Agency Experts Discuss ROI at 2013 EHS Publisher Summit

“All media buys should start with the ROI discussion,” began Kelvin Green, Manager, Acquisition & Optimization for Cadient during his panel appearance, “and secondarily move to targeting and how much information we know about the audience.” Mr. Green reinforced the essential nature of ROI planning, tracking, and analysis for a successful cross-media campaign.

The Halo Group’s Senior VP Michael Pierre explained that the value of any audience depends on the program objectives. And Sarah Bast, VP/Director, Media, Digitas Health posed that clients are willing to pay different amounts for different engagement results. Alya Sherman, VP, Partner Innovation, CMI/Compas agreed that segments of the market are moving away from the CPM model toward cost-per-engagement (CPE) and other value payment structures.

Payment based on results, though, requires both risk sharing and data sharing. Ms. Bast explained, “It’s essential for a client to share the measurement data now that technology is sophisticated enough to serve tracking pixels and provide insights to only the involved partner – not to everyone on the campaign.” R.J. Lewis, President & CEO of eHealthcare Solutions added, “when we don’t have the data to guide our optimization efforts, it’s like driving a car while wearing a blindfold.”

So, does the need for proven engagement change the face of media so dramatically that we have to toss out what we know and find the new stuff that will more effectively meet the new challenge? Not necessarily. AJ Dopwell, Associate Director, Media, Razorfish Healthware challenged the event audience, “Let’s continue to be innovative and try to create totally new offerings. But let’s reserve some resources to spend time with current offerings and evolve them. They are still here for a reason. They are still needed. How can we get them to work better and get them used more?”

Mr. Pierre offered his agency’s perspective on innovation. He defined it as closely related to flexibility. Cross-platform capabilities create one of the first opportunities to explore something new. When his clients can execute campaigns across Web, mobile, and tablet, that’s innovation. When they can extend efforts to integrate offline as well, that’s an added bonus.

Watch for additional blog postings in the coming weeks as we share more about the valuable data, insights, and opinions that were the focus of the 2013 EHS Publisher Summit. Let us know if you’d like to hear about anything sooner.