Encore Media Metrics was selected from over 450 competitors in more than 19 categories as a nominee for Econsultancy’s 2012 Innovation Awards! The annual list highlights cutting edge ideas in digital marketing. Encore is proud to be selected in two categories: “Innovation in Online Advertising,” and “Innovation in Web Analytics.”

We congratulate our strong, creative competitors and wish everyone a very happy and prosperous 2012!

For more information about Econsultancy’s Innovation Awards, visit: http://econsultancy.com/uk/awards

As always, feel free to comment and share!

The Encore Team

Key topics of discussion and questions answered:

• What are the key reasons for the slow adoption of new metrics in online advertising?
• How can marketers close the gap and remove roadblocks to growth in online advertising?

Read More:
OMMA Metrics Interview: Multichannel Attribution and Insights

The Five Forces Driving Attribution: Media Measurement Comes of Age

Attribution 101: Full Funnel Media Measurement

Media Attribution Demystified

As always, feel free to comment and share!

The Encore Team

Steve Latham is interviewed by Russ Capper, host of The BusinessMakers Radio Show.

Key topics of discussion and questions answered:

• What is the history of Spur Interactive & Spur Digital as it relates to Encore Media Metrics?
• How did Encore Media Metrics evolve out of Spur and what challenges did you encounter during the transition?
• What needs did you identify in the industry and how did you did you learn of those needs?
• How did you plan for and initiate the buyout of Spur Interactive?
• Challenges of turning the platform into a product (Packaging, pricing, marketing, positioning, supporting)
• Location challenges and the digital advertising hub of New York City
• Nuts and bolts of how Encore Media Metrics helps clients measure and optimize media through better analytics and metrics
• Display vs. Search and other advertising types and their impact/value depending on a user’s position in the funnel

As always, feel free to comment and share!

The Encore Team

Encore founder and CEO Steve Latham recently moderated a panel discussion at OMMA Social 2011 NY on June 9, 2011.

Few can answer the question “what’s the ROI?” in any definitive fashion for social media. Lacking standard metrics, methodologies and tracking capabilities, the challenge is daunting: how do you attribute credit to social as an integrated channel in your overall marketing mix? This video addresses the art and science of social media attribution, through the discussion of strategies, solutions, and concrete examples.

As always, feel free to comment and share!

The Encore Team

• What is attribution?
• What does Encore Media Metrics do?
• How do “last-click” models compare to attribution analysis?
• How can media spend be optimized by using attribution analysis?

As always, feel free to comment and share!

The Encore Team

Encore founder and CEO Steve Latham recently participated in an OMMA Metrics Panel discussion in San Francisco on July 15, 2011.

While many people talk a lot about “predictive analytics,” few actually successful deliver business value by telling business people about their fat tailed, stochastic, and autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic volatility model for online advertising in ad exchanges. Yet, high-order mathematics and statistics exist in many companies.

In this video, you’ll hear from experts who create and use verifiable and statistically-valid quantitative methods. You will learn from professionals who have successfully crossed the academic chasm of mathematical research ideals to the other side: using statistics and modeling to generate quantifiable profit.

Moderator:
Jason Harper, VP, Analytics & Marketing Intelligence, Organic, Inc.

Panelists:
Matt Butner, VP and Director, Brand & Media Research, InsightExpress
Andy Fisher, EVP, Global Data & Analytics Director, Starcom MediaVest Group
Steve Latham, Founder and CEO, Encore Media Metrics
Tim McAtee, Research Director, IPG Emerging Media Lab
Leon Zemel, Chief Analytics Officer, [x+1]

A video of the panel is embedded for viewing above.  You may also view it on ustream.

As always, feel free to comment and share!

The Encore Team

1. Social Media: Shiny Object or ROI Producer?
2. What are brands doing to measure the impact of social ROI?
3. What works and how do you know?

These questions were discussed by industry thought leaders and expert practitioners from across the country including:

- Adam Cahill, EVP Media Director, Hill Holliday
- Ben Straley, CEO & CO-Founder, Meteor Solutions                                                                  \
- Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, Yieldbot
- John Lovett, Senior Partner & Principal Consultant, Web Analytics Demystified, Inc.
- Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, VP of Marketing, Involver
- Moderator: Steve Latham, Founder and CEO, Encore Media Metrics

A video of the panel is embedded for viewing below.  You may also view it on ustream.

As always, feel free to comment and share!

The Encore Team

In addition to meeting some amazing people, one of the highlights was the release of the latest display ad landscape or “LUMAscape” aka “the slide” that was originally produced by Terence Kawaja in 2010.  For those who are new to display advertising (or have been out of the market for the last 3 years), buying display media is like buying a house: you also need phone service, internet, cable, gas, electricity, dog-walking, etc.  In this case, Media is the house; ancillary services include ad verification, OBA compliance, data/tag management, audience measurement, ad serving, and our favorite: attribution.

