Latest / Responsibly Different™ / Getting Closer to the Truth: Triangulation Attribution in Practice

Transcript

Getting Closer to the Truth: Triangulation Attribution in Practice · Responsibly Different™

• 0:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: Welcome to Fireside, a responsibly different podcast where we spark candid conversations about media investments and the strategies shaping the way we connect.
• 0:33
  Chris Marine: Hey, it's Chris Marine, founder of Campfire Consulting, and you're listening to Fireside.
• 0:36
  Chris Marine: Today is a conversation that I've been looking forward to for a while.
• 0:40
  Chris Marine: I'm joined by Madan Barwaj, founder of M Squared, a group that's helping marketers make sharper, more intentional growth decisions.
• 0:48
  Chris Marine: We get into something that doesn't get enough air time attribution More specifically, why there isn't and shouldn't be one easy attribution button, and why triangulation might be the most honest approach.
• 1:01
  Chris Marine: We've got to understand what's really working.
• 1:04
  Chris Marine: If you've ever questioned what from your marketing is actually driving the business forward, this episode's for you.
• 1:09
  Chris Marine: So settle in and enjoy this conversation with Madad.
• 1:13
  Chris Marine: One of the reasons why I love talking with you and wanted to have this conversation is because attribution is such a misunderstood piece of the puzzle, especially in media.
• 1:27
  Chris Marine: I feel like everyone as a media agency is looking at the channel strategy and media partners to define what's working, what's not, and we're often asked prove ROI for us, and I think a lot of folks want attribution and they want it to be an easy button to push.
• 1:43
  Chris Marine: But I know it's not that simple.
• 1:45
  Chris Marine: You're the smartest human that I know that I've ever talked or heard speak about this before, so what makes it so complicated?
• 1:53
  Madan Bharadwaj: Yeah, yeah, Great question, man, and thanks for having me.
• 1:57
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's fun, fun to be on your pod.
• 1:59
  Madan Bharadwaj: Let's jump into it, Jump into it.
• 2:01
  Madan Bharadwaj: The central thing that makes it complex is that at the very center of measurement is human behavior.
• 2:08
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right End of the day, what we are trying to measure is whether we have changed somebody's behavior.
• 2:14
  Madan Bharadwaj: So what I mean by that is, if I put a piece of creative in front of somebody, a piece of media or whatever, we're asking them for some sort of action, Like hey, you know, buy something with us or sign up for a lead form or whatever it is.
• 2:26
  Madan Bharadwaj: We're trying to change people's behavior, and that is the code of marketing measurement, right?
• 2:30
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's pretty hard, right.
• 2:31
  Madan Bharadwaj: Trying to figure out how to change people's behavior, just changing hearts and minds, is the hardest job in the world.
• 2:36
  Madan Bharadwaj: Everybody knows that right Now.
• 2:39
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's our job as marketers.
• 2:41
  Madan Bharadwaj: To do that.
• 2:42
  Madan Bharadwaj: When you're trying to measure that, it's an imperfect science, right.
• 2:45
  Madan Bharadwaj: I mean, human behavior is super complex and we're trying to use regression techniques, incrementality testing or qualitative studies or post-purchase surveys or whatever it is.
• 2:56
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's an imperfect measurement, right?
• 3:02
  Madan Bharadwaj: And therefore, at the core of it, the ground truth that we're trying to measure is some level immeasurable, so we're trying to get an approximation of it right.
• 3:06
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's the kind of central effect.
• 3:08
  Madan Bharadwaj: So what I evangelize is that idea of triangulation, which is there is no central ground truth.
• 3:13
  Madan Bharadwaj: We're trying to take reads of the ground truth from multiple angles, using multiple techniques and using all of it together to make one investment decision.
• 3:21
  Madan Bharadwaj: So when we think of measurement as a decision support tool, as opposed to trying to understand the meaning of life, now, all of a sudden all of this becomes useful and we can use it to direct our marketing, investments or creative decisions, or what strategy or whatever it is, then it becomes super valuable and that principle of using multiple data points or measurement reads to drive one investment decision.
• 3:44
  Madan Bharadwaj: That principle is what we call triangulation.
• 3:48
  Chris Marine: And what's the danger that you've seen when people go in all trust mode on Meta's dashboard, google's dashboard?
• 3:57
  Chris Marine: I mean because you've opened up the hood when you're going in.
• 4:00
  Chris Marine: You're talking about triangulation now.
• 4:01
  Chris Marine: I mean that's a very deep dive into not just the media's performance, but also the outcomes from the business side as well.
• 4:08
  Chris Marine: So I mean, what are the dangers of trusting those platforms as their own source of truth?
• 4:13
  Madan Bharadwaj: trying to sell media to you, and all of the metrics they publish is an attempt to justify the investment that you made on them, right?
• 4:28
  Madan Bharadwaj: So what happens is this idea of last click attribution has been around for 25 years, 30 years at this point, right, and it's a very simplistic correlational approach to say that, hey, I served a piece of media and can I connect it to an outcome you had.
• 4:43
  Madan Bharadwaj: And what has happened over many, many years is some platforms have gotten really good at connecting essentially just like correlating an impression to a conversion or a click to a conversion and it turns out that if you're online all the time, you're going to end up seeing a bunch of ads for things you buy anyway.
• 4:57
  Madan Bharadwaj: So there's a lot of like, you know, like a billboard in front of the store effect where you're just walking into the store.
• 5:00
  Madan Bharadwaj: You see a billboard in front of the store effect where you're just walking into the store.
• 5:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: You see a billboard.
• 5:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: It looks like the billboard drove most of the sales, but you were going to walk into the store anyway, so it's not very incremental right Now.
