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Marcus Johnson (00:00):

In a fast moving market, you have to know what's working, you have to. With Nielsen Ad Intel, you'll know the wheres, whens, and hows of advertising across industries and channels. Maximize your ROI and achieve better results. Stop guessing. Enough already. Start winning. Nielsen Ad Intel.

(00:25):

Hey, gang. It's Friday, November 7th. Max, Alison, Matt, and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER video podcast made possible by Nielsen. I'm Marcus. And joining me for today's conversation, we have three folks, full house. We have with us... That's not a full house. Isn't a full house five in Yahtzee? Who knows? Anyway, our Principal Analyst living in Philly is Max Willens.

Max Willens (00:45):

Hey, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (00:46):

Hey, fella. And we have two special guests, both from Nielsen. We have Head of Performance Marketing based in the Bay Area, it's Alison Gensheimer.

Alison Gensheimer (00:54):

Thanks. Happy to be here. This is fun.

Marcus Johnson (00:56):

Yeah, absolutely. And we also have with us the SVP and Head of Advertisers and Agencies, calling home Cleveland. Calling Cleveland home? Both. Matt Devitt.

Alison Gensheimer (01:07):

Good to be here.

Marcus Johnson (01:08):

All right, because we have some special guests on, whose names I'm just learning, we start with a speed intro.

(01:16):

All right. So first question, not to Max because people know him from previous episodes, but Alison, I'll start with you first, and then Matt. What do you do in a sentence?

Alison Gensheimer (01:25):

What I do, very simply, I lead product and performance marketing for Nielsen globally.

Marcus Johnson (01:30):

Very nice. Matt?

Matt Devitt (01:32):

So, I look after our advertiser and agency clients in the US.

Marcus Johnson (01:38):

Very good. And what is one passion of yours outside of work? Alison?

Alison Gensheimer (01:44):

I'm a boy mom, so I love spending time with my son. He is nine, which is so much fun because they actually like to do stuff now. So you really play soccer, basketball, watch movies, play video games. Yes, I do play Minecraft.

Marcus Johnson (01:58):

Yes, [inaudible 00:01:59].

Matt Devitt (01:59):

[inaudible 00:01:59].

Marcus Johnson (01:59):

Your favorite thing to do?

Alison Gensheimer (02:02):

I'm sorry?

Marcus Johnson (02:02):

What's your favorite thing to do with him?

Alison Gensheimer (02:05):

Probably play basketball. We have a lot of fun just, yeah, one-on-one or something. It's a good time.

Marcus Johnson (02:11):

I like that. I can't imagine my mom playing basketball with me when I was that age. She probably would've dunked on me or something though, so I'm glad she didn't.

Alison Gensheimer (02:20):

He gives me a run for my money now. [inaudible 00:02:23]. Now he's fast.

Marcus Johnson (02:25):

Very nice. Matt, how about you?

Matt Devitt (02:28):

So, not too dissimilar from Alison. My passion is family time, which these days really only have time for. I've got, for many people don't know, I have five kids, so they take up quite a bit of my time, not a lot of time for golf.

Marcus Johnson (02:47):

Yeah. Yeah, get them into it and then you can bring them, pretend it's family time still.

Matt Devitt (02:50):

Yes.

Marcus Johnson (02:52):

Max, I feel like you've got to say family time now, otherwise it makes you a terrible father.

Matt Devitt (02:56):

Yeah, exactly.

Marcus Johnson (02:57):

Cool. Max, what do you got for us?

Alison Gensheimer (02:58):

Sorry for the setup.

Max Willens (03:00):

I like my family too. No, that is the real answer, but just to spice it up, I would add that with all the free time that I clearly have as a father of two young children, I like sewing. I try when I can to make clothes for my kids because they don't get upset with me if a seam is a little wobbly or if it's not made to last for a million years, so.

Marcus Johnson (03:00):

Nice.

Max Willens (03:27):

I'm enjoying that while it lasts.

Marcus Johnson (03:29):

Very cool, and you probably have to buy clothes every week, I imagine, because of their ages. They're growing very quick.

Max Willens (03:35):

It never stops, which is good, but yeah, it never stops.

Marcus Johnson (03:39):

Very nice. Very nice. All right, all great answers. Well, today's real topic. Why advertisers are reducing spend part one, a shaky economy leads to marketing cognitive dissonance.