The newest version of the slide is getting ever closer to accurately depicting all the segments and sub-segments that comprise the digital advertising landscape.  It also marked the debut of Encore Media Metrics as a recognized leader in the Attribution and Measurement category.

“The Slide”may also viewed on slideshare or you can download the LUMA Display Landscape here.

The industry is extremely fragmented, and is likely to stay that way for a while.  So if you want to play in the display advertising space (either as a buyer, seller or manager) you need to understand the difference between a DSP, DMP and SSP without yelling “WTF!”  Yes, it’s easier said than done but this map should help you get started.

Steve Latham (@stevelatham)

It’s been 3 years since measurement buzzwords “attribution” and “engagement mapping” emerged with great anticipation and excitement in online advertising.  The idea of looking across digital channels and beyond the last click to measure media throughout the funnel was thought to be the holy grail in online marketing.  Recognizing that “last-click wins” is insufficient for measuring the brand-building attributes of display media, brands, agencies and media vendors saw Attribution as the next big thing in digital advertising.

Yet as we entered 2011, very few marketers were using Attribution to measure and optimize online media spend.  Despite the universal desire for better measurement, most were still using old metrics (click-through rates, cost per click and direct cost per action) to analyze paid media.  Greg Papaleoni, who develops Analytics and Insights for Yahoo! Advertising Solutions, sums it up well: “While Full Funnel Attribution is the future of the ever-evolving digital media measurement landscape – it should be the present.  Those advertisers who embrace and implement this logic, methodology and technology sooner rather than later will enjoy a massive advantage over their competition.”

While adoption has been slow to date, this is changing quickly due to the convergence of numerous factors.  Borrowing on Michael Porter’s “Five Forces” model for analyzing industries, here is my take on the Five Forces that are driving digital media attribution (author note – I received permission from Professor Porter to adopt his model to this category):

1. The continuing shift of media budgets from traditional to digital.

While total U.S. media spend will grow only 3% in 2011, digital spend will grow 14%, surpassing Newspaper as the #2 medium.  Accounting for almost 30% of daily media consumption, Digital spend will continue to outpace all other channels for the foreseeable future.

2. The resurgence of display advertising

Per eMarketer, Display media spend will grow 14% in 2011, outpacing 10.5% growth in paid search.  While there are many reasons behind the growth (consumption of social, video and mobile content, better targeting capabilities, real-time bidding, richer formats, etc.) I believe the resurgence of display is driven by two primary factors:

• The maturing of search: There are only so many searches every day, and most marketers have optimized their paid search efforts.  For the big advertisers, there are no more keywords to buy.  As one search exec was recently quoted “paid search inventory is maxed out.” Incremental dollars will have to go elsewhere.  Display is the obvious choice.
• The return of branding:  As the economy recovers, marketers are re-investing in their brands.  During lean times, online dollars focused on harvesting existing demand (via search).  But with the improving economy, brand-building is once again a strategic priority.  In the digital realm, display media offers the most efficient, effective and scalable way to create awareness, consideration and preference for brands, products and services.

3. Increasing focus on accountability

While marketing budgets may have loosened, the focus on results has not.  As a result, marketers are keeping a very close eye on ROI from “brand-building” media.  With the ever-increasing need to show ROI, brands now want branding plus performance.  To properly measure brand-building media, we need to measure engagement, not clicks.

4. Evolution of web architecture

Recent forays by IBM and Oracle into the marketing arena signal a new wave in convergence of IT and Marketing.  As the IT behemoths push technology-based marketing solutions, CIOs are becoming more attentive to the needs of the marketing department.  The deployment of Data Management and Universal Tagging Platforms enable advanced analytics and media measurement that were off-limits to marketers in the past.  With this roadblock removed, the stage is set for new measurement tools to be deployed across their digital infrastructure.

5. The emergence of better Attribution solutions.

While early Attribution solutions were expensive and limited in capabilities (e.g. couldn’t attribute credit for organic conversions), a new breed of point-solution vendors (including my company Encore Media Metrics), are now offering more effective, flexible and affordable solutions.  For a very modest investment (as low as 1-2% of media spend), advertisers can now have a much more holistic and accurate view into the performance of each channel, vendor, format, placement and keyword.  These insights are enabling advertisers to optimize media budgets, yielding 20-40% gains in revenue.  The immediate return on investment in Attribution solutions may exceed 1-20x (100%-2,000%).

