Opinion
Digital advertising benchmarks – a favourite tool
10 January 2012
My agency’s positioning is ‘performance-based communications’. As such, building accurate models that can demonstrate the value of campaigns is fundamental to showing that we can deliver on this promise. As a result we’ve undertaken detailed analysis to understand the relationship among paid, earned and owned activities. Key to this process is gathering data from a wide range of sources to better understand how different areas of marketing interrelate – for example, how TV spending affects consumer word-of-mouth about a brand.
Better data helps us break down silos, between different forms of branded communication, delivering integrated campaigns across a range of activities.
This is why good sources of data on digital advertising are so important, and why I look forward to Mediamind’s bi-annual benchmark reports. For planning support, global benchmarks based on hundreds of thousands of creative and billions of impressions, are invaluable every day tools. In particular they serve as inputs for our weekly performance dashboards, quickly allowing us to highlight weaker and better performers on our plans using a traffic light system and adjust activity accordingly.
Another way that benchmarks of this sort play a vital role in our business is in providing a crucial set of data that inputs directed into Initiative’s proprietary tool for monitoring campaign performance across paid, owned and earned media. Access to global benchmarks based on billions of impressions is a vital source of data on which to build baselines for our models for paid media.
Digital advertising has to date been very successful with brands seeking direct response. However, with more sophisticated metrics such as dwell and engagement that also provide insight into how long users interact with ads, you can start to demonstrate the power of digital on brand advertising. Dwell is a great improvement on CTR as it is consistently comparable across online formats and takes into account the much researched and documented fact that you don’t need to click on an ad in order for it to have an impact.
As well as showing the effectiveness of digital advertising on brand campaigns, agencies also need to take note that better data can help us show our clients that they can getting much more value out of the medium. According to internet guru Mary Meeker, there is still a significant deficit between the time spent by consumers online and the amount of ad spend online (25% of time spent online compared to only 19% of ad spend).
To change this, the industry needs to be able to demonstrate the relative value of different media, which is why metrics such as reach (uniques), GRPs (impressions) and OTS (frequency) that offer a common denominator between media are vital when trying to justify spend online versus TV advertising.
Tonia Perretta, code director, Initiative