Samsung’s first head of media in Australia, Beau Curtis, overseas an estimated $60-$80m in media spend. But Curtis says in the two and a half years since joining the electronics giant from MediaCom, “I’ve never been once been asked by anyone in the business to give them a rundown of specific media metrics.”

Instead, they want to know what’s driving business outcomes. “I certainly don’t have our head of mobiles worrying about what our reach and frequency look like. He’s more concerned about how many units we’re moving.  That’s a good summary of where we are at [with regards to measurement and metrics].”

It’s Curtis’s remit to provide insight into how media spend is helping shift product, working within the confines of imperfect attribution and fragmentation. That means, “pulling apart campaigns to ensure that efficacy is at the core of everything we do”. 

In digital, he says that means thinking about RoI in holistic terms. “I’ve seen cases over the years, though not necessarily at Samsung, where the adtech investment has been forgotten [in terms of RoI]. So while it may appear on the face of it there’s a significant efficiency increase or impact increase, ultimately, when you factor in the adtech capex cost, you end up at a zero sum. So you’re actually no better off for all the time, effort and investment.”

In-housing ahead?

Samsung, says Curtis, is “very focused on ownership of tech and data” in a bid to understand RoI. Given marketers “aren’t being handed bags of extra cash … we need to find ways of doing more with what we have … part of that is understanding each link in that value chain that is programmatic media and making sure that we remove any inefficiency from the ecosystem,” he says. “The best way to do that in my view is to own as much of that as possible.”

As such, Samsung is “looking at where we own the relationship with the ad platform or the inventory provider. What does that look like versus when we run an agency-based trading desk?” says Curtis. “All those kinds of questions are on the table at the moment.”

Data sharing

Samsung would “love” to connect the entire journey from end to end. But given much of its business is via retail partners, that visibility is not possible. Curtis says the brand is working with channel partners “to ensure we have as much visibility as possible” over the customer journey. 

But he is keen to explore data sharing arrangements.

“I don’t think anyone has as much data as they would like. We have spent quite a bit of time trying to clean our data to get it into shape where we can use it to drive decision-making – because that is its power,” says Curtis. “First party data is massively powerful when it’s accurate, clean, recent and relevant. But it is only useful if you use it to create insight with which to plan, execute and test against. That’s something we have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get right. We’ve got the data, we’ve got the understanding. It’s stitching that stuff together.” Curtis thinks much of that work can be done even with imperfect metrics.

“Digital media and marketing more generally tends to want to solve everything 100 per cent. I don’t think we need to solve the cross measurement piece before we try and stitch some of this stuff together and help marketers understand the impact of media on business outcomes. I think we need to do [the stitching first], or at best in parallel.”

Wide versus narrow

Samsung has focused on targeting “for some time … we invest a significant portion of our budget on targeted media”, but Curtis thinks it has “roughly the right balance of targeted versus mass [reach]”. That said, “It’s something we should constantly review to make sure that we’re not too far down the rabbit hole on targeting.”

Ultimately though, Curtis says the debate is not about digital versus traditional media.

“It’s about how do we demonstrate genuine cross-channel performance where we don’t have the direct linkage and the direct connection, whether it’s first-party data or cookie-based analytics or whatever it is. How the hell do we do that? That’s the bit that keeps me awake at night.”

What marketers would like from the industry

Curtis’s ask of industry is “a better understanding of what marketers need. All too often … these reports come out that are basically ’publishers want this and agencies want this.’  Well, yes, but we’re paying the bills. Ultimately, we need to solve the problems that are going to help our CMOs get better visibility, better cut-through and better impact at CEO, CFO and in some cases board level, so that we can demonstrate the value of marketing,” says Curtis. “Because that’s the opportunity we have as media people - we can help unlock an understanding of the value of marketing.”

Data haves and have nots

Gai Le Roy accepts that business outcomes and economics trump media metrics in many organisations. But Samsung, she says, is fortunate to have lots of first party data. For less data rich brands, such as FMCGs where the retailer owns the customer relationship and data, “having reach and frequency metrics across TV, video, all of their paid media investments is incredibly important - because they may not have that insight to the customer at the retail end of things”.

Working with publishers, brands and agencies to ensure datasets can work together to deliver a better picture of cross channel media performance “beyond hygiene metrics” is therefore top of mind for the IAB. 

Marketers getting tech smart

Le Roy acknowledges Curtis’s point that adtech costs are often left out of the RoI calculation. But she thinks that will not be the case for much longer, and that the sun may be setting on the days of easy tech sales. “Marketers are bringing people in-house who understand the tech side of things, so the scrutiny on the investment is getting smarter,” she suggests.  To Curtis’s point that Samsung is looking at the ownership of tech platforms and relationships with agencies, Le Roy says that as marketers work out what they need - and do not need - in terms of adtech, and “get their own data in place”, early investments that have driven the tech marketplace “will start to taper off”.

Privacy bites

Underlying all of that is privacy regulation, which could soon start to bite deeper in Australia. “Interesting but painful,” is Le Roy’s take, but she suggests it is a challenge that will unite industry. “It actually gives media owners, adtech platforms, agencies, and advertisers something that they need to work on together - and the problems look quite similar, as do the solutions,” says Le Roy. “So that is top of mind for the IAB in terms of what’s the world going to look like in 12 months with [incoming] changes to this environment.”

Second party data rising

Phil Cowlishaw, head of Adobe Advertising Cloud for Asia Pacific, says Australia is seeing “more and more high quality second party data come to market, “enabling us to drive really big differentiation in what we can deliver in digital media.” So what is second party data?

“It’s brands going into partnership with other brands and knowing exactly where that data is coming from, so it’s effectively named data,” says Cowlishaw. “Different organisations willing to share and co-mingle different data assets - so it’s really those two organisations coming together and knowing exactly where your data is coming from,” says Cowlishaw. 

Data traceability is key in the face of tightening privacy regulation, he says, with premium publishers also coming into the mix. But across those parties – and channels – consistent measurement is required. 

“There’s got to be a consistency of measurement across every single publisher in the ecosystem to be able to help [marketers] better integrate and understand their measurement and data,” says Cowlishaw. 

Only then will marketers be able to leverage data and “measure and drive brand lift through integrating their analytics teams and their marketing teams to be able to get to a more consistent reported number as well - so that you can start to understand that one customer is actually that one customer,” says Cowlishaw, “not reported as three customers in three different systems”.  

Then, he says it is a case of “what do you do with that user or with that profile? If you don’t own the user, what do you do with that profile and what’s the next best experience to be able to deliver? A consistent experience is really, really important.”

Outcomes, not metrics

Jon Bradshaw, principle of marketing capability firm Brand Traction, agrees with Samsung’s Curtis that there may be too much focus on media metrics at the expense of the bigger picture. Measuring impact, he says, is fundamental. “Beau is exactly right. We could spend months of the client’s time trying to solve specific cross media measurement issues when they haven’t yet really understood the best way of measuring brand outcomes,” says Bradshaw.  “Is that salience, is it spontaneous awareness; is it some Millward Brown brand power score – or none of that? And that is before we get to consumer and shopper behaviours that are one step before a business outcome; have I grown penetration; am I selling things more often; am I selling things at higher prices?” says Bradshaw. “We are still not in the boardroom, people. We are not in the boardroom until we multiply those things together and say that’s how much revenue and that’s how much profit we’ve made.”