Marketing metrics must reflect business impact

This is not the first time in history that marketers have been pressed to prove the impact of their work, far from it. The increase in the amount of data, growing number of sources of data, rise in synthetic data, and expectations around your ability to show the business relevance of data have skyrocketed. 

This means going beyond ‘data-driven’ decisions when building your ROI strategy. You must have the right data at every step of the customer journey. And just because metrics are easy to capture, that does not mean they are the right metrics to use. Instead, they should be those that are tied to market performance and are incrementally valuable to one another. 

Bridge the gap between outcomes and tactics

Nielsen’s latest Annual Marketing Report found that global marketers’ top priorities for 2024 are long-term and full-funnel ROI. However, 70% of these same marketers said they plan to increase their performance marketing spend and reduce their brand-building investments. 

There is a clear gap in the goals marketers have and the tactics they’re using to get there. I believe a misunderstanding of metrics is at the heart of it. If you are measuring ROI only by what’s happening to the bottom line, you may be missing the bigger picture. Being too focused on short-term returns is proven to hurt your ability to improve revenue numbers down the road. Because just as consumers and users have a path they follow, your ROI has a journey, too. 

Map your ROI journey

You can get to a destination without directions, but it takes a lot more time and effort. The same is true with outcomes; they’re consistently successful when you have a comprehensive plan. But the plan is changing. 

For much of the last decade, performance has been tracked at the channel level. Did we hit our impression targets? Did we shrink the costs per click? Did we improve our bounce rate? 

This approach fails on two fronts: 

1. It confuses engagement for impact
2. It doesn’t reflect the consumer journey

ROI can’t be tracked by a range of data points at the channel level. True full-funnel ROI starts by aligning on objectives, defining KPIs from the outset, mirroring the paths consumers take and understanding how everything works together to achieve an outcome. 

From the first point of contact to refining the reach and frequency strategy and on through the point of purchase and beyond, you have to map not only the consumer actions but the impact along the way in order to see what’s genuinely working at every touchpoint. 

For example, top of funnel and bottom of funnel KPIs can often appear to be at odds. Perhaps the keyword search volume is high, but it’s not translating to pageviews. This is too narrow of a view. Instead, look at the bigger, cross-platform picture. Is the lead volume up? How are those leads contributing to the pipeline? By zooming out to look at the bigger picture, a more consistent story should emerge. 

Plotting your ROI journey must happen before anything else, because you can’t always retroactively measure outcomes. If you don’t plan to measure KPIs like Brand Lift and Sales from the beginning, you won’t be able to measure them at all. And even when you can do retroactive-looking metrics, it can be a prohibitively large effort for most teams. 

Know and report the right metrics

When trying to determine what metrics reveal impact, I’ve found this question to be a helpful litmus test: Will the results be compelling to your CFO?  

It’s not uncommon for marketers to stay focused on metrics like impressions, frequency, clicks and downloads. While valuable, they rarely translate for CFOs. Relevancy is what matters to Finance, and it’s up to marketers to draw the connecting line for them. 

This doesn’t mean you need to stop tracking things like likes, clicks and listens;  they’re a valuable gut check. But they shouldn’t be the foundation for strategic reporting. 

This has been a particularly challenging season for the advertising industry. We’ve all had to contend with change coming from every possible direction. As paths to purchase continue to fork, impact continues to be a guiding light. As long as you know where to find it.  

For more insights on how to sharpen your ROI strategy, download the Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report. 

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When times are tight and the future is uncertain, especially amid lingering fears about recession and a sluggish ad market, it’s tempting for marketers to focus on quick wins to get some points on the board and live to fight another day. Those quick wins, however, aren’t what sustain businesses. While helpful for the next quarterly read-out, short-term sales can easily distract teams from thinking about what really drives success: long-term growth.

Those distractions can be costly. While targeted and direct marketing makes sense when consumers are feeling the pinch or a business needs to meet a sales target, these approaches aren’t as lucrative as you might think. For example, we’ve found that promotions deliver only about half of the long-term returns that media spending does. That’s because incentives typically offset natural purchase cycles. And when consumers buy earlier at a lower price or buy more at a lower price, they’re removed from the market for that product later on, which is unfavorable to the promoter. Incentives can also train consumers to buy on incentives or to look for depth of incentive, which lowers long-term profitability.

The importance of balanced marketing strategies can’t be over-emphasized, especially when you consider that brand-building efforts are a lever that drive sales: Nielsen research has found that ongoing marketing efforts account for 10%-35% of a brand’s equity. What’s more, Nielsen Compass data shows that a brand loses 2% in future revenue for every quarter it doesn’t advertise. And over the long term, lost revenue takes a long time to gain back. Our research has found that it takes up to three to five years of solid and consistent brand building effort to recover from extended periods of not advertising.

