Tag: contentmarketing

Pilots need real-time information to tell them how well their aircraft is performing and whether it’s on course to arrive on time or earlier, using airspeed indicators, altitude indicators, altimeters and more. The end goal is landing in their desired location. In-flight information is knowing and optimizing, while in flight, their means of getting there. Marketers, on the other hand, often don’t have the tools they need to understand in-flight performance and are forced to focus on the landing. 

In a data-driven marketing era, leveraging in-flight indicators to optimize your campaign in near real time is key to achieving campaign results and a positive ROI. On-target audience metrics are a key in-flight indicator of performance. In fact, Nielsen recently conducted an analysis to validate that if you deliver the right ad to the right audience, you will improve your ROI, confirming that audience metrics are an early indicator of campaign performance. The validation follows basic marketing reasoning, given that advertisers and agencies have been preaching this sentiment for years. 

Better reach = better outcomes

In our analysis, we conducted research across 15 brands and 82 campaigns and found that audience-based reach metrics are a clear and proven indicator of outcome metrics (ROI and effectiveness). We determined this by aligning in-flight reach metrics from Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) with outcome metrics from Nielsen Attribution. 

Across those brands and campaigns we found a strong relationship (R-squared of 0.68) between audience-based reach metrics and sales outcomes. Said plainly, we found that 68% of the variance in outcomes across the 15 brands could be explained by the performance of a corresponding reach metric.

Take the blinded advertiser example in the chart. Each bubble represents data for one vendor, for one month, on one campaign. The X-axis displays the Tracked Ads Index, which is an index of the percentage of ads served to a target audience versus the population size. 

The calculation for the Tracked Ads Index is as follows: 

• If you serve 4% of your ads to an audience that is 4% of the population that equates to a 100 index, fair share.  
• 2% of the ads would be undeserving this audience and a 50 index. 
• 8% of the ads would be overserving and a 200 index.  

ROI is on the Y-axis. The particular example is from an advertiser that saw results with various partners reaching its target audience.

The graph below shows three distinct performance groupings:

• The group in the bottom left represents partners who poorly reached their target audience.  
• The group in the middle represents partners who were slightly better than random in reaching the target audience.
• The group in the top right represents partners who focused on reaching the target audience. 

In this example, how did audience performance affect ROI? The cluster in the lower left (vendor/campaign/month data) represents an underdelivered audience, generating an average ROI of $0.25 for every $1 spend. The majority of the activity is in the middle of the chart, generating an average ROI of $1, but ROI did trend higher as the index increased. The cluster in the upper right represents the impact of delivering more ads to the targeted audience, which led to an increased ROI of $2.60 per $1 spent.

Knowing how you got there

So, what does this mean? Much as a pilot can use an altitude indicator to understand orientation with respect to the Earth’s horizon, marketers can use DAR metrics to indicate future outcomes performance. These metrics can also help marketers fine-tune their audiences, as was the case in this example. This particular advertiser previously used a variety of targets in the past, including a focus on much younger demographics. This analysis showed that focusing on the target audience while monitoring and optimizing performance in-flight leads to higher ROI for this brand.

It isn’t enough to simply know that you arrived at your destination, or that your campaign was successful. Marketers need to know how they got there and how to monitor their performance along the way with in-flight indicators if they plan to repeat and potentially improve their performance in the future.

Channel fragmentation and increasing media options provide consumers with an abundance of choice, but they present a hurdle for marketers that rely on traditional mass reach channels to increase brand awareness. And just as we’ve seen in previous years, the marketers surveyed for Nielsen’s 2022 Annual Marketing Report say building brand awareness is their top objective for the year ahead. Similarly, their top business priority is new customer acquisition.

While there is no discounting the importance of reaching the largest audience possible, doing so today requires increasingly more planning and strategy than it did when our media choices were far more finite—and marketers could use a handful of channels to meet their mass reach needs.

To achieve their top objectives, marketers need to reach large prospective customer groups. Amid a readily fragmenting media landscape, however, they need to approach mass reach differently than they did when it was easier to define what it means to “watch TV.” That being said, the need to drive brand awareness has never been greater.

In addition to the prevalence of choice and access, some traditional sources of brand equity are less apparent than before the pandemic simply because of reduced visibility. With many consumers shopping less regularly at physical stores, for example, the frequency of seeing a product on a shelf or a sign in a store window has declined.

In today’s world, it’s a risky proposition to take non-marketing sources of equity for granted. These examples also elevate the importance of staying top-of-mind with consumers when a sale is at stake.

To do this, global marketers continue to lean into social media, with 64% of respondents for this year’s marketing report saying it’s their most effective paid channel. And in light of recent successes on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, it’s easy to see why the sentiment—and related spending—is growing. 

Notably, global marketers plan to increase their social media budgets more than any other channel over the next year.  The projected average increase globally (53%), however, would be higher if it weren’t for marketers in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), as they intend to increase their social media spending less than marketers elsewhere (31%).

While global marketers continue to spend on social media, search and email, these channels aren’t typically ideal mass reach options. There is, however, no discounting the growing reach of online video and connected TV—and marketers are increasing their spend accordingly. Importantly, they want to ensure that their spend is reaching the right audiences—real people making real choices. In December 2021, for example, YouTube reached 135 million people on TV screens alone¹. YouTube is also a growing force in the streaming space, as Americans streamed 177.3 billion minutes of video² on the platform in January 2022. 

