Every marketer worth their salt is looking for new ways to drive incrementality in sales to keep their brand moving forwards. But at a time of tightened budgets, can you afford to take risks? Or, rather, can you afford not to?
During a recent B&T Breakfast Club, presented by Rokt, in Sydney, a panel of measurement and marketing experts told attendees that now was the time to experiment more, not less, as incrementality becomes harder to find.
“It’s natural that your appetite for risk reduces when the market is not in a great place,” said Ankita Jain, Foxtel Group’s head of performance and digital media.
“It can happen that brands want to continue business as usual and not make too many changes. But targets always increase, which means brands need to find new ways to get bang for buck.”
While there are more channels than ever for brands to find potential buyers — including the AI search and chatbot platforms which are rapidly growing in prominence — working out what works is not necessarily straightforward.
Platform metrics
Measurement has (to greater or lesser degrees) been a challenge in advertising for, well, the last century or so. After all, John Wanamaker is widely believed to have said “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” in the late 1800s.
These days, the variety of channels available to marketers, each reporting their own metrics in slightly different and not directly comparable ways might confound Wanamaker even further.
“Platform metrics are extremely valuable,” added Jain, “they can help you to segment your activity, which audiences or specific assets are working. You can also set up incrementality studies within a platform… But it does not have a full picture of your other media in market. You cannot rely on platform data in isolation.”
“They definitely muddy the waters,” said Nathan Crook, Ticketmaster’s Asia Pacific Vice President of Marketing.
“But they’re still very important for seeing the performance of campaigns and demonstrating the performance of campaigns internally. But if you look at your channels in isolation, you’re going to get misleading results.”
Rokt, of course, produces its own performance numbers. But Michael Dunlop, the business’ VP and GM of commercial, said that platform-based numbers need to be “scrutinised”.
“Like Anikta said, they’re great for real-time optimisation, historical benchmarking and being able to understand who your audience is,” he said.
“The best case scenario is that they’re used for experimentation and to test theses of what a channel is trying to do. For example, are you trying to unlock incremental acquisitions in a particular segment and how do you measure it? Are you trying to ramp up one channel and what’s the impact on another campaign running at the same time? What does it do to campaigns on the platforms? You have to scrutinise them, though, because maybe it’s just capturing existing demand.”
Market mix modelling solutions are one method to bring independent rigour to media effectiveness testing. But they are not the only solution, as Dunlop said that some advertisers Rokt works with are very willing to strip their activity to the bare bones for six weeks to reset the benchmarks and move forwards with cleaner data. It’s not an approach that would work in every sector.
Crook, meanwhile, explained that non-marketing senior executives at Ticketmaster have begun to ask greater questions around the incrementality of its performance marketing “because its results are so favourable”.
It seems, then, that the questions marketers are being asked are getting harder to answer. In a tightened market, as Jain said, the temptation is to batten down the hatches. The metrics produced by more established platforms can also reinforce this predicament.
Best practice – or easiest practice?
“Traditionally, our investments have gone to Google and Meta. They’ve always worked for us,” said Crook.
“There’s a few reasons we always go back to them — ease of use, metrics we’re used to and, at the moment, we’ve got 3,000 different products on our platform, so tracking customer conversion is vital. We’re open to emerging channels, but they’ve got to meet those basic metrics and ease of use for us to even look at them.”
Jain concurred: “The more mature advertising platforms do have very sophisticated capabilities when it comes to targeting, optimisation and reporting, so it’s only natural to compare an emerging platform to that.”
However, there’s perhaps more than meets the eye going on here, as Dunlop explained.
“We’re an emerging channel. We get KPI-ed on those things. Advertisers have years of historical performance data within existing channels. You know what happens when you scale up, down and in seasonality. It’s hard to justify investing heavily into an emerging channel.
“Platform attribution methodologies naturally measure performance through the lens of that platform, which can advantage channels closer to conversion and make cross-channel comparisons difficult.”
Australia at the leading edge
But Aussie marketers should not despair. Crook and Dunlop said that Australia is at the leading edge of marketing effectiveness measurement — certainly compared to other areas within APAC.
“We’re at the forefront. We’re leading the way in terms of advertising technology and the willingness to spend,” said Crook.
“I spend a lot of time in Japan,” added Dunlop, “and Australia is leaps and bounds ahead of that type of market because of how teams and companies are structured and where marketing expertise sits.
“Comparing the US and Australia, we have the same measurement capabilities but one difference I’ve seen is that they can be more aggressive in challenging the platforms based on their incrementality results. That might be because you’ve larger teams and it’s easier to run and you’ve got more scale to be able to take risks.”
The need to take risks, however, is growing as new channels enter the market. New commerce and retail media solutions are appearing at a quite remarkable pace and creating massive returns for some advertisers. AI search is rapidly changing the long-established tenants of SEO, if not turning them on their head. And content creators are continuing to grow in prominence.
But the way to start, in Jain’s mind, is to “crawl, walk, run”.
“It’s important to be where the customer is. That means you have to test new channels, whether that’s content creators, AI or anything else. Start small, get initial learnings, then slowly scale up and look at broader business metrics before you make any major shifts from one platform to another,” she explained.
That’s the theory. Perhaps it’s on the money.
Can you afford to risk it? Perhaps.
But perhaps the real question is, can you afford not to?
