Agency execs balance automation and strategy with new ad formats

All the industry changes might give new relevance to old fashioned media buying, noted Jeff Ratner, president of media, analytics, and data at the agency Quigley-Simpson. Ratner said performance-driven advertising often focuses on metrics like return on ad spend and traffic acquisition costs, while traditional planning takes an inverse approach by considering a consumer’s interests and media consumption. That also requires using more traditional data sets like MRI data and considering reach and frequency to understand what an advertiser can afford.

“That doesn’t mean the bottom up doesn’t matter,” Ratner said. “It doesn’t mean that those KPIs don’t matter, but it helps you understand and build out budget allocations to really see what your plan is going to deliver against a broader goal.”

It’s also important to put the right audiences into media-buying tools when testing various platforms using a brand’s first- and third-party data sources, said Will Ferguson, chief growth officer at Dentsu-owned Tag. Ferguson, who spoke onstage with Ratner, also said persuading advertisers to worry less about down-funnel metrics can make for a hard conversation. The other wild card in play is the future of third-party cookie deprecation. Ferguson noted that the repeated delays by Google have created industry uncertainty.

“Performance metrics are crack and the brand metrics are vitamins,” Ferguson said. “And it’s very addictive when you start seeing them come in and you forget to take your vitamins most of the time … Let’s not get too far down the funnel and ROI ourselves out of business because it’s a real risk.”

Retail media networks also face new opportunities and challenges amidst plenty of growing pains, a topic discussed right afterwards onstage. RMNs provide plenty of first-party data, alternative advertising channels and new ways to engage with customers, said Aisha Khan, GroupM’s executive director of global commerce client acceleration. But the fragmented landscape also creates new challenges for measurement and budget allocations.

“It’s this mindset shift of integration,” said Khan. “There’s really no such thing anymore of just brand-building or just conversion. Everything’s becoming quite gray.”

Giants like Amazon also skew perceptions of the broader RMN space, said Kristi Argyilan, svp of retail media at the grocery giant Albertsons Media Collective, who shared the stage with Khan. But she added retailers can differentiate themselves by focusing on specific verticals and customer bases. She also said advertisers that over-focus on metrics like sales or return on ad spend might also miss out on longer-term opportunities for brand-building and customer connections.

“We see our customers two and a half times a week on a personal level,” she said. “We can piece together who they are, how they are, and what’s important to them. The other thing that we really focus on in our positioning is, life happens around food. So we’re really specific about owning our vertical. As a media buyer, you should understand what each retail media network’s vertical is like.”

Even the booming creator economy has its own ongoing measurement challenges. In a discussion on the growing talent and technology sides of the creator economy, influencer agencies shed light on the metrics on creator impact, emerging channels for creators and the opportunities in commerce. 

Measuring the impact of influencer marketing campaigns is no mean feat. While traditional metrics like views and likes offer some insight, brands are increasingly seeking ways to measure more meaningful metrics like consideration, purchase intent and sales lift, explained Kimmy Phan, senior director of measurement and analytics at creator company Whalar.

“One of the biggest issues we’re seeing is inconsistent metrics across all the platforms right now,” Phan said. “We do things through unified reporting, which aggregates all of the data to ensure everything is more of an apples-to-apples comparison. We also look at true influence and engagement, so this is going beyond vanity metrics like views and likes.”

Agencies are also seeing more and more creators becoming their own brands, starting their own line of products or opening physical storefronts. It’s what led Eric Dahan, founder of influencer agency Mighty Joy, to start Mighty Ventures to focus on helping creators to launch their own brands. Mighty Venture has raised capital in order to guide creators on monetizing through different products. 

“Creators started by monetizing that through advertising, because it was the easiest they got paid up front,” Dahan said. “Then as time went on, a lot of them started realizing [they] could actually have a much larger upside if [they] take some of the upfront risk and invest in launching their own brands.”

As monetizing increases, agencies agreed that the demand for content will continue to skyrocket. Owen Sidd, vp of brand partnerships at influencer marketing company Captiv8, brought up newer channels such as social shopping and CTV as means for influencers to find more monetization opportunities. Captiv8 has more than 20,000 active creator affiliates within its network, Sidd noted. It recently launched a pilot on branded storefront products with around a dozen brands and retailers.

“You look at the whole media landscape, there’s just such a need for a dramatic amount of content,” Sidd said. “Retailers [have] their own placements and so forth … and they need content for their catalogs and whatnot. [We look] at creators as this really relevant content creation at scale [and] extending that out to OTT, CTV, digital out of home — that kind of content studio focus.”