Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Online advertisement and the measurement issue
Online advertisement has a big problem: It's rather easily monitored and it appears that numbers of clicks, views and even other details can be created just like that. The reason this is a problem is because online advertisement has bigger expectations. Unlike other more traditional ways of advertisement online must produce clear numbers. Let's take television as an example. It's said to be the most influential medium of advertisement. But what do we really know about its influence? Of course there has been a lot more time for collecting the data for television than for Internet. Decades more, that is. Thus there has been much more research about its impact. Television doesn't produce any clear numbers. All the measurement of influence of television advertisement are only estimates. The amount of people watching certain programs or channels is estimated from a small number of households and people taking part on the research. And nobody really knows if this estimated amount of viewers are actually watching and hearing the commercials. Muting is easy and checking social media during the ad breaks is common. It is quite interesting how little the estimates are questioned when it comes to television or any other traditional advertisement.
Television, radio, print and outdoor advertisement is taken as granted. Because this magazine has x number of readers then the advertisement on it has been seen n times and it has this and this kind of impact on them. Online the worth of advertisement is mostly seen in clicks and increasingly on the goal performance (how many sales where finalised after clicking the ad, how many people signed up to the service through the ad clicks). These numbers are generally more easy to get and faster too than in other kinds of advertisement. There are of course some cases where the television or other advertisement can create immediate numbers. I'm talking about television shopping and other cases where advertisement is assumed to create phone calls, website views and sales the moment it is viewed. This is however not the way traditional advertisement usually works.
Online the long term and unconscious influence tends to be forgotten. Only clicks and sales count, all the views are secondary. In a way it's understandable, since the long term and unconscious impact is hard to measure and all the research tells only a partial story. Yet this is the case with most of the traditional advertisement. The impact can only be seen afterwards, when the mother of a family decides to switch from this brand of milk to that one. Even then it's unclear what made her do the switch and when asked she might not to be able to give an answer or could tell only part of the reason. Any advertisement works in conscious and unconscious way. While a person might not right now click that ad to buy the Samsung Galaxy they could have left with the unconscious idea of buying one later when they stumble upon one at the local department store. This is not something people buying the ads wants to hear. They want it all and they want it now. That's why the folks in advertisement companies, television channels, magazines, outdoor ad space providers and then some don't want to talk about the uncertainty of the estimates.
While I'm not saying the traditional advertisement wouldn't have any impact on the way products and services are consumed I'm saying it's good to remember that measurements of that impact are generally estimates. And I'm saying online advertisement doesn't differ from others that much. Actually it's equally as hard to measure and the real impact can only be estimated. Its only mistake really is in the fact that there are easier ways to get certain measurements, which easily dilutes any other estimates of the influence.
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