From Advertisers Befuddled By Internet, Prefer Cluelessness of TV of the Silicon Valley Insider
Disney's Steve Wadsworth, head of the Internet division, summarizes:
"This industry looks like it can't get out of its own way...We need measurement of the audience and their use of the system that's clear, simple and actionable for a marketer. You need comparability with other media."
So THAT's the problem. That's why Google grew its US ad revenue 46% in Q3 and the aggregate revenue of 18 traditional media companies grew 1%--because Internet media companies can't make it simple.
.., Internet advertising is blowing the doors off, and the reason is that Internet measurement systems are NOT simple and vapid like those in TV and print advertising. Thankfully, the Internet is NOT comparable to these finger-in-the-wind advertising media--and never will be.
Could Internet advertising be made simpler and even more precise? Of course. But it is traditional media that need to get "comparability" with the Internet, not the other way around.
I couldn't agree more.
I recall those days when we were trying very, very hard to measure the audiences of internet as a medium - using concepts such as GRPs, Reach and Frequency, and "effective frequency". When I started working on such projects, there was a knot - inexplainable know - in my gut: There seems to be something wrong with this.
I raised it to those who were "experts" in the company suggesting that there was something innately wrong in measuring exposures on the internet (if one can even call them just "mere exposures") as one would measure, say, TV or radio exposures. At that point in time, we couldn't even agree how to measure outdoor ads in the same way that we were measuring TV ads.
Then the internet - with its far richer, far more complicated, far more complex interactions with the audiences?
My point back then - and still is now: You can't retrofit the internet back to standards that we've used for other media - because it is entirely different. It demands a new measure. And if that measure - whatever that is that encompasses the dimensionality of the internet - is arrived at, then we work it back to TV.
I was told I was too academic - and "well, if it works in the US, it should work in Asia".
Besides, "we just need a number - and CPM should cut it".
Oh well.
