Upwave Announces New Addition of Social Measurement via Privacy-Friendly Micro Cohorts

Building Upon Ability to Measure Web, Mobile, CTV, Linear, Upwave Now Measures Facebook and YouTube, Strengthening the Premier Cross-Media Measurement Platform

Upwave, the leading analytics platform for brand advertising, today unveiled its new ability to help brands measure the impact of brand advertising on Facebook and YouTube, to complement measuring web, mobile, CTV, and linear. With the new social measurement abilities, Upwave gives brand marketers access to full, in-platform measurement of Facebook and YouTube without any person-level ad exposure from the walled gardens.

Current Situation with Cross Channel Measurement

According to Gartner’s “Brands Retreat Behind Walled Gardens as Data Privacy Efforts Take Root,” the industry firm notes, “Marketers are dependent on how these closed ecosystems measure and interpret advertising performance, making it difficult to understand and compare campaigns outside their walls.” Additionally, Gartner’s report cites how walled gardens use cleanrooms to be privacy compliant. However, they cannot measure cross-platform and are still far from being established. In the IAB State of Data Report, the trade group raised alarm bells, warning “that advertisers are on the brink of losing their ability to measure advertising campaigns with no industry consensus about what to do next.”

“As we approach the final days of user-level tracking, brands need a way to implement accurate and privacy-compliant measurement into their advertising strategy,” said Chris Kelly, Upwave’s CEO. “At Upwave, we’re betting on cohort-level measurement and clean rooms as the future-proof alternative.”

Introducing Upwave’s New Social Measurement Capabilities

Driven mainly by these significant headwinds in the advertising industry, Upwave now offers social measurement capabilities to complement measuring existing channels web, mobile, CTV, and linear. Upwave’s new offering is leveraging the company’s ability to measure on a micro cohort level, determining the exposure probability of each micro cohort, along with other demographic and behavioral data, without a unifying 1:1 identifier.

Upwave’s new social measurement ability offers the following benefits to brand marketers:

• Privacy-friendly. Marketers want causal measurement, consumers – as well as Upwave – want privacy-friendly use of consumer data. The only way to do this is via these micro cohorts, which Upwave pioneered in 2020. Upwave’s new social measurement capabilities are a win for marketers and privacy advocates.
• Truly Cross-Media. Upwave’s truly cross-media, unified platform, can now measure top of funnel KPIs and look at Brand Outcomes data from walled gardens in the same platform as other channels. Measuring cross-media helps marketers solve the difficulty of reconciling various success metrics, especially when campaigns include walled gardens, to determine overall ROI of brand investment.
• Deterministic Control, not OTS. As with all other channels that Upwave measures, social measurement is not based on OTS data, which other providers rely on. OTS is problematic for a few key reasons: it’s imprecise and inaccurate, as noted in this Upwave blog post, “Why OTS-Based Exposure is Problematic in Brand Effectiveness Measurement.”

“We built this product capability because advertisers have complained to us about the massive assumptions behind OTS for years,” said Ken Archer, EVP of Product at Upwave. Archer continued, “that heavy social users saw their ad, that light social users are a valid control for those exposed to their ad. They’ve also pointed out that in no other bottoms-up measurement (MTA, sales lift, incrementality) would they consider tracking exposure this way.”

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