1. So, the first question is: What is so unique or special about Dynamics Logic’s Measurement Tools?
Ken Mallon: Well, I guess what is unique is that we have done so many of them and we have so much experience that we can deal with different situations that come up operationally. I think that we’ve been copied by others in terms of our basic methodology and our survey questions so what really makes us unique at this point is our level of experience and as a result our normative database that we have.
2. Your company’s solutions all forms of media, TV, radio, etc. How do you tie everything together?
Ken Mallon: Well we have a solution called Cross Media Research where we actually measures the independent and synergistic effects of each media so we are able to tell our clients – you know advertisers, agencies -how the different media work together, whether or not they are synergistic or not. Sometimes one plus one equals three so we have identified that for them.
3. What are the major differences in tracking brand awareness in the various types of media?
Ken Mallon: You know it’s all pretty much the same. We track awareness by surveying people and asking them what, they have you heard of? And that’s what would be, what we call aided brand awareness and we have unaided brand awareness where we ask people, you know which brands come to mind when thinking of, you know running shoes or whatever it is. And so that question asked in that style has been asked for dozens of years in all kinds of media, it has become pretty standard. That’s the main methodology.
4. Now, your client’s list reads like a Who’s Who of household names. To what degree are you able to tailor solutions or engagement to your various clients; it seems like a lot of the brands you work with would have special needs or are expecting a certain type of engagement.
Ken Mallon: We actually tailor every single project to a certain extent, so you know that, at least to a small degree, every single project has a certain amount of customization or tailoring. And that is because every brand that we work with has different types of brand attributes that they’re interested in. You know, we ask the client up front what their branding goals are. Sometimes they may want their brand to appear hip or they may want their brand to be, you know technical or you know they may have all kinds of attributes that they want people to ascribe to their brand and so we test for those specific attributes in addition to doing our standard testing. And so every single project has customization. There is also sometimes customization that we need to do, because of operationally, in terms of sort of recruitment, how we execute the recruitment on – websites, panels etc depending on what kind of media we are working with, we customize pretty much every project. We tailor it to that brand. Like you said because we are working with a very large brand they tend to know their brands really well, so they know exactly what it is they are looking for in terms of various brand attributes and because we have you know dedicated teams to these brands we have people in general who know everything there is to know about some of these common household brands.
5. Does that make your job easier?
Ken Mallon: I think yes and no. I mean I think it makes it easier because they have some clear ideas on what they want to do but it also makes it difficult because big brands are really complex. You look at, for example, Coca-Cola brand, they have all these sub brands that might have different goals. What Diet Coke wants to do is very different from Coke Zero and the umbrella brand; and, Coke have all other brands too that we need to think about, so how they all work together can become pretty complex. I would say yes and no. We certainly enjoy working with the big brands and you know we are happy that they put their trust in us and we enjoy the challenge.
6. So, your studies indicate not only brand awareness, but intent to purchase as well. How do you track real conversions or sales, online or offline in your studies?
Ken Mallon: We have two methods for this. The first method we can only use for packaged goods companies, and what we have done is developed a partnership with a company called IRI. And, IRI has a large panel of people who scan all of their grocery items. So they have a scanner in their house and when they come home with their groceries they scan them and it gets uploaded into a database. What we have done is created a master panel between the ads that we track and these panel members and so we know who saw which ads and what purchases they made. So for any item that you buy commonly in a grocery store we have a direct way to track ad exposure through to purchase. In other categories where there is no such panel we use a recall-based methodology where we survey people after a campaign and we ask them if they remember what they purchased. And that’s probably the most direct way. These two services work well hand-in-hand because, if you ask someone which paper towel they bought they might not know, so it’s good that we have the database. But for other items, let’s say: consumer electronics, travel, fashion, when we ask someone if they bought insurance they definitely know and so the recall based system works well for the non-CPG. Using these two methodologies we can cover all the categories.
7. That’s very interesting. The next question to ask has to do with the economy and a lot of the commentary right now in advertising has to do with the relationship between efficiency and brand awareness. How do you believe that the dialogue has changed in the last year, do you see a lot of your brands talking more about ad efficiency versus awareness, do you feel like there has been a major trend across the industry towards what do you guys do?
