MMA Newsletter July 2010
The Insider's Guide to Marketing ROI
Towards a More Equitable Attribution Model
Dan Eggleston, Vice President of Client Services Analytics at MMA, wrote in a recent article in Mediapost’s Online Media Daily about the need for marketers to take a more sophisticated, analytical approach to assigning credit for online sales than the easy “default mode” of last-click attribution. This refers to the practice of attributing all the credit for an online sale to the last page clicked while ignoring all the previous contributing factors.
According to Eggleston, last-click attribution models create an illusion of “marketing science,” when in fact the results are often grossly overstated, resulting in erroneous findings that can dramatically affect marketing ROI.
Eggleston’s solution: Use a staged system of multivariate equations to determine the relative contributions of different elements across the marketing mix. Doing it this way lets you quantify the true effect of investments in upstream media vehicles such as TV, print, display and e-mail in driving consumers to search or to marketers' websites and subsequent conversion.
Only by taking the time to do this can marketers gain a true assessment of their online marketing performance. And only then will they know how to best allocate their marketing dollars
Why Marketers Need to “Own” Their Customer Data
In a recent article in Mediapost’s Marketing Daily News, Kathy McCarthy, Vice President of Data and Account Management at MMA, cautioned against an over-reliance on digital agencies for managing, tracking and analyzing customer data, including hosting and storage.
Why the concern?
While aggregate or site-level data and dashboards are usually passed along from one digital agency to another, it’s the more granular or longitudinal data that is the true gold, according to McCarthy. That “drilled-down” data is extremely useful in helping the new agency formulate creative, targeting or placement decisions. Unfortunately, it often gets excluded from dashboards.
This becomes a real problem when a company switches agencies and the issue of data ownership becomes murky. McCarthy’s advice: Have a contingency plan in place to mitigate the risks.
Marketers should absolutely rely on digital agencies to manage third-party ad serving and reporting, says McCarthy. But wherever possible, they should also “own” the relationship with these ad serving companies so the data remains intact and consistent in the event of an agency change.
One solution: Assign an internal “Data Czar” who knows the disparate data sources and all their ins and outs, advises McCarthy.
The bottom line, according to McCarthy: “Marketers need uninterrupted access to disaggregated and granular data if they want to optimize performance; it allows them to look back in time, evaluating what worked and what didn’t and adjusting future plans accordingly. It’s the difference between old-style guesswork marketing and 21st century analytics that allows for continual evaluation and adjustment in today’s fast-changing digital world.”
MMA Launches Multi-Sector Digital Media Measurement Roundtable Series
On June 29th at Le Parker Meridien Hotel in New York, MMA held the first in a series of cross-industry roundtable forums on the digital landscape and digital media ROI. MMA executives, along with executives from advertising, media, online providers, media agencies and marketing information discussed and debated the latest digital topics. The roles of attendees ranged from Director of Business Development and Strategy to VP, Director Knowledge and Resources to EVP Research and Marketing Science.
Topics discussed and debated included:
- The Impact of Digital Media on the Media Ecosystem
- Deciphering Digital Data Sources
- Measuring the Impact of Digital on Brand Metrics and ROI
- Leveraging Digital Data in Marketing Performance Measurement Activities
“What we loved about the session was that everyone participated and they were from all kinds of sectors with very different roles,” said Steve Tobias, MMA’s Managing Director of Client Relations. “The setting was intimate enough to allow interactive conversation from everyone as opposed to passing around a wireless microphone in a one way monologue forum.”
Michele Madansky, Ph.D., MMA’s senior digital consultant, kicked off the discussion with an assessment of today’s increasingly complex digital landscape. Dan Eggleston, MMA’s VP Client Services & Analytics then presented MMA’s emerging approaches to measuring digital ROI, which produced an active discussion among the participants.
MMA is on the forefront of measuring the effectiveness of digital media tactics and over the past few years has analyzed digital media in hundreds of marketing effectiveness engagements. Further, MMA’s current and emerging partnerships with many of the world’s leading digital delivery and measurement companies have resulted in development of some unique approaches to measuring digital media and its components as well as cross-media impacts. MMA’s approaches were validated by the attendees as “new,” “unique” and “provocative,” “tying together disparate analytic techniques into a holistic and more efficient solution” to measuring digital media ROI.
MMA will be hosting similar digital media ROI roundtables in both San Francisco and Chicago in August. Please contact Maureen McInnis at (203) 834-3387 for more information on these upcoming forums.
MMA Adds New People
We are delighted to add the following new employees:
Robert Gannon as Senior Vice President, Business Development and Account Management. He joins MMA from WPP’s Red Dot Square Solutions, where he was Senior Vice President, Business Development and Account Management. While there, Gannon led acquisition and customer relationship efforts, working with premier CPG manufacturers and leading retailers including Kimberly-Clark, Unilever, General Mills and Target. Before that, he held senior leadership positions at MillerCoors Brewing, Ipsos and The Nielsen Company.
Amir Zaheer as Vice President, Business Development and Account Management. He joins MMA with more than 17 years of experience in B2B client services as well as consumer marketing on the client side. He previously held senior marketing positions at both Experian Marketing Services and RR Donnelley, helping clients improve the effectiveness of targeted marketing campaigns.
Mitch Weintraub, as Vice President, Account Management. He was Director of Business Analytics for Novartis in both the OTC and Gerber business units, where he was responsible for providing analytical support and business insights to the marketing and sales groups.
Matthew Abrena, as Associate Director, Client Services Analytics. He worked for five years as Director of Marketing Analytics and Insights at New York-based Dratfield Analytics. He was the analytical and account management lead for clients that included P&G/Gillette, Citi Cards, Barclays, WaMu/JPMorgan Chase and MasterCard (Germany).
In addition, MMA has partnered with Michelle Madansky, who is serving as its Senior Digital Advisor. Madansky, a highly sought-after consultant to major Fortune 500 firms on online media research and advertising effectiveness, was formerly Vice President of Customer Insights at Yahoo! Madansky’s responsibilities include ensuring that MMA utilize the latest digital thinking and research in its models and advisory services. She is active in MMA client engagements where digital media plays a major role in marketing activities, and also will be a major participant in MMA’s Client Digital Summits. These summits will help MMA clients understand how to better measure their digital efforts in the context of their overall marketing mix.
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