On this episode of The Sonic Truth, we’re joined by Shanil Chande, Commercial & Partnerships Director at Hawk, an Azerion company. Shanil shares his expertise on the latest trends in CTV and digital audio measurement, the biggest challenges brands face in attribution, and how advanced tools like Veritonic are changing the game. We discuss how advertisers can move beyond vanity metrics, optimize their omnichannel strategy, and prove real business outcomes from their media investments. If you want to understand how to measure and maximize performance in CTV, audio, and beyond, this episode is for you!
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Host: On this episode of the Sonic Truth, Kristen Sharon is joined by Shanil Chand, Commercial & Partnerships Director at Hawk, an Azerion company. Kristen and Shanil dive into the evolving world of omnichannel measurement, discussing how brands can better track performance across CTV and digital audio and the biggest challenges in attribution. Thank you for tuning in and welcome back to the Sonic Truth.
Shanil Chande: Good. All good.
Kristen Sharon: Welcome back to the Sonic Truth. Super excited today to have Shanil Chande in studio with us, Commercial & Partnerships Director at Hawk, an Azerion company. Welcome, Shanil.
Shanil: Hi, Kristen. How’s it going?
Kristen: It’s going well, thanks. Yourself?
Shanil: Good. Yes. All good. Very excited to be here, so thank you very much for having me.
Kristen: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for making the time. The pleasure is ours. We’re going to get into introductions and a little bit of background here, but from my research, I know that you’ve been at Hawk for a little over 10 years now and you were one of the first UK hires on the ground, is that correct?
Shanil: It is indeed. Yeah. So I was very fortunate to be one of the team that helped to launch Hawk into the UK market from France and I’ve been here ever since. So yeah, I’ve seen the company change a lot in that time, and I’m sure we’ll dig a little bit into that as we go throughout today’s podcast.
Kristen: Amazing. Well, that’s the perfect segue. Just for the listeners that may be unaware, can you share a little bit about your role at Hawk and how you serve to help brands navigate omnichannel measurement?
Shanil: Yeah, absolutely. So before we deep dive into my role itself, it’s probably worthwhile setting the scene on us as a business, and I guess how this is evolving over time and how this has evolved over time. So Hawk is the buying platform of the Azerion group, meaning that Hawk is as a product within the wider Azerion ecosystem. So Azerion is a Dutch company with global scale and local expertise, given our strong physical presence across the globe. With a Azerion acquisition of Hawk in 2023, it now means that we have an end-to-end ecosystem consisting of our omnichannel DSP, which is Hawk and SSP, our DMP, which really sits at the heart of everything that we do and really powers everything from insights through to activation and is very, very strong when it comes to multi-market scale and scalable data. We also have our owned and operated inventory as well. We offer brands full choice in the way that they work with us, and it means that brands and advertisers can either work with us as a full stack or in a modular approach offering interoperability and malleability to suit the needs of our clients. My role entails running all things commercial for Hawk in the UK and increasingly beyond as well, meaning that I get to work with so many fantastic partners from the publisher side to our SSP partners, to our amazing data and measurement partners and every business in between to increase adoption of Hawk across the landscape, build new products, and drive long-term strategy and success with our agency partners.
Hawk and Azerion in general solves for the industry issue of fragmentation and a huge part of this comes from our connected omnichannel approach meaning that applying unified data into planning, activation, and crucially measurement, we can look holistically at a brand’s challenges and help them to solve for that through the technology that we own. Cross channel measurement obviously can be complex given the various identifiers and nuances that each channel carries. However, our technology really enables advertisers to solve for this as best as possible. So we offer measurement from upper to lower funnel, and the work that we do with yourselves [inaudible] really, really helps us to quantify the success of our campaigns from an AV perspective. So really, really looking forward to digging into that a little bit deeper over the next 20 minutes or so.
Kristen: Wow. Thank you for that. You’re just a little busy. It’s so great to hear. You guys really do…
Shanil: It’s a complex ecosystem that’s ever evolving, but they say busy is good, right? So it certainly keeps me on my toes.
Kristen: For sure. Obviously, you guys specialize in both CTP and digital audio among other things. Are you seeing any trends in advertiser demand for better measurement of these channel?
