Item #7: The Future of Advertising III

Recently, I spoke as a panel member to the MBA class at the York University Schulich School of Business on the topic of The Future of Advertising and Marketing. I shared my thoughts with the audience as a series of headlines, which I’ll share as a little series. Here’s my third in that series:

Headline 3: We Need New Focus on Metrics of ‘Impact’

















For as long as I can remember, we’ve had a hard time measuring communication effectiveness. We know that when we advertise, sales increase, and when we don’t, they drop off.

With broadcast mediums like TV, magazine, newspaper and radio, we are able to measure how many people see or hear an advertisement (reach) and how many times (frequency). In the online space, we’ve gotten fancier and we’re able to track impressions and click-through rates and time spent. Measurement in the online space is considered advanced because suddenly we are able to get past measures of ‘eyeballs’ to measures of ‘engagement’.

So we have communication metrics: how many eyeballs did we presumably reach with this advertisement and how long did we keep those eyeballs engaged. And we have business metrics: how did sales react.

But as the marketplace grows increasingly tentacled and complex, the words of Trout and Ries resonate louder and louder in my head: ‘Marketing is war. It is a battle waged in the mind of the consumer’ (recalled, not exact).

But we don’t measure what’s going on in the mind of the consumer. At least, not enough. We don’t focus enough on measuring ‘impact’ on this battleground. But we need to. We need more focus on ‘impact’ metrics.

If the battle is in the minds of consumers, then we need to be measuring how well a brand is owning and protecting its distinct territory in the minds of consumers. Communications are designed to do that – carve out a distinct and compelling territory for a brand in the minds of consumers. So we need better ‘impact’ metrics to help us determine how effective we are being in doing just that. And then, we need to be mapping those ‘impact’ metrics against communications activities to really begin to understand what’s doing what.

Because it doesn’t necessarily matter if we reached 5 million eyeballs and kept them for 12 minutes. And arguably it might not be that much of a point of success to have driven high levels of sales if it’s only a short term return. What is important is that the communications brands deploy have ‘impact’. And that ‘impact’ must be in owning and protecting a distinct and compelling territory for your brand inside the minds of consumers. Because that will lead to long-term business success.