Researchers from top universities and industry experts meet in Philadelphia

The intelliAd team was pleased to present at the “Conference on Innovative Approaches to Measuring Advertising Effectiveness” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The event was organized by the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative and Wharton Future of Advertising Program at the Wharton School. We presented our unique attribution model alongside other researchers from top Universities and industry experts like Google, Ernst & Young and many more household names in the digital advertising space.

Wharton awarded a grant to our academic partners from the University of Passau, Prof. Jan Schuman and Eva Anderl, to spur on the attribution model research. The partnership demonstrates how academics and professionals are using rich measurement techniques and advanced modeling to further the capabilities to compute advertising ROI.

Presenting intelliAd’s practical application of attribution modeling to an audience of experts in the digital space and getting feedback from both, academia and industry professionals was a very positive experience.  First of all, it has shown that intelliAd’s approach is both, scientifically proven and very practical. The Attribution Analyzer allows decision makers like agencies or advertisers in combination with Multichannel-Tracking to illustrate the most profitable channel without relying too much on “Big Data”. Combined and integrated with Multi Channel Tracking, experts like the fact that the model provides an (almost) instant analysis and allows the use of real-time data along the user journey. It is critical to move fast in the world of online advertising and attribution models that rely heavily on large amounts of historical data and extended statistical methods can cause a costly delay in the decision making process.

But as rapidly as advertising has changed, there is still a long way to go. Many companies feel they are only beginning to scratch the surface in collecting – let alone fully understanding and leveraging – the vast advertising and consumer response data available across media and over time, and many look to the academic community for guidance in creating analytic methods to measure advertising effectiveness. By the same token, academics recognize that companies can now capture rich datasets on buyer behavior, and conduct extensive field experiments, that can lead to new insights in consumer psychology and economics which would never be possible in the lab.

The conference program ranged widely from experimentation, attribution and marketing mix modeling, to new measurement techniques like eye tracking and emotional response measurement.

Based on field studies and experiments, here are some important findings (just a couple of examples):

• This seems to be obvious but there are still companies out there making the classical mistake not to test ads before going live. Test your creative! You can’t expect a successful campaign with bad ads or text ads that don’t pull in the user.

• Create an audience. Most advertisers have the understanding that an online ad automatically speaks to an audience. Users performing a search on Google are not considered an audience because there is way too much “noise” (other ads and organic search results). Instead of just throwing out an ad and hoping for the best, find a simple and emotional message that speaks and connects with searchers. This way advertisers actually have a better chance to create an audience where searchers start to listen and connect with the brand.

• We get so wrapped up in data analysis that we can lose focus to apply general rules of advertising. So don’t forget that the good old rules and models of advertising effectiveness still apply in the world of online advertising.

• Let’s get emotional. Research has shown that emotional based ads are almost twice as effective as rational ads. Emotional campaigns are more effective and more profitable than rational campaigns – even in rational categories.

• Go mobile! Mobile ads influence cross-media (mobile and web) conversions. Mobile shows promising stats and can actually be the glue between digital and offline. Overall, a cross-media campaign with mobile, desktop and tablet can increase brand awareness and conversion rates. It would be a mistake to look at each channel differently and make assumptions without testing cross-channel interactions.