The brave new world of marketing accountability

 "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half."-- legendary American retailer John Wannamaker

Wannamaker vented his frustration over a hundred years ago. But until recently little had changed to reduce the frustration that CEOs and business managers felt about advertising through mass media. Now, media experts like Mitch Joel are telling the world that advertising accountability has arrived, thanks to the growing application of metrics that digitally track and measure prospect response. Direct marketing has relied on metrics for years but "measurable marketing" is finally coming to TV:

The world of change(d) by Mitch Joel

We're about to enter a very different media generation. Accountability for TV ads is going to become as precise (if not more detailed) than what the people in search engine marketing have known for over a decade. We're going to soon have a much better idea as to what creative works, how much of it was truly seen, and if it had any impact (beyond people hitting a "skip this ad" button). Something tells me that traditional advertising is going to be in for some tough truths about the type of work that is being produced, and the value behind the entire process. Directly correlating sales and interest to TV ads isn't going to be the type of metric regulated to the specialized agencies any more. It's going to be table stakes in what will become a very complex game of finding optimal marketing mixes that are no longer so heavily weighted to TV ads over everything else.

The full article is posted on his blog, Six Pixels of Separation.

Measurable marketing isn't a fad. Thanks to the web, it's here to stay. Drew Williams writes extensively about measurable marketing on his blog, Feed the Beast. Full disclosure: I co-authored Feed the Startup Beast (McGraw-Hill, 2013) with Drew.