Advertising By Numbers
Audited figures are the oil that makes the cogs of the advertising industry machine run smoothly. But should a lack of accountability keep newer forms of advertising on the sidelines, or should advertisers have the courage to encourage innovation, asks Anna Wise editor of MediaTel’s NewsLine.
One of the major issues faced by younger media such as interactive and ambient advertising is accountability. Where the established media such as radio, TV, press etc. have the established audience measurement methods such as RAJAR, BARB, ABC, NRS etc., it is still a lot harder to prove how many people notice your branded bar mat, or remember your animated web banner.
When ITV chief executive David Liddiment made his stand for the “soul of British television” at this summer’s Edinburgh TV festival he criticised the BBC for chasing ratings instead of concentrating on quality, diversity and originality. Here is a rare thing, a major media organisation that doesn’t have to play the numbers game for advertisers, and yet it is slavishly going for the populist vote like a commercial organisation, ran Liddiment’s argument.
The BBC aside, the rest of the industry has to play by the numbers game, which is why organisations such as the Internet Advertising Bureau are striving to set standards on the web while the rest of us tear our hair out trying to work out whether what really counts is page impressions, individual users, visits, hits etc, etc…
Solid numbers can be the ad salesperson’s best friend- “Buy space in X magazine and I can guarantee you 30,000 ABC1 male readers”- but should that be the end of the story? The future of advertising looks to be firmly connected with branding, a process more complex than “tell as many of the right people as possible how good you are”.
In the course of some research for an article recently, I was told by a buyer that a particular form of advertising would not grow very much until it became more effectively accountable. At present, despite having what appears to be a solid proposition and a lot of customer satisfaction, it is apparently “never the number one choice” when opportunities are being bought. Without numbers that compare to the current industry standards, this will remain an outpost of the media spectrum.
Yet advertisers already know that quality as well as quantity counts when it comes to effectiveness, especially in brand building as oppose to sales boosting. An ad for expensive perfume in Vogue may not reach as many readers as one in Take a Break , but the advertisers know that more of their potential customers will be reading the first title than the second. Not only that, but their carefully crafted image will be better furthered in the glossy pages of the fashionista’s bible than in a more down to earth gossip and cookery title.
Surely the same can and should be applied to good ambient and net advertising. Okay, so you can’t prove that a certain number of a certain demographic have seen the witty postcard campaign in those hip bars. But if you’ve managed to convey just the image you wanted, by combining the right ad with the right venue, then the impact on your brand image for those who have seen it is surely worth as much as, if not more, than a more run of the mill magazine and radio campaign, audited to within an inch of its life and quite possibly ignored as one of many by the readers/listeners.
If this were not the case, then advertisers would take more notice of councils pleading with them to stop flyposting. Completely unaccountable, this nevertheless remains a prolific feature of city streets, because it has that sexy, instant “street” appeal that does so much for the image of a new album or club night.
Of course the traditional, audited media will continue to have their very important place as the basis of the advertising industry- a lot of us would be in trouble if it didn’t. But to dismiss new forms of media as gimmicks, headline-grabbers or afterthoughts because they are less comprehensively accountable is to do a disservice to parts of the industry where some of the most innovation and imagination is being applied, pushing barriers and frequently achieving cut-through in an increasingly cluttered world. The more often advertisers have the courage to shun the numbers game and invest in emerging media, the more innovation and choice are likely to see, which can never be a bad thing.
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