Shanil: Yeah, absolutely. Loads of trends that not just siloed to CTV and audio as you mentioned too, of our specialist channels, but also challenges and trends across programmatic audio, across display and video, across the in-game arenas, all of the various channels that we offer. But as CTV and digital audio step into that addressable arena, I guess one of the trends that we’re seeing is, there’s often an expectation that metrics can be quantified on digital channels in the same way across all of the various channels. Actually, it’s quite nuanced and highly nuanced across all of the various channels that we offer. We’re now getting to a point where measurement across channels is robust, it’s scalable, it’s highly achievable, but like I said, there needs to be an appreciation for the nuances that each channel would offer and the relative strengths of each of those channels in driving success across a plan as well. On the whole, agencies know the baseline metrics of the channels themselves. We all know that audio can be quantified via listen through rate and CTV can be quantified via view through rate. However, I guess as a business we believe that those should be basic hygiene factors that are used throughout a campaign to determine success as you’re going along and to optimize whilst you’re in flight. But we’re seeing an increasing demand from agencies and brands to move past those metrics that we really see as table stakes now and really dive deeply into the effect that those channels are having more holistically. For us, that can take many different shapes and we’re really, really proud of the variety of different measurement tools that we can offer advertisers to do that. Be that via our proprietary brand lift product search lift through our partnership with [inaudible], incremental reach on digital audio and CTV through a variety of different partners that we work with. Of course, the great work that we do with yourselves to measure organic onsite lands and actions. All of these things really do lift audio and CTV into a different space when it comes to measurement and allows us to, I guess, democratize measurement against other channels and to really look at that through one singular lens.
It’s really, really important, like I said, even though we have the capability to do that in a siloed manner, really, really important that we appreciate the nuance that each channel brings to the table and understand the role that’s trying to play. So whilst comparisons of the channels versus each other may be relevant on some briefs, it might not be relevant on others. It’s really just really important that we work collaboratively with brands and agencies, establish the best frameworks that we can possible. So a few trends there, but I guess overarchingly to summarize the fact that we’re seeing more and more demand and more increasingly… the more and more capability really to move past just being able to do traditional measurement and really looking at some of these highly measurable, highly nuanced ways of quantifying campaigns, which is great.
Kristen: So obviously there’s, to your point, the increasing demand, there’s the capability and availability of those tools like brand lift, search lift, incremental reach that are helping to accomplish more granular measurement and empowering data and insights. Are there any other ways in which the approach to omnichannel measurement has evolved over the last few years?
Shanil: Yeah, definitely. Like I said, the industry is constantly evolving and I think that’s one of the most exciting aspects of our industry and particularly ad tech within that as a driving force. There are far more solutions than we’ve ever had before available to us and that’s really moved the space forward quite considerably. One of the things we’re seeing is more and more, I guess, traditional media partners who formally will have had data and appended that to media and sold that into agencies actually decoupling their data and measurement from supply. That’s bringing a lot of new solutions to the table. So I mentioned our partnership with [inaudible] that we’ve had for a number of years now, which is exclusive to Hawk. We work very closely with the likes of Samm TV, for example. We ourselves have an amazing wealth of data available from our own DMP. The ability to now decouple that and the wants to now decouple that and to push that into decoupled data and measurement has definitely been something that we’ve seen come to market over the last few years. Important to note that omnichannel itself is quite a fairly new concept within the market, and therefore, agencies and brands are still evolving their processes and approaches when it comes to omnichannel measurement and really trying to dial up what’s working and dial down areas that might be depreciating in value. That’s completely normal. Obviously, technology will facilitate the fact that these things will continue to happen.
When running a truly omnichannel plan, it’s often that geo will be the proxy for measurement. It’s really the one common denominator between all of the channels themselves. So if you think about mobile inherently uses maids, the open web often uses cookie data, digital out of home doesn’t really have an identifier, completely identifier list. CTV might use a user agent for example. So there’s a host of different IDs that you can use across the various channels, but geo is really the one common denominator. So if you’re running a truly omnichannel plan of five channels working harmoniously together, it’s often the case that we’ll do exposed and non-exposed geo and look at the measurements of control and exposed between those two. I think it’ll just continue to evolve. Omnichannel measurement will just continue to evolve given the challenges and complexities that the industry faces around IDs and fragmentation and wall gardens. So that’s where we’re currently at, but no doubt in the next few years that will continue to change.
