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Last holiday season, Solo Stove, makers of a smokeless fire pit, teamed up with Snoop Dog on what was a very expensive celebrity sponsorship. Snoop claimed to be “giving up smoke,” and the campaign showed some initial signs of success on social media and increased brand awareness.
It wasn’t until a few weeks into 2024, the campaign's real effect (or lack of) on holiday sales became clear. It was a flop, so much so that it majorly decreased the company’s EBITDA for the entire year. Solo Stove took a risk that involved a huge upfront investment, and given the nature of the sponsorship, made it difficult to adjust on the fly. Yet many marketers on digital campaigns both big and small are choosing to take a similar but unnecessary risk.
New measurement methodologies and data sources can now allow brands to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns on sales outcomes in near real-time and optimize their campaigns while they’re still in-market. It’s poised to revolutionize the digital advertising industry.
“Market conditions change so rapidly these days that latent measurement recommendations will be outdated by the time strategies can be put into place,” says Dan Kurtter, SVP of Strategy at Attain. “Modern measurement equips marketers with real-time sales signals that can be used programmatically, providing traditional incrementality measurement but with real-time optimization.”
Some of the benefits of real-time measurement are obvious — less ad waste, a higher return on spend — but there are some hidden benefits that are less frequently considered.
Until recently, digital marketers had to rely on two disparate sets of campaign performance data that may or may not correlate to each other. The first was sales performance data, which reported on the effectiveness of the campaign on real-world sales. This data came in weeks, if not months, after the campaign was over, with limited insights into what worked and why.
The second set of data used to optimize campaigns in-flight provided impressions, clicks, and CPM. Clicks were seen as the best proxy for performance, but ultimately had little to do with the effect on actual sales. Now, traders have the option to optimize campaigns using sales data instead of proxies of success. “Over 90% of digital spend is now programmatic,” says Kurtter. “Programmatic’s core functionality is rooted real-time bidding, which relies on real-time signals to make decisions. If those signals are online and offline sales, that’s the holy grail.”
Historically, there have been two major kinds of advertising campaigns: (1) branding, which builds awareness at the top of the funnel, and (2) direct response, or performance, which exists at the bottom of the funnel and tries to induce sales.
The knock on brand campaigns is they are hard to measure, requiring a time- and labor-intensive analysis process. But real-time measurement has shrunk the process time significantly. “With real-time incrementality measurement, results can be seen within the first few weeks of a campaign as opposed to waiting for a mid-campaign or post-campaign report,” Kurtter says.
Connected TV has become a performance marketing channel, for instance, largely because brands can quickly and precisely measure its effectiveness, something that was near-impossible with traditional TV. By the time the advertiser had performance reporting, a consumer could have experienced dozens of other brand touchpoints outside of that one TV impression.
“First-party purchase data makes it possible to tie CTV campaigns to actual sales, and do so in a more real-time manner than legacy methods that rely on syndicated data from a retailer,” Kurtter adds.
Sales data alone can identify which media channels and creatives performed the best (yet this isn’t a given – granularity varies greatly by provider and methodology), but when sales data is coupled with audience insights, marketers can uncover who is actually buying a product as a result of a campaign. If working with a first-party data provider that shares additional buying behaviors and other characteristics of a converting audience, marketers are able to identify net-new audiences and strategies.
“Real-time measurement and full fidelity into over- or under-performing audiences tells the marketer if their campaign is working and why or why not,” says Kurtter. “If they are able to adjust in-flight instead of waiting till the next campaign, over time, the increased effectiveness can add up to a lot of efficiencies realized.”
