Gartner Cool Vendors in Advertising 2022 – Upwave

By Dev October 26, 2022

Gartner Cool Vendors in Advertising 2022 – Upwave

Why Cool: Amid new constraints on advertising data and renewed marketer interest in the long-term benefits of brand building, Upwave’s Brand Analytics Platform offers a modern, real-time take
on brand lift measurement, reach validation and forecasting. The company employs large-scale sample-based data collection to inform brand optimization as well as reach and frequency. It uses an intercept methodology that compensates publishers for unlocking access to content in exchange for 90 seconds of surveys. The Upwave approach is geared at capturing larger and more representative groups with short surveys focused on campaign measurement, versus longer-form survey methodologies.

Upwave’s Brand Optimization aims to increase advertising ROI by harvesting insights to
inform mid-campaign reads and adjustments to creative and media tactics. Statistical significance is evaluated in flight, as Upwave refreshes data daily, allowing for frequent campaign optimizations. The Upwave Outperformance Indicator is meant to serve as an overall composite performance indicator and was designed to stabilize quickly. Campaign readouts are delivered via the dashboard and email notification.

Upwave’s Brand Reach outputs are designed to validate reach and frequency into a brand-specific target audience. Output metrics can be configured to measure how successful a tactic or campaign is in reaching a demographic or behavioral trait, not just age and gender. Upwave output profiles
are updated daily.

Upwave’s Brand Outcomes aims to forecast customers and measure brand lift. The company provides a customer forecast metric that aims to measure long-term impact measurement by using an AI-based brand equity model specific to each client’s brand, and calibrated using sales data. To measure lift, Upwave draws on deterministic TV, digital and cross-media campaign data, exposed via an exploratory dashboard suitable for ad hoc analysis.

Challenges: The generation of marketing leaders who came of age during the digital advertising boom learned to use the mountains of data generated by web browsing to hypertarget ads, drive near-term outcomes and disrupt industries. The result is a focus on near-term advertising performance outcomes that has become deeply ingrained in many marketing organizations, despite the ever-increasing constraints on the use of nonconsented data for advertising. This near-term orientation presents a challenge for brand-oriented providers, including Upwave, that must reeducate the market about the benefits of brand building and the value of (statistically significant) sentiment data in measuring the long-term impact of advertising.

Third-party measurement providers like Upwave are also challenged by the dominance of walled garden ad sellers like Google, Amazon and Meta. These tech titans control massive and ever- growing vaults of first-party data linked to unique individual identifiers, and control “census scale” data assets that span ad exposure, purchase behavior, search behavior, location data and other signals. This massive data asymmetry gives these providers a formidable advantage over any third-party panel — and sample-based solutions, which by definition have more limited scale.

Who Should Care: CMOs and marketing leaders responsible for advertising measurement, brand building and brand health; executives looking to quantify and maximize the long-term benefits of advertising; and those responsible for post cookie media strategy and execution.