Jon Wright
Regional director, analytics and insight, Asia-Pacific, MEC
‘Traditional’ metrics such as SOV and CPT are still relevant but to a lessening degree.
This is because of the almost infinite array of touchpoints through which consumers and brands connect.
However, since there is no silver bullet for measuring consumer engagement, we need to measure the performance of communications with a bucket of metrics, covering campaign, attitudinal, behavioural and business metrics. Metrics such as SOV and CPT (along with their digital equivalents) fulfil a role in the campaign metric area, but to rely on these alone is far from sufficient.
Since efforts so far to develop a more holistic industry measurement approach seem to have failed, the bucket approach is the way forward for now, with advertisers, auditors and agencies all increasingly converging with agreed sets of metrics specific to brand objectives.
Adam Hodgson
Director analytics, Mediabrands Asia-Pacific
Share-of-voice and cost-per-thousand are quite different statistical measures. Share-of-voice examines spending on advertising by direct competitors, and compares this amount to one’s own spending.
However, share-of-voice analysis can lead to misperceptions. Econometric analysis has shown that more advertising by competitors does not always lead to less sales for one’s own brand. Therefore, if in-depth econometric analysis has not been conducted, share-of-voice can be a less than useful statistic.
In contrast, cost-per-thousand refers to the rate an advertiser must pay for every one thousand clicks. As such, cost-per-thousand is likely to be part of the negotiation process for some time to come, along with a range of other numbers.
Important metrics that have standardised include the time consumers spend interacting with a brand and to what level that interaction occurs.
Chiradeep Gupta
Regional director, Starcom MediaVest Group Singapore
Asking if share-of-voice and cost-per-thousand are still relevant takes us back to the age-old debate of efficiency versus effectiveness. In my opinion it’s impossible to say firmly that one is not relevant or the other is unimportant. ‘Value’, as defined by many is essentially effectiveness or efficiency. In order for us to increase value we need to achieve high levels of effectiveness at the best possible efficiency. Consumer engagement is essentially an intermediate effectiveness measure, whereas CPMs and CPRPs are the efficiency measures. More often than not, newer innovative media lose their place in the media mix purely because the metrics of evaluation used were created to measure TV. We need to ensure that we evaluate a medium and its importance in the communication mix by using the relevant metric.
As consumers start consuming more and more content on digital platforms, the metrics need to evolve to be more meaningful and real-time yet simple. For example, move from ‘share-of-voice’ to ‘share-of-conversations’ - from ‘cost-per-thousand’ to ‘cost-per-interaction’.
So, to answer the question of whether SOV and/or CPT are relevant or not, if we are just measuring TV we need to look at both ends of the spectrum but let us not try and stretch these specific metrics to evaluate every platform.
This article was originally published in the December issue of Campaign Asia-Pacific.
