• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, November 11, 2011

Nielsen -- which, by the way, has a "solution" to fix this -- recently analyzed a 200-million-impression CPG campaign geared toward women 25-54 that ran across three ad networks and a women’s interest site. The study showed the campaign on the ad nets successfully reached its intended audience only 27% of the time. Not surprisingly, the women's site did better. Since they did not identify the ad networks, I guess all get tainted by the low target audience delivery (even though no one has any earthly idea how many ad networks there really are.) Later, a "white paper" shows that even this crappy percentage was better than a TV show's that was expected to successfully reach the same audience. 

Was this the fault of dumb-ass media buying? Ineffective creative? Or, as is often the case, are these kinds of "white papers" numbers selected because they help underscore the rationale for a service or product someone -- in this case Nielsen -- wants to sell you?  Hard to know.

But I find it analogous to the Vietnam-era proposition that in order to save a village, it was necessary to destroy it. It's so interesting to see a company use very attractive numerical results when selling against other media -- but, when it is trying to launch a new product or otherwise grab market share, produce studies that underscore how poorly its own industry performs. Moreover, if every venture out there actually delivered on the superior results they claim (often based on "studies"), advertising would be pretty simple and enormously effective. It is generally neither.

Everyone has a "secret sauce," "proprietary algorithm," or "black box" that is variously "revolutionary," "game-changing," "groundbreaking" or the "holy grail" of this or that. It is generally none of these. But you can try to make it seem like it is by comparing your deliverables to somebody else's that are worse. At the same time, though, someone else is comparing your results to theirs and finding yours suck and (surprise, surprise) theirs don't.

And you wonder why reporters are SO skeptical. And you wonder why media buyers take a "wait and see" posture. They have seen your claims and the last guy's claims, and they contradict each other -- and there is no way anyone really knows the truth. (Hey, good luck offering that side-by-side test.)

Here's an idea: Cut down the hyperbole. Stop inventing ways to point out how crappy the rest of the industry is in order to make your own products and services look better. The tide is still rising for online advertising. It is too soon to try and sink all the other boats.