Undergrad Education at LMU KPI: get a job at Fullscreen Media

Shortly before Thanksgiving break my classmates and I had to opportunity to visit Fullscreen Media in Playa Vista. I was excited to learn more about Fullscreen as I knew several of their past interns, and they all had good things to say!

While researching Fullscreen prior, I was surprised to find out that they work with not only brands, but talent as well. They even work with one of my favorite You Tubers, Kody Ko!

Our session at Fullscreen Media was about, key performance indicators (KPI's) and was led by several employees at Fullscreen. The presenters were also accompanied by 4 M-School alumni and current Fullscreen employees! It is always cool to see successful working adults who started where I am.

The presentation was initially led by Monica who gave us a brief history and rundown of Fullscreen and was completed by both Kyle and Amelia who talked about KPI's and measuring success. Kyle and Amelia began their portion of the presentation by explaining the quickly changing nature of the media landscape.

Because media and ways to reach your audience change so frequently, it is important for companies to seek help from companies such as Fullscreen who actively keep up on the latest trends. Fullscreen seeks to attract audiences that are "young, social always, mobile first, and cord never".

They aim to attract this younger, more tech savvy audience because of the market power they have and the demand present for assistance in reaching this audience. They also emphasized the power held in creativity and how important creativity is in being successful.

Kyle and Amelia then moved on the main topic of KPI's. This was a helpful session, because as they explained, KPI's in marketing don't look like the normal KPI which is just to make money. To illustrate the need for KPI's they shared an example in relation to recent work of theirs.

They had done a Hot Wheels collaboration with a popular You Tuber and helped create a promotional video for the You Tuber's channel. They told us that the video received a million views, and naturally I was impressed. However, this video was not a success, because comparatively these 1 million views were only a third of his standard viewership.

Since success can look very different across different platforms and different clients, it is important to set KPI's. They split up the process of setting KPI's into 4 parts: determine the objectives, decide on key metrics, define success, and decide on the measurement.

In order to determine the objectives for an advertisement, Fullscreen suggests choosing from one of three categories, awareness, consideration, or conversion. For brands that are new and relatively unknown by consumers, the objective is generally awareness, but for established recognizable brands with a stable customer base, the objective is generally conversion. It is important to correctly identify your objectives in order to be successful, this is likely the reason Kyle occasionally fights with brands on their objectives as she mentioned.

The second step in setting KPI's is deciding on key metrics which will look different depending on the chosen objective. Key metrics for companies whose objective is awareness are usually things like impressions and reach in order to measure exposure. Key metrics for companies aiming for consideration are likely things such as engagement rates and shares, while key metrics for companies seeking conversion are usually things such as website traffic and click-thru-rates.

The third step in setting KPI's is defining success. This step was the simplest of the for and had been divided into 3 main success indicators. They explained to us that brands typically define success by comparing their results to their competitive performance, their previous performance, or their industry performance.

Next Kyle and Amelia discussed the last step in the process which is deciding on measurement. They sectioned the categories of measurement into social listening, media tools, social analytics, and surveys/trackers. The different ways to measure are dependent on your chosen metrics.

One thing that I thought was especially interesting was a point they made in regard to measuring social listening. While one might assume a greater share of online chatter than all competitors is a good thing, it is important to consider what people are actually saying!

They showed us an example where a company received 74% more mentions than of all its competitors, but had majorly negative mentions according to the net sentiment metric. This really helped me understand the complexities involved in analyzing your metrics!

They wrapped up the presentation by analyzing the afore mentions Hot Wheel collaboration with You Tuber Tanner Fox (TFox). They showed us a clip of a video which had been successful in the collaboration process. The video focused on the creation of a new hot wheels car designed for TFox, along with giving him the real version of that vehicle. They also launched custom TFox x Hot Wheels merchandise.

This portion of the collaboration was a huge success. The video released got 34 million views and the merchandise sold out in 6 hours!

Overall, I was very impressed with Fullscreen Media. I admire their dedication to keeping up with a quickly changing landscape and am inspired by their obvious knowledge of marketing. It is no wonder so many LMU students seek internship and full time employment at Fullscreen!