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Negative uplifts

This article about negative uplifts belongs to a special series of blogposts, written by our own data wizards. It will offer you a glimpse into the engine room of Mediasynced. In these informative blogposts, we shed a light on the complexity of TV performance measurement in realtime and our robust statistical solutions.

One of the primary ways to evaluate the effect of your commercial is by comparing the performance before and after airing your commercial. A baseline is calculated based upon the performance before the commercial and is then subtracted from the performance after airing. The difference is then called the uplift. This process can be done for all kinds of metrics: we can calculate the uplift in the number of sessions on your website, the uplift in conversions and many more.

While this method can give you a good estimation of how well your commercial performed, it is not perfect. One of the most obvious flaws is that it can result in negative uplifts: cases where the performance after airing a commercial is worse than before. It is quite unlikely that users will start boycotting your products after seeing your commercial, so what is going on here? Is it even possible for a commercial to have a negative effect?

What is actually happening is that the commercial did not have a noticeable effect and the results you are seeing are actually due to noise. There is no reason to be alarmed, you did not actually lose any potential customers due to your commercial.

In the example shown above the goal is to calculate the uplift in number of sessions on your website after airing a commercial. The number of sessions is not static, it changes throughout the day in an unpredictable manner. In the graph we can see that right before the commercial aired, the number of sessions started dropping. The effect of the commercial was not enough to compensate for this drop, resulting in your actual performance being lower than the calculated baseline.

So now that we know that these negative numbers are not representative for what is actually happening, what can we do to improve them? As discussed above, the problem is that your commercial did not have a significant effect. One method that some of our competitors use, is to set all negative uplifts to 0. While this sounds like a good solution, it is statistically unsound. There are also cases where the exact opposite is happening such as the example shown below. 

The effect of your commercial is also insignificant in this example. The number of sessions started increasing right after the commercial was aired. This is not an effect of the commercial, but caused by random fluctuation in visitors. However, this situation will result in a large uplift. If you set all negative uplifts to 0, then you must do the same for the positive-uplift case (which is much harder to identify) where the effect of the commercial was insignificant, yet the uplift was still large. If this is not done your results will be positively skewed. Your overall results will be much more positive then what is actually the case. Often this results in surprisingly large uplifts for small channels, as these channels are much more likely to have small effects which may result in incorrect positive and negative results. The negative results are set to 0 so you are left with an average uplift for this channel much higher than what is actually the case. When you leave these negative numbers as they are, incorrect positive and negative results will cancel each other out over a campaign period. This results in a much more accurate estimation for a channel.

So if we can’t ignore these numbers then what can we do? The statistical reality is that we simply can’t know for certain whether a session or conversion is caused by your commercial or has a different reason. As this problem is a fundamental one in all of statistics and is not only limited to the problems in our branch.

What can be done is limiting the effect of this problem by employing methods that filter the real data from these noise and predictive models that can make strong estimations of the real data.

Mediasynced is constantly improving its methods and models using the statistical and Artificial Intelligence tools that we have developed to provide an accurate prediction. Such an example is the method we use to calculate the baseline. You can read about this method here.

Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed reading our second blog post of this special series. Every month we will release a new article, so stay tuned!

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The baseline

This article about the baseline belongs to a special series of blogposts, written by our own data wizards. It will offer you a glimpse into the engine room of Mediasynced. In these informative blogposts, we shed a light on the complexity of TV performance measurement in realtime and our robust statistical solutions. Hopefully you will enjoy reading the very first blogpost of this special series. 

The common way to measure the performance of TV spots, is to measure your website in the minutes following a commercial and comparing these results to the performance that we expected without a commercial. This process is called benchmarking. Your first step would be to measure the amount of sessions your website has after the commercial. The next step is to create a benchmark, also called a baseline to compare your results with.

Linear Baseline

The simplest method would be to measure the amount of sessions on your website before you aired the commercial and take that number as the baseline. While this solution may sound intuitive and adequate in theory, in reality it is just not accurate enough. The first problem is that your benchmark is static. You assume that it won't change during the period after your commercial up to the point you stop measuring.

To fix this problem you can use two measure points instead of one. In addition to the measure point before airing the commercial you now also measure the point after the effect of the commercial has faded. Now you can simply draw a line from the first measure point to the second and use this line as your benchmark. The problem here is identifying when the effect of your commercial has faded. We will discuss this problem in a future blog.

