Looking Beyond CTR: Unlock the Power of Attention Metrics

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Introduction

Jake Litke: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Cannabis Marketing Live. I am your host, Jake Litke. We have a couple of guests here today — our topic is attention metrics. Joining us is Ted Montanez, also from MediaJel, as you can tell by his logo behind him — Ted runs our partnership program and strategy, and he's been on before. I'd like to introduce Tyler, he's coming to us from Adelaide, which is the cool new kid on the block in the ad tech world, and he's going to tell us about attention, and what it means for you as an advertiser. So first off, Tyler, maybe you could just do a quick intro about yourself, how you found yourself here today.

Tyler: Sure, happy to do that. So my name is Tyler, VP of sales at Adelaide, working with both the buy and the sell side to help spread attention metrics across the ecosystem. Prior to Adelaide, I was at Nielsen for about nine years, before that at a DSP, and then before that at an agency. We've been working a little bit more closely with MediaJel, and we know this is a really important topic, and we want to talk about it with you today.

Jake Litke: Cool. Ted, just for those of you not familiar, do a quick intro of yourself.

Ted Montanez: Yeah, so I've been here working with Jake specifically at MediaJel for a little bit over a year, but we had been working together for five, six years before that. I come from the supply side of ad tech, through — they had a large SSP — and I've worked in television data, and then, joining here, building out our partnerships, whether it be with direct agencies, advertisers, brands, and those other services that can help the customers we work with, like Adelaide. I think, for me, this is a very interesting topic — if Tyler was on stage at CES or something, the words would be "disruption" or "innovation," words I think people hear enough about, but I do think attention metrics, the psyche behind what it's measuring, is super interesting. To preface — Jake and I talk a lot with customers, and internally, about attribution and measuring return on marketing dollars, and moving beyond last click, and realizing that consumers are people too — if they're reading something, they're not going to see your brand and go, "I gotta go buy it right now." The creative, and where the placement is, needs to resonate with the consumer more than just a scream for direct response. I think Adelaide fills a gap, especially in our industry, with cannabis, in that understanding — where, on average, we see between five to ten days post-last-impression before a consumer makes a purchase. So using AU metrics, and how we're starting to use them, is something new to this industry, but is much more aligned with how consumer behavior actually goes in real life, and how we can measure it better.

CTR, Viewability, and Their Limits

Tyler: Yeah, so we'll start off by talking about the basics that most people are aware of, at almost any level of marketing — even someone who's very much a novice understands you get ad impressions and you get clicks, and usually that's where people stop the conversation — "what's my click-through rate, what's my CTR, is it 0.1, is it 0.2," depending on the channel. Let's just make the assumption that you're running media in an environment where fraud is materially eliminated — we're dealing with real people reading the news or whatever, getting placements, and you're seeing a CTR, and that's historically where a lot of people focus, "how do I get my CTR up." However — and I think Jenny on our team says this — CTR is a good health metric of a campaign, but if it's the only thing you're looking at, and you're concerned about a combination of revenue performance and brand equity, it can mislead you in terms of the effectiveness of your marketing.

Jake Litke: On average — Tyler, you'll know this number — for the average news site, for example, because that's a common use case, most people read some amount of news, real or fake, that's a different conversation, but they're reading news, they're seeing ads — what is the average number of placements, meaning individual ad units, different sizes, different places, on a given page?

Tyler: It varies significantly, there's a ton of variance. I'd say the average is probably about 10 on a given page, but then some sites have 20-plus, and other sites have three to five. The interesting thing about the web, which is very different from other mediums, is that, unlike TV, or even CTV, where you can't manufacture ad space — it's finite — on the web, ad space can be built, added to, and adjusted with just a simple addition of code to the website, so it's really limitless in terms of the number of ads that can be there, and that means the amount of inventory can fluctuate pretty significantly, and you see a lot of publishers dial it up, and continue to dial it up, because they're chasing more yield on their side.

Jake Litke: And then there's the next evolution beyond CTR — people have started, and have been for a while, talking about viewability, right, and if you're flighting a campaign in a DSP or any ad-buying platform, many of them now have a little dial where you can say, "I want my ad impressions to be 70% viewable," or higher, whatever that number is. Maybe you could talk about how that even works — I said 70%, but what is actually happening?

