Putting the measurement cart before the horse

By now, everyone has heard of the growing investment in online advertising. More and more, companies are shifting their dollars to banner ads, click-through ads and more interactive options. The reasons are solid. Audiences – especially the coveted younger demographic – spend more time online than in front of any other old school media, such as television, radio or newspapers. Online advertising allows very specific segmenting of audiences. And online advertising provides the powerful ability to measure results in fast, detailed and comprehensive ways. One result of this last benefit, for example, is that with click-through ads, advertisers only pay for those customers who click-through (fraud and abuse notwithstanding). So you only pay for what works.

All of this means that money going to online advertising is for the most part coming from other buckets (which has traditional ad agencies in a tizzy, but that’s a topic for another blog). For some of the reasons listed above – segmenting, going where the audience is at is a good thing. And the real-time, detailed results online advertising can deliver is also a good thing. But it’s this last reason that can be abused by some marketers (and many online advertising advocates). The argument may go something like this: Why spend money on broadcast advertising or branding in general, where its nearly impossible to track the effect, when you can see the results down to the person and product using online advertising?

Hey, we all want to measure the success of our marketing efforts. In healthcare, this is critical to increasing the value placed on marketing within the organization. But here’s the rub: just because its hard to measure something doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Because its nearly impossible to measure the real impact of an updated logo or name (in real results, such as volumes or revenue), does that mean organizations should never invest in this? Using online advertising itself, does the click-through ad for Amazon.com get more hits than the ad for Little Timmy’s House of Books? It should, and it’s branding that makes this so.

Of course, branding goes way beyond a logo or ad campaign. Brands are shaped in the minds of consumers themselves, and are built through many inputs, experience and word of mouth being the two most important. But we all need to keep the allure of online advertising and its delivery of instant feedback and measurement in perspective. It’s a great tool, but its only one piece of the pie. What do you think?