March 02, 2011

Currency Across The Ecosystem

Stop the presses.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Association of National Advertisers, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, along with Bain & Company and MediaLink are banding together in the hope of  "Making Measurement Make Sense."

This should be good for a few laughs.

Apparently, what this fuster-cluck is all about is finding a way to take all the incomprehensible, misleading, intentionally obfuscatory "data" that the online metrics geniuses are generating and getting something intelligible out of them. Good luck.

Making measurement make sense? These people can't even make their press releases make sense. According to a spokesman...
"Online media has an abundance of metrics, but none that serve as currency across the ecosystem."
Yeah, that's what we need -- currency across the freakin' ecosystem.

I guess there's some solace to be taken in that these people are tacitly admitting what Ad Contras have been screaming about for years -- that most online measurement is crapola masquerading as information.

This effort is doomed to failure. The enormous success of digital advertising is based on the fortunate circumstance that almost no one understands anything about the numbers. And those who do ain't talkin'.

Do you really think the ad industry wants to butcher the cash cow by revealing how alarmingly unimpressive most of the numbers for digital advertising are?

These guys better make sure they don't do their job too well. If they suddenly forget their "currencies" and their "ecosystems" and start talking in plain English, we're all screwed.

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