Solving Wanamaker’s Dilemma
We’re close to solving advertising’s fundamental challenges. But the solution — building an entire city from scratch — is audacious.
In our last column, we talked about the twofold challenges in solving Wanamaker’s dilemma, and why the ad tech we’re currently building won’t get us there. The challenges are:
- Attribution: Which ad (or ads) put a consumer over the top and convinced them to make a purchase
- Allocation: How to we take that attribution information and use it to most wisely spend our advertising dollars.
In looking at these two challenges, the first obviously presents the larger challenge. The potential solutions that get the most press these days are digital solutions: ad tech monitoring and reporting solutions from companies like Google, Facebook or, starting to think about the physical world, companies like Foursquare and Placed (now owned by Snapchat). The problems with these solutions are clear: they exist in a digital ecosystem, separate from where the big ad dollars are spent: on television. And, of course, given that we relied on them for nearly a hundred years, and that hundred years was a time of great advertising success, it would be unwise to discount print and outdoor ads as well. A truly perfect attribution…
