Making sense of influencer marketing measurement, plus bullish holding company forecasts: Datacenter Weekly

Publicis, IPG and Omnicom remain bullish about 2022 growth

On Thursday, “Publicis Groupe reported 10.3% organic revenue growth and a 21% increase in net revenue to €5.9 billion, or $6.01 billion, for its second quarter,” Ad Age’s Brian Bonilla reports. Publicis also raised its full-year organic revenue growth expectations to 6% to 7%—up from a prior forecast of 4% to 5%.

Also on Thursday, “Interpublic Group of Cos. reported 7.9% organic net revenue growth and a net revenue increase of 4.7% compared to last year, bringing the holding company’s net revenue to $2.38 billion,” per Bonilla. IPG likewise adjusted its forecast for organic revenue growth—to 6.5% for the full year, up from a previous 6%.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, “Omnicom Group reported an 11.3% increase in second-quarter organic revenue,” per Ad Age’s Keira Wingate, “with growth in every discipline and region.” Omnicom also hiked its full-year organic revenue growth forecast—to 6.5% to 7%, up from 6% to 6.5% previously.

Keep reading about the Publicis, IPG and Omnicom results and projections here, here and here.

Quantifying influencer marketing effectiveness

“The Association of National Advertisers is looking to set some standards in a category that has few—influencer marketing measurement,” reports Ad Age’s Jack Neff. “The country’s foremost marketer organization has issued its first guidelines for measuring influencer marketing, looking to create common ground for assessing the effectiveness of a fast-growing channel with widely disparate and confusing practices.”

Essential context: Neff notes that the ANA guidelines doc “details how each of the eight major social platforms for influencers—Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube—defines engagement differently,” which complicates platform-vs.-platform comparisons.

Background: Influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ has been working behind the scenes with various ANA members, including its customer Unilever, to develop a framework for influencer marketing measurement. (The ANA Influencer Marketing Advisory Board—which produced the ANA’s influencer marketing guidelines—is chaired by Casey DePalma McCartney, senior director, external communications and digital engagement at Unilever.)

Flashback: Regular readers of Datacenter Weekly might experience a bit of déjà vu regarding the issue of cross-platform measurement and comparison in the influencer marketing space. For instance, in the Aug. 27, 2021, edition of Datacenter Weekly, we wrote, “It’s important to note that CreatorIQ’s calculation of its so-called Engagement Rate metric varies a bit from platform to platform because of platform-specific capabilities and terminology. ... In other words, a strict apples-to-apples comparison isn’t possible because of user interface differences.”

What’s next: A CreatorIQ spokesperson tells Datacenter Weekly that it has already integrated the ANA standards into its platform—and will be issuing additional ongoing guidance for clients and brands next week.

What ‘nonmovement’ of data means

“When InfoSum said to advertisers and publishers that its platform does not ‘move’ their data,” writes Ad Age’s Garett Sloane, “it was a hard concept for potential clients to grasp, admits InfoSum CEO Brian Lesser. Clients—the ad agencies, brands and publishers—still had to upload data from their digital data stores into InfoSum; and to some, that seemed like ‘movement.’ Now, that step is being eliminated as one part of an upgrade to InfoSum’s data clean room and collaboration platform.”

How it works: “We invented the concept of ‘nonmovement’ of data,” Lesser explained to Sloane in a recent interview, “and what ‘nonmovement’ means is, if your data is in the InfoSum environment, and you have multiple partners that also have their data in the InfoSum environment, the data is never comingled. It stays in your environment and yet you can still collaborate.”

Essential context: “InfoSum said publishers like Disney and UK-based ITV are testing its next-generation platform, as is Annalect, Omnicom’s data-powered marketing platform,” Sloane adds.

Keep reading here.

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Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.

This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.