Annotated takeaways from Dane Buchanan’s interview with AdExchanger on measurement without user-level data, with practical context from OneView.
Source & context: This piece shares key ideas from Allison Schiff’s interview with Dane Buchanan for AdExchanger, “How M+C Saatchi Is Navigating Marketing Measurement Without User-Level Data.”
Marketers are facing a new era of fragmented signals and restricted visibility as privacy restrictions change the digital space. Brands are looking for methods to link investment with impact without depending on user-level data as traditional attribution models become less reliable.
Death By Dashboard
“Death by dashboard is real,” said Dane Buchanan, our Chief Data and Analytics Officer, in his interview with AdExchange. He added, “But not only is ‘a plethora of measurement approaches’ overwhelming clients, from media mix modeling and geo-lift testing for incrementality to brand lift studies and last-touch attribution, measurement is also getting more difficult because of privacy changes.”
“Google may not have deprecated third-party cookies in Chrome, but there’s been a privacy vibe shift nonetheless, and marketers need to make sure they’re prepared for whatever comes,” said Dane.
He cautioned against an overload of disconnected dashboards and measurement outputs, explaining why clients and marketers need more usable insights instead of more reports, to make directly informed decisions. And our proprietary unified measurement solution, OneView, can help with that.
But Why OneView?
When asked why we decided to develop our in-house measurement product while there are lots of independent measurement and attribution solutions out there already, Dane responded, “The key thing that’s been missing from our perspective is commerciality, by which I mean making sure measurement results are actually useful for making business decisions.”
“We took a look at what was out there and found that measurement was moving into two camps: consultancies and data science-driven companies.”
“The consultancies have the commerciality aspect covered, but they were lacking speed, and the data science folks have speed, but they lack commerciality, which is why we were noticing a lot of churn with these companies,” he added.
Thus, rather than surfacing multiple, conflicting dashboards, our data and analytics team, under the leadership of Dane, built OneView, which triangulates three complementary approaches — media mix modeling, geo-lift testing, and attribution — into a single workflow, resulting in fewer dead ends and more confident and faster decisions.
OneView provides clarity and simplicity. The tool shows you what’s driving growth, so you can plan and invest your media budget with confidence.
Read more on M+C Saatchi OneView here.
Where Does AI Come Into the Picture?
Interviewer Allison Schiff asked for Dane’s take on the role of AI in all this.
Here’s what he said:
“Platforms like Meta have their own AI tools, like Advantage+, and we dabble in terms of overlaying our own AI models on top of that. And then, on the programmatic side, we develop custom algorithms that we can deploy on The Trade Desk and other DSPs to maximize the effectiveness of a budget when the MMM is telling us to allocate toward a specific channel.
We also have our own AI-powered agent that was inspired by the best of what the open-source market has to offer, like Meta’s Robyn and Google’s Meridian – but we don’t let the AI run rampant. Our human analysts build with the model, and the model tells the analyst why it’s doing what it’s doing, why it made certain decisions, what data is going in, what data isn’t going in, and what transformations are on the data.
They’re sort of challenging each other as they go along, which, we feel, delivers a better model all around for the client.”
As the industry continues to evolve beyond user-level data, this partnership between analysts and algorithms that we’re working towards at M+C Saatchi Performance will define the next era of marketing measurement that is grounded in intelligence, accountability, and trust.
Read the original interview by AdExchanger here for more insights on measurement in marketing, the renaissance of media mix modeling, and more.
