As I was testing out Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome this past week on my office PC and staring at the 25+ tabs open in Safari on my MacBook Pro something hit me.  The concept of the impression and purchasing online media based on impressions is complete insanity.  Here’s why.  Between the two computers and the three browsers I had about 50 tabs open.  That means 50 different sites were open.  If each site had 5 ads on it (I’m being kind here), with each ad coming from a different advertiser that means 250 advertisers just wasted an impression.

Why is it a waste?  Simple I had those tabs open pretty much all morning, as I do every single day.  I open tabs up throughout the day and get to them when I can.  Before the day is over and I turn into bed, I make sure to read each tab and the close it out.  I’m not alone.  I’ve observed this behavior frequently.  So many of my friends, family, and colleagues use tabbed browsing to its fullest.

For a second, let’s assume tabbed browsing has NO effect on how we measure impressions.  Remember, we purchase media on an impression based model.  If tabbed browsing has no impact on how we measure impressions that means it has no effect on the money we spend on the media.  Granted, this is an extreme, but I think you get my point.  Tabbed browsing aside, what we all really want is time.  We often refer to time as engagement or interaction, but make no mistake, its TIME we want.  It’s why we buy TV in 15 and 30 second increments.  We’re trying to purchase time.

If you asked a marketer, “do you want consumers to spend more time with your brand?”  They’d all say, “YES!”  Ok, so we want more time. We buy TV based on time.  Why the hell aren’t we buying online media based on time.  Internet Explorer and Google Chrome offer features that easily allow users to surf “anonymously” by stopping cookies from being accepted.  At an extreme this means I could potentially visit a site 10 times in 10 seconds and be counted as 10 unique visitors who saw 10 sets of unique impressions.  That’s bad for all of us.  However, if we weren’t buying based on impressions, it wouldn’t really matter.

Great, so how the hell do we solve it.  After all, it’s easy to point the finger.  But, offering solutions is a lot tougher.  At an extreme level, I want a universal cookie format that ALL advertisers have access to and all properties would leverage.  Think of this as open social for advertising purposes.  How cool would it be for an advertiser to buy across 10 different networks and properties with a goal of purchasing X amount of time with users.  Advertising properties, like ESPN, could charge more because of the sophisticated tracking and eventual ROI proving.  Advertisers, would have no problem paying more, because their dollars would be more efficiently spent.  Consumers, would see ads that were more relevant which means they might actually look forward to them.  Ok so that last part is a dream, but maybe not impossible.  People do seem to love letting Tivo recommend shows to watch based on what they actually watch already.

I don’t deny there are privacy and collaboration concerns/hurdles.  But, we need something different.  Maybe, my answer isn’t right.  However, we need something better and we need to start talking about something better.

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.