SAN JUAN, PR– In a landscape that values data, measurement, ROI, and other affirming selling points, why is it so hard to navigate? In a town hall with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp. at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Jonathan Steuer, chief research officer at Omnicom Media Group, explored how the industry got to this space and how it can work to make it more accessible.
There are two forces that got the industry to where it is today. One is the promise of digital and how the way that digital optimization has worked has led us down a dangerous path where optimization is about short-term campaigns simply proving that something worked. In turn, the data that is yielded has shown short-term gains and ignored the big picture.
“The data that we buy and use has been focused more on showing short-term gains because they’re easy to show than thinking about how data fits into a broader audience strategy that looks holistically at the whole marketing funnel, the consumer journey, the true inventory optimization,” Steuer said.
The industry is also still operating in a world of measurement that was designed for a TV ecosystem in which there were three TV networks and where rating numbers felt like an accurate representation. Now, this ecosystem has evolved.
Accuracy now comes from counting each atomic exposure, including delivery and and outcomes.
“If you skip that counting step and go directly to the, ‘we’re going to do it on an outcome’, you necessarily sort of collapse the entire conversation into, ‘This campaign did awesome because more people bought beds or beer or subscribed to a newspaper,’” Steuer said.
In order to make this more accessible and more realistic, Steuer explained that it’s about simplification and standardization. The industry has been so fragmented that there is no standard interface or data set or way of looking at outcomes.
“You need a standard underlying data set that everyone can trade on so that instead of worrying about the information gradients around who has what data and who can do what better than the other folks, you can at least look at reach and frequency across everybody,” Steuer said.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
