The Agency/Platform Metric Wars
Will the real Slim Shady please stand(ard) up?
Just last week I got a chance to attend another one of APG’s Noisy Thinking events. It was a good conversation around one of the most pressing topics in advertising today — our persistent focus on short-term metrics over the longer-term ambitions of brand building.
This is not a summary of that event (even though I tweeted a few things I found interesting). It’s rather a follow up after hearing one of the speakers, Poke’s Head of Strategy Bogdana Butnar, talk not about how we’re so focused on short-term metrics, but rather why that is so. And the answer in her view was quite simple: because that’s all there was for us to look at, and every metric we have today is the brainchild of a previous phase in digital communications.
Which is to say that the metrics we use today to measure, say, social communications, are a weird mix of metrics that were originally created to measure TV (e.g. reach, frequency), banners (e.g. views, click through rates) or online stores (e.g. conversions to a purchase), to name a few. Not that any of this is wrong, but as with any other sort of effectiveness measurement it’s probably not the full picture.
The point is that towards the end Bogdana left us all with what I think is a pertinent point: if the right metrics to measure, say, the impact of social conversation to broader business goals don’t exist today, maybe we agency people, whose role it is to advise clients on this sort of stuff, should invent them.
Which sounds nice.
Except it’s already happening, just outside our doors.
It’s happening with the media owners. Platforms like Facebook, Google or BuzzFeed to name a few, whose job (and effectively whole business model) relies on creating some sort of public framework that justifies why their platform beats all the other platforms on the market. That’s why Facebook now goes all in on video views (which sounds like TV all over), Google focuses on micro moments and direct conversion and BuzzFeed famously shuns how many times an article is viewed and instead focuses on how often or likely it is that it will get shared.
The problem is that there are absolutely no standards to this. Everyone now talks about how we should look at advertising not as a channel-specific thing but rather as a whole, but the moment you try to make sense of three, four or ten data sources you realise that it sounds great on paper, but good luck trying to figure it out in real life. You either get different sources (platforms) telling you to report on different things or, more often than we’d like to admit, when you look at the data there’s just too much in there that doesn’t add up.
So if measuring effectiveness is all about the narrative around why a piece of work works, what happens today is that we’re being thrown random characters and loose plots, and then asked to create a story that would make Christopher Nolan proud. Stories of advertising measurement today would make the plot of Suicide Squad look like an instant winner.
Maybe the solution lies in more regulations around standards. After the news that Facebook famously overstated video metrics for two years, we might be closer to this being established. But I’ve been finding it hard to understand how agencies can help lead this, as it seems that platforms themselves are way ahead in that race.
Maybe that will change as more official partnerships are created between ad networks and big platforms — which leaves independent shops in a bit of a conundrum. Do they stick around to follow the lead of the big boys, or do they figure out a way to get together and define the model from within? Maybe we should have more independent agency co-operative models around this stuff. Maybe this falls under organisations like the IPA or the IAB. Maybe it’s a mix of all of this and more.
And if it is a mix, I’d imagine we’d enter a golden age of unicorns and rainbows where agencies and platforms don’t have egos nor sales targets and we all effectively row in the same direction to get this sorted on behalf of our clients. But for me it’s more likely that this will perpetuate the debate as new platforms show up and want their piece of the pie, or established platforms try to become agencies themselves and aren’t interested in a common standard that’s not their own.
Which reminds me of one of my favourite internet cartoons.
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Hello! I’m Rob, a freelance strategist who delivers simple and practical strategies based on a solid understanding of technology, brand building and human nature. Find out more about me at estreitinho.com.
