The meaning behind the measurement

Sitting at a conference a couple of weeks ago, I sat in stunned silence as a member of a panel on gaming and engagement suggested that if interactive, gaming and social media wanted to grow its slice of the advertising pie, we would have to learn how to measure in terms of CPM.  On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable proposal - after all, a unified system of measurement for advertising can only help us all compare and evaluate results.

The problem, of course, is that there can be no truly unified measurement between radically different systems any more than you can measure the distance between New York and Vancouver in kilograms.  This is not a weakness of either the tactic, its measurability or the understanding of the medium, but rather a weakness in the desire to do things the way we've always done them.

Traditional media is measured very simply.  An advertiser buys reach and frequency based on the distribution of a particular medium, for a price ususally expressed in cost per thousand.  Whether the medium is newspaper, television or radio, there is a relative assurance that the advertiser will receive the number of impressions that they have paid for, and the value of those impressions is based on the value of the eyeballs it will be supposedly reaching.   The key thing here is that regardless of the medium, there is always a comparative metric and a comparative value.

When the web was still in its infancy, still being formed by the collective fingers of its users, advertisers co-opted this new medium in very much the same way.  If you wanted the eyeballs of Yahoo! users, you bought impressions based on CPM.  But as the way we used the web became more complex, and the technology and infrastructure that supported it became much more sophisticated,  it became impractical to reach people through a traditional broadcast approach.

So, the good agencies and strategists looked at how people were using the web, and eventually changed the way they thought about marketing to people online.  The problem is that the way we think about evaluation and measurement has largely remained rooted to the past, ignoring the realities of human interaction and attempting to retrofit social interaction with reach and frequency, or worse - attempting to express a complex interaction on par with a casual glance at a display ad in a newspaper.  The problem with this, of course, was that the measurement was left in the hand of those who were selling the advertising space.  What resulted was the baffling notion that 2.5 people read a newspaper cover to cover, or that 20,000 Neilsen families that nobody has ever met decide who's watching what based on what they watch for a minimum of 2 minutes.  Understandably, when new marketers, who were measured not by guaranteed placement, but by human behaviour had to compare results, they couldn't stack up side-by-side.

The challenge for new marketers is not measurement - any interactive medium offers no shortage of things to measure.  The challenge will be to move an entire industry away from its desire for comparing apples to oranges and establishing new benchmarks for success that do not rely on comparison to an irrelevant and inherently flawed system that is clung to simply because it's the way things have always been done.  In order to do that, we need more case studies like Direct2Dell or Fiskateers, which may not have measured up in terms of CPM, but did more for a brand and for the bottom line than any print ad could have.