(03:55):

All right, so ad spending estimates have been cut this year. A few weeks ago, our briefings editor, Daniel Konstantinovic, noted that the IAB low edits 2025 US ad spending forecast from 7.3% growth to 5.7, citing macroeconomic pressures and tariffs. But Alison, I'll start with you. And if you could, I mean, I like this idea of blame pie. It's a game I came up with that basically when you're giving an answer to something, it makes you kind of attribute shares to things. So if you think it's 100% something, then you just say the one thing. If you think it's 50/50, then you've got two halves because you think it's split between two separate things. Maybe it's 40% something, 30, 20, 10. But what do you think are the main factors leading advertisers to cut spend at the moment?

Alison Gensheimer (04:44):

Oh, that's tricky, you're going to make me do math.

Marcus Johnson (04:46):

Sorry.

Alison Gensheimer (04:46):

No, [inaudible 00:04:47], but. Well, I mean, I think definitely 50% is that macroeconomic environment that we're living in. You just can't pretend like it's not happening. The level of uncertainty is just causing people to be more conservative. I mean, our research will show that we seem to be more conservative in the US than AMEA and Asia are a little bit more optimistic than us. But in general, when you come into this place when you don't know what's going to happen in the next six, 12, 18 months, people are going to be a little bit shy about how they're going to do their spend, especially marketing spend, which is easier to move around than some other expenditures.

(05:24):

And I will say, advertisers are always asked to do more with less. That's just, if you haven't been asked that, and I would love to find the company that you're working for because most advertisers are constantly asked to do more with less. Especially as we have AI and more technology, they're like, "Can't you? Aren't there ways? Cost savings?" So, I think having to prove that direct link between ad spend and outcomes is just the world we live in.

Marcus Johnson (05:24):

Yeah. Matt, how about for you?

Matt Devitt (05:52):

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of decision making like this, at least a lot of the stated decision making like what you quoted, Marcus, it's uncertainty about the outlook. So if there's uncertainty, to Alison's point, some of the rational decision making will be to take money out of something that is perceived, at least by some organizations as a bit more discretionary, which again, in many organizations, that advertising budget is considered that. But I think that it is considered discretionary in brand building activity in particular, and I think we're going to talk about this. This is the thing that a lot of marketers are fighting within their own organization.

(06:40):

And when you look at the measurements, which obviously is a big point of emphasis for Nielsen, when you look at the ROIs and the sales responses, why would you ever cut ad spending? I see $3 to $5 ROIs. I see high volume effectiveness. If you actually believe those numbers, you're not cutting one-to-one, you're actually cutting three-to-one. Right? And so, that's where I don't think anybody is rationally making the decision under the assumption that they're cutting three-to-one, but that's the dissonance part. Do we believe the ROIs or do we not? Right? And that's something to discuss, certainly.

Max Willens (07:31):

Yeah, 100%.

Marcus Johnson (07:33):

Go, Max.

Max Willens (07:33):

I was just going to say, I really like that framing of it's not one-to-one, it's three-to-one. I think that's very clever. I would just, to weigh in, I feel like my answer would synthesize what our guests have said and just say that I feel like the downgrade in Outlook is because the economic bumpiness is compelling a lot of advertisers to feel like they have to be more agile and be able to react to things more quickly. The thing about the bumpiness that our economy has experienced this year so far is that things are gyrating kind of quickly, right? It's not just kind of, oh, the economy is slow and everything is kind of sluggish. It's like, week to week the picture changes and that makes advertisers feel like they have to be on the balls of their feet. And that is especially bad for especially ad sellers that are not as good at telling a story about the impact that they deliver.

(08:38):

And you see that in the IAB's numbers, right? I mean, this chart that we have on the screen right here shows that the IAB has basically asked these questions of its advertisers twice. They asked them at the beginning of the year and then they asked them again, I think it was in September. And you see that the channels where the downgrade is steepest are traditional spending areas, right? It's like especially things like print or radio, which are not as good at delivering information about the impact of that spending quickly. And so, if you are a marketer and you're feeling like, I have to be able to change what I'm doing very quickly, I'm going to be less patient about investing in channels where I have to wait weeks or even months to find out what happened because of my investment.

Marcus Johnson (09:28):

Yeah. Before we... I want to talk about this. Alison, I think I cut you off mid-pie. You said 50% this. Did you have another piece that you think [inaudible 00:09:37]?

