Taking Media Measurement to the next level with Laura Manning and Kevin Evers of Lucid

Episode Summary

Partnering with media measurement platforms can be one of the most important decisions you make when looking to scale your business. Gathering valuable datasets can provide business owners with information on their target audience and other critical data elements.

In the latest episode of Through Your Looking Glass, the host, Patrick Comer, talks to Laura Manning, the Director of Strategic Partnerships, and Kevin Evers is a Vice President at Lucid. They uncover key events during the creation of Lucid and discuss the main focus areas during that period of time.

Kevin and Laura point out how important it is to develop extensive datasets and how that process was much more painful in the past. However, thanks to modern technology, businesses now can see data in real-time and plan marketing strategies according to market research.

Guest-At-A-Glance

Name: Laura Manning and Kevin Evers

What they do: Laura is a Director of Strategic Partnerships, and Kevin is a Vice President at Lucid.

Company: Lucid

Key Quote: “You don’t have to optimize. You have the data. You can watch it. You can sit back for a quarter or six weeks and see how things are going.”

Key Insights

• Datasets got bigger. As the guests explain, we live in a golden age of data. When you have thousands of completed interviews and the data science behind them, it’s pretty powerful. But, it was not always like that. “In the dark old days of media measurement, you’d maybe get 30 completed interviews. Someone who has been exposed to a campaign and then data scientists, weight data, and then you tell a brand to go make a major decision about their marketing and their advertising based on a very limited number of actual data points.”
• Improved audience targeting is what we do best. Adding value is what every company should focus on. Here’s how Lucid is doing it. “We’re able to get cuts on the four different creatives you’re running or the different tactics that might be in the market. Maybe you’re running only in the city of New York and trying to reach women 18 to 34. Those are all things that we can measure. Whereas traditionally, agencies or advertisers haven’t been able to get results for those kinds of niche, narrow campaigns. I think that’s a significant value addition as well.”
• Everything is getting automated. The evolution of data space has changed the way agencies organize their time. “You don’t have to optimize. You have the data. You can watch it and sit back for a quarter or six weeks and see how things are going. I think once you put that data in people’s hands, especially if they have control over where the media is being spent or what’s running, they’re going to want to make changes when they see how it’s performing.”

“Flexibility has always been a calling card for everything we’ve done in this media landscape, from our first product rollout or service rollout. The idea of being flexible has always been a key contributor to our differentiation.”

Episode Highlights

Media Measurement Ideas Shifted Due to Technology

“We thought we could add in some tag data, it gets them exposed samples, and that would be life-changing. Our philosophy has evolved since then. We service the media industry in a couple of different ways. Last summer, we released our impact measurement dashboard, which gives real-time brand lift insights for digital campaigns to our customers. What our customers are measuring is upper funnel lifts in things like awareness or consideration. If you see a Lucid ad online, are you more likely to remember that brand name? Are you more likely to consider purchasing from Lucid in the future? How favorably do you feel about Lucid and those types of KPIs?”

A Good Platform Will Get You Great Datasets

“We can scale, turn the dial on how many completed interviews and how many results they get and what data they get, how quickly they get it. It’s all predicated on that scale. If one is underperforming, they can choose; they can push more to perform well. We started with the components of a media measurement platform. We had all of the inputs to heavy lifting. We had the ad operations, we tackled campaigns, we matched the exposures, and we brought the respondents, and then that would create the dataset.”

The Lucid Platform is Very Flexible

“Flexibility has always been a calling card for everything we’ve done in this media landscape, from our first product rollout or service rollout. The idea of being flexible has always been a key contributor to our differentiation. It’s the same thing in this work environment as well – the idea of how we’re going to match the data set to our overlay. There are going to be some media outlets, publishers who are going to continue to ride on pixels for a very long time.

Our approach has been, we have to take all of these different types of integrations and data matches. And then turn that into something that looks, smells, feels like a single source on our platform. We’re ingesting all these different data points in different ways, but when you get here, what it’s doing is the same. It’s matching this media behavior to an actual individual respondent.”

Utilizing Upper Funnels for Brand Lifting

“Laura mentioned the upper funnel earlier, and that’s what brand lift is. If you look at the metrics measuring the upper funnel, it’s identifying an understanding of the audience to which you want to target your advertising. That requires understanding the risk, the target individual, as well as getting some input from them, a portion of them. That’s the big picture for me, ‘How do we keep moving towards that in the near term? How do we take advantage of the growth and things we’ve done successfully here so far? Are there many channels right now that are measured in the upper funnel world that are measured archaically, or very old school?’ One of those is television itself.

I think we can advance that. Finite understanding of whether or not an exposure took place and what we’re considering offline channels. Those are the broad perspective for me, ‘How do we make the upper funnel measurement even more inclusive to other types of media channels?'”

Adapting to User’s Needs is a Necessity

“One of the weird things about working at Lucid, especially in this measurement practice, is that we usually identify the client’s needs. And then build a solution for them — whether it is an end-to-end solution, like our dashboard, whether it’s partnering with different types of data sets or analytic organizations to do something that an agency or a brand has been looking to accomplish for years.

We have these client lists that bring us ideation sessions about every phone call we had with them. It is something we have been lacking for so long. Usually, it’s around the speed at which they can get results in the upper-funnel metric environment or whether they can sync up our lower-funnel metrics.  

When it comes to a campaign, a measurement solution is exciting because I think we’re getting requests from our client partners about what we can do to solve more of their problems. That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in our engineering program. That’s why we built out our integration practice. That’s why Laura Manning now leads our strategic partnership team here at Lucid. It’s a very exciting time because we have proven in the past that we can adapt and coordinate some advanced approaches to things.”