by Geoff Pickering

I read the following article: Brand Comfort: Online Ads Asked to Adopt Off-line Metrics this morning.  I had to write a response to this as I couldn’t believe what I read.  This response is also listed as a comment at the end of the article as I’m interested in hearing more from the keynote speaker, Young-Bean Song, Senior Director at the Microsoft Advertising Institute.
Here’s my response.

In December of 2005 I wrote a post (It’s My Job To Be Relevant) about this issue – I went back and found a quote by Doug Hall author of Jump Start Your Marketing Brain where he said, “When a category is perceived to be complex and hard to understand, customers give up before they even begin considering new information.  It’s not that they don’t want or need advanced technology; it’s just that they feel incapable of accessing it.”

As I wrote, I feel as though the onus is squarely on our (the industry – Agencies, Publishers, Advertisers, Associations, etc.) shoulders to help reshape the landscape.

Over the past twenty years, I’ve served time on both sides of this equation as a Media Director and Digital Czar for clients such as Hallmark, Pizza Hut, Bayer, Nestle’, United/Mayflower, and Rawlings and I have experienced (r)evolutionary changes in our business.

To me, I feel your comments and recommendations are directing our industry to take a step backwards and in the wrong direction.  The dumbing down of our future marketing metrics to fit old marketing metrics is an insult to our industry and is not what we need.

You are correct, our work is more complex and difficult to explain.  Advertisers do need to understand what they are receiving for their investment.  Those are appropriate assessments of the challenges online marketing brings to the table.

The bottom-line is, online marketing is far more complex in measuring what a campaign can deliver than offline media.  It just is.

Our efforts today in understanding all of the possible digital applications and relevant metrics are paving the way for the future of marketing in a world that continues to move at warp speed towards a completely wired world.

I did not have the opportunity to hear your presentation so I may have missed some of the finer points.  I’m curious what data sets you have to offer other than the percent transfer of traditional media dollars to online dollars.  Among other things, does your research indicate a target percent of spending that would indicate an appropriate allocation of marketing spend by advertisers?

I’d love to hear/read more on this issue.

http://www.relevantengagement.com/