Independent media and advertising services agency Audience Group aims to bring data-driven advertising services to the middle market of Australian brands and businesses, finding ways to empirically prove that what it does with advertising is effective.
"We call that evidence based advertising and our use of data and technology to drive media investment decisions, both for digital and traditional media, is really what has set us apart in the last eight years and enabled us to grow to a midsized agency with more than 25 staff,” said Tom Evans, Audience Group's co-founder and MD.
Evans said that while most of the agency's revenue is derived from media planning and buying, the company describes itself as an advertising services business, because being a media agency nowadays is "a little bit too narrow" in his opinion.
"I think the requirement for agencies to understand how data is used and the integration of that with adtech and martech means that you've got to be an advertising services business, not just a media agency," he said.
"There's kind of a run to try and add some of these services on for agencies, but it's not something that we're trying to retrospectively fit to the business - it's something that we've done from the outset.
Evans said a big part of Audience Group’s day-to-day activity is working with clients to understand what the leading and lagging indicators of advertising effectiveness are for their businesses - what data does the company possess currently and if it doesn’t have the data, what can Audience Group access or create to understand measures of effectiveness for that client?
“For us, that has to go beyond advertising effectiveness, and it has to go way beyond clicks or TARPs delivered for TV - it has to talk to clients’ business objectives,” he told AdNews.
“If a clients’ objective is customer lifetime value, or increased customer numbers that are incremental from advertising investment, how are we going to measure that for the client? What are we going to measure daily in real time and optimise to and what are we going to measure over a longer period of time to understand whether we're actually delivering top and bottom-line performance to the client's business?
“It’s also about operationalising some of the clients’ first party data to help them be more effective, whether we're building lookalike audiences cross-channel, whether we're optimising to higher value customers over time or whether we're putting those audiences into a data cleanroom and sharing them with a network for an optimal TV buy."
In that modelling and analytics space, Audience Group uses data cloud company Snowflake's technology to ingest advertising information from multiple points, helping clients build data lakes and warehouses and then reporting on that in real time.
"We can ingest business performance data into that as well, so immediately, we have a very sophisticated real-time dashboard offering," he told AdNews.
"We can build customer segmentations down to mesh-block level - individual household profiles around Australia - and we can build queryable analytics against that in a dashboard view. That ingestion of data now means we can build media mix models extremely quickly, because we've got all the historical data already collected and all the business performance data that links to it."
Evans said that as a result, trying to spin up a media mix model is infinitely quicker than it would have been 12 months or two years ago, and Audience Group can apply the same methodology to predictive modeling as well.
"We can help clients understand what additional advertising investment might look like and what the return on that might be," he said.
"The goal for that is to try and make sure that all clients have improved access to evidence-based advertising and helping them to aggregate that data and use that data is one of the ways that we're doing that.
"We're also helping clients build custom bidding algorithms using their own first party data and if they're advertising programmatically, we're also taking the bidstream data, which is essentially second-party data, and turning that into clients' first party data that gives them an advantage."
Looking ahead to the rest of the year, Evans said that making sure that there's good governance around the data that Audience Group uses and how it uses that data is a key priority.
"Our push is still to provide access for the middle market to some of these evidence-based advertising services and making it an intrinsic part of the way in which they work," he said.
"Clients shouldn't be having to drag this stuff out of their media agency. They shouldn't be having to ask for a media mix model or predictive analytics or a segmentation. You can't be an effective evidence-based practitioner if you're not already doing those things as a part of the way in which you work, so trying to make sure that we're delivering that as a part of the baseline requirements for working with us as an agency will continue to be a big part of it.
"The focus remains in trying to make sure that we remain very open to the possibilities that the data presents for us and making sure that we're recruiting the right people that can see those opportunities. We've got media planners and traditional client service people from media backgrounds, but they're also working right next to the data science team, the data analytics team, the marketing technology team, to understand how they can make their work better and more effective."
James McDonald, Co-Founder and Director
What led you to launch Audience Group?
Here's just one of the reasons: Media strategy has become the point at which creative, data and digital converge. That is exciting, where I want to be, and is the foundation of what Audience Group is all about.
What are you focused on for 2024?
Attribution and performance without the pixel. In terms of merging ad fundamentals with new ad tech, I am working with the application of different statistical techniques to better understand econometric modelling as it applies to Media Mix Modelling. I can now use words like Seasonal ARIMA, Gradient Boosted Trees and Random Forest with (more) confidence (and the backing of our data scientists).
