Mobile Marketing meets Tom Jenen, Chief Revenue Officer at Brand Metrics.
Mobile Marketing: Can you explain what Brand Metrics is about for people who don’t know you?
Tom Jenen: We enable publishers, broadcasters, networks and app developers to prove their value by measuring brand lift across four key metrics: awareness, consideration, brand preference and action intent. For many years, the likes of Facebook and YouTube have incorporated this kind of measurement into their reporting, providing huge value for advertisers, but publishers have been left behind and suffered financially by comparison.
Our technology allows publishers to use a tech platform to continuously and consistently measure the effect that digital ad campaigns are having on their key metrics.
Occasionally, a few site visitors will be presented with one question pertaining to a brand that is advertising there, and our platform does all the work. It’s all completely automated and then the results are gathered independently and reported back simply and in an easy-to-analyse format.
MM: What are the wider benefits of improved brand metrics data?
TJ: When it comes to digital advertising, measuring clicks has long been the only common way to assess success, but today we have developed the means to measure brand perception, which is changing the game for publishers.
Gathering and analysing this kind of data enables publishers to provide detailed evidence of brand lift and then feed that data back into their media conversations, selling more advertising as a result. It also enables them to generate valuable insight into the performance of particular creatives and look at a brand’s advertising campaigns holistically, comparing each with those that have gone before to see how their performance varied. These nuggets of information are all crucial to advertisers who want to ensure they are building stronger brand values and driving the very best ROI from their digital advertising.
The arrangement has a multitude of benefits for the publisher: they become strategic consultants, helping their clients justify their digital advertising investments, and in doing so, strengthen their relationship with those advertisers. However, it also provides them with their own insights into their readers’ interests, which they can use to enhance their own content plans.
MM: Do these techniques require bigger campaigns or bigger investments from the client?
TJ: Absolutely not – the beauty of Brand Metrics is that our technology is just as effective with any size of campaign. One of our most active customers measures local ad campaigns! To date, anyone who wanted to prove the brand impact of a campaign would need to commission an expensive study, ruling out that option for any smaller businesses.
A big driver for us was knowing that brand lift effectiveness is unmeasured and unproven on most campaigns, with major campaigns being measured, but others being left in the dark.
Even if a client hasn’t been used to measuring brand lift, because they thought it would be too expensive or hard to achieve, if they are advertising on the website of a publisher that works with Brand Metrics, they can probably receive these brand lift insights.
Brand lift measurement is gaining interest from publishers and advertisers at significant pace, as first-party data moves into a far more integral role in brand advertising.
MM: What benchmark is your metrics data measured against to give it context?
TJ: All the results we provide are comparable against our database of thousands of campaign reports, all following a consistent methodology, derived from working with publishers all over the world. Each brand lift? measurement is automatically? compared to similar advertiser industry? sectors and ad formats,? unlocking a deeper level of insight for the client, revealing new and actionable insights.
Our approach produces, on average, the same levels of brand lift as the exposed/control approach, but the output is more robust because all available data is used. Treating all exposed people as one group, despite there being big differences in exposure, means abandoning potentially useful information. Our approach solves the problem of sample composition differences between exposed and control groups, meaning our reporting has higher reliability and validity.
MM: Where do brands go wrong when it comes to measurement metrics?
TJ: Brands still rely too much on clickthrough rates and third party cookies. Clickthrough rates offer just the briefest of snapshots of customer behaviour and don’t allow for any other aspects of the journey, leaving huge gaps in the understanding of the consumer. If you don’t know how a purchase decision was made, your measurement is as good as useless in establishing the efficacy of an ad. Instead you need to look at everything from awareness to consideration to preference to intent, by continuously evaluating the brand lift impact of media spend.
While we are working hard to advocate the use of metrics that go beyond clicks, the reality is that third party cookies have a shelf life and advertisers will have no choice but to find an alternative way of working once cookies disappear.
There is an assumption that brands are nervous about adopting new measurement techniques, but it doesn’t have to be a complex process, it just requires a willingness to explore new avenues in order to get the very best outcome for your business. And we are seeing the effects of organisations looking to improve their measurements – we have nearly tripled our client base over the last 12 months, which in the current climate serves to prove just how seriously people are taking digital ad measurement.