Kristen: What are some of the biggest challenges and/or misconceptions surrounding omnichannel measurement?
Shanil: So there are lots of challenges, but through technologies like ours, hopefully we can come up with a variety of different really robust solutions to those challenges as well. Like I said, there’s more and more solutions out there than ever before, and I think there’s more and more want and need for collaboration across the market given the way that everything is evolving at the moment, both economically and from a technology perspectives and lots of challenges, but also lots of opportunities. I guess the challenges are, as I mentioned previously, the identifiers across the other channels are so different and each channel uses slightly different identifiers to be able to both target and measure, but also each screen and each format is so different as well. So CCV is a large format, video based medium, one to many, but also can be one-to-one landscaping orientation and consumed as long form content. If you look at audio, it’s almost all non-visual, barring the companion banners that you might have with some suppliers consumed across multiple devices. So mobile, desktop, connected speakers and again, can be one to one or one to many. If you extrapolate that across four or five different channels, it’s clear that each channel is inherently different in terms of everything from composition right through to when you are consuming it down to whether it’s visual or audio lead. That’s just the nature of media. Everything does different things at different times and there’s no right or wrong answer. But there’s lots of opportunities too. So like I mentioned, geo is a really good common denominator across those various channels. For measurement, you can look at tying various channels together. So from out of home, you can do some really nice mobile retargeting and look at the effect of one channel versus dual channel exposure when it comes to that. The same is true of audio and mobile as well. CTV ties really nicely together on a geo basis with all of those different channels. So even though there are challenges, there’s lots of opportunities to tie those together and to look at measurement more holistically. Like I said, working with partners like yourselves and others that I’ve mentioned previously really, really does help us to do that in a really robust and accurate way.
Kristen: For sure. It takes a village and we’re, I think we’re really lucky to have the ability to partner with so many great vendors and companies to overcome some of these challenges and to increase the capabilities across the board for omnichannel measurement.
Shanil: For sure.
Kristen: Speaking of the work that we’ve done together, a little self-serving here over a second, you recently measured a campaign for a brand using the veritonic platform, understanding that we’ll want to, at least, for now keep the name of that brand under Ralph. Are there any key takeaways you can talk about, or just in general, can you talk a little bit about how… like some of the data that you received and how it was optimized or evaluated. I’d love to just give our listeners a little bit of insight into how some of these partnerships can enrich the measurement and the data coming out of campaigns today.
Shanil: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re seeing increasing demand for the measurement that you yourselves can bring to the table. That’s really driven by some of the really positive results that we’ve seen. So as you mentioned, we’ve worked with a couple of brands now who we’ve seen really, really phenomenal results for. But before I get to the results, the ability to quantify organic onsite lands from previously traditional offline channels like audio and TV really, really does hold a huge amount of wealth when it comes to the overall measurement of the strategies that we’re looking to execute. Currently, we work with a number of brands given our rich display and video background who look at onsite performance. This is at most brands will do this as well and look at onsite performance as a proxy of success, especially in today’s e-comm driven world. Up until recently, we haven’t had really had a way to do that robustly off the back of audio and CTV. So just the ability to measure that by Yourselves has provided a really, really strong stream to our boat. The fact that that data feeds into the dashboard that we have in real time allows us to tag up the various suppliers that we’re using and look at all trends from where’s driving the best conversion rates and landing from a publisher standpoint, what time of day and day of week trends we’re seeing and really allows our ops team to optimize those campaigns in real time in a way that they haven’t really had the ability to do so on those two channels looking at this specific metric previously. So it’s brought a lot of value to the overall offering and the way that we can prove out that audio and CTV really does deliver those onsite metrics.
For one of the campaigns that we ran, we saw a 1.9% organic land on the website itself, which actually, when you think about some of the display CTRs that you might see, and therefore the subsequent drop off of number of those users that actually land on site really is phenomenally high. I think that display and video would be proud of a conversion rate like that. So it really does dispel a few myths around yes, audio and CCV can be a little bit more expensive than display and video when it comes to a CPM, but when you’re looking at outcomes, it really does help us bring that down to the baseline and show that those channels are highly, highly efficient in driving mid and lower funnel metrics, something that we haven’t really had the chance to prove recently. I think that’s what’s been really, really pleasing to see with the measurement that we’ve done with yourselves.
