Opinion - Generation Media

Measuring the unmeasurable

This month, Jonathan looks at why, even in times of economic uncertainty, the cost of research should not be dismissed as today’s fragmented media landscape makes it even more important than ever before.

We now have more marketing datapoints than at any other time in history. In a 2022 study by LOCALiQ for example, it is estimated that every single minute, users viewed:

• 3.67m YouTube videos.

• 167m TikTok videos

• 4 4m Facebook live streams.

And this is only a selection from some of the core channels and metrics important to toy brands. So, what does this mean from a marketing perspective? Measurement has been upgraded across all media channels, thanks to advances in technology, and targeting opportunities are becoming increasingly sophisticated. We can now determine engaged users for retargeting based on the precise second they watched a creative on social media, or even identify users based on interest and location to target with digital Out of Home ads.

As we discussed extensively at our recent KidsCon 23 event, this abundance of data creates a whole host of challenges when it comes to media planning and buying. As ISBA’s Bobi Carley explained, chief amongst these challenges, for brands in all sectors, is measurement. It is very rare that two media channels measure things in the same way; Facebook will count a video view if a user has watched three seconds of a video, while TikTok on the other hand counts a view from the very first second. The fact that the majority of media channels also operate within their own ‘walled gardens’ means that de-duplicating reach (eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data) accurately remains statistically impossible. All of these challenges are compounded further when attempting to measure kids online, due to COPPA and GDPR-K compliancy. This is why we invest heavily in unique research from Giraffe Insights, allowing us to identify kids’ online media behaviours without the use of personally identifiable information in order to inform media channel selection.

The complexities involved in data management, and the fact that multiple channels need to be used and connected in modern media planning, means that identifying sales effectiveness can be tricky, to say the least. Of course, we can place UTMs on digital activity, but often data is not passed back from retailers once a user arrives on site. This means we can often be left relying on traditional EPOS analysis, which would require extensive and expensive A/B testing to identify the effectiveness of each media channel (or we could opt for the equally expensive route of econometrics).

This is why we are sending out a call to arms to the toy market. In partnership with Giraffe Insights, we are proposing a first of its kind study to help us understand even better which levers to pull when building media strategies. This will be done by:

• Collating sales data from stakeholder brands, then -

• Mapping this against all media data points from stakeholder campaign activity, then -

• Verifying this data against respondent level data from children assessing key metrics such as brand awareness, purchase intent, sentiment and ownership (with each stakeholder also having the opportunity to include questions unique to their brand).

All sales and campaign data will be anonymized and placed into a data pool, giving us a rich source to identify the impact of each media channel on sales. Stakeholder brands would therefore not only receive an evaluation of the variables unique to their brand, but also that of the anonymised pool in order to identify benchmarks and learnings for future campaigns.

This would be the first of an annual study, which ordinarily of this scale would cost in the region of what many brands might spend on a campaign. However, we appreciate this will not work for the industry and it will leave questions unanswered. Therefore, by making this a cross-industry study, we are able to reduce the cost for individual stakeholders, with brands able to be included in the study with an investment starting from £5k.

In uncertain economic times, research can often be overlooked as an essential cost. In the fragmented media landscape of today, it is more important than ever before. Therefore if you would like more details of how to be involved in this unique study, or if you would like any of the supporting material from KidsCon 23, please get in touch with either maxine.fox@giraffeinsights.co.uk or jonathan.chambers@generationmedia.co.uk.