Tyler: That's a really good question. So everyone says 70% — if you ask them why 70%, that's what they say, and that's because the market has coalesced around that number for no particular reason. I think it's heavily driven by a lot of the larger brands, and the auditors behind those brands, who, for some reason, said 70% viewable is what we stand for, and what we need to move branding forward, or get better performance. One of my favorite questions to ask a marketer is, "what's your viewability standard, and why," and a lot of them don't have a really good answer — they haven't correlated it to their outcomes, they've basically just picked an arbitrary number, and what that means is, once they pick that number, the sell side creates ad experiences to hit that particular hurdle, good or bad. You could look at 70% through a couple different lenses — are 70% of my ads viewable, or, on a given publisher, are 70% of those ads viewable? I don't think anyone knows. A lot of clients are running viewability on their end, that's the viewability of that particular ad, but a lot of websites have created ad experiences where they can ensure they're hitting those viewability thresholds — have you ever been to a cooking website? You want to get a recipe, and you've got to read someone's whole story about their grandma first before you get to the recipe.

Ted Montanez: We had a customer come in, and they saw their competitor's ads on Daily Mail and worried it should just be part of the course, should be standard. And then, where I think Adelaide comes in, or measuring attention — viewability should be the expected, if you're paying for something, that should be expected, but not every placement that is viewable is valued the same, they're looked at differently. So isn't that something you're also measuring, the attention value of those placements, because it might not be the one on this side or that side or up here, those might not resonate with the consumer, so each of those placements, while highly viewable, still doesn't have the same value to them.

Tyler: Yeah, I mean, that's 100% right — viewability is a very arbitrary metric, it's kind of a zero or one. We have a running joke at Adelaide — Waldo, have you guys ever played Where's Waldo — finding Waldo — he's 100% viewable, right. What that means is you need to move beyond that metric, and really understand the environment in which that ad is being shown — is there a lot of clutter, what's the ratio of ad to content — because if it's just a recipe website lined with 300x250s, all of those are viewable, but you're not paying any attention to them, they're not going to drive a particular outcome for you, but they are going to check the box of being brand safe, fraud free, and 100% viewable. That's the nuance we help clients understand and uncover, and once you're able to understand that nuance, you can better optimize and re-envision the media you're buying, to find more attentive environments that aren't being gamed, and, in doing so, drive better brand outcomes.

Introducing the AU Metric

Ted Montanez: And I think it's a little technical too — we run into that a lot, cannabis being a newer vertical, a newer industry in its broader acceptance in marketing, so there's a different learning curve. We're talking about placements on pages, and a base-level understanding is CTR and clicks, because it's viewed in a tangible way — it's the same with paid search, where you're essentially paying for a digital doorman. But in order to get to the point where we're serving the ads, and how they're recognized and how they resonate with advertisers, is moving beyond just measuring clicks — it's still accepted industry-wide, but the value of the placement might far exceed the CTR, but there'll be a huge discrepancy where the AU metric shows it's potentially worth a lot more than the clicks are saying. Is that something you run into too, explaining to advertisers who are more performance-based, especially in the immediate?

Tyler: Yeah, definitely, I mean, a click is very easy to understand for a marketer — you click it, and that shows intent, and that will lead to something, it's quantifiable, it's pretty straightforward. When I was at Nielsen, probably five or six years ago, we did a meta-analysis looking at clicks and ROI, and what we found is there was no correlation between clicks and ROI. What that means is there's a lot you miss if you simply focus on clicks, and there's a lot of efficiency to be gained by moving away from just focusing on clicks.

Jake Litke: We see that with campaigns we run all the time, where there's a pretty big disconnect between publishers that are driving clicks and publishers that are actually driving transactions, which is ultimately what most of our marketers care about — they're trying to drive revenue. We're trying to connect the top of the funnel, starting at awareness, and seeing how we get someone through the journey to purchase, and it does require education a lot of the time, because people will say, "oh, well, the CTR has gone down in this campaign" — yes, but your revenue has gone up, and that's because we're doing our work on the optimization side, figuring out what paths consumers are taking to purchase. Ted, you mentioned "AU" — is that something you invented at Adelaide, did you trademark that?

