Q&A with Vicky Farley: How a focus on Quality boosted brand lift for Clearpay
We sit down with Vicky Farley, Digital Director at Goodstuff, to discuss the transformative impact of media quality on campaign success, spotlighting the recent Clearpay "Back to School" campaign that achieved brand consideration results well above industry benchmarks. With nearly a decade of experience in media and a proven track record of delivering results, Vicky shares her insights on the challenges of campaign measurement, the limitations of vanity metrics, and why quality is key to driving meaningful outcomes.
Please introduce yourself.
Hi! My name’s Vicky, I’m a Digital Director for Goodstuff. I’ve worked in media for nearly a decade now, though my start was in the world of print. I’ve worked at Goodstuff for five years, and on Clearpay’s account ever since they came into the agency back in 2021.
What are some of the key challenges you and your team face?
Where to start? In my view, the most common challenge we face is measurement, not just in the practicalities of establishing it but also in working out what we should measure. What does success look like? We have to consider everything, not just from a comms perspective but also what is going to be the most useful towards a client’s short—and long-term business goals and how that translates into media.
How do you think a solution like PIQ helps solve those challenges?
Having a discrete, no-argument variable assigned to a campaign to enrich our measurement and show development against our comms objectives. Media quality can be subjective - is it measured through viewability, or engagement, or a general improvement in performance over time? How do we correlate ‘quality’ with success? Particularly when working with a brand over a long period of time, the incremental improvement to media quality can be vitally important, particularly with brands where sales can happen slowly over a longer period and the value of media can be called into question.
What were the goals of the Clearpay campaign?
The aim of the ‘Back To School’ campaign was to increase consideration of Clearpay’s participating merchant partners (Marks & Spencer, The Range, Footasylum and John Lewis) with parents 25-44 preparing their children for going back to school.
What did you think of the results, in particular, how vanity metrics performed very similarly across both sets?
I was honestly quite surprised, particularly with CTR. When we think of ‘quality,’ we tend to naturally correlate this to better performance, and while I think CTR as a metric is generally outdated as a metric for success, if you’d asked me, I would have expected to see this come out stronger on the high PIQ site list.
What does this say to you about vanity metrics, and the industry’s use of them to judge campaign success?
I think as an industry, the continued reliance on these metrics is a sign of the reversion to short-termism that we’ve seen come in since COVID. Naturally with world events over the last few years brands were having to squeeze their marketing budgets as hard as they could, and that brought a renewed reliance on the ‘most cost-efficient CPM’ or ‘most clicks’ as the marketing metric for success, further spurred on by the reduction of measurement through increased privacy measures in iOS/Safari. The resources needed to restore, or even build fresh, the measurement needed to show success post-COVID can be expensive, and in my experience, many brands struggle to justify the time and monetary resources to undertake this.
Did you expect there to be such a difference in brand uplift between the two inventory sets?
I did, yes - particularly for consideration and purchase intent, we know that consumers think more favourably of brands that advertise in high-quality, premium environments and that ultimately leads to higher ROI and profit. Newsworks has done huge amounts of research into the advantages of advertising in quality environments, and they were one of the first bodies in the industry to talk about the power of attention. This research really shows the benefit of high-quality sites on these mid-to-lower funnel metrics; while awareness is important, it doesn’t take into account brand sentiment, a hugely vital part of showing how to recruit new customers and keep existing customers loyal to your brand.
What were your initial impressions when you were first introduced to PIQ?
I was surprised this hadn’t been done before! It feels like we’re well overdue for a buying mechanic like PIQ that enriches the data we bring to our clients to show site quality outside of the core viewability and fraud metrics (as important as they are).
In your own words, how do you define 'quality’?
To me a ‘quality’ website/publisher provides a beneficial experience that adds to a consumer’s daily life; we know that the presence of advertising is an annoyance to many, so while we want potential customers to take notice, it needs to be in a way that doesn’t leave a bad taste in their mouth.
How do you approach balancing the quality of ad reach with the quantity?
I think it comes down ultimately to the drive and perseverance of the people behind the campaign; from the media agency, and the media owner to the client, achieving balance is a continual effort to take into account the metrics that matter. As an agency, Goodstuff imposes strict quality benchmarks on our partners that often see both ours and the media owner’s teams in the platforms daily to monitor and optimise campaigns. Scale and volume are important, but if you deliver the majority of your impressions on MFA websites or in placements below the fold, your client’s budget is wasted.
What are your thoughts on quality and why do you think it’s so important that advertisers understand and prioritise this?
The quality of a campaign is just as important as the quantity - a marketing budget is useless if no one sees your advertising.
Would you recommend PIQ to a peer and why?
Yes; tools that give us a more rigorous approach to delivering across higher-quality sites are certainly something to be considered if you’re thinking about how to effectively optimise brand metric growth, such as consideration, but have limitations on your creative or budget.
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