By Leslie Wood, Chief Research Officer, NCS

Consumer engagement is the most universal challenge for brands today. Expectations are high (getting higher) and attention is short. There are more ways than ever to engage with content without seeing advertising. And consumers likely don’t even notice irrelevant ads – who can blame them?

The best part about this challenging environment we all find ourselves in today is that brands also have an unprecedented opportunity to engage in an authentic conversation with their tribe.

For the past 10 years, we’ve engaged in significant R&D efforts – hand-in-hand with brands and publishers – aimed at figuring out how advertising works. Everything we’ve learned has shown us how to create and deliver more effective advertising. It’s also given us a glimpse into what’s next for the advertising industry. Continue reading “Advertising Effectiveness: What’s Next for CPG Brands?” →

By: Lisa Kerins, Vice President, Publisher Client Consulting, NCS

Through discussions with our publisher clients over the past several months, my team has observed some clear issues and pain points that have popped up time and time again. Many of these are related to doing business in the fast-changing and ever more crowded ad tech space. Continue reading “We Heart Publishers: Best Practices for Growth in 2019” →

After a very positive 2016, with many successes – the launch of our first Multimedia ROAS Benchmarks, the availability of our purchase data to reach CPG category and brand buyers on Facebook, and the industry’s first case study with Yahoo and Chobani to measure the incremental sales impact of search advertising – 2017 is off to an equally exciting start.

NCS has been the innovator in our space since 2009 and we’ve been fortunate to work with innovative clients who want to be on the leading edge of precision marketing and return on ad spend measurement. But the pace of change taking place in the industry today has us realizing that these practices are no longer the domain of the risk takers but the mandate of CPG marketers large and small. Our focus on purchase based targeting and sales outcomes, and our pursuit of consistent cross-media measurement, have us sitting right at the heart of where the industry is wants to be. We wanted to take a minute and share what we’ve been up to.

We sat down with AdExchanger to talk programmatic activation and addressable TV…

Here are some highlights, read the full interview here:

“Two years ago, NCS data could be activated programmatically on 12 ad platforms. Today, that number is at 170… including direct relationships with DSPs like Turn, The Trade Desk and AppNexus, WPP’s Xaxis unit and DMPs or data onboarders like LiveRamp/Acxiom, Neustar and Nielsen Marketing Cloud. Each onboarding partner has around 40-70 ad tech integrations where it can send NCS audience segments.”

“NCS is an early measurement partner for addressable TV buying with Comcast, Charter, Altice (which bought Cablevision in 2016), Dish and AT&T.”

“More media is becoming addressable and more accountable, and NCS is well-positioned to grow on the back of that trend,” said Nicole Monteleone, executive director of analytics and modeling for the video ad tech company Eyeview, where she’s overseen some work with NCS on addressable TV measurement.

We announced a new cross-media sales measurement solution with Facebook…

To help our clients answer the question “but did it work?”, we set out to create a new cross-media solution that could identify: the unduplicated reach delivered by a campaign, how Facebook and TV contribute to sales results individually, and the synergy resulting from combining two or more media for a campaign. Currently, we’re measuring advertising campaigns that run across TV and Facebook (or Instagram or Facebook Audience Network), and in the future we’ll also do this for campaigns that cross TV, Facebook and other digital publishers.

We debuted the NCS Learning Lab, and our first project on viewability and attention…

NCS is fortunate to work with many agencies, advertisers and media companies who welcome the opportunity to test & learn alongside us, with the goal of creating better advertising and advertising solutions. This year we launched the NCS Learning Lab to further the industry’s understanding of advertising effectiveness. The first project we’re working on, with Moat, Yahoo and Kellogg’s, is aimed at connecting viewability and attention metrics to in-store sales. This will help marketers understand the correlation between attention and outcomes.

And we’re working on even more this quarter…

Over the coming months, we will have more exciting research and solutions to share with you. Currently, we’re analyzing hundreds of TV and digital campaigns to understand the impact of each campaign element (reach, creative, recency, targeting, context) on driving sales. We’re also planning Learning Lab projects related to addressable and data driven TV, and a meta-study furthering our viewability and attention work. We look forward to sharing more with you next quarter.

Attendees at next week’s ARF Re!Think will see new research on predictive ROI and cross-media sales measurement during Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ sessions, co-presented by David Poltrack of CBS, Maggie Zak of Time Inc., and Kaz Gunay of Kraft Heinz. Late registrants for Re!Think can sign up here.

Want to meet with NCS during ARF? Get in touch with us here.

Timing IS Everything: New Paradigm for ROI Based Media Planning and Evaluation

Monday, March 14 | 12:20 – 12:40pm | Gramercy East, Floor 2

David Poltrack (CBS) and Leslie Wood (NCS) are at it again, this time with demos of NCS’ new ROI-based media-planning tool and a preview of how to put neuro principles into action to develop superior creative. They’ll be joined by and expert panel of advertisers and agencies for reaction and discussion.

New Breakthrough Research Theories Put Into Practice

Tuesday, March 15 | 9:45 – 10:15am | Grand Ballroom

A panel session demonstrating of the power and impact of Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ new ROI-based media planning and evaluation tool.

Cross-Platform Sales Measurement Has Arrived

Tuesday, March 15 | 12:40-1:00 pm

Recap on Wednesday, March 16 | 9:50 – 10:30am during the Best Papers Session

Find out how Time Inc. and NCS have worked to develop a new method, practical approach for cross-platform ROI measurement and optimization which can be applied to campaigns for television, magazine, and digital. Understand how consumers respond to messages on one platform vs. another and quantify the synergies of multiple media. We’ll share for the first time how secondary audiences for print (pass-along) contributes to sales.

If you’re here surfing our website, you’ve probably heard of buyergraphics, or at least the idea behind it. But, as with many glossary terms in the ad industry, it’s probably a good idea to get a real primer on what buyergraphics are, rather than simply mumbling it in meetings and hoping no one questions you on the definition.

So: you know what demographics are, right? Great.

Buyergraphics are demographics too. But, on top of containing core demographic data like age, sex, income and geography, the data also includes purchase behavior. That’s important to note, for two reasons:

1. In verticals with short sales cycles (like CPG and OTC), the #1 predictor of future purchase behavior is past purchase behavior. If you want to sell me a new cereal, there is no demographic or psychographic data that will consistently predict my reaction better than knowing what cereals I bought over the past year. That’s what the purchase data in buyergraphics can do for your brand.
2. If you have access to consumers’ purchase behavior, you can not only define more effective audiences, but can also measure the impact of an ad campaign in real world terms: dollars at the register. That’s real return on ad spend.

All of an advertiser’s core needs are notably improved with buyergraphics: justifying ad spend, quantifying results, tying creative to campaign goals, avoiding the “50% waste” problem… but we’ll let our friend Marty explain further.