As an industry, we can be proud of how the UK’s digital advertising industry has been the leading market in so many areas; the UK has been relentlessly leading the adoption of digital display as a platform, with the highest share of advertising spend globally. We have the highest level of adoption of programmatic platforms and also the fastest adoption of display advertising on mobile platforms.
It’s clear that the UK is ahead of the curve, and we’ve been happy to forge our own path as industry leaders in many areas, but it’s also apparent that in certain areas we’ve looked to the US for reference and even leadership; so whilst in mobile, for example, many of our specialist agencies existed before any such industry even existed in the US, whilst our adoption of programmatic solutions strictly follows the US trend, and is fuelled almost entirely by US born technologies.
This isn’t surprising: scale is the reason why programmatic is so important in the US market, but the UK market has rightly benefited from the efficiencies gained.
Sometimes, however, that need for scale efficiencies may not always drive changes that are in the interests of smaller markets.
As an example, the needs of brand advertisers are very different in the US and the UK. The scale of the US market means many brand advertisers have large dedicated digital teams focused on creating and managing highly optimized campaigns. Campaign success is readily measured using post campaign research, as this becomes so much more cost effective when massive scale is involved.
‘Viewable impressions’ is a quantitative measure of delivery – a refinement of the pre-existing and universal CPM metric.
In the UK, however, brand advertisers typically have fewer resources, and smaller budgets, so they rely far more on their media partners to deliver campaign success measurement and optimization. Post campaign panel measurement is occasionally employed, but generally only for the biggest campaigns, due to the prohibitive costs involved.
As a result of these differences, the US media owners are right to promote ‘viewable impressions’ as the preferred measure for brand campaigns. It’s easily defined and agreed, and importantly, easily automated. It makes sense for an industry where brand advertisers optimize and use third parties to measure the qualitative success of their campaigns independently of their media suppliers.
‘Viewable impressions’ is a quantitative measure of delivery – a refinement of the pre-existing and universal CPM metric. Whilst it doesn’t provide any insight or means of comparison, it’s easily attached to the ‘impression’ commodity that is being traded.
For brand advertisers in the UK, ‘viewable impressions’ simply isn’t enough. They also need a qualitative measure to help them establish a clear return on investment.
UK brand advertisers, when seeking to optimize and measure the success of their brand activity and thereby establish an ROI, are typically presented with one of two options;
- The most common solution is to try to shoehorn performance metrics into a brand campaign, attempting to prove and improve the campaign success through measuring clicks.
- Alternatively, brand advertisers are encouraged to invest more in social channels, where the rate of increase in the number of likes / retweets / follows can somehow be indicators of the success of the campaign.
Inherent flaws limit the value of both these ‘solutions’. Brand advertisements generally do not attract clicks; why should they? Their role is to influence opinion, not to drive a direct action. For most brands, there is no direct action that can occur; any action takes place days, weeks or months down the line, far away from any keyboard. Meanwhile, social media can be very powerful, but only for a few discrete demographics who engage with it. Even for those brands that find it valuable, attaching an ROI is difficult, as management, measurement and interpretation of sentiment on social media is extremely difficult.
Brand advertisers currently don’t get the metrics they need, and as a result reduce their overall spend in digital. Our industry associations are keen that the UK adopts the US initiatives for brand metrics, and while this is a subtle improvement on existing measures, it’s clear that ‘viewable impressions’ aren’t enough. Brand advertisers need to be provided with the metrics that they really care about, and as an industry, our media owners should be taking the initiative to provide this.
Digital media owners often express concerns that the battle for clicks has become a ‘race to the bottom’, so they should work to embrace a different paradigm, where they are actively partnering with their advertisers to create greater value for both.
When brand advertisers write their campaign briefs, they tend to focus on one of three outcomes – creating brand awareness for new or relaunched brands, building sentiment towards their brands, or converting sentiment to action by encouraging purchase intention. These are exactly the three metrics that are measured in post campaign research, and these are exactly the three metrics that media owners should be using to measure and optimize brand campaigns. Solutions to measure these three brand engagement measures in real time already exist, as do solutions to allow a campaign to be optimized to improve each of these. nugg.ad’s own brand solutions are already being used with great success by many forward-thinking media owners, empowering these publishers to offer real time brand measurement and optimization to their advertisers in an easy and efficient way.
Brand advertising represents another opportunity for the UK digital industry to forge a strong global leadership position, and it’s something we have to lead not follow.