• 5:10
  Madan Bharadwaj: Therefore, the most classic example is retargeting and prospecting.
• 5:14
  Madan Bharadwaj: If you look at the ROAS on retargeting, it's going to look really, really strong.
• 5:18
  Madan Bharadwaj: But those are folks who came to your site or spend time on your site.
• 5:21
  Madan Bharadwaj: They already know what they want to buy.
• 5:22
  Madan Bharadwaj: They're probably trying to just like figure out, you know, maybe, some logistics before they buy it.
• 5:26
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not very incremental, whereas when you the very first piece of media that brought them to the site, they introduced your brand to them and created the demand, is a lot more incremental.
• 5:36
  Madan Bharadwaj: But the conversion rates on that will be far less.
• 5:39
  Madan Bharadwaj: Conversion rates on the lower funnel retargeting will be far more and the ROAS will obviously be, like you know, a lot stronger and lower funnel properties.
• 5:46
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now if you follow the ROAS, you're going to dump a lot of money into retargeting, which was obviously not incremental.
• 5:51
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not going to drive demand and you're going to end up like no, obviously sort of underutilizing your investments or actually wasting your investments pretty pretty meaningfully.
• 6:00
  Madan Bharadwaj: Incrementality you can understand what's really driving change in behavior and outcomes, business outcomes for you.
• 6:05
  Madan Bharadwaj: And when you point your investment against incrementally measured ROI, life is going to get better.
• 6:11
  Madan Bharadwaj: But it's a little bit like exercising.
• 6:13
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not going to happen overnight.
• 6:14
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's like you can do three pumps and push-ups and check your muscles right.
• 6:19
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not going to change overnight, but if you do it three quarters straight, without question your business will improve.
• 6:24
  Madan Bharadwaj: But it requires discipline, that requires stay-with-it-ness type of thing, and you kind of keep at it for a period of time and absolutely the business outcomes will come.
• 6:34
  Chris Marine: And I think that's the biggest difference that you call out there between we talked with so many folks where I think there might be a misunderstanding between some of the upfront discovery research that helps us understand who that audience is, make sure that we're getting that billboard in front of that right audience as they're going into the store.
• 6:50
  Chris Marine: But that research is a different piece than attribution, which is really should always be going forward.
• 6:57
  Chris Marine: It's not this yeah, you said it.
• 6:59
  Chris Marine: You do those three or four pushups, like you said, and then you're buff.
• 7:01
  Chris Marine: It's like this is something, something that you track, you keep moving with you All the time.
• 7:05
  Chris Marine: That's right.
• 7:06
  Chris Marine: But I think that's a misunderstanding for folks.
• 7:08
  Chris Marine: They think like well, attribution cool, we can like get our data points and get out.
• 7:12
  Chris Marine: Why is that?
• 7:13
  Chris Marine: Have you worked in a case, or have an example of a case, where someone has tried to do that and where you're just not able to get the full story that?
• 7:19
  Madan Bharadwaj: way.
• 7:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: That is, in fact, the most common sort of circumstance where people think because we all grew up, chris, you and I, when we grew up in industry, we grew up with Google Analytics and Google AdWords, where we never questioned attribution.
• 7:33
  Madan Bharadwaj: Whatever was reported in the Google Analytics and AdWords dashboards was just considered to be what happened.
• 7:41
  Madan Bharadwaj: We never questioned whether the attribution was incremental or not.
• 7:44
  Madan Bharadwaj: It was kind of like assumed to be fully incremental and implicitly, so to speak.
• 7:48
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right Now, therefore, as far as measurement is concerned, many marketers expect that, well, it's Google Analytics.
• 7:55
  Madan Bharadwaj: You drop a pixel, you get a dashboard and whatever you see is the truth.
• 7:59
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right Now, it turns out in the world we live in, it's completely like that mode and that model has gotten blown up entirely.
• 8:06
  Madan Bharadwaj: There are really two work streams, okay, in the world of advanced attribution, as you call it, or causal attribution, one is causal studies and second is operationalization.
• 8:17
  Madan Bharadwaj: Okay, take an example of two DTC brands.
• 8:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right?
• 8:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: Two fashion brands, dtc brands, you might assume that, hey, they are just the same.
• 8:24
  Madan Bharadwaj: The measurement should be identical for them, right?
• 8:26
  Madan Bharadwaj: They're both selling t-shirts online.
• 8:28
  Madan Bharadwaj: They're both about $40, $50 million in GMV.
• 8:31
  Madan Bharadwaj: They're about the same.
• 8:32
  Madan Bharadwaj: It turns out when you actually get closer and closer to the business.
• 8:35
  Madan Bharadwaj: They are very different go-to markets, one brand and the one CMO is really focused on performance marketing.
• 8:41
  Madan Bharadwaj: She really cares about getting performance marketing right.
• 8:43
  Madan Bharadwaj: For her it's all about retargeting and prospecting.
• 8:46
  Madan Bharadwaj: She's really trying to figure out what is the right incrementality for prospecting.
• 8:49
  Madan Bharadwaj: How much can I invest in it?
• 8:50
  Madan Bharadwaj: How much can I scale meta?
• 8:51
  Madan Bharadwaj: How much can I scale shopping?
• 8:53
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's what she's focused on.
• 8:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: You walk over next door to another brand and that CMO is like well, dude, I really don't care about new customer acquisitions, all about retention for me.
• 9:09
  Madan Bharadwaj: If I don't keep these customers on longer, I mean I don't care if I get them on and I don't have a business.
• 9:11
  Madan Bharadwaj: So she is really focused on LTV measurement and longer term longitudinal studies to measure long term behavior and how to move behavior and all that stuff.
• 9:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: You move to another brand right next to them.
