Figuring out where potential customers are in the hectic media system and not waste budgets reaching them across disparate channels is driving marketers and media agencies to experiment with some interesting alternatives in cross-media audience measurement. Kmart, its agency UM and IPG tech stablemate Kinesso, think they have landed on a winner – Beatgrid’s automatic content recognition phone-based panel. 

Beatgrid counts the likes of Amazon, Google, P&G, Unilever and Virgin as clients. The firm’s tech measures TV, digital video, audio and even out of home audiences, as well as in-store footfall. Plus its panel of paid-up and consented humans is doing away with the guesswork of brand uplift studies. Which is why Kinesso Digital Strategy Director, Charlie Allatt, convinced UM’s Group Director for Kmart, Adam Russell, to trial the tech. By making “inaudible pitch shifts” to creative across different screen types, “the system can unwind whether people are being exposed in a particular channel,” says Allatt.

For Kmart, the two launched the trial across linear TV, BVOD and YouTube – which siloed measurement systems can’t do in one hit. Then they ran the numbers against Google’s DV360 DSP for YouTube ads, and against OzTam’s data for linear TV and BVOD. “Both channels tilted very, very closely to the Beatgrid numbers,” says Russell. Plus, using Beatgrid’s location data, they could map the ads served to Kmart’s in-store footfall. “We could see the difference of people who, within a two-week span, had seen an ad and then gone on into a Kmart store versus people who haven't seen an ad,” says Allatt. “We could directly measure that uplift in real time, specifically broken down for each channel.” 

Kmart must “demonstrate every day that we are [reaching customers] really efficiently, ensuring every dollar we invest is performing,” says GM of Marketing Rennie Freer. The Beatgrid trial, “was a great opportunity to do that,” she says, “because if we're saving dollars here, if what we're doing is really delivering the efficacy we need, we can reinvest in new channels.”

As cookies disappear and privacy laws tighten, Beatgrid’s founder Daniel Tjondronegoro and Australia GM Cameron Curtis think single-source panels are about to have a major renaissance.

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