EDO and Nielsen Demonstrate Strong Sales Proxy Media Optimization

Analysis of this enormous database reveals which media environments tend to create the greatest consumer engagement lifts for given product and service categories. This raises the possibility of using the engagement spiking propensity of a program environment as an impression impact quality measure. The industry has experimented with such impact quality measures for many decades, ever since media optimizers came on the scene in the early 1960s. It was quickly discovered that without impact quality scores, media optimizers were overkill, because directionally it was easy by manual methods, to simply go for the lowest CPMs. Further, the agencies pioneering optimizers used subjective (Bayesian) impact indices in the absence of empirically derived metrics. In the most recent phase, the industry has experimented with attention data as a possible impact quality metric, but while attention is a good predictor of ad recall, it is not a strong predictor of sales effect.

Share of Search Predicts Market Share Growth

In a seven-country study covering 12 verticals from 2016 through 2021, working with the prestigious UK Institute for Practitioners of Advertising (IPA) led by Les Binet, IPA, and EDO found that when a brand has a higher share of search than its share of market, its share of market almost always goes up, and when the reverse is true, the brand’s share of market almost always goes down. Specifically, this pattern applies in 86% of all cases.

What this means is that search spikes can be used in media optimization as a strong predictive proxy for sales effect.

Comparison of Two Media Optimizations

EDO’s SVP of Decision Science John Cripps has just concluded a new paper, "The Power of Engaged Impressions: Maximizing TV Ad Impact With Balanced Optimization™" in which a linear TV advertising campaign is optimized two ways:

1. Lowest CPM
2. Lowest CPM but weighted by Engagement Rate (“ER”, the Nielsen-adjusted EDO search proclivity measure)

The objective function being maximized in these two optimizations is website visit as measured by EDO pixel.

The first finding is that quality is more important than quantity: any percentage increase in ER has 40% more impact on maximizing website visitation behavior than the same percentage increase in impression volume.

This is a very relevant finding because many marketers and their agencies tend to act as if impression volume (lowest CPM) is the only driver that matters. This is an unscientific attitude, of course, evidencing a degree of absolute skepticism as regards impression quality metrics in general. Most buys in market today are still driven by the lowest CPM more than any other factor.

The second finding is that incremental total website visits caused by the Lowest CPM campaign was about 5%, whereas the same net gain statistic for the ER weighted optimization was about 19%, 3.8X the lowest CPM strategy.

Takeaway: Lowest CPM strategy is a very dated approach and should be quickly improved upon. It’s long overdue. With sales effect the most dominant KPI, one should use a strong sales proxy to increase the value recognition of specific media environments. EDO and Nielsen's approach to Engaged Impressions is a strong sales proxy, as proven by this latest research and the past IPA study. Now more than ever, advertisers can and should go beyond optimizing for impression quantity, but also for the sales effect quality of those impressions — the impact those impressions have on market share, not just on ad recall.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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