Cross-Media Duplication Must Be Rigorously Empirically Determined

This is a very major disconnect between Project Blueprint and the Northstar initiative as the WFA effort has been called All of the hard work that has gone into the WFA project including APIs called HALO which help measurement companies create crossmedia data based on Virtual People is undermined by this flaw at the core of everythingFor if Virtual IDs are allowed in to the currency for crossmedia everyone can save a ton of money and effort and simply write a small Python script using the 1960s equation known as the Sainsbury formula random probability that can be used to simulate crossmedia audience data quite inaccurately But if that is what the advertisers really want itamp8217s their moneyIn other words if random duplication is an acceptable assumption in making media buys aggregately in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually we have all the tools we need No one needs to build ambitious new systems like Nielsen ONE Simply use the currency for the medium and determine reach within each medium then combine those using random probabilityHowever random duplication is not an acceptable assumption Paul Donato Chief Research Officer of the objective scientific Advertising Research Foundation ARF and former Chief Research Officer of Nielsen says quotThe one thing we do truly know is that duplication is not randomquotIamp8217m about to show you in this post compelling proof that random duplication estimates can be very far from the truth In fact even hallucinating ChatGPT and other Large Language Models tell the truth more often than random duplication doesDespite the WFA Northstar specs having given a hall pass Nielsen went the other way and in Nielsen ONE uses random probability less than one percent of the time as a last resort And more than 99 of Nielsen ONE Ads is based on empirically measured duplicationIn doing this Nielsen explicitly follows the line of thought development which runs through all of CONTAM BARB ARF MRC and CIMM work since the 1960s Harris Committee Hearings including Artie Bulgrinamp8217s Project BlueprintAt my request Nielsenamp8217s Remy Spoentgen provided me with pair duplication data on a random sample of ten campaigns with the specs I had laid outA range in GRP levelsUse linear TV CTV computer and mobile mediaRemy also applied the Sainsbury formula to estimate by the assumption of random duplication how those same pair duplications would have come out if Nielsen hadnamp8217t done the hard work to get the most rigorous empirical duplicationsHere are the ten anonymized campaigns Nielsen of course cannot reveal to us the brands involvedFirst letamp8217s look at the errors of random duplication when considering the campaignamp8217s duplication between its linear TV and its CTV The first column is the official Nielsen ONE Ads published numbers the second column is what random probability would estimate that duplication to be and the third column is the percent error in the random probability deviation from the empirical measurement numberThe errors do not follow any pattern I can discern that would enable adjustment factors to be of practical value This is a case of where empirical measurement is not a quotnice to havequot Rather it is a quotmust havequotHere are the data for the TVmobile duplicationsTVcomputerCTVMobileCTVcomputerBetween computer and mobileWhat if in the third campaign you were buying mobile and computer and got the signal that the overlap was enormous You might drop one or the other But that would be a mistake because the duplication was less than 4 of what it was said to be by a probability algorithmEither we need accurate data on the total population or we donamp8217t Until today everything Iamp8217ve learned in the industry says that we must have the most complete accurate and precise data possible properly reflecting the total population as long as the cost is kept down at a couple of percentage points of our top line which is where research and data have always been But a slight increase could be extremely smart if invested correctlyIf we are going to talk the talk we better walk the walk I observe that CPM is still the decider not ROI I see that people do whatamp8217s easy and what theyamp8217ve always done and that tends to waste vast amounts of advertiser moneyThe ANA just came out with a study that says advertisers wasted at least 20 billion last year in just programmatic digital aloneWe have all the tools we need to stop throwing money around and to place bets as scientifically as can be achieved today but we must not cut corners in the quality of the data we send into those tools or itamp8217s all wastedThe HALO tools should be used for planning estimates not for postevaluation nor outcome measurement Privacy rules will not impede these things as there are firstparty data and legal platforms which cannot be turned off HALO usage as planning tools alone more than justifies all the work that went into HALO But we highly recommend against using Virtual IDs in activation optimization ROI AI deeplearning models or postevaluation The datadriven decisions needed in those areas is at a much higher level of sensitivity to crude data As the numbers above proveLast suggestion Create a HALO 20 that uses empirical data no VIDsPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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Cross-Media Duplication Must Be Rigorously Empirically Determined

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Bill Harvey

Jon Miller | Cofounder Marketo, Engagio | The Gumball Machine is Broken - Rethinking B2B Marketing - By Mike Linton

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