Another problem is that this benchmark is based on a short snapshot of your website’s traffic. In such a short timeframe, sudden variations in your website visits can occur that will distort the baseline calculation. So the measured baseline may no longer be an accurate representation. This can result in significant higher or lower measured uplifts than what is really the case. So adding an additional measure point does not change anything. Now your baseline is simply based upon two potentially inaccurate points.

Average baseline 

So why don’t we take the average traffic of each specific day and minute combination? Well that model is flawed because there is no such thing as an average Monday. Seasons, the weather, events, etc., can all heavily influence the baseline.

Our Baseline

At Mediasynced, we have taken a more sophisticated approach in order to provide an accurate baseline. For each client, we build specific day models. These models are based on historical data and take several factors into consideration. They are then aligned with the actual data with the use of a y-intercept. Using this method we can construct a baseline that follows the natural curve we expect it to have, so based on the organic rhythm of the website throughout the day. If we expect the traffic of your website to rise slightly from 16:10 to 16:20, then the constructed baseline for that time frame will also rise slightly. To increase the accuracy we have splitted our data up by device and repeated this process for each of those devices. Using these methods we were able to construct a baseline that correlates better with reality and is less affected by the noise within the data.

In the example below, we see that the number of baseline sessions (real baseline) is oscillating around an average of 10 sessions per minute. During the commercial the baseline is starting a positive peak which the two simple baselines fail to capture. Our baseline on the other hand can correctly predict this pattern and recreates this peak as best as possible.

Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed reading our first blog post of this special series. Every month we will release a new article, so stay tuned! 

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Sharing our insights about Spotalytics at the Double Proof expert session

On Tuesday the 13th of June, Screenforce and RAB organize the expert session Double Proof. During this session, the take outs of the Double Proof research will be discussed, and we will be there to share all you need to know about our RTV performance measurement tool Spotalytics.

For the Double Proof research, all TV- and Radio campaign data of 13 advertisers was analyzed to determine the effects on online search behavior, and to shed a light on the scope and power of Radio and TV efforts.

This is the part where our software Spotalytics comes in useful: the tool allows you to attribute and optimize your RTV-campaigns in realtime. Our CEO Mark van de Crommert will explain how Spotalytics can be used to optimize and align your RTV-campaigns with your online objectives.

Click here to read more about the Double Proof expert session.

Click here to read more about Spotalytics.

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Winners of the Silver Crossmedia Award, Innovation of the year!

Sharing our happiness with a present! 

We are very thrilled to let you know that Spotalytics is crowned with the Silver Award for Best Cross Media Innovation! 

And of course we would like you to celebrate with us! To add to the festive spirit, we would like to offer you a present:

Measure the effects of your TV campaign in May with Spotalytics and receive a free analysis of your radio campaign!

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Mediasynced nominated for Cross Media Awards 2017

On the 19th of April, the fifth edition of the Cross Media Awards will take place at the Compagnietheater in Amsterdam. We can proudly announce that Mediasynced is nominated twice for the Cross Media Awards 2017: our innovation Spotalytics is nominated for Cross Media Innovation of the year and our CEO Mark van de Crommert is nominated for Cross Media Man of the year.

It’s save to state that cross media can be seen as one of the most relevant themes in media. A large amount of the dynamics in media can be assigned to the development of cross media. Since 2013, the best cross media cases are crowned during the Cross Media Awards. It’s the only professional award that places cross media in the centre of attention. The event is organized by Nederlands MediaNieuws. Mediasynced is fully specialized in developing cross media technology. We break down the wall between the online and offline world with our technical solutions and build bridges between media. As a result, we are very proud to be nominated twice for the Cross Media Awards 2017. In fact, it feels like old times, because in 2013, we also received two nominations!

Launching new cross media techniques is in our blood and we want to ensure and maintain that we can measure ourselves against the best cross media adtech players in this world. The Cross Media Awards nominations are a great acknowledgement for us.

Nederlands MediaNieuws published two interviews on their website about Mediasynced and our nominated innovation Spotalytics. In both interviews, Mark discusses the story behind Mediasynced and the TV performance tool Spotalytics. He highlights why Spotalytics uniquely fulfills a lagoon between TV and online. Furthermore, Mark addresses Mediasynced’s vision on cross media and our plans for the future.

Read the full interview about Spotalytics here.

Read the full interview about Mediasynced here.

