Why Better Brand Lift Data Makes Advertising Smarter with Alistair Hill of OnDevice

AdTechGod (0:00)

Welcome to the AdTechGodPod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to another episode of the AdTechGodPod, where we speak to the co-founders of our industry. Today, I'm joined by Alistair Hill, CEO and co-founder of OnDevice. Alistair has spent about 20 years in media and advertising research. Before starting OnDevice, he was a Senior Mobile Analyst at Metrix. And interestingly enough, he actually wrote his dissertation on the subject all the way back in college. You don't hear about that too often. Most people fall into this industry. He actually liked it while he was in college, which is very rare. So today, OnDevice, the company he co-founded, is really focused on brand lift and cross media measurement. They're trying to help advertisers understand a deceptively simple question, which is, did the advertising actually work? Just full disclosure, OnDevice is a Marketecture Live partner, and this episode is brought to you by OnDevice. So Alistair, thank you so much for joining me today, all the way from London.

Okay. So I want to hear about your background, but I think before we even start there, why were you writing about this in college? You don't hear that too often.

Alistair Hill (1:21)

Yeah.

It's linked to how I fell into the industry. So I was doing a business degree and I was 18 years old and I had to make a choice at the end of the first year. And they said, you know, do you want to go into economics? Do you want to do the accounting thing? Or do you want to go into marketing? And in reality was my 18 year old self just looked at the other people who were thinking about doing what. And it turned out that there were far more women on the marketing one. They were far better looking. And it turns out that was a sensible decision for an 18 year old to make. So that's how I got into advertising and marketing. So yeah, with that in mind, a couple of years later, they said you need to decide on what you're going to do for your dissertation. Now, one of the modules I loved was consumer behavior, understanding why people were doing what they were doing. And what was fascinating about internet advertising back in 2000 at the time was all of the articles written about how you would measure it. We're talking about clicks.

Everything was about clicks. And it just completely confused me because I was like, well, advertising is trying to influence people to do stuff sometimes at that point, but often at other times.

And so if it's all about clicks, then that just doesn't make any logical sense whatsoever. And so I wrote this dissertation, which if I'm honest with you, I was still in the pub a lot and probably wasn't the best student in the world. And so it's not a great piece of work because my mum still had it in the attic of our house a few years ago when I looked it out and it's barely logical. But it came to a very good conclusion. And my conclusion was clicks are going to be kind of useful for performance advertising, but will have no bearing whatsoever on anything to do with brand advertising. And if internet advertising was able to really take off, then there needed to be comparable metrics between internet, TV, out of home, radio, and so on. And it turns out 25 plus years later, that's my business.

AdTechGod (3:22)

It's pretty incredible when you look back at even just the creative that was used 20 years ago, it was entirely based off of trying to drive clicks. And it kind of amazes me that was the performance metric. Like that's what everybody was looking for. Like, hey, the click-through rate is 1%, half a percent, quarter percent, 01%. And you found that that click-through rate started to diminish, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the campaign wasn't effective. Like you still saw these conversions happen, maybe at a lower click-through rate, but people just got wiser to those banner ads and those calls to click.

Alistair Hill (3:57)

Exactly.

And then when I was at Conscore, this is maybe 15, 18 years ago, and there was a brilliant report which basically showed that there was a reverse correlation between people clicking on ads and brand impact. And basically what that showed is that people who have kept on ads are just like really weird people. There isn't any correlation between that and then nothing else. And that was really one of the motivations for me starting up the company and the products, this complete and utter confusion between the way in which something was being measured and the actual objective of what people were trying to do.