said: “The biggest thing for me is: don’t get caught up waiting for standardisation. It’s a slow-moving thing so you need to focus on proving different measurements for yourself.”
Kinsella said many brands are now testing and learning while campaigns are in-flight, looking to understand how to optimise creatives and product placement in real-time, rather than running complex models or waiting for post-campaign reporting. This is especially true in the CTV space, according to Kinsella.
She commented: “We’re part of the instant gratification generation, and with the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok, we need to be able to move quickly. It’s not just about unique unduplicated reach. Yes, we want that too but it’s about: did I sell more product? And if this streaming service didn’t work for me, where else am I able to go with my dollars? How else am I going to spread out my inventory to be most effective?”
Cranston believes that, while the advertising market is evolving rapidly, the metrics we measure with have not caught up. According to the Ozone Director, “Every impression is different” and we should have different metrics to measure them depending on the objectives brands set for their campaigns.
She elaborated: “Sometimes click-through rate might be relevant but for other campaigns, when you want your campaign to focus on awareness, maybe it’s not and you need to look at brand lift instead. That would involve capturing attention through attention metrics.”
