Old Media Guy, but still works.

Old Media Guy, but still works.

My old friend, Dave the media guy, has always warned me about unmeasured media. Now maybe we should put into that category, hyper-measured media. Dave’s comment about measured online media should get some attention.

Interesting if somewhat flawed article about the near impossibility of measuring advertising effectiveness on the Internet (just like with off-line ads!). As they say consumer behavior is so “erratic” that almost any type of final analysis has to be view that behavior as coincidental to the ad rather than caused by the ad, especially for big, well-known brands.

It’s also only dealing with what I’d call retail ads — search and the like that expect a consumer to “do” something as a result of the ad. In other words, they skip the branding part entirely where the Internet delivers people in pretty much the same way as any other medium — even I watch, albeit almost always without sound, the occasional advertising video that annoyingly runs in front of some snippet of video about something “weird” that I really wanted to see.

They also grant that for smaller, unknown companies search etc. can work, though hardly with the precision that the Internet sales reps would like you to believe.