What's top of my mind

With the world’s current economic climate, many brands are looking to see how they can make the most of their owned assets, including first-party data to fuel their growth.

Brands are prioritising growth and look to us to understand where limited time, energy and budgets should be used to therefore identify the best conversion opportunities for reaching existing and prospective clients.

Now, more than ever, during uncertain economic times, analytics and measurement play a critical role, both in the brands and agencies worlds, for making the most of what they have and investing wisely.

Brands’ big opportunity

From the conversations I have with marketers, many brands already see the value in using measurement solutions to quantify their media impact on their performance outcomes, whether that be sales, ROI or something else.

However, where brands are not always realising their potential is the level of granularity the measurement that takes place and what brands do with their media insights once they have them. Many are not feeding them back into their marketing strategies, and this is a lost opportunity.

Brands should rethink their approach to measurement by bringing it to the heart of their decisioning processes to fuel growth at various stages, including business planning, communications strategy or media planning and activation.

What defines a quality media environment

At GroupM, quality digital advertising is defined as being viewed by a real human in our target audience, served in an appropriate editorial environment and underpinned by independent industry certification and third-party verification, while being mindful of user-experience and privacy.

As a build up to this foundation, brands have to turn to measurement to ensure they strengthen the definition to quality using metrics that have proven to be valuable. Combining key attention metrics to proven and validated signals of performance that really matter for your brand is an essential part of the process.

Not all signals have the same importance across brands and media environments. Being able to integrate the right mix into the bidding process is the best way for optimising to quality media and drives better outcomes, but it can only be achieved by bringing analytics to the centre of the process.

Transforming the agency

EssenceMediacom will launch in early 2023, so we’re currently at an exciting stage of redesigning how things are done in the new agency across all areas.

Within Analytics, we’re working on a number of projects to bring advanced measurement to advertising mediums that haven’t before been brought together, including various areas of offline and online media.

The greatest opportunity lies in creating a holistic data strategy that will connect first-party data with many other data sets - such as media performance, proprietary research tools, and third-party research tools - to help brands with their growth strategies.

As an industry, things are becoming more privacy-first, so we know clients’ owned data will only increase in importance as a differentiator for them. As a result, data will be the backbone to all areas of media and previously separate divisions at the agency and across the wider agency group will be brought together by a shared thinking in data.