Tyler: Yeah, no, it's got a TM behind it — AU is our proprietary metric that we built, and what AU represents is the probability of attention, weighted by the likelihood of an outcome. Effectively, we take a bunch of signals that we collect — some of them are legacy signals, we also use a page scanner, we also use eye-gaze data — and we put it into a model, and then we utilize outcomes on the back end, and outcomes effectively act as the dependent variable within our model. We've gone out and worked with the likes of Nielsen, IRI, Dynata, Disqo, and Lucid, and effectively built out this huge outcomes database, and we utilize that to train the model. The whole idea behind AU is to move the industry forward in its understanding of media quality, and how to appropriately evaluate media quality.

Premium Publishers vs. Undervalued Inventory

Ted Montanez: Do you think there's an opportunity too for a lot of publishers that are overlooked? We run into this a lot, where, in our dashboard, the publishers that populate — we're very transparent about it, we show the app or website, and where we bought it, who owns that ad placement — and a lot of customers will say, "I don't see the ESPNs and CNNs and Hearsts here, but the ones driving transactions are the Words With Friends and things like that." Could you say that's maybe proving out the user experience on some of these apps or sites that normally would get cut out of plans years ago, but because of the setting and how the consumer is interacting with that content, the AU metric is much higher than it is on these more widely known, "premium" publishers?

Tyler: Yeah, I think that's true. I think the definition of "premium" for us is different than others — what we're helping clients look for is inventory that may be undervalued or overlooked, but does have a really good experience and will drive a better outcome. But there's definitely a range there — there's a lot of publishers who have built their ad experiences based on chasing historical norms around what the industry thinks is valuable, 100% viewable, and they'll stack a lot of ads on a given page, and the whole premise behind what we're doing is thinking a little differently about how to evaluate media quality, and then using it to your advantage, whether you're on the sell side or buy side — there will be winners, and there will be losers, as there should be.

Ted Montanez: What's the variation between environment types, and how do you value the metric across, let's say, CTV, display, social, mobile, digital out-of-home?

Tyler: That's a really good question. We've published our benchmarks with eMarketer, on a quarterly basis, across all the channels we measure — that includes walled gardens, display, OLV, CTV, linear, etc. It's not surprising that CTV garners a lot more attention than a display ad, so when you're comparing, what you want to look at is not only the individual channel, but also what you're spending within that channel, because that's how you understand the relative efficiency of these different mediums, and how they interact with driving outcomes.

Ted Montanez: TV has been king, and now CTV, "TV 2.0," is still king, but has anything jumped out or been surprising with some of these different environments?

Tyler: Yeah, I think what's interesting is that a lot of the walled gardens aren't really that attentive an environment, they're not very good at driving outcomes, and I think that's driven a lot by the fact that the environments are homogeneous, and people are trained to just look for the content they want to consume — a lot of those apps have been built to keep people in the app, and using the app, and seeking out content, and what that's done, effectively, is help them, kind of subliminally, as a user, mute their relative attentiveness to ads. There are very different things going on in people's brains when they're scrolling through a feed versus consuming content in an entertainment or research context.

Regional Publishers and the Attention Advantage

Tyler: I was just looking at a performance report our team was doing on a publisher, or an advertiser, we have — they're a DTC brand, very focused, and we work with retailers, and we work with e-commerce people, but e-commerce businesses are a little different because they don't have the retail recall effect, where you serve ads in a market and there's going to be people that go in or near the store, and you can measure that. With e-commerce-only companies, it's all about the online experience, and — I don't have empirical evidence about this, you might, this kind of touches on what Ted said — we've seen that smaller — we'll just take news sites, because they actually work pretty well for this advertiser — you've got your CNN, your Fox News, and you've got local journals and local TV stations, and we see quite a bit of revenue coming from something like Fox News, that drives a bunch of revenue, but then we have all these smaller regional news sites that are driving less revenue but, on the number of impressions they're getting, are driving more revenue on a transaction-rate-to-impression level.

Jake Litke: And I have a theory about that, which is that most of those sites are less sophisticated in their supply-side optimization, and so there's less — in some cases fewer ads on the site itself, and less manipulation, whether you'd call it bad or good, of the reader experience, and how many ads you can shove into a single session, and it seems like that tends to skew the numbers positively for some of these smaller, regional, or independent, or large blog-type publishers. Have you seen that kind of data in your experience?

