Standards: For, Against and Fence-Sitting
Industry leaders’ insights on whether the digital ad market needs standards for measuring the effectiveness of online brand advertising to spur growth.
For Standards:
“At the end of the day, we ultimately need a standard. If we look at the CMO and how they’re going to want to buy media, it’s only in our best interest to get a system that will measure the impact of brand advertising more effectively.
“The Dynamic Logic brand impact study is today a de facto standard, and many agencies request one to accompany an online campaign because it’s really the single proxy that most people have. DL’s MarketNorms database allows marketers to benchmark their campaign’s performance against others in the same category. But agencies are also starting to create their own metrics to understand brand effectiveness.
“In the long run, would it be great for us to have a single standard to measure the brand impact of online advertising, something that’s interchangeable between all the media? Yes. I hope it happens in my lifetime.”
“Absolutely. Without question we need a standard, because if I’m a marketer, my charge is not only to build results, but to build the value of my brand. It has been demonstrated empirically, time and again, that stronger, higher-valued brands lead to stronger, better business results.
“Marketers want to know what methods to use to evaluate brand value and measure it. Brand equity and value isn’t attributed to any one particular form of media, it’s a function of the totality of their marketing and the impact on consumers. Our marketers would like standards for measuring brand health for all media. In most instances, but not all, brand equity is tied very much to consumer satisfaction and marketing.”
“There is a lack of standardization of measurement strategies. Companies are trying to make their approach to measurement their competitive advantage. That’s wrong. Measurement should be consistent.
“I think the biggest problem is the lack of standards. The industry needs consistent dialogue, agreement on standards of methodology and support from the IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau], the 4A’s [American Association of Advertising Agencies] and ARF [Advertising Research Foundation].”
“It’s not a bad idea. We are thinking through how to standardize an approach within VivaKi. But we could take an industry approach toward measurement. 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 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.”
Against Standards:
“There isn’t a really a standardized way of looking at brand health regardless, so I’m not sure how the online industry could have something that’s standardized. I don’t know how you would approach it. It might be good to have a couple of leading methods. Rather than standardizing it, let’s develop a few different ways of doing it.”
“I don’t think it’s the American way. Companies have their own way of doing things. In my experience, it’s very difficult to force a standard way of measuring something on the industry unless there’s a monopoly.
“Nielsen and TV is a good example. I’d be very surprised if we ever got to a point where there was only one way of doing something. I think publishers like to believe that there’s something outside of their control that’s causing this industry not to grow as fast as it should. We have our approach and we’re out selling it and clients are using it.”
“I’m not in favor of a standard because I think there are different needs for different clients in different circumstances. Competition is good. And we think that our system for measuring brand impact is the standard. Competition pushes us to do new things and to take into account the impact on brands of social networks, mobile and other new media and to analyze behavior.”
“I feel somewhat mixed about it. I think innovation is good and as a person who likes doing research for a living, I like being pushed. I like having an environment that’s dynamic.
“We have to create a currency model that’s built on transparency and data quality. Transparency means that the clients need to know exactly what goes into it so they can trust the numbers. The advertisers need to know exactly what goes into it so they trust these numbers that are being used for the media buying. We’re trying to find the right cocktail before we try to serve it to the industry.”
“As an industry, we do lack standards. I think that most would agree on that. But I also think we tend to put too much weight on standards. There’s this view that once we have some better brand measurement standards in place, that the dollars will begin to flow, and I think that’s overly optimistic.
“Online measurement is too complex to be standardized, frankly. I think we should put some foundations in place and have some common vocabulary around brand measurement and go from there. But what I think we need to realize is that as an industry, there’s still so much work to be done on the analytics front. If we think there’s a finish line around measurement, we’ll do brand marketers a real disservice.
“Some of the more standardized metrics, like recall and purchase intent, are valued by our clients, but I think they and we see the opportunity to tie attitudinal measures to behavioral measures. And that’s where the complexity comes in. There’s value in measuring those tried-and-true attitudinal metrics but also in recognizing that there’s another piece to the puzzle, which is the actual behavior. Did consumers purchase? Did they register? Did they take that end action? Digital yields valuable insights and also creates incredible complexity.”
“For us, no. With all the different venues in the digital world, it would be hard to find a digital standard, because it depends on the strategy and objective—what you’re looking to accomplish.
“Our goals revolve around forming a lifetime relationship with the customer. The process is definitely about real-time behavioral and contextual targeting that engages the consumer in a very relevant conversation that’s two-way.”
Fence-Sitting:
“When it comes to ad effectiveness, no. I don’t think that that’s ever going to be possible. But in terms of the currency metrics, the answer is yes. I don’t think you need to have a monopoly to get there.
“So for instance, the two major third-party ad-servers that allow advertisers to track the number of impressions, clicks and conversions from each of their campaigns are Atlas and DoubleClick. Those two are pretty much a de facto standard in terms of counting impressions and clicks. The count discrepancies are nothing compared to the count discrepancies we talked about five years ago.
“There’s never going to be a patented equation on GRPs for online media. That will never fly. Standards exist because they’re transparent. Standards are successful when you get to that tipping point where people say, ‘OK, we’re cool with it.’”
