Directing Dollars: New Ad Measurement Tool Delivers Real-Time, Cross-Platform Metrics

By Ken Liebeskind

Visual IQ, a Boston-area market intelligence firm, has developed a software platform that tracks data from all forms of advertising in an integrated manner to help companies manage their ad spend.

“We translate data on the return of ad spend by looking at the marketing you have in terms of product groups, customers, channels and geography,” says Manu Mathew, Visual IQ’s CEO. “We put all the data categories in one bucket and translate it into actionable intelligence.”

The one bucket concept is extremely important, because most ad measurement systems are unable to measure disparate forms of advertising and express them in one clear metric. “Not a lot of vendors can crunch through the data effectively to provide insight on an hourly or daily basis,” Mathew says. “There are point solutions that do search or display but none look at it from a perspective that optimizes touch points from the audience side. We provide data that will help advertisers determine the most effective combination of channels to engage the audience that leads to conversion.”

Visual IQ creates its own set of metrics that cover a variety of advertising channels, including email, display, cable TV, social media, blogs, mobile and SEO. It generates the data from a variety of sources — Atlas and DoubleClick for online ads; Google for search engine marketing; Webtrends and Omniture for site analysis; SMS data for mobile advertising; and GRP data for TV, print and radio ads.

“The goal is to analyze multiple marketing touch points across media channels to give marketers a more accurate understanding of how various channels affect the conversion or desired activity,” Mathew says.

When asked how the company unites the measurement of online and offline channels, Mathew says, “We’re media agnostic. It starts with the advertiser. If they’re using display, search, email or mobile we can look at any channel in equal standing. How the info gets analyzed depends on the different metrics in play for the advertiser.”

Among Visual IQ’s clients are major brands including Wells Fargo, Wachovia, Radio Shack, Pfizer and EchoStar.
Susan Aldrich, a Patricia Seybold Group analyst who has covered Visual IQ, says that advertisers have difficulty determining ad spend. “They often run reports that don’t compare with each other, so they can’t optimize their spend, even within online channels,” she says. “The arrival of market optimization software from Visual IQ is valuable because it collects the data in a warehouse and applies analytics to it. They’re able to merge Google search engine data with postcard response data.”

Hill Holliday has used Visual IQ data to plan advertising for one of its clients, Liberty Mutual. “We’ve worked on multiple aspects of the business, from traditional advertising to online media and search engine marketing,” says Adam Cahill, Hill Holliday’s senior vice president of digital media. “Visual IQ builds analytic dashboards to show the effectiveness of media display advertising and brings a view of them together to see how one influences the other.”

Cahill notes how important it is to look at different forms of media together. “When you look at them independent of each other you make bad decisions,” he says. “The best example is that people look at search engine marketing and think it’s effective but display ads may have spurred them to do a search. It’s important to know full attribution, but if you look at them in silos you think search is the core benefit. Visual IQ helps you see how all forms of media work together.”

When asked how Visual IQ enabled him to view the data together, Cahill says, “From the display media side you look at ad serving data and from the search engine side you look at DoubleClick and Dart data and for website analytics you might look at data from Omniture. Visual IQ marries those sources together to present a unified dashboard of what happens at the user level.”

The data influences his client’s ad spend immediately and in the future. “When you have the data in real time, you can optimize campaigns in market at the moment. At the end of a campaign you can pull data that will influence the next campaign you plan,” Cahill says.

From YouTube to Your PDA: The Future of Online Video

By Lee Simmons

As president and CEO of video hosting services provider Fliqz.com, Benjamin Wayne has learned a simple truth about the potential of video technology: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Or, to be more succinct, the more video technology changes, the more it must continue to meet the staid goals of the marketing world. “The goals of marketing remain the same,” he says. “We evaluate traditional marketing spend against traditional marketing goals.”

