Curt Hecht, VivaKi Nerve Center, Publicis Groupe
Curt Hecht
President
VivaKi Nerve Center, Publicis Groupe
Curt Hecht leads Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Nerve Center, a hub of new media companies and capabilities that was formed in June 2008. VivaKi offers marketers a variety of tools and services, including ad-serving and analytics, search, direct marketing, mobile integration, CRM services and insight into emerging media platforms.
In his role, Mr. Hecht focuses on developing the next generation of technical platforms to enable Publicis and its clients to scale their digital marketing and media efforts. He contributes to several industrywide media research initiatives. His accomplishments include organizing VivaKi’s Audience on Demand Network, an open-technology platform built in collaboration with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL’s Platform-A. He was previously chief digital officer at Publicis’ Starcom MediaVest Group.
In this discussion, Mr. Hecht offers his take on the need for marketers, agencies, research organizations and publishers to rally around common platforms for assessing the effectiveness of online advertising and its brand impact.
eMarketer: Where can marketers go to evaluate the effectiveness of their online advertising campaigns and, more specifically, the impact on their brand?
Curt Hecht: I think Dynamic Logic was kind of a breath of fresh air in that there was really no way of understanding how brands were performing online until they entered the market. I think they gave us some really good insight at a campaign level, and it helped justify spending online against brand metrics like brand awareness, purchase intent and recall.
I think that a lot of marketers propped themselves up on that kind of research to rationalize and move their spending from more traditional media formats to digital, consciously recognizing that consumers are going in that direction.
I would say we haven’t seen a lot of innovation from a measurement perspective in a while. It’s time for digital media to grow up and for clients who are running full-on marketing campaigns using multiple sites with multiple objectives to really understand how their campaigns are performing. [To understand performance whether they are spending] $5 million or $1 million or $800,000 online, across various sites and fragmented audiences.
Marketers can take on a custom initiative with one of the research companies and get some insight, but in my opinion, there’s really no scale behind it. It’s just a one-off and I’m not seeing a lot of innovation in terms of a company kind of stepping into that void to provide the kind of research and tools needed.
eMarketer: Why is that the case?
Mr. Hecht: I think it’s really hard to go out there and create a panel of size or create a technique to do surveys that are not interruptive and that are useful. From what I’ve picked up, and without naming names, it’s not only a marketer or an agency problem. I think some of the publishers are frustrated with the amount of money that they’ve poured into understanding brand impact and the returns they’re getting from those initiatives.
I think the market’s at the pressure point, in a good way, and that it’s going to force innovation and solutions to come forward.
eMarketer: Is it hard to understand and interpret the level of engagement or brand recall from online media?
Mr. Hecht: No, I don’t think it’s impossible, but you need to carry over the objectives that matter from traditional media to digital media. You can’t change the objectives. The objectives are the same. You have pull the objectives through the CRM and the research teams or whoever it may be on the client side to actually get them to consider making that shift.
At the same time, spending needs to ramp up and unless a good answer comes along, I worry a little bit about how the branding side of digital spending will grow.
eMarketer: It’s still very difficult for a brand marketer to spend millions online with the exception of ongoing keyword search efforts.
Mr. Hecht: But it’s very easy if they want to find very specific audiences and drive behavior outcomes.
eMarketer: That’s more of a direct response approach. How do brand marketers tie the online advertising to the offline sales?
Mr. Hecht: I think that’s a good question. They can do that by undertaking custom research. It’s clearly doable.
eMarketer: But there’s no scalable way?
Mr. Hecht: There’s no scalable way to tie the online advertising to the offline sales. You need to start by creating proxies. If a marketer runs a campaign with Google TV, they’ll look to compare how offline media drives demand online—that holds a lot of promise. You could evaluate search query volume, traffic to the Website and key events on those Websites that you care about.
eMarketer: What is the single biggest problem with online brand measurement as it exists today?
Mr. Hecht: I think it’s the problem of doing either custom one-off research, which doesn’t scale, or doing studies focused on individual campaigns, which don’t give you the whole story. For example, you can get research back that tells you a campaign or sponsorship was effective, but honestly, I haven’t seen many studies that tell you that something didn’t work.
One of the things we’re trying to do is provide clients with measurement and insight from the social graph in real time. We’re working with a company called Converseon, a conversation and social media marketing agency, that offers feedback in real time.
eMarketer: What do you mean by insight from the social graph?
Mr. Hecht: It’s what are people saying on blogs and forums and how they’re talking about a brand. It’s having the ability to index those conversations and making them useful to clients.
eMarketer: Can you offer an example of how a marketer could turn this kind of information into actionable insights?
