If you’re looking to optimize your media budgets and placements for digital, audio, TV, and more, pay attention to these 6 key purchasing criteria for advertising products:
1. Competitive Intelligence
Competitive Intelligence is the ability to gather, analyze, and use information collected on competitors, customers, and other market factors that contribute to a business’s competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence is important because it helps businesses understand their competitive environment and the opportunities and challenges it presents. Businesses analyze this information to create effective and efficient business practices.
The key aspects to consider while selecting a competitive spend intelligence product such as Ad Intel include:
a) Real user reviews on competing tools – A comparative analysis of the specific number of customer reviews for a variety of products, the comments made, and overall app ratings.
b) Reliability – The ease of contact with system developers to get any questions answered very quickly and level of detail in giving intuitive information from the system.
c) Ease of use – The level of ease for brand new users to jump into the data and extract valuable business insights very quickly. This also relates to how easy it is to compare multiple data sets from the system.
d) Speed – How fast the page loads information making it easy to follow a path of investigation. Also, the frequency and lack of latency in which data is updated offer the ability to give timely updates.
e) Display of information – The more friendly a user interface is, the more attractive the product. Beautiful and well-formatted data makes it quick and straightforward to pull infographics and information.
2. Ad Targeting and Measurement
Knowing your brand’s target demographics assists in creating better audience profiles and reaching customers on platforms they frequent most. Using objective measurement tools to track the results of your marketing efforts helps to identify the best sales opportunities.
For Ad targeting and Measurement products such as NC solutions, important things for consideration are:
a) Data Management – Based on the aggregation of data, with extreme accuracy, a product can decipher the demographics, interests, and preferences of individuals which is a vital analytic.
b) Psychographics reports – In some instances, values, affinities, and motivation are a more accurate targeting goal than demographics.
c) Timeliness – The ability of the product to provide key trend insights that inform performance and enable timely making of informed decisions
d) Customers ratings and comments – This is the basic number of comments, likes, and dislikes for a particular product.
3. Market Mix Modelling (MMM)
Market mix modeling is the statistical analysis of data to estimate the impact of various marketing tactics on sales and then forecast the impact of future sets of tactics. MMM uses statistical modeling to find correlations between marketing investments and returns. It is the act of taking any activities that could influence sales numbers, then applying statistical modeling to show how marketing contributes to changes in sales volume. MMM breaks down results by channel. So, you can see which marketing activities are having the most significant impact on your return on investment.
Factors that would impact the choice of a MMM product to select are:
a) Marketing channels – what are the channels used? Is it the traditional radio, newspaper, television, or the more used online platforms today?
b) Analysis of marketing Results – It is vital to see the results that every marketing channel delivered to tell the impact that non-marketing-related factors had on performance.
c) Statistical reliability based on the extent of the data set chosen for analysis – it is paramount for the system to use an accurate and proven statistical modeling method such as regression analysis.
d) Feedback/Reporting – after analysis, feedback on how and what changes you should make comes quite in handy. The results should be used to forecast and to inform future marketing plans.
e) Data collection- To analyze data, a diverse & large database as well as involvement of various stakeholders may be needed.
f) Level of detail – Detailed insights about the things that matter is important. Discerning which data to measure and what they are able to measure is vital. Data quality cannot be overlooked, so organizations will need to spend time aggregating and cleansing data from internal databases, third-party sources, or both. From this big database, it is critical to identifying data important for analysis.
4. Ad Effectiveness Tools
Ad effectiveness tools include products such as Brand Resonance. These are tools for marketers seeking to understand how their campaigns perform. They help in understanding what elements of the campaign worked well or not so well and provide valuable learnings for future campaigns.
