Marketers today need to outthink – not just outspend – competitors. To explore this as part of TMP’s Media Week, I spoke to Dr Karen Nelson-Field and Felipe Thomaz, the two most influential, most innovative voices in modern media measurement.
“Marketing is a competitive game, and you need to know one useful thing more than your competitors. If your competition is missing a variable, you can create a massive advantage, because they won't even know how you're winning. It's not on their dashboard.”
Felipe Thomaz, Associate Professor, Oxford Saïd Business School
The mischief of metrics
Dr. Karen Nelson-Field can’t pinpoint the exact day that ‘the media died’ (her words), but it was about 25 years ago. That’s when much of media land stopped measuring human beings and started measuring hardware instead, to accompany the shift towards digital channels.
This might seem like a subtle shift, but it had real-world consequences. When you change the basis of measurement, you redefine everything. Underlying incentive structures shift. Optimisation shifts.
A crack appeared between ads that are ‘seen’ by human beings, and those that are ‘served’ by devices.
Fast-forward 25 years, and that shift still hasn’t been resolved in the way many marketers think about measurement and media effectiveness. “We carry on old habits and heuristics for how we bought media, but we end up in a completely different place,” as Felipe puts it.
These ‘old habits’ include a reliance on reach as the sole objective for many campaigns – an idea boosted by the writings of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. But if some ads are ‘served’ but not ‘seen’, then not all reach is created equal, and ‘reach’ metrics can become disentangled from effectiveness.
‘Attention’ pays
This is where ‘attention’ measurement comes in.
Attention metrics help you understand whether or not the ads that are served are actually ‘seen’, by refocusing measurement on human response, not device activity.
Karen’s own firm, Amplified Intelligence, have measured billions of attention data points from (consenting) people. This data shows three important lessons for marketers:
- Attention isn’t binary. There is a sliding scale of attention ‘quality’.
- Attention quality varies depending on channel, creative and context.
- The quality of attention directly impacts campaign effectiveness.
So, attention matters for marketers, and you need to have a coherent approach to creative and media if you want to increase it. And if you’d like to chat about the impact of attention in your media investments, let me know. But attention isn’t the whole story.
n+1
Many loud voices in today’s marketing circles are guilty of reductionist thinking. Oversimplification. It’s exacerbated by social media.
If you’re smart and you keep a cool head, you can use this to your advantage.
Every time your competitors reduce a complicated problem to a single dimension, that gives you a chance to outthink them by broadening your thinking to include another dimension. This is the ‘n+1’ approach. You don’t have to know everything there is to know about marketing. You just have to know one more useful thing than your competitors.
Consider this:
If you and everyone else in your category only measure reach, then start measuring attention and you have a level of understanding your competitors can’t see. Measuring attention will put you one step ahead – for now.
But there are other factors you could take into account as well.
Felipe’s recent research focuses on one of these factors – channel complementarity. This is the impact that each channel has on other channels. You might recognise this intuitively – seeing a brand advertise on TV can change how you respond to their lead gen ad on LinkedIn.
The impact of channel complementarity is even more complex and significant in enterprise buying cycles, as more people spend more time across more channels. That’s why B2B-specific experience and expertise – pattern recognition built up over time – is so valuable when it comes to media planning.
So, it’s best to think of your media mix holistically and coherently, not just in terms of individual channel performance. One practical way to do this is through Media Mix Modelling (MMM). MMM can help to capture some of the effects of channel complementarity, which is why we recommend this as part of our clients’ measurement methodology. It's another potential ‘+1’ for you as a marketer.
Outthinking: your media strategy for 2025
Ultimately, outthinking your competition means refusing to settle for surface-level metrics and overly simplistic answers. By looking beyond reach – whether it’s attention, channel complementarity, or something else like creative effectiveness – you can out-perform your competitors, and they won’t even be able to work out why.
You can watch the full keynote from Media Week, along with 8 other sessions covering everything from thought leadership and ABX to creative and Connected TV here.