The Five Forces Driving Attribution are illustrated below:

As our business objectives change, so must the manner in which we measure results.  As dollars continue to flow into digital, brands and their agencies must use more efficient, accurate and effective metrics for measuring media throughout the funnel.  The emergence of more advanced and affordable Attribution solutions, supported by growing support from IT departments is paving the way for Attribution to become a foundational component within the digital marketing ecosystem.

Matt Miller, SVP of Strategy & Analytics at Performics, agrees, stating “Attribution is one of the top priorities for us and our advertisers.  Focus on attribution will only increase as advertisers build and implement strategies to maximize ROI across all digital channels.”

As always, comments are encouraged. And please feel free to share!

Steve Latham (@stevelatham)

Encore Media Metrics Incorporating Attribution For Paid, Owned And Earned Media

Steve Latham is CEO of Encore Media Metrics, an attribution technology company.

So, what problem are you solving with Encore?

We solve 2 problems for agencies and brands alike.  First, we provide advanced attribution and measurement, enabling them to see across channels and beyond the last click to measure performance of paid, owned and earned media.  While most marketers are aware of the need for attribution, very few are doing it.  Second, we allow them to offload the tedious, manual work of reporting and measurement, which is a loss-leader for most agencies.  They need good metrics, but it’s hard to justify the cost of large teams needed to manage all aspects of reporting.  We offer a cost-effective way to produce the insights they need to optimize budgets and maximize campaign ROI.  So to sum it up, we provide better reports and deeper insights in a way that saves them time and money.

I believe we’re hitting the market at a great time and that this will be the year Attribution goes mainstream for a few reasons.  First, paid search is maturing and expanding digital budgets will have to be deployed elsewhere (display, social, mobile, etc).  There are only so many searches every day and most companies have optimized their ppc campaigns.  The low hanging fruit in search has been picked; further gains will be in much smaller increments and will require buying short-tail terms that start conversations rather close them (hence the need for keyword attribution).  This is supported by the fact that Display will grow faster than search in 2011 and is expected to outpace it for coming years. Search is still the big dog, but display and other brand-building media are nipping at its heels.  If you believe Eric Schmidt’s prediction of a $200 billion global display market, we’re still very early in this game. Other factors driving Attribution are the increasing focus on accountability, the upgrading of web architecture (e.g. adoption of universal tags) and the emergence of affordable attribution solutions – such as ours.  These factors are converging to make 2011 a very exciting year for those of us in the attribution space.

What’s your view on the competitive set and where you’ve been and how would you say you differentiate?

To understand how we’re positioned, you must first understand how the Attribution marketplace is segmented. For starters, there are two different approaches to attribution: operational attribution and statistical or algorithmic modeling. Each approach has its place and I believe they are more complementary than competitive. Statistical modeling analyzes vast amounts of data to look for correlations that indicate how media channels (display, search, email, affiliate, etc.) work together to drive results. Modeling allows you to see which channels feed each other, and which mix should yield the best overall ROI.

In contrast, operational attribution creates detailed records for each visitor that enable you to see which ads were seen and clicked on, how the visitor found your site, what pages they viewed and what actions they took. You can then query the data to analyze engagement paths and assess the performance of each channel, vendor, keyword and placement. We believe operational attribution is the foundation for advanced analytics as it’s based on actual visitor data (vs. a black box) and provides much more granular insights into performance of all types of media. Once you have operational attribution, you can then do advanced modeling of that data to glean additional insights. But, operational attribution will provide 80-90% of the insight you need to optimize your spend.

Within the Operational segment, you then have to look at the extent of attribution: lower-funnel (click-based) vs. full-funnel (clicks and impressions). While click-based attribution is better than nothing, it doesn’t answer the question: “which media buys are creating demand?” The lower-funnel approach relies on clicks, which may be great for search, but insufficient for measuring the impact of display media. If you want a true picture of which ads are creating demand and which placements are satisfying demand, you need a full-funnel solution.

Now to the original question: how are we positioned vs. our competitors? While I can’t speak for our competitors, I can say we differentiate in a few ways: 1) we incorporate attribution from social media (even in the absence of referring clicks), allowing us to provide attribution for paid, owned and earned media, 2) we have a flexible approach that is designed to accommodate varying needs of agencies and brands (no long-term commitments, pay for what you use, etc.), and 3) we are affordable for most marketers. If a client spends between $50,000 and $5 million per month in online media, they can afford our solution.

Is scale of ad spend critical to Encore’s services – attribution, media mix modeling?

If you’re asking is Attribution is only suited for the biggest advertisers, the answer is no. It really doesn’t matter how much you spend; you still need to look across channels and beyond the last click to optimize your mix. Even if you’re only spending $50,000 a month, a small incremental investment can yield a dramatic improvement in Return on Spend. Any advertiser who is buying more than just search is going to benefit from Attribution.