Mr. Hecht: A hotel chain used this tool. The data showed a big green circle representing positive online conversation and a big red one for negative. The size of the circles represents how much conversation took place. In this case, there was a big green circle on price—the obvious insight from that is the chain is well-priced and people like that. There was a big red circle that indicated the beds weren’t great.
So, in real time, the marketer learns that people like staying there, the room rates [are] competitive but people think our beds suck. The solution is to change the mattresses or the comforters or both in response to the insight from a real-time tool.
eMarketer: Can monitoring these kinds of conversations indicate anything about the impact on a marketer’s brand?
Mr. Hecht: Yes. Monitoring customer conversations can indicate much about a marketer’s brand and at a very scalable level versus pulling everybody into a focus group. Marketers get really excited by that because it’s not expensive. Our creatives get really excited by it because I think it inspires them in terms of developing messages and really understanding what’s happening with people around brands in real time.
eMarketer: Looking at the entire purchasing funnel from the point at which someone is made aware of a new product or service to the point at which they’re finally ready to make a purchase, where do you think the measurement model is most broken?
Mr. Hecht: It’s probably the top of the funnel that has the biggest challenge. Once you get into real behavior around intent and helping clients come up with proxies to show levels of interest, it’s the attitudinal metrics at the top of the funnel that are harder to come up with.
eMarketer: What do you mean by attitudinal metrics?
Mr. Hecht: For example, if I’m a laptop computer marketer, I want to know how people feel about my laptop, right? I might want to use Yahoo! or MSN or a portal with shopping channels to gauge consideration for my product. If I were to survey people who considered my brand through these channels over the course of a year, I could evaluate what effect my media spending had on these people.
The example I gave is the funnel from a building awareness with content and sponsorships stage to shopping channels and search. This speaks to how online display advertising and search work together.
Attitudinally, I feel like we’re at this inflection point where there is enough angst and enough dollars have been spent that I think there’s an opportunity for a bunch of parties to pull together and take on this issue.
eMarketer: What are the biggest challenges with respect to measuring the brand effectiveness of online video?
Mr. Hecht: We launched something we call the Pool Initiative. The purpose is to get at an understanding about which video formats make the most sense for consumers, depending on the type of video content they’re consuming.
Initially, the preroll made it easy for marketers. By forcing the view and putting [it] before the content, you can get to bigger numbers and that’s really what created the video marketplace. But the one thing that was missing was considering what is best for the consumer. We’re doing a full-blown qualitative/quantitative study that will take about six months to do. We hope it will identify the right formats for various kinds of campaigns.
eMarketer: Are gross rating points relevant for online media?
Mr. Hecht: Yes. I think reach is relevant. The form in which you measure it isn’t as relevant. I mean, GRPs keep things simple. Going out and reaching a lot of people is relevant. And that ties us to what we’re doing with the Audience on Demand Network.
The network is a platform that builds on Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and AOL’s Platform-A tools to enable marketers to connect with specific audience demographics in one campaign buy across multiple online networks. We use DoubleClick’s ad-serving platform as a common base.
What we’re saying to clients is with data technology, your ability to reach your true target—dog owners, moms with three kids or whomever—is much more available. We’re trying to help them acquire a publisher’s inventory in a more straightforward way.
eMarketer: Do you see GRPs diminishing in importance?
Mr. Hecht: I do, but not in traditional media. I’ve written a lot of media plans and one of the very first ones was for McDonald’s, around 1998, when I had to convert the digital media to GRPs. I think some clients, when they want to combine offline and digital, they may force that match.
What we need to do is focus more on the outcomes and the outputs of digital media. We’re focused more on brand engagement metrics that enable us to have better proxies for behavior and attitudes.
eMarketer: Can you give me an example of a marketer that’s going down that path?
Mr. Hecht: Certain categories—financial services, auto and consumer electronics—have mastered the behavioral side. Now they want to understand brand impact. They want to know how to measure it. That’s not going to be achieved online through things like “request a quote” or “complete an application.” It could be through partnerships with online publishers, though.
If you’re a consumer electronics brand and you’ve got a partnership with CNET, there are a lot of ways to partner to find out whether a campaign is performing in terms of product consideration. Consideration is an engagement metric that clients care about.
eMarketer: Should the industry look to create some type of standardized online brand measurement platform?
Mr. Hecht: It’s not a bad idea. I just hired a pretty smart guy from Google to work on those issues. He has a product and engineering background. The reason we brought him on board was to think through how to standardize an approach within VivaKi. He feels that we should really be taking an industry approach toward it.
It could be a research consortium, it could be with agency networks. In the area of data, there’s an opportunity to work collaboratively with other companies. I just don’t have any specifics on that. I think it would help everybody in the industry. At the end of the day, the secret sauce is in how you use those things that are standard to glean the insight.