Tyler: I'd have to dig in and look at it a little more, but I think, overall, if a site has a cleaner environment, has very compelling content, it's going to drive better outcomes. A perfect example of that is the New York Times — they have a very low ad load, those ads are very valuable, but they haven't gone down the path of adding all this tech and building out all these different ads surrounding you the entire time, which really fragments the opportunity for attention, and leads to a diminishing return on outcomes.

Jake Litke: What are some examples from your data set that are interesting, in terms of wildly different AU scores for something someone might think is the same — like, within a single publisher, where, without using AU, you're paying effectively the same price, this placement costs X CPM, and this other one costs almost the same thing, but in the data you've seen one is far more valuable than the other. What are some extreme cases of that?

Tyler: Yeah, that's a good question — so, what we see in the market right now is that the market's priced on all of these legacy metrics, and what that means is there's an opportunity to find efficiency in the ecosystem, using our metric, to find more impactful placements that the market might deem less valuable, but are actually more valuable at driving performance. I don't have a specific example I can point to with complete confidence, but a lot of the work we do with advertisers is help them understand all the domains they're running in, all the ad slots, and some of the more well-known websites, you'd be surprised, have fairly low AU scores — and Ted, I think this goes back to your point about the definition of "premium," and rethinking what premium means.

Ted Montanez: I wasn't asking you to call out a specific publisher, I was more thinking — let's say a publisher that gets lots of traffic, has 10 main placements, all high viewability, above the fold, and let's say they're all priced the same, they're all clearing at the same price — have you seen an example where one of them scores, say, double what the lowest AU score is on a single publisher?

Tyler: It can be, yeah. What's interesting is that, right now, there isn't placement-level specificity in terms of bidding — there are initiatives going on, like GPT and others, trying to get down to that level of specificity, but when you're buying in the market today, you're going to say "300x250 on this particular domain," and there might be 10 of them there, five of them are valuable, five are not, and the difference between the two is pretty drastic, and when we do our measurement for clients, that's something we really work to help them understand.

Creative, Audience, and Media: Separating the Variables

Ted Montanez: Where have you seen advertisers, the brands themselves, do well with taking this reporting, this information, back — because it does change where they're buying, and how they're valuing the content they're purchasing — but there's more to it, and the simplest version is, you serve somebody an ad, they see it, and they just don't like the print, and it can score high on everything else. So, have you seen advertisers take this information back and it changes other things they're doing — changes how they're doing creative, changes where they're landing, their messaging in the video?

Tyler: Yeah, because you don't see a lot now, where — I think Nike did a very good job recently, with their commercial where people were moving slowly, or crawling down steps, promoting a new shoe, but the brand recognition came in the last less-than-five-seconds of the 30-second spot, so now, where consumers are more "in it" — how do these metrics dictate other things a marketing team should do with copy, creative?

Ted Montanez: That's a really good question. One thing to think about with AU is that we wanted to be agnostic of creative and audience — we're rating the box, not what's in the box. The issue marketers face is that, today, they'll run a campaign, and they've got three legs of the stool — audience, creative, and media — and at the end of the campaign they look at the outcomes and say, "your brand is flat, you're not doing anything." I like to think of it as the Spider-Man meme, where they're all pointing at each other — was it the audience, was it the creative, was it the media? So what we have a lot of our more advanced clients doing is using us to help normalize the media quality, and then, from there, they can tease out creative efficacy at driving outcomes, or audience efficacy at driving outcomes. What's really important to note is that outcomes are largely driven by audience and creative, but those are two very difficult things to change, and they're fairly ambiguous in terms of how they're going to resonate with a particular audience — so if you can hold media constant, and then iterate on creative and audience, you're going to move down the path of understanding how each of those pillars interacts with the others.

Winners and Losers in the Ad Tech Ecosystem

Ted Montanez: In the market, who's getting the short end here — is it the agencies, the creative teams, the teams that are buying it, or is it, how everything in ad tech is constantly put back on the publishers, where we see CPMs dropping, publishers trying to get more and more monetization, covered on every SSP, cutting a piece of themselves off to catch up — or do you see Adelaide as being maybe a reluctant friend that they should adopt more, where outcomes long-term will be better for them?