• 9:17
  Madan Bharadwaj: They're like I don't have that.
• 9:18
  Madan Bharadwaj: Go to market.
• 9:18
  Madan Bharadwaj: I'm a very brand influencer.
• 9:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: Go to market.
• 9:21
  Madan Bharadwaj: I'm all about inspiring people about my message and what I mean to the world and it's really upper funnel.
• 9:28
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's very organic and influencer-led and their measurement challenges, therefore, are entirely different.
• 9:32
  Madan Bharadwaj: In the first case, it's all about live studies and very tactical and whatnot.
• 9:37
  Madan Bharadwaj: If you move to the second case, it's all about longitudinal LTV measurement and sort of like what we call universal holdouts on the customer file and that kind of measurement.
• 9:45
  Madan Bharadwaj: And if you go to the influencer marketing, it's a very different, essentially different measurement around upper funnel properties and sort of like more high value actions and stuff like that.
• 9:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now if you take one approach to all three CMOs, you are almost certainly going to fail.
• 9:59
  Madan Bharadwaj: At least two out of three will just like blow up in your face.
• 10:02
  Madan Bharadwaj: They'll be like I don't know what you're talking about.
• 10:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: This is not even close to the question I asked, right?
• 10:05
  Madan Bharadwaj: What I say is that the causal studies, the studies you run to help understand and unlock go-to-market questions you have right now, are almost entirely bespoke and they're moving on you every six months.
• 10:16
  Madan Bharadwaj: So if you run a go-to-market right now, whatever learnings you have, you're going to put that in market.
• 10:22
  Madan Bharadwaj: Some things work, some things don't, and every six months a CMO is like rethinking her brand.
• 10:26
  Madan Bharadwaj: I go to market calibrating.
• 10:27
  Madan Bharadwaj: So her questions are moving on us right.
• 10:29
  Madan Bharadwaj: So those studies, the LIF studies, the causal studies, the MMMs, what questions you're asking, how you kind of shape measurement around, that is always bespoke.
• 10:37
  Madan Bharadwaj: Okay, now, that's happening all the time.
• 10:39
  Madan Bharadwaj: Think of it as research, right, that's like a sort of a stream of research.
• 10:43
  Madan Bharadwaj: Well, underneath that is operationalization.
• 10:45
  Madan Bharadwaj: So, every quarter, every month, quarter, twice a year, whatever is the right cadence you got to take all the learnings you have and distill them into investment decisions.
• 10:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: You have to have the discipline to say okay, I have some questions I've not answered, some questions I've answered, but I still have to make decisions.
• 11:01
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right, I'm investing, no matter what.
• 11:02
  Madan Bharadwaj: So I got to translate every piece of insight and calibrate that into an investment thesis and a media mix for my brand and media mix, creative, go to market whatever it is right.
• 11:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: So that needs to happen on a regular basis.
• 11:14
  Madan Bharadwaj: That we call operationalization.
• 11:16
  Madan Bharadwaj: So this is a dashboard weekly reads, monthly business reviews, quarterly QBRs, type of thing and you kind of like, you know, take a much more like okay, let's operationalize whatever we learn.
• 11:25
  Madan Bharadwaj: Here you're doing research.
• 11:27
  Madan Bharadwaj: This is a lot more sort of like, you know, right, asking the right questions, coming up with a learning agenda, right test, right models.
• 11:33
  Madan Bharadwaj: Here it is about discipline, right, executing all that insight into action.
• 11:37
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right Now, it's a program.
• 11:40
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not an easy button, it's not something that you can add water and stir and, like you know, make pancakes out of.
• 11:45
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not there.
• 11:46
  Madan Bharadwaj: Honestly, this is a little bit more challenging.
• 11:48
  Madan Bharadwaj: This is like when you and I started out, you know, 20 years back.
• 11:51
  Madan Bharadwaj: It might have been CRM, might have been like this Conversion optimization on the site would have been like this right so?
• 11:56
  Chris Marine: that's where we are.
• 11:57
  Chris Marine: Well, the nice thing, too, you speaking about it in this way, is you're connecting two areas of an organization, which I think you speak really well about, which is bringing together the finance and the marketing people to speak that same language.
• 12:09
  Chris Marine: Because when you're connecting those two, that's when you can really advance the work forward in a meaningful way.
• 12:14
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's right.
• 12:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: So this is what.
• 12:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: In the operationalization sort of area, we talk about something with governance.
• 12:19
  Madan Bharadwaj: You and I have talked about this, chris.
• 12:21
  Madan Bharadwaj: So there is something called a governance structure.
• 12:23
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right Now, let's say, for example, there's a board meeting coming up next month and you have an AOP.
• 12:28
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right now you put an AOP together and some kind of forecast or not.
• 12:31
  Madan Bharadwaj: In the forecast you're like oh, I've used MMM and I am going to like spend a lot more on TV, right.
• 12:37
  Madan Bharadwaj: And then you walk into the board meeting, say, hey, this is my new media mix and I'm spending all my money on 70% of my budget on upper funnel and only 20% on lower funnel and blah, blah.
• 12:47
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right, somebody picks up some random data point Remember this study we ran?
• 12:52
  Madan Bharadwaj: This is a post-purchase survey that says that half of the business is driven by influencers Some random data point that nobody's like thought of.
• 13:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: All of a sudden in the board meeting, the whole AOP kind of comes falling down, and then you don't have a business case for the investment thesis.
• 13:11
  Madan Bharadwaj: You have right, because you didn't like fully think through what are all the questions that a board would ask and anybody would ask in this situation.
• 13:17
  Madan Bharadwaj: We call that governance, which is once a quarter, once twice a year, whatever is the right cadence for your business.
