Last month, the Association of New Zealand Advertisers (ANZA) held a private client breakfast event for over 60 clients in Auckland in association with Ebiquity on the topic of ‘Navigating Media Complexity’.
Peter Cornelius, Managing Director, Ebiquity AUS/NZ, An-Rui Chiew, Head of Effectiveness, Ebiquity Asia Pacific and Lindsay Mouat Chief Executive of ANZA spoke at this year’s event.
The event was held to tackle some of the key issues relating to media transparency globally, with Peter Cornelius’s session drawing attention on recent news that the FBI has launched an investigation into media trading practices in the U.S. market.
Peter looked back to 2016 when the ANA, Ebiquity and FirmDecisions developed guidelines designed to help advertisers achieve media transparency in the report – “Media Transparency: Prescriptions, Principles, and Processes.” He highlighted that since then we have seen many advertisers taking this issue more seriously globally with WFA research highlighting;
- 47% of advertisers highlighting this is a top priority
- 70% have amended their media agency contracts
- $8.1bn worth of media spend has been renegotiated with the framework contract used as guidance
Following this, Peter outlined some concerning statistics relating to agency contracts in the Asia Pacific region, specifically;
- 60% of contracts have insufficient rebate return clauses
- 26% Of contracts are not signed
- 25% Insufficient audit rights
To support this, ANZA released a ‘Media Contract Guidance’ in 2017, to help clients better manage their contracts and what elements should be included in their contracts with agencies.
Peter concluded the presentation by sharing seven strategic principles Ebiquity and FirmDecisions outlined in the ANA guidelines report. You can read these principles in detail here.
“The need for brand advertisers to achieve transparency and trust in the media ecosystem remains important as ever but is not there yet.”
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An-Rui’s session (Digital Misattribution) discussed how evolution in the marketing landscape has seen companies investing significantly more in data-driven measurable channels, and no longer necessarily defaulting to mainstream advertising. This exposes advertisers to the danger of short-termism to achieve faster results, and not thinking of the long-term brand-building.
Referring to Ebiquity’s recent study ‘Payback Australia’ commissioned by ThinkTV, An-Rui highlighted that acceleration into digital media isn’t always the right answer. The study calculated the average return on investment (ROI) for media channel for brands from four of the economy’s most significant marketing sectors: FMCG, automotive, finance and e-commerce. The results showcased that TV is the most effective media channel, delivering almost twice the ROI of search and radio, and around five times that of out-of-home, online video and online display advertising.
Admittedly, it can be very challenging to measure online advertising, now that consumer journeys have become increasingly fragmented – the average New Zealand home having 7.6 internet-connectable . An-Rui explained how Digital attribution is the most commonly used methodology, but is inherently flawed:
- Many advertisers use attribution tools that rely on rule-based methods such as ‘first click’ and ‘last click’. These approaches are subjective, i.e. determined by point-of-view rather than analysis, and also focus exclusively on converting paths, whereas the overwhelming majority of paths are non-converting.
- The solution for this is to use data-driven attribution: analytics that employs a powerful combination of predictive algorithms and integrated analytics to reveal — and properly credit — every bit of digital marketing spend that contributes to conversion likelihood.
- However, even data-driven attribution is far from a silver bullet. Cross-device attribution remains a major stumbling block, as does offline-to-online attribution where major factors such as seasonality, distribution, price, promotions and offline media are not accounted for.
With all the benefits and pitfalls laid out, An-Rui highlighted Ebiquity’s solution to these challenges: pairing digital data-driven attribution with econometric modelling to effectively scale digital attribution contribution. By using both these tools the gaps between measuring offline and online journeys narrow and allow for a consistent and holistic view of performance.
Finally, An-Rui advised advertisers to consider both the short and long-term brand impacts of advertising. Long-term equity modelling, an extension on econometric modelling, enables you to understand which brand metrics really help to build your business and which channels and creative executions are effective at shifting them. With this knowledge, you can fuel the creative briefing to drive effective advertising to achieve both short and long-term business goals.
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