3 mistakes holding you back from quality media investment outcomes

Consistent media measurement tied to an outcome has long been a challenge for advertising industry stakeholders. With the increasing fragmentation of consumer attention, complexity has compounded and the issue of transparency has persisted. Marketers are calling for the industry to respond with solutions.

While we all long for a simple, turnkey path forward, the reality is that measuring media investments effectively requires as much thought and consideration as typical activation strategies.

Measurement is a constant evolution, and every campaign has the potential to transform your digital strategy toward better outcomes. Here are three ways your media measurement strategy may be lacking and how you can upgrade it in 2021.

1. It only accounts for baseline measurement.

As an industry, the focus on measurement hasn’t evolved much past verification, or what is considered human, viewable and brand-safe impressions. While these are extremely important metrics in a complex digital landscape, delivery verification was intended only as a starting point.

The reason verification should be considered the first step in the measurement journey, and not the destination, is that it only reflects an ad’s opportunity to be seen—not whether anyone actually paid attention to it. This leads us to the next common stumbling block in media measurement:

2. It overlooks advanced attention signals.

All marketers, in some way or another, want their target audiences to engage more with their brand, as this is what ultimately drives outcomes. Measuring attention is critical to strengthening digital performance, since attention signals provide the clarity into all the ways your brand message may have been received by consumers.

Attention signals—metrics such as interaction rate, screen real estate, active time on screen, and audible and visible on complete—help assess the quality of time a user spends with an ad. This helps marketers assess ad frequency and the overall quality of their impressions—producing a better, holistic view of advertising performance.

By looking beyond verification and into consumer attention, the mark of success isn’t whether the ad was valid and viewable, but something much more insightful.

3. It has limited visibility into cross-channel and cross-platform performance.

Today, we know from our Oracle ID Graph that people have, on average, about five devices on which they consume media. The ability to solve for measuring attention across screens is especially crucial, now more than ever.

Historically, ad hoc measurement offerings have only delivered partial visibility of cross-channel advertising—providing the illusion of precision but leaving marketers blind to overall waste and efficiency. But marketing agility is possible. It requires thinking differently about measurement and making it a key element in your media strategy, enabling you to uncover new insights and promote informed decision-making around your unique marketing goals.

The path to measurement innovation

With billions of dollars now transacted on metrics that didn’t exist a few years ago, precision and rigor in detailed measurement is no longer a nice-to-have, but an essential component to any comprehensive, modern media campaign.

After 25 years of digital advertising, ad measurement has progressed into a sophisticated discipline that has opened up a plethora of advanced metrics that help marketers understand performance on a deeper level. These metrics, and the underlying consumer attention signals they measure, are key ways to ensure that marketers are getting the value they paid for when they invest in digital.