• 13:23
  Madan Bharadwaj: There is an actual structure for having these meetings where there is a decisions committee, a measurement committee and a data committee.
• 13:29
  Madan Bharadwaj: The decisions committee is like the CMO and the CFO, right.
• 13:32
  Madan Bharadwaj: The CMO is presenting a plan, the CFO is like evaluating and she's asking all the questions that the board would ask and there is kind of a mock process that goes through, the decisions, get stress tested in that environment and then, while you're testing that, you ask all the questions hey, are these models credible?
• 13:48
  Madan Bharadwaj: Have you taken into account the post-purchase survey?
• 13:50
  Madan Bharadwaj: Have you taken into account that particular tribal knowledge we have?
• 13:52
  Madan Bharadwaj: How does it overlay on the plan?
• 13:55
  Madan Bharadwaj: We have, right, all those questions get asked in the context of the governance meeting and by the time you come out of the governance meeting maybe you had 15 decisions.
• 14:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: Maybe seven are like rock solid and six more are like you know, not so strong, but you know you're going to, but you know how to answer this question in the context of a board meeting, right?
• 14:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: So that process is very important, part of operationalization and we advocate and evangelize for it and we help run this program for clients.
• 14:19
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's what operationalization is about like figuring out to activate those insights in a structured, repeatable fashion.
• 14:25
  Chris Marine: And part of that opera, opera lie oh man, I can't even say it.
• 14:28
  Chris Marine: But and part of that opera opera lie, oh man, I can't even say it.
• 14:31
  Chris Marine: But part of that is benchmarking.
• 14:32
  Chris Marine: I think one of the common questions that we get on the on the media side is like, well, tell us what the benchmark is and you kind of spoke to this in one of your earlier responses.
• 14:41
  Chris Marine: But it's a question that always troubles us, because we can give you the benchmark for media, but that's not the right question to be asking because, to your point, it's a moving dial.
• 14:51
  Chris Marine: What's moving From your perspective can you define, like benchmarking?
• 14:57
  Chris Marine: I mean and that's a two part question, because there's benchmarking and media Like, yes, I can give you the meta benchmarks, I can give you the benchmarks of, like, what your vertical is doing, but then there's a benchmarking that you're talking about which is different.
• 15:09
  Madan Bharadwaj: We think of benchmarks as the two multiplier benchmarks.
• 15:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: One of the things that we do is that we've been doing this for a long time.
• 15:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: One of the key questions is contextualizing their performance.
• 15:19
  Madan Bharadwaj: When you are coming in and saying, meta is working well, not working well, your media overall is doing a good job, not doing a good job against what line in the sand are we talking about?
• 15:29
  Madan Bharadwaj: So as a measurement agency and as agencies in the sand?
• 15:30
  Madan Bharadwaj: Are we talking about right?
• 15:30
  Madan Bharadwaj: So as sort of a measurement agency and as agencies in general?
• 15:33
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's what we bring to the table for brands, which is brands are so focused and sort of in their own lane all the time.
• 15:39
  Madan Bharadwaj: We can bring a more industry perspective to it and inform their execution against what's working, what's not working, what is the overall like?
• 15:47
  Madan Bharadwaj: For example, when I work with CPG brands, they will almost always ask the question am I spending a lot or little?
• 15:53
  Madan Bharadwaj: I mean, what's my budget?
• 15:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: What should my budget be right?
• 15:55
  Madan Bharadwaj: What are my peer brand spending?
• 15:56
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's a very common question.
• 15:58
  Madan Bharadwaj: I'm sure you get asked all the time.
• 15:59
  Madan Bharadwaj: I get asked the question hey, what should media be contributing to business?
• 16:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: Is it 15% or 85%?
• 16:06
  Madan Bharadwaj: What is the right number right?
• 16:07
  Madan Bharadwaj: How do I contextualize that?
• 16:08
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right?
• 16:08
  Madan Bharadwaj: So we bring these benchmarks where we a couple of benchmarks.
• 16:11
  Madan Bharadwaj: One we say these multipliers we talked about before.
• 16:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: What is a good multiplier for Facebook, for shopping, for TV, for blah, blah, blah?
• 16:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: All those multiplied benchmarks.
• 16:21
  Madan Bharadwaj: So you have a starting point for that.
• 16:23
  Madan Bharadwaj: And what is marketing's contribution to business for a brand like you?
• 16:26
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now, for Amex, marketing's contribution may be like 2%, 3%, right.
• 16:33
  Madan Bharadwaj: For a small emerging fashion brand, marketing's contribution may be like 85, 90%, right.
• 16:38
  Madan Bharadwaj: But 3% on a $100 billion business is still like a massive contribution.
• 16:43
  Madan Bharadwaj: 95% on a $6 million business is a modest contribution, right.
• 16:46
  Madan Bharadwaj: So by trying to bring that to the table and talk about, hey, these models, this measurement we're doing, and how we're interpreting media's performance, it is where it roughly, we expect it to land.
• 16:57
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's very surprising you land here or you're very much in the ballpark of where you are and therefore, contextualizing the risk and the decision-making around that, there's a lot of the consulting that we do and that's very important.
• 17:08
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not a paint by numbers, it's not an add water and stir and like.
• 17:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: Helping brands navigate investment decisions is probably the most important sort of mandate and remit that we have as professionals.
• 17:19
  Chris Marine: I'm Italian, so everything comes back to food for me, and what we've talked a lot about are all these different ingredients.
• 17:24
  Chris Marine: So what are the?
• 17:26
  Chris Marine: And probably buried this a little bit too deep in the conversation by now.
• 17:29
  Chris Marine: Everyone's heard us mention triangulation and all these different pieces that go into this, but can you boil down simply, like when we talk about what triangulation attribution is?
