3 Important Themes on Data-Driven Marketing from ANA’s Data, Analytics & Measurement Conference

Last week I represented Havas Edge by attending the Association of National Advertisers’ Data, Analytics & Measurement Conference in Chicago. The conference is becoming one of the ANA’s most important events of the year as it showcases the power of measurement and value of data-driven marketing in our ever-evolving marketing ecosystem.

Attendees learned how to harness data into storytelling and how to keep pace with the most recent updates in data privacy regulations, new and emerging platforms, the evolving TV landscape and the latest advances in measuring outcomes and impact.

I’ve categorized those lessons into three important themes to keep your organization at the forefront of modern marketing. I hope you find these tips as helpful as I did.

1.???? Measurement Drives Growth

?Bill Tucker, Group EVP at the ANA, kicked off the conference with powerful findings from the ANA that validate having a data strategy drives company performance. Their research shows that when a company has a documented data strategy in place, their data initiative outcomes outperform companies with no data strategy 20-100% across key metrics. Most importantly, revenue generation for new growth/customer retention is 45% higher from companies with a data strategy than those without one. However, only 47% of marketing professionals feel that the quality of their marketing data allows them to make effective decisions on where to spend resources (Ascend 2, 2022), so investments in data analytics grew 37% last year (Deloitte, 2022) to improve their foundation for decision making.

Kirti Singh , Chief Analytics & Insights Officer at Procter & Gamble then presented how to drive growth by producing superior brand communications through the combination of data analytics, human insights and technology. For their Cascade brand, P&G first used smart home technologies to capture consensual first-party consumer data, to then analyze actual consumer behavior to discover the human insight that 20% of consumers don’t use their dishwashers due to feeling guilty that they’re wasting water. P&G’s research shows that dishwashers only use 4 gallons of water per load compared to 40 gallons of water using the kitchen sink per load, so P&G communicated this useful information in their ads to drive new consumer habits. Not only did this result in 3x brand growth for Cascade and category growth, but it also produced a water savings of 77.7 billion gallons annually.? ?

Yushuang Zhou , Senior Director of Analytics & Data Science at The Clorox Company echoed P&G’s theme, sharing that they made a $500M investment in transformative technology, including data & analytics. Clorox’s success comes from their improved test & learn capabilities that’s anchored at critical touchpoints of their business process.?Yushuang shared that to increase the horsepower of your analytics engine, you need to test fast and learn faster.?Their test & learn capabilities center around pre-launch experimentation and in-flight tracking & optimization, so their infinite loop for marketing campaigns starts/ends with experimentation>pre-launch>in-flight optimization>measurement>performance review>spend optimization>forecasting>experimentation.?

Andy Hasselwanter, Chief Analytics Officer of MarketBridge , and Marc Guldimann , CEO of Adelaide also shared interesting, unintended consequences from how digital marketing has been measured since its inception and ways to course correct to drive upper funnel sales growth. ?

Andy presented that as marketing channels compete for dollars, siloed teams focus on telling their best measurement story, preventing a scientific approach to multi-channel optimization. For example, upper funnel channels have been harder to measure, which has led many brands to undervest in brand awareness and shift more dollars to down-funnel capture such as paid search at lower CPMs, which hurts new customer attention. Andy suggests that Multi-Stage Models (MMS) that combine Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Tests/Casual Inference is the way forward to shift marketing budgets to a more balanced (50:50) approach that can credit upper funnel awareness building to mid funnel capture and lower funnel sales metrics.

Marc shined a light that the biggest risk advertisers face is becoming Waldo, meaning that Waldo is reported as 100% viewable in the famous “Where’s Waldo?” pictures, but he’s hard to find/decipher. For years, marketers have relied on viewability metrics, but Marc reports that optimizing audiences to the maximum level of attention can result in wasting dollars by reaching people who are already aware of the brand and will pay more attention to subsequent airings/servings of the same ad. ?

Instead, Marc suggests that a better measure is the probability of attention times the probability of outcomes. Using attention as an outcome means optimizing to it and no other KPIs, while optimizing from attention means using it as an input to an algorithm. So, stop measuring as Media x Audience x Creative = Attention and focus on Media (Attention) x Creative x Audiences = Outcomes (shameless plug alert: Havas Media Network Partners with Adelaide in North America to Build Industry-first Meaningful Ad Unit (MAU) ).

With all this new thinking around ways to capture data and measure marketing effectiveness, one theme became clear across the conference:

2.???? Cross-Media Measurement is the Key to Success

This wouldn’t be a data event recap without some big stats and Kroger’s 84.51 did not disappoint. Their research shows that 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 2 years, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced by humans every day, 347.3 billion emails and 100 billion WhatsApp messages are sent every day, and 5 billion YouTube videos and 1 billion TikTok videos are watched daily.

