Global brands are getting more particular about data. They are now looking to performance data from their global digital campaigns to answer questions and provide insights into how creative, media and overall messaging affect consumer behavior.
But we’ve also noticed that in Latin America, much of the rich data available to these brands is not captured by their agency partners – wasting an opportunity to drive performance, efficiency and knowledge from their digital media.
It’s not a new problem – North America, Europe and Asia used to operate the same way - but the stakes are higher now, and data has become the industry currency, informing the majority of business decisions. If data is not reliable and consistent across regions, its value is limited.
Here are five questions to ask your client to be sure you’re on the same page when it comes to their digital data:
1. Are you okay with publishers self-reporting their performance numbers? Is fraud a concern?
One of the benefits of serving your ads with an IAB- and MRC-accredited ad server is that your data is consistent and trustworthy. When you use tracking pixels, there are many ways publishers can intentionally or unintentionally skew performance data. When you’re using a tracking pixel, even through a reliable ad server, you are relying on the publisher to place this pixel correctly on their site and in your ad. Even for legitimate and trustworthy sites, data can be bad. For untrustworthy publishers or impressions bought programmatically, fraud and erroneous performance reporting can be huge problems.
2. Is it important to know whether your ads appeared in a viewable window for the consumer? Do you want to know how many impressions are you paying for that aren’t seen? How important is it to make sure your ads are running in a “safe” environment and in territories you expect?
Verification and Viewability have become hot topics for brands around the world. Verification provides insights into geographic impression delivery, brand safety, content classifications (sports, entertainment, news, etc.) and device type impression delivery. Viewability provides insights into whether the ad served was in the viewable window. These are becoming increasingly critical as more content is being purchased programmatically and as budgets continue to rise in Latin America.
3. Do you want the ability to cap the frequency of your ads or optimize based on performance? How important is it to be able to sequence or retarget ads based on what we know about the consumer? Is repeating the same ad to the same user hurting the brand?
Frequency capping and the ability to rotate/optimize creative easily is crucial to maximizing the value of your data and the performance of your ads. We’ve seen many campaign situations where the same viewer has seen the same ad 10+ times. This can create a negative brand image and harm the effectiveness of your campaign. The right ad serving technology can easily avoid these traps---but you have to take advantage of the tools at your disposal.
4. Is data consistency important to be able to compare apples to apples among publishers and placements?
As an agency, if you are allowing your publishers to self-report, you limit your ability to leverage the data you are getting across your whole plan. Since publishers report on proprietary metrics and often showcase certain KPIs (that benefit them), you lose the impartiality you’d get with the performance data from a third-party ad server. Ideally, you want to select one who is not also selling you media.
5. Is who you reach important or merely how many times? How do you compare traditional media to digital for investment decisions?
Audience reporting for digital has reached a turning point, as industry research leaders Nielsen (OCR) and Comscore (vCE) have pushed the adoption of their versions of the eGRP.
The GRP has been used in traditional broadcast for 50+ years to apply a singular performance data point for audience targeting and reach/frequency. Now, brands are leveraging eGRPs to compare traditional broadcast to digital and force publishers to guarantee audience.
In most cases, agencies and brands are aligned in their desire to improve performance and enhance knowledge from campaign to campaign. But asking questions like these can showcase the importance of aligning data with execution and enhance your stature as a valuable partner.
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Mike Caprio is the VP of Latin America and Global GM for Online Video at ad technology company DG/MediaMind. You can follow him on Twitter @michaelcaprio, or connect via LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcaprio/