• 17:39
  Chris Marine: Are we talking platform data?
• 17:41
  Chris Marine: We talked about CRM and where that really where how CRM was really put on a pedestal years ago and how it's still important but what are the main ingredients when we're talking about, like, building out a triangulation attribution model?
• 17:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: Great, question, matt.
• 17:55
  Madan Bharadwaj: So the framing is that before you get into triangulation, there's something called base attribution, something called advanced attribution or causal attribution.
• 18:04
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now, base attribution is all the last click stuff which is platform numbers from Facebook, platform attribution from Facebook, adwords attribution, ispot attribution, commission junction reporting All of that is what we call base attribution, and also UTM attribution, like Google Analytics attribution, branch app attribution, appsly all of this correlational and tracking attribution.
• 18:26
  Madan Bharadwaj: What we've come to call attribution over the last 20 years, is what we call base attribution.
• 18:29
  Madan Bharadwaj: Causal attribution is all the statistical stuff marketing, mix, modeling, incrementality testing and, to some extent, qual studies and post-purchase surveys can be thought of as causal attribution.
• 18:40
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right, all of these are causal attribution.
• 18:41
  Madan Bharadwaj: And then you bring them together through something called multipliers, where you might run a platformless study.
• 18:47
  Madan Bharadwaj: You make it very simple on meta and we might find that meta is 70% incremental or the multiplier is 70% so, which means that whatever meta is self-reporting from a last-click perspective, 70% of that is incremental.
• 18:59
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's the multiplier.
• 19:00
  Madan Bharadwaj: So maintain a list of multipliers for all of the channels and that's the fundamental idea of advanced attribution.
• 19:06
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now triangulation is the idea that let's say, for example, now you take meta, now meta has four data points right now Its own attribution that might say the ROAS is like 4.5.
• 19:17
  Madan Bharadwaj: And the UTM attribution that might say the ROAS is like 0.5.
• 19:21
  Madan Bharadwaj: And then the MMM read that says the ROAS is closer to 1.3.
• 19:25
  Madan Bharadwaj: And the LIFT read that's 1.5, right.
• 19:27
  Madan Bharadwaj: So now you have four data points that say very different things about meta.
• 19:30
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now you can triangulate and say you know what.
• 19:32
  Madan Bharadwaj: So my actual reverse is between 1.3 and 1.5.
• 19:35
  Madan Bharadwaj: And the multiplier compared to their own reporting is probably 70%.
• 19:41
  Madan Bharadwaj: Compared to UTM is closer to 120, 130%, okay, great.
• 19:44
  Madan Bharadwaj: And now I get a sense for meta's performance.
• 19:47
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now I can use those multipliers to report on a daily basis, weekly basis, meta's performance.
• 19:52
  Madan Bharadwaj: My investment thesis should be to just hold investment.
• 19:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: Okay, it's probably not worth investing more.
• 19:56
  Madan Bharadwaj: I probably should hold it.
• 19:57
  Madan Bharadwaj: I should explore other channels, right, as an example of how you might triangulate, right.
• 20:01
  Madan Bharadwaj: But setting up this framing for having the conversation is probably what helps you actually get you to the point of now.
• 20:08
  Madan Bharadwaj: Clarity in decision making, right?
• 20:09
  Madan Bharadwaj: You know that worst case, best case, performance all land in this place.
• 20:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: So Meta is kind of like a good investment at this point Great.
• 20:16
  Madan Bharadwaj: Whereas some other investment may be like very much on the other side and be like oh okay, now it doesn't matter.
• 20:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: If I look at platform attribution, utm attribution, mmm, incrementality, everything is saying that OS is like 0.3, no more than 0.7.
• 20:28
  Madan Bharadwaj: I need it to be at least 1.2 for me to be breakeven.
• 20:32
  Madan Bharadwaj: So clearly, this other channel whatever it is, youtube maybe is not working for me.
• 20:36
  Madan Bharadwaj: So I need to go back to drawing board, right?
• 20:37
  Madan Bharadwaj: Being able to like put that together so you can have clarity in the decision-making is probably where majority of the alpha comes from.
• 20:46
  Chris Marine: And just to reiterate, like you mentioned, clarity, which is important, and for people to hear that we're talking and you've mentioned this before just in this conversation alone, and I know in many conversations with you and I before clarity is not perfection.
• 20:57
  Chris Marine: There is no silver bullet, and so I think what's really important which I think you do a really good job educating folks about through your M squared club and just when you're out preaching this across the country we met at an event a couple of months ago is that you talk about how.
• 21:12
  Chris Marine: It's definitely what you're talking about right now with triangulation.
• 21:14
  Chris Marine: It isn't perfect, but it is better.
• 21:17
  Chris Marine: Can you speak to like why it's better and closer to the truth?
• 21:21
  Chris Marine: If people haven't picked that up by now, you know they probably have but like just to really put a pin in it, like, why is it closer to the truth by approaching it this way?
• 21:29
  Madan Bharadwaj: When I say closer to the truth, it's closer to a more optimal decision, like, for example ultimately, you're trying to translate everything back to what should I do with this thing?
• 21:40
  Madan Bharadwaj: Should I spend more, spend less?
• 21:41
  Madan Bharadwaj: To make it simple, right?
• 21:41
  Madan Bharadwaj: Should I hold my budgets on meta?
• 21:42
  Madan Bharadwaj: Should I scale my budgets on meta?
• 21:43
  Madan Bharadwaj: Should I cut my budgets on meta?
• 21:44
  Madan Bharadwaj: So, if you're going to simplify the decision to three levers, are all the data points we have synthesized, are they all telling you to hey, no matter how I look at this, this is a really strong investment.
