The devil is in the details, as they say, and for most marketers, the details of measurement are hellish indeed these days.

As marketers, we’ve spent years collecting data on consumers to understand how best to advertise to them. Marketers imagine a world where we know what consumers want before they want it, they click everything we serve them and they follow a beautiful hero’s journey: They have a problem, we save them from drudgery, they transform their lives and then they come back for more. The reality is much more prosaic: We track where they’ve been, we stalk them around the Web, we then hound them to buy and they do everything they can to evade giving us their information.

The truth is, we have created a vast industrial complex devoted to tracking consumer attention and what shoppers and buyers do when exposed to marketing messages. And yet, measuring that very thing has never been more convoluted, elusive or diabolically hard. And exhausting — for all parties involved.

Consumers are devouring more digital content than ever, but they’ve also gotten savvier. On the internet they’re skipping ads, installing ad blockers, denying third-party cookies and generally clamping down their privacy settings (whether intentionally or not). Suddenly, advertisers are flying blind on the internet as they lose targeting. And it’s worse in lean-back environments like connected TV where over-frequency, audience deduplication and viewability problems abound and ad fraud and audience identification issues are the norm.

It’s a Mess, But It Doesn’t Have To Be

Measurement is in a massive upheaval and the race for alternative measurement is on. While behavioral targeting gave us insights into consumers like never before, it's not effective anymore and won't stand the test of time when it comes to emerging environments and platforms or future privacy regulations. We can do so much better.

It’s time to get back to basics and put consumers first. Instead of trying to measure low-fidelity signals like impressions and clicks, technology is already smart enough to truly understand the context of a digital environment. It can read words, video, audio, metadata and more to understand the full context — and pair that environment with dynamic and engaging ad creative. Making those work together will change the face of digital advertising, no matter where it appears, making it something people find useful and delightful (without worrying about crossing the line on users’ personal data).

But context is just one part of it. Advanced attention solutions validate whether the ad creative is resonating or not in that environment (by way of increased or decreased attention). And then real-time optimization engines programmatically deliver the campaign accordingly.

Context, creative and attention combined is what I call the Mindset Matrix. Having these three things working in tandem allows advertisers to captivate a person’s mindset in current and emerging digital environments — without using any personally identifiable information. An analogy I like to use for this combination is the perfect hamburger: The bun is the context, the burger is the creative and the secret sauce is attention.

Individually They’re Good. Together They’re Magic  

For now, the digital measurement market is fractured and tortured. And it will continue to be as we try to understand the best ways to measure. Digital environments are coming online at lightning speed and a one-point solution like Nielsen is just not viable (and neither are third-party cookies). It used to be we just had Web and mobile to think about. Today we have myriad environments including in-game display, connected TV, your fridge screen and beyond, with more environments arriving every day (hello, AR and metaverse). But standards will emerge (they always do). And when they do, these principles of context, creative and attention need to be part of the solution. In fact, they already are today.

As a CEO with a passion to make advertising experiences better, my team and I have been advocating with the industry to shift us to a mindset-first mentality for measuring digital ads. We want to productize and leverage machine learning techniques within the ecosystem to get into the mindset of consumers.

We are also being very vocal to and supporting all the governing bodies in our space, including the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). And we’re initiating, investing in and leveraging case studies to help the industry see the value in mindset-first, privacy-forward solutions and to support them on their journeys.

Measurement is broken, full stop, and collectively we have our work cut out for us to get out of this infernal death spiral. But we also have some of the most innovative and smart people in the world working on advertising technology and the future of media and we can do this. Now let’s make it happen. ■

Advertisers, edge providers and legislators are giving the Federal Trade Commission an earful over a petition by Accountable Tech to ban so-called surveillance online advertising as anti-competitive “unfair competition.”

That includes claims by advertisers that granting the petition would imperil trillions of dollars in U.S. gross domestic product.

By “surveillance,” Accountable Tech means ads based on tracking and profiling data that allows the hyper-targeted ads that sponsors point out are part of the ad-based model of free online content.

In comments to the FTC about the petition, the Association of National Advertisers said banning data-driven targeted ads would “stifle” internet-based advertising, threatening “trillions of dollars” in economic activity. That is based on the fact that the Internet economy contributed $2.45 trillion of the U.S. $21.18 trillion GDP, said ANA.

A ban would mean “a swift decrease in the availability of accessible information for consumers, cripple the economy and disproportionately impact small and midsize businesses,” ANA told the FTC.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) called the ban petition “baseless,” and discounted it as “a self-interested stunt manufactured by competitors” seeking to “declare the commercial internet itself an unfair business practice." Accountable Tech does not identify its backers.

IAB CEO David Cohen said data use and customized ads predate the internet, and simply banning them "would be a devastating blow to jobs, economic growth and innovation.”

Taking the other side, Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told the FCC that they support the petition, branding such ads as “the internet’s Original Sin” and a “time bomb” along the lines of the subprime mortgage crisis. 

“The surveillance advertising business model is premised on the unseemly collection and hoarding of personal data to enable ad targeting,” they told the agency. “Companies collect huge amounts of data to maximize user engagement because it increases ad revenue. The FTC should evaluate the harms to society and individuals, as we believe they vastly outweigh the benefits.”

They were hardly alone in advocating for the FTC to step into the online advertising space.

“[S]urveillance on such a scale represents an unprecedented interference with the right to privacy that cannot be compatible with the companies’ responsibility to respect human rights,” said Amnesty International.

