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Multi-Touch Attribution Continues To Evolve At A Time When Accuracy Is Increasingly Critical

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Attribution has become the hot topic in the world of advertising measurement. It’s a way for brands to get a view of how their ad spend is actually impacting everything from awareness to sales, and as margins get tighter in light of the pandemic, marketing managers are more keen than ever to be aware of the value of every dollar spent. 

Like everything else in media, attribution has largely been siloed into digital and television buckets, the former being far more advanced, with the latter catching up quickly as more and more television is watched on digitally enabled devices (which makes attribution possible, regardless of what is being watched, since ACR data from smart TVs captures whatever is on a glass, regardless of the source.)

That bifurcation meant that brands and agencies have had to figure out ways to cobble together their own cross-platform solutions and to judge which of the new breed of TV attribution providers were giving them the sort of well-researched, data-heavy stats they were looking for and which ones were just skimming the surface.

Hence the interest in the recent news that iSpot and Neustar, two of the leading measurement and analytics companies used by the world’s biggest brands, would be joining forces to share measurement data so that clients would be able to track digital and television campaigns simultaneously.

While each has attribution capabilities on their own, by integrating technologies the two believe they just gave the industry a quantum leap when it needs it most. 

Neustar is the only company that has the rights to use Facebook data for attribution, while iSpot was first to market with real-time ad tracking and the ability to map those airings to consumer responses at scale. 

The two companies actually came together organically when it became apparent many of the nation’s largest advertisers (auto, CPG, retailers, insurance, and beverage companies) were combining their data for media mixed modeling, a way of tracking performance across digital and television.

“Enterprise brand marketers are increasingly looking for a holistic approach to marketing planning that encompasses both digital and television,” said Neustar Senior Vice President and General Manager of Marketing Solutions, Michael Schoen. “It’s our mission to provide enterprise brand marketers with an integrated understanding of the effects of their digital and television campaigns, using integrated user-level data.”

Neustar is a market leader in identity resolution and marketing analytics known for its dominance in digital multi-touch attribution, media mixed modeling and data security.

The Need To Get Attribution Right 

The partnership is a critical step in making attribution function as a real currency for marketers.

While the industry tends to divide digital and TV advertising into two separate buckets, marketers themselves don’t see it that way. They know that consumers see ads across a wide range of media outlets and that results that only focus on one or the other don’t give them the whole picture as they don’t account for other influences on viewers.

That’s not to say that the iSpot/Neustar data will be foolproof: there are still factors like word of mouth (e.g., friend recommendations), persuasive salespeople and below the radar online influencers. But those are minor factors and a system that can give marketers a clear view of how their message is being received across both digital and television should prove to be of utmost value.

Another benefit of the Neustar/iSpot partnership is that it brings together two companies who have sterling reputations and who utilize a high degree of rigor in their attribution measurement. 

This is important right now due to the abundance of big, raw data sets and the subsequent proliferation of analytics boutiques which has in turn given rise to low quality, low cost attribution services whose output can prove to be risky as a means for making decisions. 

“It’s not hard for a small company to get their hands on a bunch of big raw data sets and plug them into an equation or a makeshift dashboard, but that’s not going to help them get accurate insights unless measurement quality analytics are flowing into the attribution systems,” said iSpot CEO Sean Muller. 

The big challenges for companies like iSpot Muller says are “educating advertisers and media buyers on the importance of data fidelity, quality and consistency and giving brands the tools to properly leverage those insights to generate more revenues, cost savings and generally improve the ROI on their ad spend.” 

It’s a lesson that is assuming even more importance these days as consumer behavior shifts in response to the pandemic and brands scramble to stay on top of how their marketing efforts are being received in this unfamiliar landscape. Understanding how campaigns work across both TV and digital will provide the sort of insight they need.

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