Nielsen's Advertising Strategies

Taken from SharedThis blog:
Shared Conversations Series with Randall Beard
By Matt Wolfrom on September 03, 2014

Randall delves into innovative ad strategies to succeed in today’s fragmented media industry, the transformational nature of marketing organizations and the value of leveraging quality data to increase your advertising effectiveness.

Developing ad strategies in the current multi-screen landscape.

Today, creating an effective advertising strategy is complicated due to an incredibly fragmented industry, especially with the rise of new forms of media like social, mobile, tablet, etc.

The challenges that advertisers are facing in an integrated multi-screen world:
1. It is important to measure not only how well your advertising reaches your intended audience, but also how much it resonates, changes brand preference and reaction. In other words, does it impact behavioral sales? We call this the three Rs: reach, resonance and reaction.
2. Clients want common metrics in measurement across platforms. Although every platform is unique, in order to have comparability to allocate spending appropriately across platforms, you have to have common measurement metrics. Simplify success metrics with three basic questions:
- How well are you reaching your intended audience?
- How well does your advertising resonate with that audience?
- How well does it drive a reaction?

“Better, not bigger, data.”

For years many digital measurements like page views and click through rates existed, but at the end of the day advertisers and agencies were left with one major question: who did my digital advertising reach?

The ability to measure audience delivery in digital with traditional panels was virtually impossible, so we  partner with Facebook, who has the largest panel in the world.

To make the data even better, we take it and compare it to our cross platform gold standard panel. Then we put it through a calibration engine to make sure it is really accurate.

Reach consumers and understand  behavior in today’s crowded marketplace

The reason digital audience measurement is so important is because advertisers, agencies and media companies want accountability. When an advertiser buys 30M impressions against women 20-29, they want some measurement and a guarantee to know whether or not the media company or publisher actually delivered.

Another approach is through real-time optimization — moving money from lower performing to higher performing sites. In terms of reaching consumers and understanding consumer behavior, that circles back around to the reach, resonance, and reaction model, and using reaction to be smarter about who you want to reach. Being able to optimize real-time allows users to maximize performance of a campaign while it’s still going on, and before ad dollars are wasted.

One of the things that we have developed is the ability to do single source — bringing together a measurement of what people watch, including the ads that they are exposed to, and what they buy at the household level. We have a panel of consumers where we know what they’ve been exposed to and what those people have purchased in store, based on other datasets. We then match those two at a household level, stripping out any personally identifiable information. This data is anonymized and privacy-protected.

Impending advertising singularity  

Singularity is when computers and artificial intelligence become smart enough to self-learn and smarter than humans. There is so much going on in the world of advertising and media and it is creating greater automation and optimization opportunities for advertising effectiveness.

Increasingly you’re able to measure individual level exposure to ads and then match that to consumption of purchase behavior. By looking at what people are exposed to and they’re buying, brands can measure the individual impact of every digital touch point. An advertiser that’s bidding for 10K search keywords could measure the individual impact of each of those 10K search keywords for online and offline sales.

These advertisers can also measure the impact of all combinations of touch points. Many platforms have machine learning capabilities where they continuously learn about what methods are more effective. They have the ability to plug into demand-side platforms and drive real-time bidding. This is individual-level measurement of advertising exposure that is connected to purchase behavior and all updated in real-time.

Excellent partnership and foster with digital partners

To stay on top of industry trends there are two ways approach, organizational and cultural.

From an organizational approach, we need capability to address cutting edge issues. Create an advertising effectiveness innovation lab in partnership with University.  

Fostering a culture that is open to experimentation and external partnerships to solve big important  problems is really important.

Marketing Trends

There are three areas that are really important:
1) Data. Marketing in general is much more data and evidenced base, and it is becoming much more of a science. To be clear, creative, big advertising and marketing ideas will always be the foundation for great marketing. However, the rise of data and evidence-based marketing is a big trend, and getting the finance function to begin seeing marketing as an investment, as opposed to a cost line in the income statement, is essential.
2) Real-time. There’s a growing need for people that have the ability to be adaptive and operate in the moment.
3) Technology. new capabilities are enabling expanded opportunities in marketing that were not possible before.

The main challenge is how to advertise in a truly cross-platform in an integrated way. We’ve been very focused on bringing new tools to advertisers and agencies that allow them to plan across platforms so they can maximize reach across TV and digital.