And when you remove long-term brand building, brand awareness and consideration fall, which typically reduces the effectiveness of conversion marketing efforts. If you let your brand decay, future sales tend to decline at a 1:1 ratio. Lastly, pulling back on long-term marketing increases your cost of acquisition. So the reality of a short-term marketing strategy is share contraction because you’re forgoing future sales while increasing cost to drive near-term sales.

Historical research has also found that an outsized share of voice can increase a brand’s share of market. Several years ago, Nielsen analyzed more than 120 brands across 30 categories of typical advertising to test this thinking. The study results showed that, all things being equal, a 10-point difference between share of voice and share of market ultimately led to 0.5 percentage points of extra share growth. Practically, that means that a brand with a market share of 20.5% and an excessive share of voice of 10 points would grow its share of market to 21% in a single year.

But understanding the importance of brand building is the first step. To take your brand to the next level, it’s critical to understand which tactical investments produce the best returns in the long run. As with many industry terms and phrases, “long-term” can mean different things to different brands. The same can be true about evaluating long-term impact. Some may choose to lean on downstream purchases that result from conversions or previous brand exposures. Others may opt to analyze the impact that their marketing has on driving brand equity metrics, like consideration and purchase intent.

Each of these approaches help define the foundational building blocks of a brand’s base business, but they’re very different from one another. They also work much better when they complement each other instead of as independent approaches. Said differently, long-term measurement requires a holistic effort that incorporates both of these approaches: One that looks at the impact of downstream purchases as well as how consumer perceptions are affected by marketing exposures and how they’re sustained over time. 

Consider this: The impact of a single marketing exposure is a point in time. Once the exposure passes, its effect will fade over time. Comparatively, brand perceptions aren’t confined to a single point in time. Brand perceptions also aren’t static. They can shift, which is why marketers need to reinforce their messages over time to ensure they’re frequently engaging with their target consumers. Reinforcing those messages through media investments carries significant weight. According to the ROI norms data in Nielsen Compass, the long-term impact of media can double the impact of media spend, particularly for upper-funnel channels like TV and digital video.

Aside from aggregated proof points, analytics at a brand level can show how a shift from short-term decision making to a more well-rounded marketing approach can help marketers understand how to allocate their budgets while still working to build their brands for long-term success.

For example, a national insurance company recently set out to understand the strength of its marketing efforts across channels, campaigns and KPIs. With an eye on an unpredictable economy on the horizon, the company knew that if it wanted to safeguard its marketing investments, it would need to validate them both in the present and the future. 

To get a read on how to approach its marketing in the short term, the company enlisted Nielsen to use its most recent spending data to model quotes and items for new and existing customers, as well as renewals. The models also factored in the costs associated with new customer acquisition and customer retention.

With a clear view of how to use its marketing budget efficiently, the company took its planning a step further to understand the short-term and long-term impact of marketing on sales. With the use of Nielsen’s Long-Term Effects analyses, the company was able to prove that its marketing efforts generated more than 31% increased incremental sales over the long term, thereby justifying its investments despite the economic uncertainty. The company also discovered which business lines benefitted the most from the marketing investments, as well as which marketing vehicles drove the biggest impact. 

Yes, short-term sales are appealing and can deliver results now, but longevity and long-term business vitality need effective, balanced marketing. And perhaps more importantly, marketers need the insight into their long-term efforts to keep their investments safe and their businesses growing.

This article originally appeared on MediaPost.

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In the U.S. and around the globe, fragmentation of viewing has challenged the ability of traditional audience measurement panels to deliver reliable ratings information. That information remains essential for ad buyers and sellers to plan and execute deals, and for content producers to understand program performance. 

Although higher-rated networks and programs are less affected by this measurement issue, a lot of viewing today is niche, leading to lower ratings and less-reliable measurement. In some cases, this can lead to ratings being reported as zeroes, where despite there being viewers to a program in the population, none of them were on the measurement panel. To address this, Nielsen is releasing its “panel plus big data” measurement data. This entails combining panel data with big data—return-path data (RPD) from MVPDs and automatic content recognition (ACR) data from smart TVs, significantly improving the audience measurement by making it more precise and effectively addressing the problem of “zero ratings.”

We know that the data from cable boxes and smart TVs isn’t feasible for measurement by itself. It has gaps and doesn’t measure everything on the screen or tell you who’s watching. But, when paired with accredited person-level panel data, the combined data sets significantly advance the science of audience measurement. Among the benefits, the combination of these data sets allows measurement to collect far more viewing than what’s possible with panel data alone.

Understanding zero ratings

In the first quarter of this year, for example, The Nielsen panel reported zero ratings for 8,454 telecasts across broadcast, cable and syndicated TV, out of a total of 362,168 total telecasts (2%), for live telecasts and the following three days of time-shifted viewing. A rating of zero means that no homes in the panel tuned in, which in most cases, reflects the limitation of the measurement rather than what actually happened in the population. In other words, there was some low level of viewing in the population, the viewers were not found in the panel.

