The Leading Indicator
A quarter of a century in marketing measurement, from a dissertation on digital effectiveness to co-founding a brand lift company that scores and improves brand advertising.
"I don't think there's really any doubt now in like most of the marketing world that brand advertising makes performance advertising better, right?"
Alistair Hill is co-founder of On Device, a brand lift company he describes as measuring and enhancing brand effectiveness. He is known for the argument that the easy metrics of digital advertising, click-through chief among them, cannot measure brand, and that brand lift is a leading indicator of a brand's future sales.
Hill's route into the industry was, by his own account, close to an accident. Doing a business degree, he changed onto a marketing course 25 years ago because he fancied someone studying it, then found the subject genuinely fascinating. His university dissertation on measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising set the direction for everything since, concluding that click-through metrics suited performance and had no bearing on brand, and that digital needed a way of being compared against other media.
He later worked at Comscore, where research on the odd people who click on ads stayed with him, before founding On Device, which he says he has run for 15 years. At On Device, Hill has built a business around passive measurement of ad exposure and balanced exposed and unexposed survey groups, treating the resulting lift as a leading indicator of future sales. His team owns consumer panels and, he says, dedicates people to defending them against survey fraud, which he estimates runs from 10 to 40 percent of market research. More recently he has positioned the company around feeding effectiveness data into machine systems for outcomes based planning.
To measure is to give a score. To enhance is to give a recommendation.
"Having more confidence in your job and in your role actually quite often leads to doing these slightly more complicated things which actually get th- the best result"
Hill returns repeatedly to confidence, not competence and not budget, as the deciding factor. He argues that the harder measurement is rarely the cheapest or easiest option, so it takes a secure person to choose it. Where the individual or the agency feels insecure, he says, the easy metric wins and the brand suffers.
"You're showing what a Nigerian thinks about a American campaign, right?"
Hill treats data quality as existential because his business owns panels and pays respondents. He estimates that 10 to 40 percent of market research is bots, describing it as organised crime that cracks new defences within a day. Let fraudulent respondents through, he warns, and the effectiveness numbers measure nothing real.
"Being good at that, being able to really see stories in data is just a wonderful, wonderful skill"
Hill credits his early career to using Excel and any data tool well enough to split data and find the insight inside it. He frames the rare ability to see a story in numbers as a genuine advantage, one few people have. It is the skill he would tell anyone entering the industry to build first.
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