Attribution Beyond Vanity Metrics - Heather Roestamadji

0:00Heather Roestamadji:Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. Today's episode comes live to you from Possible, where the ideas move fast, the conversations matter, and the coffee has no chance of surviving. I'm joined by Heather Rastamaji, Director of Growth Strategy at Claritas.

0:42Heather Roestamadji:Heather sits at the intersection of audience intelligence, AI-driven optimization, and multi-channel measurement, helping brands turn complexity into clarity and data into real business growth. Now, with nearly two decades of experience, she knows how to cut through the noise, connect strategy to performance, and answer the question every marketer eventually faces, what's actually working? I'm sitting right across from her, Heather. It is so great to meet you. Welcome to the CMO Whisperer Podcast. Thanks for having me. You are so welcome. Okay, let's do, for the first time meeting, give us the quick snapshot.

1:23Heather Roestamadji:What lane do you live in every day and what challenges are brands bringing to you the most right now? Yeah, so my everyday day-to-day is helping manage the growth of the measurement product suite at Claritas, or attribution and incrementality solutions it's an omni-channel measurement suite and most often brands are coming to me because they they are frustrated with the inflation of results that come from in-platform measurement for instance if you're advertising on the ctv platform if you're advertising on even an audio publisher platform that offers their own attribution that's very inflated they're grading their own homework and so they're coming to claritas to have a holistic view of every channel that they're advertising on, but then also an unbiased performance metrics to see how their campaigns are really performing in general without being worried that someone is inflating results to make their own channel look good.

2:19Heather Roestamadji:Okay, so we're recording this on day one of possible. By the end of the week, what do you think the smartest marketers will actually be talking about? You know, I think they're going to be talking about how they can leverage AI in the best way. That's like the biggest buzzword of the year, the past five years. Keep going. All the time. But what I really hope they consider, not just what the programs we're having in mind of maybe not so subtly selling their own solutions. What I really hope they consider is what they're going to be incorporating that can be measured and performed and validated against.

2:58that's so crucial in any investment you make. And if it's not going to be an unbiased measurement, if it's not going to be, you know, something that can be proven, like you really should take a step back and consider your strategy.

3:09Heather Roestamadji:Are you also hearing, because, you know, I talk to CMOs all the time and marketing leaders, and there's so much now pressure now to tie everything they're doing to revenue. Are you seeing that kind of wave of, yeah, I got to do this, got to do that, but how does it tie to revenue? Yeah, they often don't realize that from an attribution perspective, you can pass through revenue through a simple pixel implementation. We offer that as added value. And it really helps not only advertisers understand which ones are driving the most incremental revenue, but it really helps publishers make the case for why you should be spending money with our channel or with our with our platforms.

3:46It's because we are driving this much incremental revenue for you and you can't afford not to advertise with us.

3:52Heather Roestamadji:Right, exactly. Exactly. So marketers have more data than ever, right? We know that. Yet many, and at least the ones I talk to, seem less confident than ever, maybe in the validity of the data. Or what are you hearing? What do you think when it comes to data and confidence level, I guess, is the way to put it? We hear a lot at Claritas that they think that the attribution results are too good to be true. I actually get that counter quite often. And when we're talking to them, There's a few things that I think they should understand and anyone can use this when they're evaluating a measurement provider.

4:26They don't only have to work with Claretas. So I would love if everyone only worked with Claretas and make my job a lot easier. But, you know, you can provide the odds ratio evaluation where you take the reach and frequency of the campaign. You look at the analytics on your website and just kind of look at America's conversion rate to see, you know, how many households are just converting on your website. Right. And then look at the specific campaign and measurement that you're looking at and look at that conversion rate. That should be higher than America's conversion rate. Right. They got the right target and it should be driving more than if you did nothing.

5:01And so a good measurement provider should not come in under that. Then you're under attributing. So that's one simple gut check that you can take. Then another thing that Clare Toss does, especially is journey truthing. We do this once a year where we set up a controlled experiment, controlled environment for panelists and internal employees as well. We'll go through this control journey of interacting with an advertisement that we serve and making a conversion that we tell them to make. And then we track their device, their information, the whole gambit to validate that we are still measuring what we think we're measuring, that we are accounting for any data loss signals along the way.

5:41And we adjust our projections and our methodology accordingly to adjust for some of that signal loss and provide signal loss recovery.

5:49Heather Roestamadji:So you've said measurement should be infrastructure, not a dashboard. What did you mean by that? Well, it should be part of your everyday. It should be integrated every day. You shouldn't just be looking at a dashboard for results. You should be ingesting these reports and using them for your decision making. all of our reporting can be fed into through an API connection, or it can be delivered to an S3 for you to ingest automatically through a Snowflake integration, if you will, or any other business intelligence tools. So you shouldn't just be logging into a dashboard and then logging back out.

