The #1 digital advertising metric is…

Comscore is excited to be part of next month’s IAB UK Upfronts, which promises to be “a showcase of premium digital advertising opportunities”. It would be interesting to survey the brand marketers and agencies in attendance for definitions of what ‘premium’ currently means for them among today’s diverse technology and media channels. I suspect that between some unifying themes, we’d also find bespoke, individual criteria, some relating to audiences, others to the platforms and inventory on which campaigns are served.

Consumer awareness and / or action have never gone away as ultimate objectives, but there is now a dazzling array of metrics between campaign planning and that final marketing goal, the majority of which can have demonstrable, cumulative impact at successive stages of the funnel. One prominent example is viewability: ads that have no opportunity to be seen muddy the waters for ensuing effectiveness and ROI calculations. All of these measures might, for different brands, industries and campaigns, steer opinion on what constitutes the most desirable advertising location.

Unsurprisingly, not every brand places strict objectives against all the numbers potentially available to them, but there can be enormous benefit to understanding possible uplifts that might be achieved by adding new criteria into planning or evaluation metrics.

In our Upfronts session on 4 October, Comscore will present the end-to-end advertising process from an independent, data-centric point of view (with at least some attempt to put the ‘fun’ into ‘funnel metrics’). We’ll look at alternative ways to evaluate the media landscape that might unlock value or uncluttered opportunities, as well as demonstrating how and why a full range of advertising measures (from viewability to in-target delivery and brand safety) benefit buy and sell sides of the digital economy.

Finally, we’ll take a look at some custom projects that our multi-platform panels and large census network have facilitated for clients in a range of industries, helping them to understand the journeys of customers outside the brands’ traditional field of view.

We’re hoping that our guests will join us for some discussion (over a few refreshments) about where their investments in planning, measurement and optimisation are making the biggest difference to overall marketing achievements, and where they still feel that work needs to be done by the industry at large.

Digital is occasionally maligned for its complexity, but with diligent application, its measurability can become a true strength for advertisers and publishers alike. A growing body of work (including our own Halo Effect study) highlights the multiplier effect of clean impressions and context, and these are almost certainly amplified for campaigns that find the right audiences in those sweet spots, especially with an understanding of how these specific purchase journeys can be influenced – “right people, right place, right time” is a cliché, but it appears to ring true.

We won’t force you to complete a survey, but we’d love you to stop by the IAB offices at 1pm on 4 October, and tell us which metrics are proving ‘premium’ for you.