Stop Waiting for a Standard Advanced Advertising Metric

We often hear media companies and advertisers alike lament the lack of a standard cross-media metric that everyone can agree on. The reality is that metric will either never exist or the mathematically complex nature of consensus will be years, if not a decade, in fruition.

There is a new (un)standard practice, however, that can and probably should drive out the need for a cross-media metric. The true advanced advertising metric is defined by the advertiser according to their bottom-line KPI.

The best metrics available used to be demo/GRPs in TV and CPC/CPV in digital. That was all we had to go on, so they became the standard by default. Now, technology has evolved to the point that advanced target audience delivery and, most important, audience action, can be measured.

Cost per converted viewer. Cost per converted subscriber. Cost per sale. Cost per visit. These are all KPIs unlocked by new data sets and new platforms that put KPI definition and action directly into advertisers’ hands.

The reason no one can agree on a standard metric for advanced TV advertising is because the KPIs advertisers are looking for have advanced too. For the first time, brands have the ability to understand how marketing actually impacts their bottom line dollars. And, every bottom line is different. That makes the KPI different within brand products and between brands and categories.

This KPI/metric revolution is also what enables marketing to become a truly core component of business strategy.

Moving forward, the most informed questions anyone who advertises can ask – whether in planning, buying, reporting and/or strategy discussions – are:

• “What do I want to impact, at the business level, with this media strategy?”
• “Does this media plan give me the necessary insight at the audience and attribution level to make strategic business decisions?”