Mind The Gap

27 October 2022

Next week many of the most influential thinkers in audience measurement will gather in Nice for the annual asi Conference. I say ‘many’ as there will be the inevitable shortage of agency representation (‘we spent our budgets in Cannes…’) and despite an admirable turn-out from ISBA there will not be many advertisers present either. 

This is a shame – audience measurement (in one form or another) forms the bedrock of the media business, the foundation on which plans are built, and buys are made.  

Worryingly the principles on which the various systems have been built over a considerable period are coming into question like never before. 

The concern is that whilst the technocrats squabble over the detail the real argument is happening elsewhere and is concerned less with technique and more with politics, structure, and the search for ever larger numbers, however meaningless. 

We are genuinely in danger of weakening the bedrock, and once you do that the likelihood is that the whole house will come tumbling down. 

It might be worthwhile starting at the beginning. 

Why measure audiences at all? It may seem an obvious question but in the modern era of platforms and big data (is that still a thing?) we can allegedly quantify everything without going to the trouble of measuring it. 

If you can claim, with a straight face that your platform reaches more of a certain demographic than actually exists in living breathing form (a particular specialism of Facebook), and if buyers are happy to continue to buy impressions allegedly made against these non-existent people, then why bother? 

As we all know, audience measurement creates the currency used to buy and sell space and time. 

The provision of a currency is hugely important, and it is a credit to the measurement community that its accuracy is not questioned. I doubt that there are many advertisers or their agencies seriously questioning BARB data. 

BARB just is – and well done to all involved to have reached that status. 

That they have done so is due to a lot of behind-the-scenes work, strengthening the bedrock where necessary, so that it’s able to take the strain imposed upon it by new developments in the marketplace. 

BARB is on firm ground in any technical debate. 

But the participants in the new debate are not technicians, they are investors, moneymen who see advertising dollars blindly following size. 

They demand ever bigger numbers to feed the beast. If the audience is not there, then make it look as if it is. Matters of research propriety will soon be forgotten as the platforms deliver ever more impressions, ever higher reach. 

And therein lies the genius idea. 

Take 100 advertisers from 20 years ago and ask them to define ‘impressions’. Or ‘reach.’ Few would have been able to do so. 

So why not use the same words? 

No-one that matters will spot the difference when online terms are set against conventional measurement norms. 

Once you have got away with misusing words you can do what you like. 

Sell more ‘impressions,’ no-one knows what they are anyway, but we can see you more of them for less. 

Are they human ‘impressions?’ Well, who knows and anyway (runs the online evangelists’ argument) TV commercials sometimes play to an empty room. 

In olden times everyone accepted TV ratings as an approximation of the truth. It was close, the gap between ratings as reported and reality was there, but it was narrow. 

Yes, when the ads came on people left the room; yes, they looked away; yes, they ate, yes, they chatted. But not in massive, wholly distracted numbers. 

When ratings data were used in econometric models, it was with confidence. The data were consistent and accepted, the correlation was there. Advertising, done well, worked.  

The gap between the measurement and real life was not too wide. 

But now it is a gaping chasm. 

Dr Augustine Fou reports that in the world of programmatic buying somewhere between 1% and 4% of online clicks come from humans. 

But hey, the impressions were cheap. Hurrah for cheap media! 

We need to start to change this narrative. 

Advertisers need to ask the right questions of their agencies (who are in no way going to want to initiate this conversation). 

They need to understand that the same word used in different media contexts does not necessarily mean the same thing. 

They need to understand the size of the gap that’s opened up between what they are buying and what they think they are buying. 

If they do not do this, they will have some exceedingly tough questions to answer.  

Including how come we bought more impressions than we did back in the olden days, but our advertising seemed to work back then? 

Only yesterday the BBC reported a slow-down in online ad spend. 

An economic slowdown is upon us, yes. But maybe these ads are not working so well, and it has just taken us a while to work that out. 

Those spending the money are going to have to accept the truth that, in the words of my Crater Lake analytics colleague David Beaton, ‘Bots Don’t Buy.’