Getting Media Right: Marketing in Motion

by Aaron Ethan Peterson – Senior Director, Marketing / Kantar

If you don’t have access to all the data you need to create actionable insights, you’re not alone. Only eight percent or less of marketers think they have all the data they need. That’s according to our latest study, Getting Media Right: Marketing in Motion, which highlights that advertisers are struggling to use data to effectively guide media investments.

The Getting Media Right report examines the perspectives of nearly 500 advertisers, media and creative agencies, and media companies, and finds that only 51 percent are confident they can even take the data they have and infuse it to generate learnings to influence their campaigns. Adding to that challenge is the fact that few in the industry are nimble enough to act on real-time data. The struggles with data and insights is leading to a lack of confidence among marketers that they have the right media mix, with 40 percent of Advertisers and Media companies indicating they aren’t confident about their media programs.

This lack of confidence is further extended into the broader marketing program, where marketers indicate they don’t understand all media and non-media placements (and how they complement and synergize). Nearly one third of marketers note that their media and non-media activities are not very integrated, which has implications to brand performance and customer experience.

Further, there’s a lack of understanding of how context plays a role in campaign success. Nearly two thirds of marketers agree that developing custom content is an important challenge they must tackle, but when it comes to understanding how context impact creative executions, there’s still a gap. 32 percent of advertisers aren’t confident they understand the impact of context on creative executions. This indicates they’re likely sending messages that reach the right audiences but not necessarily at the right time or place in which they are receptive to those messaging, resulting in lost opportunity (and potential for annoyance).

Collectively, this largely impacts marketers’ ability to measure and demonstrate marketing performance, particularly when it comes to the balance between short and long-term performance. 82 percent recognize that the best indicator of success is a combination of short and long-term measurement and impact, but a large portion – 38 percent – still focus on short-term (sales) with only 52 percent measuring a mix of short and long-term. ROI measurement it seems is still a work in progress, with only a small portion of the figuring out how to integrate marketing ROI results from measurement such as Marketing Mix Modeling and Multi-Touch Attribution to a unified measurement solution. More encouraging is that most marketers, over 50 percent, are working towards such a solution.

For more on the state of media and measurement check out the full report, including some interesting perspectives into the differing views of advertisers, media companies and agencies. Meanwhile, why do you think that marketers continue to struggle with turning data into insights?