Kristen: Did you find that ROI increased the brands that you work with generally, like their confidence in audio and CTV going forward and that will perhaps drive additional spends against those channels?
Shanil: Yeah, totally. With those brands themselves, but also with a whole host of other brands that have seen results like this and that have come up with objections to us to say, “Look, we’d love to try audio and we’d love to try CTV, but our real quantifying metric is on site behavior and I just can’t do that via those channels.” So number one, being able to get over that hurdle and to bring this new solution to them has been fantastic. But then what’s even better is the fact that when you actually see the results, you can totally see that those channels are exceptional at driving the onsite behaviors that we would want. That’s even without a flick through. So those are organic site lands. People that have then remembered the brand, typed it into their phone or their desktop and then landed on that site. So the conversion rate is probably even higher than what we’ve reported to see that from an organic basis is really, really pleasing.
Kristen: I think we’ve touched on this a little bit, but is there anything else that you would add to the question of, what are the most important KPIs for brands investing in CTV and audio?
Shanil: So you’ve obviously got the, as I called them earlier, table stakes metrics like your CTRs and your VCRs. Those are usually the metrics that brands will… when you put a channel on a plan, will look to as a benchmarking KPI. How many views and how many listens am I going to drive from this activity? That’s great. As I mentioned earlier, that’s like a hygiene factor for us and we can absolutely optimize towards that, but it really is about going further and further and looking at real life metrics off the back of that. Not just looking at the digital metrics, but looking at the effect that that had on that brand’s search uplift, looking at how many incremental users or audiences and that brand was able to reach as a result of activating that channel. Looking at the attitudinal behavior from brand studies and looking at upper funnel right through to lower funnel. From our audio products, you can track Footfall Winter Store in real time. So looking at how many people went into the stores themselves is really powerful and a really key indicator of success. The work that we’re doing with Yourself when it comes to onsite behavior. So I think it’s really about having as much measurement open to you as possible. As a brand, really identifying what is the one key thing other than the CTRs and VTRs that we want to quantify. What is my holistic plan trying to do, and how are all of my different channels laddering up to help me to achieve that? That’s really how we try to approach both our recommendations and our measurement frameworks that we put forwards to brands and as part of that what channels end up being recommended to the brands themselves as well. So a variety of different KPIs and some of those mentioned there, but partners like us who can offer lots of those measurement tools, hopefully in a really good position to help brands into new channels that they might not have tried previously.
Kristen: Where do brands obtain the benchmarks that they should be looking to evaluate campaign performance against some of these metrics?
Shanil: So much of that will come from past campaign learnings, I would assume. Also looking at their wider business objectives. So looking at a micro level, a brand may look at what they’ve done previously and use previous metrics as a benchmark for success. We totally understand that and that’s a really sensible way to do it. I would just encourage brands who may not have tried audio or CTV or some of those new emerging programmatic channels, try not to compare the metrics that you’re getting from your first campaigns on programmatic audio and CTV to legacy years’ worth of display and video activity. Because ultimately, like I said, those channels are different and they’re driving different outcomes. It is important to look at some comparison piece to see which channels are working and which channels aren’t. But I would say don’t get spooked if the metrics aren’t exactly where you want them to be when you start, because ultimately, display and video may have had a similar journey and you can only build that up over lots and lots of time. Then of course, at a macro level, that will be set within the brand’s marketing department. So wanting to shift preference away from competitors over to brand X by a certain percentage. Obviously, we can work really closely with those partners that we work closely with to help them to achieve that as well. Make sure that everything’s laddering up to those overarching MMM studies that they might be conducting. So yeah, a couple of takes there both on a micro and a macro level.
Kristen: That’s really good advice. In terms of looking ahead, understanding that this is audio, CTV, the digital advertising space in general is such a rapidly and constantly evolving space, it’s hard to even say where do you see the future of omnichannel measurement heading in the next three to five years. So maybe we focus on the next six to 12 months or a year to two years, but do you have any thoughts on where you see it heading and what’s the one piece of advice you’d give to brands looking to improve their measurement strategy?
