Nasser: 

Welcome to Shift Happens. I’m Nasser Sahlool with DAC. Today we are joined by Robert Cooney who is our VP of Client Strategy and all-around smarty pants when it comes to integrated media. Welcome to the show, Robert.  

Robert: 

Thanks for having me on, I really thought this would happen sooner, given everyone tells me I have a face for podcasting.  

Nasser: 

And a voice for TV.  

Robert: 

That’s right. And then I heard I this was being video recorded and I was like, oh, okay. That’s why. 

Nasser: 

Video recorded. I was going to say that this is a generational shift from the last episode where we had Luke Regan on, but the fact that you said video recorded, tells me that we’re still stuck in a similar generation. So welcome to Gen X Robert. 

Robert: 

Thank you.  

Nasser: 

So, Robert, we’re going to talk about the integration and shifts between performance and brand media. So, you know, one of the big conversations right now is if performance media is so measurable, why should I spend anything in brand media, especially given the perceived lack of accountability, or measurement? So, why are we talking about pushing more and more brands into spending money on brand media?  

Robert: 

I think this is a case of a pendulum swinging too far in one direction, and this has really been a thing that’s played out over not just years, but decades. I can see go back to, the proliferation of digital in the first place and how it progressively trained us that everything is measurable, that you can see a really, hard conversion count, or ROI on every marketing dollar spent. 

And then this becomes part of the justification for how you go and get the budget from the business to continue investing. So, digital tactics have kind of trained us to set the bar really high in terms of measurability and of course, what’s been happening recently with a lot of signal loss or deprecation of these forms of measurement, is that that’s no longer true, for one thing. 

We have also seen that the idea of being able to invest in brand building and emotional storytelling for at least some businesses has become a bit of a lost art, even though it’s still very important and very powerful when done correctly. And actually, some of the tactics that show the hardest measurable results or the best ROI when measured in the last click sort of way, they may be tactics that actually have the lowest incremental in long term value. 

And so, we get to this point where businesses are kind of misled by the numbers into this situation that is borderline if not outright fraudulent, where they’re moving money into the things that have the least true impact.  

Nasser: 

So, I mean, that’s a big word – fraudulent, right? Especially as it relates to some of these types of investments. I mean, we certainly saw through, you know, starting with COVID, a lot of this shift away from brand investment and more on that kind of bottom of the funnel, you know, last click, investments. So assuming that it’s all above board, what is the impact on long term brand health?  

Robert: 

So I think it’s very true that, this shift was exacerbated by COVID, and I think it was a bit of a forced short termism. Right. If you have no idea of what’s happening, with the supply chain or whether or not we’re going into another lockdown, it makes a lot of sense that you don’t want to make one-year long media commitments. So, there was a bit of a flight out of things like the upfronts and into, investing in digital in an even bigger way, just because you have that flexibility to turn investments up and down at the drop of a hat. 

So the problem definitely got worse. And I think we’re seeing the results of that. We’re starting to see, more mid-sized businesses waking up to the fact that they’ve had an erosion of their brand, and that they have to continue to invest more into these sorts of demand capture channels in order to keep hitting their business objectives. 

But it’s a bit of a race to the bottom. And I think for just, I talked about the pendulum swinging too far in one direction. I think it’s kind of hitting the end of that track. And we’re now realizing, okay, it’s got to come back the other way a bit. 

Nasser: 

So this, this feels like a little bit of a, you know, back to the future kind of situation, right? I mean,  where everything old is new again.  And it’s not just in media. It’s in popular culture. Like celebrities are smoking again for some reason.  

Robert: 

That’s right. Sabrina Carpenter has a cigarette in her mouth and TV is cool again.  

Nasser: 

So maybe I’ll be cool as well. Who knows? Let’s talk a little bit about this idea that you brought up about storytelling, right? Is it a lost art? Do the people in charge of marketing organizations today know how to do that anymore, in your opinion?  

Robert: 

I think it depends very much on the business, of course. And a lot of the largest businesses have been lost this because they’ve continued to invest in brand media in a big way, and they’ve understood that really well over the years. 

And they have the ability to invest in the right forms of measurement around it. So this is not a problem for the Coca-Colas of the world. This is really a problem that seems to most affect, mid-tier brands. Let’s say anyone who’s spending from $5 to $50 million in advertising seems to have the biggest problem with getting the right balance of performance media and brand building media. 

Nasser: 

Okay, so if you were talking to those brands, what evidence is there to support, investing more in a funnel?  

Robert: 

So there has been some really critical landmark research conducted on a global scale. Probably one of the most important and famous texts, The Long and The Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Field. I think that this really advocates for a mix of brand and performance marketing being somewhere around a 60 to 40 ratio for most brands. 

