In this evolving digital media landscape, media buying and planning have become a labyrinth of complexity with the rapid proliferation of channels, the explosion of data and technology, and shifting consumer behaviour.
Navigating through the new maze of media options, optimising budgets, targeting the right audiences and measuring campaign performance have become intricate processes, requiring a deep understanding of the environment, advanced technical expertise and strategic agility.
Against that backdrop, Acceleration, WPP’s data and technology consultancy operated by GroupM, has launched an operation in Sub-Saharan Africa, believing that technology, data and media investments can produce a long-term competitive advantage for businesses across the region.
Acceleration gives brands access to more than 6,000 technology and data consultants, connecting data and technology investments to business results.
In an interview with the FM, Nick Jackson, MD of Acceleration Sub-Saharan Africa, says brands are looking for what he calls “always on” solutions to unlock value.
Acceleration leverages Google Marketing Platform and Google Cloud Platform.
In making an effective media buy, he says brands are looking for solutions that can reach their target audience with the right message, at the right time, on the right platform and in the right format.
He says understanding the value chain of media investments is a fundamental requirement, and at the heart of this understanding lies consented, high-quality, representative data.
“Brands need to ensure they can integrate top- and bottom-line metrics with their media investments, and attribute them effectively, essentially accessing data sources and insights that can help make informed decisions quickly. Liquidity of that budget, therefore, becomes very important. Flexibility and agility in marketing and media practice allow us to make the most effective media-buying decisions at a very high frequency.”
The difficulty is how brands work out where to optimally invest to reach key target audiences.
Says Jackson: “Industry changes over the past few years have accelerated this challenge and since Apple’s introduction of its hidden privacy feature, we’ve had a steadily increasing drumbeat of signal reduction. This affects our ability to make those informed decisions. Data science has changed the game in allowing us to start modelling environments using the signals we do have. If we have high-quality, usable data we can model it to an outstanding degree of accuracy.”
Jackson says new forms of measurement are now being developed that use techniques such as econometric modelling (using attribution modelling and other artificial intelligence, or AI, techniques) to fill these gaps. These models, he says, are built through the correlation between broad inputs: media spend per channel and some conversion/business metric, usually sales.
A media-mix model, he says, often also takes economic and other external factors into account, such as competitor activity or global events.
A key problem facing marketers is being able to accurately measure the impact of their media buys to optimise return on investment.
Jackson says marketing is a vital catalyst for business growth. “But to build credibility and trust with your finance team, you must show that your marketing investment has a clear connection to your organisation’s financial KPIs. Modelling the financial value of digital transformation allows brands to hold a clear view of what’s important.”
Brands also need to ensure that they make the most of their budgets and don’t overspend on media buys. Jackson says media budgets have become a precious resource. “With more and more pressure being placed on marketing investments, overspending in areas not producing results can be risky, and platform and technology expertise is critical in helping brands manage media investments, and bidding effectively through advanced activation. Our data science teams build custom algorithms for in-platform investments, which essentially use AI to augment bidding by ingesting new data sources.”
But digital transformation through investments in data and technology only represents one side of the coin. Jackson says transforming an organisation’s operations and culture is important in using the new capabilities that are created.
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