Introducing… Head of Research and Data Science, Gareth Lloyd

As Head of Research and Data Science, with over 15 years of experience in the research space, Gareth Lloyd is one of the key minds behind Brand Metrics.

His career spans leading data teams in South Africa, optimising ad features at Meta and, now, heading up the Brand Metrics research and data teams. In this exclusive Q&A, we introduce you to the man behind the data. 

Give us a small introduction to yourself, what your role is and where your expertise lies?

I started my career in market research around the time the first wave of smartphones hit the market. I did a lot of usability and marketing communications research for all kinds of weird and wonderful developments in that space at the time. From there, I specialised in brand equity measurement and advertising impact, with a particular focus on how brands grow and how advertising influences this.

I then moved to what was South Africa's largest digital publisher, working with commercial and product teams to enhance their product and drive ad sales. This is where I was first introduced to Brand Metrics. 

More recently, I worked at Meta, working with advertisers to unlock growth as well as refining their ‘Ads Manager' tool. That gave me a good foundation in digital advertising, advertising measurements and brand equity building. 

Now that I’m Head of Research and Data Science at Brand Metrics, I’m responsible for curating and organising our data, creating a secure and mature data environment and developing new commercial offerings to enhance advertising optimisation. This is largely achieved by utilising data science techniques, and it draws on my background in quantitative research, brand theory, brand equity measurement and advertising impact.

What initially drew you to Brand Metrics? 

In my time working on the publisher side, we struggled with walled garden competitors who offered superior digital advertising measurements and tracking. The company I was working for was under a lot of pressure at the time to drive revenue and increase their focus on digital advertising, given the fact that print advertising was in decline. Brand Metrics provided the perfect solution, combining technology with a focus on attitudinal shifts towards brands which is measured via their survey mechanism. 

This allowed us to demonstrate the value of the publisher network by providing insights and best practice, as well as recommendations as to how to optimise various campaigns. Most importantly, you could prove that your advertising was working across various metrics on the publisher network. This aligned well with long-term brand-building and helped us to effectively communicate the value of our ad network to clients. 

With your previous experience on the publisher side, working as a Brand Metrics client, can you give us a few examples of where the technology of Brand Metrics was used and what it helped to solve?

We used Brand Metrics’ technology in really interesting ways. We ran annual brand lift case studies to demonstrate the value of ads placed within our content, encouraging advertisers to focus on long-term brand building. We analysed data at the campaign, report, and respondent levels to extract insights on optimal formats, placements, frequency and cadence. 

This allowed us to provide specific creative recommendations to clients and benchmark them against industry standards. These case studies, presented at events and conferences, positioned the publisher as a thought leader. This approach helped to retain and grow clients, showing the value of our network in driving marketing performance and solidifying our reputation as a forward-thinking publisher addressing advertising measurement challenges. 

What is a big task you’re working on at the moment? Where is it set to take Brand Metrics and its partners?

Curating, organising and structuring data sources is a huge task. As we continue to develop and mature as a company, this is foundational work for Brand Metrics to ensure clean, easy storage and analysis. 

Using all this data, myself and the engineering team are running extensive analyses on our vast dataset, including around 8 million survey responses. We’re adding new features to understand the movements of key metrics like purchase intent and consideration. 

We’re also working with our partners to integrate attention metrics into our offering. This will help us and our clients to understand the relationship between attention and brand lift, providing us with the extra information we need to optimise campaigns to an even higher level, adding power and value for our clients.

Are there any exciting future plans for Brand Metrics that you can share with us? What are you excited for in H2?

One of the most exciting projects we’ve got coming up as a team is working to leverage our vast data to develop new signals that can be used for campaign optimisation. Moving away from the traditional way of manually applying insights to extract campaign performance, we want to take this even further and create models to automate the whole process. These models will analyse various signals across campaigns to optimise ad placements using algorithms. 

The objective of this would be to increase the performance of any given campaign based on an outcome that’s aligned with our metrics. This approach will allow Brand Metrics to provide optimisation signals based on available inventory, budget and objectives, making campaigns both more effective and efficient. 

Listen to Gareth’s full interview on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel for more: https://youtu.be/rJJPNkLif5Q?si=Lu2eCRV-Bw50n0Jj