With Cookies Crumbling, Publishers Push Brand Metrics

As the industry scrambles to find ways to target and measure audiences without third-party cookies, publishers like the Guardian are proving their digital ad campaigns work by investing in brand metrics, diverting reliance away from click-through rates as a marker of success. And it's driving results for advertisers. Over the last three months, the publisher has measured 50 different campaigns across 35 different brands including Netflix and Samsung, serving 9,500 readers who have been exposed to a campaign with a survey. The aim is to understand how the campaign delivers on driving brand awareness, consideration, preference and intent. Combining these metrics gives a total brand uplift score. Standard metrics for performance have been broken for a long time.Paula Stanford, the Guardian The publisher offers brand studies to all campaigns costing over £10,000 ($13,870). From this database it's created a planning tool, Modern Metrics, to make recommendations to ad buyers depending on their objective and the type of brand metric they are trying to move. “The standard metrics for performance have been broken for a long time,” said Paula Stanford, display director at the Guardian at an event hosted by data management platform Permutive this week. “We know with confidence that we can drive brand uplifts, it’s rooted in data." Time to reset As third-party cookies deprecate, how audiences are targeted and measured is being upended. There are currently a few solutions in the market: publisher-based identifiers, universal identifiers from vendors like The Trade Desk, identifiers within walled gardens and Chrome’s cross-industry Privacy Sandbox among them. The Trade Desk to Hand Control of Unified ID 2.0 to Prebid The Guardian is not interested in testing the latter’s targeting method, federated learning of cohorts (FLoCs), which are in origin tests in the U.S. and other countries but have stalled in Europe for not meeting GDPR compliance. While brand metrics to measure campaign success pre-dates digital advertising, anchoring around an easily understandable and universal metric is a welcome change for advertisers who find themselves in an increasingly fragmented ecosystem. “It’s time to reset,” said James Swan, digital director at the Guardian at the event. “Are we looking at the right metrics and data points? Are those effective? At the Guardian, we are looking at attention metrics and ad products so we can measure brand uplift in a way that doesn't use cookies.” First-party data leads to higher brand lift For three months, the Guardian worked with data management platform Permutive, which allowed the publisher to build 350 first-party data audience segments, and tech company Brand Metrics, which surveys readers on campaign effectiveness. The publisher found that campaigns using the Guardian’s first-party data had on average a brand lift 65% higher than Brand Metrics’ average. When using Guardian first-party data, the proportion of impact on preference and intent metrics was 39% higher than average. In a hopeful sign for the news publisher, campaigns that ran in so-called hard news environments—like politics or Covid-19 content—delivered a 22% brand uplift versus the average. “Last year we went to market saying 'please don’t block hard news, it’s bad for our business,’ said Stanford, "this shows that it can be bad for advertisers’ business too.” As well as using a standard metric, part of the appeal is the Guardian's solution is a light-touch for buyers. Walled garden tech platforms like Google and Facebook have been generous with campaign measurement access for the buy-side, information that will be eradicated as third-party cookies get quashed. Agencies are not getting brand lift measures on the open web trading, so cookieless measurement from companies like Brand Metrics are filling that gap. “There is definite interest in the buy side in using brand metric data to guide their investments,” Tom Jenen, chief revenue officer at Brand Metrics told Adweek. And publishers need to show their value to be a long-term partner. "There will be pressure on publishers," said Rafael Aquino, programmatic trader at L'Oréal. "There's also a pressure on us to feed-back what is successful to publishers."