Interview with Sean Adams, Global Insights Director at Brand Metrics Featuring Jade Power, Director of Digital Monetisation at National World

Hi, Welcome to our Interview Series.

Sean, please tell us a little bit about your journey in this ad tech industry and what inspired you to start at Brand Metrics.

Sean: Hi, I began my career as an advertising account handler before moving into strategic planning. I’ve worked in both London and Sydney and, when I returned to England over a decade ago now, I continued my love affair with media, joining News UK to head up its Commercial Insights department, developing award-winning research initiatives for flagship newspaper brands, The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun.

I have been working with Brand Metrics since 2018, helping the company scale beyond its roots in the Nordics to provide brand lift solutions all over the world. As Global Insight Director, I am passionate about helping customers turn metrics into revenues and I have particular responsibility for helping publishers, agencies and advertisers extract meaningful and practical insights from brand lift data.

On that note, can you please tell us about your recent partnership with National World Plc?

Sean: Our mission is to democratise advertising effectiveness, turning brand lift data into a metric that is available to as many advertisers as possible. Having worked closely with National World over the last four years – helping it to offer brand lift data to smaller advertisers, who would never normally have access to such information – we are delighted to see our partnership grow still further to support the launch of its new self-serve platform and thereby provide even more advertisers with evidence of their campaigns’ effectiveness.

Jade, good to have you joining the conversation too! We would be keen to know from your perspective, why did you link up with the team at Brand Metrics?

Jade: We are passionate about evolving digital advertising solutions for businesses of all sizes and it’s important that advertisers can truly see campaign performance. The click-through-rate, whilst still a valuable metric, does not tell all of the story and we at National World felt that there must be a better way to convey performance.

We ran a small scale trial with Brand Metrics back in 2019 and found that we could give an in-depth account on brand effectiveness across all levels of the marketing funnel. When we looked at the marketplace we couldn’t see any brand lift reporting that was accessible or affordable for SME advertisers and identified an opportunity to better support advertiser needs.

How has that changed the conversation? How has your relationship with Brand Metrics evolved over the 4 years in partnership?

Jade: We recently launched a new ad manager platform, designed to empower businesses to take control of their advertising. This automates the ad buying process and offers greater flexibility to advertisers; allowing businesses of all sizes to access our extensive portfolio of respected news brands.

The platform allows advertisers to place ads in front of our audience of over 14 million unique monthly visitors, making it an effective way for businesses to reach their target audiences and increase brand awareness. Alongside the ability to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviours, within the platform, advertisers can create and launch campaigns, track performance, and make adjustments in real-time, to ensure ads achieve the desired results.

A key offer built into the platform is the availability of Brand Metric’s Brand Lift reports, providing extensive research on the effectiveness of campaigns across the marketing funnel at a far lower entry point than is normally available.

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The last two years have accelerated digital transformation for businesses of all sizes and stature. What has been the biggest lesson for you that helped you stay on top of your marketing and revenue-generation goals? Would you like to share your pandemic experience on how you managed to continue your business development works during these uncertain times?

Sean: With disruption comes opportunity. As we saw during the pandemic and as we see now as the world economy faces a number of challenges. Typically there are decreases in advertising when a recession hits. Yet marketers remain hungry for sales in a recession, and when these big structural changes occur, the media ecosystem needs to evolve as well, including measurement, verification, analytics and optimisation.

In our view, in the current economic climate, publishers should be looking to do two things. First, prove accountability – demonstrating brand building effectiveness to advertisers, in order to reassure that stretched ad budgets are being well spent. Second, improve efficiency – refining and automating internal processes. This is good practice at any time, but faced with the current squeeze on resources, it’s absolutely critical. We’re here to help our partners with this.

Please tell us a little bit about your marketing technology and marketing communication stacks. Which tools are indispensable for a modern advertising organization today?

Sean: Brand Metrics provides a SaaS platform to measure brand uplift at scale for digital ad campaigns, including display, branded content and video, to ensure publishers have tangible proof-of-value for even smaller clients. Our survey-based technology calculates brand lift across four key metrics: Awareness, consideration, brand preference and action intent and compares these scores against global benchmarks, allowing full comparability from campaign to campaign.

Today, perhaps more than ever, advertisers need rigorous measurements; assessing the impact of their investment as part of a wider aim to boost effectiveness in an iterative fashion – after all, research has shown the impact of ad investment can be even greater during a downturn.

How do campaign effectiveness strategies improve brand lift campaigns? What roles does an adtech company like Brand Metrics play in campaign effectiveness measurement?

Sean: We enable publishers to prove the effectiveness of digital ad campaigns continuously and consistently against advertisers’ key metrics, by measuring brand lift at scale, regardless of campaign size and cost. This is empowering publishers to gather independent data on their digital ad campaigns, by measuring uplift in awareness, consideration, preference and action intent, in a simple, cost-effective and comparable way. This is a game-changer for publishers; helping them to prove the value of digital advertising and to use this data in a proactive way, informing future campaign planning.