The inclusion of big data in Nielsen’s national panel data significantly addresses this, allowing buyers and sellers to have clearer visibility into audience viewing behavior. Nielsen is combining TV data from approximately 30 million homes with its 40,000 home/100,000 person panel, greatly increasing the precision of measurement. The larger sample size reduces the statistical sampling errors associated with panel measurement, including the presence of zero ratings.

Big data facilitates greater viewing precision

Before making big data available for measurement this September, Nielsen spent over a year analyzing the combined data sets to understand the impact on sampling errors. The analysis found that the inclusion of big data significantly reduced zero ratings across all viewing groups. When the 8,454 TV program telecasts in the first quarter that generated zero household ratings were measured with panel data plus big data, the presence of zero ratings declined by 99.9%. Across all major audience demographics, the declines ranged from 96.8%-99.9%. The reductions were most notable among younger audiences, who tend to be lighter viewers of traditional TV programming and are therefore more likely to cause zero ratings in panel measurement.

The increased sample size also allows more precise viewing to be collected among specific audiences. In the first quarter, for example, there were 3,471 Hispanic program telecasts that generated zero ratings (live+3 days) on Hispanic networks when measured with panel data. When measured with panel data and big data, the zero ratings were removed entirely.

Clearly, the addition of millions of homes into measurement is positive. However, while big data provides a significantly larger sample size, on its own, it lacks the specific detail about who is watching, and typically under-represents diverse populations and certain age groups. Big data is also unable to measure viewing from over-the-air antennas, broadband-only homes and viewing that takes place away from the home. That’s where audited and accredited panel data comes into play. By combining the scale of big data and granular insights from our people-based panel, Nielsen is helping the industry realize the full potential of RPD and ACR data.

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There is no shortchanging the complexity of today’s media industry, or the impact that the ever-expanding range of choice has on effective cross-media measurement. That complexity, however, doesn’t grant marketers any leeway when it comes to delivering on business objectives. In reality, we know that increased complexity simply amplifies accountability.

And managing complexity isn’t enough. Marketers need to find ways to keep things simple, streamlined and clear—oftentimes with reduced budgets and fewer resources. Marketers are on the hook to deliver for their businesses and justify their investments along the way. In that way, the complexity of today’s media landscape has become both a unique and a universal challenge.

The proliferation and growth of new media channels presents one of the most pressing difficulties in the quest for effective cross-media measurement, especially as audiences increase their connected TV (CTV)¹ usage, which provides access to streaming services. Streaming may be the most top-of-mind today, but the future of cross-media measurement will need to be adaptive to many new channels as they emerge.

Today, however, marketers know that streaming is where the audience is, and they’re adjusting their marketing plans accordingly. In fact, the survey supporting the 2023 Nielsen Annual Marketing Report found that 45% of ad budgets globally, on average, are shifting to CTV channels. The flipside, however, is that marketers don’t yet see the value in their CTV spending, as only 49% of marketers say CTV is either very or extremely effective.

Given the appeal of streaming with audiences, it makes sense that marketers are leaning in—even though the perceived effectiveness is currently low. When any new channel gains audiences, marketers need to balance between spending where they know the audience is and the risk associated with learning what they need to know to prove their investment there.

But measuring audiences across the streaming landscape won’t be marketers’ last hurdle. It’s simply the one they’re facing now. Widespread connectivity will continue opening the doors to new options, all of which will have their own measurement needs. That’s where the real cross-media measurement challenge is.

Tools and solutions that measure engagement at the channel level have never been able to provide marketers with a holistic view of how individual people are engaging across all channels. Historically, the road to cross-media measurement has relied on marketers’ ability to aggregate channel measurement and then surmise what a complete consumer journey looked like. Channel proliferation and increasing privacy regulations make that an increasingly tall order, and sentiment from global marketers reflects the increasing difficulty: Only 50%, on average, say they’re extremely or very confident in their ability to measure for full-funnel ROI across channels.

Confidence aside, marketers know they need to address the challenge, as 71% overwhelmingly acknowledge the importance of arriving at a single view of audience engagement across channels (i.e., comparable, deduplicated measurement).

If marketers truly desire that single view of audience engagement across every touchpoint, they’ll need to abandon any tool or solution that isn’t complementary from a data perspective. Marketers should consider leveraging as few tools as possible to arrive at that single view of audience engagement. Undoubtedly, a shift like this could be unsettling for many. But as marketing dollars span an increasing number of channels, disparate datasets from channel-specific tools will require an increasing amount of manual reconciling.

