Oscar Wilde and media buying

Yet an advertiser rarely wants to transmit a message to ‘housewives aged 18-49’. More likely, the target will be people interested in buying a car or those who are about to run out of coffee. Media sellers are happy just to maximise the revenue earned for their inventory.

So while a TV slot or a magazine page will have a different value to each advertiser, the price will depend on how many of them want it and what they will pay for it. A high audience number and an attractive demographic profile will generally favour a higher price.

So ratings – the product of what we might call ‘traditional’ audience measurement – are inevitably quite imprecise. They have other limitations: they measure opportunities to see rather than message exposure and are published after an ad has aired, limiting their use in supporting short-term decisions.

For example, readership research measures the probability that somebody will read a given newspaper. Not which ad pages they see or whether the reader is attentive. Television audiences represent the number of people in a room with (normally) a television set tuned to a programme – not the number watching it.

Audience measurement data (except TV), is published infrequently and long after the period to which it relates.

The rapid rise in digital display advertising has ushered in a new kind of audience measurement: according to proponents, it enables precise targeting, captures ad exposure and it is available in near real-time.

Users of the internet generate a digital ‘footprint’ wherever they go. Each person’s device leaves a unique mark on every page visited. Websites install small pieces of code (called cookies) on the device of anybody visiting so that they can recognise them when they return. Cookies are the basis of much of the data that can now be used to power media transactions.

Data from internet browsing helps us pinpoint who might be looking to buy a car or home insurance or who is suffering from indigestion – based on the websites they visit.

Data partnerships with various organisations (retailers, manufacturers of complementary products and services, mapping companies, information services companies, social media sites and many more) can further improve the depth of information held on customers and potential prospects.

Companies can house all this information within their own Data Management Platform (DMP) which collates, sorts, stores and outputs information to order. In the ‘sorting’ phase, DMPs group audience data into workable segments that can be targeted in programmatic ad buys. They also track the impact of campaigns. DMPs enable much faster reactions to changes in consumer behaviour. Digital information can be fed continuously into the database and used to fine-tune campaigns as they are in progress – which is at the heart of automated or programmatic buying systems.

But these data are not without limitations. First of all, programmatic buying represents a fairly small – though growing - part of the advertising market. Of $565 billion spent on advertising worldwide, programmatic buys account for around $14 billion (Magna Global) or 2% of the total.

Secondly, although internet display advertising can be addressed very precisely to device IP addresses with known past behaviour, digital audience data has its own shortcomings.

For example, several individuals can be behind a single IP address, reducing targeting precision. Cookies are often deleted, so that ‘new’ users are in fact people that have already seen a message. There is no solid link between a device loading an ad (the measure of a web page view) and it actually being seen by the user (the ad may be ‘below the fold’, be placed amongst lots of other ads and, of course, it may be ignored). As with any media measurement, online display advertising ‘views’ represent an opportunity to see, not a proven exposure.

‘Click fraud’ can contaminate results, while the growing popularity of ad blockers can close off large chunks of potential audience.

We cannot doubt the effectiveness and superior targeting ability of much digital advertising. On the other hand we cannot claim that all the challenges around targeting and advertising exposure have been solved. Price is determined by the programmatic process for a growing number of brands and campaigns. And the price paid will differ according the parameters of each buy set by the advertiser. But the value of the digital advertising space bought can still be debated.

Traditional audience measurement is far from dead.