Richard Huntington was recently one of the judges at the Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards. Despite digital's much heralded accountability, he found this to be something of an empty claim that didn't translate to business results…
"The standard measure for return on investment would appear to be the difference between the cost of the campaign and the cost of reaching the same number of people in more conventional media. That is not a return on investment, that is the sort of haphazard disregard for accurate accounting that precipitated the current global financial crisis. Indeed, any effectiveness metric that does not tell you the incremental profit that your marketing activity generated for the business isn’t worth the paper it is written on. Not click through, not cost per impression, not cost per response, not page views, not dwell time, not fanciful measures of engagement...And I lay the blame fairly and squarely on digital’s cult of accountability. Accountability sounds like a thoroughly noble endeavor because it suggests an appropriate use of the client’s budget and an ability to show what happened to it...(but it) measures efficiency not effect...(And) so long as the digital community clings to its obsession with accountability over effectiveness it will remain in the unedifying position of creating engaging brand fluff on the one hand and highly measurable but largely pointless direct response advertising on the other."
Read the whole thing here. And I'm sure there are alternative POVs!