With confidence in arriving at full-funnel ROI measurement at relatively low levels today, an increasingly rich media landscape in the years ahead suggests the need for transformative thinking based on data and solutions that are both trusted and channel agnostic. With audiences adding and seamlessly switching from channel to channel, it makes sense that measurement should be able to do the same.

For additional insight, download the 2023 Nielsen Annual Marketing Report.

Note

Connected TV (CTV) refers to any television that is connected to the internet. The most common use case is to stream video content.

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Once the niche domain of select, pure-play streamers, streaming has matured into ubiquity by meeting a critical audience need: choice.

Teeming with an array of live, on-demand and ad-supported options to complement traditional subscription options, streaming has transformed television viewing light years beyond its origins as an online replacement for physical movie rentals. And audiences have followed. In September, streaming—in all of its flavors—accounted for 36.9% of total TV usage, a new high water mark and up from 27.7% a year ago¹.

Perhaps more important, however, is the blurring of the lines between different media offerings, amplifying the need for comparable measurement even more. YouTube, for example, has historically existed largely in the social media realm, providing individual content creators a platform to upload and share their own video content. But with its existing footprint and the ongoing adoption of YouTube TV, YouTube is steadily growing as both a video sharing platform and virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD). In September 2022, YouTube (including YouTube TV) accounted for 8% of total TV usage¹.

To keep pace with audiences, advertisers are pivoting. Market research company Insider Intelligence forecasts that U.S. connected TV (CTV) spending will total $18.9 billion this year, with one-third being spent during the annual TV upfronts. And in contrast to the early days of streaming, ad-supported options—from pure-play streamers, traditional media companies and platforms like YouTube—are blossoming. In September 2022, for example, linear streaming from MVPD apps and vMVPDs accounted for 14.5% of all streaming¹. 

The growth of linear streaming speaks to how varied options have become, accompanied by an assortment of nuanced acronyms to boot (e.g., FAST, AVOD, vMVPD, OTT). But the alphabet soup is far less important than the aggregate impact that streaming is having on audiences and the content that’s resonating with them.

That’s where the appeal is for advertisers—reaching audiences that aren’t just watching traditional, linear television. While there is no denying the mass reach of traditional television, it’s clear that CTV is now a viable, scalable complement to it. Today, audiences use a range of devices interchangeably to tap into an ever-growing range of platforms, services and experiences.

In first-quarter 2022, for example, U.S. adults spent nearly as much time on TV-connected devices as on their mobile devices, both now far eclipsing the time they spend on their computers².

As video advertising fragments to follow consumption, marketers need a reliable view into each touchpoint as well as an understanding of how each disparate piece ladders into complete consumer journeys—all while ensuring that individual people aren’t being measured multiple times. And because the lines between linear and digital continue to blur, measurement should no longer be specific to linear or digital. It should be continuous, automatic and comparable.

The good news is that it can be. Marketers no longer need to enable or tag individual campaigns—or rely on point-in-time metrics. They can simply “turn measurement on.” Continuous, “always on” measurement is a major comparability advancement, as it provides advertisers and agencies the ability to assess cross-media campaign performance on an even playing field. Continuous measurement also provides increased impression data, facilitating easier reach and frequency management, as well as the ability to make adjustments while campaigns are still in market.

The influx of ad-supported services and ad-available options within multi-tier platforms highlights the clear need for comparable, deduplicated campaign measurement across the digital landscape. Our YouTube example from above presents a relevant and real-time use case, especially as it has grown its share of total TV usage nearly 40% on a year-over-year basis and claimed the largest percentage of TV usage among streaming providers in September¹.

The upside in this case for advertisers and agencies is that YouTube has already enabled the “always on” function of Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings, which means that advertisers and agencies simply need to enable the functionality for their YouTube campaigns to begin benefiting from true cross-channel comparability within one of the market’s leading and largest ad-supported platforms.

Transformative change requires precision, attention to market needs and a focus on the future. And in today’s media landscape, measurement that is comparable and deduplicated across platforms and devices is paramount. It’s also reflective of a future state, where the focus is on the audience.

1. The Gauge, September 2022 usage data
2. Nielsen Total Media Fusion

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The term “brand” is often bandied about and rarely defined. It can be tied to reputation, value propositions or culture—but Jeff Bezos coined one great definition: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Simply put, your brand is how people see, experience and perceive you.

Given this dynamic, marketers have many critical roles to play—including engaging customers and driving growth. But one of the most important roles is the ongoing intentional work they need to do to define and create a compelling brand narrative that unifies their organization, resonates with customers and the market, and helps differentiate the company internally and externally across all touchpoints.

Consumers and businesses have more choices than ever and vote with their wallets every day. In a complex and dynamic marketplace, it is important for companies to be clear about their values and purpose as well as the unique product or service they bring to their audiences—including what they stand for, what they offer and how they deliver. While building brands can take time, every organization—in startup, transformation or expansion mode—should stick to four key principles throughout the process.

