Why we must recalibrate marketing expectations in 2023
Despite challenging economic headwinds, marketing investments in 2023 are expected to remain strong. In fact, 89% of CMOs and senior marketing executives say they’re planning to increase their marketing budgets, with 44% indicating that those increases will be substantial, according to eMarketer.
These strong investments place a heavy mandate on modern marketing leaders: If brands are to continue to increase their marketing dollars despite financial marketplace uncertainties, they must be prepared to show ROI. And with the measurement landscape changing, CMOs and senior marketing executives cite measurement as the single greatest challenge facing their programs today.
The measurement challenges
New privacy regulations and constant tech platform policy changes have reduced marketers’ ability to attribute their ad spends in a reliable, cross-channel way. But that doesn’t mean today’s brands and agencies have to throw their ad dollars into a black hole and hope for the best on the bottom line.
Now is the time to take stock of what’s possible within the new marketing landscape, approaches that offer strong, scalable and (most importantly) sustainable measurement capabilities in 2023 and beyond.
The root of many of the current measurement challenges stems from the fact that the common resettable, cross-site and cross-app advertising identifiers are going away. Beyond the loss of identifiers themselves, there’s the challenge of attribution across the buyer journey.
Attribution to specific tactics at each stage of the funnel is still very much a loose art form, and any cross-screen or non-individual screen—for example, CTV, DOOH, rideshare advertising, etc.—makes the attribution and funnel story even more challenging. The simple fact is that marketers have become accustomed to the 1:1 attribution that cookies and the use of pixels have afforded, so anything less can feel like a tough pill to swallow, even in instances where true 1:1 capabilities were never a reality in the first place.
The good news is that there are, in fact, other attribution and measurement solutions that are statistically just as accurate as the tools of the past, and that’s where the industry needs to be headed.
How measurement needs to evolve for sustainability
It’s time to move more firmly toward incrementality-based measurement metrics. It is no longer sufficient to shove ad exposures in front of broad swaths of consumers who have already signaled intent, and then claim influence of purchase for the entirety of the response metrics. Sophisticated advertisers will require an emphasis on measuring incremental lift with proper science-based methodology, experiment design and control.
In this regard, large representative panels will be the key to unlocking meaningful insights and measurement moving forward. Statistically, a strong enough panel can net similar insights into impact and incremental behaviors to drive measurement and actionable next steps. Importantly, these panel-based measurement approaches can also apply within the ever-important mobile space.
From a measurement standpoint, mobile is often thought of as the linchpin to customer understanding, but it has faced a number of challenges when it comes to measurement and attribution in recent years. However, with carrier or OEM data visibility, marketers can still glean insights into consumer behavior patterns, trends, interests and intent due to the scale and depth of those panel data sets.
Going forward, individual ID-level attribution at scale and across channels is definitely going away. However, with panel-based tactics, incrementality will be measurable and indicative.
Embracing this new approach means that marketers need to rethink their measures of success and get more comfortable with statistics. There is so much more engagement, retention and customer value that occur after an install, click or conversion. It’s time for marketers to shift mindsets to tap into the power of incrementality via truly balanced, non-biased, panel-based measurement and sophisticated modeling techniques.
Now is the best time to test and compare measured outcomes and insights between the traditional individual-level attribution and new panel-based incrementality insights. Once individual identifiers go away, it will be much harder to benchmark the statistical relevance of panel-based measures with the known measures of today.
Source: Adage
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