A campaign for better measurement

We can access data on how many digital clicks, impressions, interactions, engagements, conversions ads received. We can scrutinise a wide range of metrics around the degree to which the ad was viewed, whether the sound was on – the list of data points now available is almost endless.

But what’s missing in our data-rich age is information about audience attributes, what our campaigns delivered cumulatively across media, platforms and publishers. We are also lacking data about sales performance and brand perception in the medium to long-term.

But worse than the blanks is the fact that the data we do have is all based on different standards, preventing marketers from being able to accurately understand the return on their investments across media types.

However there is optimism among global brands that the situation can and will change. For the past couple of months, WFA has been working with a cross-industry group to accelerate the work needed to achieve transparent cross-media measurement. We will continue to flesh out a plan over the next months and then share our proposal with the wider industry.

The goal of this exercise is to enable marketers to measure and de-duplicate every impression in an always-on, privacy-safe, holistic cross-media measurement fashion.

No one said this was going to be easy, of course. We live in a world of changing consumer behaviour.

TV viewing habits are being transformed. With the growth of Connected TVs and OTT viewing, TV has been becoming more digital.

And yet, TV audience measurement in most markets is still predicated on panels and ‘people meters’, a world apart from the census measures offered in digital. And while a commercial TV impression is fully viewable and full duration by definition, the digital world doesn’t offer the same guarantee.

One of the key objectives of the cross media measurement group will be to establish globally-aligned principles, expressing advertiser preference, supported by cross-industry consensus, for how cross-media measurement should work.

At the same time, we want to promote greater consistency with global measurement. That means fewer national, nuanced versions of the same thing.

Media is measured locally, of course, and markets may deviate in some areas but our objective is to ease implementation by finding consensus with key parties once and globally.

Hear more from Ben Jankowski, SVP Global Media, Mastercard, on why cross-media measurement is important and please reach out if your company would like to find out more about WFA’s work on this.