Quantifying the Qualitative

It's hard to argue with numbers.  They're so absolute and objective.  Nine is greater than five, so why would one choose five over nine?  A good chunk of media planning aims to reduce media selection and levels to a series of numbers, so that judgment calls become easier to make.  Decisions become very clear cut, which is why the quants tend to outmaneuver the quals in the long run.  Maybe the quals win a battle or two, but the quants win the overall war. Online media has a quantitative and a qualitative side.  The quantitative tends to put it at a disadvantage.  For instance, if you're targeting wide demographic audiences like Adults 18-49, the numbers for television tend to blow away online numbers for the most part.  It's hard to compete with TV for cheap reach.

The qualitative side is one of online's big advantages.  Online tends to more engaging, owing to its two-way nature.  It also tends to reach people while they're in the right mindset and most receptive to an ad.  Engagement, receptivity, relevance - these are all concepts that tend to be expressed not through numbers, but via rationale that hinges on subjective arguments.  In other words, if you're a media planner and you make the argument that a Flash ad in the baseball section of ESPN is more engaging than a TV spot within a baseball game on ESPN, it's not as if there's an engagement factor that quantifies the ability of the online ad or the TV spot to engage your audience.  You may have some research to back up your arguments, but by and large, it's usually a leap of logic to apply the very expensive and very specific research to your particular product category and situation.  That's why many qualitative arguments require a leap of faith to accept.

That's unfortunate, because leaps of faith are precisely what land brand managers and VPs of marketing in hot water.  It's rare for client-side professionals to get fired for playing it safe.  Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) thus tip the balance toward the quants, as it's easier to show how one arrived at a decision and justify the logic.

If absolute numbers are what clients need to see, perhaps it makes sense to develop ratings scales for things on the qualitative side that we think of as subjective.  Certainly I've done it in my traditional media experience.  At Y&R, we used to do this with print a lot.  We'd at least make an attempt to quantify some of the factors we take into consideration when we tried to gauge the relative value of insertions in various magazines.  Qualitative rankings would take into consideration everything from editorial reputation to advertising/editorial ratio to whether the book was saddle-stitched or perfect bound.

Why can't we do this with some of the fuzzier metrics in online?

While every 3-letter industry trade organization argues about a definition of engagement that all marketers can use, why don't marketers define it themselves and start developing their own ratings scales for the attributes of engagement that matter to them?  Surely, different types of ads and placements can be rated on a 1-10 scale for things like time spent with an ad, receptivity of the audience, contextual relevance and a whole host of other attributes.

At least this approach could get us by until metrics become standardized.  Heck, maybe a custom rating system would end up serving a client better than standard metrics and could become a permanent fixture of media planning...

Demographics Are Still Killing Us

The fact that broad demographics are still the way we evaluate the delivery of media plans is really hampering the online advertising industry. Let's use the hypothetical example of Slurm, the fictitious energy drink that was the subject of a Futurama episode a while back. An agency developing a media plan for Slurm will do a lot of research on the target audience. They'll find that a lot of different types of people drink Slurm, but that the core target is, say, Adults 18-34. They might find that the core target for Slurm is a certain type of young person who likes music, attends concerts, tends to be a young, urban professional, etc. When it comes time to evaluate the delivery of the plan, we're still talking reach, frequency and GRPs against A18-34.

One of the reasons this sucks for online is that people align themselves with sites and communities online according to their interests and lifestyles. As an online media planner, I might look to MTV and VH-1 as potential media venues. But guess what? Lots of people who aren't between the ages of 18 and 34 like MTV and VH-1, too. Since we pay for every impression in online, we end up paying for a lot of people who aren't inside the demographic parameters. I don't think this is such a horrible thing, but when it comes time to evaluate the delivery of the plan, online can look inefficient at reaching the target because it has higher costs to reach 1,000 people in the target demo. (Cost Per Point.)

If I buy a bunch of TV spots in Prime time, (hey, Slurm has a pretty big budget) I pay based on the audience of A18-34 who are watching the networks and shows we purchase. I also get a ton of other people who just happen to be watching the shows, like folks who happen to be 39 and still might be interested in lugging a case of Slurm home from CostCo or whatever. Slurm benefits from this, because while their media is evaluated against the core target, they also get a lot of Slurm drinkers outside the demographic that they don't pay for.

