Comment by jackgolding | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackgolding | Hacker News Reader

After working in two jobs where my job was using quantitative analysis to try figure out what marketing channels to invest in I have to say this is incredibly hard to get any answers - to the point where you might ask why bother? The current solutions in the marketplace AFAIK are either extremely expensive vendors (think $50k pa starting price) or startups which are most focused on direct response (an example I was shown was web traffic from a TV commercial which let you "win a jeep".)

The best steps you can do for your business are have a very firm commercial idea of what success looks like (i.e. measure LTV, churn etc by channel) and have a robust framework for market research. I personally like the idea of splitting spending marketing spend between branding (where your aim is to promote unprompted brand awareness) and acquisition (where you want CPA < LTV.) Also remember there are A LOT of businesses which spend money in things that an expert can identify as not commercially sound - so audits by external agencys can be useful (i.e. not using negative keywords in AdWords and spending many thousands on direct response campaigns that don't work.)

I'll add the cavaet that rhe worst thing about "attribution" I've found is it puts an unfair amount of pressure in the bottom of the funnel. Brand focused marketers aren't really held to scrutiny at all (lots of marketing teams in businesses I know don't even do total spend / total sales) - I think this can cause some resentment between teams.

Good articles on this are few and far between but this one I don't mind https://www.cmo.com.au/article/641243/iag-marketers-must-end... as well as Willem's talk on what they did to bring programmatic in-house at Foxtel.

Happy to connect with anyone interested in this space.

Thanks for the links and comment, I'm on the adtech side and largely agree - true measurement of effectiveness is unsolved, and we conflate measuring lift with causing lift.

IMO anyone paying attention in the industry knows the answer is probably less ad spend, aka most inventory is overpriced...but then the incentives take over and the firehose stays on full blast. Publishers, agencies adtech/martech, are not incentivized to right-size ad spend at all, and even for advertisers orgs, the slightest bit of silo/politics incentivizes CMOs to spend & protect their budgets.

It is a select handful of orgs with serious CEO level buy in that are willing to honestly tackle this and spend less, more efficiently. That tends to be a competitive advantage in a sea of waste.

Yep also I think there are incentives to look like you are investing in this space ... and for the vendors who are selling these tools, not many marketing managers are going to be happy if you make their placements or creative choices look stupid

All good points. I think brand marketers aren’t held to standards often because it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to do so. It’s not like you can’t just calculate a quick roas from your tv spot. I’d love for an easier way to measure branding. All I know of are brand lift studies (expensive), PSAs (waste of money at low spend levels), and attempting to segment other ways which is difficult long term with view through conversions.

My first job out of uni was quantitative market research (read: surveys) and at the time I thought it was a waste of time - studying UX you learn that for a lot of questions customers will give you incorrect or unhelpful answers (depending on the wording.) Compared to the more advance marketing technology it is probably better ROI though - I read something recently which I haven't been able to find again that most marketing leaders DO NOT trust their DMP (data management platform).

One of the biggest problems I think of with making brand lift studies more cheaper is you encourage the supplier to recruit people who answer surveys as side-income to answer questions. Places like usertesting.com are now full of "professional website testers" rather than your average customer who may be adverse to tech.

The thing about view through conversions and cross device tracking is maybe only a handful of marketing analytics professionals I know can actually measure the uplift they get from installing the required tracking from these. The first question I think people NEED to ask when investing in analytics is "will I get ROI on this or am I just making more work for myself"?

> "will I get ROI on this or am I just making more work for myself"?

Or more often I see a brand spend money on a brand lift study when that $50k would've been better spends on more advertising.

I work in a trading desk and use a dmp daily. I definitely don't trust it 100% but there isn't really a need to. As long as I set up ~7 strategies (some of which use data from the dmp) I only care which strategy is the best, regardless of how accurate the data is. Of course more accurate is better, but that isn't something I have control over.

Sounds like we've had some similar jobs over the years!

depends if that $50k is 10% 1% 0.1% 0.001% of your media spend haha!

Never had a trading job - i'm a publisher at the moment!

Can you link to the talk?

Can't find the more attribution focused talk (see he's given it a few times but can't find the slides - think I found them once searching through slideshare.) Here is one Willem did which is probably a bit too brief to get much out of (was at a CDO conference) https://www.slideshare.net/Corinium/foxtel-at-the-chief-data...

Another two: https://www.cmo.com.au/article/630808/exclusive-iag-columbus...

https://www.cmo.com.au/article/575203/how-foxtel-regained-co...

Another talk synopsis here which might provide some insight https://www.meetup.com/Web-Analytics-Wednesday-Sydney/events...

Willem is the person I know in Australia who has put the most effort into this stuff and has been able to talk about it.

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