Ken Mallon: We want to stay nimble and stay relevant to our clients and so about a year ago, while we were sort of in the middle of this downturn we went and talked to a lot of our clients and asked them: what are your needs right now? How can we better address them? And the main themes that we heard is that they want are ROI; they want ROI measurement and they want it inexpensively. So we went back to the joint board and we looked at our offer and we significantly broadened it and enhanced it during the past year to fulfill this need. And we did it in two ways, one is if you look at our standard brand metrics what we did is we, we are now offering to look at a cost per impact. And so previously we would say your campaign brought brand awareness to 10% of the people who saw it. Well now what we also offer is we can take their spend data and say how many people did you make aware per dollar spent or how many people did you create a purchase intent in X number of people per dollar spent? So we are making it more of an efficiency-type argument even with the brand metrics. Outside of the brand metrics we also expanded, and I have already talked about the sales tracking and measurement that we do, so we added that to our arsenal. So now we have brand plus off-line sales impact and then we did a partnership with a company called compete.com. Compete.com is one of our cousin companies, they were part of TNS in TNS was bought by our parent company and so we formed a partnership with compete and compete tracks behavior. And so now in addition to branding impact and sales impact we also have online behavioral impact studies – and by this I mean we are able to track – after ad exposure – what activities someone did. So is there an increase in user rate? Was there an increase in online sales? Was there an increase in search? An example might be automotive advertisers, they might drive traffic to the client site, let’s say it’s Honda.com or being exposed to that ad make you more likely to go to Kelley Blue Book or to Yahoo Autos or it may increase your likelihood to do a search for Honda. So now we’re tracking post view online behavior as well as tracking sales and it’s a pretty encompassing ROI offer suite at this point.
That sounds pretty comprehensive.
Ken Mallon: Yeah, we sit and talk to our clients so it’s really, no real hole in it at this point. I mean what else would you want to know other than why advertising changed people’s perceptions; it made people buy something, it made people do certain things. The only other areas that are of interest right now are viral and word-of-mouth: does advertising generate people talking, increasing discussion. Interestingly, we’ve developed a partnership with a company called Symphony (which is also a cousin company), and they track bogs and other unstructured discussion areas, and so we now can also track that kind of discussion and buzz that is happening.
8. It sounds like your company figured out how to measure the immeasurable, the awareness aspect. The next question we had touches on that, and also relates to the economy and efficiency. Did you notice a difference in efficiency across different types of advertising, or in different types of media during the downturn? Does it seem like certain kinds of ads are becoming more efficient, specific to each type of media?
Ken Mallon: I think a lot of advertisers and agencies are trying a lot of ad networks a lot more because of the low cost and sometimes they see better performance, sometimes somewhat worse performance, sometimes the same performance versus their standard buys. But typically it is so much more expensive so from a cost-effective standpoint ad networks can many times be cost-effective, cost effectiveness wise. What else do I see people trying? I think better targeting is being attempted, with behavioral targeting or demographic targeting. Other things that people are trying are video ads, although I think that they are seeing they are very impacting but maybe not yet cost-effective. I would say that the main trend that I see with the economy would be the use of ad networks and the purchase of remnant inventory.
9. So people are trying to cut costs. What else you think is next for online branding management?
Ken Mallon: I think increasingly people want to look simultaneously at multiple media and digital itself is now being viewed as multiple media because you have media being bought on social networks, media on display advertising, plus search. So you look at search, video, social standard display and people; our clients want to understand how those work together and how those can be synergistic and how those can be independent. And how those can also work with off-line. So I think my first answer would be, understanding how the various digital components work together and how they work off-line. And the second thing I would say is mobile. You know mobile is a pretty big area for us and we are measuring the ad effectiveness of mobile. Also there are different ways of doing mobile executions and so I think because of the prominence of cell phones globally, I think mobile is going to be an interesting area of research.
10. Any last words that you would like to add to tie all this in together or something that we touched on that you would like to elaborate more on?
Ken Mallon: Well I think the final word I would say is that we study a lot about you know what drives things to be effective online. We look at things like ad sizes, ad technologies, targeting and many factors and again and again what we see as being the most important thing that drives success is the actual creative quality. And sometimes this is overlooked because the digital space is so technical people, forget that, “oh yeah I’ve got to make these ads.” Often, you will see pretty average or poor ads online and so I think, the smartest thing you can do if you want to be successful online is to make good ads by copy testing them, really researching and understanding what makes a good ad online.
Ken Mallon is the Senior Vice President, Custom Solutions & Ad Effectiveness Consulting for Dynamic Logic.