Reaching new consumers isn’t what it used to be, and the last 2.5 years have permanently changed consumer behaviors. Traditional mass reach channels like traditional TV and radio are still critical in any marketer’s media mix, but they’re no longer the only options for reaching large audiences en masse. 

For additional insights, download our 2022 Annual Marketing Report.

Notes

1. Nielsen Streaming Platform Ratings
2. The Gauge, February 2022

If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will. For people from Middle East/North Africa (MENA), this has indeed been a challenge when it comes to the stories that they see in the media. Nielsen data shows that MENA presence on screen stands at just 2.5% across 1,500 broadcast, cable and streaming TV shows. But it’s not just the media that underrepresents this group. In fact, the U.S. Census still classifies MENA people as white, leaving a population that must fight harder for resources because they are under represented and undercounted. So, what can the media industry do to increase MENA representation on screen and tell more accurate stories about their experiences?

To explore some ideas and opportunities, we spoke with Dr. Evelyn Alsultany, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California, and educational consultant for the MENA Arts Advocacy Coalition (MAAC), an organization that advocates for greater visibility of Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian talent in Hollywood.

Q: From 2019-2021, Nielsen data shows that the genres where MENA talent is most often seen are biographies, action sports and dark comedies. From your research/experience, what stories about MENA culture are being told on screen? Are there stereotypes or accurate representation/depictions?

A: Hollywood films and TV shows are not “just entertainment.” Stereotypical images and their repetition throughout history influence support for policies that harm Arabs and Muslims. They have tremendous impact and consequences. MAAC built greater awareness about MENA in the Entertainment industry in 2017 as a new diversity category, helping the community gain recognition and allowing companies like Nielsen and others to properly measure what MENA on-screen representation looks like. But it still continues to fall short. 

There have been some notable changes over the last two or three decades. After 9/11, there was an increase in “good” Arab and Muslim characters in TV shows like 24, Homeland and Jack Ryan. However, these characters appeared as U.S. patriots who either worked for the FBI or CIA or who were willing to fight and die for the U.S. to prove their patriotism. It is an improvement over portrayals as terrorists but it is nonetheless a very limiting character that defines Arabs and Muslims as “good” or “bad” in relation to terrorism and in relation to a very narrow conception of patriotism.

Q: As streaming and digital platform content increases, are we seeing more MENA culture/people on screen?

We have shifted from the days when most people watched the same set of shows on network television to such a wide array of programming offered through streaming services. We also have more access to non-U.S. productions. There is a lot of potential here in diversifying the images we consume of MENA people. 

Historically,non-Arabs would play Arab roles and would use costumes and accents to convey Arabness. Anthony Quinn, who was Mexican, played Arab characters in several movies: The Road to Morocco, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Lion of the Desert (1981). As recently as 2014 and 2016, Gerard Butler was in Gods of Egypt, and both Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton in Exodus: Gods and Kings were all painted brown to play MENA Characters.  Most of the roles left  available for MENA actors over the last two decades have been stereotypical characters. Even when MENA talent is present, there is still a need to expand the stories that are told about them. Nielsen’s Gracenote Inclusion Analytics data shows that romance was the top genre where MENA talent appeared on screen in 2021—almost twice more than in mystery, which is the genre with the second highest MENA share of screen. And when we look at the programs under the romance genre, 40% is in Spanish-language novelas, which is limited to the Spanish audience.

Luckily, we have content creators like Ramy and Nasim Pedrad helping to change the landscape. But we need more streamers and networks to buy MENA content from MENA creators and put it on air. With TV more global than ever, there is a market for it.  We’ve seen a concerted and notable effort in Hollywood to expand and improve representations especially in response to the Muslim Travel Ban proposed in 2015. As a result, we saw an increase in representations of Muslims outside of terrorism. It is quite refreshing. These include CBS’ FBI, Fox’s 9-1-1: Lonestar, the CW’s DC Legends of Tomorrow, Freeform’s The Bold Type, NBC’s Transplant, Hulu’s Ramy, Peacock’s We Are Lady Parts, and most recently Disney+ Moon Knight. These shows have been impacting the MENA audience in moving ways for their accurate and thoughtful representation.

Q: What else can be done to drive change?

Over the last five years, some wonderful resources have emerged to support Hollywood in diversifying representations. The MENA Arts Advocacy Coalition, MAAC, works to educate the industry at large on the underrepresentation of MENA in entertainment and has created a database of MENA and South Asian creatives to connect emerging and established talent from these regions to the industry. The WGA launched a Middle Eastern Writers Committee to create awareness for MENA Writers, and SAG-AFTRA recently created a National MENA Committee to advocate for performers.

But devising  effective solutions requires developing a fuller understanding of the problem. The problem is not one movie or TV show, but how a history of stereotypical representations has constructed negative meanings about Arabs (and Muslims) that have real world consequences. The problem is that MENA performers have been portrayed as terrorists so many times that it has come to represent the entire community of 300 million people. Therefore, we need to encourage streamers and networks to invest in MENA talent and hire MENA writers. 

We tend to try to solve problems when they flare up or when there is a crisis, like the Muslim ban. But the most effective approach will be those that seek to rectify a history of representations rather than a momentary crisis.