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Of course it’s directional. It’s pretty good at measuring offline, but you have to assume the digital spend is super understated, it doesn’t have good hooks into social. What you should take away is “these are the channels my competitors are spending in and compared to my spend (also measured by kantar), here’s where we stand”. Kantar is still the gold standard, and Bane Capital is about to buy them for $4 Billion... For the client sellthrough, but make sure you caveat that it’s directional, it’s usually an easy conversation.
So most agencies will have access to kantar stradegy if anything. I’ve used both, Adspender is dumb AF. I’d much rather pull the exact data i need in stradegy, pivot it & analyze it to create whatever story I want to tell. Adspender basically takes the “customization” piece out of it, which is cool if you’re AdAge or Variety & want a quick number to throw in your bull shit “journalistic report” but is meaningless for the rest of it.
As others have already say - kantar, adviews/adspender, comscore - literally none of them do digital correctly. Kantar even was bad at offline until recently (they used to rely on self reported rate card rates, reported by the tv networks, for its tv spend estimates until 2019. they published a report showing that their own previous estimates were ~ -100% - +180% inaccurate depending on the network, which proves that their old methodology was literal trash. The new methodology is to ask agencies for their negotiated rates - waaay more accurate.).
But all of them suck at digital reporting. They all use click bots basically, so they only capture what the bot sees which is wildly inaccurate.
Regardless, the nice thing about any of these services is that they under/over report equitably across the board. So they are still useful directionally as long as you look at it in relation to your own client’s actual spend (eg they fuck up your clients spend = to your competitors)
Can’t count the number of times I’ve explained this to clients. Get killed on saying we sold x% of the budget only for Kantar or CMR report to say the budget was triple what we were told by an agency. Kantar Numbers are not gospel.
Hey what is a CMR report??
Not just you. They always mention to use those tools “directionally”...I guess to cover their a*s
Ok happy to hear! And specifically, I think they’re trash at measuring digital and tend to severely underestimate competitor spends. Making them less valuable at explaining to clients when they’re under budgeting.
Are there any other tools to tell clients they’re being...naive??
Thanks! It’s so shocking Bain is putting such an investment in it...when it’s so “directional” as a tool.
Do you use any other Kantar products besides ad$spender? (We don’t...I don’t even know what they offer...)
From what I’ve been told (all anecdotal as this is waay above my pay grade), kantar is the cheapest option. My agency holding company (#3) recently switched from Nielsen AdIntel to Kantar. Clearly a money move. So if you company has access to AdSpender I’d assume you have Stratedgy (or better) access.