Alison Gensheimer (09:37):

I think the other 50 was really just that, exactly what we're talking about, the need to prove performance. And so marketers have a tendency to cut things that are harder to measure or have take longer to measure, for things that they can walk in a month or two months and say, "Look, we had an impact. Look, we did it," and that just keeps the ball rolling. And I think to Matt's point though, if you'd wait, if you look at the bigger holistic picture, you're actually cutting off the top of your funnel, which means those lower funnel aspects are going to stop performing as well eventually the more and more you reduce from it because you're not looking at it holistically.

(10:15):

But again, marketers get stuck in those moment to moment, what's happening this month, what's happening this quarter, and they have to answer questions. And so, it's natural that these things happen.

Marcus Johnson (10:26):

Yeah. Yeah. I liked how you framed it before the episode, Max, you were saying because of the shaking economy, advertisers facing more pressure than ever to prove, this word, prove they're spending is effective. And that the ad spending channels that can't effectively and speedily demonstrate the value of investing are there, they are getting penalized for it. Matt, what do you think about this? Have we reached a point where ad sellers have to adapt how they approach measurement? And if so, how are they?

Matt Devitt (10:56):

I think what Max said is totally right in terms of speed. I think actually, many advertisers and their agencies are prioritizing speed to giving their executives an answer, versus something that's holistic and in many cases actually accurate. And this is partly why digital, I think it gets actually an outsized amount of spend relative to its reach.

(11:16):

So, Max actually mentioned audio. So audio is a advertising format that reaches massive swaths of the population. I think a lot of us who are in urban areas may not necessarily see that, especially New Yorkers, because we don't drive. The vast majority of the country drives and they listen to audio. But it is, it's slower moving metrics. And to a degree, I think to Max's point, in a world where we need flexibility, we need quick answers, we're willing to just take, say, what a publisher is telling us. What does an ad server tell us in terms of delivery because I need to justify this thing really fast, versus looking at it as a whole pie because the urgency is so high and the demand for flexibility and agility, but I do think we're losing something there because we're not making holistic data-driven decisions.

Max Willens (12:12):

I think it's so interesting that when you look across the landscape, the different efforts that are underway to ensure that that holistic picture or really just even a fair representation of what's happening at the mid and upper parts of the funnel are underway. I remember, at this point a couple months ago now, I was in New York for Programmatic I/O, and the CEO of Disco got up on stage and said, "We're going to do free brand lift studies for every publisher that works with us." And I just thought, geez, that's crazy. I mean, obviously that's partly done for biz dev on their part, but the idea that that's been so neglected that that would be a thing that there would be lots of publishers in the room to pounce on as an idea, reflects how out of whack some of this stuff has gotten. That struggle to paint a holistic picture of what's going on is a real issue.

Matt Devitt (13:13):

100%. And I can jump in, Marcus. How can you tell an accurate measurement story if you're looking at a specific publisher in a silo if as an advertiser? If you have no visibility to what is happening outside of that publisher... I'm on multiple sites watching multiple programs throughout the day, the idea that you could from just a pure data science perspective come up with an accurate representation of what is happening to your brand just in a silo like that is not, unless that is all you're doing, right? It is, I am skeptical of that.

Marcus Johnson (13:54):

Max, I liked how you phrased this in your report. You just put out some research. Measurement trends, H2, is that what it's titled?

Max Willens (14:02):

Add measurement trends, yeah.

Marcus Johnson (14:03):

Pro Plus subscribers, emaketer.com, you know where to find it. And you said that a marketer's approach to measurement is changing. After years of treating ad measurement tools like an airplane's black box, more marketers are embracing tools that function more like a piece of a plane's guidance system, rather than providing postmortem campaign data. Ad measurement tools are now expected to enable mid-flight course corrections. Tell us a bit more about that kind of thinking.

Max Willens (14:31):

Yeah. I mean, so a lot of this is kind of a function of technology and a lot of it is a function of emerging ad spending channels that have reset marketers' expectations. But in the course of doing research for that report, I found this great survey that we did of a bunch of marketers where they asked about the cadence at which they adjust their ad spending based on measurement data. And what it shows is that the marketing world is evenly split right now, where you have about, I think it's 49% of the population does this on quarterly or less. And then the remaining 51% does it at least monthly.