Overview of all nominations: Cross Media Awards 2017

On April the 19th the award winners will be announced, so stay tuned!

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Measuring the ROI of TV advertising; a Perfect Storm

Measuring TV ads effectiveness beyond classical KPI’s such as reach and frequency has rapidly become a reality for all TV advertisers. This is due to a couple of trends that have created the perfect storm for TV ROI measurement and TV attribution tools. In this article we will describe these trends:

Googlification and Programmatic Advertising

In the previous century the availability of powerful, free measurement tools from Google, such as Google Analytics and Google Adwords, proliferated the use of statistics in advertising. Then in the last 10 years, the growth of realtime biddable online advertising expanded this measurement to include online display advertising and video advertising. 

This resulted in advertisers becoming used to quantitative KPI’s such as Cost per view or Cost per Sale. While initially such campaign analytics were only common among online advertising professionals, they have now made their way to offline marketers too.  They are now expecting quantitative measurements of the TV ROI, in line with what they are used to see for online campaigns.

Data, Software & Computing power

In order to calculate the effectiveness of a TV Campaign, technically we need three building blocks

1. Data. This will come as no surprise. Advertisers are expanding their customer knowledge through combining CRM, sales data, DMP’s (Data Management Platforms that track and profile online customers) and also website analytics data (Google 360, Adobe Omniture). This creates a very detailed view of the customer and the ‘how and why’ of their purchase behaviour.

2. Software. Both start-ups and household names, mostly from the online advertising industry, have jumped on the opportunity to measure the performance of TV. Roughly, they can be split in to 2 categories that complement each other, though they both can used in isolation too.

Marketing mix modelling. It provides a bird’s eye view on total media spend. The approach uses regression techniques to identify the ideal mix of different media types and the correlations between different media types (e.g. the halo effect of TV advertising on online performance). It does this by analysing historical campaign and sales data and creating forecasts for future campaigns. It roughly answers the question: “what medium mix yields the highest campaign ROI?”  An example conclusion could be: “It is best to spend 50% on TV, 30% on online, 10% on Outdoor and 10% on Radio”.

TV effect measurement. It provides a detailed view of TV spend. The approach is to maximize TV ROI by measuring the TV ad effects of each individual TV-spot airing. For each spot, the baseline is calculated and compared to actual results, e.g. an increase on website traffic or inbound calls. This minute based approach allows TV researchers and TV buyers, to measure effects on a very detailed level. It attributes effects of TV advertising to find the best performing TV channels, TV-genres or hours of the day. It roughly answers the question: “Which TV ad position should I buy to maximize my TV ROI?”. An example conclusion could be: “The genre crime, hours 7pm and 10pm and Channel 4 and Discovery, deliver the best ROI on TV.

3. Computing power. Cloud based computing power is now available for a fraction of what it cost 10 years ago. Meaning we can now store and crunch big datasets at very affordable rates. This allowed start ups to enter the TV measurement arena with affordable pricing, at least compared to incumbent tools. This means smaller advertisers with smaller TV budgets can now also afford to implement TV ROI measurement. And larger TV advertisers can affordably measure all their TV campaigns, instead of a few per year.

Agencies and advertisers

Both advertisers and their agencies, by means of their TV research departments, have often used TV measurement. Though not necessarily by using the same advanced and automated models that are currently used, it certainly created more acceptance and appreciation for effect measurement of TV campaigns. The reason this never grew to larger application among TV research departments, were the costs involved and timeliness of the conclusions. It was simply too time consuming and too costly. And by the time the results were analysed, the new TV campaign had already been planned.

The conclusion is that measuring TV ads effectiveness is a clear and logical need in the quest for optimizing TV campaigns and TV-performance. But it wasn’t until recently, that the trends above created the perfect storm for TV attribution and TV campaign ROI measurement. Software tools that cater for this growing need, will become as much a standard for TV advertisers as Google Analytics for websites owners.

Expect to see more innovations and new TV business models evolving, as the industry embraces the latest tools to measure and buy TV advertising more precisely.

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Online campaign Jetair increases by 75% thanks to synchronisation with TV

Since December 2015, advertisers in Belgium can sync their digital campaigns with TV, radio and weather. Jetair has achieved another first by becoming the first travel agency in Belgium to synchronise television with online media in cooperation with Mediasynced.

