I'm so glad to have Jen Chick with us. She's the Vice President at Hilton Worldwide. Jen does a lot of work on media attribution and I'm glad we have her to give us an industry perspective on media attribution. Jen, glad to have you here. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here. Jen, how prevalent is the practice of media attribution these days? Is the trend growing? Is it decreasing? From your vantage point, how do you see the landscape of media attribution models? From my perspective just over my career in marketing it has absolutely been growing. You know, I think now it's not that uncommon as many years ago. I'd say fiveish years ago it was more unusual to find companies doing it but now I think you find most companies are doing it. Everything from consulting firms to ad agencies, to firms that specialize in marketing analytics offer these services. And so, a lot of marketers have access to specialized skills to help enable media mix modeling and marketing attribution for their marketing activities. I think there's a trend in changing and evolving the methodologies behind media attribution. I think, you know, it's no longer just about the top line channel mix, whether we should use TV or we should use print. But now when you start getting into the digital channels, in particular, and you think about multi-touch attribution versus last touch attribution and how you can really use media mix attribution modeling to help you better define how to use those channels. There's where I think is kind of the new horizon and is probably less sophisticated in the industry and less people using that, marketers using that than, than just overall media mix. That's great. Good to hear that there's a growing interest in media attribution models. Can you talk about why this trend is growing? Why more people are doing multi attribution touch media attribution models? Absolutely. You know, marketers are, as every function in the business but marketing in particular, is increasingly, you know, under that, the ask of senior management and leadership to really come to the table with what marketing is driving to really show a correlated view on the returns that all those dollars that we spend in marketing are actually bringing to hit the bottom line. And so, you know, really there's no, there's really not that many ways to show, particularly when you talk about upper funnel marketing activity, some broad awareness like TV, and prints, to be able to show the returns and the halo effect that that media has on the rest of your marketing and really on your overall revenue growth. But marketing attribution is really one of the few ways that you can actually do that. And it's no longer acceptable just to look at things like awareness or, you know, just purely kind of brand health metrics as a way to say "Yes, marketing is working". I think the digital landscape has also propelled us into having the ability to measure a lot more. We have a lot more data available to us than we had to, say even 10 years ago. We're able to really use that data in new and different ways to get insights into the revenue we're driving that we weren't able to do and it's much harder to do when you're just looking at impression levels on a TV spot, for example. So it's the pressure for marketing to prove the return on their investment and the growth of digital media that is driving a lot of this interest in media attribution models. Now, turning to actually implementing some of these media attribution models, what do you see, as say, the three biggest challenges managers face when they get to actually implementing a media attribution model? So there are a number of factors that make it challenging. I'd say probably the three biggest, first is balancing short term goals and long term brand health and how those two interplay together. This is a topic we talk about quite a lot here at Hilton. You know, we know our brands are important. We also spend a lot of our marketing funding across our portfolio of brands so in some cases there's a halo in that communication. And so, and we have immediate goals that we need to make in the quarter for the quarter, you know, really even the month for the month. So, you know, balancing the importance of building the brand and building equity in the brand, to be able to command things like a price premium and to really understand the value proposition of the brand. But to be able to also to drive that heads in beds revenue generating part of our business is a tricky balance and yet, absolutely necessary. And we have actually successfully been able to really use the data that we have to help understand what brand health does, of course over the long term, but how that long term ultimately really does impact the short term. And to quantify that which is, was very challenging in the beginning, it's still challenging for people to wrap their heads around that. I mean it's just not the way they are used to looking at the business but it's certainly helped give us, I think, a more integrated view than we had before. I think the second thing is data, right? The availability of data. As in any model, garbage in, garbage out. If you don't have the right data, if the data isn't clean or you don't have enough of the data, it's not going to be useful and you can actually draw the wrong conclusions. So, you know, unfortunately in some vehicles there just isn't as much available data and certainly in some cases not the right data. So if we think about emerging social channels and what, you know, likes on Facebook,is that really something that translates into revenue and in metrics like the viewability data with online is not available for everything so you have an incomplete data set. A lot of time we talk about messaging and how you push messaging and what you're saying in your marketing into that attribution model, what data points can we even find to be able to really show whether a, one message resonates over another. And so, you know, really at the end of the day it's all about what you can measure and how you get those metrics into play in the model. And you can't measure absolutely everything. I'd say the third challenge and probably the most underplayed, but the most important, is the organizational change. I alluded to it earlier around the brand health. But it's absolutely critically important that the organization understand what the methodology is. In some cases you have to really take a hard look at how the organization measures performance and, therefore, how are individuals measured against performance. Because when you do marketing attribution you have to optimize your model based on a metric. And if you're a metric that you're optimizing on it's not how people or goals are measured, it's going to create conflicts in behavior. And so, I think just making sure people really understand the methodology and not over complicating the understanding of that methodology, even though it's a complex thing, and then ensuring that the organizational reward system is set up to support the success and the conclusions that you're going to find in the model.