Could you please explain what’s in store for digital marketers when we analyse the global market for virtual experiences? How do new benchmarks in immersive content influence adtech budgets?

Sean: With the media landscape constantly evolving, and new platforms and formats emerging all the time, the challenge remains to ensure consistency, accuracy and scale when it comes to measurement – whatever the media type. This needs to be built into everyday ways of working – whether we’re assessing the impact of a standard display campaign, or in-game advertising in a virtual immersive world. The key is data-led evidence to build a holistic picture, even as audience behaviour shifts and changes.

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Your message for modern CMOs and marketing leaders looking to enhance their understanding of brand-centric campaign effectiveness measurement tools and insights? Is there a heightened need to have more sales enablement in this domain?

Sean: Sales enablement is key, but collaboration and sharing of insights across the whole organisation is the way that they benefit optimally from new technologies. These organisations take actionable insights from their data. To benefit optimally, organisations need to bake in methodological accuracy and consistency of data collection. Processes must be built into existing ways of working, harnessed across every campaign and fed into a broader, holistic picture. The more campaigns that can be measured, the better. In this way, a variety of data sources can inform proactive conversations around planning, with teams armed with evidence and freed up to focus on strategic direction.

Your take on the new buzzwords in AI-driven Advertising Technology:

Sean: Buzzwords are just that – and too many people in our industry hide behind jargon. That said, the reality is that automation and AI is a missed opportunity in many businesses. Many fail to implement processes at scale across an organisation meaning that insights gathering never really becomes business as usual. With increasingly advanced, complex advertising campaigns in a fast-moving industry, and new and exciting metrics – such as attention – constantly progressing the game, supplementing traditional performance measurements, such as clicks, with a metric such as ‘brand lift’ for a more holistic picture of campaign  effect is essential. And the real benefit of this is the ability to build previous learnings into future campaigns. After all, success breeds success.

What is the future of customer profile management in the era of AI and automation?

Sean: In recent years, we’ve seen a dismantling of metrics that weren’t that valuable in the first place. Quite simply, ads need to grab attention, and when they have our attention they need to change or reinforce something in our minds, be it cognitive, attitudinal or behavioural. It is only through understanding this process that we learn how to improve.

The modern consumer is exposed to thousands of adverts a day. If a consumer doesn’t yet know your brand or new product, it’s important to develop advertising that creates awareness. If they know your brand, but are not interested in engaging, you need to build consideration. And when your brand is a consideration, you need to offer a message that drives preference over other brands. Once you’ve become a preferred brand, you need to craft a message to generate buyer intent. Finally, when you are a brand they intend to use in the future, you must curate brand messaging to drive action. Each of these stages in the funnel have specific goals that build brand resonance and lead towards that eventual click, conversion and purchase.

The essence of brand lift is measuring the success of a brand through these stages of awareness, consideration, preference and action intent. And, over time, you’ll amass a broad dataset that presents a holistic understanding of how your campaigns are helping to build your brand.

Consistent and regular collection of brand lift data brings a whole new perspective to the performance marketing conversation. It offers a far greater understanding of what is happening to your brand perception between the initial delivery of the ad and the ultimate click.

How important is it for companies like National World and Brand Metrics to innovate and keep ahead of market trends?

Jade: The path to sustainable growth is key – as we’ve seen during the ups and downs of the past few years. We aim for transformation through organic growth, launches, acquisition and partnership – creating a modern, scalable platform for publishing by implementing a new operating model, powered by the latest technology. Being willing to innovate is key. We seek to create high quality, specialised content across every format, including articles, video, audio and events, and to distribute this content on the channels and devices our customers prefer.   This efficient dissemination is monetised by matching content to highly engaged and involved audience segments and changing the business model by diversifying and sustaining revenue growth.

Sean: Yes, and as we’ve said before, there’s no Brand Metrics client more appreciated than the one who pushes us into uncharted territory. Key for us is an appetite for continual improvement and pioneering partnership to continue to develop scalable measurement solutions and actionable insights with regard to brand KPIs. Indeed, a key part of our culture is to encourage proactive conversations both internally and with partners, to drive new marketplace opportunities.

What is even more pleasing to see is that our partnership is now being recognised in the marketplace too. We entered the 2023 AOP Digital Publishing Awards with a joint entry, describing how we have worked closely together to collect and use campaign effectiveness data, culminating in National World’s recent introduction of their innovative self serve ad platform, incorporating Brand Metrics brand lift measurement capability. Against significant competition, the award won the “Best Use of Data” category (June 2023), further underlining how well regarded our partnership is becoming in the wider industry.

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