Tyler: I mean, that's a pretty loaded question, Ted, but there are going to be winners and losers here. I think we can all agree that, as a consumer, there are some websites you go to that are just loaded with ad tech, and ads that will get your computer whizzing, everything's going to go very slow — those people have gone too far in terms of monetizing their site, sticking all these different ads in all these different places, and I'd say those are, to a certain degree, the losers in this scenario. What we strive to do is make the ecosystem better for everyone — the whole idea behind AU is to provide a true value of that impression that both the buy and sell side can agree to, one that hasn't been gamed or manipulated, as legacy metrics have done to the ecosystem as a whole. The other important point is, it's not necessarily about driving as much attention as possible — if you want to drive a lot of attention, buy linear, buy CTV, that's probably the best scenario for most brands, but we know that's not possible, and we also know it's probably a bad idea, because you're not going to reach people at the different touch points they need to be reached at, in order to change their heart and mind and drive a particular outcome. So the whole idea is to figure out the right level of attention to drive a particular outcome, and utilize that to buy more efficient, more impactful inventory at the right price. Price is incredibly important to this whole equation — being able to understand, "this is the level of AU we need to drive a conversion, or drive ROAS, or drive ROI," and then pivot off that to build an efficient media plan and optimization strategy. I think everyone wins in that circumstance.

Using AU as a Pricing Currency

Jake Litke: On that note, let's talk, for advertisers you've worked with — is it largely a function of finding efficiencies in buying this placement on this publisher versus that one, because obviously bringing the cost of media down, either spending less or getting more for the same dollars, is where you start with your ROAS calculation — how much money did you spend — is that the primary thing that changes outcomes, or are there other factors that come into play?

Tyler: So I'd say, right now, a lot of the buy side is using our data to find efficiency in the ecosystem. What we're seeing, though, with some of our more advanced advertisers, is they're starting to use our data, and, once they've correlated it to their specific outcomes, use it to effectively set a particular floor, and create stability or predictability in their buys. This is more on the bleeding edge of what we're doing, but we do have advertisers going to publishers and saying, "we will only pay for an AU of 20 or higher," effectively using it as a currency, and in that case it starts to de-risk the media portion of their buy, and, if they're able to get predictability out of it, everyone wins.

Jake Litke: What is your scoring — what's 20, is that good, how high does it go?

Tyler: It's a zero to 100 score, higher is better, but there are also ranges per channel — the zero to 100 represents all the different channels we can measure, but if we look at display, there's zero to about 35, for OLV it's 15 to 50. So the idea, and we have a bunch of benchmarks that clients use regularly, is to make optimizations within your channel to find the most efficient AU you can, to drive the behavior you're looking to achieve.

Time, Day-Parting, and Attention

Jake Litke: Does time come into play at all? I know for us, when we're optimizing campaigns — and this dovetails right into your question about multi-touch attribution, because we do a fair amount of that — we look at touch points for consumers, in terms of publishers, and, when I say publishers, that includes apps and websites — using standard behavior patterns, people play games on their phone when commuting or at home, and they're reading news at different parts of the day, doing different things, and the mental context of the person looking at the ad is very different at different times of day — the example I always give is, if I'm at the airport on a business trip, reading the news while waiting for a plane, that's a very different mental context than if I'm at the park with my daughter — I'm thinking about different things, I care about different things, but there's a little overlap in terms of time that you can do some prediction with consumer behavior. So does the AU metric fluctuate on a time basis, or by category?

Tyler: In the digital environments, it doesn't as much, but in environments like CTV and linear, time plays a pretty critical role, also genre, category, day part, things like that. What we've seen a lot of folks do is deploy contextual targeting, or a time-based strategy, and that, paired with high-AU inventory, will typically lead to incremental performance versus just running 100%-viewable, run-of-network-type inventory. So it's more additive to a contextual or time-based strategy in digital environments.

Jake Litke: And what about from a reach perspective — the goal with our campaigns is we always want to be as precise as possible, but if you start stacking audiences and geos and things together, you eventually shrink your aperture down so small you can't necessarily get fill. If I start using Adelaide's auction packages, how much does that shrink my world down — of the whole universe of however many trillion impressions available — what's your coverage look like today?

