ANALYSIS MEDIA RETAIL ADVERTISING DATA & ANALYTICS DIGITAL REAL TIME MARKETING

Illuminating theworld of mediabuying data

By Nicola Smith on 11 Dec 2014

Faced with an abundance of media data, somebrands are shifting focus from third-party to real-time first-party data while others are opting toamalgamate sources into a single view. Whateveroption they choose, the data has to be reliable.

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Bad data is costing businesses at least 30% ofrevenues, according to research by analystsOvum in 2012, while in December 2013 aDemand Gen Report revealed that more than62% of organisations rely on marketing orprospect data that is 20 to 40% incomplete orinaccurate. But as data continues to becomemore central – and plentiful – within brands’media buying, is it becoming more reliable?

“Marketing organisations are getting much moredata-driven, and as a pure play we are literallyswimming in data, so we have to make sure thatthe data we are using enables us to make theright decisions,” says Ben Carter, marketingdirector at online marketplaceNotonthehighstreet.com.

He is not alone in continually battling to harnessthe wealth of media data available to brandstoday, identifying what is useful and what isnoise. Claire Round, director of marketing andbrand at English National Opera (ENO), says: “Imade the mistake of trying to collect everypiece of data I could, but that makes itimpossible to make a decision, so you have towork out which data you actually need. It’s notjust about data for data’s sake.”

Multiple data sources

Part of the answer lies in ensuring that multipledata sources do not exist in separate silos.Online clothing retailer Surfdome, which workswith Quantcast, has recently invested in this

area, appointing a data specialist earlier this year.Head of paid channels Matt Slingsby says: “[Thedata specialist] has put in place a big dataanalytics package that consolidates all our datasources into one, giving us what is approachingone single version of the truth, so everyone isworking on the same page and the same data,meaning insights become trustworthy and easilyactionable.” The retailer uses real-time salesdata, lifetime data and more recently genderdata.

One finding from its paid media activity was thatthe company was spending more moneyadvertising to women than men. “We realisedmen provided more value to us as a companybecause return rates were lower and conversionrates were higher. We started re-evaluatingwhere we put that money based on lifetimevalue, but from a gender perspective,” explainsSlingsby.

He adds that although it is always important toquery any data, the company is “at a stagewhere all the influence-makers are happy withthe data and insights, and we have enough trustto be able to say ‘ok, let’s put £400k into this[media buy]’.”

Publisher Northern & Shell, whose titles includeExpress newspapers and OK! magazine, has alsobrought together disparate data sources,partnering with technology vendor Amido tocreate a single view that improves the reliabilityof its audience data as a media owner. The dayswhen a print publisher could rely solely on itsABC circulation figure to sell ads seem to benumbered.

“The only waywe can actually

make adifference from adata point ofview is to putpeople intoaudiencesegments andwe can thenserve thempersonalised adson the fly whenthey are on thewebsite”

DeniBoncheva, Northern& Shell

“I inherited a lot of digital platforms that didn’treally talk to each other,” says head of CRM DeniBoncheva. “The data didn’t work together. Sowe have been addressing how to get people toregister, and how to combine all the data acrossour different brands into one data pot and makesense of it – online and offline.”

ENO has also been able to aggregate its onlineand offline data, working with Total Media andusing the QlikView data visualisation platform.ENO’s Round says: “[QlikView] takes data feedsof all our information including historic salesinformation, social media information, emailengagement and comparative Nielsen MediaResearch data, enabling us to start visualisingthe sales pattern and how it benchmarks againstother things in the marketplace.”

The company has recently moved more of itsmedia budget into digital, which is now around50%. “We put tracking tags all the way throughthe purchasing journey, and have increased thatspend because we have seen a really goodconversion in sales,” explains Round. Not thattracking tags are always reliable. “If somethinghappens, such as a software upgrade, thetracking tags don’t stick.” It is one of a numberof causes of potential discrepancies. “We look athistorical analysis too, but you have to ensuresometimes that you are comparing like for like.”

However, ENO does learn lessons fromeach campaign. “We are just reviewing ourrecent La Bohème campaign because we haveLa Traviata coming up in February and they havefairly similar audience profiles,” says Round. “Wewill look at what we can learn from thatcampaign in terms of optimising the next onefrom the start.”

Real-world reach

As a London venue, ENO’s offline media spendincludes out-of-home (OOH) advertising on theLondon Underground, as well as radio. Roundsays the organisation segments its customerdata, as well as using information from KantarMedia TGI, to give it a sense of its audiences’cultural engagement and behaviour. “Forexample, if we are looking at one targetaudience and a significant percentage are within

the Classic FM [audience demographic], thatseems like a sensible place to put thatcampaign.”

Notonthehighstreet also uses offline advertising.In September it ran its first OOH campaign,promoting its offering around London tubestations. It worked with media agency M2M toidentify the audience it was targeting, as well asusing ‘mosaic’ data from TGI to profile itscustomer base and combine this withattitudinal segmentation. “We pulled all of thosetogether and identified the right media to reachthose people,” says Carter. “For example, weknew we didn’t want to be in Oxford Circusbecause it is a big tourist station and therewould be a lot of wastage – we wanted to goafter commuter stations where we knew peoplewould give more consideration to the message.”The campaign prompted an uplift in demand inwhat is usually a quiet trading period.