Be clear about who you are

A brand identity reflects everything a company is and does, and the stronger the brand, the more readily consumers, prospects and employees can engage. It’s critical that marketers and all senior leaders are closely aligned on the mission and purpose of the company and its core values. The company’s external persona and presentation should mirror its internal guiding compass to create congruence; enduring brands are built on solid foundations that allow them to stay true and consistent to engender trust and loyalty among employees and customers alike.

By building on a clear purpose, a company can more successfully define its identity and ensure its strategies and actions align. This, in turn, can create greater clarity around target audiences, key messages, brand actions and core product value propositions. Following the sale of its IQ business in 2020, my company, Nielsen, articulated a new purpose: Powering a better media future for all people. This purpose encapsulated our role (powering), our goal (a better media future) and our values (all people: inclusion). This statement also supported our tag line—“audience is everything”—the external-facing summation of our brand.

A strong purpose provides clarity and sets a bar for the brand. Support of and adherence to it will help establish credibility and trust over time and can give an organization more of a voice and distinction in the marketplace. Once a company knows what consumers want and need, and where its opportunity lies in the market, marketers may turn to market research and data to optimize brand and business-building activities.

Use market research and data to inform

As the CMO of a company that offers audience measurement media planning and marketing optimization solutions, I’ve found that consumers’ expectations of brands are ever-evolving and can leave marketers feeling as though they’re playing catch-up. With macro and micro changes occurring daily, marketers need to have a pulse on consumer attitudes and behaviors.

We should think of market research and behavioral data mining as a continuous process: one that enables companies to monitor what consumers need and expect. Marketers should look at how consumers are reacting to campaigns or promotions. With this information, they should react appropriately by making changes to current campaigns or promotions based on consumer sentiment. Fostering a two-way dialogue—e.g., through social media—can help marketers tailor messages to audiences.

For a healthy brand, insights from quantitative, qualitative and analytic efforts shouldn’t just be treated as a one-and-done activity for a branding campaign. Marketers should consider conducting quarterly brand surveys and pulse surveys, and they should ensure they’re measuring all campaigns to understand the impact on perception and behavior. They should also use any insights available from call centers, service channels and social media to inform continuous message testing.

Ensure the brand message is real

With a healthy pulse on your consumers, market and brand metrics, it is critical to execute on the value proposition that delivers while also ensuring that employees are in line with brand messaging. Consumer experience remains a powerful brand builder.

It is tempting for brands in need of change to signal the change they are pursuing through a campaign or messaging. While sometimes this is necessary—as in periods of crisis—it is always preferable to “be the brand” in tangible ways. Organizations should take action on their values and have tangible proof points of their commitments.

It’s no surprise that employee engagement is an important component of a company’s success and ability to live its brand in an authentic way. When employees are engaged and believe in the company’s mission and values, I’ve found that consumers feel it, which further cements their trust in the brand. To keep employees engaged, marketers can work with senior leaders to ensure that they are living the brand’s mission and values, which creates a trickle-down effect throughout the organization.

Share the brand story widely

With the above underway, it’s time to tell the story. All stakeholders—employees, shareholders, clients and prospects—are potential brand advocates, and the marketer’s job is to ensure those stakeholders are aware, actively considering, using and, hopefully, advocating for the brand and its products or services.

Marketers should achieve overall broad-based brand awareness and favorability while prioritizing the right audiences, campaigns, channels and messages to garner consumer consideration (and ideally purchases). While clearly there are messages and channels that lead with brand—including levers like sponsorships, social media and communications—there are also opportunities to think of brand building and acquisition goals together, as the historical purchase funnel is often condensed, with brand and acquisition happening in a mutually reinforcing and simultaneous way.

Building brands to drive business and reputation is one of the most critical roles for a marketer—a disciplined approach to understanding the brand’s purpose and value proposition and having a real-time understanding of the consumer will help them ensure success in the marketplace.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com. 

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During times of economic unease, there can be a knee-jerk reaction to tighten the belt and slash the budgets—especially in the marketing and advertising departments.

However, there’s also a long and storied track record of how risky this approach is. Deprioritizing marketing erodes brand share and relevance and can make it that much harder to make up for lost ground when markets bounce back.

As the classic industry idiom goes, “When times are good, you should advertise. When times are bad, you MUST advertise.”

Marketers know this already. But, occasionally, others in the company need more convincing. And a powerful rationale is one that anticipates concerns, addresses reality and sets everyone up for success on the other side.

To that end, here are three marketing strategies that will help you acquire new customers, promote sales in the long term and adjust to dynamic and unpredictable circumstances. By following these practices—and making the right case to finance—you can protect your budgets and reinforce their impact.

