David Campanelli, EVP at Horizon Media, the largest independent advertising agency,is one of the ad buyers beckoning the industry away from its traditional methods of proving efficacy, toward a future in which ad exposure can be linked to eventual consumer outcomes – and priced accordingly.
Many third-party ad vendors have been moving in the same direction, touting “outcome-based attribution.
“Now it’s time to start asking our immediate partners to … actually put the money where their mouth is, so to speak, and guarantee those results … and not just the eyeballs,” says Campanelli in this video interview with Beet.TV
Campanelli will be speaking on a panel at AT&T-owned Xandr’s Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara on September 17.
But outcome-based ad buying isn’t just for the future. Campanelli says this method was already “a big part of our conversations (with sellers) in this past up-front”, the season when publishers tout their upcoming content slate in order to secure forward-looking at deals.
“We have, with several major network groups, set up the framework for business outcome deals,” he says.
What’s an “outcome”? That varies by client. Some want to achieve a website visit, others want to generate an actual consumer transaction. Attribution technology, which can measure the ad exposures which led up to those actions and draw a line between the events, promises to be the glue which enables those KPIs.
But Campanelli acknowledges the industry won’t flip to outcome-based buying overnight. He sees a two-year lead-up that is in-play:
- Year one: “Monitoring, attribution, understanding how, when you pull different levers, you get different results or better results, hopefully.
- Year two: “Year two is a guarantee of that result or an improvement on that result. Networks’ vendors are guaranteeing those results.
“It’s really a fairly long road, intentionally, because it is not a quick-solution space,” he adds. “It’s something that takes a long time, and it is challenging to get up and running and get running properly, because we want to make sure we’re doing it right.”
Note: Beet.TV will cover the conference as part of a sponsorship arrangement with Xandr.