Mediacorp shifts from short-term metrics to offer brand uplift

Mediacorp has added brand-uplift studies to its advertising offering in response to an industry-wide shift away from short-term metrics such as impressions and clicks, and toward long-term brand-building.

Singapore's national public broadcaster will offer brand-lift studies to clients via a partnership with Brand Metrics, a Swedish software firm that automates the measure of brand lift for premium publishers.

Mediacorp is the first premium publisher in Asia-Pacific to partner with Brand Metrics, which has 41 customers across 16 countries, including The Guardian, The Sun, The Washington Post, Bloomberg and The Telegraph.

Brand-lift studies are not a new innovation—the concept of surveying consumers after they were exposed to an ad was tested as early as 2005 and began to gain traction among measurement firms in the 2010s. These studies have become a key part of the ad offerings of tech platforms like Facebook and Google.

Many publishers perform brand-lift studies on an ad-hoc basis for clients, but they face several barriers in conducting such studies in a standardised way across all of the hundreds of campaigns that run across their platforms. These range from financial and resourcing challenges to limits in methodology to an inability to compare performance from one campaign to the next, according to Sean Adams, the global insight director of Brand Metrics.

In a media briefing on Thursday (September 30), Mediacorp's VP of digital sales, solutions and operations, Jennifer Chase, told Campaign Asia-Pacific: "Brand-lift studies have never really been done at all—at scale—on premium platforms, and that has been a big missing part if you are an agency or a marketer. They know what is happening on the YouTube and Facebook side, but they have no idea of the effectiveness of what they are doing on premium platforms."

Brand Metrics has positioned itself to plug that gap by automating the process of conducting brand-lift studies across multiple campaigns. It does this by sending out a single-survey question to site visitors that is able to generate scores against four key metrics: awareness, consideration, preference and action intent. The survey data is measured against frequency of ad exposure to calculate the brand lift of each campaign. In the platform, publishers are also able to benchmark their performance in each of their ad categories against Brand Metrics' full customer base.

For Mediacorp, it means it can measure and compare performance and brand uplift across the majority of its 18 media properties, which includes CNA, Today, 8World and more. Mediacorp's brand-lift studies are currently limited to display ads, but it is testing with Brand Metrics to conduct studies within branded content, instream video (in-app/CTV) and audio.

Mediacorp's Chase said the product has seen strong interest from clients in the banking, finance and insurance (BFI) industry, as well as FMCG and entertainment.

"On the BFI side you are talking about many different types of products and services, and if you are just focusing on a clickthrough rate obviously that doesn't do a lot because it takes frequency to get people aware of it, to influence a consumer to adopt a solution or product," Chase said.

The product has so far been tested by six agencies, including WPP's Mindshare, Wavemaker and Xaxis, Omnicom Media Group, Havas and financial services agency Ptarmigan Media.

Chase told Campaign that appetite for brand metrics in Singapore "depends on how savvy the clients and agencies are", but added "the temperature from local agencies and the response we have had has been very positive so far."

Mediacorp launched its ad platform Mediacorp AdDirect in February this year.