 By synchronising relevant TV moments with digital advertising, the travel agency can extend it’s TV message with a subsequent online campaign. By strengthening the brand message through TVC Sync, traffic on the Jetair website increases right after the TV commercial. TUI Netherlands was the first customer of Mediasynced in 2012 and has already used this way of cross-media advertising several times. 

Nicolas Elshout: "At Jetair, we are always looking for new and innovative ways to reach our customers. People increasingly use a second screen while watching TV. Thanks to the Mediasynced technology, we can effectively reach our customers during those moments. In addition, this technology fits perfectly into our cross media strategy in which we want to bring online and offline communication ever closer. The campaign resulted in a 75% increase in our CTR for mobile devices."

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Norwegian radio station P4 presents "RadioSync": synchronising radio commercials with P4's own digital inventory, and Facebook and Google. Mediasynced provided the sync technology for this new proposition. RadioSync technology enables P4 to launch a digital campaign simultaneously with airing a radio commercial, visualising the message of the radio commercial online. Rune Hafskjær, digital director at P4, says: "Tests and case studies we have done so far, show much greater propensity to click, than a non-synchronised digital campaign."

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How to really capitalize on multiscreen marketing

It’s no news that consumers hop from one screen to the other. Especially during commercial breaks on TV. Who does not have his smartphone within reach whilst hanging on the couch? MillwardBrown's AdReaction 2014 report described typical multiscreen users diverting to a second screen out of boredom, habit, and a desire to be more productive and in touch. Users spend two out of seven-plus hours of daily screen time eying a digital device while watching TV.

Brands can no longer regard “channels” standing alone: one screen has to add up to the other and tell a consistent brand story. This means creative has to think multiscreen (WHAT) and media agencies have to think multiscreen (WHERE). But what if you can add the “WHEN” to this strategy?

Syncing is the answer here. The missing link is timing. If you have sequential creatives that will tell your consistent story across screen, time them! Sync your TV ad with your digital campaign (using programmatic buying this is possible within milliseconds) and reach your consumers everywhere, on all screens. You can adapt your message to tell a story from TV to digital. Mediasyned will make sure the timing is perfect and the right creative is displayed at the right moment. So people see your commercial on TV (A) and then see your digital ad on their smartphone (B). We can sync your digital campaign to specific media: (mobile) sites, social media, app’s: you name it.

Come talk to us about multiscreen moment marketing. Together I’m sure we can create the perfect strategy to tell a consistent brand story across all screens.

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A day in the life of… Krizia, our campaign manager

Early morning, I enter the office, fix myself a cup of coffee and open my laptop. Between shutting down last night and booting up again this morning a lot has happened. Actually, my work doesn’t hold office hours… Let me explain.

I’m in charge of setting up all Mediasynced campaigns. I use our control panel “Central” to book, analyse, optimize and report digital, synced campaigns. “Central” is our super user friendly campaign booking and management tool, built by our own developers. They come up with new functionalities almost every day. To make my life easier of course ;-)

Example. Let's say, we have an advertiser called “Lemondaisy”, a new super refreshing soda. Tonight, their TV campaign starts and they want a simultaneous burst for their digital campaign. That's where I come in.

I go to “Central” and set up the Lemondaisy campaign. I choose the event (their TV commercial) and choose the DSP, which is used for buying this campaign programmatically. Subsequently, I connect the correct line items (like desktop/mobile/tablet, prospecting/retargeting) and save.

Now, I don’t want to sync every aired commercial. We only want to trigger the digital campaign when enough people are tuned in to the channel. We want some volume, right? So we set a certain GRP threshold, to make sure the digital campaign is only released when we have enough potential TV viewers to target on the second screen.

Our experience shows that timing is everything. Digital campaigns that run shortly after the aired the commercial show the best performance. So we will set the line items to activate for a short period of time, say 4 minutes. Now the “Lemondaisy” campaign is all set, we wait for the commercials to air. Meanwhile I check on another campaign that has been running a while, and see I need to optimise. Some sites are not converting well, so I exclude them from the inventory.

End of day, I go home, but my work is not done yet. I know my Lemondaisy campaign is set to activate around 8:15PM, but we’ll have to wait and see. Because we detect the commercial using our own technology we never miss one. So I check in the evening if we have detected, and yes we have! Detection led to a trigger, which led to activation of the digital campaign. All systems go and the synced campaign is active! Nice job.