• 21:56
  Madan Bharadwaj: At least a ROAS of one or greater.
• 21:58
  Madan Bharadwaj: This thing is 1.5, 1.7.
• 21:59
  Madan Bharadwaj: Best case it's 2.5.
• 22:02
  Madan Bharadwaj: Worst case, it's 1.7.
• 22:04
  Madan Bharadwaj: It clearly is a good investment.
• 22:05
  Madan Bharadwaj: I might break even as one.
• 22:06
  Madan Bharadwaj: So I should really scale into this investment.
• 22:09
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now, the decision to invest more dollars into it is very clear.
• 22:13
  Madan Bharadwaj: You may choose to say, well, there is some uncertainty here.
• 22:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: I shouldn't double my investment.
• 22:17
  Madan Bharadwaj: I should only probably go 30% more right, great.
• 22:19
  Madan Bharadwaj: But the fact that you have now gotten clarity and certainty about your current investment and probably the decision to increase investments, very clear.
• 22:27
  Madan Bharadwaj: You may argue whether it should be 30 or 50 or 80 or whatever, but that clarity comes through with this triangulation and the opposite could be true as well where you might say, okay, I can't tell if YouTube's good or not.
• 22:37
  Madan Bharadwaj: Well, when I look at it, through multiple lenses, through MMM, through platform lift testing, through a geo test, through, like post-purchase surveys or last click attribution, everything says that the OS is no better than 0.3.
• 22:48
  Madan Bharadwaj: I've looked at it five different ways.
• 22:50
  Madan Bharadwaj: Everything is saying is that it's never going to cross one.
• 22:52
  Madan Bharadwaj: So the decision to like go back to the drawing board on YouTube is very clear, right.
• 22:57
  Madan Bharadwaj: That clarity comes through triangulation, right, and it's not.
• 23:01
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's a sort of a heterogeneous data problem.
• 23:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not as easy as I sort of make it sound.
• 23:06
  Madan Bharadwaj: By the time you get to the players, you've kind of like had a few battle scars, right.
• 23:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: A lot of data is like blowing up on you and it all looks like monkeys and donkeys and it can't get them all to be apples to apples.
• 23:17
  Madan Bharadwaj: So that problem you have to solve.
• 23:18
  Madan Bharadwaj: But that's what you know as professionals, we help solve that.
• 23:22
  Madan Bharadwaj: Put it together in a way that can now go through a sort of a reasoning flow like I just walked through.
• 23:28
  Chris Marine: But that's what I appreciate from the media perspective.
• 23:30
  Chris Marine: It gives us more confidence in making smarter sometimes not so obvious decisions, because we're only looking at set data points ourselves from a media perspective.
• 23:42
  Chris Marine: So I love when we're able to talk about this with folks because it is giving us a deeper dive, which leads me to this next idea that I think is something maybe our industry put together where, like this is probably the wrong term, but maybe not appreciating fully the skill set of this, because a lot of the times people will come to media experts and say we'll solve all this.
• 24:07
  Chris Marine: But I think what gets missed a lot is that this isn't just about the data.
• 24:11
  Chris Marine: It's about how you read it, that mindset of skills.
• 24:15
  Chris Marine: How do you help marketers think and build around this, because it is completely different than someone that's working in media or creative or brand research.
• 24:26
  Chris Marine: How do you help people understand that skillset better?
• 24:30
  Madan Bharadwaj: So the need for expertise is, unfortunately, the education around that is still developing.
• 24:36
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right, I'm constantly.
• 24:38
  Madan Bharadwaj: There are 4 million marketers in the industry, maybe more.
• 24:40
  Madan Bharadwaj: The percentage of marketers who actually are CMOs and marketing teams and folks who make the decisions who understand the level of expertise required to deal with measurement is no more than 10%.
• 24:52
  Madan Bharadwaj: Okay, probably less than that.
• 24:53
  Madan Bharadwaj: Okay, most marketers still want an easy button right, just somewhat dangerous.
• 24:59
  Madan Bharadwaj: But also that's kind of how we all grew up.
• 25:00
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's not that you know, it's something that happened overnight.
• 25:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's kind of how the industry evolved.
• 25:05
  Madan Bharadwaj: We're used to looking at meta dashboards and GA dashboards and AdWords dashboards for understanding performance and when you're a small brand, that's okay.
• 25:13
  Madan Bharadwaj: But as you grow further and further up, the level of inquiry you need to like guide those investments keeps going up.
• 25:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right Now, if you've kind of made the investments along the way, then you'll kind of appreciate that.
• 25:24
  Madan Bharadwaj: If not, then it's a big challenge.
• 25:27
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now how do I help educate that, educate marketers?
• 25:31
  Madan Bharadwaj: Honestly, it's a lot of like education evangelism around.
• 25:33
  Madan Bharadwaj: What is the right approach for measuring marketing?
• 25:37
  Madan Bharadwaj: There are only three levers right.
• 25:38
  Madan Bharadwaj: One is media creative measurement right, those are the three big levers where you can find alpha.
• 25:44
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now, almost all forward-thinking marketers can appreciate.
• 25:48
  Madan Bharadwaj: Creative is obvious.
• 25:49
  Madan Bharadwaj: Everybody understands that Media strategy.
• 25:51
  Chris Marine: It's been around for you know, ever so they kind of Still a little oblique.
• 25:57
  Madan Bharadwaj: Measurement's kind of the new kid in town, right, the new, yes, the trifecta that gives you the alpha now agencies and marketers are able to put those three things together.
• 26:07
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's an unfair advantage today, right, if you can understand that, appreciate that and actually please start sort of like, even start the journey of like bringing those three things together in your organization and building a competency that brings measurement into your strategy and creative.