On the online side, a planner might decide to overlay a demographic targeting filter to increase delivery against the core target. This will make Cost Per Points competitive with television, print, radio and other offline media, but it has several nasty side effects:

1. You lose the benefit of the "spill" outside the demographic. Most sites that can target demographically use site registration data to target ads to people occupying specific demographics. For all intents and purposes on the delivery evaluation side, ALL of the impressions you buy end up going to that core demographic.
2. You limit your site selection. There are a lot of sites that would be well-suited to reaching the Slurm drinker in a relevant context, but guess what? They don't have demographic targeting capabilities. When it comes time to eliminate options based on their ability to reach the target efficiently, these sites are selected against.
3. You boost frequency at the expense of reach. Fewer sites to choose from means less reach and more frequency (in general). Further, very few sites have registration data on 100% of the people who visit their site. When a demographic targeting filter is added, the potential pool of people who can receive the message is not only limited by the demographic filter, but also by the total number of people submitting valid registration data. And when you talk to a smaller pool of people, you decrease your reach and increase your frequency.

These are just three of the undesirable side effects. There are more. I won't get into them now.

So, what's to be done? To me, two feasible options exist:

The first is an audience-based currency for online. In other words, we pay for online the same way we pay for TV. If I buy a rotation through Yahoo! Music against A18-34, I pay for delivery against A18-34, but I also get a lot of other folks outside the demographic who happen to be hanging out there. This would have the benefit of increasing the value of Run of Site and other untargeted inventory that doesn't tend to be used on targeted online media plans because of its high cost to reach a specific demographic. It would also help make CPPs more competitive between offline media and online media. Plus, it's easy for clients to understand.

The biggest drawback of this approach, IMHO, is that it abandons what makes online media unique and desirable - the ability to reach people in alignment with their interests and lifestyles - by concentrating on demographics, which are really just a surrogate for the real audience you're trying to reach.

The audience-based approach is nothing new. There's been a lot of talk in the industry over the years, debating a move to this approach. There are a lot of problems with it, including the notion that publishers don't trust measurement companies enough to be able to determine delivery against a demographic. It would open up a huge can of worms with respect to whose numbers to trust.

IMHO, the second option is the better one - Evaluating entire media plans on something other than demographics. Unfortunately, this would take a seismic shift in the entire media industry, which isn't exactly known for its ability to adapt its systems quickly (or at all).

Back to Slurm for a second... As an online guy, I'm in the position of having to alter my plan on MTV and VH-1 because my demographic delivery doesn't look as attractive from an efficiency standpoint as the :30 TV spots. But let's say that it was the TV people who had to adjust their delivery evaluation instead of me. Because people online congregate around interests and lifestyles, online will deliver the psychographic target a lot better than offline. My cost to reach the people I REALLY want to reach is at worst comparable and at best, a lot more efficient. It's only because of the demographic surrogate that television appears to deliver the target more efficiently than online.

Now, since television doesn't have vast reams of data to the extent that online does, it's a huge challenge to be able to sell or evaluate television by delivery against an interest or a psychographic audience. Even if you could develop a model for evaluating it that way, there not a snowball's chance in hell that the networks will sell it to you that way. They'll only guarantee against demographics. Thus, it's television's inflexibility in both measurement and pricing model that preserves its own dominance.

If we could change the way we evaluate the delivery of media plans, interactive media could be the core of many ad campaigns. You wouldn't see 5-15% of media budgets spent online, you'd see 50, 60 or 70 percent.

Then we could get to work on how to avoid shortchanging two-way dialogue, which is easily facilitated online but not in other media. Before we can get there, though, we need to show how interests and lifestyles are better measurement evaluation criteria than age and sex.

Cleaning Up

Lots of work around the house over the weekend... We finally got our pool area straightened out. First thing to get done was the concrete patio. After years of neglect, the concrete was covered with nasty black and green gunk - mostly mold and algae that needed a blast from the pressure washer to get rid of. It looks 100% better now. We also took the pool cover off, cleaned it off and put it away along with the water bags lining the edge that were supposed to keep the cover from falling into the pool. We situated the patio furniture and swept up around the patio as well. I also knocked down the rotting fence around the pool filter. I also fertilized the lawn and gave it a good soaking so it wouldn't burn out. The folks from Monster Sheds also stopped by to give us an estimate on a new shed. The one that came with the house is falling apart and it needs to come down before it falls down on its own. We're getting a 10' X 14' building in the corner of the property, with a ramp and a nice double barn door.

On Sunday, we went to Fortunoff. I really wanted a big grill, since I spend my spring and summer cooking most of my meals outside. Check out the pic - we got a great deal on this one, and I can't wait for it to arrive.

Next weekend, Craig is dropping off his Bobcat and I'm getting a dumpster to get rid of all the debris I'll create. The old shed needs to be demolished, plus I need to do a great deal of landscaping work (yanking out stumps and bushes, clearing out beds, digging up an old walkway, etc.)

Monday Morning Wakeup

Nothing will wake you up on a Monday morning quite like having one of your trainmates spike your coffee into your lap. As soon as the Men's Wearhouse down the block opens, I'm there...