Welcome to the first edition of Leaders of Digital. This blog series gives a nod to companies and experts in and around the Digital Marketing space that we think are extra awesome.
First up is Trevor Testwuide, the Co-Founder and CEO of Measured, a startup focused media incrementality measurement. Read on to learn how his team is solving all of the big challenges surrounding attribution, what trends to look out for, and more.
What drove you and your Co-Founder, Madan Bharadwaj, to start a company like Measured?
Madan and I have been on the field deploying complex multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling with as many brands as anyone over the last 10 years.
Together with many on our Measured team, we have been working closely with brands to help them evolve from basic last-click attribution to complex cross-channel multi-touch attribution. MTA holds great promise, but the reality of building complex user-level paths in a world of walled gardens, evolving privacy and compliance laws, and centralized and comprehensive user tracking challenges has made it impossible in practice. Out of necessity and under Madan’s leadership we have developed a cross-channel attribution and decisioning framework anchored on incrementality measurement through an experimentation-based methodology.
Ultimately we solve the cross-channel attribution problem statement by taking a very different approach that is best suited for the practical realities of marketing tech today.
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What aspects of media measurement do companies seem ‘lost’ in most often? Why do you think this is?
People are often mindful of starting with the question to inform with measurement. We suggest taking it one step further and focusing on the universe of media decisions you can make to drive and grow your business. Then prioritize the most meaningful decisions you can inform with precise measurement to make the biggest impact on your growth goals. Answering measurement questions with precision requires an investment in resources, time, money, etc. I have seen many times where we burned resources to get to an answer with precision. Then when we arrived, it became clear the media investment decision was not going to change based on the range of possible outcomes from the measurement.
We are in this era where data is the Holy Grail, and people have this idea that if they collect all the data and crunch it in just the right ways, it will uncover these brilliant insights and lead them to all the right decisions. That was kind of the hope with multi-touch attribution. Unfortunately, there are so many variables and limitations with the data and challenges to how you weigh different types of data that people get lost fine-tuning the analysis to the point that the insights become meaningless.
Cross-channel measurement – any advanced media measurement – is all about informing smarter investment decisions to grow your business. That’s where value is captured.
Are you seeing any surprising or new trends in terms of what is driving incremental contribution from media spend lately?
If you asked me two years ago, I would have said nearly everyone overspends on retargeting vs. prospecting. The truth is people have gotten smarter about retargeting’s true incremental contribution and getting the composition right with prospecting.
Today and throughout 2020, brands are seeing media incrementality drop during heavy promotional periods. They are learning that it’s not the media driving the majority of the influence but rather the 60% off promo.
We’ve also been seeing more brands making OTT really work for them as a meaningful scale channel next to Facebook, and more brands making Snap and Pinterest drive meaningful incremental contribution, where in years past brands really struggled to move the need with these platforms.
What’s one big thing you’re working on now that we should be excited about?
We have a ton of things in the works, and 2021 is going to be a really important year for Measured. This year has shown brands the importance of having direct-to-consumer channels, and we can show very clearly how their different media tactics inform sales on those channels so we expect demand to continue to grow.
If I had to pick one thing that will be coming out with soon, I would choose our Marketing Data Warehouse. It’s going to provide a single source of truth for cross-channel data and reporting for all stakeholders from the C-suite down through marketers, data scientists, finance and operations. We are drawing on years of experience in the field with hundreds of brands to deliver a turnkey full-featured marketing data warehouse solution.
There’s so much going on in measurement right now, how do you keep up with the latest industry trends – what do you read/follow/watch?
You’re absolutely right that there is a ton going on. There are a lot of people working on measurement and coming at it from different angles. Honestly, I try not to dig into every new thing that I see because they just become distractions. I get my best information from our clients. We’ve been really fortunate to work with some really brilliant people who know marketing and data. When we talk about these challenges for the industry and their specific brands, they get the value Measured provides. I just try to stay laser-focused on their needs and how to help them.
