Latest And Greatest Ad Metrics Discussed

The New Ad Measurement - The Latest Thinking panel started off slow, but once it got rolling I was so captivated I started sketching graphs in my notebook. At first, the discussion centered around Interactive Advertising Bureau guidelines for measuring impressions which didn’t exactly impress as the latest thinking on ad measurement. Fortunately, there was more current and better thinking, expressed best by Young-Bean Sean of Atlas and David Smith of Mediasmith.

Smith said, “There are more advertisers not using the internet to an optimal level than those who are.” He goaded that we must continue to seek ways to bring together measurement of what happened with measurements for the potential of what can happen. He also said we need to better compare interactive measurements to TV and print. “We’ve been working on it for 10 years and haven’t found it.”

Young-Bean said, “Half of agencies aren’t doing any creative optimization; the other half aren’t performing very well.” Smith advised coupling publisher media optimization with creative optimization for the best results. On the interactive marketers’ use of personally identifiable information (PII), Young-Bean said, “I think the offline world is really more egregious in using your PII than anything in the online world.”

Young-Bean also advocated behavioral targeting to ramp up the volume of targeted ads. This ties into another zinger of his regarding publishers’ need to present frequency caps since average frequency is often a worthless measurement. He noted how. for a campaign with an optimal 5x frequency, a 5x average of ads viewed per consumer most likely means a huge volume of consumers seeing only one or two ads and then a smaller but significant number of consumers seeing 10, 20, or 50 ads; the average itself is thus meaningless.