You can shift that in a bit in either direction, depending on the nature of the business. And where they are at in their overall development. But I think we can take a lot away from that basic heuristic and just say, you know, if you’re spending 5% of your money or 0% of your money on brand building, that’s going to be way wrong. 

And it has to be something closer to an even mix. And you don’t need to A/B test a parachute. You don’t have to go and figure this out for yourself. That could be disastrous. So just, take some learning from, what we already know.  

Nasser: 

So it is interesting that you point to The Long and The Short of It, because that’s the text of the industry and it’s been around for so long. Surely there’s something that is more current and more contemporary than that. Any data that or evidence that you can point to that is more recent? 

Robert: 

I think that, we’re continuing to see this play out when businesses measure this in the right way. So any business can test it for themselves by delving into media mix modeling and incrementality testing. 

And we’re doing this all of the time. We’re helping brands bring together these kinds of unified measurement frameworks that help them establish a better way of looking at the results of brand building media. And this continues to play out exactly the way these texts suggest. So I don’t think that there’s been a major shift over time in the fundamentals of how this works, or of advertising science. The data is pretty much in on that.  

But the ways that we can measure it have evolved. And that makes things like media mix modeling more accessible to a wider variety of brands. Used to be something that was very time consuming to do and very expensive to do. And now you can have AI platforms help with gathering and assembling the data and stitching it together in all of the right ways and actually running the models. 

There’s some great open source models available to do MMM. We’ve got models being provided by Google and by Meta. They’re both very strong models for different reasons. And I think it’s very telling that, the two largest digital advertising platforms in the world have provided a faculty for doing a media mix model. Right? Because even they understand that the quality and value of their traffic can’t be measured through anything other than that. 

Nasser: 

So you mentioned media mix modeling and earlier you talked about incrementality testing. Could you explain the difference between the two and when you would use one versus the other? 

Robert: 

So media mix modeling is really most effective when you’re trying to get the channel mix right. So if you’re looking at across all of your advertising activities and you’re trying to evolve toward a scenario plan of shifting dollars across channels. Incrementality testing is best when you really want to understand an individual channel or tactic and how much it’s contributing.  

So there we can do things like holdout testing or match market testing to do a comparison of the specific lift being driven by that one channel. And so I think ideally these things work in very complementary fashions where you might start with a foundational media mix model. Maybe it raises some questions, like while it looks like we’re doing really well in radio, but we haven’t spent a lot in radio, we might need to invest more and test it. So you would design, specific incrementality test on the back of that, to get a better read on that specific channel.  

Nasser: 

So let’s build on that. If a brand wants to, invest more into upper funnel, where should they start? What should the first steps be? 

Robert: 

I think the very first thing would be just trying to evolve toward audience centricity and really understanding your target consumer and how they consume media. Because if you understand that, if you know where they’re showing up and where they’re engaging with media and the types of content that matters to them, then even if you have no measurement strategy, you’re still not going to go wildly wrong, right? 

If you are, selling motorcycle insurance and you’re advertising in places where motorcycle enthusiasts are shopping for motorcycles, there’s only so, far, you can go down the wrong path, so that that audience centricity is a pretty good place to start. And then we want to start looking at the early, I would say leading indicators of success. 

So we might not understand right out of the gates how well that translates to long term value in building a brand or customer acquisition or the lifetime value of a customer. We should see signs of life, where you run this media and you get more engagement on your social feeds, more traffic to your website, more branded searches in your in your name. 

And this is really, the concept behind burst attribution. So we do a big push into brand media. Do we see a burst in some of those direct response KPIs that that just give us that first sign that it’s working. 

Nasser: 

Now, I know you’ve applied this thinking in a number of different use cases. Could you illustrate this with a couple of specific examples and talk about the impact that it’s had on the business, this kind of more balanced approach to performance and, brand building. 

Robert: 

We have, one client that we’ve been doing a lot of work with from a strategy and analytics standpoint, a menswear retailer. We first started speaking with them. They were spending, the majority of their advertising budget actually talking to existing customers. It’s kind of a niche segment. And they found that, if they just got the latest promotion in front of their best customers, those customers would show up and spend more. 

So that made a lot of sense on one level. But growth was stagnating. And there is kind of a bathtub effect with customers where eventually you start to lose some. And if there’s no new ones coming in, then your customer list is just perpetually shrinking. So we looked at the situation and said, okay, we really need to start moving some of the media back up funnel and focus around customer acquisition. 

We want to get the types of customers who have the highest lifetime value. So segmentation and targeting is critical and just the media tactics are going to be different around that. We want to pursue tactics that are good at making a customer introduction and driving brand discovery, rather than channels like, email and retargeting ads that are just going to go after those existing customers. 