The retailer will also increase its focus on TVadvertising next year. It has used econometricsto show that TV has been working, but this hasalso been supported by online data. “We canalso see the TV success through the correlationto search impressions as well as overall websitetraffic when our ads are on TV,” says Carter. Butthe company plans to take this further: “Wewant to drill down to what is the most effectiveand efficient media buy, so we will do spot byspot analysis. We have a bespoke audience whowe go after, which is a combination of ourtarget audience and some attitudinal segmentsthat we have identified, and that is crosschecked against TGI data to say what theirmedia consumption behaviour will be like. Forexample, we know our audience tends to startwatching TV later in the evening.”

Change in emphasis

One key shift online is the move from relianceon third-party data to an increased emphasis ongathering first-party data, whether from thebrand itself or from a publisher’s directrelationship with its audiences. Northern & Shellcan track every customer touchpoint on itswebsite, from browsing behaviour toregistration, login and competitions, and this iscombined with social media data, allowing it tosegment customers. “For example, if someone ison the Daily Express website and we also knowfrom their Facebook interests that they like acertain political party and regularly comment onarticles about politics, we put them into asegment called ‘politics’,” says Boncheva.

“Programmaticadvertisingalready accountsfor more thanhalf the revenuesfor many online

Out-of-home advertising at LondonUnderground stations helpedNotonthehighstreet boost demand during anormally quiet trading period

publishers andwe expect this togrow further”

Rakesh Patel, AutoTrader

The data is also real time, enabling the publisherto serve programmatic advertising. “The onlyway we can actually make a difference from adata point of view is to put people intoaudience segments and we can then serve thempersonalised ads on the fly when they are on thewebsite,” she explains.

Automotive website Auto Trader, which isinvolved in the media buying market both as apublisher and advertiser (working with Vizeum),is also seeing a rise in programmatic advertising.Digital sales director Rakesh Patel says:“Programmatic advertising already accounts formore than half the revenues for many onlinepublishers and we expect this to grow further.”He adds that Auto Trader offers its advertisers,which include Hyundai, Kia and Mercedes-Benz,detailed consumer segments based on first-party data to be targeted in real time. As anadvertiser itself, 70% of Auto Trader’s digitalinvestments are in programmatic advertising.

This trend towards programmatic is furtherundermining the importance of third-party dataonline. Surfdome’s Slingsby says it now useslargely proprietary data. “Everything we work onis raw data and we pump it into one system.”The retailer used to rely heavily on GoogleAnalytics but Slingsby says it has moved awayfrom this as he is unsure of its accuracy. “Fortrends such as day-to-day comparisons and

year-on-year, it is absolutely fine, but in termsof pure decision making at a granular level it’snot there.”

Channel 4 is another organisation investingmore in gathering first-party data, havingdeveloped a strategy that has resulted in theregistration of over 11.5 million viewers in theUK. Head of data planning and analyticsSanjeevan Bala says first-party data “is both highquality and obtained through a relationship oftrust. There are too many sources of third-partydata that are increasingly perceived as lowervalue and often based on models, and thereforenot as reliable for targeting.”

The Post Office’s real-timemedia decisions

Sunday 20 July 2014 saw the launch ofthe Post Office’s ‘We’re Changing’campaign, which promoted that it hasbranches open on Sundays. Thecampaign ran across a number ofchannels, including social media, and thePost Office worked with Mindshare UK touse its Loop Room, a physical data hubthat made statistics, campaigninformation and national news visibleacross six screens simultaneously,allowing informed decisions to be madebased on the data at hand.

“We used external and one-to-onepersonal data to inform the degree ofmedia spend behind certain social mediaposts,” says social media manager DarrenJones. ”We knew that by having all theright people in one room together wecould make decisions faster and respondquicker to real-time events.”

The Post Office used Lithium, a back-endsocial media technology that enabled itto drill down into what individual userswere talking about to give tailoredresponses. The organisation alsoresponded to real-time events.

The campaign took place on PrinceGeorge’s birthday, so the Post Officecreated a bespoke post for Twitter,Facebook and Vine, and used targeting tomake sure it was delivered to the rightpeople, such as followers of the Royalfamily. The post read ‘First steps forPrince George, next steps for us’. Thecampaign achieved a 7.9% engagementrate, and prompted 300 tweets an hour atits peak.

“In terms of the reliability of social datayou have to take into account context,and spend time interrogating it andmaking sure it is right by looking at pastcampaigns and activity,” says Jones. Buthe adds that ‘dark social’ – social sharingof content that occurs outside of whatcan be measured by web analyticsprograms, such as via online chat oremail, adds another challenge. “You caninterrogate all of this public data yet findyou are sometimes missing two-thirds ofthe pie.”