Five Questions to Guide 2021 Media Performance

2020 has asked a lot of us, including the media and marketing ecosystem.

Marketers were asked by their company leadership to change spending levels, adjust creative messaging, and adapt to consumer media consumption.

Agencies were asked to not only change how and where they worked but to adapt to the new workstyles of their clients and to do this while they slashed and burned away all their strategic plans.

Media vendors, platform companies, tech vendors and research and service companies found that their plans were altered in major ways and had to quickly pivot.

And all this from home offices amongst kids in virtual classrooms, too-close-for-comfort roommates and barking dogs.

No wonder the ANA declared “pivot” as the word of 2020! Slowly, as the dust of 2020 has settled bringing new ways of operating and some things moved forward; like agencies pitches and hiring new talent have marched forward.

Now, with 2021 almost (finally) here, it is time for the teams who run marketing strategies and media transactions to continue to look forward and ask key questions to propel their businesses to future success. With all this change in mind, we pulled a list together for marketers, agencies, and media services to consider before implementing 2021 strategies.

1. Have you refreshed your media channel selection?

Channel selection for media plans must start somewhere, and the starting point tends to be an increment on what has been done in the past. But the past was blown up in 2020…. So where to start? Do zero-based-budgeting guidelines developed pre-2020 even matter in 2021?

The first challenge is to set up how to evaluate media channels based on their ability to deliver success. And this depends on fully understanding the problem that media needs to solve. There is a big difference between a new brand on an awareness strategy rather than one on an acquisition strategy or a brand with high awareness seeking to increase usage-occasions.

Typical media channel selection would come down to media-oriented measures such as building efficient reach, or audience composition or recent-search activity.

But the one measure that we think matters more in 2021 than any other is the ability to persuade a consumer to change behavior and or to act.

Think about consumer touchpoints holistically and spend time with the team members that are measuring the outcomes of campaigns and channels to uncover the ways that channels – or combinations of channels - can lift the persuasion metric.

2. Is your Marketing Mix Modeling working hard enough?

We have heard from partners and friends in the business that marketing mix modeling practices are suffering from a lack of progress and usefulness. These initiatives invented ~20 years ago are challenging to do well, can be very wide in scope, and require heavy amounts of clean data. Add into this mix a fragmented media ecosystem and MMX can be valuable but daunting to pull off well. The old-school MMX processes have suffered with a lack of organizational buy-in, and many marketers have never fully adopted and executed action steps because they just didn’t agree with the recommendations. We all have heard the stories of MMX outcomes that drastically cut or eliminated all non-trade marketing only to find that this had the effect of killing brands.

Like many cross-company initiatives, there is still some enthusiasm for MMX – the question is, how to do MMX in a new way? The new thinking can be summed up in three key points: 1- MMX is better at arriving at high-level outcomes rather than granular pinpoint discoveries; 2- Consider shifting from always-on analytics to an annual or bi-annual assessment; Make MMX easy on the organization by lightening data collection and starting with a unified MMX platform to bring data and outcomes together.

3. Are you spending in line with your growth goals?

In our experience running Zero-Based-Budgeting “ZBB” projects, the goal is usually a (big) budget cut and the start-from-zero approach of ZBB is the process to build upwards from a set of priorities.

ZBB is a two-sided coin: On one side, budgets should be scrutinized. Long-held media strategies can be re-assessed, new calculations for audience reach, share-of-voice as a ratio to competitor share-of-market and the number of messages can be evaluated for effectiveness (and whether these strategies deserve to be funded).

The other side of the coin has cause for concern for growth brands: budgets can be cut so drastically that reach levels (and the corresponding awareness reach drives) are sent below thresholds. Brands that needed some longer-length/size creative copy can find that only short messaging is allowed. And probably the worst action in a cost-cutting scenario is that experimentation and A/B testing of new channels and messaging gets wiped away in the ZBB process.

Net-net, ZBB is a good, solid process, but cutting back too drastically can hurt brands ability to accumulate reach and grow.

For marketers not employing a ZBB program, keep in mind that maintaining foundational media metrics such as reach, and share-of-voice can help to retain brand health during a recessionary time period.

4. Are you and your agency partners in lock step with goals and processes?

Many clients we talk with have praised their agencies for quickly adapting and helping them navigate major changes to 2020 marketing plans. They have accomplished this by quickly executing directives from their clients, followed by building back in new ways with new media channel mixes. We’ve all heard the term “jumping through hoops”. But 2020 has taken that up a notch. It has been a year where everyone has been jumping in the air and in many cases were asked to remain suspended sans-gravity.

But things do have a way of returning to terra firma Given the substantial changes in workflow, the media channels being used, and new demands on cost the current agency contractual agreement may be obsolete given how way-of-workings and expectations have evolved for 2021. If this is true, and the agreement is outdated, then the agency is operating under a pre-2020 set of work assumptions and goals, and in our view, this is a recipe for disaster. Taking a fresh look at the partner agreement and updating it, as needed, enables a focus on current and future needs to refresh scope, and just as importantly, make sure the staffing plan matches any new requirements.

Without a contractual refresh, putting an agency up for review might be the knee-jerk reaction that is unnecessary and could have been repaired with an in-depth assessment of the work and the contract.

A contract assessment starts with an assessment of the relationship and performance across several areas to understand gaps and improvement areas. Including a transparency assessment will identify possible areas or workflows that are outdated for the channels being used (bringing our readers back to #1 on our list). And bringing in a current Media Performance Management program will ensure that the right metrics are measured as part of an improvement plan.

5. Have you implemented a Media Performance Management process?

Current media auditing can’t pivot to new ways of using media because these processes – built ~20 years ago - are reliant on cost & quality pools that do not capture the full extent of media channels now being used. Current media auditing was always a look-back and now it feels slow, not actionable. The annoyance of taking up too much valuable agency FTE time and effort is real. And media auditing was built to rely on media KPIs as opposed to business KPI’s.

But some current auditing offering are trying to reemerge by reapplying media pools to different areas of the media planning process. This is a good effort but is another layer of a watch-dog activity on the agency and is not fully addressing how media is being used by enlightened marketers.

Smart marketers are taking the approach to pivot to Media Performance Management by leveraging all data and tech marketers already have in place by adding a governance process with methodologies that add business-focused metrics. By having a plan up front – as marketers pivot, results can be seen faster by all stakeholders.

Net-net, like a lot of things, media auditing is pivoting too. Going from over-reliance on auditor-owned pools and media-only KPIs with duplicative analysis workstreams to a new process leveraging data and tech already in place, adding business outcome-based metrics and eliminating redundant analysis. Marketers now finally have a media performance management system worthy of the pivot.

Conclusion:

The holidays are here. Take a break. Disconnect. Spend some time with family and friends. Socially distanced or via video chat. Clear your minds so that you can think about your business goals with a refresh. Learn from 2020 and move on to what’s next.

Give us a call if you would like to discuss any of our recommendations or to just chat about the media, advertising, and marketing industry. We love to talk but we are even better listeners.