With the global shift towards digital media channels and the industry’s deprecation (and eventual disappearance) of third-party cookies, we urgently need new ways to understand ad effectiveness. Kantar is creating the new future of media effectiveness, with great progress being made on our Project Moonshot initiative with Google, Anzu and others.
For marketing teams to lead the recovery from the COVID-19 fallout, marketers need to prove and understand what channels work for them, and target their investments accordingly. Without effectiveness measurement that isn’t possible – like flying in poor visibility. We are also seeing the digitisation of more traditional channels, so it’s never been more important to understand how that investment impacts brand metrics, which are vital for creating sustainable growth.
Until now, advertisers and media agencies have been able to measure the effectiveness of their online advertising with many publishers, except the walled gardens, using tracking cookies. With the disappearance of the third-party cookie, Kantar has developed new ways to assess effectiveness, using a combination of methodologies including direct integrations and extensively validated probabilistic measurement, heralding a new era for cross-publisher effectiveness. This initiative, Project Moonshot, provides publishers with two cookieless and privacy-compliant methodologies to deploy measurement and tracking. Both methodologies have at their core Kantar’s permission-based and privacy-compliant Profiles Network of 100 million consumers globally.
And we know that third party measurement is what clients want: our Getting Media Right research indicates that 80% of marketers trust third party measurement, compared to just over 40% who trust data from individual publisher or media platforms. Our research also identified important priorities for advertisers including the need to prove ROI, attribute brand and sales impact to the right channels and the ability to optimise throughout campaigns.
Why should advertiser brands care?
With increasing spend going to digital channels, and predicted to be even more so after the pandemic, advertisers should be asking real questions about their ad effectiveness and the brand impact of their investments in digital channels. With the gradual disappearance of cookies, third-party cookies can no longer be relied on. Advertisers cannot gain strategic or forward-looking insights from simply looking at behavioural data or nebulous ‘engagement’ metrics.
Why should publishers care?
In a competitive media environment, and to continue to justify their presence on a media plan, publishers need to prove their ad effectiveness on their own channels but also highlight their strengths in comparison to others. If you’re a publisher that wishes to discuss direct integrations with Kantar, please reach out to james.jarzab@kantar.com.
Why should media agencies care?
With increasing investment in digital media channels, including addressable TV, media agency clients will expect and demand accountability for their spend. Media agencies may also wish to optimise spend inflight with the best and most comprehensive information available.