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Peter Burgess

Gmail Peter Burgess Metrics Insider: Building A Single Currency For Marketing Measurement 1 message [MP] MediaPost Op-Ed Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 3:33 PM To: peterbnyc@gmail.com

MediaPost's Metrics Insider

The Inside Line On Web Measurement and Metrics Building A Single Currency For Marketing Measurement

by Anto Chittilappilly, Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Twenty years ago, traveling through Europe meant that you needed a pretty big change purse and a calculator. That’s because you had to use multiple currencies, depending on which countries you were visiting during your trip -- lira in Italy, francs in France -- all with their own individual exchange rate.. But then the European Union introduced the euro, which not only provided a simple solution, but also saved everyone a lot of headaches when traveling across borders.

In this case, conversion rates made it easy to translate the value of each individual country’s currency to other currencies. But when it comes to marketing, building a single currency is much more complex. The individual currencies of different marketing silos within a company are often difficult to convert in order to understand relative values across marketing channels. Depending on the channel, the currently accepted currency could be conversions, clicks, CTR, visits or GRP’s, just to name a few.

But why do we need a single marketing currency in the first place?

The answer is simple. Though recently there has been criticism of the single-currency model, a single currency drives standardized measurement across your company. Standardized and accurate measurement drive more effective optimization. And effective optimization helps you buy the right media to give you the best returns for your marketing spend.

Best Practices for Building the Right Currency

Your single marketing currency should be a metric that is the most important to your company. Consider these best practices for selecting and using a single currency:

Select the right metric for the business: Align your currency with your most valuable bottom-funnel metric, such as revenue, conversions or purchases. Even if you are measuring brand marketing efforts, select a brand engagement currency that will ultimately drive future bottom-funnel outcomes.

Ensure accuracy of the metric: Make sure your currency can properly credit every marketing touchpoint (e.g. display, SEM, etc.), as well as its underlying attributes (e.g., device type, placement, keyword, etc.). In other words, it should look beyond the last touchpoint to account for the entire customer journey.

Deal with viewability: The right currency should be able to automatically weed out media with non-viewable impressions during the optimization process. If the currency accounts for all of your touchpoints and their individual attributes, then the specific publishers and placements that serve the most non-viewable impressions will quickly be weeded out due to their poor performance.

Activate programmatic media buying across channels based on your single currency: Programmatic buying is expanding beyond desktop search and display to other channels and screens, such as social and mobile devices. This is what enables marketers to do their measurement, optimization and activation all in one closed loop. So you need to deploy optimizations to your programmatic platforms on a regular basis to buy media based on your single currency. If your programmatic buying platforms can’t accept your currency, then they will never be able to inform their buying and optimization based on what’s important to your business.

Once you have established your single currency for marketing, then you can finally throw away your currency exchange calculator and giant change purse. Instead, you can focus your time and effort on launching strategic, closed-loop marketing programs that drive business results across all of your marketing channels.

Post your response to the public Metrics Insider blog.

See what others are saying on the Metrics Insider blog. About the author: Anto Chittilappilly, Co-Founder, President & CTO, Visual IQ

Metrics Insider for Tuesday, July 21, 2015: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/254499/building-a-single-currency-for-marketing-measureme.html

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Rethinking The Single Currency Model by Josh Chasin, July 17, 2015, 2:46 PM

It’s axiomatic that digital technology radically alters every business it touches, turning long-held assumptions on their respective heads. (If you’re a veteran of the music or newspaper businesses, you probably just winced reading that sentence.)

There is no question that digital has fundamentally altered the advertising and media measurement landscape. Viewability and fraud are probably the most ubiquitous topics in the digital audience measurement space today, and neither of these were media hot topics just a few years ago. I’ve worked in the audience measurement business since 1980 (I know what you’re thinking:“Josh, come on! You must have been four years old when you started!”) so I’ve always tended to see the digital metrics landscape through old-school goggles. One of the long-standing assumptions in audience measurement has been the notion of currency — and more to the point, of a single currency. I learned about the one-currency model in a very real way working at Arbitron in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We won one single-currency battle: spot radio measurement, where we competed with Birch Radio. And we lost one: spot TV, where we competed with Nielsen. Back then, in looking at the TV ratings business, we used to say that there was enough money to support one-and-a-half players. And while data users very much like competition, historically they (you) believed that multiple currencies led to confusion. Thus, as with Simmons and MRI in print, Arbitron and Birch in spot radio, Arbitron and Nielsen in spot TV, Nielsen and a number of players in network TV, eventually a single currency won out. More often than not, the losing player went out of business. But I’d like to offer a radical opinion. In the digital age, multiple transactional media currencies can, do, and will continue to exist. Indeed, they need to exist. Consider viewability. Right now we have over a dozen accredited third-party viewability providers. Presumably all these companies have customers. While it’s almost certain that some thinning of the herd will take place over time, I don’t think it’s realistic, or even desirable, to expect we get down to a single viewability provider. Certainly buyers and sellers want to understand the reasons for differences between vendors, and the MRC’s recently released study will help provide some clarity about these differences. But it is almost equally certain that multiple viewability currencies will continue to compete in the marketplace. And the world will go on. There is a need for a single currency, but the need is per transaction, not per market. The entire marketplace need not convene around a single currency in order for commerce to take place freely. Rather, in a given transaction, the buyer and seller must agree on a single currency. But different clusters of buyers and sellers can and will convene around different measurement currencies, and everyone will still be able to conduct business efficiently. The counterargument one might make to this is that if there are multiple currencies, then none of them are currencies at all. But this is a false premise, as multiple currencies absolutely can co-exist. You can buy the same good or service right now using dollars, euros, pounds, or even bitcoin. These are all currencies. The media marketplace is fragmenting and growing increasingly complex. In a simpler time, a single-currency marketplace seemed simple and orderly. But anyone who has seen the Lumascape knows that our marketplaces are neither simple nor orderly. Advertisers and their agencies negotiate increasingly diverse and expansive packages with media operators; media deals might include digital display, digital video, traditional TV, OTT, terrestrial radio, and digital streaming. Buyers and sellers will almost certainly convene around different currencies to valuate such complex media packages moving forward. As we move further and further into an era of multi-media, multi-screen media buys, new currencies will have to emerge, as single-media currencies will prove inefficient. 192 SHARES Tags: metrics