“[T]he benefits of surveillance advertising do not outweigh the harms, since relevant ads can be delivered to consumers in a much less privacy-intrusive manner through contextual advertising,” the Consumer Federation of America said.

“As noted in Accountable Tech’s petition, surveillance advertising causes serious harm to both the market and individuals,” Public Knowledge said. “The commission’s dual role as both a competition agency and a consumer-protection agency make it the ideal administrative body to promulgate rules to curb abusive practices by the online advertising ecosystem.”

Lawmakers Weigh In

The issue is also playing out on the legislative front.

A bill was introduced two weeks ago, the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, that would ban the use of personal information to target most online advertising.

The bill was introduced by Eshoo and Booker along with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). IAB said of the bill last week that the sponsors must not understand the degree to which the bill would “effectively eliminate internet advertising in the United States, jeopardizing an estimated 17 million jobs primarily at small- and medium-sized businesses.” ■

A bipartisan quartet of state attorneys general -- from Texas, Indiana and both Washingtons (the state and the District of Columbia) -- are suing Google over location data privacy and its use in targeted advertising.

The AGs argue that Google misled consumers by tracking their locations even when they believed they had disabled that feature, then using the data for targeted ads, to the "enormous" enrichment of the online platform.

"Google provides a setting called 'Location History' and tells users that, if they turn it off, 'the places you go are no longer stored," said the Texas AG's office. "In spite of this assurance, Google continues to track users’ location through other settings and methods that it fails to adequately disclose."

Also: Sen. Blumenthal Says Google, Bing Must Drop Suicide Site

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who has been on Google's case about alleged misuse of location data since at least 2017, including asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate, signaled it was about time.

“The stunning allegations in this bipartisan suit by four attorneys general show, yet again, that tech companies continue to mislead, deceive, and prioritize profits over protecting user privacy," he said. "I’ve long raised alarm over Google’s location data deceptions and Big Tech’s lies must stop. Congress must urgently meet this moment in the privacy crisis by passing a comprehensive law that provides the privacy protections that Americans need and deserve.”

According to a copy of the Texas suit, the AG's are telling the courts that Google "has systematically misled, deceived, and withheld material facts from users in Texas about how their location is tracked and used and how to stop Google from monetizing their movements. More to the point, while many Texans may reasonably believe they have disabled the tracking of their location, the reality is that Google has
been hard at work behind the scenes logging their movements in a data store Google calls “Footprints.” But while footprints generally fade, Google ensures that the location information it stores about Texans is not so easily erased." ■

After attending last week's network television upfronts, it is hard not to recognize how advanced the business really is and how much of what we have been talking about for so long has become reality. Television is no longer just about ratings, units and GRPs, but rather about the ability to effectively utilize data and technology to target and measure more specific, granular audiences within best-in-class content and an array of alternative distribution formats.

The concept of buying audiences and hyper-targeting is not new. It has been a standard practice in digital marketing for some time and has more than proven its value to the market. However, we are now lifting these trends and tactics and applying them to television at full scale, thereby demonstrating the value with metrics far beyond impression delivery.

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Five years ago, targeting in television consisted of standard demography, and reaching those identified demos was heavily based on using the content as the surrogate for the audience.

Today, every major TV network has incorporated the necessary data sets into their portfolio that allows advertisers to understand how the content they are aligning their brands with delivers against highly customized, handpicked segments.

In many cases, the transaction is based on the delivery of the commercial to those specified audience segments. These are valuable tools but, more importantly, it gives advertisers choice and options, which is critical in this ever-changing, highly connected and fragmented marketplace.

While data may be the backbone of this television evolution, it is not the only contributing factor. Technology now has a seat at the table. Measurement is no longer limited to our standard sources and delivered in confined buckets. Advertisers have true crossplatform reach and frequency understanding available to them, which allows for the application of technology towards near and soon-to-be-real-time optimization.

When thinking about television, it’s easy to keep the conversation focused on national networks and mass reach; however, it is important to recognize the role multichannel video programming distributors play in the transformation of TV.

Looking back again those five years, the notion of “addressable” targeting and campaign-level attribution were somewhere between a dream and a test. Today, more than 50% of U.S. TV households can receive a highly segmented message to the individual set-top box, with the results tied back to a sale.

Yes, we finally can identify households based on the type of car they drive, what brand of soup they purchase, what they watch on TV and even those who suffer from seasonal allergies. The identification and messaging to these homes is made possible through technology, data management and innovative business planning by many of our country’s largest pay TV providers. `

This mechanism of targeting an attribution is right out of the digital playbook, but without the concerns surrounding fraud and viewability.

The most exciting part of the television business today is that nothing is off the table.

Applications that we thought would never surface are being built as we speak, and the vision of a data-driven, majority addressable and semi-automated marketplace is within our grasp.

When I speak to advertisers and they tell me they have moved beyond the “test and learn” stage, and are truly vested in a data and technology market, it only increases my confidence in the future of our business.

Nick Troiano leads a family of Cross MediaWorks companies focused on addressing the current and future needs of television advertisers. Those companies include Cadent, a leading provider of media, advertising technology and data solutions for both advertisers and pay TV providers; TCA (The Cross Agency), a data-driven performance-based marketing agency; and one2one Media, a newly formed company focused on expanding and streamlining the addressable video marketplace.

Image by John Lund/Getty Images.