Founded in 1951, the Alliance for Women in Media (AWM) is a professional organization committed to providing educational, networking and professional development support and growth opportunities for women across all segments of the media industry. AWM connects, inspires and celebrates the achievements of women in electronic media and allied fields.

The Dallas/Ft. Worth branch has been educating and acting as a resource to members and the industry for over three decades. Each year the group holds an Awards of Excellence Gala to recognize outstanding individuals in the field. Mindstream Media Group was proud to have several members of our team nominated for awards this year.

Bradi Slovak, Supervisor, Programmatic Operations was selected as the winner of the Digital Support Staff category.

Bradi has been a part of the Mindstream team for 7 years. In addition to managing the programmatic team in the Dallas office, she is also responsible for running and optimizing display, pre-roll video, CTV and digital PR Out of Home campaigns for a number of clients. She has a strong understanding of hitting KPI goals across a range of media channels and has extensive experience executing and optimizing media across several DSPs. Bradi enjoys putting together full-funnel programmatic media strategies and works to drive maximum efficiency, spending media dollars at the right time with the least amount of waste.

Chandler Swanner, Associate Media Buyer was nominated as an Agency Rising Star.

Chandler’s mother was a Media Buyer and later a Media Director in media for 25 years. All her friends were also in the business and hearing how much they loved the industry led Chandler to want to follow in her mother’s footsteps. For the last 6 months Chandler has been learning the ropes at Mindstream as they relate to the buying process and interacting with vendor reps. Her responsibilities include daily reconciliation of discrepancies and make-goods for radio, TV and cable as well as gathering details and producing weekly television post logs for her buyers in each of their markets as requested by the client. She also enters out-of-home orders and handles traffic for radio and television advertising.

Shelby Clement, Lead of Integrated Strategy was nominated for the Local Planner award.

Shelby has over 20 years of media agency experience across multiple media disciplines including media strategy, media negotiation/buying and account service. Throughout her career she has been involved in a variety of media efforts including leading promotional initiatives, leveraging local paid media to secure bonus airtime to execute cross-promotional activities and data collection efforts, testing various digital platforms for reaching a confirmed target audience as well as managing and providing media investment recommendations for multi-million-dollar client media budgets.

Congratulations to all of this year’s nominees and winners at the Awards of Excellence Gala. We’re already looking forward to next year!

The need to establish clear brand awareness and brand health metrics is essential for any new brand awareness campaign. We believe the first challenge is to clarify brand goals according to best practices that will lead to meaningful business results. The second is to ensure those goals are adopted and understood throughout the organization. This is key to long-term planning ability and helps align resources with marketing and business goals. While brand awareness is a significant factor, there are other health metrics that should be monitored to create a full picture.

We recommend measuring total awareness, both aided and unaided, and metrics such as preference, intent to purchase and satisfaction with the customer experience. These will enable a richer view of the brand and show progress as an organization over time.

How to approach this challenge

Brand measurement should be approached on two different paths. We believe in combining a classic brand awareness and health study with a media effectiveness and impact study.

Brand awareness and health measurement study

This is a survey-based study that is conducted quarterly or twice per year at a minimum, and is designed to thoroughly understand how well a brand is known by the target audience, how it is perceived and how it is viewed against competitors. It can also measure attributes such as intent to purchase and mission-based perceptions as well. The study should be customized to the specific goals of the brand and be considered the ultimate measurement; all efforts should be aligned around this data.

Media effectiveness and impact study

Naturally, as a media agency we recommend measuring the impact of media efforts on brand and marketing goals as directly as possible. There are many great tools and technologies to help facilitate the process. The result is enhanced confidence in long-term planning for media and advertising dollars that work harder to achieve specific brand goals.

A media effectiveness study can look at cross-channel media such as TV, digital, video, print and more, understand how they work together and then provide insight on which channels deliver in more effective ways to reach specific objectives. Dollar for dollar it can help identify which tactics and platforms drive greater outcomes. It is not a full attribution study, but a quicker, less costly way to gain insight specifically on media spend and its impact.

This approach is ideal for a new brand launch since it can quickly shed light on how valuable media dollars are performing in the marketplace.

Recommendations for selecting partners and services

There are many services and agencies that can deliver a brand health measurement approach. The ideal partner is one who is a proven expert in creative and effective ways to approach brand and marketing research. They should be able to work quickly to customize for specific needs and deliver a range of research solutions that can lead to real business insights. Of course, a classic brand study is essential, but additional customer experience research can prove helpful as well, especially as the brand grows.

For the media effectiveness study, Comscore offers a variety of cross-channel media impact measurement tools. They can help determine the best option based on the parameters of the study, identify which is best-suited based on needs and aid in planning adequate budget resources. It is best to share media plans as they are developed. They will then examine for feasibility and outline costs and expectations for the study. At the end of the study, Comscore will deliver a comprehensive report of all media tactics and explain which types of media, creative and audiences were most impactful to the advertising goals.