• 26:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: All of a sudden you're going to have unfair advantage, but it's slow, I'll be honest, and I don't think many marketers appreciate the level of expertise required to solve.
• 26:29
  Chris Marine: Do you think within organizations, that it should live as a separate function, almost the way that finance or legal is, or should it be bundled under with creative or with media?
• 26:36
  Chris Marine: Should it be bundled under with creative or with media?
• 26:40
  Chris Marine: I know my perspective is, I think, because I respect it very much and I know what media is able to do.
• 26:46
  Chris Marine: I believe it should be a separate function within an organization, but what are your thoughts on that?
• 26:53
  Madan Bharadwaj: The world is split on this.
• 26:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: Chris, there are benefits in both right.
• 26:56
  Madan Bharadwaj: The neutrality benefits cannot be understated.
• 27:00
  Madan Bharadwaj: Like in many big organizations when I work with a Zillow or an Instacart, or like big big organizations or eBay, they like to almost put this function under finance or like a separate functions, almost like an FP&A function.
• 27:11
  Madan Bharadwaj: That is kind of auditing marketing's contribution to the business, right.
• 27:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: The challenge is that it becomes siloed, which means that the insights don't flow back into marketing and creates kind of this adversarial relationship between marketing and sort of data science and now they're kind of like you know they're not trusting the results and it kind of creates all these insights eventually don't get absorbed into the execution but you get the neutrality right, whereas when you actually have it be part of growth marketing and it actually supports marketing, then it's much more integrated into thinking.
• 27:43
  Madan Bharadwaj: But you don't get a lot of investment because now it's thought of as sort of supporting the media.
• 27:48
  Madan Bharadwaj: It gets super underinvested because you want to get as much of your money into media as possible.
• 27:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: Naturally, right.
• 27:54
  Madan Bharadwaj: If I'm a CMO I want to get as much of my dollars into like efforts that touch consumers.
• 27:59
  Madan Bharadwaj: When you talk about all the analysis and research supporting it.
• 28:03
  Madan Bharadwaj: You're like it feels a little bit like well, okay, but I need to first get my marketing stimuli out there, so get under invested right.
• 28:10
  Madan Bharadwaj: So there's no right answer.
• 28:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: In the industry today.
• 28:13
  Madan Bharadwaj: Really, the alpha is in building neutral insights, but absorbing them into your execution and actually deploying it so it actually creates value for your insights.
• 28:24
  Madan Bharadwaj: It's an evolving space right now.
• 28:26
  Madan Bharadwaj: I think integrating it right is the real answer.
• 28:29
  Madan Bharadwaj: But how should organizations organize themselves?
• 28:33
  Madan Bharadwaj: On paper, I teach this in class.
• 28:35
  Madan Bharadwaj: We call this the three disciplines model for marketing measurement, but I got to tell you the world is split is probably the answer.
• 28:42
  Chris Marine: Maybe it's my journalism foundation, but I believe that the reason for splitting is I believe in numerous sources of truth and immediately when you start to blend those I mean church and state is a very journalistic way of putting it.
• 28:55
  Chris Marine: It's not that way in marketing, but when you start blending those it's hard to not have a little bit of bias when you're receiving that information if it's being cooked within that same team.
• 29:04
  Chris Marine: Absolutely, but I know we're running out of time so I kind of have these might be two unfair kind of quick, lightning round questions to ask, but some of the most common questions and it's kind of double clicking into one of the areas you just touched on.
• 29:17
  Chris Marine: But to your point about the CMO, one of the most common questions is you know what channels are driving the right ROI?
• 29:23
  Chris Marine: What's a better way to reframe that for folks?
• 29:31
  Madan Bharadwaj: Another way to say that is.
• 29:31
  Madan Bharadwaj: So, of course, when you say that, you have to say it in the language of finance.
• 29:33
  Madan Bharadwaj: Okay, so you need to like be able to express what you just said in terms of like.
• 29:37
  Madan Bharadwaj: Let me restate that in sort of like finance language.
• 29:40
  Madan Bharadwaj: I would say that hey, I invested a million dollars in TikTok last quarter.
• 29:44
  Madan Bharadwaj: It drove a contribution margin of $800,000.
• 29:47
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's the whole business case for TikTok, right?
• 29:50
  Madan Bharadwaj: You don't have to express it any differently.
• 29:52
  Madan Bharadwaj: You've already said you gave me a million dollars, you gave me $800,000 in contribution margin, which means I gave you back the million and after taking cost of goods out and all the other shipping costs and whatnot, I am still putting $800,000 in profit back in your pocket, cfo.
• 30:07
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's the whole business case for the media.
• 30:09
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now you can do that for every line item in your media mix.
• 30:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now you've made the business case for the entire investment Very quickly.
• 30:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: The CFO is going to turn around and be like why do you want to only take a million dollars?
• 30:18
  Madan Bharadwaj: Why don't you take 10 from me?
• 30:20
  Madan Bharadwaj: I'll give you 10 on TikTok.
• 30:21
  Madan Bharadwaj: And the CMO will be like I can't deploy 10 on TikTok, I can probably deploy another 200K.
• 30:27
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now it turns the equation.
• 30:29
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now this looks like an ATM.
• 30:30
  Madan Bharadwaj: You've identified that this particular thing that you're asking me to run is an ATM.
• 30:36
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now you give me a dollar and give you like a dollar back and 80 cents back in your pocket.
• 30:40
  Madan Bharadwaj: Like, why stop with a dollar, give me a million, like a billion right Now.
• 30:44
  Madan Bharadwaj: How do you express that?
• 30:45
  Madan Bharadwaj: What is the right marketing accounting framework?