Shanil: Gosh, I would even say six to 12 months and one to two years is tough. If I look at where our measurement products were two years ago, they’re in a completely different space to where we are now.
Kristen: So true.
Shanil: It’s evolving at lightning pace, but in terms of the trends that we’ve seen around more and more measurement solutions coming to market, I think that’s going to continue. We live in brands, advertisers, everybody really in this macroeconomic climate needs to prove that everything that we’re doing, every penny that we are investing, every partner that we’re working with is bringing value to the overarching goals of the business, whatever it does and measurement is obviously the way that we go about quantifying that. So whether it’s qualitative or quantitative, ultimately, it’ll be quantitative on the bottom line. But when working with partners, there’ll just be more and more measurement solutions in the market. A greater trend of some of those traditionally upper funnel channels moving towards the mid and lower funnel. That will be driven by the confidence that brands and agencies will get from looking at metrics like the ones that I described previously. So being able to look at audio and CTV and go, actually these are not just brilliant at driving brand awareness and mass reach and big screen fame. They’re actually really, really good at helping me to drive some of my mid funnel and lower funnel metrics as well. So I think we’ll start to see that converging of the funnel, those convergence of channels and those channels working really, really nicely together to provide a full funnel measurement solution for brands moving forward.
Ultimately real world outcomes, I think everything will be driven towards real world outcomes rather than the hygiene metrics that we described previously. Again, they’re important during the campaign to be able to optimize towards the best outcomes that you can, but ultimately, it’ll be how much does that help to shift the needle on the overarching KPIs that that brand may have. Finally, also greater ingestion of first party data, both from a targeting and from a measurement standpoint as well. So brands being able to ingest their first party data into technologies, whether that’s via agency’s proprietary products or whether that’s directly into platform, I think that’s going to be absolutely key in finding those audiences and incremental audiences to the ones that the brands already know will be really, really important to omnichannel and the platforms and the tech providers that can help brands to do that, I think will accelerate quicker.
Kristen: That makes perfect sense. Is there anything else that you’d like to leave our listeners with? Anything we haven’t touched on? Even if there are any listeners that haven’t yet experimented with CTV and digital audio, any words of advice, tips, et cetera, that you would want to leave as parting words with them? Something food for thought, if you will.
Shanil: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that right now, obviously we live in a complex and fragmented digital ecosystem, which can sometimes be daunting to approach for brands looking to step into new spaces. But with technologies like ours that help to connect the dots between the different channels that help to give you a unified view of everything that your campaign is doing with robust measurement and with experts in the people that you work with as well as the technology, I don’t think that omnichannel space has to be daunting. So I would just say if you’re thinking about omnichannel, if you’ve considered it and if you think that the fragmentation and the complexity of it might hold you back, if you try it, it might be easier than what you first think. I think creatively as well, there’s going to be a lot done over the next three to four years. I think AI will really help us to power creative build obviously still relying on fantastic creative agencies to help with that, but AI will help to allow us to reach new channels and brands to appear on new channels in a slightly easier way. So my overarching advice, if you’re thinking about omnichannel, if you’re thinking about running more and more channels and looking at the effect that has on your brand, it really can be easy if you work with the right technology and the right people.
Kristen: If anyone listening is interested in working with Hawk and Azerion, how can they reach you?
Shanil: You can reach out to us via our website. Hopefully people listening to this podcast will have had some engagement with Hawk and Azerion previously. But yeah, please do feel free to reach out via our website, via LinkedIn or via any route into the business that you may be familiar with. But website or LinkedIn, please, do feel free to get in touch.
Kristen: Beautiful. Well, thank you again so much for joining me today. Your insights into omnichannel measurement, particularly around CTV and digital audio have been incredibly valuable. It’s so clear that the industry is evolving rapidly and the ability to move beyond the table stake metrics, as you call them, to truly understand real world impact is more important than ever. We appreciate your expertise and all the work you and the team are doing to help brands navigate the landscape, and we hope to have you on again soon and to hear more of the great stuff you guys are doing.
Shanil: Amazing. Hope to be back soon. Thank you so much, Kristen. Thank you very much for inviting us today.
Kristen: Thank you so much.
