Selling online as if it were TV? HERESY! Let's do it anyway.

Yet another article asks if we should measure online the same way we measure TV. Meaning, should we package online impressions and present them as Gross Rating Points, the way TV and radio people have been doing it for decades? This kind of thing usually causes the hipster crowd to spit their triple venti sugar free no foam skinny extra caramel macchiato all over their Macs before collapsing into paroxysms of rage at the thought of degrading the integrity of online accountability with such an old-school measure.

Problem is, accountability is online advertising's own worst enemy. There, I said it. Don't get me wrong; accountability is a great thing, but as I pointed out in my first entry to this blog, the rush to accountability has caused the industry and those who support it with advertising to focus only on direct responses and on conversions at the bottom of the marketing funnel. There are other measures of accountability, equally as valid and valuable under many circumstances, such as brand preference, purchase intent, search term volume, social chatter, and so on. But they don't focus on clicks and conversions, so they are dismissed out of hand as the purview of old school hacks intent on wasting clients' money before hitting the links for the 3rd time that week.

This focus on clicks and conversions actually, and paradoxically, works against the movement of money from offline to online media, because:

It keeps the people who have that money from seeing online as a viable top-of-funnel medium.

Embrace the paradox. If we want to accelerate the movement of TV dollars to online, then for the time being we have to get it from those that control the TV money. That means selling it them on a basis their processes and systems are built around: Points.

The benefit is four-fold: 1) We will accelerate the growth of online ad dollars 2) We will decelerate or reverse the decline of the inventory's value 3) We will start to free online activity from the unfair and often misdirected chains of Direct Response Accountability, and 4) With the increase in money will come even higher-quality productions...and with those will come viewers. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Online is capable of helping fill the top of the marketing funnel the same way TV does, but not when the industry continues to insist on measuring it and pricing it based only on the conversions it generates.

One respondent to that article asked "Must we really dumb-down digital marketing to meet the old model of GRPs in order for us to succeed? We can keep rolling our eyes and asking that until the cows come home, and the answer is "yes, little Fauntleroy, we must".

I am not suggesting online and all the things that make up that space be packaged and sold this way. Far, far from it. But the sooner the industry gets over its collective distaste for "old school" metrics, and packages some opportunities (particularly video) using metrics and terms familiar to those who hold the old-school purse strings, the sooner the industry will get a bigger and well-deserved chunk of old school money.