Strategy #1: Double down on unique audience reach

Even during booming economic times, it’s tempting for companies to chase the low-hanging fruit of quarterly revenue. During a recession, that temptation grows even stronger as everyone’s financial anxieties start to climb. They want cash flow, and they want it now.

However, as all marketers know, revenue is the end point of a much longer sales funnel. During tough times, it’s even more important to grow your base and acquire new customers, especially as your current customers may change their spending habits.

One of the best proxies available for new customer acquisition is unique audience reach: how many unique individuals saw your campaign across different apps, sites and devices.

Unique reach is a deduplicated metric. That means it counts individuals instead of frequency, regardless of which device they’re on. Without deduplicated metrics, your ads may rack up thousands of impressions but only reach a relatively small audience.

Especially during a recession, when you want to broaden your audience, it’s critical to know if you’re actually expanding your reach or just targeting the same folks over and over. By following this metric, you can continuously optimize ad placements and select the media partners that deliver fresh eyes.

At the end of the day, you can’t convert new customers if you never reach them. In fact, a 2022 Nielsen study of 15 brands and 82 digital campaigns in the U.S. revealed that campaigns with strong target reach consistently delivered better sales outcomes.

Strategy #2: Define your audience—and then dig deeper

Audience targeting is the most important tactic for global marketers, but it becomes even more important during an economic downturn. As the C-suite looks everywhere to cut spending, you don’t want to use budget to reach an audience that wasn’t going to convert in the first place.

If you generally consider your audience to be fairly broad—Millennials living in mid- to large-sized cities—you may need to focus on a smaller niche, like single millennials between 28 and 35 living in the 20 largest metro areas who bought a sedan in the last five years and are now looking for an SUV. The pool of potential consumers may shrink, but ideally your ad resonates with more of them.

This kind of refined reach allows you to put your message in front of your ideal customer as they go throughout their day, follow them as they cruise the internet, and retarget visitors who come to your website.

To make the case for these capabilities, stress that consumers are likely to change their behavior during the economic downturn. As incomes and spending habits shift, your conception of the ideal customer may have to transform as well. To that end, traditional demographic data may not be enough to identify your core audience. A simple solution is to augment those data sets with psychographic, behavioral, purchase-based, and media consumption information.

Strategy #3: Always be ready to adjust on the fly

Ignore this advice if you’re one of the marketers who has a perfect strategy that works every time, under every economic scenario.

For the rest of us, we need to create a feedback system spanning all of our campaigns that allows for real-time adjustment, experimentation, and optimization. Because here’s the unfortunate truth: It’s easy to throw dollars at the wrong people. In fact, brands waste nearly 40% of their digital advertising on the wrong audiences, and 29% of CTV ad spend reaches off-target audiences.

The potential for wasted spend is higher during a recession when whoever we’re targeting might be in a constant state of flux (see above).

There are two great ways to spot and capitalize on advertising opportunities. The first is using in-flight metrics. Ideally, you’ve got a single tool that analyzes reach, frequency and gross rating points across platforms AND delivers data daily, regardless of the size of the campaign, the platform or even the device.

The other is by owning your marketing performance data. When you don’t, you’re dependent on outside firms that likely don’t use transparent measurement systems you can access. This is even more pronounced when your data partners work on different timelines than you. As supply chains get disrupted and inflation continues rising, trends and tastes will evolve even more quickly, and the last thing you want is to be waiting on metrics that are days or even weeks old to make crucial decisions.

To advocate for resources that open up access to near real-time performance data, emphasize that it’s difficult to predict consumer behavior when bad economic news abounds. So, despite all of your best efforts, a campaign might flounder—and isn’t it better to cut your losses and move on before tapping your quarterly budget?

To learn more about our resilient marketing solutions, explore our Audience Segments and Digital Ad Ratings offerings.

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The importance of brand awareness and new customer acquisition elevated this year among the marketers surveyed for Nielsen’s 2022 Annual Marketing Report, but there isn’t a marketer on the planet who’s not laser focused on growing their return on investment (ROI). For media sellers, increasing competition—both within specific channels and in adjacent channels—has never been higher, which adds new layers of nuance on the road to finding new growth.

Historically, media sellers have relied on two proven strategies to boost their returns:

• Acquire more of the advertising dollars being spent (e.g., gain share)
• Raise the price of their advertising (e.g., boost CPMs)

Both options require media owners to prove the attractiveness of their media, which is critical in proper ad pricing and securing a greater portion of the ad dollars being spent. 

In an ideal world, sellers would seek to grow—in perpetuity—through a combination of both strategies. The circumstances where that’s feasible, however, are few and far between. So, when considering these two options, sellers should start by assessing how their media is faring with respect to other options, and not just those within the same channel or those that are most comparable.

