Why should we have to change the online metrics?
Media Are Different
It makes sense to use impression metrics to compare
one 30-second TV ad spot to another. It makes no sense to use impressions when
comparing a TV spot to a website banner impression to a magazine ad page.
Probably 90% of what makes each of those media placements special is unique to
media and how their viewers, users and readers consume them. TV is all about
sight, sound and motion. It is about shared experiences; it is passive, leaning
back. The web is all about leaning forward, interactivity and declaring
intentions. Radio is often just in the background. Magazines are glossy,
sensual, personal. Defining the economic comparability of those various media
by the 10% that is the same, distorts their relative value and creates a false
sense of equivalency.
Exposures Are Different
Cross-media impressions comparisons are bad enough,
but what about using impressions to create comparability among very different
types of media exposures? Impressions are not the best way to compare
interstitials on NYTimes.com to a corporate logo on a pro golfer's visor
promotion to Facebook buttons. It doesn't matter which exposure is better; --
they are all clearly very different. The NYTimes.com interstitial owns your
attention while you wait for your news. The Facebook button is one of a dozen
more ad-like images fighting for your attention while you check our friends'
status and photos. The pro golfer visor logo is one of hundreds of latent logo
"impressions" that you see every 15 minutes when watching a golf
tournament on TV. Who can argue that each of their impressions are comparable?
No More Scarcity
Focusing on impressions as the common currency of
media made some sense when all media impressions were scarce and as a rule
folks were not consuming three or four different media all at once as they
often do today. Decades ago it required printing presses, broadcast licenses or
transmission towers to deliver media, and their owners -- newspaper companies,
TV and radio broadcasters -- made sure to create a limited number of ad units that
they charged a lot for. Today, the internet and digital networks have made
media distribution plentiful and cheap, and impressions have become plentiful
and cheap as well. When impressions were scarce as gold, they had currency
value. Not now, when they've become as plentiful as paper.
Back-end Overtaking Impressions on the Web
Web advertising is probably the most
impression-standardized media of all. The industry adopted impression-based
measurement and cost-per-impression measurement as its primary selling and
buying metrics from almost the very beginning. However, as everyone who has
bought or sold web display ads know, back end metrics, like cost-per-click and
cost-per-action and cost-per-conversion are the real drivers of the economics
in the category. Cost-per-impression campaigns are almost always "backed
into" from results-based measurements. As more media channels become
"web-ified," impression metrics will continue to lose ground to
back-end results.