More broadly, to evaluate total marketing ROAS and understand the impact of efforts across all channels, we recommend collaborating with a business partner who has a complete team of data scientists that can quickly recommend a data approach and build a predictive ROI model. Although it has a longer development time window, this type of model is ultimately necessary to forecast and manage marketing spend.

Next Steps

Ready to move forward with brand measurement? Let’s connect. We will review your needs, make recommendations and facilitate conversations with additional agencies or consultants as needed to ensure comprehensive brand health measurement and guidance to fast-forward your business.

The agency landscape has changed dramatically thanks to the pressures created by the pandemic. Learn how we’re filling the gap for agency partners that now have limited media and research capabilities. In this episode of Fast-Forward the Conversation, VP of Business Development Fabio Ramos and Planning Strategist Misty Castellanos join President Zac Keeney to discuss the value we can provide not only to other agencies but to their clients as well.

We believe the daily pressure on CMOs to move their business forward is real, intense and not going away. Join our media practitioners, as we discuss the HOW behind making meaningful progress, on well-defined targets.

Catch the Highlights

• COVID-19 has presented numerous challenges across the marketplace that have drastically changed the agency landscape. Agencies are rethinking not only staffing but which capabilities they will handle themselves versus bringing in a partner to provide.
• There are 3 seminal points where we can provide value, not only to agency partners but to their clients.
• • Scale
  • Perspective/Research
  • Trusted Partnership

Scale

• The wide range of capabilities that we have, from traditional to broadcast to digital to analytics, allows us to be a true media powerhouse. This proficiency gives us the opportunity to extend our offering beyond our direct clients to other agencies that can benefit from that partnership.
• From the pricing insight that we can provide on the media landscape to the market research tools that we use in our planning and strategy – there’s no incremental labor. An agency can use us as their media arm without having to hire a full staff or sign multiple contracts with vendors to fulfill media buys for their clients.
• This allows agencies to focus on their core competency while leaving the media piece for us to fulfill for their clients, giving them the opportunity to capture additional revenue that they weren’t able to before without investing a large amount of money to handle these capabilities in-house.

Perspective/Research

• Even prior to COVID-19, we would have agency partners reach out to us for research help because of the tools we have at our fingertips to do things like build audience profiles and analyze the competitive landscape.
• Many agencies have had to cut expenses, and that might have meant sacrificing their research tools. We love to help fill that gap.
• We invest over $1 million annually in the industry’s best research tools. This data helps to define and drive media recommendations.
• Kantar Strategy – provides insight into the competitive landscape from a directional sense on where brands are spending across traditional and digital media.
• Pathmatics – allows us to get an idea of spend by brand and shows how creative messaging changes throughout the year. This has been especially helpful given the challenges this year, to ensure we’re using the right voice and messaging to resonate with consumers.
• MRI Simmons OneView – helps identify and paint a more complete picture of an audience segment by going beyond demographics to reveal their attitudes, opinions and beliefs.

Trusted Partnership

• Whether just down the road or across the country, we’ve helped multiple agencies with their research needs.
• When a creative shop in southern California needed to drive end-of-year donations for a nationwide nonprofit client, they turned to us for planning and execution of a multi-channel campaign. We crafted a media plan for a 60-day flight with the goal of reaching the previous year’s donations ($10 million). Not only did we hit the goal by deadline, but we surpassed it by 8 percent. The ROI on that campaign was 240 percent, a win-win across the board.
• About three years ago a creative agency out of D.C. called us to co-pitch an education client. We won the business and are still working with the client, running media globally which has resulted in additional creative work for the primary agency.
• We’re also partnering with an agency just down the road from our San Diego office to fill an analytics/data visualization need. They were also looking for programmatic display to be integrated with campaigns they were running in-house. We created a concise strategy and developed a live dashboard making it much easier for the client to access their media story.
• We recently had an interactive agency partner come to us about a research opportunity for a Canadian client of theirs that is looking to expand into the U.S. They tasked us to look at a couple of markets and help them identify, of the two, which one is the better market to go into for their next distribution warehouse.
• Ten years ago, a B2B agency in Oklahoma reached out for assistance with a couple of clients that were looking to get into some traditional media, TV and radio, and they just didn’t have those capabilities in-house. We’ve evolved with them as a true extension of their team. Our team members are even included on their website as their media personnel. Not only have we helped their existing clients grow, we’ve pitched and won new clients with them.
• When responding to an RFP a few years ago we discovered that a former client contact had joined an agency in Florida. Familiar with our media expertise, they reached out to us to give their creative shop an edge in. We partnered with them and have been pitching new business together ever since.
• Our relationship with a creative shop on the east coast started with an audit when a CPG brand was looking for a business intelligence perspective to determine if their media efforts were working. We uncovered some opportunities and provided momentum to the creative. We’re now reviewing budget increases for 2021 based on the success of that work driving more sales.

If you’re on the agency side and looking for a partner to help take your work to the next level, we should chat. Connect with us to explore the opportunities.