6:20You can incorporate it into the bigger picture of your business decisions.

6:25Heather Roestamadji:Where's, this is a big one. Where's the biggest disconnect or plural today between media spend and real business outcomes? We touched on it earlier, but I think ROI, proving real ROI, incrementality for sure, with tying it into business outcomes. But I think also people are so used to just the default KPIs. There's like site visits and there's purchases, but a lot of people just even default to page views. And you can dig deeper than that. If you do event based tracking, then you can really get into the nitty gritty of what actions on this website are being driven by the campaigns. And I think you do need to take a step back to realize the strategy of, you know, what do I want to get out of this campaign?

7:13Do I really just want site visits? And then not only that, so there's that whole from the measurement perspective of what they're measuring. But what I find people are missing is what they do after that. They're not acting upon it. Make this strategy and then they don't adjust in real time. And that's like kind of losing the plot. Yeah.

7:33Heather Roestamadji:Oh, I have to stop you there. And it may be rhetorical because you don't know. I don't know. Only they know. But why do they stop? Why don't they stop? Yeah. Like, what? I don't know. I wish I could sit. You know, you see these results of campaigns with specific publishers. And some of it really is like a personality play. They just like working with the publisher. And so they continue to do it. Or it's a cost measure. sometimes it's cost effective to continue advertising with a publisher even though you know they're not performing for you so that's some of it some of it's you know annual agreements that they have to fulfill um so i understand the balance and it's difficult decisions to make i'm glad i don't have to make those yeah right exactly so first party data right it's always the holy grail right everybody wants it um that's how are the brands are truly activating it well versus is just simply collecting it.

8:26I think the ones that are activating it well are the ones that are, you know, using it as more than just understanding their customer. So they're using it to profile their customer, of course. That's the basic baseline of understanding who your customer is. But then you have to literally activate it in your media plan. So you should be working with publisher partners that talk the same language as far as a segmentation perspective goes. but then take it even a level further and you should be able to track the performance of those segments specifically like are are my customers who i think are the highest converters actually the highest converters are they reacting to my creative or are there other segments that are reacting to my creative that's one thing that claretos really does set us apart because we can give you that that level of performance from our segments that you've activated in your media plan across the publishers, across the DSPs, within our measurement platform and also within our reporting out exports, we can tell you which segments are performing, which ones like the creative and which ones aren't responding at all, even though they're a common website converter.

9:34Heather Roestamadji:Right. Right. Where's that disconnect? Yeah. Interesting. Let's talk about waste in media, right? It feels like a silent problem, at least to me. Why does so much of it remain unchecked? I think some of it, it has to do with like agreements ahead of time. You know, they just agree that they're going to be spending a little bit with the, with the impressions and with exposures ahead of time. And so they just have to do it to fulfill the agreement rather than looking at performance and making efficiencies. So one thing to, you know, they just kind of set it and forget it, but there are, there are optimizations that you can make to take advantage of every single impression and not waste the spend that you're spending.

10:17And so rather than set it and forget it or just spend it and let happen what it will, you make optimizations within it with audience optimization. If you make optimizations that Claretas offers as well as audience optimization, but we also offer like site retargeting and suppression where we're tracking who is coming to the website, we're tracking who is converting from the campaign, we can suppress the people who made the purchase so you don't keep targeting them over and over again and you're retargeting the people who came to the website but didn't make the purchase and so that helps with the efficiency so you're helping boost and keep stay top of mind for these advertisers it's just like any standard site retargeting product but one thing that the use case for claritas site retargeting specifically is helpful is for audio publishers that don't have their own conversion pixels, they can leverage our pixel, our conversion pixel, and then use our data to do retargeting within their platform.

11:14And they don't have that. They haven't had that capability because they don't have the pixel data. They have to use our pixel data.

11:20Heather Roestamadji:Right, exactly. So it's not a question of eliminating waste entirely. It's minimizing. Minimizing waste and taking advantage of, you know, getting the best bang for your buck. So when brands get smarter with targeting and measurement, What are some ripple effects that happen beyond just marketing metrics? Oh, my goodness. They just, they grow. I mean, they grow from a brand awareness because they're able to spend more. And not only are they just spending more and just throwing money at it, like, whatever sticks to the wall, they're also, like, spending smarter, and that is helping them grow even more.