Factors to look out for when choosing an Ad effective tool include:
a) Audience – segmentation to monitor how specific campaigns resonate with a target group identified based on behavioral, geographic, or demographic data. Audience validation also enables you to see which specific media was most effective.
b) Campaign – results of how each element performed by channel. Specifics about different digital activities.
c) Metrics – Ads can inform, persuade, and or remind consumers about your product. The best way to determine whether your ads are achieving these objectives is to tie them to either of these relevant metrics.
d) Model – An attribution model helps examine how overlapping marketing channels drive a certain result. The model also assigns value to every one of them, based on their contribution
e) Recommendations for next steps – As a follow up to the key take-outs section, the final section of the report should highlight the main recommendations for the next steps
5. Data Management Platforms
A data management platform (DMP) is a centralized data system that collects audience and customer information from any source and analyzes it to provide an in-depth reference and resource collection. It is a unifying platform to collect, organize and activate first, second, and third-party audience data from any source, including online, offline, mobile, and beyond. Examples of DMP include Exlate and Marketing Cloud.
In choosing a DMP, consider the following:
a) Return on investment – consider the resources it would cost in running, implementing and maintaining the system versus the profits it adds to the business.
b) Data management – This concerns how data is handled and organized before returning to you. Is the data online, offline or mobile-based? How many sources of data can a platform integrate? You want to be on a platform that allows you to collect data from as many sources as possible, no limitations.
c) Access to third-party data – Does the DMP you’re considering offer the use of third-party data, and do they have a steady supply of third-party sources? Depending on your data needs, you may want to have easy access to a particular source of third-party data.
d) Size versus flexibility – Initially, you have to decide what elements you can’t live without. Some data management platforms decrease their personalized services as they increase in size. There is a need to clearly define the problems you’re trying to solve and have an understanding of the tools available to solve them then run the project knowing what you want to achieve. Are they willing to make changes based on customer feedback?
e) Support – It is vital to ensure that the vendor possesses great training resources and also provides active service and support in case your team needs help. You want to make sure that whatever platform you choose, has a local support team to help you navigate your way through.
Other examples of Ad planning and optimization products are:
- ISpot.tv Provides fast, accurate, and actionable measurement and attribution solutions that enable advertisers to assess creative effectiveness, enhance media plans and attribute advertising results for cross-platform campaigns
- Gracenote Provides metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services through software and metadata. The solution empowers content owners, distributors and brands to make better informed decisions around inclusive content investments.
- Oracle Retail planning and optimization product that enables the switch from a product-centric to customer-focused merchandise planning process. It helps define your assortment, placement, pricing, promotions, and product lifecycles to grow profitability with retail planning.
- Nielsen Data Management Platform The platform brings the power of Nielsen audience data and analytics to clients for the purposes of audience discovery, targeting, and analysis. It gives a real-time end-to-end platform that allows clients to capture, profile, syndicate, and optimize data.
- Nielsen Media Analytics Hones in on the segments that matter most. Helps to build, plan, activate, and measure audience segments across platforms and devices. Is the most comprehensive source of local and national advertising spend data available today with a platform that enables advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad platforms to monitor ad activity across 23 media platforms
- Nielsen Ad Intel Ad Intel helps customers navigate the crowded media landscape with actionable insights to identify prospects, analyze brand strategies and learn from past advertising campaigns to plan for the next.
- Kantar Competitive Intelligence Regards connected data about what brands are saying and spending across media channels, to inform strategy and boost performance.
- Kantar Brand Tracking helps get the insights you need when you need them, so you can make better and faster decisions to grow your brand. You can see where your brand is now and where it is heading. When the unexpected happens, you can trigger further short deep-dive surveys to help you respond quickly to challenges and opportunities.
- NCSolutions NCS connects the media people consume with the products they buy.
- IRi Voracity – is the only organically grown, fully integrated data lifecycle management platform and manipulation powerhouse for data, big and small.
We are constantly learning, and staying abreast of advancements and updates to keep our clients ahead of the game online. We’re obsessed with helping you achieve your objectives even in a changing landscape. Learn more about how we can help you get more done.
