Research is the only route to measuring effectiveness

10 January 2008

It goes without saying that two of the words digital people seem to loathe the most are 'advertising' and 'research'. Advertising because digital-kind believes itself to be above such a grubby and discredited approach to selling things. And research because this hardly suits the buccaneering spirit of the digital frontier where gut feeling and instinct gets results.

So it was no great surprise that at a recent conference on advertising research run by the eminent people at the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) there wasn't a single soul from the digital fraternity on the delegate list.

The truth is that attending a conference like that wouldn't have even begun to flicker across the minds of most people in the London digerati. Who in their right mind would swap a slap-up lunch at Shoreditch House for listening to a bunch of boring research people droning on about how you evaluate engagement online? However, this sort of disinterest is symptomatic of the chasm that exists between the digital world and the research community. Which is a shame because you could be so good for each other.

Sure, many research people carry the pallid complexion of those who spend too long sitting ruminating in dank basements, emerging blinking into the light merely to collect data or submit a paper for peer review. And sure, they have a curious way with PowerPoint that involves cramming so many words onto a slide you'd have difficulty reading them with the Hubble Telescope. But they might, just might, have the answers that you're looking for.

Of course, number one on the list of questions that need answering is how to prove the effectiveness of digital campaigns, specifically the value of engagement. Not with terminally intermediate metrics like click-through, pass-on rates, average dwell time and the like, nor the entirely reprehensible habit of multiplying visits by length of visit, finding out the cost of buying that 'engagement' with conventional media and calling the result of this sordid little calculation 'return on investment'. We need real attempts to prove the commercial value of immersing people in a brand's world and having them interact with it and share it with others, not to mention the means by which to model the sales effect of digital activity and prove its contribution to the client's bottom line.

You may feel that you're happy with your click-throughs, pass-on rates and average dwell times. After all, aren't they proof of digital's accountability? And isn't that what clients are looking for?

In my book, accountability is rather overrated. What clients really want is an effect - a real sense that the marketing activity they undertake is selling goods and services. Ad agencies have always understood this and not only have they historically valued bigger and longer-term effects over short-term movements in the metrics, but they have set out to get them, and develop the research tools and models to prove that they have been delivered.

If digital wants to prove that it can deliver the real results clients are looking for, it must engage with the research community. Digital folk, it's time to discover that the boring people sometimes have interesting things to say.

Richard Huntington is author of Adliterate.com; huntingtonr@mac.com