Mobile Marketing Magazine meets with Brand Metrics’ Sean Adams to discuss the importance of brand lift and the company’s latest innovation.

Mobile Marketing: Describe Brand Metrics and what you do?

Sean Adams: Brand Metrics provides simple yet highly powerful ways to measure brand uplift for any digital ad campaign, no matter its size, ensuring publishers have tangible proof of their site’s value. Our SaaS technology presents unintrusive surveys on publisher websites that capture frequency of campaign exposure and brand relationship. A regression-based algorithm then calculates brand lift across four key metrics: awareness, consideration, brand preference and action intent, and compares these scores against Brand Metrics’ global benchmarks created using exactly the same methodology. 

MM: Sum up the challenges that your business identifies in the digital publishing sector, and how your solution is designed to help?

SA: As advertising budgets shift inexorably towards digital channels, media owners are under increasing pressure to justify that spend. This is a challenge for premium publishers, who must charge a premium for access to their higher quality environments and the relationship they have with their audiences. They intuitively know advertising in their environments is more effective, but often lack the brand-led effectiveness data to prove it. Brand Metrics is a research/algorithm-driven technology platform designed to measure brand lift at scale across all formats and devices, allowing premium publishers to prove empirically the impact they have in driving more effective advertising campaigns.

Google and Facebook get brand spend partly because they measure brand lift – which publishers usually don’t. Without this data, publishers don’t know what strategies, formats or media drive the brand results clients want. Brand Metrics is the first platform to measure brand uplift for digital ad campaigns of all sizes, giving digital publishers tangible proof of their value. A consistent single-question survey and powerful algorithms and reporting provides four metrics, plus global benchmarks, on display, branded content, video – even small, 50K impression campaigns – to win publishers more brand spend: A game changer for the industry.

MM: Can you share a client success story of how they achieved results with your solution?

SA: Brand Metrics worked closely with JPIMedia to integrate brand lift as a metric across their business, changing client conversations and helping address the threat of budgets leaking to Google and Facebook, who routinely offer campaign effectiveness data.

Because Brand Metrics allows measurement of an unlimited number of campaigns for a flat monthly fee, JPIMedia were able to scale up during the 3-month trial, running 200+ successful measurements, producing a wealth of data to assess the ongoing viability of the platform.

Over this time, JPIMedia found they could measure campaigns as low as 50,000 impressions, a key concern beforehand, given the modest size of many of their advertiser’s budgets.

JPIMedia also integrated Brand Metrics into their ad ops process to ensure brand lift measurements could be added easily during a campaign set-up, thereby making it scalable.

As a result of a truly collaborative approach, JPIMedia now has placed Brand Metrics at the heart of the sales process, creating sales narratives, running training sessions around the country and developing new campaign results templates, taking Brand Metrics data directly via API.

MM: What is the importance of premium ads for premium brand lift?

SA: Premium publishers like The Guardian often make for premium ad environments. Working alongside the Brand Metrics’ team to build a planning tool, Modern Metrics, The Guardian can now make recommendations to ad buyers depending on their objective and the type of brand metric they are trying to move. This is significant, since it enables the organisation to compete with the global platforms who also offer brand lift measurement on most campaigns. Thanks to our partnership, the publisher now offers brand studies on all campaigns costing more than £10,000 and can measure brand uplift in a way that doesn’t rely on cookies.

Indeed, campaigns using the Guardian’s first-party data had on average a brand lift 65 per cent higher than Brand Metrics’ average. When using Guardian first-party data, the proportion of impact on preference and intent metrics was 39 per cent higher than average. Campaigns that ran in so-called hard news environments – like politics or COVID-19 content – delivered a 22 per cent brand uplift versus the average.

MM: Tell us more about Brand Metrics’ latest innovation, Custom Benchmarks

SA: Our latest feature enables our clients to create a bespoke benchmark comparison for one particular report, but has many other use cases. Whilst our automated campaign reports have five pre-set benchmark comparisons, this new feature makes it possible for clients to create an additional custom benchmark for each report and then include it in the final PowerPoint presentation.

So, now you can do everything from creating filters and narrowing down the regional base to monitoring the average performance in different industry sectors across different ad formats or targeting.

Most importantly, the feature doesn’t have to be limited to providing an additional comparison for a completed campaign, it can also be used more proactively in the planning process for future campaigns.