Next day starts with a nice cup of coffee again and opening my laptop. I see we had three triggers last night and can let our client know that everything is running smoothly. Our client is pleased, but wants to get extra creative.  A “Lemondaisy” drink is extra refreshing when it’s over 20°C and sunny, right? So we set up a Weather Sync campaign. We set to trigger the digital campaign when it is sunny and 20+°C. With a TV Sync and a Weather Sync campaign, people can not get around the refreshing power of Lemondaisy!

Interested in what Krizia can do for you? Give us a call or send us an email!

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Hallmark wanted more impact for their Mother’s Day campaign last year. Their TV commercial “The Hidden Camera” showed moms opening a Mother’s Day card from their loved ones, capturing the emotion of that moment. While airing this commercial a TV-synced campaign was unleashed at the exact same moment online, to activate audiences to create their own Mother’s Day card.Choosing to sync this particular campaign turned out to be a brilliant move! Hallmark reached +81% on the CTR of the online campaign and saw 20x more visitors on their website, leading to 15.000+ conversions! You can review the case study here.

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Mediasynced partners with ad platform RadiumOne in Australia

Mediasynced has partnered with ad platform RadiumOne in Australia, launching their joint proposition “Moment” in May 2015. “Moment” triggers digital campaigns based on big TV moments – such as high rating and must-watch shows, events, TVCs and trending news stories – across all free-to-air TV providers.

“Ads running at the same time as TVCs is nice, but it doesn’t even come close to touching on the opportunity that comes with connecting TV moments based on social interest and intent data”, Kerry McCabe, RadiumOne managing director – Asia Pacific explains. ”With over 70% of TV viewers engaging with a second screen at the same time, a huge opportunity exists to connect those dots with both precision and scale.”

Technology wise, “MOMENT” fuses two data gathering and activation platforms to create a world-first social syncing solution. Mediasynced created the world’s first triggering software along with a proprietary TVR (TV ratings) and GRP (Gross Rating Points) estimator. RadiumOne’s social tools and programmatic media buying platform provides a real-time data and delivery solution on consumer interest and intent based on the social sharing behaviors of over 22 million Australian unique users across all social media and dark social channels.

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Nothing beats the feeling of your toes wiggling about in your flip-flops. But when can you finally wear them again? Mediasynced’s technology keeps track of the weather and forecast. Some products just sell better when the weather meets certain conditions. Can you imagine yourself buying flip-flops when all you can see is rain and grey sky, without any chance on improvement? Not really, so why advertise? Target the moment that we all get that special summer-time feeling. For the first time this year. After coming out of the winter. #momentsthatmatter

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Colorful eggs to sell? Special Easter-event in your showroom? Launching a digital campaign linked to Easter, seems relatively easy. Everyone knows when it’s Easter. A year in advance. Timing seems unessential and your campaign is easy to plan. To the day. But what if you want to be a little smarter about it? And time your digital campaign exactly right?

Than you should consider a synced campaign. To really target the right moment. Not just Easter, but milliseconds after your Easter-campaign airs on TV or radio. Now it is really getting interesting, right? If you’re bunny hops across the big screen, it will immediately hop on through to the second screen. Giving you maximum reach and incredible relevance for your brand message.

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In the Netherlands, a spring storm is coming. Yuk. But, this *is* the perfect opportunity for a #WeatherSync campaign! Using the weather conditions as a trigger for your digital campaign. Adding relevance to the moment for your message. You should try it!

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Using the relevance of the moment

"We target the moments that matter". What does that mean? I can almost hear you ask. Well, I’ll tell you exactly what it means. Mediasyned has developed the technology that enables you to boost your digital campaign WHEN IT’S RELEVANT. Sounds good, right? So instead of digging deep inside third party data to reach, say, max 10% of your potential audience, we allow you to get creative about the moment:

The moment, people online are actually open to your message.

The moment, they see your ad on TV. Or hear you on the radio.

The moment, they think about a tropical holiday, because they are waiting for the bus in the pouring rain. Daydreaming about, exactly: your tropical holiday.

Or the moment, you’re potential customers are stuck at a train station because of horrible delays. Isn't that the perfect moment to offer them a free cup of coffee? On mobile, redeemable at a train station kiosk?

By targeting the moments that matter, Mediasynced bridges the gap between offline and online. Our targeting technology detects and analyses the exact right moment to trigger your digital campaign. In real-time. By syncing your digital campaign with this relevant moment, you reinforce the emotion of that moment and become incredibly relevant. Creating the perfect opportunity for your brand to engage.