Dolan Data Company 605 Launches Attribution Metrics

605, a data and analytics company created by Dolan Family Ventures, has launched the 605 Impact Index, which measures TV advertising’s impact on brand attributes and sales.

As marketers have shifted ad dollars from TV to digital outlets, TV networks have been looking for ways to better measure the return on advertising spending commercials generate. That has spawned great interest in attribution, which looks to quantify how much each part of a company’s marketing mix contributes to generating sales.

605 acquired a company that worked with Walmart and Uber two years ago and developed its Impact Index as a complete way to measure TV advertising.

“Although recent developments in the field of TV attribution are a mov[ing] in the right direction, most of these solutions focus on sales attribution only,” said Ben Tatta, co-founder and president of 605.

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Tatta said you also must look at what marketers call the top of the marketing funnel, where brand reputations are built, as well as the bottom of the funnel, where sales occur.

“These ‘bottom-funnel’ methods fail to capture the enormous impact TV delivers in terms of brand awareness, perception and favorability. After years of conducting full-funnel attribution, 605 developed the Impact Index as a turn-key solution for measuring the total impact of TV advertising in a scientific, yet easy-to-implement way,” Tatta said.

The Impact Index takes advantage of 605’s matchable data sets of viewer data, which can be combined with a marketer’s first-party data.

“Over the past few years, 605 and Walmart Corporate Affairs have worked together to identify the relationship between television, brand reputation and consumer purchasing behavior, which has yielded tremendous results,” said Aaron Bernstein, senior director of insights and advocacy at Walmart.

605 can generate two types of metrics for evaluating advertising campaigns:

  • Brand Impact Metrics, which are designed to measure the ‘upper’ and ‘mid-funnel’ impact including brand awareness, brand perception, brand favorability, and net promoter score (NPS); and
  • Sales Impact Metrics, which are designed to measure the ‘bottom funnel’ impact including ad engagement, ad response, sales conversion and conversion lift.

“While we all still call it TV, what those two letters mean for data-savvy advertisers has greatly evolved in just the past few quarters,” said Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the Video Advertising Bureau. “What hasn’t changed is consumers spending the vast majority of their viewing time with premium TV video content. TV continues to deliver real impact against all audiences in scale, just as more advanced TV data insights for advertisers are rapidly rising.”

Jon Lafayette

Jon has been business editor of Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He focuses on revenue-generating activities, including advertising and distribution, as well as executive intrigue and merger and acquisition activity. Just about any story is fair game, if a dollar sign can make its way into the article. Before B+C, Jon covered the industry for TVWeek, Cable World, Electronic Media, Advertising Age and The New York Post. A native New Yorker, Jon is hiding in plain sight in the suburbs of Chicago.