Measuring the Full Signal

There’s no shortage of data available to marketers today. If anything, the challenge is figuring out which signals actually matter and how much weight to give each of them.

In the current environment, we’re seeing a very clear focus from clients on returns. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), sales lift, and other performance metrics are understandably becoming more important as brands are being asked to make every dollar work harder.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean the other measures of advertising effectiveness have become less important. What we’re finding at SiriusXM Media is that the conversation is increasingly about how we bring these different signals together.

For streaming audio and podcasts, we’re often being asked to do both: demonstrate that media is driving efficient returns while also showing that it’s having a meaningful impact on the brand. And those two things don’t always show up in the same place or at the same time.

Adding attention to the conversation

That’s part of what makes attention measurement interesting to us.

We don’t view attention as a replacement for MMM, brand lift, or other established forms of measurement. It’s another signal we can use to better understand what may be driving campaign performance.

We’ve been exploring this in practice by looking at attention metrics alongside other campaign measurement, including MMM, to better understand what we can learn when these signals are considered together.

The goal isn’t to look at an attention study, see one tactic perform particularly well, and immediately conclude that’s where investment should shift. Instead, we’re interested in how that finding fits alongside the other signals we have about campaign performance.

Maybe one tactic is particularly efficient at driving a return, while another is doing a better job of capturing attention or building the brand. That doesn’t necessarily mean one is working and the other isn’t. It may tell us that we need both, but that the balance between them could be different.

That’s where I think measurement becomes much more useful. It moves us from simply reporting what happened to helping inform where a marketer may be over- or under-invested and how the next dollar could work harder.

Bringing brand and performance together

We talk a lot in this industry about brand versus performance, but I’m not sure that distinction is as useful as it once was.

Driving returns and sales is paramount for a lot of brands right now. But we also know that building awareness, consideration, and preference over time can ultimately influence those business outcomes. The challenge is that those effects aren’t always going to appear on the same timeline or through the same measurement solution.

That’s why I don’t think there’s one metric that tells us whether advertising worked.

MMM can tell us one thing. Brand measurement can tell us another. Attention gives us another piece of the picture. The value comes from looking across those signals and understanding where they reinforce each other, where they don’t, and what we can learn from that.

For us, that’s increasingly the goal: not more measurement for the sake of measurement, but a more complete view of performance that can actually help marketers make decisions.

And since we’re talking about audio, I’ll use the obvious analogy: you can listen to one part of a song and learn something about it, but you understand a whole lot more when you hear the entire track.

Measurement is no different. Each signal can tell us something useful on its own, but when we bring those signals together, we get a much clearer picture of how the campaign is actually performing — and what we should do next.

 

Author

Cameron Moulton

Associate Director, Ad Measurement

SiriusXM Media