So we put together, this measurement model and we saw, some things that were surprising to the client initially. One comment that was made was, “hey, can we take a look at our attribution setup?” Because all of a sudden we’re getting a bunch of traffic showing up as direct and maybe we’re missing a tag somewhere. 

And it was like, no, you’re not missing a tag. That’s brand marketing working. It’s now seeing you on TV and they’re showing up to your website. So it’s doing finally exactly what it’s supposed to do.  

Nasser: 

I’m hung up on that analogy you used of a bathtub and all your customers in it, and then an image came into my head… 

Robert: 

Yeah, yeah, all the customers in a bathtub, but they’re wearing great suits and really nice shoes. 

Nasser: 

It’s, it’s still disturbing.  

Robert: 

Yeah, it’s both awkward and classy.  

Nasser: 

That could be both of our taglines.  

Robert: 

Yeah, we’re in the business of dichotomy.  

Nasser: 

There you go. Awkward but classy. So how can teams optimize upper funnel media quickly? Like what? What are the practical steps that they can take? 

Robert: 

I think, kind of advice number zero is accepting the heuristic, right.  It’s just understanding… You’ve got to get your balance towards something that makes sense. And there’s going to be a lot of obstacles in your way. You’re going to have to fight for it. But let’s start there. Let’s recognize what a good balance is supposed to be and try and quickly move toward that. And the next thing is to begin looking at those leading indicators. 

So, where do we see signs of life? Whether it’s traffic searches, all of the things that are going to move fast, and you eventually want to start building that into a more robust framework where you’ve got a handle on customer acquisition and lifetime value. And we can hopefully statistically validate the connection between those leading indicators and value, right? So we can prove to the business that delivering more traffic to the website from the right audiences eventually leads to a high value customer. 

It might take us two years to prove that, which is why you start with the fast-moving data, the long-term goal, put the fast moving and the slow-moving data together…  

Nasser: 

Explains the fast moving…Give an example of that if you can.  

Robert: 

So those would be the KPIs like branded searches and website traffic, the types of things that you can get on a daily if not hourly basis. Versus things like a lifetime customer value. You would really need to take years to measure that in full. 

Though you can begin to measure, sort of the three month value, the six month value, the nine month value, and track those customers as a cohort. So there’s always, more short-term way to measure, the predictors of long-term success. And as time goes on, you should see hopefully, that your ultimate result comes in line with your prediction. 

Nasser: 

So this all sounds reasonable and logical. Why aren’t more people doing this? 

Robert: 

Mainly because it’s hard, it’s hard to set up all of these measurement models. It’s a journey. It’s not something you can stand up overnight and just take a new approach. So you have to build a lot of the foundations in place to understand your customer acquisition cost, your customer lifetime value. 

You have to convince the business that it’s worth doing. So if you, are a marketing lead and you’re going to your CFO for money and you really kind of bucking the trend to say, I’m going to invest in something that’s harder to measure than what you’re used to or the way we typically get funds approved. 

So, again, it is kind of going back in time. It’s kind of breaking the model. We’ve grown accustomed to, and it really requires a lot of support around the modeling of why this should work. And hopefully the brand marketers and the agency working together and, close collaboration to build and validate that story. So ,you could say we can’t prove exactly out of the gate how this is going to work, but we’re going to have a number of checkpoints along the way. And let’s keep coming back and talking about this at each of these milestones and see that this is playing out the way we hope it does. 

Nasser: 

Branded search is a hell of a drug, right.  

Robert: 

It sure is. Yeah. And if you believe some models or if you believe last click attribution, it’ll still tell you to put all your money there. 

Nasser: 

Of course, why wouldn’t you? 

Robert: 

Where does it come from, right? I, I heard someone say once, branded search is a lack of attribution, and that’s probably one of the most astute statements I have come across.  

Nasser: 

That’s wonderful. So, Robert, I know you’re a bit of a dog with a bone when it comes to this subject, and in fact, you can fill almost an entire book on this subject. And I can say that with certainty, because you’ve almost written one. So, anybody who’s listening, go to the DAC group.com website and check out the article that, Robert has written there, about Bridging Brand and Performance Media for a fuller view of this conversation and a lot more detail and specific examples. 

So here’s the shift. Brand and performance aren’t competing priorities. They’re interdependent. Performance only works at its best when brand demand is doing the heavy lifting, and brand only scales when it’s measured with rigor. The brands that win are the ones building systems where brand fuels performance. Today, while creating the confidence to invest for long term growth. Now. Make it happen. 

Follow Shift Happens. Leave us a review and share this episode with your team. If you have any questions for the podcast, email us at shifthappens@dacgroup.com. We’d love to hear from you. Thank you for joining us today, Robert.  

Robert: 

Thank you, Nasser. 

Nasser: 

And thank you for listening and watching at Shift Happens. I’m Nasser Sahlool.