Since 2005, Fliqz has carved itself a respectable niche in providing plug-and-play video services that are infinitely customizable to a client’s brand and website capabilities. Unlike services such as YouTube, where the YouTube brand stands out and search engine optimization (SEO) is impractical, Fliqz’s video players come custom-built with a client’s logo, uploading, encoding, storage, streaming and management, all for a monthly fee.

It’s just the kind of service that answers the question on the lips of many vice presidents of marketing, Wayne says: “How do we use video for the first time?”

“In 2005, it was hard to convince investors that video was important,” he says. “We looked at sites like Shutterfly, as digital camera technology was improving, and realized that video was also becoming a high-asset value.”

In its early days, the company looked at catering to blogging and self-publishing companies. At the same time, Wayne and his team noticed that marketing departments were studying how they could adopt video. So, Fliqz sharpened its strategy to target two main arenas - consumer destination sites and media companies that distribute video - in an effort to meet that marketing need.

Business-to-business publisher Design World is among the Fliqz clients who have seen a near-instantaneous return on their investment in the video tools. The company, which targets design engineers, had initially used YouTube to upload the thousands of user-generated and proprietary videos it hosted on its site.

However, says Marshall Matheson, Design World’s senior vice president of new media, the company wanted its own identity on the videos, not to mention a way to measure viewer click throughs. “We make our money off of advertising, so the more eyeballs we get on our site, the better,” he says.

Fliqz created a custom video player for the company and then submitted 1,000 videos to Google. The result was above what Matheson had predicted. “Within two days we were instantly indexed on Google,” he says. “The general trend line was that within a month we saw approximately 30 percent more traffic.”

For companies like Design World, video has become a crucial part of generating online traffic. For its part, Design World uses pre-roll technology for its advertising, runs e-newsletters around the videos, and includes ads strategically placed near the video player on the site itself. All have proven a boon to traffic.

Future of online video consumption
In September 2009, Fliqz completed 11 quarters of quarter-over-quarter growth. To date, the company’s video tools are used on 35,000 websites. Still, Wayne sees the online video sector just beginning to see its full potential. “We’re in a very small market today,” he says.

Viral videos and email in particular have become top-tier tools in generating online traffic for the company’s marketing clients. Viral produces roughly 40 percent of the traffic for Fliqz clients, while email is increasingly used to disseminate new videos.

“Email is getting a new life around video,” Wayne says. “Many companies are doubling and tripling their click-through rate through email.”

As far as which technology will win the day, Wayne favors pre-rolls to in-streams. For Fliqz clients, pre-roll technology has been the most effective unit in driving click throughs, he says. In-streams, on the other hand, have shown less impressive click-through rates. Meanwhile, the cost per in-stream continues to go down, an indication that the technology may be treading water. Wayne cites one major player as evidence that in-streams are not quite the revenue generator people had hoped for.

“ComScore now [puts] Hulu at 583 million streams a month, which would be a $70 million business at a $10 CPM,” he says. “People will argue that perhaps Hulu will serve multiple ads and get better than a $10 CPM, but it’s still small (money) in my opinion.”

The sheer number of technology offerings makes online video a little more than daunting to the first-time buyer. Video is being used for tactical purposes, like SEO and conversion, Wayne says. It is also moving outside of major media. Industries that have never produced content, such as many law firms, are going to have trouble getting up to speed. Conversely, community sites that already produce video content will find it easier going.

However, while Wayne agrees that the plethora of techno offerings can strain distribution, he doesn’t necessarily see video technology changing the core focus of any one industry. “Suddenly, tools for desktop publishing got really good, but they didn’t change the publishing industry,” Wayne says. “Still, as applications become more complex, the user experience degenerates.”

Another challenge more closely related to Fliqz is its chosen market. The company simply cannot control market maturation, Wayne offers, yet the marketing budget continues to be the largest area of spend in the corporate world.

But Wayne tempers the challenges ahead by extolling the technology’s potential, particularly regarding mobile applications. With cell phones and PDAs fast becoming the device of choice, companies like his are well positioned to take video technology to its logical next level.