There’s no question the culture we live in is just a wee bit obsessed with measuring things. And nowhere is this more evident than in the marketing/advertising world’s seemingly mindless embrace of the Internet as a medium. Just look at the golconda of “metrics” it provides, for god’s sake!
However, as the subhead to an article in The Economist recently (and pointedly) put it: “Such a lot of data, so little information”. Oh, I understand the position marketers find themselves in. With accountability all the rage, lacking numerical support for one’s actions can be a career-limiting move. But when this intrepid quest for data approaches the point where it rivals the hunt for dental floss after a meal of corn on the cob, something is wrong.
Or, given the lead paragraph in this article, maybe it’s everything: “Imagine you’re an advertiser, you want to place your banners on the most popular website, and you want to know how much to pay. Globally, the leading site is Google, which has the most ‘page views’. Or is it Microsoft, whose various sites have, in the jargon, the most ‘time spent’? Or should you go by unique users, duration, hits, click-through, impressions, queries, sessions, streams or engagement?”
Apparently, no one knows for sure, including Bob Ivins of comScore, who’s quoted in the article as saying the web generates data like “a fire hose shoots water” and determining what any of it means, if anything, is a challenge not unlike “putting a straw into the fire hose to take a sip”. And only a few sentences later, there’s this doozy attributed to an unnamed, internet “old-timer” who came right out and admitted: “We produced hit numbers because we could, not because it was useful.”
Which gets me to wondering if we aren’t asking the internet–with its myriad quantitative resources–to answer a question no amount of data can resolve: How long is a piece of string? Or worse still, running the very real risk of doing what Jim Albert, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University, warned of when he said “You can prove any silly hypothesis…by running a statistical test on tons of data.”
And no, that’s not my Luddite petticoat showing again. I like numbers, I embrace measurement, in fact, as creative people go, I’m something of a nut for empirical evidence and Data Head is my best “Cranium” category. So there. But I continue to suspect that what the sellers of the Internet as a medium are selling and what the buyers are buying are two very different things. A notion I couldn’t help reflecting upon today after I read in The New York Times that the FTC finally cleared Google’s merger (sic) with DoubleClick.
Now doesn’t this union of portal prowess and data depth prove beyond any doubt the singular attractiveness of the internet to marketers and advertisers? Maybe. But I’m reminded of what has to have been one of the economist John Maynard Keynes’ most trenchant (or at least comprehensible) observations. He compared the stock market to a beauty pageant in which the judges are required to vote on which contestant the other judges will select as the most beautiful instead of the person they would vote for themselves. So, is it not possible that the purveyors of internet advertising (Google, for one) are touting the data they can generate, not because these numbers are inherently so meaningful, but rather because their buyers find them irresistibly attractive?
That’s the trouble with measurement. Without fully understanding the motives of the people behind it, there’s not telling what you may be led to believe. Kind of like the old joke: Why do women have such poor depth perception? Because they’re forever being told that this (the span of the teller’s thumb and middle finger held as far apart as possible) is twelve inches.
