It’s over and I’m pretty buggered. I can happily blame the few guys I went out with last night; an evening rounding off on a high note what has been an interesting conference experience. The conversation into the early hours was deep and intellectual, focused mainly on past episodes of TopGear, horse-racing and worst cities in the world while some of us lost money at the Roulette table.
Day 3 of the conference got into some of the topics that were of most interest to me personally and the OPA. The big ones were a panel on the state and future of site-centric measurement (ie.web analytics), a panel on audience targeting and then a related panel on the future of ad-serving. The afternoon sessions were skipped as I spent it with the EMEA and Mobile reps from Nielsen over a very long and productive lunch. It was an opportunity to chart the rest of the year for the OPA’s measurement requirements and spend time with the regional and product heads on how I see things.
Quote of the morning for me was that “people do not equal cookies, so don’t treat them like they do”. Couldn’t agree more. We keep trying to come up with a unique visitor definition that gets as close approximation to a person with various approaches to the cookie deletion problem, amongst other issues. Perhaps its better to just understand that a cookie is a cookie, and that it is very likely to be larger than the number of actual people visiting a website.
For South Africa and the OPA, I have the following key insights …
1. We’re only 10+ years in….
We’re so hard on ourselves as an industry, desperate to get this right in a market that’s effectively the wild west of media. All the measurement companies, from been-around-for-ever Nielsen to just-out-the-gates Quantcast, have their own methodology and nuanced approach to audience measurement online. Audience comparison with different tools is and will be tricky for a little while yet as the market evolves toward metrics that are actually going to drive improved returns for media owners and buyers alike. Currently, everyone is losing out due to low CPM values and shoddy CTR’s, so things must and will change. For a small market like ours, we need to focus on the basics: education, education and more education of the buy-side.
1. Listen to the old guys…
In SA, the digital industry is dominated by youngsters. Without being coy, I take my hat off to the guys I met at ICOM who were masters of the traditional audience measurement space in TV and are now participating fully in the digital realm. You feel like these chaps can work out where audiences are with a slide rule, a pencil and many years of proven marketing theory. When they query current hypotheses for the digital world, one realises that the basic questions marketers ask haven’t changed; they just want to reach the right audience for the right price. The problem seems to be that the way we’re currently presenting digital audience data isn’t allowing them to answer these questions easily at all. Until they can, we’re not going to to the big money.
2. It all about the data.
Data is the key asset, interpreting it is the key skill. If you’ve got the data on audience activity and behaviour, you can draw out insights that help you sell. Not rocket science by any stretch, but more needs to happen to make standardised metrics available to more people so they can make marketing decisions without trepidation. The question for media owners and organisations like the OPA is who owns their audience data? It seems that due to the complexity of collecting and validating it, the data is going to from now on sit with 3rd party measurement entities who media owners depend on to unlock the value of their traffic.
3. Brand advertising requires targeting
Its unequivocal for me. For digital to attract the kind of share of spend we want, we have to enable brand advertisers to easily deliver and report on their marketing efforts with comparable metrics of reach to other media (tv, radio etc). There is only one way to make this happen - effective targeting platforms for ads via demographic, behavioural, contextual and other profiling. Watch this space closely, as the measurement companies and ad-serving players begin to dance together. Equally, we need to keep an eye on Privacy, and how our local regulatory enviroment reacts to increased monitoring.
2. Preaching to the converted is easy
This phrase is often said by our very own OPA chairperson Mr Adrian Hewlett, and it rings true here in Lisbon. The I-COM global summit had very few advertisers or agency delegates. The world over, they need to join the conversation actively to help craft a set of audience measurement tools that give them what they want - simple, effective media planning in the digital space.
5. We’ve done well for our market!
While I get questions often about our choice of measurement provider, who the provider is I feel is not the key issue if you take a step back. Our goal must be singularly to drive digital advertising spend for the eco-system to grow. To do that, our primary function is to educate the market, bring agencies and planners into the fold and make it as easy as possible for them to do their work with a strong measurement vendor. The OPA is the strongest digital body in the country, with a strong exco who are making the right decisions to pursue growth. From a measurement perspective, the fact that we have a single currency for measurement data through Nielsen means that our planners have it much easier than any other territory I now know of. We are equally not behind in any way, with cutting edge developments in measuring things like the mobile internet and panel based approaches being brought to our shores as quickly as any where else.
Thanks again to the OPA exco and Isobar for making the trip possible. A brief member report will be sent out after I’ve consulted with the rest of the OPA exco on some key decisions that need to be made ahead of our vendor review later in the year. I hope these daily reports were useful for those that managed to find them!
Josh