With more data and cross-device viewing than ever before, Jackson Bazley , Group EVP at the ANA presented how the ANA is bringing the brightest minds in the industry (F500 marketers, media platforms/publishers, trade organizations, etc.) together for the Cross-Media Measurement (CMM) initiative to shape the future of marketing measurement. Their focus is to create the first-of-its kind, transparent, and privacy-centric system of measurement that restores essential metrics of campaign measurement and provides complete measurement of all ad exposures, with a particular emphasis on unduplicated reach and frequency across all media channels.

The ANA first announced the CMM initiative in 2021, and Jackson shared that they just completed their first test phase in Q3 2023 that validated their proof-of-concept that unduplicated reach & frequency reporting for campaigns running across digital platforms and linear television can be measured. The ANA will next move into beta testing in 2024 and production rollout of the measurement framework in 2025.

This has huge implications for marketers including billions per year in cost savings through frequency management, improved consumer ad experience by reducing excess frequency, optimized media planning & buying by understanding who’s being reached & how many times, and better outcomes/ROI analytics by providing marketers with the ability to evaluate the cumulative effects of their ad campaigns across all media channels & devices.?

Jamie Moldafsky , CMO of Nielsen , and Christine Turner , Managing Director of Data, Measurement & Analytics at Google shared some big reasons driving the need for cross-media measurement and the next chapter in the future of measurement.

Jamie presented Nielsen data that consumers still spend 5 hours pers day on average watching TV/CTV (streaming), second only to sleep times per day, and the biggest challenge for marketers is tracking where those audiences are watching.? As of July 2023, Nielsen data reports that 50% of consumers watch linear TV and 50% watch streaming each day. Linear TV viewing is almost evenly split between 20% watching Broadcast and 28.6% watching Cable. While Streaming now represents the most viewing at 38.7%, viewing is fragmented across YouTube 9.2%, Netflix 8.5%, Hulu 3.6%, (Amazon) Prime Video 3.4%, Disney+ 2.0%, (HBO) Max 1.4%, Tubi 1.4%, Peacock 1.1%, Roku Channel 1.1%, Paramount+ 1.0%, Pluto TV 0.9% and Other Streaming 5.1%.

Jamie went on to share that with the rise of streaming, 85% of marketers now include streaming with their media buys, but 49% only of marketers believe their streaming investment is effective.? Cross-media measurement is a challenge with so much streaming fragmentation, so it’s critical that streaming needs to be reconciled with all other media.

Google Chrome’s proposed end of 3rd party cookie support has been talked about and delayed for a few years, but it’s time to prepare for the phasing out of 3rd party cookies. Christine shared that the cookie would start depreciating by 1% starting in Q1 of 2024 until they’re gone completely by the end of 2024.

Christine suggests that the cookieless countdown presents an opportunity to fundamentally change the way digital advertising is done, moving from a Precision model based solely on data, to a Prediction model based on AI. ?She also advises to keep in mind that you’re not competing with AI, you’re competing with another marketer using AI and you must adopt a test and learn mentality with new measurement tools such as AI and the new Google suite (Google AI, Privacy Sandbox and Max).?

Christine shared that some precision-based solutions that won’t be durable moving forward include tag-based remarketing and combined segments (audiences), cookie-based affinity and custom segments (predictive analytics) and user-level multi-touch attribution models (measurement).? Some prediction-based solutions that will be durable after cookies include 1st party and GA4 audiences, demographics/life events and custom segments (predictive analytics), audience expansion and lifecycle optimization (AI-powered targeting) and MMM and clean rooms (measurement).

Marketers will not only have to change the way they capture and measure data in the future, but they’ll also need to fundamentally rethink how they approach marketing.

My favorite hot take of the conference came from Brad Feinberg , VP of Media and Consumer Engagement at Molson Coors , who stated, “the word TV is outdated.” Brad believes the word TV has become shorthand for the box in your living room. Instead, he thinks of TV as hardware, so your mobile phone or gas station pump screens are TV. Brad further questioned the definition of “TV” with the interesting observation that YouTube TV is device agnostic even though most consumer now watch it on their living room TVs.

This thinking led Molson Coors to monitor the content consumers are consuming, whether long-form or short-form, and get their message in front of them regardless of the medium, which then led Molson Coors to reframe their upfront “TV” strategy to an upfront “video” strategy. Now they measure how many eyeballs they need to reach across video platforms rather than how many TV screens they’re on.

To validate this new way of thinking, Molson Coors partners with iSPot.tv to incorporate their near real-time integrated user level data into Molson Coors’ MTA strategy to optimize their TV ad performance to gain visibility into cross-channel impact. To Brad’s team, an impression on a large device is not more important than on a phone, they only care about tracking incremental sales tied to an ad versus a control group. This unique type of thinking and reporting is a great segue into the third theme.

