The Advertising Research Foundation’s annual flagship conference AudiencexScience 2023 was very special to all attendees, being the first in person (and online) major ARF conference since the onset of COVID. As such it drew over 300 people from all over the world, eager to reconnect in person with their colleagues. There was much hugging and kissing. And a valuable array of papers exceptional even by ARF standards. Here are the moments that stand out the most for me, and I’m sure that readers who attended will wonder why I left out other noteworthy happenings.
- Jackson Bazley, Executive Vice President, Association of National Advertisers, saying that he wanted to be perfectly clear, unequivocally stated that inclusion of a probability-sample panel, and specifically MRC accreditation, as two non-negotiable ANA requirements for any cross-media audience currency. Alternative non-MRC certifications are not an acceptable replacement.
- Pete Doe, Chief Research Officer of Nielsen, appeared twice, once being interviewed on the main stage in a fireside chat by ARF CEO Scott McDonald, and once in a breakout session. Pete recounted his experiences working closely for years with BARB, the currency JIC in the U.K. before coming to the United States, and his leading role in his earlier stint at Nielsen in the development of validated fusion methods in which the U.S. had been far behind Europe.
These fusion methods have now become essential parts of cross-platform measurement, written in stone in the World Federation of Advertisers/ANA Northstar standards, and the means by which Nielsen accurately projects its people meter data onto big data. Nielsen is able to combine big data from computers, mobile devices, smart TVs and other TVs, because of Nielsen’s panel and well-validated mature fusion methodologies.
In the breakout session, Pete transparently revealed an attempt to adapt these methods to validly project beyond the footprint of a big data source, which showed that in that use case, unacceptable levels of validity are irreducible. However, springing back from that disappointment, Pete showed the first results of a different method of big data calibration to the panel which yield the stability of big data without sacrifice of validity.
- Radha Subramanyum, Ph.D., President and Chief Research & Analytics Officer, CBS, re-emphasized that a panel is essential along with big data, and pointed out the vital importance of precise measurement of over the air homes, now a growing and complex segment. Her main message was that despite the myths and misconceptions we read, the broadcast audience is up, CBS is up, and the ongoing successful future of television is not in any doubt.
- Audrey Steele, Executive Vice President Sales Research & Strategy, FOX Corp, Lloyd Darbonne, Senior Director Research, Insights & Strategy, FOX Corp, and myself presented a nearly ten-year multiple regression study of $3 trillion in sales vs. $50 billion in advertising in the U.S., which showed that television and premium digital video are the only two media with marginal utility to raise Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) for the big CPG, QSR and car brands, the digital media types having been saturated.
An ROAS optimizer showed that the highest increases in ROAS, in the 20% to 40% range, would be achieved by shifting some digital ad spend back into TV and premium digital video. Broadcast Prime Entertainment was spotlighted as deserving the largest increases, coming in at an optimal 32% of CPG TV dollars. Decades ago the ARF IRI Adworks study found that parameter to be 38%, so all of the new media choices have slightly reduced the optimal CPG allocation to Broadcast Prime.
- Sophie MacIntyre, Ads Research Lead, Meta, and I presented the results of a RealEyes, Eye Square, Bill Harvey Consulting experiment in which five brands were measured across fifteen different digital video environment platforms classified at high level into Feed, Shortform, and Stream, measuring viewability, click behaviors, attention, facial emotion, ad recall, brand recognition, ad liking, brand trust, persuasion, and mindsets.
The study showed that Feed has the most positive click behavior, Stream has the highest viewability and attention, but that almost every business outcome measure shows the three broad types almost equal in outcome value. This shows that each environment creates value in its own unique way, with some using more attention than others.
- Artie Bulgrin, the man who gave the industry Project Blueprint, the model for the World Federation of Advertisers and ANA Northstar cross-media audience measurement specifications, won the Erwin Ephron Award, causing many of us to wonder why he hadn’t won it years ago – but it might be a reflection of Artie’s signature selfless humility. We are lucky that the ANA has engaged Artie for the past few years to guide the WFA/ANA efforts to lead the global market in cross-media measurement design.
- Johanna Welch, Global Mars Horizon Comms Lab Senior Manager, and Max Kalehoff, VP Marketing Growth, RealEyes, presented findings showing that RealEyes in the wild attention and facial emotion measurements enabled sales increases of up to 18% across 19 markets, and ad optimizations of $30 million, in the first year of the system’s implementation. To date this is the most compelling proof of the value of in the wild attention measures, capping the work of The Attention Council and its members which had already compiled dozens of validations of diverse forms of attention measurement.
- Andy Brown, CEO of the Attention Council, moderated a lively panel of many of the speakers* on the subject of attention measurement presenting at the conference, and Karen Nelson-Field, whom most of us in the field consider to be the progenitor of modern attention measurement. Throughout the conference in which attention was the major theme, there had been a useful dynamic between Duane* and Elise* on one side, and the other attention measurement practitioners on the other side, regarding whether eye tracking in the wild is or is not a usable measure of attention.
At the conclusion of this session I made the point that although perhaps not as scientific as lab measures, eye tracking is robust in the wild, where lab measures break down in all the noise. And I predicted that we would as an industry converge on a “cocktail” of metrics – eye tracking, facial emotion, skin conductance response, heartbeat, alignment of metadata between ad and context – to measure “impression quality”, a term which I recommended in place of “attention”, which Duane and Elise and everyone else on the panel agreed to, ending on a note of consensus.
Alas I’ve run out of space to cover the fascinating and valuable sessions involving Robert L. Santos, Director, U.S. Census Bureau, Colleen Fahey Rush, Executive Vice President & CRO, Paramount, Andrea Zapata, Executive Vice President, Head of Ad Sales Research, Measurement and Insights, Warner Bros. Discovery, Brian Wieser, Principal, Madison & Wall, Harvey Goldhersz, Executive Vice President, Product, Circana (formerly IRI and The NPD Group), and many others. I’ll have to dedicate individual interviews in order to close this gap in upcoming columns.
Pedro Almeida, CEO, MindProber
Mike Follett, CEO, Lumen Research
Marc Guldimann, Founder & CEO, Adelaide
Bill Harvey, Chairman, RMT
Elise Temple, Ph.D., VP, Neuroscience & Client Service, Nielsen IQ
Duane Varan, Ph.D., CEO, MediaScience
Johanna Welch, Global Mars Horizon Comms Lab Senior Manager
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
Click the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friends.
The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.