Improve your targeting power with estimations and improve the ROI of your overall marketing activities

The competitive axis of current marketing activities is shifting to a quality perspective, using data that could be called the "voice of the customer" to provide a more attractive and integrated brand experience. In an era when the source of a brand's competitiveness is not the appeal of specifications from a company's perspective, but an attractive experience value from the customer's perspective, how can companies create and provide an integrated and attractive experience value?

This requires the planning and execution of marketing in a broader sense than just traditional marketing and communication such as advertising. How should those in charge of marketing at media companies, and partner companies that support marketing activities, deal with the changes in the competitive axis? In the second installment of this series, Yoshiaki Hirao of XICA and Riji Matsumura of Kodansha discuss the issue.

Context-matching advertising and statistical analysis gaining attention in the cookie-less era

What do you think about the challenges surrounding corporate marketing activities today?

Matsumura:Due to regulations on third-party cookies, retargeting in online advertising is no longer possible as before, and I feel that many advertisers are struggling to reach their target customers digitally.

Hirao:The COVID-19 pandemic has made people look more closely at marketing investments, and I think there is a growing momentum to place more importance on ROI than ever before. In addition, as Matsumura pointed out, there is a global trend toward protecting personal information, and the Personal Information Protection Act has also been revised in Japan. While investment efficiency is required, traditional methods are becoming less effective in online advertising. In such an environment, I think that context match advertising and statistical approaches to evaluating ads are attracting attention. The former estimates from acquired information and, without using personal information, understands and links the context surrounding the user, maintaining the accuracy of targeting by delivering optimal ads. The latter is a method of looking at the ROI of various ads using an estimation-based approach, so I think it provides hints for improving the efficiency of marketing activities without using data that violates personal privacy.

What do you think about the challenges facing advertisers?

Hirao:"Unification of campaign evaluation indicators." Until now, it was common for different campaigns to track different KPIs. For example, the person in charge of online advertising tracked CPA, while the person in charge of TV commercials tracked favorability and awareness, creating a siloed situation. As a result, even if each KPI was maximized individually, it was unclear whether the return on investment of the entire marketing activity was being maximized. Therefore, I feel that efforts to be able to properly measure the degree of contribution to KGI across campaigns and departments are accelerating in various ways.

Matsumura:We have been hearing a lot of people wanting to somehow measure "how much ROI can be expected from this initiative." For example, in the case of Kodansha, up until now, our advertising sales department and the client's advertising department had only discussed what kind of creative to create and how to promote it, but recently they have also been discussing how much ROI can be expected.

Kodansha released OTAKAD in 2019, which provides asset-based ad delivery, creative and analysis services..

Matsumura:OTAKAD is a digital marketing service that uses data from 11 media outlets owned by our company to deliver targeted ads and promote customer understanding from the results of delivery. It extracts user interests from article access history and analyzes the enthusiasm of readers to deliver optimal ads in real time.

Hirao:It's a method of inferring from accumulated data, rather than chasing individuals, using the information collected so far and information from various advertisements. We are also interested in OtaKaD's data. What is the segment we should really target? We feel that in the near future we will be able to realize a world where we can refine and experiment with OtaKaD, turn it into evidence, and then feed it back into other measures for overall optimization.

Matsumura:In our privacy policy we explain to our users how we collect their data, but so far we haven't had any major reactions, so I think they have accepted it.

Hirao:Some people mistakenly believe that estimating technologies like OTAKAD will be less accurate because they do not track individuals as they once did, but I think the reality is the opposite. The movements of individuals that can be understood by acquiring 3rd party cookie data are random and often inexplicable, and ads for the same product may continue to be displayed based on the browsing history of a product that has already been purchased. Therefore, understanding past accumulated data and making estimates from that should improve accuracy.

What kind of support do you think media companies like Kodansha and data analysis companies like XICA can provide to advertisers?

Hirao:We help with the task of "having a unified indicator." If this is done in-house, there is a possibility that friction will remain between departments, so by having a third party like us objectively present the analysis results, we can create an environment that makes it easier to collaborate between departments to maximize results with the unified indicator as the subject.

Matsumura:Media companies like ours look at things like "This person is currently reading this article, and is taking this action." We also provide suggestions based on the results of ad delivery, such as "This type of appeal would be more likely to interest this person."

When players in different positions join hands, it leads to integrated marketing.

Matsumura:I think collaboration is really important. We don't think we can do everything by ourselves. It's actually quite common, but sometimes clients point out that "there are no conversions" after placing ads. Of course, it's important to focus on conversions as an indicator, but not all conversions can be obtained through display ads or video ads. There must have been times when a memory of "I saw this product on YouTube" led to a purchase in a store. If we could collaborate with XICA so that we could see such a series of data, we might be able to see these results, so I'm very interested.

Hirao:I agree. Not only conversions but also the assist effect should be evaluated. I think it is necessary to make it the norm to provide proper evaluations that are not based on the last touch.

Matsumura:Also, if we can determine through advance data analysis by XICA that "even if there is no direct conversion, people who read this kind of article end up purchasing, so why not try advertising," we can then target and deliver ads to people who accessed that article. I think that this kind of collaboration will lead to more precise analysis, which will make it easier to optimize marketing overall.

Hirao:We unexpectedly saw a picture of cooperation emerge. I hope to continue discussing new possibilities in the future.

[Data-driven Total Marketing Optimization] Series

• Vol. 1:Based on data, we understand customers in high resolution and use estimates to grasp the entire market
• Vol. 2: This article
• Vol. 3:We live in an age where data can be used to provide new value. How should marketers approach data?

This article was published in the June 2022 issue of the monthly magazine "Sendenkaigi."