Ordinary Advertising

“Run, run, run, Spot.” Or so many of us were told in our first reading primer. Something those clever folks at Nielsen Media Research are going to verify starting in November, when according to news reports, it will start to break out the ratings for the commercials pods within a program and not just the program in its entirety. (Frankly, I never knew everything was lumped together.)

But as evidence of the parlous state of the advertising “accountability” movement, these ratings will not apply to individual commercials. They will simply measure how many people turned the set off, changed channels or maybe just muted the damn things.

Advertisers are expected to be all over this new thing because it’s anticipated that the viewership of commercials will be somewhat lower than the programming itself. (Duh.) And that this will allow them to grind a few more bucks out of the networks. (”I don’t care if the show has a 10 share, my pod had a 2, so I want a discount!”)

Which, once again, is missing the entire point.

The gross tonnage approach favored by media buyers–”total impressions”, “readership”, “CPM”–have picked the pockets of advertisers and lined the pockets of media vendors for decades. And it’s high time someone put a stop to it. Exposure to an advertising message, i.e being in the room when it ran or flipping through the magazine or newspaper it ran in is no indicator that the message actually reached or had any impact on its supposed recipients. And short of Nielsen installing fMRI machines in its thousands of TV rooms, I doubt whether this will ever be accurately measured.

What can be intuited, however, is that an exposure is a far cry from a connection. I’ve been exposed to (or it to me) the same Hooters outdoor board on I-90 countless times over the last few years and have yet to set foot in the place. (Honest, honey.) And would be hard pressed to tell you what it says. But I still count as one of the millions of “impressions” this advertising has achieved.

Rating advertising on this basis alone is like grading students for attendance. A numerical truism, but a pretty poor predictor of knowledge imparted.