For example, a media owner’s television ads might be outperforming industry benchmarks, but sellers can’t afford to think too narrowly when evaluating channel and platform effectiveness. Case in point, TV remains a dominant channel for advertising, but ROI from TV has been in decline over the past two or three years. This suggests that while buyers and sellers continue to view TV favorably, the channel may be facing pricing pressure as other options drive better results.

Comparatively, paid ads on social media deliver 1.7x the short-term ROI globally of TV even though brands are spending two-thirds less on them. Given the higher ROI, social media has pricing power, allowing sellers to justifiably increase CPMs. No decisions, however, should be made based on aggregated data. ROI performance varies by market and subchannel, and the best way to maximize success is to invest in the granularity that provides case-specific guidance.

In addition to assessing channel and platform performance, media sellers should be mindful that many buyers aren’t spending enough to break through. Said differently, advertisers may pull back on spending simply because they aren’t achieving the returns they’re looking for. But when we look at data from a cross-channel analysis of planned media spending, we can see that 50% of planned investments are too low to be effective. This presents an opportunity for sellers.

Globally, the prevalence of underspending is significant. Among those that are underinvesting, the median under-investment is 52%. This gap might be too big to close in a single planning session, but those that do have the opportunity to improve their ROI by a median of 50.3%. Armed with this data, which supports higher spending, media sellers are better positioned to help advertisers and media buyers allocate their spending to better achieve their desired returns.

In thinking about advertiser ROI, media owners should be thinking about validating the effectiveness of their platforms and channels for both short- and long-term strategies. Measuring the impact of their media for both is critical, simply because channels aren’t usually able to deliver on both objectives. According to Nielsen’s Marketing Mix Models, channels deliver on both revenue and brand metrics just 36% of the time.

Driving sales and awareness is important to clients, and performance for driving brand awareness and conversion will affect how advertisers value media. Helping clients understand that channels don’t typically deliver on both may provide sellers with twice the opportunity to prove value and retain—even grow—spend from clients. 

Along these lines, sellers that only measure the impact of one business strategy may find themselves below average in that one measurement. Comparatively, media sellers that measure for both brand awareness and sales will be more likely to see a positive story most of the time. 

Globally, the importance of measuring for both objectives is highest in the Americas, where channels deliver above-average results on both objectives just 20% of the time. Comparatively, in Asia-Pacific, the percentage is much higher at 42%. When sellers measure the impact of their media on brand and sales outcomes, they’re best positioned to mitigate disappointing results from singularly focused measurement.

While many marketers are leaning into measurement tools to inform their channel and mix allotments, media owners can tap into ROI data to assess the attractiveness of their media and best position it from a pricing and ad share perspective. With an understanding about which platforms and channels deliver on the short- and long-term goals of advertisers, sellers have twice the opportunity to showcase the value and attractiveness of their media.

The post In the search for growth, what’s a media seller to do? appeared first on Nielsen.

The TV industry is big business. It always has been. But how we define “TV” is very much an evolving story, simply because viewership and engagement is no longer directly tied to a predefined schedule or static set of channel options. And while people still spend more than twice the amount of time with traditional TV than their connected TV devices, trends over the last year showcase how streaming-first mindsets are critical to success in the future.

For context, Americans increased their streaming usage by 21% between May 2021 and May 2022. That uptick, much of which happened during historically low TV viewing months, fueled a dramatic shift in total TV consumption—even though total TV viewing remained virtually unchanged. In June 2022, streaming accounted for more than one-third of total TV time, 6.3 points higher than in June 2021.

The flipside of this surge in consumption is a growing expanse of content—and platforms to host it. In the period between December 2019 and February 2022, the number of unique video content titles grew from 646k to more than 817k¹. And to complement the growth in titles, some now estimate there are more than 200 streaming services for audiences to choose from.

So, as lucrative and attractive as the streaming space is, success is far from easy. Several entities, including Deloitte, have forecasted subscriber churn amid the deluge of content and channel options, and a recent Nielsen survey found that 46% of streaming subscribers believe there are too many services available to them.

For content owners and buyers, knowing how to navigate the environment is anything but cut and dry. With so much competition—and a finite amount of time in any given day—any and all decisions could make or break whether audiences engage with a program. Said differently, going viral in the streaming space is a taller order than when audiences first coined the term “binge-watching” as streaming platforms started dropping full seasons of content all at once. 

But what if, even in an increasingly crowded space, content owners and buyers could use data to determine whether content will drive viewership—or that it might even be binge worthy? And what if these determinations weren’t limited to streaming content?

The good news is that they’re not. The even better news is that employing this type of data will benefit viewers just as much as owners and buyers—perhaps even more. After all, they’re the ones clamoring for relevant content.

Given the amount of content that’s available—and will become available—metadata becomes critical to content discovery. It can also help content owners and buyers understand why audiences gravitate to specific content. When owners and buyers know which characteristics drive engagement, they have the information they need to drive viewership—and keep it. 

