OPINION: Rethinking audiences and digital measurement

The media industry in Malaysia has been abuzz over the last couple months on the topic of digital measurement as the anniversary of the appointment of Effective Measure rolled around. The topic of discussion revolved around a few points: the top sites that Malaysian surfers go to and the measurement of unique audiences on those websites. Usually there is a huge amount of excitement in terms of whose got bigger audiences and in this manner, online marketers are probably no different than their print counterparts who go to interesting lengths to contest the various numbers.

Exciting as this may be, I always find it a rather moot point.

Frankly, most digital measurement systems have the same output. They have the same unique visitors, unique browsers and so on. What they may differ slightly on is their calculation and methodology. Although there are purists who like to get to the technical point, those are usually minor variations. However, like their ATL brethren, what is often more contentious is a question of sufficiency and representativeness of their sampling. ‘Does the sampled base represent an accurate representation of the Malaysian internet public?’ is often a more genuine concern. It is this that generates contention and questions on the methodology in achieving it. In this regard, the digital space is no different than the traditional space.

Count me cynical but no matter how representative a sample is, somebody always questions it, and it always depends on which side of the numbers you sit on. The fundamental approach on the need for accurate audiences on websites is so that agencies can select the right websites to place advertising on. The media planner then selects the right combination of websites to hit an optimal selection of audiences that meets the objectives of the campaign.

In today’s world, as agencies are focusing more on the consumer, through consumer and channel planning, this approach must be questioned.

It is not unusual for an agency to recommend ad networks in the pursuit of planning a digital campaign. When you buy an ad network, you are buying the long tail of digital inventory beyond the top 20. For example, if you were targeting urbanites aged 20-39 with interests in telecommunications, you could in essence looks for this audience with this kind of behaviour. However, all too often, questions abound on “which site does it appear on?”. Often, the question isn’t about the sufficiency of the audience (as you would on TV, reach factors of 70 per cent crop up and so on) but rather on the focus on sites.

Today in the digital world, as we focus more on consumers, should our planning behaviour mimic that? Should we not buy audiences, rather than buying specific sites?

This question will get more pronounced as agencies are gearing up their digital departments into DSPs (demand side platforms), where we are now able to look for audiences in real time among the multitude of digital sites, from the top 20 to the long tail.

We now buy audiences in where they will be, rather than buying the website which we think they will be in.

From a digital planner’s perspective, this is superb as finally you will be able to target purely the right demographic of your audience with the behaviour you want across where the audiences will be and yet limit your exposure in the way you want it. Yet, I am certain people will still ask “so which site does it appear on?”.

DSPs have a great potential for clients looking for large consumer based audiences, a demographic with a behaviour in mind. As audiences fragment more in the digital space from the top 20 websites into the nooks and crannies of the digital space, DSPs potentially allow us to follow and track our consumers across a large chunk of the digital spaces. The top 20 still does play a role, perhaps in creating impact or partnerships for brands to solidify their presence in the digital space.

If we don’t know where we buy, does this mean we can’t tell the impact of what we buy?

One of the key reasons why I love digital is the ability to track and measure every impact of the work that we do. No different on DSPs: all that we can do still applies, we can use the ad serving agent of our choice to determine the intelligence of our digital campaigns.

Today, with the intelligence of retargeting as well as dynamic ad creation, we are able to fragment our consumer into the microcosm of communications, a targeted message for different stages of the communication, that appears with creative messages that resonate with the consumer at that stage. With the inputs from this rich digital environment married with social media data and its behavioural context plus good old fashioned media data multiplies the complexity but brings clarity to the analytics table. It would accelerate the behavioural context of our communications environment, a richness previously never seen before. I think it is a great time to be in media, and an even greater time to be in digital.