PHOENIX — If Maggie Zhang could choose a tagline for this year it would be “prove incremental value.” Because while it’s a given that digital and television advertising works, “altogether we need to understand how each channel, each different tactic actually works and contributes to the final outcome in order to advise or inform advertisers to allocate budgets and optimize outcomes.”

The SVP of Video Research & Insights for Dentsu Aegis Network is seeing an “explosive growth of attribution vendors,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Such providers have traditionally been digital oriented, measuring multi-touch attribution across all digital touchpoints. “But now, especially this year, there’s been a growing school of TV specialists,” Zhang says.

“They are able to attribute the impact of big-screen, top-funnel impact of TV advertising to the actual business outcome in terms of any type of conversion metric, be it foot traffic or online purchase, offline purchase.”

Dentsu Aegis has been doing “a very thorough audit across the entire spectrum of TV/cross platform video attribution vetting. It’s still going and we’ve learned a lot just to understand their modeling approach, their TV/video data sources, their conversion metric sources and how they can match together and modeling and analyze and predict the outcome.”

In an age sensitive to consumer privacy and increasing data regulations, the media agency is looking into “pixel-less methodology” to measure both conversion and viewership data.

“So ACR data is one good example and there are also a lot of other tech platforms that are able to provide data, especially on the back end without pixels. So we’re able to measure in terms of the audience in a one-to-one, deterministic fashion.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.