3.???? Diversify Your Data and Don’t Forget Diversity Data

Between all the great presentations from and conversations with data providers at the conference including 84.51, Adelaide, Affinity Solutions, Comscore, Google, Nilsen, iSpot.tv , Resonate and TransUnion, one thing is certain in these uncertain times, there is no silver bullet when it comes to data/analytics/measurement solutions (although the ANA’s CMM is promising).

You must diversify how to capture and measure data and that means working with an expansive set of partners and creating an internal communications framework/network between your data sets and partner providers.?

Underneath all of that, you must have a strategy in place to start capturing as much 1st party customer data as you can. An entire article can be written on this subject and how privacy compliance is an ever-changing landscape, so instead I recommend you read the full, brilliant presentation “Balancing the Compliance Scale” by Brittany Powell , Senior Manager of Privacy and Compliance at The Coca-Cola Company on the best ways to capture 1st party data.

Eye-opening presentations were also given by TikTok , Uber Advertising and Frameplay on where consumer attention is heading and how these platforms can drive sales outcomes through campaign effectiveness and cost efficiency, which further complicates (in a good way) where you should diversify your media spend and ways to measure data captured across partners in your MMMs and MTAs. ??

The need to differentiate your data sets to reach diverse audiences came to a crossroads when ANA’s SeeHer, the largest global movement to eliminate gender bias in advertising, in partnership with Comscore, unveiled the industry-first Gender Equality Measurement (GEM) for digital platforms.

SeeHer’s research shows that consumers see media as a catalyst for change with 90% of consumers surveyed agreeing that media is critical in shaping gender roles and 64% of Gen Z respondents saying that accurately representing women in advertising would advance the stature of women and women’s equality, but only 16% of women respondents believe that the media usually portrays them accurately.

Due to that discrepancy, GEM was conceived to increase the representation and accurate portrayal of all women and girls in marketing, media, and entertainment to reflect culture and transform society.? GEM is the largest global database measuring gender bias in ads and programming and reaches audiences in agreement with the following statements:

• I think highly of the way women are presented
• Women are presented in a respectful manner
• It is inappropriate how women are featured
• Women are presented in a manner where they can be seen as good role models for other women and young girls

Early results through Comscore show that high GEM scoring ads increase sales by 5x, and those sales lifts come across gender, race, ethnicity, and language, with the highest increases coming from Black Men (+196%) and Hispanic Men (+120%).? Powerful stuff, so marketers talk to your planning and buying teams about utilizing GEM audiences and build GEM audiences’ attributes into your existing targets.?

Last, but certainly not least, Carlos Santiago , Co-Founder of ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing (AIMM), and Ron Pinelli , SVP of Digital Research & Standards at the Media Rating Council (MRC), closed the conference with another powerful presentation on why data quality matters for multicultural marketing.

Carlos shared that inaccurate multicultural target audience data is the biggest barrier to reaching the right consumer with the right message. For years, investments in multicultural and inclusive segments have been held back in large part by the invisibility of multicultural identity in 3rd party data and the lack of measures proving the value of cultural authenticity in communications.

?AIMM has been tracking multicultural data accuracy and presence in 3rd party datasets, the foundation of audience targeting, for the past three years and has not seen significant increases in accuracy rates.?AIMM’s research shows that multicultural coverage in 3rd party data is 15-40% lower than white non-Hispanic audiences.

For example, Carlos shared that if you’re activating against Black or Hispanic audiences, you could reach only 50% of the target with your message, depending on which 3rd party data provider you use. Identifying more accurate multicultural target audience data is not only the right thing to do, but it also delivers more impressions to your true prospects and reduces your effective CPM.?AIMM finds that a 20% improvement in target audience accuracy translates directly to a 20% reduction in CPM and a material increase in sales lift.

Ron went on to share that many surveys and data collection techniques exclude entire populations/data sets if consumers don’t check a pre-selected box such as gender. The MRC has also found that country of origin, homogeneity, and context matters when measuring multicultural audiences. For example, Asian populations with diverse countries of origin and language considerations are a consistently under-measured aspect, and even when adequately measured, multicultural groups such as Asians and Hispanics are not the same and do not behave the same. Context and interest matter.

Summary

I can’t promise that your job will be easier if you head these warnings and follow these lessons from best-in-class marketers, data providers, and media outlets, but they will keep your organization ahead of modern marketing and your competition. ?As ANA’s President & CEO Bob Liodice puts it, “the various ways that marketing technologies are influencing what marketers and media companies can do today only enhances and significantly grows the media measurement challenges that we have.”

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