As the Association for Downloadable Media and other interested organizations and individuals struggle to come up with a useful and agreed-upon standard for measuring site audience, a lot of attention is being paid to the kind of audience advertisers should be trying to reach.
In traditional media - as well as the initial attempts to measure online audiences - the emphasis has always been on raw numbers: how many people saw our ad? How many people read that paper? How many people saw that web page?
But there's a growing chorus of voices arguing that perhaps advertisers should be focussing on the quality rather than the quantity of people who see their ads: how many people respond? How many sales, or visits, or whatever, can be traced directly to a particular ad?
Over at RemainComm, Phil Wilson presents a cogent argument on behalf of this kind of realignment of our thoughts about measurement. Key graf:
The numbers in question continue to be based on the way we measure TV, Radio and Newspaper. “How many see it? How many hear it? How many read it?” I would submit that we need to focus on “Who uses it?” New media advertising offers something to the consumer that no other media does…instant interaction. Clicking on a banner, downloading a video or podcast, that’s something you can measure. In fact, I think that if a new media ad inspires someone to take immediate action its worth more than a TV, Radio, or Newspaper ad.
I've heard it said by a number of people, "The good news is, we can now tell advertisers how many people have viewed their ad. The bad news is, we can now tell advertisers how many people have viewed their ad." True - but. If we can come up with a system which tells advertisers, in effect, "Never mind about bulk numbers - look at the number of interactions/sales/responses you have generated from an active audience," then we may be well on our way to proving our value to advertisers. It's up to us to come up with a way to deliver that proof.
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