Two Elephants in the Ad Measurement Room

The first elephant is the difference between digital consumption and digital advertisingconsumption. All the usual issues of viewability, bot fraud and, well, plain unnoticeabilty - and I'm looking squarely at you here, little banner ads ! - is why the percentage of ad exposures will remain relatively stable even as online consumption grows exponentially.(Though,obviously, the absolutes of ad exposures will grow with it)

The good thing with online video advertising where the difference is clearly quantified as the difference between ad impressions and ad views is that the elephant is easily sighted, understood and can be responded to.

The second elephant in the room is the less obvious one : TV ad avoidance.

There is simply no way of knowing whether people really watched your ads on TV. All that commercial ad break ratings tell us for certain - and this is keeping aside markets such as ours in MENA where these are not even available in the first place ! - is that people didn't switch off the TV and didn't zap channels.

Whether they walked out of the room or switched their mind off or buried their noses in their phones or , indeed, watched the TV commercials with love and adoration during those three or five or ten long minutes we do not know. And have no way of knowing.

So in effect we are penalizing online video for being transparent while not holding up TV to the same level of scrutiny and accountability. So TV ad exposures* all over the world are likely to be overstated simply because of a quantification gap (see figure)

* This post is only from the limited point of view of ad exposure. Engagement, impact, sales outcome et al are a different- though surely correlated !- matter.

While realistically speaking this gap can't be eliminated, can it be reduced ? Perhaps through syndicated sample survey-based research or,say, through more pervasive individual advertiser-level A/B experiments ? Hard to tell - but as viewer consumption boundaries blur and the market battles intensify, more attention will probably need to be paid to this TV elephant to size it up to some reasonable approximation.

(click to enlarge picture)

Data and the problem of plenty

"Won't be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore" - Leonard Cohen : The Future

As I listen in remembrance to one of the greatest pop poet-musicians of all time in the wake of his passing, I am also thinking of the problem of plenty in marketing data today. Namely : the more data there is the less data there is.

That paradox sounds (almost) Cohenesque but it's certainly a lot less than poetic for us practitioners out there !

Marketing data today has immense depth but very little breadth. There is a treasure trove of KPI metrics for each digital 'walled garden'* in your marketing mix but little or nothing by way of the same metrics aggregated for the entire digital mix (let alone the entire overall mix as a combination of online and offline)

(* I borrow the term in this context from an excellent piece by senior and very respected industry leader Gowthaman Ragothaman which you can read here)

Later if not sooner this is likely to place at least some constraint to business growth for these advertising dependent gardens - and which is why I am sure a solution will arrive sooner rather than later ! The recent announcement from Facebook (read here) about the launch of a 'Measurement Council' along with Third Party verification measures is a step in that direction. More will no doubt follow from more players. After all, it is some very important value delivered to their customers (viz. advertisers and agencies) - and as we all know to superior customer value goes the spoils !

Even leaving the whole third party thing to one side , improvement in existing reporting within each single platform is where it can and needs to begin. An obvious if simple example is unduplicated individual person-level reach. Sure, it is complex but something that can be solved given the right commitment and resources. Far more complex problems have been solved after all ! The question is when it will be deemed a necessity rather than an also-good-to-have. I suspect it will be sooner rather than later. One step at a time and the rest follows. This diagram illustrates very roughly how that can unfold. We await that first step !