← Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
Navigating Whiplash: How Real-Time Brand Lift Helps Advertisers Thrive in Uncertainty | Behind the Numbers
00:23:12
Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:00]
Marcus
Are your brand campaigns as effective as they could be? If you're only getting insights when the campaign is over, then the answer is no. To make better campaign decisions, you need real time measurement. You need lucid measurement by synt. Discover the power of real time brand lift measurement@synt.com insights that's C I N T.com insights foreign. Hey, gang. It's Friday, June 6th. Evelyn, Max, Steph and listeners, welcome to behind the Numbers, the new marketer video podcast made possible by sint. I'm Marcus, and joining me today we have senior analyst. Our senior analyst covering digital advertising media based in Virginia, it's Evelyn Mitchell Wolf.
- [00:50]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Hello, Marcus. Hi, everybody.
- [00:51]
Marcus
Hello there. She said there's an ice cream truck going by, so at any point, if it cuts back to her and she's got a Vanilla Crunch bar in her hand, don't worry about it.
- [00:59]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Okay? Don't ask questions.
- [01:00]
Marcus
Yeah. Also a gent with the same title, different location. He reluctantly calls Philly home. Shots fired. Maxwells.
- [01:08]
Maxwells
Yo.
- [01:10]
Marcus
Hello there. And also we have with us the director of product management at SINT Living in Seattle, it's Steph Gore.
- [01:17]
Steph Gore
Hey, everyone.
- [01:19]
Marcus
Hello there. Welcome to the show. Whenever we have an external guest on, we start with a speed intro to get to know our guests a little better. Let's do it. First question, there's only two what do you do?
- [01:34]
Steph Gore
In a sentence, Steph, I as mentioned, the director of product management for our measurement and data solutions products. My team builds products to help brands and marketers measure the impact of advertising on attitudinal brand lift.
- [01:50]
Marcus
Okay, and what three items would you take with you onto a desert island if you had food, water and shelter covered?
- [01:59]
Steph Gore
Okay, the essentials are covered. I think I'd start with my E reader. Probably full of downloaded library books. That would be central. Number one.
- [02:08]
Marcus
Such a good answer. I said I was thinking book, but I was like, that's going to run out real quick. E reader.
- [02:13]
Steph Gore
I got to think bigger. I don't know how long I'm on this island. There are questions here.
- [02:18]
Marcus
All right, Number two.
- [02:19]
Steph Gore
So gotta be prepared. Number two, probably my Stanley water cup. Pretty obsessed about staying hydrated. And I think that would be especially important.
- [02:28]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Cheers, Steph.
- [02:29]
Steph Gore
Yeah, perfect. See? On the same page. And I think the third thing would be my Tevas. Very practical sandal. Great for the water, good for the sand. Just seems like an important, you know, an important essential to have.
- [02:45]
Marcus
It'll be comfy. Well played. All right. Very nice. Evelyn didn't know that she was supposed to answer These questions. So she's coming up with these off the cuff.
- [02:56]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Well, I. Well, I had questions about, like, do I have electricity? Because, like, I was also going to say my E reader, but then, well, it'll. It'll run out of battery. So I definitely. Steph would also, if I could bring it, I would just load it up with as many books as it could hold for time purposes. But eventually it will run out of battery. So, like, I mean, can I plug it in? Do I need to also bring a battery pack? These are. These are important questions for sure.
- [03:22]
Marcus
Max, I should have just gone to you. Let's pretend there's electricity.
- [03:26]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Okay, then. Yeah. E reader would also be.
- [03:29]
Marcus
My God.
- [03:31]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
I know. I mean, what are you going to do, though? So that would be my first one. I think I. I would also. I was thinking about music and I guess maybe my record player. Yeah. If we have electricity, I would just say my record player, and it comes with records. It. It inexplicably just comes with all the records that I would need. And I guess the third thing would be.
- [04:02]
Marcus
A washing machine. Okay.
- [04:04]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Refrigerator. To keep food good for longer.
- [04:06]
Marcus
I feel like food's covered. Matt, we've got to move on. Max, this is terrible. What have you got for us?
- [04:13]
Maxwells
This is glamping in the extreme. I mean, I'm going to cheat a little bit. I would also bring an E reader. I just love having. I don't know what would be available on the desert island library system via Libby, but. So I would do that. And then I'd probably also. I'd bring a banjo. I don't know how to play one, but I got to do something.
- [04:35]
Marcus
You'd learn.
- [04:35]
Maxwells
Yeah, exactly. And great idea. You know, the banjo is one of those instruments where even if you have no idea what you're doing, all the sounds you make are great. So it was just you. That's right. So I would be able to put up with my endless mistakes and, you know, it would be great.
