The BB Blog: You Say 'DAH-tah,' I Say 'DAY-tah'
Updated: Dec 22, 2022
By: Roxanne Geyer, SVP Customer Experience
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend Beet Retreat Santa Monica - and what an experience.
As a first-time attendee, I give big kudos to Andy Plesser and the Beet Team for hosting high caliber events with top-notch attendees. As someone who has been in the space for a number of years, it was fantastic to see old friends and friendly faces... as well as, folks I have watched and followed over the years.
Here are a few of my take-aways...
Measurement, Measurement, Measurement!
At the risk of sounding like a broken record - measurement is still one of the most hotly debated topics in our space. And, rightly so.
With the massive measurement misstep by Nielsen during the pandemic - what turned out to be an incredibly impactful media consumption time period - the doors opened not only for competitors, but allowed for legitimate discussion on what is beyond classic TV measurement.
I thought Julie Berger, Executive Director of Investment at Essence, said it best. To paraphrase... "all advertisers are performance advertisers, we just need to understand what it is that they are trying to measure."
How exciting is that?!? To be at the cusp of our industry and ready to truly ask advertisers what they need to measure and have the technologies to satisfy it.
Video Is Video - But Premium Video Demands Recognition and Classification
Without a doubt, video is a special medium. For advertising, it can truly become a brilliant challenge.... to combine sight, sound, motion with a story that has to move someone in 30
seconds. Wow. Remarkable when done well.
The Blockboard executive team has spent the majority of each of our careers in the video advertising space because we are each uniquely fascinated with the challenge and the value. The concept of classifying out video content that ads could run against is at least 10 years old. And, the main drivers of that status is, of course, the content owners (publishers).
So, it came as no surprise that in the conference, surrounded by legitimate high quality publishers, that the conversation around classification
bubbled to the surface.
The need to support great content predominantly comes from advertising - and so the price factor comes into play. But, at the end of the day, I think everyone recognizes that in the end, you do get what you pay for. And when an advertiser needs to get their message in front of audience that is watching great content, the cost buying in-stream will be higher but so will the chances of reaching your next customer.
The trick is - let's make sure that your high dollar media investment is delivered without waste, in front of real audiences and moves your target consumer down the funnel. If you're achieving your business goals, then the investment on premium content is absolutely worth it.
Data - The Keystone?
The promise of digital advertising is that reams and reams (checks notes on that analog reference) of data would come back for campaigns ... pre-, mid- and post-flight.
The golden ring of achievement would be that for all the partners and publishers that end up getting involved - the advertiser would have a very clean, universal understanding of data so they could make better decisions and optimize effectively across the board.
I think it's safe to say that we are still not quite there yet.
To me, the data and information about the audience and metrics is only half the battle. The other half is around interoperability... the ability to pass back and forth important data so that it can be actioned upon holistically. And that always seems to be a bit more squirrely.
To solve for that, some interesting ideas and solutions are starting to become fashionable topics (i.e. clean rooms), but the biggest issue I see with that is there becomes yet another party in the mix. Is that really the best we can do? Add more players and layers to the complexity for advertisers to deal with? How can we simplify an already complex situation? (Psst.. we have a few ideas here at Blockboard, so stay tuned...)
Overall, data is a critical part of digital advertising and will always be at the forefront of conversations. It will be part of every decision an advertiser makes. It will be part of every evaluation. It will be part of every interoperability call. Right now there's no silver bullet... so, as an ecosystem, we have a long way to go to make an advertiser's life easier.
Final thought... I'm always so curious to hear the different ways people say "data." There's no right or wrong, is it regional? Is it preference? Could it mean slightly different things in context? What a curiosity to me! Tell me... how do you pronounce it?
How do you pronounce it?
- DAY-ta?
- Dah-ta?
- Flip flopper
