#ARFAM8 : Measurement issues from the CEO perspective

 

By David Brudenell

Opening the Tuesday session of the conference, Bob Pittman, the CEO of Clear Channel shared perspective through the eyes of Executives on marketing and research metrics and their impact in real-world executive decisions.

“I use research as the guide for what we do.” Pittman said as he opened his presentation. Framing up his topic, Pittman remarked that ‘[The] best way to prepare for the future is to listen to your customers.” and that the marketing world has changed dramatically. Consumer control was an introductory theme during the first parts of the presentation “[because] for consumers, everything is customizable, consumption is time shifted and place-shifted and that most importantly, convenience is king”.

Building on the new consumer, Pittman showed examples of how the smart home of the consumer, created in the 1960’s was wrong. Today Americans spend 70% of their time away from the home. This was reflected in some of the Clear Channel product programs where their focus, just in 2011 was on PC-based radio. Today over 60% of radio listening is done on mobile however.

“So how do we all deal with this” Pittman rhetorically remarked, as he navigated his speech to the importance of research and insights to the Clear Chanel budgetary mix. Pittman want on to describe his ‘toolkit’ questions:

1. What are [advertisers] getting for every dollar of their media spends? – And making sure that they measure this success. This is done in a “Culture of Understanding”.

2. New growth will come from being part of the multi platform – specifically Pittman focused on the fact that radio moves with the connected consumer.

3. No ad campaign is standalone anymore – the great campaigns are looking to how and where to connect with the connect consumer.

4. Growing clients relationships into partnerships is key

Moving the conversation from the landscape to the job of the CEO, Pittman outlined executive needs to the research industry:

1. Rapidly evolve with the changing consumer

2. One measurement across broadcast and digital

3. Improvement in media mix modeling to reflect true customer behavior.

Continuing the Tuesday session Aussie invasion, Steve Weaver from Nine Entertainment spoke about his experiences in understanding how Australians engaged cross-platform with Olympic media in 2012.

Weaver introduced the topic by painting a unique Australian media consumption landscape and that there was a need to create an Australian-specific research lab to better understand how media was being consumed during the 2012 London Games.

Illustrating the comprehensive multi-phase technique using six research producing single-source consumer data, Weaver then dove more deeply into how Channel 9 executives and advertisers consumed this powerful data via a slick online dashboarding system.

Weaver showed the eight concurrent media consumption platforms, and discussed some interesting findings on the media mix, including, but not limited to the fact that online consumption was not only higher but offered better impact than print.

Interestingly, Weaver showed content consumption patterns across day-parts was not affected by screen fragmentation, but rather followed historical patterns of consumption. “The content consumption is the same, it just lives in different places”, said Weaver to conclude the point.

While the vast majority of content consumption of Olympic content was in primetime across all devices, diving deeper into the day-part data, Weaver showed the audience that there was noticeable differences between screens – especially around commuting for mobile devices, lunchtime for PCs and tablet usage at night.

“The commute became a very important part of the broadcast” remarked Weaver with 8% of content during commuting hours was consumed via mobile. Weaver discussed the importance of “the best screen” and how they saw this effect during Olympic day-part viewing. Of interest to the writer was that concurrent screen consumption peaked at night as a “companion device”, but with the exception of the morning commute effects, trended fairly consistently with primary viewing.

Short form viewing was also key component to the consumption data and interestingly, according to Weaver, “[secondary screen content] would never make it to broadcast, it’s simply used for these types of short form consumption”.

Weaver concluded the presentation by focusing on the importance in measuring “cross screening” with 48% of Australians dual screening during the 2012 Olympics. The data identifying higher content consumption by these dual-screeners was ‘extremely important to our advertisers”.