Sometimes it seems like we tie ourselves up in knots worrying about the exactness of the number and lose sight of the reason why we care. Is online the right channel to reach people, what is the right place to put our message and do the people who will see it even care. Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is whether or not we can measure that.

Increasingly, marketing activities demand accountability. Did it work? In order to assess this, we need some sort of yardstick. Statistics and measurement are our only tools for assessing this but just as it is difficult to compare two lengths when one is measured in imperial standards and the other in metric, the current inconsistencies in measurement make any true comparative assessment of reach or effectiveness pretty hard to do.

Our industry, as it has matured, has turned more and more focus on developing a unilateral standard around this topic. I spoke to Monique Perry from Nielson who promises that a consistent measurement currency is very close to launching in Australia so perhaps we are starting to see some light at the end of this tunnel.

The challenge however still remains that whether or not we can decide on a consistent way to measure the audience on one site, or even the web universe as a whole, how can we measure the cross platform effectiveness.

Measuring the interactions between platforms remains a problem. Although we have agreed currency around TV and radio audiences and by integrating these with a standardised online measurement tool we will get half way there, it does not solve the entire problem. When we start to consider other online channels such as social media, mobile, email and outdoor, the measurement task becomes even more complex. When we decide we want to look at how the interactions between platforms may have a multiplier effect on a consumers propensity to respond, measurement of this becomes almost impossible.

It is always an interesting area of debate and one which is a constantly evolving. The ad:tech panel have certainly got their work cut out getting to the bottom of this and I’m looking forward to hearing what they’ve got to say. Here are the panel details:

Wednesday 17th March The Evolution Of Audience Measurement

• How do we get a fixed method of measuring and reporting online audiences?
• What are the steps towards cross platform audience measurement: can we get a true view of the consumers’ activity
• Beyond reach and frequency: how do we move to measuring advertising effectiveness, not audience numbers

Session Leader: Megan Brownlow, Editor, Entertainment & Media Outlook, PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Gai Le Roy, Programmes Manager, IAB Australia
Stuart Pike, Asia Pacific Research Director, Nielsen
Gordon Towell, CEO, Audit Bureau of Circulations
Lisa Walsh, Head of Audience Research, ABC

Registration closes Friday 12th march 5.30pm. Register now.

That is continuing into 2010. People want to know how to plan their product and marketing campaigns even better, particularly how to weave them more succintly into the wider buisness objectives. In order to capture new business and spark passion (even influence!) with your market, innovation is a critical requirement. Innovation in terms of products, campaigns but also business structure and relationship management. And of course measurement - the need to account for each dollar, report bottom line impact and understand return beyond black & white figures - is thoroughly in the limelight.

How important are these areas in your business right now? And what’s changing?

We’ll be addressing these issues in detail at ad:tech and finding out what the leading minds in digital media & marketing are doing and what you can learn from them.

You can register for the FREE ad:tech EXHIBITION and full ad:tech CONFERENCE here.

The dust has now settled a little on last week’s Ad:Tech conference here in Sydney and I have had a chance to catch up on some work, reading and even a little writing.

There have been some great summaries and wrap-ups of the event – which has been very useful – particularly as there were three concurrent streams running at any one time. So, despite missing out on two-thirds of the conference, I can still glean a little of the proceedings thanks to the blogs and Twitter streams of other attendees. (Neerav Bhatt has a great overview of the Twitter stream and Jenny Williams sums up the even on the Ad:Tech Brain blog.)

Both Ben Shepherd and Mark Jones provide great overviews of day one; and Carl Moggridge breaks down the sessions.

For my part, I thought that the keynotes could have gone deeper. Nick Brien from MediaBrands took the big picture approach and got the day rolling. He suggested that “Marketing 3.0” required adjusting to some new realities – but did not take the opportunity to delve into the agency world to suggest how these new realities may play out. I did think this was where the speech was going, but I was wrong. However, he did remind us all that “Promotional driven marketing opens conversations and broadens appeal of your brand” – something that is too easily forgotten in the rush to produce the next glossy TVC or shiny website.

On the second day, Kim Niblock, MD of BBC.com promised much but ended up delivering what was mostly a media kit for their new site. They had done some nice work on attitudinally profiling their audiences – but that really was to be expected from a quality outfit like the BBC. It will be interesting to see how robust this commercial foray will be for the BBC. I am sure the ABC will be watching closely too.

The social network panel with representatives of all the major platforms were interviewed by Jenny Williams. I don’t think I was alone in feeling that Facebook, MySpace, Friendster et al are all beginning to transform themselves into 1990s style portal publishers. Jye Smith suggested that social networks should pay more attention to the thing that made them successful in the first place – the people who use them. As the session closed, I asked whether we would see any differentiating innovation in terms of the platforms or whether they would continue copying each other’s features and functions. And in the last few days, as Facebook’s attempt to out-micro-blog Twitter rolls out around the world, this question seems more pressing than ever. I have a feeling that we will all tire of this cannibalistic behaviour sooner rather than later.

The panel discussions were opportunities for a little more depth. And while there were initial misgivings around the balancing of the conference agenda, it soon became clear that the social media stream was worth it’s weight in gold. Each of the sessions were packed out, often with standing room only.

The digital strategy session ended up being more about the execution than strategy; and the Johnson and Johnson case study while solid, ran in 2007 and felt out-of-date.

Julian Cole and Fake Julian Cole stirred up the audience with some theatrics and audience-directed questioning in the session on “dark marketing”. Of course, the question was raised around the use of fake virals – and the recent work for Witchery by Naked. While the panel seemed to think this was not the way to go for brands, I tend to agree with Iain McDonald:

There are better, bigger, broader opportunities to engage consumers using social media that can still be authentic, mysterious, realistic. Yes it’s a creative challenge but if we can start to get this right there are big wins for consumers, clients and agencies alike.

Jye Smith, Laurel Papworth, Mike Hickinbotham and I spoke about the relevance of Twitter. It felt like it went well, but time flies when you are in front of a room of people … and it felt like we were out of time before we really got going. Jye facilitated the discussion well – diving into the audience to take questions and keep us all in order. Mike stepped us through some of the approaches and lessons they learned from launching the @BigpondTeam on Twitter – fingers crossed his presentation will be shared at some point.

Iain McDonald, Stephen Collins, Lesley White and Katie Chatfield created a powerful buzz when talking social media measurement. “Data is everywhere, but insight is rare”, suggested Katie, while Lesley explained that there should be a focus on the rants vs raves in any conversational analysis. There were some great points made by all the speakers and Katie shared this fantastic presentation on the tools and techniques that any digital strategist will love.

Overall, this felt like a great conference. There was plenty of good discussion and the panels worked well (for the most part) – and the vibe was strong. There were a couple of talks that were borderline pitches, but they were in the minority. I would have liked to have seen more detailed cross-over discussions between traditional advertising and social media – it seems that there are two distinct points of view with a chasm of understanding separating the two. Perhaps then we will see the type of fireworks that we really do need to see to move the industry forward in a meaningful way.

http://www.servantofchaos.com/2009/03/a-personal-take-on-adtech-sydney.html