What does a typical day look like for you?
As agency co-founder, I don’t really have one. My remit is a roving one where I am fortunate enough to be able stick my head into any brief that’s in the agency. It’s really annoying for the people actually working on the brief, but I love it. For me it's about ensuring advertising outcomes are tied to our clients' business objectives, and that we're embedding all the cool stuff we know how to do into our clients' advertising programs.
What do you love most about your role?
I am always learning new things, new client industries, new technology and new ways of executing advertising. One day I will get a proper job, but this’ll do for now.
What’s the biggest challenge in your role?
Other than having to work with Tom, staying on top of what is new and current in the industry as an independent agency (vs being in a Multinational agency) takes a concerted effort. The IMAA does a great job of helping us stay up to date, but nothing beats staying inquisitive (and sending myself to conventions, preferably overseas).
Damon Mudge, Director of Marketing and Advertising Technology
What’s the biggest challenge in your role?
Keeping up to date is an ongoing, consistent challenge. That includes keeping abreast of tech changes in the media market – e.g. a cookieless future, server-side tagging, data warehousing, impending changes to the Privacy Act. It also includes being open to broader technology change (e.g. the evolution of AI) and looking at ways to leverage that to the benefit of our clients.
Another challenge I enjoy taking on, given my background as a CIO, is building bridges between our clients’ marketing and technology teams. It’s all in service of helping clients, especially those with complex internal IT environments, to quickly collate and leverage their data for advertising and media strategy, securely and in compliance with data privacy and governance objectives.
What attracted you to Audience Group?
Audience Group is an agency that is on the leading edge of media strategy and the use of martech and adtech on behalf of its clients. The founders understand the role that technology must play in effective, modern advertising programs and media buying strategies. It is important to me to be a part of an organisation that is pushing boundaries, and one in which I feel my skills can make a difference.
Some agencies don’t provide advanced martech and adtech integrations or advanced data analytics and data science support despite the impact it can have on media buying. Others are restructuring in order to introduce these skill sets to their offering. In some cases this is being driven by clients with requirements and requests, whereas we proactively help our clients understand the potential of leveraging their data and what can be achieved with effective first-party data strategies. As we onboard a client, we immediately seek to understand their data structures and identify how their data can help improve their media and advertising outcomes. With Audience Group this was built into the business from day one, eight years ago.
What are you focused on for 2024?
This year is about continuing to improve our integration of data privacy and risk management measures, advanced and speedy modelling and predictive analytics into our standard client packages. It’s about making sure every client gets access to those services and improving the availability of these services to midmarket organisations in Australia.
We’re also focused on looking for the next thing. Over the past few years we introduced custom bidding algorithms and the combined custom bidding with attention metrics. We’ll be increasing our usage of AI in terms of AI allocation and adding new variations of custom bidding algorithms. Our focus on continuous evolution ensures we are open to what’s next.
Tracey Rosen, Client Service Director
What does a typical day look like for you?
Every day the Client Services Team focuses on the three key areas of the Audience Group offering: helping clients manage their advertising investment, measure the outcomes of that investment, and leverage predictive analytics so they can make their next advertising investment decisions with confidence.
As an evidence-based agency, the Client Services Team focuses on communicating the value and performance of our clients advertising investments. Our clients appreciate that they know what aspects of their media spend and advertising campaigns are working. One of my day-to-day jobs is to help clients understand, measure and report on the impact of their advertising investments in ways that are relevant to their business metrics and commercial outcomes.
What’s the biggest challenge in your role?
When brands decide to work with Audience Group, one of the reasons they choose us is because of how we can harness their first-party data proactively, at speed. They really come on the journey with us to be able to then use that data to make sure their advertising investment contributes to business objectives.
However, our clients’ business objectives can be changeable as they adapt to market forces etc. My challenge is to keep open communication flowing so that our clients keep us informed when objectives change over time. I also work to understand from them how well we’ve been able to help them deliver against their KPIs. Then we are nimble enough that we can pivot and support the feedback or the updated strategic direction.
What is an aspect of your job at Audience Group that you value or appreciate?
Because we use data to actually prove the effectiveness of a campaign or to provide empirical evidence about how we have delivered on an objective, it makes my conversations with clients easier and more relevant.
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