Advertising best practice, evidence and insights

What we know about attribution and marketing mix modelling

Article • WARC Best Practice, December 2018

This article provides marketers with information and guidance about attribution and marketing mix modelling.

How to develop an attribution model for your brand

Article • Patrik Sahlin, WARC Best Practice, January 2018

Provides advice on attribution modelling which can help marketers understand the factors that contribute towards key performance indicators.

How attribution can increase agency trust and transparency

Opinion • Ben Samuel, May 2019

Ben Samuel explains how multi-touch attribution helps agencies increase transparency, differentiate their offering, and build stronger client relationships.

How FMCG marketers can make smarter media investments in Asia

Article • Amit Chaubey, Sachin Sharma and Dhruv Chadha, WARC Exclusive, May 2019

FMCG marketers in APAC can use marketing science to extract more efficient investments in digital media, especially when resources are constrained.

The moneyball moment for marketing in Canada

Article • Josef Hrebik and Brent Chaters, WARC Webinars, April 2019

Provides results from a first-of-its-kind study conducted by Accenture and thinktv, which measures the effectiveness of media channel spending on driving sales in the Canadian market.

ARF chief sees “tangible progress” in a chaotic marketing-research industry

Article • Geoffrey Precourt, Event Reports, ARF AUDIENCExSCIENCE, April 2019

The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), the industry body, believes that real progress is being made in tackling some of the biggest problems facing the research industry.

Revenue-based attribution modeling for online advertising

Research Paper • Kaifeng Zhao, Seyed Hanif Mahboobi and Saeed R. Bagheri, International Journal of Market Research, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2019, pp. 195-209

This article examines and proposes several attribution models that quantify how revenue should be attributed to online advertising inputs.

Advanced TV Attribution: Buyer's Guide

Article • IAB, October, 2018

Notifies buyers in the US on the benefits, opportunities and processes for conducting attribution studies within the confines of Addressable TV/VOD and OTT/CTV.

Walled gardens, social media impede marketing-mix models

News • 15 February 2019

Marketing-mix models face a variety of challenges in achieving true accuracy, including the prevalence of walled gardens and the challenges posed by social media, a paper in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) has argued.

Forecasting advertising and media effects on sales: Econometrics and alternatives

Article • John Dawes, Rachel Kennedy, Kesten Green, and Byron Sharp, International Journal of Market Research, Vol. 60, No. 6, 2018, pp. 611-620

The contribution of regression analysis (econometrics) to advertising and media decision-making is questioned and found wanting.

Attribution modeling in digital advertising: An empirical investigation of the impact of digital sales channels

Research Paper • Tahir M. Nisar and Man Yeung, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 58, No. 4, 2018, pp. 399-413

Digital advertising campaigns often are launched across multiple channels, a selection of which may include search, display advertisements, social media, mobile, video, and e-mail.

Coalition game theory in attribution modeling: Measuring what matters at scale

Research Paper • Seyed Hanif Mahboobi, Mericcan Usta and Saeed R. Bagheri, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 58, No. 4, 2018, pp. 414-422

Attribution modeling (AM) has a crucial role in measuring the impact of advertising inputs in driving actions (clicks, conversions, purchases, homepage visits, etc.).

How limited data access constrains marketing-mix analytical efforts: Why data barriers are preventing marketers from optimizing marketing spend

Article • Gian M. Fulgoni, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 58, No. 4, 2018, pp. 390-393

This article examines marketing-mix models and how data issues are limiting marketers’ capabilities. As the Internet grew in the nineties, challenges emerged for the availability of causal data that fueled marketing-mix models, as it created difficult-to-measure touchpoints.

New digital study measures what matters at scale

News • 07 December 2018

A new study in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) offers valuable insights into the impact of search, display and programmatic ads on conversion, based on a campaign that reached approximately 120 million users.

Google: The battle of the campaign effectiveness methodologies: can two diverse approaches deliver one truth?

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Media Research, 2018

Google, a multinational technology company, created two studies that delivered empirical findings to uncover the effectiveness of an offline campaign in France.

Omnicom Media Group: OMG ROI Planning

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Innovation in Data Analytics, 2018

Omnicom, a global media, marketing and corporate communications company, democratised the market mix modelling approach by building models that predict ROI and advertising elasticity on demand.

Radiocentre: Re-evaluating Media – What the evidence reveals about the true worth of media for brand advertisers

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Media Research, 2018

Radiocentre, the industry body for UK commercial radio, launched a research survey of media decision makers to reveal the extent to which perceptions lead media decisions.

StarHub: Where are the parents visiting?

Article • Jeremy Lim, WARC Prize for Asian Strategy, Entrant, 2018

StarHub, one of the top telecommunications companies in Singapore, used an in-house analytical method to increase landings and cost-per-landing.

How can I predict the business impact of my marketing activity?

Article • WARC Evidence, October 2018

Discusses the techniques marketers can use to estimate the likely impact of marketing activity.

The case for multi-touch attribution

News • 24 September 2018

Brands and their agencies are cookie-bombing consumers and wasting huge chunks of their advertising budgets by wrongly attributing sales to the first and last clicks in their online campaigns, a new white paper claims.

The overlooked value of multichannel attribution … and why last-click models should be killed off

Article • Jo Bowman, WARC Exclusive, September 2018

A white paper from I-COM details how an overreliance on last-touch attribution results in ‘cookie bombing’ and the misallocation of marketing budgets.

UNTUCKit refines its TV measurement model

Article • Stephen Whiteside, Event Reports, CommerceNext, July 2018

UNTUCKit, the apparel manufacturer, has been able to refine its approach to television advertising by using smarter measurement solutions.

How TD Ameritrade found a common launch pad for discrete messaging

Article • Geoffrey Precourt, Event Reports, ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference, April 2018

TD Ameritrade, the financial-service company, has found an effective means of retaining brand consistency while reaching out to difference audiences.

At the beating heart of Diageo’s effectiveness machine

Article • Sam Peña-Taylor, Event Reports, MRS Impact, March 2018

Drinks company Diageo has invested heavily in marketing effectiveness, recruiting a Head of Effectivenesss and building a global data planning and data platform, Marketing Catalyst.

Bulgrin urges researchers to mix old and new

News • 27 March 2018

MIAMI BEACH, FL: Marketing researchers must find the right balance of new analytic techniques and more traditional forms of audience measurement, according to Artie Bulgrin, EVP/strategy & insights at MediaScience.

Modelling & attribution