Lights, Camera....Action: What Marketers Should Really Care About!

Wall Street Journal: Some Marketers Want More Ad Testing, Less Debating About Metrics

As we discussed in the very first class, online marketing is diverse arena that is rapidly expanding. With so many formats and advertisements out there, it is critical for marketers to approach their targeted consumers in new and innovative ways in order to maximize their return on marketing spend. However, in order to evaluate the impact of a campaign, marketers debate, and seemingly struggle to agree upon the appropriate metric or measurement to use or calculate the impact. We have learned about some of the traditional metrics and this article goes on to discuss some of the other commonly used metrics in digital, but what is the right metric? Which of these should marketers focus on? What is the "magic bullet" of advertisement metrics, tantamount in the determination of an advertisements impact?

Like most, if not all of you, I use the internet and as a result am subjected to digital advertisements. Now I don’t know about you, but I have gotten into the practice of tuning out advertisements as noise on a webpage or immediately looking for the “Skip Advertisement” button to appear when I am shown a video on my way to another web page. I have increasingly felt that advertisements are forcing themselves upon me – and in response I tune them out even more and often get irritated to the point of eroding any likelihood that I had to every purchase a product or use a service. Perhaps I am a poor example, but I get the sense that I am representative of the new norm – I don’t care about viewability, I am not likely to click on an intrusive advertisement that pops up, I just want to read my ESPN article in peace and go back to doing my work – who has time to sit and watch a video! I, like many of you, place an enormous premium on time (these days more than ever) and prefer advertisements that are designed to drive a specific action. Stop showing me commercials – that is why I stream my shows as well as use DVR, Netflix, and Amazon Prime – I DON’T WANT TO WATCH COMMERCIALS.

From my personal perspective, I agree whole heartedly with Alok Gupta, Airbnb’s data science manager, that advertising should be purely outcome based and marketers should shift their mentality to focus on tracking how well digital advertisements drive results they care about – are the potential consumers acting.  In my experience, the best advertisements illicit some type of action from me and are different, direct, and concise. Accordingly, their mindset is that marketers should be more daring and willing to experiment in order to get their target audience to take action!

In short, marketers’ focus should be around thinking outside the box in order to get their audiences to stop watching and start acting!