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The CMO Council’s new report Getting Smart About Ad Waste explores advances in attribution. Today’s CMOs, their media partners and analytics providers are feeling growing pressure to make marketing and advertising dollars work harder, especially in the current uncertain business environment where budgets are carefully scrutinized. Here’s an excerpt of the report:

Do you know what percentage of your media is wasted? Do you want to know? And would you like to reduce that waste? For marketers, agencies and even CFOs, the answer to the first question is very likely “No.” The answer to the next two questions should, of course, be an emphatic “Yes.”

A new study undertaken by InMarket, in cooperation with the CMO Council, provides real insights into the answers to these questions. It uncovers massive disparities in ad waste and optimization opportunities among advertisers in similar consumer categories. And it shows that rigorous, always-on use of attribution is a major factor in optimizing campaigns to gain significantly higher lift in incremental visits and sales from media spend.

In fact, some advertisers in this study wasted more than 75% of their marketing on impressions that failed to generate incremental outcomes, while others kept that waste well below 10%. Put another way, under-performing advertisers have an opportunity to optimize over 75% of their media spend, and put those media dollars back to work.

According to the study, high-performing brand advertisers that continuously optimize campaigns, based on rigorous analytics that identify what campaign dimensions are driving increased sales, are realizing as much as a 11x improvement in advertising performance over laggards who use real-time, in-flight optimization only sporadically or superficially.

InMarket is a leader in 360-degree marketing intelligence and real-time advertising. Its attribution platform, LCI (Lift Conversion Index®), is capable of measuring campaigns across a range of campaign dimensions to understand the impact of those choices on key KPIs including driving incremental visits and sales.

InMarket believes (and most CMOs would agree) that measuring the impact of media on incremental sales, i.e. visits and purchases that would not have taken place without exposure to an advertising impression, is the most relevant and powerful metric by which to optimize advertising performance. Measuring total purchases by shoppers exposed to advertising, versus incremental visits and purchases, does not provide an accurate view of what media is driving increased revenue and sales.

• InMarket found its highest performing brands, which utilize real-time, in-flight optimization, drove positive incremental results for 94% of their media.
• Brand advertisers who use always-on attribution and real-time optimization drive up to 11x more media effectiveness than peers.

Download the full report.

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