- [04:53]
Marcus
All right. Very nice. I thought Guitar, NBA Jam, Arcade game. Since there's electricity.
- [05:02]
Maxwells
We are so cooked. We're bringing Super Nintendo. We're bringing refrigerators. We got our readers.
- [05:09]
Marcus
And one player board game. Oh, yeah, I know. They do exist.
- [05:14]
Maxwells
Like, go against yourself forever and ever.
- [05:17]
Marcus
I wasn't thinking solitaire. Maybe a pack of cards would have been better anyway. What? I'd actually bring. Bucket, spade, beach umbrella. Come on. Okay, sweeties. Yeah. Someone on Reddit answered. International airport, plane and pilot. I don't think that's in keeping with.
- [05:32]
Maxwells
The spirit of the game take my down votes.
- [05:35]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Yeah, I do. I feel like maybe the rules of engagement here should be like you have to be able to reasonably carry it. And that would also throw my refrigerator out the back door here. But that would be helpful.
- [05:48]
Marcus
Or the rules could be don't get Evelyn to play.
- [05:51]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
That's true. I'm too practical for my own good.
- [05:53]
Steph Gore
We see I pick sandals.
- [05:55]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
So you know, that's true.
- [05:57]
Marcus
We're all over the map. Anyway, today's real topic, how real time brand lift measurement can thrive in uncertainty. So speaking of uncertainty, consumer confidence has fallen every month this year according to the University of Michigan's Insight Index, reaching what folks had hoped would be the floor in April of 52 points. But a reading in mid May suggested that the number was now closer to 50. Fast forward to the end of May and things are looking a bit rosier. Jeff Cox of CNBC writes that the Conference Board's consumer confidence index leaps to 98 points, a 12 point jump from April. Different indices, but still positive as consumer optimism got a much needed boost on hopes for trade peace between the US And China. And Evelyn, we were talking yesterday a bit about this and you had said that advertisers aren't just navigating uncertainty, they're navigating whiplash. Tell us a bit more about this, this concept.
- [07:01]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm coining a new concept here. I mean, I don't think it is really that new. It's just that the headlines are telling different story week to week and I think it is a reflection of reality. Right. Nobody knows what's going on here. Consumers are trying to figure out how to budget when they don't know what the price of their essential items is going to be in the near future. They don't know what the price of their more discretionary items. Consumer electronics, like all of this is completely up in the air. Consumers don't know what they're going to be able to do with their money. And that of course has huge implications for what advertisers are going to be able to, you know, what they're, what they should be messaging to their consumers, how much, how much marketing budget they're going to have, if it'll impact their, their sales and their revenue. So there's, there's a lot of questions in the air. And it feels like it's not just, I don't, we don't know how the next few months are going to go, but we're also getting signals that are saying it's going to be really bad. It's going to be okay. It's going to be great. So it's really hard to feel confident in making plans that are going to have staying power. I think agility is really the name of the game right now, and measurement is a huge part in figuring out what to do next. As long as you have your light on your feet, then you need to have some sort of truth or information that you're able to figure out what your next step is, even if you don't know what the finish line, where it is, or what it looks like right now.
- [08:39]
Marcus
Yes. Steph, what's your take on the changing attitudes and sentiments during this time? And there are other times as well, but this time in particular of great uncertainty.
- [08:48]
Steph Gore
I would agree. I think consumers are dealing with a lot of changing information and that obviously impacts kind of their outlook and their confidence in making certain purchases, whether it's the everyday or something more significant like a car or, you know, taking a vacation, Are they comfortable making those choices? And, you know, what are the, what are the things that are influencing their decisions? And how can brands and advertisers help to, you know, create messages that are really kind of cutting through all this noise and like, what is connecting, what is, what is providing their customers with the confidence to go out and potentially buy or invest in their product in a time when they're not sure what's going to happen next week, let alone next month?
- [09:33]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Yeah. And consumers are also seeing these headlines. Right? They're seeing, oh, I guess everyone else around me is freaking out too. Maybe I should be freaking out more, I don't know. So as marketers are trying to interpret all this, and consumers are trying to interpret all this, the headlines that are being brought into consideration for marketers also are actively working on consumer behavior and attitudes as well.
