Guest Blogger: Obey Your CPM

A cranky post from guest blogger Roger Lewis.

Here is an excerpt from AdAge's article on agencies of the year with an A grade or better.

"AKQA's work for Coca-Cola's Sprite grabbed attention with a campaign that invited consumers to participate in the marketing process through a national contest to create a theme song for TV spots featuring basketball star LeBron James. According to AKQA, the site received more than 250,000 visits with an average interaction time of 7 minutes, 24 seconds."

I don't know how much this cost to execute but lets say it was $ 250,000 (and I will bet I am way low). That would give a cost per thousand of $1,000. At $ 1,000,000 it is a cpm of $ 4,000.

I would also posit that they don't know if it was 250,000 unique visitors or one person 250,000 times. And I would also wonder if they knew how many of them were Sprite users before the promotion and how many bought Sprite after they played on the web site.

I do know that management is happy because they could measure it, but was it worth the cost? Did it create new users? Did it change behavior? Did sales go up? ( probably not possible to measure because 250,000 people would not have an impact on sales.)I am sure they can't answer the last few questions.

Its cold here in Florida, tomorrow is supposed to be warmer and I won't have time on my hands to read articles that upset me.

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