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Is Measurability More Important Than Effectiveness For Marketers?

Forbes Communications Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Keith Bendes

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It’s an important question for all marketers to ask themselves: Does measurability reign supreme, or does creating the best consumer experience? We all want to claim the latter, but the reality is that we answer to someone, and if we can’t show the value of our work with data, it’s hard to prove our professional value. The result is that marketers often choose to execute experiences that are measurable, even at the expense of impact.

Programmatic media is an example of this. It’s the most measurable media spend given the data is in real time. Marketers can gauge exactly how many times their ads are clicked, the cost of each click and the resulting return on investment (ROI).

The issue with programmatic is that an alarming portion of it is fraud, and the industry is aware of this. In 2017, an Advertising Week panel (subscription required) was asked how much fraud is in the numbers, and the estimates were frightening. The CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions reportedly estimated that over 50% of direct programmatic is fraudulent, while other experts reportedly agreed that the best-case scenario is one-third.

While many savvy marketers would agree that measuring clicks is not the most effective way to gauge ROI given this level of fraud, clicks are still the predominant key performance indicator (KPI). Since programmatic media can generate a large number of clicks, it is a major focus area for most marketers.

I’m not saying brands shouldn’t invest in programmatic. There is a lot of progress in mitigating fraud, and even when accounting for fraud, it can be highly effective if used correctly and in balance with other marketing efforts. What I am saying is that measurability allows programmatic media to have this level of fraud without losing its funding to other channels.

Based on my experience working with an experiential marketing agency, it’s clear that many marketers believe that the value of a physical interaction is greater than a digital interaction. There is also data showing the importance of experiences for younger generations. Even so, it is still much easier to measure a digital interaction than a physical interaction.

Brands may claim they are increasing their spend on branded experiences, but this is likely due to their understanding that younger consumers prefer experiences over material things. It’s also likely in response to competitors increasing their experiential budgets, and we all know the impact of the fear of missing out, or FOMO. What is still largely missing is the quantitative evidence that a consumer who engages with an experience is more valuable than one who interacts solely online.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, but one the industry must address to avoid the pendulum swinging away from experiences and back toward clickbait. Comparing physical and digital interactions will never be apples to apples, but the closer we can get the KPIs, the better off the industry will be.

The question then becomes: How do you prove the impact of a physical experience in a way that allows for a healthy comparison to programmatic and other digital media?

Extend the physical experience with digital components.

If you can deliver the same KPIs (impression, clicks) as a digital program, then the physical experience is icing on the cake.

As an activity, take the total spend of your physical experience including the digital extension. Ask your brand what they could deliver for that spend in programmatic clicks. Given the level of fraud we know exists, take a conservative 70% to arrive at a true impression count. With digital extensions and content production from your physical event, you should be able to deliver that level of engagement (if your experience is buzzworthy), and the decision for the brand becomes easy.

Any time I pitch an experiential activation to a brand I ask, “If I can deliver the same results as if you spent this money on programmatic, then would you would agree it’s a homerun investment?” I don’t know of any brand that would say otherwise.

Prove the value of the event attendee to the brand.

Most experiential companies focus their event recaps on the number of attendees that went through the experience. The issue with this approach is that you will never reach as wide an audience as with digital media. Now, if you instead prove the value of each event attendee is exponentially greater than digital-only consumers, you have a strong case. Here are two ways to prove value: engagement and purchasing.

• Engagement: By comparing engagement rates of consumers who participated in a branded experience versus came from other channels like paid audiences, you can demonstrate the value of experiences. Metrics including email marketing open rates, social post engagements and coupon redemption all demonstrate how valuable an individual is to a brand. To measure these effectively, you must monitor the audience well after the experience ends, which means it’s no longer only about what happened during the experience.

• Purchasing: This is much harder to measure and is ultimately the holy grail. The way most marketers track purchasing is through credit card data. When they serve a banner ad to a consumer, that consumer has a unique IP address. Information is tied to that IP address, and data companies make it possible to connect the IP to a credit card. They can identify if consumers who saw an ad eventually made a purchase. The same approach must be brought to experiential. Brands and agencies should be segmenting audiences that came through experiential channels to understand if that group is more likely to purchase than other groups, therefore making them a more valuable audience.

The reality is that measurability is a major component of a marketer’s decision making process. There are ways to compare the value of consumers who come from physical experiences versus digital clicks, and the industry must advance those methods to increase transparency. If all marketing tactics have high transparency of measurement, marketers won’t have to make the choice between measurability and effectiveness.

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