Tyler: From a measurement standpoint, we can measure roughly 90% of the media that we see, so it's a pretty large, robust coverage. There are obviously a few holes here and there, but we can measure the vast majority of media plans.

Ted Montanez: Nobody's better at putting out press releases than Adelaide, one after another — there was a string a couple years ago, like a renaming with PRNewswire or something. But back to the day-parting thing — especially in our industry, cannabis specifically, you have the retailers, but brands have a different set of challenges, and, with day parting, as a CPG product, which cannabis is — some of it speaks towards sleep — I've always wanted to run, and I guess now measure, using attention metrics, the "insomniac hour" as the perfect time to send, "hey, we've got sleep edibles," or this or that — shout out to Kiva for wanting to do that — I think that's a good way to measure that success too, because it's not a time they're going to make a purchase immediately, but it's going to resonate with them, and I just envision the narrator lying on the couch, like in Fight Club, going through the channels, zombie-like.

Tyler: What's interesting, that made me think of back in the day, when you'd be watching a cable network, and at midnight it would turn to infomercials, from 12 to 5.

Ted Montanez: Right, someone did an analysis, said this works — I started my career at Dish Network, and then moved to DirecTV, and what people didn't know about DirecTV at the time was they had Sunday Ticket, but the satellites only had a certain amount of bandwidth, so during football season, on Fridays, we were physically unplugging and re-plugging things back into direct response, and back and forth — you were the one physically plugging it in?

Jake Litke: No, I'm not that old, but yeah, there were some cases where you're running tapes down and plugging them in, like the Mad Men were driving around with old Cadillacs filled with reels of film, but it's still the same concept.

The Origin Story of Adelaide

Ted Montanez: Speaking of Sunday Ticket — one of the founders of that was, you know, "our man John Taffer," from Bar Rescue, but he's done a lot with menu optimizations too — if you're looking at a site and where the placements are and how they resonate, it comes from restaurant menus, it's a perishable good, so if you move that item or dish around on your menu, it moves quicker, because you sit down, look at it, and go, "oh, I'm going to have the fish." So optimizing those, it's kind of like the early days of Adelaide, and you being at Nielsen — which was a lot of test-and-control, sample sets — what were the origins of Adelaide, and coming up with this science, how much was automated digitally, and how much was there a study part to it before?

Tyler: Well, I didn't know what direction you were going to go with that, Ted, but you landed it well. So what's interesting is Adelaide started as a DSP — it was a company called Parsec Media, and the idea behind Parsec Media was selling on time-based, versus impressions, and selling on attention. What's interesting is Adelaide had a — Parsec had a big client, think of a top-10 technology company, and they said, "we love this, but what we really want to do is quantify this, and understand the relative value of these placements we're buying." So the founders built out a metric, and that metric was AU, and they realized there was a lot more value in providing that metric to the broader ecosystem than in selling an attention-based DSP, and that's how Adelaide was born, spinning out of Parsec.

Ted Montanez: Isn't "Parsec" from Star Trek, or maybe — I think it's like when they talked about how far they were going, it was like "50 parsecs" or something, does that sound familiar, are you a Trekkie?

Tyler: We could — I've never gotten that reference before, whenever I've told the story, so maybe I've given up on ad tech names, they're just constantly changing and getting more and more ridiculous.

Ted Montanez: Well, the good news about Adelaide is it's one word, it's got "AD" in it, starts with an "A," so for anyone with OCD, it files at the top — and then, if you think a little further, Adelaide is a city in Australia, the country code for Australia is "AU," and "Au" is also the periodic symbol for gold.

Jake Litke: Wow, that's a lot of stuff there, I like it. Ours is not that complicated — MediaJel, put the words together, connects all the dots.

Ted Montanez: Isn't it also your initials?

Jake Litke: That's also true, that was a bit of a coincidence, it made it easy to get, is what it was.

Ted Montanez: Well, you could add, over time, our initials to the end of it, and we just become like a media law firm.

Jake Litke: Esquire, put "Esquire" at the end.