11:59You know, I see people that partner with us from a measurement perspective, audience perspective, that do the full suite of cleric cost and they they're some of the thought leaders in the marketplace that they're even they're even here today at the event yeah yeah it's it just seems so

12:15Heather Roestamadji:it's like i have a better fishing rod so i can give you a better fishing rod to collect more fish no i'm just gonna use my old one why if i'm giving you like everything you need to be Everything you need to be successful. And to find it a little bit along the way. Right? Yeah. And adapt it as the world. Obviously, the world's changing. I don't know. I'm putting common sense into this discussion. I might say, too, something else that I can see measurement having a bigger role in the future when it comes to creatives is helping validate your AI creative. So I've seen people going through layoffs quite often in marketing and advertising in lieu of using AI to do some of their creative work for them.

13:00If you're making that decision, you could at least use measurement to help you know which one the AI got right and which one it didn't.

13:08Heather Roestamadji:People want to repeat that one, by the way. So go back and because that's a really, especially during this conference. Yeah. Right. Okay. There's the Hatfields and McCoys. there's the Capulets and the Montagues, and then there's sales and marketing, right? Yeah. How can better measurement help alignment with those two mortal enemies, if you will? I think it helps them work hand in hand. And in fact, I work with sales and marketing teams together all the time. And even at Claretos, we work with sales and marketing from a measurement perspective. I think from a marketing perspective, it helps enable the sales team.

13:46Like they should be seen as partners anyway, really. Yeah, we help them prove performance. So we make the sales team jobs easier. We make the marketing team's job also easier because we're giving them the data that says our product works and then that helps enable the sales team to say, Hey, our product works. This is an easy sell. It's an easy, easy conversation. And so incorporating measurement gives like data driven insights as to why you should be working with XYZ agencies. Our campaigns do boost results. Why you should be working with publishers. you know, are, you know, working with us helps boost your results.

14:21But then it also helps the advertiser understand from a sales and marketing, more so from a marketing perspective, you know, which, which publishers and which agency they, that are the smartest ones to be working with and the best data that help boost their results. And, and those are the ones that they're going to shift the partnerships towards.

14:39Heather Roestamadji:Okay. We touched on AI, but let's, let's pull back the curtain here and and i'm gonna ask you to i'm not gonna name names of products and things but when it comes to ai what's just noise right now in your opinion you're not seeing her but she's she's checking for are we listening devices anybody i didn't say i didn't say i never said name names that's why that's my preface it What do I think with AI? What's just noise or what's this kind of like hyperbole in your lens? That's the thing I think. I think that it's not the easy button that everyone thinks it is. You have to remember that AI gets it wrong.

15:25And without the right skill set supervising AI in any use case, it's just going to be our downfall. You really have to value the people that work for you, that understand the data that the AI is ingesting, to understand how to check the AI's output for correctness in the first place. Or it's really not going to save you time. You're going to lose money. You're going to lose trust. Like I say proceed with caution.

15:53Heather Roestamadji:Got it. Very politically correct. And you're not seeing her. She's struggling. And I'm going to have to cut her off. Okay. So, you know, I talk to leaders a lot, not just CMOs, every type of leader. So looking at leaders only, how should leaders operative think about attribution today differently? I think people should really understand that attribution is an empowerment tool. You know, it should empower you to have confidence in your media plan. It should empower you to have confidence even in your own products and it should empower you to know where your money is going from from the media perspective but also what is driving the most results so that you can continue in real time to shift and that's the other thing that I like about attribution a lot obviously I'm biased but it gives you data in real time so that when something isn't working you can shift in real time to shift or spend to what is working we give insights off into like create when it's time for a creative refreshes as well for like frequency capping perspective when you're not going to get any more lift in the campaign performance and it's time for a refresh um that you know that's empowering you know you're not just like blindly launching something into the ether and having no idea if it's working or not we're telling you we're giving you those answers clearly um and you're no longer relying on click data which is only like you know one percent of of the view through, you're not reliant on people being logged in.

17:26You really see who was exposed to my ad and later convert it. And will they do it again? Did this drive revenue? You know, you give all these you give all these insights. It really helps you just be smarter, a smarter marketer.

17:38Heather Roestamadji:All right. Last question. If you could give every CMO listening right now one mindset, mindset shift to make right now on growth and measurement, what would that be or advice doesn't be, you know, what would you say? one thing, CMOs, here's what you need to think about differently when it comes to growth and measurement. Yeah, I'd say be very wary of in-platform measurement that is creating their own homework. And you should really consider the value of a third-party measurement provider because they're unbiased and they understand me. Well, listen, what a treat. Absolutely treat. Hold on, I'm going to try it one more time.

18:11Heather Roestamadji:Heather Rastamaji. Yeah, you got it. Bam. Damn. And moms would be so proud. Right? You can send us to them. We're coming live, like I said, from Possible. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Well, that wraps up another episode of the CMO Whisperer Show. I hope you shared this episode with your friends. And if you have not already, please subscribe to be kept up to date on all the latest episodes. And if you're so inclined, leave me a review on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.