The Cuebiq marketing team got the chance to chat with Tom Riordan, Head of Advanced Measurement Group, Adobe Advertising Cloud last week. Keep reading for Tom’s take on measurement metrics, his vision for helping brands increase their ROAS, and more!
Nearly three-quarters of marketers say that measurement commands most of their time. What is your advice to marketers looking to identify the right metrics to optimize campaign performance and get the most out of their ad spend?
It’s true that ad campaign measurement can eat up a lot of time — oftentimes the most progressive new measurement approaches don’t always provide immediate and obvious return. A good example can be found in cases where brands evolve from website metrics to offline customer metrics; not only does this migration usually entail bringing a new partner into the fold, but it also requires reeducation for key brand stakeholders on how to interpret these new metrics and contrast them to previously used KPIs. To counter this, a brand-centric or — better yet — product-centric approach that is empathetic to how consumers actually purchase a product is our suggested starting point, rather than basing a measurement framework on what’s been available historically. For many brands, this means adding offline actions as a key optimization lever in their mix of metrics.
There have been so many advancements in offline intelligence and footfall attribution over the last few years — what prompted you to include footfall measurement as part of your client offering?
Footfall is an exciting measurement metric that Adobe invested in developing because it enables offline visitation metrics across many key verticals for our agency partners and brands, such as retail, shopper, QSR, and auto. We knew that the space had finally reached a point of maturity where quality data from location-based app partners — as opposed to ad auctions, a less reliable more outdated currency for location tracking — could be included transparently and at scale to our customers. So we decided to make Footfall and Location data two of our focus points within the Advanced Measurement Services team at Adobe Advertising Cloud.
Adobe chose Cuebiq as preferred measurement partner. How did you conduct the search — which qualifiers did you analyze and what prompted you to pick Cuebiq?
We found that Cuebiq was a leader in transparency and has a very strong data collection methodology and governance/privacy approach, as well as a dedicated focus to weeding out bad signals that seem to prevail in location data sets. We also like Cuebiq’s variety of data access options, such as the ability to access pre-canned reports for simple activations or user-level data for more complex measurement assignments, depending on the customer.
As Head of the Advanced Measurement Group at Adobe, what is your vision to help brands better measure their campaign performance and increase their ROAS?
Increasing the scope of measuring customer behavior is one of our primary goals. Correlating the emotional impact of ads with a store visit and then an eventual purchase is a reality today for advertisers who are willing to connect the dots. We should be willing to make the same bets on these performance indicators that we have in clicks and other digital metrics. Don’t be afraid to challenge religion and better complete your view of the customer experience.
