Great article at AdAge; I know I rarely say that, but seriously this article is fantastic. I’ve been preaching the need to go beyond the click as a means of measuring success. Finally a large marketing player, Kellogg’s has the balls to challenge their media buying agency, Starcom, to invest in a cost per interaction campaign.
Good things are ahead indeed.
Last year I attended the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in San Diego. Great show, and if you haven’t attended a summit you really should. Anyhow, I participated in a round table discussion about how Web 2.0 (which is total BS and I’ll address this pharce in another post) is screwing up our ability to track/measure impressions and clicks for online ad units. For those not in the know, the industry has been selling online adspace via an impressions based model an we’ve been reporting success on a clicks based model for years.
There have been some slight nuances. For example, rich Media service providers like PointRoll will give you an interaction rate metric in addition to the traditional impressions and clicks metrics. The idea being that while a consumer might not actually click thru they are still engaging (another silly word) with your brand.
For the last year or so you’ve probably seen alot about engaging consumers or measuring engagement. The industry has made it seem like engagement is some brand new concept that will revolutionize the world. Not surprisingly, I’m taking an alternate view point.
Engagement is simply a fancy word for time. What we really care about as advertisers is how much time consumers/targets are spending with our brands. There’s only 24 hours in a day; that constraint is fixed and it’s been that way since the dawn of time. We buy TV in 15 second increments; so in essence we are buying on time. If I can buy “time” for TV shouldn’t I be able to buy my online media in time based increments. For example, instead of buying 1,000,000 impressions shouldn’t I be able to buy 1,000,000 minutes of brand exposure?
Hopefully, that’s given you something to think about the next time you’re thinking about how to measure your media.
Head of Social Media at Walgreens. Interactive marketer, innovator, boat rocker, continuous learner, movie lover, risk taker, dad and all around good guy. I'm always up for a spirited conversation. These are my thoughts and ramblings, not those of my employer.