So among the many characteristics to consider, which ones really factor into viewership preference and long-term engagement? And how can these characteristics actually be quantified? 

To help content owners and buyers on this front, Gracenote, the content solutions pillar of Nielsen, recently announced a new data set that can be used to optimize program licensing and acquisition strategies as TV viewership booms. These are the characteristics that shed the most light on how individual streaming and broadcast programs are consumed:

• Bingeability: Understand how many TV show episodes audiences watch per day to quantify viewer propensity to consume multiple episodes in a row.
• Loyalty: Understand how much (in minutes and percentage of) available content is viewed per month to identify viewer likeliness to stick with a program.
• Program similarity: Identify programs that resemble other programs based on lookalike thematic characteristics, viewing audiences and historical performance.

While these characteristics might be useful to some degree in determining road-tested programs with established audiences, especially as competition rises, they will be critical in assessing audience engagement with new programs. As streaming continues to account for an increasing share of total TV usage, we analyzed two new Netflix programs that debuted this year to gauge how audiences received them: Inventing Anna, which debuted in February, and The Lincoln Lawyer, which debuted in May. Both shows performed well with audiences, as they each appeared on Nielsen’s top 10 streaming list for several weeks around their respective debut dates.

When we look beyond the minutes viewed, however, we can better understand program-level engagement—and see viewers were more engaged with The Lincoln Lawyer than Inventing Anna.

Given the reception and resulting media fanfare around The Lincoln Lawyer, Netflix did announce that it greenlit a season 2 of the show. That said, the loyalty and binge scores for the program provide independent data points validating engagement. Comparatively, the Shonda Rhimes-led Inventing Anna was planned as a limited series, and therefore, no second season has been announced. But if the creators and Netflix ever change their minds and need viewer validation, the loyalty and binge scores could certainly serve that need. 

This article originally appeared on Streaming Media.

Notes

1. Gracenote Global Video Data

The post Win the streaming wars with bingeable content appeared first on Nielsen.

With third-party cookies disappearing, it is more important than ever to make sure that your ads are reaching the intended target audience.

In addition to utilizing cookieless delivery, it is more important than ever to be able to accurately measure ad performance to confirm you’re matching ads with the right audience. Nielsen recently conducted an analysis of 82 digital advertising campaigns across 15 brands to validate that delivering the right ad to the right audience will improve ROI, confirming that audience metrics are an early indicator of campaign performance.

For marketers concerned with decreased targeting accuracy due to a cookieless future, in-flight campaign optimizations are essential for improving ad delivery performance—and increasing ROI. And every optimization effort begins with accurate measurement.

With the increase of views from connected TVs in recent years, cost per completed view (CPCV) is quickly becoming a key video KPI for advertisers. While this new metric adds a layer of complexity onto campaign measurement—combining on-target rate¹ and CPCV, which are typically measured separately—it also offers an additional opportunity for improving your campaigns. By calculating and optimizing the on-target CPCV², marketers will be able to improve in both indicators.

As an example, consider a campaign targeting males 20-34 years old consisting of digital ads placed on three sites over an 8-week period. Suppose that after the first two weeks of the campaign, Site 3 has the lowest on-target CPCV. In terms of on-target CPCV, lower costs mean more efficient ads, so in-flight campaign optimizations should be focused on lowering total CPCV. In the case of our example, the entire on-target CPCV for the campaign can be lowered by reallocating all or part of the media spend from Sites 1 and 2 to Site 3 in the latter half of the campaign.

As a result, it is possible to get more targeted viewers to watch video ads within the same budget without increasing media costs. In this example, optimizing by looking only at the CPCV would reallocate the budget to Site 1 and miss the opportunity to get more of the target audience to fully view the site.

Knowing how to optimize your campaigns is only the first step. Actually implementing in-flight changes can be a challenge, as some platforms may not allow reallocation of budget after a campaign starts. But, even in campaigns that include sites for which budget cannot be changed after launch, it’s still possible to reallocate those campaign dollars to sites that are performing well, or disburse them among delivery settings, if multiple settings are being used within a single site.

In addition to reallocation of spend, advertisers can modify ad delivery conditions to maximize those dollars. For example, lack of third-party cookies may result in low on-target rates for some campaigns. By changing your data source in-flight, you can increase your targeting accuracy and reach more of your ideal audience.

To reach more of their target audience and drive higher ROI, it’s up to advertisers to harness their creativity, and their data, in order to make the most of their marketing spend. And while campaign optimization may not be a new concept, faced with a cookieless future, advertisers need to adjust how and what they are measuring to stay ahead of industry changes—and the competition 

Notes

¹On-target rate = Percentage of total impressions that reached the target audience.
²On-target CPCV = media cost / (number of completed video views x on-target rate)
Ex: If media cost is $10,000 and 10,000 targeted views are completed, on-target CPCV is $1.

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