Brand Metric’s asks the experts! What are your views on brand lift measurement? Do you request it on campaigns you are responsible for? Do you often receive it?

Kate Mezzanotte, Senior Director of Programmatic media, Jellyfish
In general, we see brand lift as a valuable tool, especially where we are tapping into a new initiative. For example, a new channel or audience. With any type of new or different activity, we can lean on brand lift to see its impact on awareness, consideration, purchase intent etc. To those clients sufficiently setup to do so, we recommend this type of activity on at least a quarterly basis.

Damian Chandler, Head of Programmatic Advertising, Webrepublic
Brand lift is one of the things we’re most interested in measuring right now – it can fill the gap described before, with a qualitative response from the user. Therefore, we have established a structured approach to measuring uplift across different campaign goals and platforms and always include them, provided the requirements are met. “Now you’ve seen the ad, has it changed your opinion?” This is exactly what we want to know, and precisely what we are struggling to learn through traditional campaign metrics. While we’re getting a lot of benefits from our uplift study approach, we don’t yet have data points from all advertising activities. What’s missing are results from our campaigns on the open web, outside the walled gardens, which Brand Metrics might offer us. In an ideal world, we would have holistic brand uplift measures across every single ad placement. However, there are political, technical and economic barriers to a solution like that.

Jerry Daykin, Senior Media Director EMEA, GSK
As mentioned, my personal view is that digital metrics often don’t tell us as much as we like to think – we need instead to adapt and apply more traditional measures, already proven elsewhere. And brand lift studies give you a good snapshot of campaign impact. We have a general rule of trying to build in brand lift on all reasonably sized campaigns. Though qualifying minimum spends apply usually, depending on the partner. For example, on Facebook we did more than 200 last year globally. We’re not just using them to answer the question “does Facebook work?” We have a fundamental belief that the channels we use do work. Instead, we have learning agendas – the nuances of how it worked: which content, messages or formats are working better for us? You can quickly get to a place where you’re asking quite sophisticated questions.

Caroline Franzén, Programmatic Lead, Precis Digital
Generally, we see an increased demand in this area. For programmatic it's kind of a big focus. Technical limitations at DSP level leave the buyer unable to set up brand lift studies for display campaigns for example. In the future, this is an area we want to explore more and work more with our clients with. However, it´s always important for us to understand the technology and take a close look at the methodology behind brand lift studies, for example we need to know the answer to questions like "how long after the exposure of an ad will the user be asked the question?". In general, I think brand lift studies are a great way of measuring branding campaigns and being able to report on branding-specific metrics. And in the future, I hope that we will be able to offer a strong solution in this area (especially for programmatic display campaigns).

Martin Van Der Meij, Head of Digital at Wavemaker Netherlands
Until Brand Metrics, there was no standard proposition for brand lift measurement from publishers in our region. Brand Metrics’ key strength is its neutrality – and that is why I’ve been campaigning for publishers here to start using their tech. With this solution, we will finally be able to compare brand uplift around formats and environments for each brand. And because it’s “always on” by nature, we will also have vastly improved benchmarks. That, in turn, can really start to influence how and where we invest in digital.