3 min.
The new 360: Achieving better synergy between online and offline media
1L’art de la gestion de projet2Un projet à succès commence par une bonne gouvernance3Cascade, agilité, demandes de changement?

The new 360: Achieving better synergy between online and offline media

  • TECHNICAL LEVEL

It’s coming up on two years since Google announced the disappearance of cookies. After taking another look at the issue and analyzing it from every angle, today we’re investing all our effort in measuring the effect of this major change on our methods and professional practices.

Over the last 24 months, our ways of doing things have evolved a lot in response to many transformations within the industry. Consider in particular Apple’s iOS 14 update, which had a noticeable impact on ad campaign management on Facebook’s and Google’s networks. The experts in digital advertising have been bragging about their advantage in the area of measurement for a long time, since more accurate and precise data enabled them to confirm the returns on an initiative “with greater certainty” than in traditional media. But for the past two years, this advantage has been eroded bit by bit, to the point where it is now on the verge of disappearing.

A new opportunity could, however, emerge from this situation, which on the surface seems to be an entirely negative development.

What if data could contribute to stimulating performance in traditional media as well as digital?

Here’s a brief overview of the business opportunities presented by this new context and the models that could enable us to outdo ourselves as advertising experts.

 

The end of attribution

As mentioned by my colleague Roger Kamena in his most recent article, the disappearance of third-party cookies is forcing us to review our way of measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. There’s no point in being equivocal. We’ve already said our last goodbyes to attribution models as we used to know them! And anyway, no one ever did agree on what model to use!

Jokes aside, this paradigm shift is bringing us back to statistical inference models of analysis that are more traditional. While these were used less and less in recent years, they’re no less effective than they were before, particularly when it comes to analyzing all the digital data generated every day that are still available. Basically, despite the disappearance of third-party cookies, a phenomenal quantity of data points will always be accessible and usable for the purposes of analysis and modelling.

The real question is, in fact, What are we going to do with them?

 

What should we do with all the data available?

Back in the days when we generated and warehoused data at a frenetic pace, many marketing specialists had little idea what to do with it all. Before being able to be activated, they needed to be organized, segmented, analyzed and modelled, a long, fastidious process that was necessary in order to achieve high efficiency in data use. This means governance will be the cornerstone of the process, an aspect that will enable you to take maximum advantage of analytics.

For any marketing expert, data activation is increasingly being more clearly recognized as the driving asset, and this is where science and analytics are playing more of a central role! The establishment of statistical inference models of analysis will be crucial, in that they can increase the effectiveness of our measurement through two particularly significant advantages. First, thanks to these models, we’ll be able to evaluate the contribution of our marketing efforts towards achieving clients’ business objectives with greater accuracy. Second, they’ll enable us to predict results and define our media and marketing mix more effectively, both for digital and traditional media.

Establishing statistical inference models is therefore the best measure to put in place to avoid planning in silos, which creates a division between these two fields and establishes “two solitudes”—an insidious phenomenon that harms results and the performance of your ad campaigns.

Our profession is evolving. This is nothing new, but it remains essential to show resilience in the face of the latest wave of changes that are transforming our industry. Flexibility and agility are absolutely essential to anyone who wants to effectively adapt to these emergent phenomena and adjust their practices as our domain evolves.

Today, we believe that these transformations are a good omen—because of them, we’ll now be able to plan and execute 360 campaigns that will still be supported by data, both upstream and downstream.

But to take on this challenge, we’ll need to review and adjust our analytical models, keeping in mind the old adage that sometimes you need to take one step back before taking two forward.

 

Do you have any questions or need professional guidance in order to overcome certain challenges or adapt to recent changes in the industry? Our team of specialists would be happy to give you a hand to make 2022 a prosperous year that propels your business to a whole new level!