Some Marketers Want More Ad Testing, Less Debating About Metrics
Not every marketer is obsessed with how much time consumers spend with their digital ads or how many pixels they see. They’re less hung up on whether they pay for five seconds of screen time or 10 seconds, or how their ad efforts compare with TV campaigns.
They just want their ads to work.
As many leaders in the marketing world push hard for better standards in digital advertising, some executives roll their eyes at debates over viewability minimums and ad currency battles.
“We’ve seen a real bifurcation in the market,” said Carolyn Everson, Facebook ’s vice president of global marketing solutions. “You have many traditional marketers…And then you have these disrupter brands like Dollar Shave Club, Airbnb and Netflix . They don’t care if somebody watches their ads for 2.5 seconds or 2 minutes. As long as someone takes an action.”
This new wave of marketers is advocating for experimentation with what works on different digital outlets from Facebook to Snapchat to take advantage of each platform’s unique strengths and audience, rather than try to get all platforms to adopt identical standards for measuring and selling ads.
Laura Joukovski, senior vice president of media and analytics at TechStyle, which operates e-commerce brands such as Shoedazzle and Fabletics, says she “doesn’t actively participate in the conversations” regarding viewabilty standards, third-party audits and the like.
Marketers spend too much time trying to equate different media and social platforms, she said. “You really have to reflect the way the people use those things,” she said.
Instead, she pushes her team to frequently test new tactics and to challenge the prevailing, traditional marketing wisdom. For example, on Snapchat, the company has seen better results from ads that are on screen for just three seconds versus 10 seconds.
To him, advertising should be “purely outcome based.” For instance, what matters to the company is, did an ad lead to someone booking a rental through Airbnb? “We don’t need convoluted controversial metrics systems,” he said.
Marketers need to make a “mentality shift” to focus on tracking how well digital ads drive the results they care about, Mr. Gupta argues, then issues such as viewability will take care of themselves.
Wayfair, the largest online-only furniture retailer in the U.S., is another brand that sees itself as part of this emerging category of marketers.
“There used to be two ways” to advertise, said Nancy Go, Wayfair’s vice president of brand marketing. “You were Pepsi, you invested in the brand, you ran on the Super Bowl.”
Or, you were purely directly response and paid for direct mail or “dancing mortgage commercials,” she said. “Those brands don’t give much heed to customer experience or lifetime brand value. What we do is think about building a brand with a performance view.”
Of course, it’s a lot harder to think and act this way if you are marketing automobiles or consumer products like shampoo and toothpaste, said GroupM North America Chief Executive Brian Lesser. Unlike marketers that have the luxury of easily tracking a direct consumer behavior, advertisers of giant brands may be trying to build a long-term association with a line of products because they don’t sell their wares directly to consumers, instead relying on retail partners.
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GroupM has been known for pushing some of the toughest digital ads standards in the business. For example, ads must be 100% viewable, and video ads must be user initiated. Mr. Lesser believes that creating apples-to-apples comparisons across media channels is vital, particularly the more an advertiser spends.
“If you have $100,000 to spend on digital media, you do not care [as much about these metrics issues],” he said. “If you’ve got $100 million or $1 billion, you need to level the playing field when buying media. It’s not a fool’s errand…It is perhaps the most important thing that you do.”
It’s not a surprise that platforms like Facebook and Google prefer the way disrupter brands think.
Brad Smallwood, vice president of measurement and insights at Facebook, said some ad buyers are making what he feels are misguided decisions by paying only for ads that appear on a consumer’s screen for 10 seconds or are 100% viewable. For example, that can lead to reaching mostly older consumers, Mr. Smallwood contended.
“We can push back and let them know, ‘it may not be good for you,’” he said. “We want them to keep an open mind, we want to guide them down that easier path that is good for their business.”
Naturally, given the way people quickly thumb through the news feed on their phones, Facebook has looked to sell the marketing world on the idea that there is lots of value in short ad views.
“How do marketers build brands when you don’t have the same kind of attention you once had?” Mr. Smallwood asked.
Babak Pahlavan, Google’s senior director, product management, acknowledged that some brand advertisers want scale, broad reach and as many users as possible as cheaply as possible.
That lack of nuanced, sophisticated buying can be a crutch, say some marketers.
“Some companies use the metrics debate to delay decisions,” said Duncan Fulton, president of FGL Sports, a sporting goods retailer in Canada, which has shifted a lot of its media spend from traditional outlets to digital in recent years.
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