Better Options to Siloed Cross-Platform Measurement

Today, DISQO is launching the second paper in our New Foundations of Ad Effectiveness series. The report, A Kaleidoscope for Cross-Platform Measurement: How measurement silos distort brand and behavioral lift research, explores how campaign measurement without a view across all platforms fails to deliver meaningful insights, at best, and at worse drives brands in the wrong direction.

With so much change in consumer behavior as we live our lives more digitally, and with the concurrent landslide changes in measurement technology, our Foundations series seeks to give marketers tools for success in the new era. Our recently released first Foundations report, X-Ray Specs for Path to Purchase Attribution, provides more context to these changes and how campaign optimization on brand-owned first-party data may not be the panacea some think. You see… the changes faced by all players in our industry challenge intuitive and conventional wisdom — and that’s what our series explores.

No one sees this more clearly than our EVP of Advertising, Stephen Jepson. Stephen is an industry veteran and thought leader who’s seen many changes to the ad measurement space. We asked him to weigh in on what he’s seeing and hearing from clients — big brands and their agencies as well as media companies.   

What was most surprising from DISQO’s new research?
The fact that siloed measurement doesn’t work and can’t work wasn’t surprising for someone like me who is on many social platforms. It should also be no surprise to media companies, brands and agencies who’ve been grappling with cross-platform measurement solutions for far too long. 

Our clients will find it useful to see their challenges quantified — 62% of people in our sample audience use multiple social networks in a month. This means that marketers who run ads on multiple platforms are having measurement problems, big time.

Do you see this research accuracy problem getting better any time soon?
The ad measurement community needs to evolve to another methodology by which they can identify and act on exposure. One way is to build identity matching protocols based on PII. However, without a first-party audience, we believe that this is not sustainable, nor scalable. Given the existing privacy landscape with CCPA and other regulations that will arise, solutions providers will have a difficult time obtaining PII from third-party audiences. Further, identity matching will inherently result in poor match rates, which will reduce the feasibility to measure advertising due to extremely small sample sizes. 

Why are people coming to DISQO for help measuring cross-platform brand lift?
DISQO’s CX platform was built from the ground up on the foundation of a 100% direct, opted-in audience. We own the entire value chain, including the consumer relationships, proprietary technology, and the delivery of insights. This means that we know every consumer in our audience who is exposed to our clients’ advertising. 

DISQO anticipated the deprecation of third-party cookies and built our solutions for today — and the future. Even now, we’re able to measure advertising in browsers that don’t support third-party cookies.

Our methodology and platform were designed to provide valid and reliable measures of ad effectiveness by giving credit to the actual advertising. We have a full line of sight into behaviors that might indicate interest in a brand – anywhere online, including siloed platforms. For example, we’re able to see how advertising affects shopping behavior on the most important e-commerce retailers’ sites and can give attribution credit back to the ads that produced transactions and other desired behaviors. This is only possible because we don’t rely on cookies.

Today, consumers who are exposed to advertising are also falsely classified as “not exposed to ads” due to cookie deletion and tagging errors. Another of our advantages is that our solution is based on deterministic identification and a cookie-less system to identify if a consumer was served an ad, providing a more complete view of ad effectiveness based on all exposures.

What’s different about research panels today that even industry vets might not know?
Brands and advertisers are awakening to the concept that today’s, modern, panel-based approaches are a far cry from the panels of old. As hooked on cookies as the industry may be, the truth is they were never a perfect measurement tool. The scale that is possible with DISQO, and especially our ability to combine sentiment and outcomes is entirely new and better than cookies ever were. As the AdTech world changes, we believe the only way to sustainably serve our clients is to rely on first-party, permission-based audiences and technology where no cookies, identity matching, or onboarding is needed.