• 30:48
  Madan Bharadwaj: To be able to say that with confidence is that it's a language we call marketing accounting framework.
• 30:52
  Madan Bharadwaj: You break up the business into the right four clients in the business new customers, repeat customers, right.
• 30:57
  Madan Bharadwaj: The very different incrementality.
• 30:58
  Madan Bharadwaj: Media has a much larger role in driving new customer acquisition.
• 31:02
  Madan Bharadwaj: A more modest role in driving retention.
• 31:04
  Madan Bharadwaj: Okay, different products high LTV, low LTV customers.
• 31:07
  Madan Bharadwaj: Obviously there's a lot more value in driving higher LTV customers.
• 31:10
  Madan Bharadwaj: But what's the mix?
• 31:11
  Madan Bharadwaj: What's the unit economics, right?
• 31:12
  Madan Bharadwaj: Or markets, tier one markets, tier two markets?
• 31:14
  Madan Bharadwaj: If you've been in a market for a long time, your baseline's much larger Media's contribution is more modest than in a more emerging market where you don't have any baseline.
• 31:23
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right?
• 31:23
  Madan Bharadwaj: What is the natural fault lines in the business?
• 31:25
  Madan Bharadwaj: How do you cut this up in a way that's right for go-to-market and how do you flip it and report it in language, in metrics, in KPIs, that both finance and the executive team and marketing can all align.
• 31:38
  Madan Bharadwaj: Behind that language we don't have a gap sort of accounting and marketing right.
• 31:42
  Madan Bharadwaj: This MAF is the equivalent of gap in marketing, where we can now report marketing in terms.
• 31:47
  Madan Bharadwaj: Finance will actually appreciate that completely changes the transactional language between these two teams and has a huge impact in being able to push through investment decisions and strategy behind that.
• 32:00
  Chris Marine: So my last question that I teased up, I think you might have just answered very well there, but for CMOs that are listening, what's one thing you tell them to stop doing when it comes to attribution and one thing to start doing?
• 32:10
  Chris Marine: I think that idea of putting this language into a CFO's terms is a great call.
• 32:15
  Madan Bharadwaj: Absolutely the two ways.
• 32:16
  Madan Bharadwaj: I mean don't follow the ROAS is something that you know.
• 32:19
  Madan Bharadwaj: If you follow the ROAS, you fall off a cliff, is a common adage.
• 32:22
  Madan Bharadwaj: Now, that's obvious, right?
• 32:24
  Madan Bharadwaj: If you just follow last-click ROAS, a platform ROAS or whatnot, you're going to run into a wall or run off a cliff.
• 32:29
  Madan Bharadwaj: One of the two things is going to happen.
• 32:30
  Madan Bharadwaj: Right, that's one that's an obvious sort of advice.
• 32:35
  Madan Bharadwaj: Second is put MAF, the accounting framework, in so you can now talk to finance, report to finance in a way that justifies, makes the business case for investment Huge.
• 32:44
  Madan Bharadwaj: That's the.
• 32:45
  Madan Bharadwaj: You're going to do one thing in your in the next six months that allows you to completely transform your organization.
• 32:50
  Madan Bharadwaj: That would be.
• 32:51
  Madan Bharadwaj: That would be the one investment you would make.
• 32:53
  Chris Marine: Well, madan, I could keep going.
• 32:55
  Chris Marine: I think everything you speak about is just fascinating.
• 32:57
  Chris Marine: I appreciate how you bring truth and transparency, and everything we talked about today is something that you and your group are doing.
• 33:05
  Chris Marine: So it's just fascinating and we'll have to have a part two, part three, part four.
• 33:11
  Madan Bharadwaj: We live in a really fun time, chris.
• 33:13
  Madan Bharadwaj: We're obviously reshaping the industry in a way that has not been done in the last 20, 25 years, so we're obviously part of a big movement and it's a fun time to be part of it.
• 33:22
  Madan Bharadwaj: Hopefully we get a chance to do a lot of work together and like make a small dent in the universe together.
• 33:27
  Chris Marine: For sure you're leading the way.
• 33:28
  Chris Marine: So thanks for your time today.
• 33:29
  Chris Marine: Madan Appreciate it.
• 33:29
  Chris Marine: Thank you so much.
• 33:30
  Chris Marine: That's a wrap on this episode of Fireside.
• 33:35
  Chris Marine: Huge thanks to Madan for joining us and for sharing such a thoughtful perspective on attribution, decision-making and how we get closer to truth in a noisy media landscape.
• 33:46
  Chris Marine: Now I'll be speaking at Programmaticio in New York this September and we'd love to see you there.
• 33:50
  Chris Marine: We'll drop a link in the event show notes here, so I want you to come find us.
• 33:54
  Chris Marine: The whole Campfire crew will be there.
• 33:56
  Chris Marine: Come say hello and let's keep this conversation going in person.
• 33:59
  Chris Marine: And if you liked what you heard today, you can always reach out to us here at Campfire Consulting.
• 34:05
  Chris Marine: Attribution is a critical part of the work we do and M Squared is a trusted partner we work with to bring additional layers of truth and transparency to the cross-channel strategy, media planning and buying we lead for our clients clients.
• 34:23
  Chris Marine: Now, finally, if you want to support the kind of values we talk about here, we made a responsibly different shop a few months back and really this came from a place of our clients sharing with us that they love how we wear our values on our sleeves.
• 34:32
  Chris Marine: Well, now you can literally do that and wear them proudly.
• 34:35
  Chris Marine: Check out shopcampfirecom and you'll find the responsibly different shop.
• 34:40
  Chris Marine: Every piece is ethically made and a large portion of the proceeds support causes we believe in.
• 34:47
  Chris Marine: So until next time, keep tending to the fire of positive change.