Dominic Mills argues that the evidence supposedly meant to demonstrate ad effectiveness is just too feeble to truly work
Oh dear. I’ve got a horrible feeling the effectiveness industry – i.e. those parts of adland that focus on proving that advertising actually works – is having the beginnings of an existential crisis.
Confidence, purpose, direction: it all feels a bit wobbly to me.
This matters: the planners, the strategists, the big thinkers who all beaver away on effectiveness are, not only the people who justify and prove what the industry does, but also the bit that keeps the industry honest.
Without being able to articulate it precisely, I’ve sensed this crisis for some time. Partly it’s down to the fact that when I see the evidence from campaigns and case histories that is supposed to demonstrate effectiveness, it’s just so feeble.
Up to now, apart from being irritated, I’ve excused them: they haven’t got the time; they can’t get the right information from the client; it’s too early to tell; they just grab the first stats they can find and cross their fingers.
But what if the real problem is that they just don’t know what to do, or how to do it?
Last week’s Newsworks Effectiveness Summit crystallised it for me. This was nothing to do with the content of the summit or the way Newsworks made its case, which I thought was excellent. The detail is on this microsite here.
Indeed, so far as I can tell, as media owners jostle for share of budgets, they’re all doing a good job proving the effectiveness of their medium, whether this is magazines or out-of-home.
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But it’s the bigger picture stuff where there appears to be a fair degree of angst. Newsworks’ introductory video, featuring effectiveness luminaries from AMV BBDO, M&S, Mondelez, Maxus and Holmes and Cook, made for depressing viewing. None of the speakers, including at the summit itself, was exactly upbeat about the overall state of effectiveness. Among the charges:
– Measuring the easy stuff, not the metrics that matter
– Over-valuing the stuff we can measure most easily
– Too much focus on short-term measurement, and demand for quick answers
– Reluctance among effectiveness experts to deal with client short-termism and accept that it is here to stay
– Lack of clarity (and unanimity) about the right metrics
– Growth of Facebook and Google ‘walled gardens’, making multi-media, multi-platform, campaign effectiveness measurement harder
– Established communications models in flux; lack of new, emerging, models
– Drowning in data
– Expectation that new media and platforms behave in the same way as established media
Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see the video, and further down to watch Alex Steer, head of technology, effectiveness and data at Maxus, summing up the issues.
My fear about Eff Week is that the effectiveness experts like nothing more than a chin-stroking talking shop”
Nevertheless, there are signs the industry recognises it needs to get a grip on the issues. That, at least, is how I interpret the arrival later this year of Effectiveness Week, a cross-industry initiative kick-started by the IPA which it describes variously as a ‘crash course’ and a ‘culture change’ programme.
The list of industry organisations involved reads like acronym hell, but includes digital (IAB), PR(PRCA), and the content marketing crowd (CMA), as well as some serious academic pointyheads from Wharton, Warwick, and Goldsmiths.
It coincides with the IPA’s own Effectiveness Awards, which are the definitive gold standard, so we can at least be sure that the topic will be hot, and there will be some blue-chip success stories to talk about.
You can see here the list of challenges Eff Week has identified, and while the wording may be different, they broadly parallel those expressed by the Newsworks speakers.
But to me, the key will be ensuring that proper, grown-up, discussions about digital media are threaded into all the key areas.
That’s because, for all its virtues, digital is the root cause of many of the issues raised by our effie experts: short-termism; too easily measured in simple things (i.e. reach, impressions, shares and so on); but not easily accountable in the areas like salience, market share growth, loyalty and price protection; lack of widely accepted communications models; and hard to integrate with measurement of other media.
And yet, as Peter Field pointed out at Newsworks, the irony is that digital is the one medium that rarely has to justify its place on the media schedule.
My fear about Eff Week is that the effectiveness experts like nothing more than a chin-stroking talking shop, where real world issues are often put to one side in favour of arcane discussions about communications models.
On the other hand, they are also by nature open-minded peaceniks, defiantly evidence-based and lacking in tribalism. That means we are unlikely to see a ‘my ROI is bigger than yours’ punch-up, the likes of which could turn Eff Week into ‘F’ Week.
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