Multi-Touch Attribution and Publisher Clusters

Jake Litke: Let's go back to multi-touch a little bit, since that's near and dear to our hearts. Have you done any analysis of the intersection between the AU score of different publishers, and how — if there's a Venn diagram, like, take someone like Dstillery, for example, who looks at consumer behavior across different websites, and can say, "put a tag here, and it'll tell you the people who go to your site also over-index for these other sites" — do you have any data around clusters of behavior with attention?

Tyler: Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of the work we do with clients is help them understand the level of media quality, or attention, a particular consumer received on their path to either a purchase or not — that's how we help establish, "this is the relative AU score you need to drive ROAS, or ROI, or a particular conversion," and what we see is that varies from client to client, and also varies from brand to brand — some brands might need a much higher level of AU to drive a particular outcome than another. I think that pairs nicely with a multi-touch attribution strategy, because I'm sure the data on your side differs significantly from client to client, and it might take three or four hops for one brand and two hops for another — so we'd be fairly complementary, and add another dimension of understanding to that process.

Moving Beyond Last-Click Attribution

Jake Litke: That makes sense. Let's take a minute — how can we beat up on last click, which we run into a lot, especially with less sophisticated marketers, because usually people don't necessarily understand all the workings, and what they can understand is an impression and a click, and then there's a strong human bias toward assuming the last thing someone did is the primary reason they made the purchase — when we know, from our data, that a huge portion of sales coming in through organic traffic are directly related to the fact that they got 20 impressions for that brand, and the actual purchase — they'd already made up their mind. How do you talk about last click as sort of an outdated KPI — maybe it's not as much a key performance indicator, it's definitely a performance indicator, but should it be held in as high esteem as it is for many people?

Tyler: I mean, the shorter answer is, you're missing 90% of the story if you're just looking at last click — maybe 95%. What will happen is, if you continue to chase last click, you're going to run out of your customer pool very quickly, your funnel is going to completely break down, you're going to deplete whoever was already primed, and it's just not a sustainable model for growing a brand, in my opinion.

Jake Litke: That's a more eloquent way of putting it — I tend to describe it as, you have to put things in the top of the funnel to chase the bottom of the funnel, if you're just chasing the bottom, you're going to run out of customers pretty quickly.

Ted Montanez: I think it's something too, that we run into, where customers come on and immediately it's, "I'm giving you X amount of dollars, I need Y in sales back," and what we try not to push back on, but set the tone around, is that, if you're a retailer, there's a broad spectrum of consumers that fit into different audience profiles — types of people that won't all buy immediately, they all have different reasons for being consumers — so, basically putting them on a Gantt chart, different timelines, maybe this group, boomers 35 to 50 or something, will adopt and buy, but they need more time, and there can be a ton of different identifiers. Moving beyond last click, using attention to optimize for these different profiles, because if we're only going after one consumer group to get everything immediately, we're not planning for the future, and I think that's where AU metrics can come in, looking at that reporting, how it's resonating with that group, where to make optimizations — because at some point, the marketing to them, and the revenue they're putting back in, won't run parallel, but they will hopefully, and certainly positively, intersect at some point. So it's also, I guess, moving beyond last click is a call to action for patience too, understanding how your brand is resonating, and I think, for us, doing the media buying, it's a good way to show that patience.

Adelaide U and Closing Remarks

Jake Litke: Let's do this, I think we've got just a few minutes left. Ted, someone mentioned something about an academy of some sort — Tyler, is that true, what is that?

Ted Montanez: I actually don't know anything about it, I just heard someone talk about it.

Tyler: So, this is a shameless plug, but we've got an online course called Adelaide U, anyone can take it, it's available on our website. It goes through the evolution of the market and the ecosystem, how the market's moving towards attention metrics, and also focuses on how you can utilize it, makes it very actionable.

Jake Litke: So you get a little certificate?

Tyler: Oh, sure do.

Jake Litke: Can you put it on your LinkedIn, and be like, "hey, I'm an attention expert"?

Tyler: Exactly, pay attention to me.

Jake Litke: How long is the course?

Tyler: I think it's fairly short, you can do it in about an hour, we wanted to design it to be very manageable.

Jake Litke: A lot of people — I know Ted spends his weekends just collecting certificates on LinkedIn, I see them all the time.

