POE – the next step…
Sally Dickerson, global director at BrandScience, on measuring Paid, Owned and Earned media…
POE is now a rather geriatric hot phrase in marketing, getting overtaken by so-lo-mo, ping and bandwidth. While some of these phrases give us little more than fodder for buzz word bingo at conferences, POE is now a well established way of thinking about different kinds of media – Paid, Owned and Earned. But the next step – describing exactly how they work together and how to manage this – has been the big stumbling block. This comes down to one big problem: you can’t manage what you can’t measure comparably.
For advertisers this question is crucial to how they can reduce their paid media budgets via increased activities in the owned and earned space, without harming their brand and business, and without paying ‘more’ in hidden resource, IT and content lost.
BrandScience decided the time has come to tackle this question, by seeking to develop a common currency across media types starting by identifying and, crucially, measuring the multiple relationships and synergies between them.
And, now we’ve done it – developed a system to provide comparable measurement for all UK communication channels in terms of total marketing cost and reach. So we can compare their relative impact on brand and business outcomes. The POEMS Pilot Study, sponsored by Channel 4 with Metrica / the Gorkana Group, among others, as data partners has enabled us to gather data for analysis on:
- 29 car brands
- 22 supermarket / grocery brands
- 58 other retail brands – high street, fashion and retail
The work falls into three parts:
- POEMS Predicts Reach
- POEMS Predicts Brand, and
- POEMS Predicts Business
Our aim first was to determine the combined reach of all POE communications over a campaign period, then the exclusive reach of the groups of Paid, Owned and Earned communications and finally the exclusive reach of each individual communications activity over a campaign.
We could then, through a TouchPoints analysis, determine the extent to which Owned and Earned deliver additional reach beyond Paid activity and determine the extent to which paid activity amplifies owned and earned activity. We also ran meta-analysis to understand how Paid content and integration drives Earned values.
There were some challenges in terms of data collection especially for Owned Media. We believe offline is an important ingredient of Owned, and one that is often overlooked in the rush to the digital space. However there are few sources of this data at a sector level (although when we apply this thinking to individual client businesses they will know exactly what their owned foot print is) so we had to satisfy ourselves with online Owned data for this first pilot sector level study. However, when it came to Earned we were able to include offline conversation (courtesy of Keller Fay data) and PR as well as social media, something most other POE analyses do not.
To calculate reach, all Paid, Owned and Earned Comms within our dataset were then assigned curves based on TouchPoints curves. It was easy to choose curves for Paid media. For Owned and Earned, we picked the exact curve or chose appropriate proxies. The TouchPoints system allows us to work out reach of non paid advertising, by estimating “impacts”, assigning proxy paid channels, and a factor for penetration.
We performed multiple runs in TouchPoints for each media channel combined with each of the other media channels – in effect all types of two media combinations (both exclusive reach and combined reach). For our Paid and Owned curves, we applied TouchPoints adjustment factors to accommodate smaller audiences. Finally, using all the data we had collected from TouchPoints, we built a tool which allowed us to calculate the average reach of a POE comms campaign with up to 14 channels.
Results so far? We chose to look at Supermarkets because 86% of all paid spend by UK Supermarkets is on TV and Press. What our analysis showed was that, while Paid Offline had a exclusive reach of 17%, Earned Offline and Paid Online had no exclusive reaches at all and Earned Online and Owned Online delivered only a very small amount of exclusive reach. So these media added little, if any, extra reach to Paid Offline. Our second category, Cars, is similar apart from a slightly larger exclusive reach from Earned media.
More interestingly, we can begin to see the level of relationships between Paid, Owned and Earned communications and how they drive brand and business success. We can also see these relationships by online and offline.
The Holy Grail of linking the effects of different communications types on brand/business measures, understanding how all the communication channels work individually and together to drive brand and business measures, and to create a full channel planning system is our next step.