Measuring effectiveness remains the hot topic

By Michael Nutley

When I was a kid back in the 1970s, my dad took me to visit my uncle who worked in the data processing department of a large FMCG company. My dad also worked in marketing and asked him, “When you have a number of different campaigns running, how can you isolate and measure the effectiveness of each of them?” To which my uncle replied: “We can’t.”

I remembered this incident the other week after chatting to new media age columnist and Saatchi & Saatchi director of strategy Richard Huntington about the agency’s Trafalgar Square singalong for T-Mobile. The participants were recruited via social media and, while the event was filmed in the traditional way, the results were distributed across old and new media platforms. There’s the TV ad and posters, but also digital outdoor on the Tube and buses. Then there’s the long-form video on YouTube and so on. All of this is great from the point of view of integration, but how do you measure it? Indeed, what do you measure? The IPA is working to address just these questions with its Touchpoints survey, the third stage of which was announced recently.

Last week, at the nma Live conference on online video advertising, everyone was talking about measuring the effectiveness of online video and how it could be related to measurement of offline video. Julie Jeancolas, head of new products and digital strategy at Carat Digital, said that while it was waiting for such compatible measures, they were working to agreed KPIs for individual campaigns.

This issue is a legacy from the early days of web advertising. Because a lot of web ads led to a response in the form of a click, online advertising was widely seen as a direct response medium. During the dotcom crash, most of the big agency groups bundled online in with DM and at conferences people asked, seemingly in all seriousness, whether the web could actually act as a branding medium. Meanwhile, we in the interactive industry carried on talking about measurement and accountability, heading further down a cul-de-sac of our own making.

The fallacy behind ‘last click wins’ has led to a great deal of work being done to find ways to attribute value to all the points of contact on the customer’s online journey. But in the end it’s still only online where this can work. I see this problem every year when I’m chairing the judging of the nma Effectiveness Awards. Most of the entries show click-throughs, many link that to ROI, but what really fires up the judges as we move into a phase when online and offline channels are ever more integrated are the entries that link results to the KPIs of the project.

This was what people like my uncle were struggling with back in the 1970s, and things haven’t really changed that much. If you want to understand how well a campaign is working, you have to know what your objectives are and how you’re going to measure them. In an integrated solar system, KPIs are what everything else revolves around.