Ted Montanez: Yeah, well, we got Jake here, who spent his weekend building an attribution dashboard for direct mailers, so — it was fun, we hadn't done stuff with mailers before. For context, one of our partners we work with does direct mail — I should have assumed direct mail is still very effective, because I get a lot of it — but we have a partner that does direct mail for dispensaries, it works quite well, and has a similar ROAS profile to what digital does, for more successful campaigns, but there was no dashboard for it, because it's mail — but because we have POS integrations, and can match with our identity graph the addresses, we were able to generate a dashboard that showed, here's how many mailers went out, here's your ROAS, here's your conversion rate, here's where the mailers went — fun little project.

Jake Litke: Did that need to be done on a Saturday or Sunday?

Ted Montanez: You can ask my wife, the answer is probably no.

Jake Litke: Yeah, as Tyler knows — I've got a toddler downstairs, so, he's got the weekends locked up. But other than that, you can catch me crushing LinkedIn certificates. Tyler, what else can you add — ways to get a hold of you, how can people — give us both sides — I think mostly our audience here is going to be demand-side advertisers, looking to figure out how to gain efficiencies in their buying — how does someone engage with your company, how do they pay you, what's your business model, so people understand that?

Tyler: Yeah, that's a really good question — so, if you want to reach me, I'm at tyler@adelaidemetrics.com. If you go to adelaidemetrics.com, we've got a ton of resources and guides — we actually just published our 2025 outcomes guide, it's kind of a recap of the past year, includes roughly 50 case studies across 10 to 15 different verticals and outcomes, so there's a ton of proof points in there people can look at. We've got vertical-specific guides — we'd love to partner on a cannabis-specific one, that'd be pretty cool. And otherwise, how we work with clients directly is typically through measurement, so we can work off a CPM or a flat fee, we're pretty open to different pricing models, and what we want to do is help you understand, this is the media you're buying, this is how it connects to the outcomes you care about, and then figure out how to find efficiencies, drive better performance, and build out workflows that drive predictable outcomes. You can also work with our partners, like MediaJel, and they can help infuse our data into the way you're buying and reporting.

Jake Litke: And we use some of your signal for our campaigns — depending on who we're working with, because we have some marketers more interested in the data than others, sometimes we'll bring it up that we're doing that, sometimes we just use it in the background, it helps with efficiencies.

Ted Montanez: Oh, wait, one last thing — because you mentioned this, I'd heard, a long time ago, about the direct-response, late-night TV stuff — my understanding was those were all performance-based, is that true, that they weren't buying the inventory, they were just, like, the cable network getting a cut of sales?

Tyler: Well, yes and no — a lot of it was, for some of those spots, remnant inventory that didn't get sold, because on linear TV there's a finite amount of actual avails, whereas digital created trillions. So if something wasn't sold, it would go immediately to whoever was going to buy — there were a lot of phone calls, and they'd pay depending on the relationship, or the inventory they were buying, how many products were sold — if they had a whole shopping channel, there were two different models — you'd pay per subscriber if it was cable, or if it was satellite you'd pay a dollar or a cent based on how many people, and then there were some cases where it was a little below that, where each month you'd get a share — every "hour-long" show, or 30 minutes, it was actually like 28, 30, and then 90 seconds in between, and those would all be tallied, how many products were sold — I got some of the best Christmas gifts, just all sorts of stuff sent, all these different products, but yeah, they measured it that way.

Ted Montanez: Yeah, and they'd shift things for different day parts, put different values on them, if it's a good product, you might want a rev share, if not, then — all right, sorry for the tangent there everyone, that's your fault.

Jake Litke: Yeah, it is my fault. All right, we're a minute over now, so, Tyler, thank you so much for taking the time to tell us about what you're up to, and how advertisers can use it. Ted, any final parting shots at Tyler?

Ted Montanez: No, no, all right, he's doing — I know a bunch came to mind, but he realizes we're being recorded, so — made the cut.

Jake Litke: Right, yeah, we'll leave that then. Thanks everyone for taking the time, this has been another episode of Cannabis Marketing Live, your host, Jake Litke — if you have questions about marketing for cannabis, reach out to Ted or myself, ted@mediajel.com, jake@mediajel.com, happy to chat anytime, have a great day.

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