In an iMedia Agency Summit Spotlight presentation, BlackFoot Inc. Founder and President Martin Wesley walked the audience through media mix and econometric modeling.

One of the earlier PowerPoint slides in BlackFoot President Martin Wesley's presentation was telling, "The problem with most marketing data? It's just not that revealing." This was the theme of Wesley's presentation.

Wesley argued that most analysis of advertising is overly fixated on the final click or page view that leads to a conversion, often ignoring the fact that up to 75 percent of conversions are supported by prior marketing. 

What has created this problem? Wesley listed market conditions that include:

• Continued media fragmentation
• No industry standards for data architecture
• Digital marketing on the rise
• Media dollars continuing to shift to the digital arena
• And Clients who have embraced many technology providers across a channel mix

He also described corresponding marketing challenges, including the fact that data sources for marketers have increased in both number and complexity, the sheer volume of available data is too large and complex for most traditional media planners to handle, and the fact that clients believe they should have nothing less than instant gratification when it comes to digital marketing data.

Diving deeper into the three main barriers to advertisers getting accurate and actionable insight from their masses of data, Wesley argued first that the proliferation of different data companies "Has made the agencies' job harder."

He then described what he calls "the stove pipe approach" in which data companies "only play with the data they generate... They are closed systems and don’t enable you to freely integrate other disparate data sources in stream to get the insights."

Finally, Wesley said that "the counting methodology adopted industry wide" is, quite simply, flawed.

This methodology focuses on the last click, the last view, and only attributes marketing ROI to the last consumer engagement with a marketing message, rather than the entirety of the engagement. This approach, "absolutely minimize all aspects of frequency in the marketing model... They actually work against agencies and marketing 101... ignoring Life Time Value integration," Wesley said.

Wesley then went on to demonstrate BlackFoot's Analytix MI platform, which looks at correlations across marketing channels in order to empower better insights into customer behavior, what Wesley referred to as "Total Marketing Consumption" or TMC.

Wesley went on to describe how BlackFoot took all of a client's marketing and synched the data-- particularly the cookie data from:

• Branded Search Clicks
• Display Clicks
• Logo Views
• SEO
• Rich Media Clicks
• Rich Media Views
• Unbranded Search Clicks

"We compared all the conversations," Wesley said, finding that, "75 percent of the conversions were supported by prior marketing. This supports frequency," as a metric. However, "nobody is supporting a non-instant gratification approach," Wesley said.

"For each tactic," Wesley argued, advertisers, "need to analyze the time lag," in an "Exposure Type Window Analysis." You could argue, Wesley said, that by day five or day seven of a branded search campaign the SEM results have become marketing noise, whereas on day two of an unbranded campaign the results might become noise.

"When you're looking at every conversion that happens, you need to go back a certain number of days… not looking at the last click or view, but beyond that to the prior exposures and the frequency of that kind of tactic… and then factor in some kind of a ratio," Wesley said.

Returning to the search example, Wesley said that BlackFoot found 83,000 other marketing exposures before the branded search clicks over a few days. The company then suggested that the client redistribute, "credit for conversions based on exposure over time" in order to reevaluate what actually caused conversions.

In this example, the last click approach gave the branded search clicks credit for 320 clicks, but from a more expansive point of view enabled by BlackFoot's technology, that credit does down to only 105.

Wesley then opened the floor to questions, whereupon a Summit Attendee asked, "How are you incorporating offline?"

"We like really granular data," Wesley replied. "So, we went in and integrated an audio finger printing technology with a daily log file of TV ads." BlackFoot knows "which markets where the ads were shown, and then can overlay that with all the activity happening on a client's site." This enables BlackFoot to ask integrated channel questions, for example, "How was the TV ad impacting the site or the call center?"

Wesley went on to describe BlackFoot's capabilities with geolocator information and total impression level, all in an attempt, "to create an online GRP." 

This sort of data analysis, Wesley said in conclusion, is "not something you can peel off in XL or Access. In order to do this right, you have to have both the entire front end and entire backend to make sure you're always optimizing in the highest value customers."

Brad Berens is editor in chief and chief content officer for iMedia Communications.