- [10:01]
Maxwells
Yeah. And the pace of it, the pace of it is really just astonishing. Right. I mean, I think that the day that headline came out about the rebound and the explanation of that rebound being the prospect of basically a ceasefire, you might call it, between China and the United States in their trade war, we had the headline that all of Trump's tariffs might actually get thrown out the window by that court of international trade, and that's probably still in limbo. We will see what happens in the next, however many hours it takes between when we tape and when this goes live. But, you know, so just the amount of agility that's required is really pretty head spinning. The good news, I guess, just for the advertising community at large, is that even though there aren't a ton of parallels between the pandemic and the current kind of instability that we've been discussing, but marketers did get a bit of a crash course in how to be in an environment where what is acceptable or what the outlook is is changing on a week by week basis. And you saw that a ton in advertisers and publishers kind of getting a lot better at communicating more, at optimizing and fine tuning the way they were working together more. And you saw also lots of vendors step up and really fill this gap of being able to respond to and gather up signal that will allow for those rapid responses. So even though it's definitely a lot more work and all the people who are in charge of optimizing this stuff are going to be a lot busier, they do have the tools, it seems, to roll with the punches as they come in.
- [11:58]
Marcus
You mentioned agility and also the pandemic. And I was going to bring up the pandemic not for that reason, but because the pandemic really fragmented everybody's individual lives and now experiences even more so than before. Before it was 9 to 5. You get up, you get commute, you go to work, maybe go out for dinner in the evening or do whatever there. And then you commute back and then you watch. And now everyone's life is, can look very, very different. And so you're not only having to be agile as an advertiser, but customers, I think, are thinking about things very, very differently. Some do have savings from that time. Some people don't need to commute anymore. There's so many different scenarios that consumers are facing. And we've seen that just because their confidence is lower doesn't mean necessarily they're going to stop spending. Maybe they'll spend a little bit more now because things are going to get more expensive later. So everyone is so, so different. Consumer budgets being watched more closely, I think that's probably common across the board, but, but another thing being watched closely, advertisers, budgets. Steph, how do folks prioritize and get the most out of ad measurements with a limited budget?
- [13:08]
Steph Gore
Yeah, so I think just thinking about consumers and it depends on the target audience that you have and kind of where they are, we get these sort of broad numbers across the entire consumer sentiment. But depending on who your target audience is, their situation could be very different. So I think it is important to have data and information on, you know, what are the attributes that are most important to your particular target? Is it cost, Is it trust? Is it quality? And this can vary obviously by different types of consumers, but also obviously by the impact of what's being reported in terms of changing policy in the news. So on the consumer side, I think that data is really essential to give advertisers the information they need to make decisions based on data driven information. More thinking about kind of tightening budgets. I think the most important thing is making sure that all of the advertising dollars that are being sent are spent are accountable. So the importance of measurement, I think just continues to be, continue to increase. Those advertisers want to know if they're making the right investment decisions because those budgets potentially are getting tightening up and they need that information, that real time information in order to do so. They can't afford to wait until a campaign ends to have information on, you know, what creative was most effective with my, with my customers, what media tactics or what, you know, ad platforms had the most impact. They really need that information while the campaign is still running, kind of as soon as possible to make those sort of agile decisions in order to kind of maximize the dollars that they're spending.
- [14:52]
Maxwells
And this is especially true, I feel like in an era where the landscape is as fractured as it is. Right. I mean, it's not just spending in one or two places, it could be a dozen. And waiting for all of it to wrap up, as Steph just said, is just not a tactic that will cut it at this current moment. So it'll be interesting to see how much marketers kind of move in the direction of being able to adjust the plane's trajectory while it's still in the air.
- [15:28]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Yeah, it's about agility and also about proving the impact to maintain those budgets. Right. If you have a set budget for a given quarter, that's great. It seems like it's going to be more of a luxury though to feel confident in the amount that you will have to spend over the course of a given time period as things change so rapidly. Having the proof to say, you know, this media is worthwhile, it's driving more sales. You can see the incremental impact. You can see that consumers want to hear from the brands right now because they're trying to make decisions too. All of that information is incredibly important, like up and down the advertising decision making process from where you're going to put the money to even having the money to spend in the first place.
- [16:15]
Maxwells
Yeah, I feel like that last piece is especially, you know, we've talked a lot about the sort of instability of it, of the current environment, but there's also just the reality that or the knock on effect of that instability and the sort of stakes involved. Like earlier, I think it might have been. It was in the middle of May. Nielsen released a study that touched on a lot of different marketing topics. But as a sort of table setting question, they asked their survey respondents what they thought was going to happen to their ad budgets in 2025. And close to half of them said that they thought that they were going to go down. Now, obviously a lot could change if China and the United States kiss and make up, if everybody rallies, we could see that changing quite rapidly as well. But in this kind of pessimistic environment, it really ramps up the necessity of being able to point to evidence that says this works, this is a valid investment and a good use of our resources. And so it just reinforces what we've been discussing already.
