Facebook is increasingly focused on connecting audiences across screens and channels, and helping clients measure those results.
Graham Mudd, the company’s director of advertising measurement for North America, described aspects of the company’s approach to AdExchanger at the IAB’s Mobile Marketplace conference.
“We believe the future of marketing is being able to find specific consumers based on what the publisher, advertiser or intermediary knows about the consumers,” Mudd said. “And [to do that] we need to move beyond panels and cookies to census-based measurements.”
Instead of relying on consumer panels, which Mudd said fail to provide the necessary scale to measure diverse audiences across channels, Facebook is focusing on a combination of CRM data and third-party data from companies like Datalogix, Acxiom and Epsilon to help clients enhance their measurement capabilities.
Mudd also confirmed that the new “people-based measurement capability” that Facebook ads product VP Brian Boland alluded to in an AdAge op-ed will include partnerships with other data providers, although he declined to name the providers.
Facebook uses Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) and Datalogix to measure the effectiveness of ads on both Facebook and Instagram, even though the latter is positioned as a separate brand and service. The company does not however, target users with ads based on data collected from both Instagram and Facebook.
It remains to be seen whether the company will stick to its decision to treat user behavior on Instagram and Facebook’s platform as separate entities for targeting purposes. Instagram does allow users to sign in through their Facebook log-in and it could potentially connect check-in information and keywords on photos with other user data to serve more relevant ads.
Mudd noted that “measuring systems built on top of log-in data is the future of attribution.” He described Netflix, for instance, as “the future of the TV platform. It’s not hard to imagine people logging into their set-top boxes to have personalized content.”
No Money Without Measurements
During a separate panel discussion at the IAB event, Mitch Weinstein, SVP of ad operations at media agency Magna Global, said advertisers need to see more results in mobile before they can consider cross-screen campaigns.
“If we’re spending a lot of money on mobile we need to prove it’s effective and a lot of it’s experimental at this point,” he said. “But once attribution models play nicely with other mediums like TV, that’ll be huge.”
Sarah Baehr, SVP and group director of digital strategy at Carat, noted that more campaigns are becoming mobile campaigns by virtue of the platform.
“What we’re finding is a lot of media is winding up on mobile regardless. I have many client examples in which you’re running a campaign on Facebook and by default 75% of it is on mobile,” she said. “Some platforms are lending themselves to mobile more which could make the migration more natural rather than forcing yourself into it.”
Whether marketers should prioritize mobile measurements over broader measurements depends on the client, said Baehr. Measurements, she noted, “often turn into an endless customization of what measurement and attribution means for you.”
