Mind the Gap

This is a shame Audience measurement in one form or another forms the bedrock of the media business the foundation on which plans are built and buys are madeWorryingly the principles on which the various systems have been built over a considerable period are coming into question like never beforeThe concern is that whilst the technocrats squabble over the detail the real argument is happening elsewhere and is concerned less with technique and more with politics structure and the search for ever larger numbers however meaninglessWe are genuinely in danger of weakening the bedrock and once you do that the likelihood is that the whole house will come tumbling downIt might be worthwhile starting at the beginningWhy measure audiences at all It may seem an obvious question but in the modern era of platforms and big data is that still a thing we can allegedly quantify everything without going to the trouble of measuring itIf you can claim with a straight face that your platform reaches more of a certain demographic than actually exists in living breathing form a particular specialism of Facebook and if buyers are happy to continue to buy impressions allegedly made against these nonexistent people then why botherAs we all know audience measurement creates the currency used to buy and sell space and timeThe provision of a currency is hugely important and it is a credit to the measurement community that its accuracy is not questioned I doubt that there are many advertisers or their agencies seriously questioning BARB Broadcastersamp8217 Audience Research Board dataBARB just is and well done to all involved to have reached that status That they have done so is due to a lot of behindthescenes work strengthening the bedrock where necessary so that itamp8217s able to take the strain imposed upon it by new developments in the marketplaceBARB is on firm ground in any technical debate But the participants in the new debate are not technicians they are investors moneymen who see advertising dollars blindly following sizeThey demand ever bigger numbers to feed the beast If the audience is not there then make it look as if it is Matters of research propriety will soon be forgotten as the platforms deliver ever more impressions ever higher reachAnd therein lies the genius idea Take 100 advertisers from 20 years ago and ask them to define quotimpressionsquot Or quotreachquot Few would have been able to do soSo why not use the same words Noone that matters will spot the difference when online terms are set against conventional measurement normsOnce you have got away with misusing words you can do what you like Sell more quotimpressionsquot noone knows what they are anyway but we can see you more of them for lessAre they human quotimpressionsquot Well who knows and anyway runs the online evangelistsamp8217 argument TV commercials sometimes play to an empty roomIn olden times everyone accepted TV ratings as an approximation of the truth It was close The gap between ratings as reported and reality was there but it was narrowYes when the ads came on people left the room yes they looked away yes they ate yes they chatted But not in massive wholly distracted numbersWhen ratings data were used in econometric models it was with confidence The data were consistent and accepted the correlation was there Advertising done well workedThe gap between the measurement and real life was not too wide But now it is a gaping chasmDr Augustine Fou reports that in the world of programmatic buying somewhere between 1 and 4 of online clicks come from humansBut hey the impressions were cheap Hurrah for cheap mediaWe need to start to change this narrative Advertisers need to ask the right questions of their agencies who are in no way going to want to initiate this conversationThey need to understand that the same word used in different media contexts does not necessarily mean the same thingThey need to understand the size of the gap thatamp8217s opened up between what they are buying and what they think they are buyingIf they do not do this they will have some exceedingly tough questions to answerIncluding how come we bought more impressions than we did back in the olden days but our advertising seemed to work back thenOnly yesterday the BBC reported a slowdown in online ad spendAn economic slowdown is upon us yes But maybe these ads are not working so well and it has just taken us a while to work that outThose spending the money are going to have to accept the truth that in the words of my Crater Lake analytics colleague David Beaton quotBots Donamp8217t BuyquotClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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Mind the Gap

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Brian Jacobs

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Mind the Gap

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