What’s your view on the “view‑through conversion”?

View-throughs are good for ad networks seeking to optimize their media placement, but they are limited in what they offer advertisers.  If you are buying display media from 5-6 vendors, you’re likely to get some view-throughs from each buy.  While view-throughs tell you if an ad was seen they don’t tell you which ads were the most effective (and cost-effective) in creating demand, or how each media buy influenced results from paid or natural search.  You can’t analyze recency or frequency and you can’t tell the order in which ads were viewed.  You need more details to truly understand which placements created demand, the role they played in the engagement path, and how to attribute credit within the channel.  Yes, you need a full-funnel attribution solution.

What’s the difference between attribution modeling and media‑mix modeling?

In the context of measuring the impact of digital media, they’re effectively the same thing.  But for most marketers, media‑mix modeling encompasses all channels, including TV, print, radio and other traditional media.  Within that context, operational attribution should play an important role in providing the inputs that go into such a model.  We can provide a much more accurate and richer set of data inputs that will enable the global media mix model to produce more relevant and insightful outputs.  As mentioned earlier, it shouldn’t be “either / or” when evaluating operational vs. algorithmic attribution.  They can work in concert quite well.

What do you see out there as the most difficult channel to provide the sort of service you’re providing today?

Within digital media, Social is definitely the hardest to measure.  First, referring clicks are not good indicators as very few actually click-through from social sites to the brand’s web site (see “Connecting the Dots”).  But beyond clicks, how do you attribute credit back to people who are watching your You Tube channel, viewing comments on your Facebook page or reading a blog about you?  It’s hard because you can’t cookie browsers on 3^rd party social media sites.  While Facebook now allows marketers to set cookies via iframes on company pages, very few are doing it.

Some try to do social attribution via correlation or looking at directional trends, where a social mentions drove a spike in traffic and a lift in conversions.  But this approach is, in technical terms, “squishy.”  For most, social attribution is a future goal more than a near term objective.

But since you asked, I should mention that we offer a unique solution to the social media attribution problem. We use a patent-pending tool that allows us to identify which visitors or purchasers have engaged with the brand in social media, regardless of whether or not they clicked through to the site.   Through this, we can draw a direct line between online conversions and the social interactions that preceded them.  We think it’s pretty cool and we’re seeing a lot of interest from brands, agencies and media vendors.

Do you see social media attribution as an opportunity?

It’s definitely something we see as a differentiator but it should be viewed as part of our solution for two reasons: 1) social should be integrated with other channels from a measurement perspective, and 2) it’s hard to make a ton of money on social media measurement.  A brand may spend $500-$1,000 to measure social interaction, but they’re not likely to spend more on the tool than they do on their social media marketing efforts.  You also don’t want to be a one-trick pony in the digital landscape.  Things move too quickly and one player (e.g. Google) can make render your product obsolete overnight.  So we see it as a differentiator and a conversation starter more than a standalone offering.

What is Encore’s target market?

We serve brands and agencies who are seeking to create demand and/or drive sales through paid, owned and earned digital media.  While we can accommodate budgets as low as $50k per month, our sweet spot is campaigns with budgets of $100,000 to $2 million per month.

In general, Attribution tends to be more appropriate for considered purchases, e.g. financial, auto, travel, health care, luxury goods and anything B-to-B.  The longer the sales cycle and the bigger the ticket, the more you need Attribution.

We work with brands, agencies and trading desks of all sizes, even those with internal ad ops teams.  Even if they have a bench, they still need better tools to produce the insights their planners and customers demand.

How does pricing work? Do you charge on according to media spend or is it a per seat?

We price our solution as a technology (vs. a flat % of media spend) that is tiered based on the scope and scale of the campaign.  In general, we charge a fixed fee that covers the planning, production and client services, along with a cpm-based fee that covers the cost of data capture, storage and analysis.  The fee as a percentage of the media budget will vary significantly.  If you’re buying premium placement media at $10cpm, our fees are tiny.  If on the other hand you’re going for scale (e.g. $2cpm), the fee will be slightly higher as a percentage of spend.  But in either scenario, we’re very affordable and the ROI is hard to beat.

What sort of milestones would you like the company to have accomplished?

My primary goal for 2011 is for Encore to become widely known as a leading provider of measurement, attribution and reporting services.  If there is a discussion about Attribution, I want us to be one of the solutions that are always mentioned.  Our value proposition (better reports, deeper insights, affordable and adaptable) is hard to beat, and we look forward to proving it to leading brands and agencies.

Follow Steve Latham (@stevelatham), Encore Media Metrics (@EncoreMetrics) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.