Myth measurement: what you really need to know about your advertising

In the new era of accountability responsibility and state-authorised bonuses everyone is trying to measure everything.

Most of the time, this is a justification of activity, inactivity, existence or jobs. But in the world of advertising, we need to be particularly careful what we measure. As the saying goes, we know that only half of our advertising is working - we just don’t know which half.

Online marketing has the beauty of being 100% measurable - or so we are led to believe. The use of cookies and pixels enables us to track who has seen our ad and what they did after it. And all this is beautifully packaged as “analytics” - a lovely word implying science and absolutes.

But online analytics don’t tell us as much as we think they do. Is it enough to know how many people viewed an ad? What about how people think and feel? How do you measure the whole experience?

Measurement v money

With media budgets shrinking across the board, it has become even more important to justify every penny spent. And so it seems strange that marketers are still so attached to one-dimensional metrics when they really need to know as much as they can.

We’ve taken an overview of advertising measurement - both on- and off-line - in our whitepaper: Finding Out Which Half Of Your Advertising Is Working. Please feel free to download it here - and leave a comment or get in touch if you want to continue the discussion or find out more.

Service innovation through co-creation

Andrew Needham of Face has a really interesting article in October's Admap pointing out how some go-ahead consumer product companies like Unilever are using their customers to help them develop their products. There is a strand of thinking that customers and consumers don't really know what they want and if we always rely on them to tell us, we would never invent anything new. Like Henry Ford said, if he had asked customers what they wanted - they would just have asked for a faster horse. The advocates of this thinking (usually big-brand agencies) regard the only useful customer research is as crash test dummies - ie to test stuff after its been invented.

But it depends how you use the input from your customers and consumers and the way you deal with it. The Economist Intelligence Unit published a paper called The Digital Company 2013. They believe that customer-driven innovation will become mainstream by 2013.

If all this is true for product innovation then how much more real and important will customer co-creation be for service innovation? Services more than products are a series of interactions between the individual and the offering. It is continuous interface between the users of the service and the people providing it. So who is going to be better at deciding whether the experience was a good one or a bad one - the agency or the user? As the Design Council's RED Paper 02 says "A top down innovation strategy is no longer appropriate for solving today's complex problems". And this is even more so when you are solving today's complex service problems.

How you involve the user to co design the services they will use, and how you can get them to truly co innovate rather than just ask for a faster horse, is more to do with the techniques you use and the way you ask the questions. But the successful service companies will work out how to involve their customers and users and they will be the most innovative companies of the future.

It ain't what you get it's the way that you get it.

Have you noticed how really good service makes you happy? Whether it's dealing with a restaurant booking or using a mobile phone, your experience really makes a difference to whether you go back there or renew your contract.

So why don't companies and organisations take more care in how they put together that customer experience? If you were buying a razor, you'd understand that a lot of research has gone into how to design it. Making it fit your hand. Making it look good. Making it do its job properly. But when it comes to services, people just put them together. There is a tendency to offer the service without really thinking about who is going to use it and what their experience would be.