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As consumers exert control over the sales and marketing funnel, marketers are seeking out new and better ways to attribute new customers to the proper medium in a multichannel campaign. Members of the Response Advisory Board take on some of the key questions.
Consumers are driving marketing more than ever, responding to marketers' messages wherever, whenever, and however they prefer. This has created a major buzzword for marketers looking to quantify return on investment (ROI) on multichannel campaigns: attribution,
"It is critical to honor the duality of attribution," says Doug Garnett, founder and CEO of Portland, Ore.-based Atomic Direct. "Attribution can be used to dramatically increase the performance of your media spending. It can also lead you into wasteful media spending."
The challenges of attribution differ based on the type of campaign: is it for a hard good, including a drive-to-retail element? Is it a service with a leadgeneration drive to the web? And, as campaigns have grown into multichannel behemoths, different attribution models continue to sprout.
Early in the e-commerce era, the battle of attribution was between "first-click" (the first source of marketing that drove response that became a sale) and "last-click" (allocating the sale to the most recently tracked visit) models. Now, "evenly weighted" (giving credit to all drivers across the board that resulted in a sale) or "any click" (sale attributed randomly to a referring source) models, along with other custom attribution models, are gaining more relevance.
"One of the bigger discussions we've had is around 'building or buying' your attribution model," says Fern Lee, CEO of New York-based THOR Associates. "While building custom models may work for larger agencies or clients that have the capability internally, we prefer to partner with one of the larger attribution companies for several reasons: they can apply their knowledge to determine the most appropriate model and strengthen it for your brand right out of the gate; they have the research and other infrastructure to stay altead of the curve when it comes to refining and enhancing the mod- els; and they can typically more easily aggregate data coming from several different tactics and platforms for analysis."
While Lee clearly believes in the vendor model for attribution, a major expansion in the number of...