Tom is Vice President, Media Services at Brkthru — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
Tom Leone: Brkthru at its core is a services company. We just happen to specialize in paid media. A lot of times people mistake us as an agency, but agencies are our clients. We work really closely with a lot of agency partners to help power their media buys on behalf of their clients. We work across about 23 three different buying platforms across all digital mediums. We really hang our hat on service to those clients - by helping them meet the client KPIs and driving results through exceptional service.
James Cridland: Talking about driving results, you’ve just announced a new tool, which helps better measure advertising. Before we get into that tool, firstly, what’s wrong with things like promo codes and vanity URLs. That’s what most people use, right?
TL: I wouldn’t necessarily say anything’s wrong with them. I think it’s just different use cases for different circumstances. There are times when a promo code, for instance, has its benefits, but it’s going to be largely dependent on what the end goal is. If it’s for e-commerce or takeout, you know, getting a pizza, that’s one thing where promo codes could work in your advantage and help you. If we’re going to measure something more personal, like a medical screening or something like that, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend a promo code. You have to be very mindful of your audience and what the outcomes are, but also how you intend to measure. If your sole source of measurement is going to be how many people are utilizing the promo code, that could be a bit short-sighted.
JC: A lot of people just forget to type the promo code in, of course; or if you’re given a promo code but just Google the name of the company, that might mean no attribution to the podcast either.
TL: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a full journey. Podcasting is interesting because it’s an audio medium and audio has always been upper funnel brand recognition, not as much direct response. But now with being able to watch podcasting on various devices and video forms, and getting so niche in your targeting, it’s led to some more attribution focus.
JC: So what’s your solution to better measure advertising? How does that work?
TL: We look holistically at the whole campaign. It’s very rare that one of our customers is running just a podcasting campaign with us - it’s part of the entire story. We really try to attack it from a full funnel approach and utilizing podcasting to help drive results down the funnel. We also run search engine marketing campaigns and programmatic campaigns, native campaigns, etc, so we’re able to see the results of those campaigns that happen with lower funnel attribution. But we also like to look more holistically at the results you want - to drive more people to your website, more engagement across your socials, more unique visitors getting to your homepage, things like that, because that’s essentially your virtual storefront. So we look at the baseline of where we started. And as the campaign’s running, if it’s going up and to the right, it’s typically a good attribution, driving positive results.
JC: Are you using, you know, web bugs and IP addresses and stuff like that? Or is there some AI in the mix?
TL: All of the above. We work within Google Tag Manager where we’re deploying a container across a client’s website, checking the various page visits and areas of the page where individuals are visiting after ad listening, ad viewing via cross-device graphs, etc. We do use AI to some extent, but mostly to help us slice and dice the information. There are a ton of different log file reports that we receive and the advent of AI has helped us pull quicker insights and splice a lot more information together, faster than we ever have been able to do before.
JC: Your release talks about delayed conversions, and I always find delayed conversions really interesting. There was some research that I saw recently talking about radio advertising and saying that radio advertising can work up to 48 hours after the spots have gone out, as people remember what they were hearing while driving. How does that work? Is it the last touchpoint? Do they get the credit?
TL: Typically we want to look at the whole picture. You could go back and say, okay, well, we touched this user five days ago, three days ago, one day ago. And it’s all part of that journey. This is why we try to zoom out and look at the overall traffic getting driven to a website, for instance, because someone might see a truck with a brand on the side of the road and then see a billboard. And then pass the storefront and then hear the radio ad and then see it on social and then convert. Great. So who gets the credit there? So we want to take that whole journey into account when judging the success of the campaign.
JC: So everybody gets a bit of the credit. What’s the secret source that Brkthru is, is offering here?
TL: We pride ourselves on being platform agnostic. We’re running across 23 different platforms. It allows us to find the audience a lot more efficiently than some of our competitors may be able to. The fact that we’re running across such a wide variety of platforms allows us to play within various walled gardens, as well as outside of them. That takes a lot of expertise - I have a team of 40 plus media traders that are working on our behalf and they need to be fluent and have a lot of expertise across all those various platforms in order to execute the campaigns on behalf of our clients.
We’re very customer service focused, so a lot of it is centered around that. If there’s something that you’re looking to do, give us a call. Chances are we’re able to do it.
JC: Tom, that’s really, really interesting. Thank you so much for spending time with us.