- [17:18]
Marcus
Yeah, the real time piece, incredibly important. I mean it kind of even just an example of we were just talking about the consumer confidence indices and the one from the conference board which took a mid month reading and showed what was happening mid month. You know, a lot of times we have to wait for numbers to come out at the end of the month. And I think even just taking that mid month reading helped people understand the trajectory of, of where things were going. And if you can get that Steph, real time, that's even better than every two weeks Max mentions ad dollars being in a lot of different places. Talk to us a bit about the importance of you guys refer to it as kind of integrated, holistic, kind of cross platform media performance measurement.
- [18:11]
Steph Gore
Yeah. So one of the pillars of our product value is being able to provide measurement across an entire sort of media plan. If you're an advertiser, you don't want to have to go to 10 different vendors in order to aggregate the performance of your campaign. So I think one of the things that we've really focused on is being able to include all screens and all channels through which advertising is delivered. And whether that's through our own tagging or working with partners, we focus focused on digital linear TV and CTV as well as emerging channels such as digital out of home and podcasts and sort of hard to reach and trackable ads within walled gardens. We've also developed partnerships and methodologies to make sure that the holistic campaign can be measured. And that's what customers really want. Is it all in one place with sort of a consistent reporting framework, reasonable methodology that they can have confidence in using that data to make those decisions on million Dollar budgets and ad campaigns.
- [19:17]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Yeah, right. The more places you have to go to try and piece together what's happening, the harder it is to, the longer it takes to make strategy decisions. Right. And we're talking about the importance of agility, the importance of staying on your toes and being able to make quick changes if necessary. And even just the time it takes to go to 17 different platforms to get a finger on the pulse for everything that exists across your investments. That isn't practical in these times, I think, or at least it can be a pretty huge speed bump that can eventually cost in terms of revenue, not just in terms of time and in terms of resourcing.
- [20:01]
Marcus
So everyone loves a dashboard.
- [20:04]
Steph Gore
Yeah, I'd say we've like, we've even further empowered our customers with a kind of a do your do it yourself option. So we now have, we call it Study Creator and it allows our customers to jump in at any time and set up their own brand lift studies. So instead of having to go back and forth with a vendor over, you know, emails and days of, of review, customers have really responded positively to the ability to just go in and within, you know, a few minutes, really a three step, easy process, set up a brandless study and get that launched as soon or whenever they need to in order to gather those additional insights to help drive those decisions they're trying to make.
- [20:46]
Marcus
And that's live now, you said yes?
- [20:49]
Steph Gore
Yeah, we released it last year and really seen it gain a lot of momentum. I think it's really the empowerment of the customer to be able to do it themselves. And also there's a little price efficiency when you're doing diy. So in kind of both ways, it kind of lends itself to being, I think, really impactful at this current time where folks are trying to kind of tighten budgets and understanding what that does to their ability to work with different vendors.
- [21:18]
Marcus
Let's close with this. What's next for Synth? What's on your roadmap that you can share for the rest of the year or something maybe you're working on this year for next year?
- [21:27]
Steph Gore
Sure, yeah. So in terms of kind of what's. What's coming, we're continuing to kind of utilize AI to pull insights out from the data that we have. We have a really rich data set, thousands of campaigns, hundreds of thousands of data points. And so our goal is to kind of harness the power of all of that data to provide both insights on the campaign level, but also contextual insights, trends that we've seen over time. It's really a data set that lends itself well to using a large language model. Another area, I guess, that we're focused on is sort of exploring new ways to help customers connect, kind of connect the dots between what people say and also what they're actually doing. So we've really focused on attitudinal brand lift. But we know that there's a desire to understand not just the answers to questions, but also how consumers are behaving, what actions are they taking, and finding ways to build that into our product suite that provides the most value to our customers and that maybe we can uniquely deliver given our, you know, our scale and our ability to reach a lot of humans, human respondents.
- [22:38]
Marcus
Excellent. Well, that's all we have time for for this episode, unfortunately. Thank you so much to my guests for hanging out today. Thank you to Max.
- [22:45]
Maxwells
Always a pleasure. Marcus, thanks.
- [22:46]
Marcus
Yes, indeed. To Evelyn.
- [22:48]
Evelyn Mitchell Wolf
Thank you, Marcus, thanks everyone.
- [22:50]
Marcus
And to Steph.
- [22:51]
Steph Gore
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [22:52]
Marcus
And thanks to everyone for listening in to behind the Numbers and E Marketer video podcast made possible by sint. Make sure you subscribe and follow and leave a rating and review if you could. We'll be back on Monday talking about attitudes towards AI happiest of weekends.