Media Contacts Canada has begun offering clients a proprietary data platform for collecting marketing data that will allow the optimization of online campaigns where brand exposure is the objective.
Known as Artemis, the new tool is described by Chris Williams, the agency’s managing director, as ‘a marketing decision support system – a secure warehouse for marketing data from standard ad servers such as DoubleClick Dart and Atlas Advertiser Suite (as well as other sources) plus reporting tools that can be customized to specific advertiser needs.
‘Most advertising campaigns are about brand objectives,’ adds Williams. ‘Here we have the most measurable of media in online, and it just made sense to apply what we have known in other media for years: reach, frequency and recency are important measures. Our clients demanded better ways than clicks and click-through to measure their online campaigns, and so – working with our data centres in Boston, London and Paris – we were able to spec how we wanted Artemis to report the data.’
The system works to identify sites in the media plan where the exposure of the message is happening at too low frequencies to too many users. In addition, the use of frequency caps at the maximum of desired frequency improves the number of impressions that are delivered to users at the optimal frequency levels. In these cases, either the site can be culled from the buy, or more impressions can be bought to improve performance.
‘Measuring on brand exposure is an important step for marketers who want to focus on the users who are seeing the ads, the 99% who didn’t click as opposed to the 1% that did,’ adds Williams. ‘That’s critical for marketers of consumer packaged goods, quick service restaurants and others whose products have simple messages that don’t need a drive-to-website strategy.’
Artemis programming is used to determine which creatives are suffering from exposure wear-out and need to be replaced. Further development is taking place to map out the delivery of impressions over time to deliver recency measures. Additionally, Media Contacts is using Artemis to matrix the exposure of impressions, site versus site, to understand to what extent sites share the same audience.
‘We knew we had to get away from click-through rates, it’s a horrible measure that is nearly meaningless to a brand advertiser,’ Williams concludes. ‘After 14 years of CTR, it’s time to kill it.’
Media Contacts is the global interactive media network of Havas Media – the media division of HAVAS.
