We got the opportunity to sit down with Louis Hellman, Product Manager for Customer Link, LiveRamp — a Cuebiq partner and identity resolution provider offering data onboarding. Keep reading to learn about Louis’s view on advanced TV, footfall attribution, and more!
1. What are some of the biggest challenges for brands looking to measure holistic success across TV and Digital?
One major challenge is resolving identities between display, TV and conversion/attribution data. For example, display is tied to cookies, and Cuebiq data is mobile IDs, and TV is either subscriber data or CTV IDs.
Another obstacle for advertisers is getting access to trusted data. It’s difficult to ensure independent judgment, privacy safety, and verification on measurement. Different brands have different combinations of difficulties depending on what data they have in-house. Many times, advertisers need to seek out trusted third-party data to look at complex paths to purchase such as online-to-offline attribution.
It can also be hard to know how to make sense of the data, as it requires a certain level of expertise to know which questions to ask and understand the data science and infrastructure.
With regard to TV, it can be a challenge to know how to define the right attribution window for the channel to interpret the data correctly. Since TV is usually a brand awareness channel and influences conversion, the attribution window for TV would be different from digital.
An additional obstacle is choosing the right measurement vendor; you want one that can show the conversion data for TV-only, digital-only and TV+digital. Order of exposure could also be a factor, the same as the time of day or day of the week. You need a measurement provider that can customize the reports to uncover the right insights and make them actionable.
As TV is evolving and marketers are pushing to have more accountability from TV, standardization is going to become a challenge. We believe we will see third-party providers bring in their own methodology without a common gold standard. As follows, we will need to define success in these campaigns in a more concrete way than ever before.
2. As advanced TV brings to fruition new advertising capabilities, what new trends will we see marketers take advantage of in 2019 and beyond?
As TV gets more people-based and less about reaching the general masses, advertisers will be able to quantify the impact of their TV ad dollars in driving conversions from their target audience, bringing digital-like transparency and measurability into TV. There will be an increasing focus on people-based and personalized advertising and measurement. Additionally, we’ll see a shift toward testing effectiveness at an individual level instead of a comScore/Nielsen household level.
First-party data will probably explode — marketers have been using their first-party data for digital campaigns for a while now and have seen the effectiveness of using that data set. As advanced TV solutions gain momentum, the same marketers will expect that valuable data set to be used in TV as well to improve the performance of their campaigns.
Not just first-party data, but third-party data sets will also see explosive growth. Data is not just a nice-to-have but will become critical for any campaign. We’ll see the rise of data on TV for defining and discovering the right target audience. This includes figuring out the right price to pay to reach that audience, measuring the effectiveness of those dollars, and quantifying the impact in driving conversions. None of this would be possible without data, and TV marketers will not be able to get away from using data to justify ROAS.
3. How has partnering with Cuebiq for offline intelligence and Footfall Attribution helped LiveRamp offer its customers more complete solutions?
Offline intelligence enables a new way of measurement that advertisers could not access before — it provides a specific success metric or conversion criteria that operate as a proxy for conversion and ROAS. It also allows for customization options to calibrate the definition of attribution and attribution windows, using dwell times and buffer time from exposure to POI visit.
4. As head of product management for LiveRamp Measurement, what is your vision to help brands better measure their campaign performance and identify ROAS optimization opportunities?
The “data is the new oil” cliché is accurate here — the more direct access brands have to detailed data about their campaigns and conversions, the more confident they can be in their analysis and conclusions. LiveRamp wants to make accessing and using that data simple and seamless.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by complexity in this area and give up before even figuring out where to start — LiveRamp will help brands start small and progress up the difficulty curve over time. Crawl, walk, then run.
We’ll do this on multiple dimensions — some brands need help with the technical infrastructure of a measurement and analytics data lake, some with the actual reporting itself, some with figuring out where to start, and all need help with identity resolution to power that measurement. LiveRamp wants to be brands’ trusted, neutral solution for any and all of the above.
5. If you were a superhero who would you be… and why?
Wolverine. Instant healing, complex and three-dimensional characterization, great hair, star of the best superhero movie (Logan)… What’s not to love?