(15:25):

And if you drill down even further, you've got close to or more than a fifth of them do it every two weeks. And on the one hand, if you're concentrating all your spending just in quick twitch digital environments, that makes a ton of sense. But if you're a brand that spends to drive against full funnel outcomes, lots of different KPIs, this puts you in sort of a tricky spot, right? Where you have to make clear to the stakeholders in your organization that the kind of like weekly readouts of how much you're spending in one digital channel drove some sales on your website is fine, but you also have to factor in this other stuff that takes a little bit longer to assess and think through and crunch the numbers of.

(16:18):

So, we're at an exciting but also perilous juncture for a lot of marketers where you have this opportunity to think about your spending with more detail and more precision than ever, but you also have to make sure that you're making the case for doing so, because otherwise the temptation is, get yourself hooked on short-term metrics is maybe more acute than it's ever been.

Marcus Johnson (16:44):

Yeah. Alison, I'd love to get your take here, because to Max's point, this data, I think it comes from us and TransUnion Marketing Measurement Confidence Survey we did this year. He's saying half the industry updates its spend quite frequently, its spend mixed quite frequently, the other half does not. What happens to the industry as more marketers begin to embrace the opportunity to shift spend around at a higher velocity, as Max phrases it?

Alison Gensheimer (17:11):

I mean, I think marketers have always wanted to do that, right? It's a desired state, we wait anxiously for that report. How did it work? We pull numbers every day and try to understand what's happening. Can we do better? Can we optimize in the moment, has always been the kind of desired end states. There's not a marketer out there that wouldn't try to do that.

(17:30):

That said, I was a programmatic advertiser for years. The algorithms don't update in a day. It takes a while to learn, it takes a while to have optimizations rule out. And to Matt's earlier point, one publisher, one, we all know that one... We all studied MTA when MTA was still a thing, it's kind of coming back. But not one channel, one email, one paid search, one social post does not equal a conversion of it. I've always lived by the mantra, "Seven times, seven different ways to get someone to understand something once." So it's like you don't just drive by and be like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to go do that thing. I'd never thought about it before. I've seen the one thing, I'm moving on."

(18:13):

So it's important to optimize, but it's also important to not get stuck in that single channel thinking, or just what's in front of my face thinking, because that's easy, to our earlier conversation. It gets you through the meeting of how is marketing performing, which is sometimes what marketers are trying to do. But looking holistically and looking across and looking together, because that's in fact how the consumer is experiencing it. They're not just going to one thing, and we're trying to find them. That was the whole point of programmatic advertising, to find the same consumer across multiple different things in the open web and try to link that together to create that frequency experience.

(18:51):

So, I think cross-channel frequency management is something that we have to consider. We have to continue to think. We have to keep measuring and understanding its importance and optimization, especially I think your 50% that aren't doing it are probably the ones that are spending in more channels than the lower of the 50%, they're probably spending in one or two channels.

Marcus Johnson (19:10):

Yeah, yeah. Matt, 20% of marketers according to this data, 20% of marketers updating their spend mix every two weeks. 30%, as Max said, monthly. What are your thoughts around this question?

Matt Devitt (19:22):

I think if we need to change our mix that often, it suggests we're not planning very well.

Marcus Johnson (19:28):

Interesting.

Matt Devitt (19:29):

If I'm being honest, sometimes, genuinely I think we're overdoing it as marketers in terms of just how much we feel like we need to be optimizing. If we can get the right metrics. And maybe actually, I think where it is appropriate is in test and learning scenarios. So I think experimentation is a really good idea if you have really clear hypotheses and what you want to get out of the measurement experiments. Right? And so testing and optimizing different things for specific purposes to learn something about maybe a new channel or a new publisher or a new platform, I think is really interesting approach and you can carve off spend for that. But if you're making major media investments and it's not clear going in what your plan is and you're changing that so frequently. I mean, to me, I think a lot more can be done on the planning side and if you can get your KPIs right upfront.

Marcus Johnson (20:40):

Yeah, yeah. I think a perfect note to end this episode on. That's all we have time for, unfortunately, but thank you so much to my guests for hanging out with me today. Thank you first to Alison.

Alison Gensheimer (20:52):

Thanks, it's been fun. Let's do it again.

Marcus Johnson (20:54):

Yes, indeed. Thank you to Matt.

Matt Devitt (20:56):

Thanks, guys.

Marcus Johnson (20:57):

And to Matt. Oh, and to Max.

Max Willens (21:00):

Always a pleasure, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (21:01):

And of course, thanks to the whole production crew, and to everyone for listening into Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER video podcast made possible by Nielsen. We'll be back on Monday, happiest of weekends.